by CG Blade
“Great that’s just great. What’s next, marbles?”
With her HUD now up and running, Petra calculated the speed, weight and rotations of the twelve-inch leather handled knife and stepped out of the dark alley into the moonlit street letting the knife fly out of her hand. It made a revolving series of whoosh sounds through the air as it tumbled end over end reflecting in the moonlight. Seconds later, she heard a ‘thwack’ sound.
“Sorry…I…green…don’t…fly…you…night.” Nelson was now completely irrational sounding and his language was incomprehensible to her. He fell straight over backwards with the knife rigidly going with him sticking straight out of his chest. A small black palm sized device flew onto the street as he bounced a couple of times stirring up dust and dirt all around his now stiff body. Petra could hear a strong whining sound getting closer and closer echoing off the building walls.
“That sounds like drones Petra.”
“He had a kill switch in his hand!” This kill switch had a normally closed circuit with some kind of button that when released opened a circuit to an explosive wired device or some other six flying explosive devices.
Petra picked Cooper up by the waist and opened her comset trying to contact the Gwadar Jet-Port. She ran for the bottom of the steel stairs on the back of the building. By now, the whining sound had turned the corner and hovered over her. As she turned to look at the drones all six of them huddled around her like flies looking for a sugar fix. Each one of them was twice the size of the drones she killed in her virtual training and they looked and sounded different. They were teardrop shaped tapered in the back and were black with the familiar ‘RC’ shield logo on the side. They resembled ocean creatures reminiscent of Ammonite fossils spiraling and winding with jet-blue flames shooting out of the bottom of each of them. She tried to cover Cooper with her armor as she flew onto the third stair step rattling all the steel around her attached to the building. All six of them fired a blast of blue magnificent flames out of a small port in the front of their bulbous housings. Petra hung on to Cooper tightly as all six silver one inch wide projectiles seemed to have a mind of their own and hovered around her looking for something. What the—? They were curiously searching or seeking something around her armor. The metallic two inch long cylinders seemed to have pitch, roll, and yaw capability and hovered silently before one of them sped forward and attached itself to her left shoulder.
“The projectiles seem to be looking for your exposed weak spots Petra. They are reminiscent of piercer bullets.”
The drone’s offspring were having a hard time finding a place to do damage through her armored joints.
This is new Petra thought as she furiously tried to hide her exposed skin sticking out of the armor. Her facial armor was now up covering her face and head as the other five projectiles attacked her exposed weak spots as she tried to remove the unwanted shoulder biter. The more she fought pulling one of them off the easier it became for the other five to clamp tighter onto her and finish their mission. Petra wasn’t letting go of Cooper and held him tighter while the six mercenaries of death did their toll on her fingers, elbows, and shoulders. They clamped onto her fleshy skin and injected her joints with multiple barbs that gripped tightly and had internal oscillating cutting lasers in the center that spat a brown colored corrosive Tine Juice into the wounds. Her Cobalt skin and blood were trying to keep up the repairs on her already taxed body and mind. The silver messengers of destruction were too much on her system and she went limp over the top of Cooper. Her beautiful blue-lit irises slowly went dim fading to black on top of the third step covering her friend.
“I hope Jac…kie finds this…err…or on the next mod…” Ter went silent.
Chapter 22
CONNECTION
Emily was standing on the top rung of a shaky broken wooden ladder in the musty basement of the AL SHIFA hospital in Gwadar trying to figure out how to get the network cable from the small hole in the floor above her to the Vidscreen sitting on the shaky card table next to the rusty bathtub. She had on an unknown white buttoned up lab coat over her blue jeans and a white t-shirt underneath it with black lettering that read, “Please do not feed the Engineer”. Her pink tennis shoes and black hair were covered in dust from the crumbling cement ceiling above her. She could see Bar’s eyeball and his brown eyelid looking down at her through the one inch drilled hole as he fed the cable to her a little bit at a time. The two of them were still tired from the twenty-hour flight but both of them had willingly accepted the challenge that Jackie had laid out before them. They were to be her eyes ears and hands. As they flew over Europe on their way to Gwadar Cooper was on his way back to Washington D. C. to Walter Reed Medical Center.
Petra had sent out one final signal on her GPS beacon through her comset that was picked up by the men and women at the Jetport in Gwadar she was transmitting to. The security detail that was sent to Nelsons factory that morning had found an old dead doctor, six dead bearded men with blue holes in their foreheads clutching guns, and a red liquid covered robot resembling a bulldozer with missing headlights. Nelson was wrapped up in a body bag along with his cutlery and sent along with Cooper‘s bloodied hyperbaric tent after they picked up the puzzle pieces of Petra. Her pale white skin was sans armor and the women who were in the security detail quickly covered her up. Some of them were shedding tears over the sheets they used to hide her naked torso. Her limbs and body were carted off to the morgue at the AL SHIFA hospital. They labeled her ‘Jane Doe’ until one of the security detail figured out she was on the fight to Gwadar with them and called the bases in the U. S. until they found Jackie at the Med Lab in Meredith. Jackie had instructed the soldiers to fly Cooper and Nelson back swiftly and she moved them to Meredith secretly the next night. Now Petra’s naked torso, legs, and head lay limp in a rusty iron bathtub in the damp used medical equipment room of the AL SHIFA hospital basement. Her four remaining pieces and two fingertips sat next to her on a dirty card table that was used for filling out paperwork for donations at a previous blood drive for the hospital.
“I think I’ve got enough, Bar!” Emily yelled up to him through the hole in the ceiling.
He gave her the “OK” sign back through the hole and left the room he was in above her.
The police and hospital staff could not figure out why there weren’t any blood pools in the area of Petra’s body and limbs and thought that she had been moved there from a crime scene they hadn’t found yet. The police back at the station checked her fingerprints and dental records but didn’t come up with any matches through INTERPOL or WAS. The morgue doctor on duty put her on ice and put a toe tag on her until Emily and Bar could get there and pick her up. Doctor Judson and Doctor Al-Tabar tried to explain to the Morgue doctor that she was in need of some “stimulation” and asked if they could have a private room in which to view their friend. The morgue doctor’s thick Arab upbringing and dialect was to say the least very unimpressed and disappointed with them both as scientists and he threatened to call the local police. Bar used the religion card and the morgue doctor harshly suggested the damp musty basement for whatever sick evil things they were doing to that poor blonde girl’s body parts.
“Do you have it tied in up there?” Emily asked Bar who was now standing next to her.
He was wearing the same generic white lab coat as Emily with blue jeans white t-shirt and white tennis shoes. He was bending over with his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath from the jaunt down the stairs.
“Yes—let’s test it.”
Emily plugged the cable into the network port and waited for the icon to come up on the Vidscreen to tell her if she had a connection. The wireless network at the hospital wouldn’t reach the basement and Jackie said they needed a strong signal to start the process. On the cement floor sitting all around Bar and Emily were tools in bags and barrels they brought with them. There were ten 15-gallon Cobalt blue steel barrels the two of them personally carried and rolled from the delivery carrier
to the basement from the Jet-Carrier. Bags of melting ice sat in small coolers next to the barrels.
“Okay—we’ve got a strong connection let’s call Jackie.” Emily told Bar who was now trying to wrap a bungee cord around Petra’s neck fastened to the edge of the bathtub so she wouldn’t slump down any further.
The two of them worked feverishly since they had been there and hadn’t stopped to eat or drink anything except the bags of snacks and coffee that were packed for them by the staff before they left. Jackie had hugged both of them goodbye and told them to call when they were up to this point on Emily’s ‘to-do’ list. Bar was now sitting on a wooden stool in front of the screen, voice logging into the Cobalt Program while Emily instructed her Vidset to call Jackie.
“Hello Jackie?” Emily asked setting the Vidset down on the table next to the Vidscreen.
“Yes I’m here,” Jackie responded through the screen. Emily switched it to ‘Hologram mode’ and Jackie’s head was now facing them four inches above the table. Emily played with the setting to get a better image.
“How are you two doing?”
“We’re good but a little tired. How’s General Cooper doing?” Emily asked sincerely knowing that Jackie was probably not doing well.
“We’ve got him stabilized in Cobalt but I really don’t know. It’s going to be touch and go for the next forty-eight hours or so. He lost a lot of blood and we had to do a transfusion to flush out the liquid Nelson was giving him. We’ll see what happens. We won’t know for a couple of hours until a lot of the tests start coming back and we can get him into imaging. He seems to be resting peacefully. It’s kind of ironic that the program he helped build may just end up saving his life.”
“I’m really sorry Jackie. I wish things were different. You and the staff hang in there.” Bar told her looking at the small head on the table looking back at them.
“Yes. Well we have to deal with Nelson here too.”
“Is he still alive?” Emily asked quizzically
“No, no he isn’t. He was—a replacement—some type of robot like Dreama was.”
Bar and Emily both looked at each other with eyebrows raised up almost touching their hairlines.
“You’re kidding me?” Bar asked almost shouting the question.
“Nope I wish I was kidding. That thing is locked in a room with no windows or furniture strapped on a gurney waiting for dissection. Armed security guards are doing rotating shifts at the door in case Mr. Nice Guy decides to wake up. Petra did a number on him. He has very large bullet holes in him and he came with a twelve-inch hunting knife sticking out of his so-called chest. Do we have any idea what did this to Petra? Was it Nelson?”
“We don’t know. We asked about it when we got here and we were told the security cameras around the area had been disabled or were not working at the time,” Bar told her.
“Sounds like a load of crap,” Jackie snapped.
They could now see Jackie putting her reading glasses on. Her beautiful blonde hair was in a swirl on her head held together by pencils.
“Yep sure does” Emily added.
“Are you two ready to do this?”
Tinker pushed Jackie’s head gently out of the way and waved to them.
“Hi Tinker how’s it going?” Bar asked. Tinker’s red hair and face popped into view on the Vidset Hologram above the table. He had a big wide smile like a leprechaun on some kind of stimulants.
“Good. We’re just finishing up imaging here. How’s it going with you guys?”
“Good buddy. Thanks for taking over for me.”
“No problem you two hurry back soon!” Tinker left and Jackie commented on his overly energetic personality.
“It’s the vitamins I think,” Bar told her smirking. “He takes a lot of them.”
“Don’t be nervous you two. We’ve done this many times without incident before we got the hyperbaric vacuum tanks.” Jackie was reassuring to them and speaking in layman’s terms specifically for Bar’s benefit. “The difference is one of you is going to have to push her and hold her down into the solution while she completes her cycle”
“Okay—?” Bar and Emily said simultaneously staring at each other curious of what was about to transpire.
“Here at the lab she’s in a tank that is filled with the cobalt solution and then we connect two filter tubes to it. One on the top fills the tank with air and pushes her and the liquid down to the bottom of the tank. The other tube forms a vacuum at the top of the tank that sucks out the remaining unused air and impurities. It compresses her down making her body mass and the gel dense enough to cover all of the exposed wounds so to speak. Here at the Med Lab the cycle is computer controlled and normally more pushing is needed than vacuum obviously, so you should be ok. I can’t stress to you enough that you need to make sure all the air pockets are collapsed around her during this procedure and there needs to be an even distribution of the gel.”
“So we are going to have to put our hands in there while she is—doing—re-growing?” Emily asked. Her mouth was having a hard time closing.
“Yes exactly. It shouldn’t take long once you have a program connection and your hands will love it trust me,” Jackie told Emily smiling like a woman discussing detergent during a commercial. “You two need to put on the plastic clothing and cover up any electronic equipment you care about. Bar you can clamp me up on the edge of the Vidscreen facing the tub while Emily is busy. This might get a little messy.”
Bar and Emily put plastic clothing on that was given to them back at the lab to cover their clothes and then they covered up all of the equipment they thought would get soaked during whatever was going to happen next.
“Okay good,” Jackie said. “Bar you need to connect up the short network cable I gave you into the Vidscreen port and then lift up on the back of Petra’s neck and peel her hairline up at the bottom. You’ll see a port similar to the one on the Vidscreen so just plug the other end in there. Emily you need to put the nose plugs in her nostrils and the air tubing I gave you down her esophagus. Make sure you have a good seal. We don’t need her sucking any liquid down her throat.”
Emily and Bar did as they were told while still trying to comprehend actually what they were doing here in a dirty basement of a hospital.
“Good.” Jackie was still watching the tub from the Vidset attached to the edge of the screen. “Okay now Emily you are probably going to need Bar’s help with this part. Those barrels are small but heavy.”
“Yeah, we found that out,” Emily said jokingly but proud that they had rolled the barrels there themselves.
“Open about five barrels. They should have pull-tabs that open the whole top up. I would move them next to the tub first. Bar instruct the initiate sequence icon on the screen first. Either one of you are going to have to regularly check her irises during this process. It will probably be easier for Emily to do it being a doctor and all.”
Bar and Emily rolled the five barrels next to the tub. Bar initiated the sequence of the cobalt program on the Vidscreen while Emily popped the tops off the barrels. The liquid inside of the barrels was a beautiful fragrant cobalt gelatin that had microscopic bubbles in it. It moved slowly when rocked back and forth with the consistency of liquid hand soap.
“Emily, I need you to flip Petra over on her side while Bar fills up the bottom of the tub underneath her. Push her head and shoulders down to the bottom and rub the solution all over her torso and wounds.”
Emily flipped Petra while Bar dumped four of the five open barrels into the tub. Emily pushed her down while Bar dumped the remaining barrel over her chest and head. The almost fluorescent looking warm Cobalt gel glopped and gulped causing drops to extenuate everywhere during the transition from the barrels to the tub. Both Emily and Bar’s plastic sheeting and heads had tiny blue fragrant dripping dots all over them. The exposed air tube and Petra’s blue, gel covered blonde hair was now lying over the edge of the tub. Emily had half of her 145-pound body in the tub with Pet
ra holding her down wiping the gel over Petra’s head, chest, and exposed wounded parts.
“Thank God Tinker isn’t here to see this,” Bar said wiping his damp brow with a clean part of his sleeve.
“Why?” Jackie asked.
“He loves Women’s Mud Wrestling.” The three of them chuckled and Bar dumped another two barrels in with most of Emily almost sitting on top of Petra now.
“Bar can you please check the program screen? Do you see a feedback timer?”
“Uh—yes, yes I do.”
Okay. Set it for initiate timer and enter…” Jackie was going through her notes as they went along, “set it for 1,931 seconds about thirty-two minutes or so. That should be enough time for her to regenerate.”
Bar entered the numbers and voice initiated the program.
“Emily I need you to somehow lift one of her eyelids and tell me if her iris is pulsing blue flashes and if so how many in a minute. If she has a strong link, it will be close to one flash every ten seconds or so—six a minute. It’s how we check her program speed. If it’s any faster or slower we’ve got a problem.”
Emily reached through the goopy blue slimy gel to Petra’s face on the bottom of the tub. She used her thumb to pull back her left eyelid. Her beautiful blue iris was lit up through the gel and Emily could see a consistent pulsing light coming out. “It’s lit almost all the time. Like maybe hundreds of times a minute,” Emily told Jackie hurriedly.
“Bar can you please do a speed test? What’s your network speed?” Jackie asked.
“Uh—I’m down to—oh no about five terabytes a second.”
“Bar you need to be in the petabyte range. The Cobalt program is going to try to feed her a lot faster from here at the Med Lab than what the network is pushing there. There’s a huge lag somewhere.”
Chapter 23
REGENERATION
Bar was busy checking all of his cable connections while Emily was soaking up the Cobalt solution slowly staring at her dripping blue fingers and hands. Petra’s torso and legs submerged in the bottom of the tub was held down now by the weight of the solution. Bar told Emily he needed to check the source of the cabling and would be right back. He proceeded up out of the basement via the steps while she continued to gaze at the gel running down her arm playing with it. It was in itself warm and amazing. It seemed to have its own tendencies as it slowly removed any traces of the faint wrinkles, spots, and scars from Emily’s creamy skin.