Promethean Files 1: The New Prometheus

by Andrew Dobell

  All this just solidified her resolve and her view of the Corps as corrupt and in desperate need of reform and regulation, although how you achieved that when they owned the government was anybody’s guess.

  The quickest way out of here that she could see was to use the lift shaft and drop straight down to the bottom floor. The data that her Cyberbrain ran on a drop of that distance indicated she would make it with only a small chance of serious injury. So she ran as fast as she could and slammed her shoulder into the closed lift doors, not having the time to stand there and try and pry them open.

  The door buckled under her weight and the power of her attack on them, opening a gap that she fell through and into the lift shaft beyond. She immediately fell into the dark abyss and shifted her vision again to see in the darkness and the floor that rose swiftly up to her. She twisted as she fell, putting her feet beneath her as about ten doorways to other levels rushed past her before she hit the floor. She used her legs to cushion her landing but still cracked the concrete beneath her feet.

  Red icons flashed up in her field of vision.

  -Warning: Approaching stress tolerance levels in lower limbs-

  -Nanobots initiating repairs to stress fractures-

  She had pushed herself with that fall, but she had made it, and she had discovered something else out about her new body. She had Nano Machines within her that could heal her.

  Cool.

  As the red icons turned to amber, she stood up and looked back up to the lift doors she had ruined. The Gunfire had stopped, but she could still hear the cries of the injured.

  Satisfied that she had a few seconds, Frankie opened up and put on the coat she had taken from the apartment she had landed in upstairs. It was long and black, reaching to just above her knees and made from a shiny waterproof material. As she tied the belt around her waist, an odd buzzing noise reached her ears. She looked up in time to see an explosion at the lift doors she had broken through a moment before. She ducked into the frame of the doorway next to her to avoid the falling bricks, rubble and remains of the lift doors and looked up again to see the drone from the Tiltrotor hover into view above her.

  ‘Aaah shit,’ she muttered to herself and spun round. She pried the doors open and glanced up again in time to see the drone angle itself down and fire off a missile towards her.

  Moving as fast as she could, she ducked around the side of the doorway and faced away from it, just as the missile struck home and detonated, sending shrapnel flying.

  She felt the shockwave of the blast as dust, brick, and metal exploded about her, but luckily she escaped any significant damage. As the dust cloud settled, Frankie looked up and noted she stood in what looked like the basement of the building with its bare brick walls, exposed wires and piping delivering utilities to its residents.

  No one seemed to be around luckily, so she pressed herself up against the wall next to the lift doors and waited for the drone to appear.

  The whine of its mini jet engines grew louder as it dropped to the basement and a few seconds later she knew it was just inside the lift door to her right.

  Moving quickly, she stepped around the edge of the door frame and reached into the shaft, grasping the closest wing and pulling the machine out into the corridor. She swung it around her in an arc, smashing its front end into the wall beside her with as much force as she could muster.

  The engines on the drone died, and it dropped to the floor of the basement, little more than just scrap metal now.

  Satisfied, she walked away from the lift shaft and into the basement area. She would need to move fast as that drone probably had a video feed running. She didn’t know where she was in relation to anything else and had no idea how to get out of this building, so she moved down the corridor, scanning the area around her. A short distance down the hallway, she glanced into a side room and spotted a pair of boots under a bench.

  She looked down at her bare feet, wiggling her toes. They weren’t cold, but they would look odd to anyone who saw her walking down the street like this.

  She ducked into the room which seemed like the janitor's restroom with its rusted lockers, benches and a small table with empty food cartons on it. Ignoring the smell of oil, sweat and rotting food, she moved to the seat and held one of the boots up to her foot. It was a good few sizes bigger than her, but she needed something, so they would have to do for now.

  She also spotted a set of work overalls. With nothing else presenting itself, she picked up the overalls and went to leave the room, before suddenly spotting a map of the basement next to an “In the case of a Fire” information card stuck to the wall.

  Ten seconds later she knew where she was and the location of a service hatch that led to a side alley. She ran from the room, sprinted down the corridor, taking a few twists and turns in her stride and quickly found the recess with a padlocked hatch above it.

  She smiled to herself, feeling more confident in her strength and hopeful that she would escape this current situation as she reached up, grasped the lock and gave it a sharp pull. The lock broke free, the small metal bar landing at her feet with a tiny metallic noise. So far so good, she thought. She opened the latch and pushed the door open with a clang of metal against concrete.

  Frankie waited for a second and heard nothing to indicate trouble. Moving quickly, she pulled herself through the hatch into an empty alleyway outside in the rain.

  Pausing again, she listened and looked towards the street, spotting some flashing lights reflected in the buildings across the street and the sounds of some people shouting.

  They were close by, but she had a chance.

  She ran down the alleyway and took the first right turn, away from the building she had just been in. Running along the next few alleyways, she kept looking behind herself, feeling sure that these guys would find her at any moment and appear from the shadows with guns blazing. But it never happened, and she reached the next main street without issue and looked in both directions, ready to turn and run at the first sign of trouble. A few cars hummed along the roads, people walked in the rain, their hands in the pockets and the hoods up, obscuring their faces, but no one paid her any interest.

  There wasn’t any sign of the Corporate Agents here, no flashing lights or armed personnel, only the blazing neon signs that lined the buildings, reflecting off the slick black waterlogged concrete roads.

  She felt a little safer, but she would feel a lot better if she could get even further away. She spotted another side alley up ahead and crossed the street towards it, reaching it without any problems.

  Not feeling like she could stop yet, she walked through a few more blocks and over main roads, taking a haphazard route that always led away from the Doctor’s lab. After another twenty minutes, she stood in a quiet alleyway feeling like she’d gone far enough.

  Frankie looked around and found a little recess in the side of a building with a couple of steps leading up to a padlocked doorway that looked like it had not been used in years.

  She stepped up into it, glancing up and down the alleyway to make sure she was alone. Her enhanced vision saw no one. Feeling safe for the moment, she relaxed, laying the overalls and boots on the dry steps and pulled off her newly acquired coat.

  Frankie felt like she would have shivered if she’d stood here naked in her natural human body, but in this synthetic body, although she knew the temperature, she didn’t feel cold. Pulling her arm out of the sleeve she suddenly noticed that she was injured, there was a cut on her forearm, probably from some of the flying shrapnel earlier on. Now that she took a moment to concentrate, she noticed the additional red flashing icons in her vision and knew immediately what each one related to.

  She paused to look at the damage to her arm, feeling fascinated rather than distressed or sickened by it. The cut was maybe a few inches long and deep enough to see an armoured shell beneath her soft outer skin. There was no blood, though, which was the strangest thing of all. She felt sure that a cut like this wou
ld have been leaking blood everywhere in her natural body.

  Opening the icon in her vision that was related to the cut, she saw her Nanobots were already healing it. She also saw an array of other useful information, including the exact moment that it had occurred and the actual damage it had inflicted on her.

  Frankie shrugged and continued to change into the overalls before pulling on the oversized boots and putting the raincoat back on over the top. Frankie glanced up and down the alleyway once more, spotting nothing suspicious and thought about her situation. She had just been taken advantage of by this strange Doctor Xenox in a moment of crisis. She probably would have died if it wasn’t for him, but the fact remained that, in her opinion, he had taken advantage of her.

  He did save her life, that was true, and she could well have said “save me” to him while she was delirious and bleeding out, not that she remembered it. But the way he acted in the lab, with her strung up, and immobile said more about his real intentions than anything else. He had been about to wipe her memories, which would have basically killed her. The old Frankie would no longer be there, and a new personality would take her place.

  Despite this, his kidnapping by the corporation, Psytech, troubled her. Xenox had created this body, made it from scratch and only he knew its full capabilities, limitations and needs.

  Part of her wanted to leave him to rot in a Corporation cell somewhere, but another part of her felt sure that she would need him and his expertise sometime soon.

  But how could she go about finding and rescuing him from a Corporation like Psytech? They were a huge global concern with buildings and offices, not only all over Neo-London but all around the world as well.

  It appeared that the Corporation wanted her as well, but she felt sure that getting into the Psytech building wouldn’t be as straightforward as just letting the Corporation capture her. They had ruthlessly destroyed the Doctor’s Dolls, so it wasn’t unlikely that they would execute her on sight as well. She was an unregistered Cyborg, independent from the Corporations, and she knew full well how much the Corporations hated those. Meaning it wasn’t unreasonable to think that the Corps wouldn’t just scrap or repurpose the remains of the body she now found herself in.

  She didn’t quite know what to do, and other than going home, nothing else really presented itself.

  But she wasn’t stupid, and heading back up to the mid-level of the city might not be quite so straightforward anymore, but she had only one way of really knowing that with any certainty.

  Standing up, she took a deep breath and walked out of the alleyway, raising the hood on her coat to shield her from the rain as she stepped out onto the street and made her way to the nearest checkpoint up to the mid-levels.

  You could almost always tell where they were. You just looked for the closest building that reached up to the city above. There looked to be one a few blocks over, so she kept very much to herself and made the fifteen-minute walk there without issue, stopping across the street and eyeing the covered lobby with the scanners and security personnel in there, guarding the lifts and escalators beyond.

  She had her data pad with her official ID on it, which would match with her visually. But it was everything else that might cause an issue. She would need to submit to a hand print scan and a retinal scan, as well as pass through the body scanner.

  Any one of these might cause problems for her. She would just need to be ready to make a run for it if things started to go wrong.

  With the strength and speed of her new body, escaping the security guards felt like a relatively simple matter. Frankie took a breath, even though she had no need too, and readied herself for what was to come.

  Walking with purpose, she crossed the street and entered the checkpoint. She was the only person in here for the moment, which she both preferred and hated at the same time.

  If things turned ugly, and that was certainly possible, she didn’t want any innocent people getting hurt, but she felt like, had there been a rush of people going, though, she might have had a chance to blend in.

  She could have waited, but she chose to make a go of it while it was quiet, preferring that to the alternative.

  Frankie approached the security man who stepped forward, holding his hand out for her data pad. She passed it to him and waited as he accessed the ID that it contained and checked it on his Pad.

  As she waited, she looked up at the armed men who stood nearby, watching her, and wondered what they might be thinking as they looked at her.

  This wasn’t her usual checkpoint. That was back the way she had come, much closer to Xenox’s Lab. She didn’t want to go back there just yet, but she wondered if she had made a mistake coming to this one. Maybe she should have used her usual one where some of the security guys knew her and might have waved her through.

  Well, it was too late now, and she would just need to see what happened here.

  She looked back at the man before her, accessing her Pad, and smiled at him as he looked up at her, no doubt checking her photo against the one on his device.

  He looked up and down a couple more times and nodded, passing her Pad back to her.

  She placed it in her pocket as the man then directed her over to the retinal and hand scanners. She walked up to them, the whole process feeling both familiar and yet also very different and for the first time, really scary.

  Seconds later the scanners flashed red, with messages of “File not found” appearing on the screens.

  ‘Miss, would you mind trying again please?’ the man said.

  ‘I’ve had some work done while I was down here, so it might not be able to register me,’ she said, hoping to try and bargain her way through.

  ‘Work? They must have been fairly big procedures to have both your eyes and hands replaced. A bit risky doing that down here don’t you think?’ the man said.

  ‘Maybe, but I can’t afford the prices up there,’ she explained.

  Okay, pass through the scanner, let’s have a look at you,’ he said.

  Frankie stepped forward and walked through the scanner. It made a sharp buzzing noise, and some red lights flashed once as she went through. On the other side, two men with large guns stepped forward slightly and raised their weapons to a more ready position without actually aiming them at her.

  She didn’t like this and felt like she knew where this might be heading.

  ‘Wait there miss,’ said the security man behind her. She looked around to see him looking at something on his Pad, before looking up at her with a slight frown on his face. He flinched slightly when he saw her looking at him. He looked a little scared.

  ‘Miss, we need to make a few more checks, would you mind waiting over here,’ he said.

  ‘Am I in any trouble?’

  ‘We just need to make a few checks, nothing to worry about,’ he answered her, his voice calm and measured.

  ‘Well I really need to get back home, I have some meetings to get too…’ she countered.

  ‘Miss, er, Gene is it? Francesca Gene?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Look, this won’t take long, and I’m sure you will be on your way before you know it if you could just bear with us for one moment.’

  Frankie looked at the man and tried to weigh him up, wondering what he might be thinking. In her field of view, icons showed her access points, such as his Data Pad that she could direct her body to hack into wirelessly, but she had been ignoring them, thinking that she might have raised their suspicions.

  She was scared to do it basically, preferring to see if she could just make it through security the old fashioned way.

  The temptation to try and access his pad hovered there before her, but she wanted to believe that she could still move about like she used to, that she could still live her life.

  Something on the screen of the man’s Data Pad caught his attention, making him glance down at it, and then back up at her, with a new expression on his face that said he had a new understa
nding of who she might be.

  The game was up it seemed.

  She heard footsteps behind her and glanced back to see the two armed guards walking towards her.

  She looked back to the man before her and noted he now had his hand on his sidearm.

  ‘Miss, if you’d just like to come this way,’ he said, his voice sounding slightly more authoritarian now as one of the security guards behind her moved up next to her and placed a guiding hand on her upper arm.

  ‘This way miss,’ he said.

  1.06

  Frankie had no intentions of going with these men, and as the guard tried to guide her, pulling on her arm with his hand, she chose not to move.

  Despite the man’s urging, he was unable to move her and looked up into her eyes.

  ‘I’m not going with you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re resisting arrest?’

  ‘Is that what this is? An arrest?’

  The man took a step back and raised his rifle to point at her head, but before he could level it at her, she had already moved and used her hand to grab and pull the gun barrel sideways. The man tried to keep a hold of it, but she followed the action up with a jab at the man’s nose with the heel of her other hand, breaking it and causing blood to splatter out sideways under her palm.

  The man squealed and let go of the weapon allowing Frankie to continue her momentum and spin around, throwing the rifle like a flying disc to the other guard who had his gun up and pointed at her, hitting him on the head and knocking him backwards as he fired a couple of rounds into the roof.

  Frankie looked up the escalators in front of her, and saw a squad of maybe five or six more armed guards heading down towards her, and knew there would be other checkpoints and more guards on the way up to the mid-level, and knew better than to try and push her luck.

  Frankie turned and ran from the lobby, ducking as a couple of shots were fired, missing her by some way.

  They didn’t follow her, they weren’t authorised to do that, but they probably called the incident in and she thought it quite likely that Psytech would either know about this encounter by now or would do in the very near future.