‘Huh, sucks to be you,’ she muttered, and backed up from the thing, before turning and running back to the van with a couple of glances over her shoulder to make sure the thing was down for good.
‘Gibson, you okay?’ she said on reaching her friends. After she had boosted out of the van to attack the enemy Mech, it appeared that Gibson had lost control of the vehicle and ended up smashing it into the back of another car.
She looked in and saw Gibson holding his right shoulder, his blood had turned the shirt under his coat dark red.
‘I’m fine, just got my wing clipped. We need to get out of here, though,’ he gasped.
‘If we can get to a Lab I can patch him up and do something for the pain. You don’t learn to do Cybernetics without a good knowledge of biology,’ the Doctor said.
Frankie looked up and around them. There were some crashed cars close to them and a good number of people peeking out from behind them, wondering if the violence was over.
She spotted a car nearby that looked to have suffered only minor damage, and decided it was as good as any. She reached in and helped Gibson out of the van, the Doctor taking the opposite side.
‘This way,’ she said and guided them around the van and moved towards the car she had chosen.
As they neared it, a couple of people rose up from behind the vehicle.
‘Mind if we take your car?’ Frankie asked them.
‘Um… I ur… well…’ the man said.
‘Well we’re taking it,’ she said before he managed to pull an answer together. She had already Hacked the car’s Key Code and as she reached the door, the whole thing unlocked and started up.
‘Oh…okay,’ the man said, noticing her gun and backing off a couple of steps.
The Doctor climbed into the back with Gibson and helped him into the seatbelt while Frankie stepped into the front seat, smiling happily at the man whose car they had commandeered.
‘Thanks,’ she said brightly, dumping her gun on the passenger seat and revving the engine. ‘We good to go?’ she said, looking in the rear view mirror.
‘Yes, go,’ Xenox answered.
Frankie gunned the engine again and sped off along the highway, dodging between other stationary cars and onlookers until they passed the extent of the incidents, and she could power away down the road.
‘Where are we heading?’ Frankie asked.
‘We need a Lab, somewhere with medical equipment,’ Xenox answered her.
‘The under city it is then,’ she said and started to plot a route in her head. Her cyber brain worked like a navigation system, and she was able to plan a path of least resistance down into the darkness of the Undercity with little trouble.
Frankie guided the car along the elevated highways, down off-ramps, ever lower into the mid-levels of the city, before finally leaving the Motorways behind and exiting onto the city streets. She knew of a few ways for vehicles to get down into the Undercity, and chose the one she hoped would be the easiest and quickest.
When Gibson let out an almighty scream from the back seat, Frankie jumped with fright.
‘Jeez, what the hell?’ she said and looked in the rear view mirror to see Gibson curled up into a ball and clearly in a lot of pain. The veins on his neck stood out in relief as he groaned and yelped. ‘What’s wrong? What's happening to him?’ she asked.
‘Damnit, it’s his Nanobots. I was hoping this wouldn’t happen. The Corporation must have found out who his insurance is with and cut a deal,’ Xenox said.
‘What are you talking about?’ Frankie asked.
‘His Nanobots, they’re killing him.’
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‘They can do that?’ she asked.
‘That and worse, they’re sending us a message.’
‘Well, I hear it. Is there anything we can do?’
‘We need to get to a Lab with a Faraday Cage so I can fix him,’ the Doctor mused.
‘Will he die? We’re a little way off the Undercity yet,’ she stated.
‘Maybe…’
‘Maybe? What do you mean maybe? Can’t we do anything now? Can’t we help him?’ Frankie yelled.
‘Pull over, I’ll drive,’ he said.
‘What? Why? We have no time,’ she protested.
‘Exactly, but they have underestimated you. Pull over.’
‘Me?’ she answered as she pulled the car over on a quiet street.
‘Yes you, now get in the back,’ he yelled and climbed out the car.
Frankie followed suit and took the Doctors place in the back seat. ‘Now what?’ she asked as the car wheel-span away from the kerb.
‘Hack his Neural Net, you should be able to talk to the Nanobots through that and hold off their attack for a while,’ he explained.
Frankie looked down at Gibson. He had curled up on his side in the foetal position and lay there shivering. His eyes were clamped tightly shut, and all the muscles of his body pulled taught, making the veins on his neck pop.
She could do this she thought and scanned for his wireless data port. She had already connected with him, so she was quickly able to open up that connection again, but that was a superficial connection. She needed deeper access. Seconds passed, and she came up against the Firewall for his Neural Net. Now, the real work began she thought as she sent in her Hacking Software and barrier breakers to get access.
Gibson’s firewall was good, but the Nanobots were causing havoc with that as well, causing it to fail intermittently.
If the Nanobots brought down his Neural Net firewall, then Psytech could hack into his mind and destroy that too. Frankie decided that she would simply not let that happen. When the next brief failure of his firewall happened, Frankie slipped through and was suddenly inside his Neural Net, in cyberspace VR, manifesting as her usual shiny skinned avatar. Before Gibson’s security measures could kick her out, she brought up a virtual terminal to access his registry and added a permission listing for her to be inside his mind. Seconds later the firewall came back up, but Frankie wasn’t booted from Gibson’s Net, it had worked.
The malfunctioning Nanobots were creating all kinds of problems in his mind too. Everything seemed to be misfiring and in something of a mess, so Frankie set to work rebooting the firewalls. As his Neural Net stabilised, she did her best to backtrack the path from Gibson’s Net to the Nanobots, a pathway that most people with a Neural Net had, to allow them to have some limited control over the Bots. Frankies Avatar floated through the virtual world of Gibson’s mind, her hands and fingers splayed wide while glowing lines of light flickered out from her fingertips, scanning the virtual representation of the Detective’s mind. She found the control program for the Nanobots after a few moments and used its terminal to start to talk to it. She accessed the control program and in seconds broke into its back end code, allowing her to watch the corruption happening right away.
Frankie felt vaguely aware that she was sat in the back of the speeding car, having no idea where the doctor was taking them. She kept her eyes shut though and concentrated on the task at hand. She needed to focus on what she was doing.
The Corp had sent a signal to the Nanobots, telling them to harm their host. The Nanobots were automatons, but their programming was always quite specific. They were to keep their hosts alive and heal them, no matter what. Telling them to harm their host was against their core programming, which often led to corruption and conflicts. They could kill Gibson like this, but it would be a long and painful death as his Nanobots went haywire.
Frankie wasn’t sure what she could do, other than to try and strengthen the Bots resistance to the orders from the Corps. So she quickly tailored one of her hacking programs and used Gibson’s Nanobot Control system to send it out to the Bots.
Seconds later and the Nanobots started to switch back to being helpful, their icons flickering from red to green on the virtual readout before her. Frankie breathed a sigh of relief, pulling herself out of the VR dive and opened her eyes as the Doctor pulled the car in behind a bui
lding. Looking around her, although she didn’t recognise this part of town, she felt sure they were still on the city mid-levels.
It was dark, and the neon lights ruled the streets now, bathing everything in their sickly glow.
The car bumped along the dark unlit alleyway, bookended by bright main streets as the Doctor brought the vehicle to a stop.
‘Where are we?’ Frankie asked.
‘The east end, I have another place here, and it has what I need.’
‘I had no idea about this,’ Frankie stated.
‘Why would you? I’m sure there’s lots you don’t know about me,’ the Doctor said as he exited the car and opened the door closest to Gibson.
‘That’s true,’ she said, and stepped out of the door on her side and walked around to Gibson. ‘Here, let me,’ she said and reached in. Her superhuman strength allowed her to pick up Gibson single-handedly, lifting him from the car. ‘Lead the way,’ she said.
The Doctor moved over to a nearby door and started to unlock it. The door was metal and very plain looking, with some basic, but strong locks on it. He undid them before cleaning off a portion of the handle and pressing his thumb to the small area he had just cleaned.
A hidden hatch slid back and revealed a screen with a touch keypad on it. Hiding it from Frankie’s view, the Doctor tapped in a series of digits, and on the press of the last button, she heard locks disengage.
‘Here we go,’ he said, and opened the door, leading them inside. Frankie noted that the door was a good six inches thick set into a wall that looked reinforced from the inside. A vast, dark and very dusty space greeted her. The Doctor flicked on the lights, saving her from using her night vision and allowing her to take a good look around.
It was a large, open plan space, a warehouse maybe with tall ceilings and catwalks. Frankie saw some workstations, tables with various bits of equipment on them, lots of cybernetic body parts, and even a few full prosthetic bodies. Over in one corner, there was a large cube made from finely meshed metal sheets, about four meters square up on a pedestal.
There also looked to be some personal space in the far right corner and probably more stuff she couldn’t see from here.
The Doctor was heading for the cage, though and asked Frankie to follow him.
‘We’re going in there?’ Frankie asked.
‘That’s right, it’s a Faraday Cage, I should be able to work on him safely in there.’ He answered her.
She wasn’t sure she’d known what a Faraday cage was before gaining this new body, but she knew it now.
The conductive metal mesh that made up all the surfaces of the cube kept all electromagnetic signals and interference out, meaning it should block the signal to the Nanobots from the Corp, so they revert to their usual role.
‘Good idea,’ she said and carried Gibson over to the cube. Walking up the steps, she saw a good sized room inside, furnished with a computer workstation and in the center, a hospital stretcher that Frankie lay the unconscious Gibson onto. ‘So this stops all signals getting in?’
‘Most of them, yes,’ the Doctor said and closed the door. Suddenly Frankie’s connection to the wider net was gone. She no longer had access and felt completely cut off from outside communication.
‘Wow, that’s Awesome,’ she said.
‘Take a seat, this will take a while,’ he said, pointing to some chairs in the corner of the room. Frankie moved over to them and sat herself down, watching as the Doctor arranged his tools and went to work. At first, Frankie watched carefully as Doctor Xenox dressed the wound on the Detective’s shoulder, administering pain relief and fixing him up. It took him less than an hour to do it, and from what she could see, and knew about these things, which wasn’t a huge amount, it looked like he did a good job.
Xenox then moved the surgical equipment out of the way and gathered up some cables that he plugged into the sockets on the back of Gibson’s neck before he walked over to the workstation and began to code. He was hacking, and she could quite clearly see that he was rewriting whole sections of code within the Nanobots. She was a skilled hacker, but she couldn’t write code and program like the Doctor could, and she watched with interest as he deregistered the Nanobots within Gibson.
When he had finished, Gibson’s bots would work as they always had done, healing him and saving his life as usual, but they would no longer be under the control of the Corporation that he paid his insurance too, and they could no longer be used to kill him either. In much the same way as her Nanobots, he would be truly independent. Frankie guessed that the Doctor’s Nanobots had been deregistered also. It took a little over three hours to complete the process, and Frankie was feeling quite bored by the time he had finished.
‘Done,’ the Doctor said as he leant over and pulled the plugs out of Gibson’s Neural Net ports. ‘You can open the door now; the Corporations signal won’t affect him anymore. He’s safe.’
‘Thanks, Doc,’ she said and rose from her seat. She walked out the room, down the steps and back into the open space of the warehouse. She stretched as she walked. She didn’t need to; it was more of a subconscious thing.
‘For what it’s worth, I would never have wiped your memory. I was trying to scare you,’ the Doctor said from behind her.
Frankie turned around and looked back at the man with his receding white hair and retinal implants that looked like curious goggles or glasses.
‘Really?’ She answered him. Wondering what the point of that statement was.
‘Yeah. I’m amazed by you and what you’ve done…’
‘Don’t patronise me Doc, and don’t think that because I can act cordially around you that I have forgiven you for what you have done to me. I was quite happy with my life, thank you very much,’ she asserted.
‘Your life had ended Frankie. I just gave you a new one. Had I left you there, you would have died. No one was coming to save you; you know that don’t you.’
‘And that’s meant to absolve you of what you did?’
‘I’m putting things into perspective, telling you what I saw.’
‘And what did you see Doc?’ Frankie asked.
‘A young woman, too young to die in a random attack, bleeding out because some idiot Jacker Gang got a little too trigger happy. I wanted to help. I wanted to offer you a chance at a second life, a second chance,’ he said to her.
‘Huh,’ she said and looked away. She found herself dealing with an enormous internal conflict over this, not sure how she should feel. On the one hand, she felt violated. Was this how rape victims felt? The way he had taken advantage of her, of her body. That would take some getting used too. She had a funny feeling that he had been watching her for a while actually. Had he somehow engineered the Jacker Gang attack in the hope of being able to harvest her? At this point, she wouldn’t put it past him.
But despite this, what he had said to her was right. She had been dying, and would almost certainly have been dead by now if he hadn’t stepped in when he did. She had to admit he had given her a second chance at life, in a body, that, although it felt, different, did some truly amazing things.
If it wasn’t for the feelings of violation and her suspicions of his true motives and actions surrounding her death, she would be feeling much more grateful and would probably be thanking him for it all right now.
She sighed and turned to look back at the doctor as he stepped to the floor from the Faraday Cage, watching her.
‘I have my issues with this, that’s for sure, and you will just have to accept that for the time being, but, I do recognise that whatever your motives, you did give me this second chance, and you have given me a body that has continued to impress me. For that, I am thankful.’
‘I understand, it’s a lot to take in.’
‘I would like to know more about this body, though…?’ she asked.
‘Sure, what would you like to know?’
‘This is a cybernetic body, a robot body, right? So, how long does its power cell last?’
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‘On your existing power cell, depending on how you use your body, you can expect to last for eighty to one hundred and twenty years.’
‘Oh, so a good long time then? What about eating and such, you know, the usual human things?’ she asked.
‘Your body does have a digestive system so that you can eat as normal. The Nanobots will take anything they need from the food. In fact, I would recommend that you do eat from time to time to give your body any raw materials that it might want, especially if you’ve been injured. It just helps these things along. You can expel the wastage the usual way.’
‘Also, I noticed, you, um, missed a couple of things from my anatomy,’ she said, gesturing to herself.
‘You don’t… need those things,’ he said.
‘In whose opinion?’ she countered.
‘You want them, ahem, installed?’ he asked.
‘Not right now, but yes, that would be good,’ she said.
The Doctor nodded. ‘I can do that, not a problem once we have a little more time.
‘Good, thank you,’ she said, feeling a little embarrassed and keen to change the subject. It felt so wrong to her that the Doctor had this hold over her, she hated it, and she hated the internal conflict she had over him. On the one hand he’d saved her life and given her a body that continued to amaze her, on the other, he’d violated her in an incredibly fundamental and intimate way. Even failing to give her some of the most basic parts of her human body that were such an integral part of who she was and her identity. She turned away from him, frustrated and angry, and looked over the warehouse before her. ‘So, are we safe here?’ she asked.
‘For now, yes. They, um, the Corporation, they don’t know about this place yet. We’re safe here.’
‘Good,’ she muttered to herself. These past few days had been chaotic and life changing in ways she could have never predicted. Even now, walking around this warehouse, every time she heard a noise or a car she jumped or felt even more on edge. This fight with the Corps had been non-stop and quite relentless. ‘Why is all this happening, what do they want with us?’ she asked.
Promethean Files 1: The New Prometheus Page 12
