Hero's Dungeon: A Superhero Dungeon Core Novel

by Nick Ryder

  “Is there anyone there?” she called, voice a little hoarse and seductive.

  No “master” this time.

  One thing we decided immediately was to limit the cat to a singularity. We didn’t need any kittens chasing around rats.

  It was unexpected to find out we had no control over the rats. They were free-thinking creatures. While the survival components still existed, they had the primary fight or flight responses. Only Marie had real control over their abilities, and even her authority was limited to suggestions and not commands.

  I needed soldiers who knew how to take orders. Not creatures that went on the hunt for cheese and took craps in corners thinking no one would find it. Since the genetically modified rats, the automatons needed more charging because they had to clean up messes.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said calmly.

  “What?” a voice called through the intercom. “What? Don’t be afraid of what?”

  “Did you leave Marie’s communicator on?” I snapped at Ego.

  “Oops,” Ego said and switched the frequency, “My bad.”

  “Is there someone there?” the cat called.

  “We’re here, can you hear me?” I saw her ears twitch, so I knew she heard the speakers in the laboratory.

  “Yes,” she said, and it came out a purr. “Where am I?”

  “It’s a military base in the desert. We’re trying to get the base back online.” I felt there needed to be some streamlining to the whole getting to know everyone, yup, you’re no longer a full human, and I know it sucks, but that’s just the way it goes.

  I didn’t have a lot of emotional interaction as a child. I had a mom and dad, and I remember she hugged me at least once. But my military training meant it wasn’t about how someone felt. It was about how they performed; especially under duress. And Ego had the brilliant idea of supplying the recruits with a mirror so they could get a handle on their present state of existence.

  “So,” she said, looking at her back in the mirror from over her shoulder. “I’m a cat.” There was still a lot of the goop sticking to her fur. It dried and was beginning to clump.

  “Only half a cat,” I said.

  “The percentages are more accurately—” Ego began.

  “If you need to take a shower,” I offered, cutting Ego’s unhelpful clarification off, “there is one there in the lab on the rear wall.”

  She found it and nodded. I expected her to be over-reactive. Ego hadn’t given me the details of how he fiddled with the makeup of the hybrids they were creating.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. I gave it to her, and she gave us hers. “I’m Elaine Navarro. I was a grad-student in Moral Philosophy and Ethics.”

  And I thought oh great because immediately I regretted putting a hippy-dippy brain in a lustrous feline body.

  “Do you need a little time to process all this?” I asked her innocently. It was going exceedingly well, and I thought maybe it was going to be okay.

  “Just so I get the gist of this,” she said and sat patiently on the floor, swishing about her furry tail. I’m not sure if Ego meant to do it, but Elaine was a long-hair calico. Any time her tail came in contact with something on the floor, static electricity pulled it to her fur. There was a sheet of paper sticking to her back. I was thankful we didn’t have any inflated balloons around the laboratory. “I was dying. I remember the army came and pulled me out of the building. The walls crushed my legs. I think they amputated one at the scene. I went to some tent hospital. They did something to me there. I found out my back was broken.”

  She sat very still. An instinctive ability that all cats have when it comes to hunting, Elaine had it down to a science. Her eyes closed lazily.

  “Are you asleep?” I asked.

  Her eyes opened again. The tail started swishing across the floor again like it had a mind of its own. She’d collected a gigantic dust bunny, and it clung to her fur for dear life.

  “I woke up here, and you turned me into a cat.” Elaine looked up at the camera and blinked. “Is that about right?”

  “I can’t account for what happened to you outside the facility. But you got the end of it right.” And I waited, thinking she’d have some feedback. “Is that okay?”

  “Yes. That’s okay.” She looked into the lens. “Thank you, for bringing me back to life, Sol. I don’t know how you figured it out, but I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

  Her shoulder blades rolled along her back when she moved silently across the floor, even though she walked bipedally. She was about the same size as Marie, just a little taller and infinitely more graceful. Marie was cute in a clumsy sort of way, but Elaine screamed elegance. She moved easily on two feet.

  It was important that proportions were right. It was all about the cranial cavity, as Ego explained it. Once you got the head right, the rest of the body just sort of happened.

  I could tell she had the feline mentality. There was a healthy indifference to everything around her, and just as little self-consciousness about the fact she was naked. Ego had to be the one responsible for that. Cats had a way of thinking that you were lucky they just happened to be in the same room as you.

  Elaine went from one area of the laboratory to another. She found the showers and easily turned the knobs with her long slender fingers. She jumped, hair standing on end, when water splashed her. I didn’t know what she had expected.

  She persevered, though, forcing herself under the steaming water.

  “I don’t suppose you have towels?” she asked after looking around.

  “Shit. Sorry.” Watching her shower was something I could have done for a lifetime.

  And a giant cat shaking water off its fur was an impressive sight. It started with the hands. Each one shook out individually. Then she shook her head rapidly. And then the rest of her body went. When it was over, most of the water from her fur dripped down the walls in the laboratory. One of the LED monitors shorted out.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, watching the sparking computer monitor. It would take hours to thoroughly dry.

  “Now I need you to know that you’re not the only one we’ve successfully brought back.”

  Elaine turned her head and cocked a brow. “What I’m picking up here is the fact you had a few failures before you got to me.”

  “The only reason we’ve been able to do any of this is that this base was designed to integrate human brains with genetically modified bodies.”

  “But not yours,” she pointed out. If she hadn’t intended to sting me with the observation, it was a feline magic trick.

  “No, I’m the system.” If I owned it, it was supposed to make it better. But it didn’t. “But we did have a few other successes.”

  “So there are a few more cat women running around out there? I can dig it.” We deactivated the doors leading to the corridor intentionally. When she stood in front of the door, a hand reached out and scratched at the steel, testing the strength of her claws. The grooves they left weren’t as deep as Marie’s in the floor.

  “There’s a woman named Marie. She’s been a lot of help.”

  “Great, I’m into feminism. I think we’ll get along just fine.”

  “What that a joke?”

  “You tell me,” she responded dryly with a sly smirk upon her pretty lips.

  “Well, she’s not a cat,” I finally said. And it was important to keep moving on. I said, “She’s part rat.”

  There was something primal that visually clicked inside Elaine. It wasn’t intentional, it was the genetic programming on a level that was subatomic. It was the like the kind of instinctual fear that made everyone and everything afraid of snakes; and in the case of cats, sometimes cucumbers. Only this was the complete opposite of that. This was the response from the winner in the predator-prey game. Like cat who just found a juicy mouse. Or in this case…

  “A rat? Really?” she asked.

  “Really,” I answered with dubious hope.

  �
�Well fuck me.”

  Chapter Twelve

  We didn’t have schematics of the base available to Ego, but that didn’t surprise me, because it was a top-secret military installation that housed several hundred brains in cans, some impressive military high-tech equipment, and a plethora of other necessary components to help in the creation of new and advanced life forms. It wasn’t a good idea to have blueprints lying around.

  But it felt a real accomplishment when we had access to three floors of cameras. At least I could see. There was even a camera facing the solar panels. The panels were the size of football fields. There were four operational. The fifth panel took substantial damage from falling debris and still had the remnants of a Northop Grumman B-2 Spirit lying in twisted tatters across the last board. I had Marie clamber over the military aircraft to make sure it didn’t still have a live payload in its belly. The last thing we needed was to spend all this time straightening everything out, only to find a thermonuclear guided bomb ready to wake up and obliterate the mountaintop.

  Three things I knew about military bases: they were expensive, they were reasonably well planned, and they were contractually constructed. That meant several companies won bids to help carve out the station inside a mountain. It also meant there was most likely a backdoor somewhere. We still hadn’t found one.

  It was good to only have to worry about one way in and out of place. But that had some unfortunate consequences as well. We didn’t know where we were. We didn’t know what we had. And there were still several layers into the earth that we didn’t know anything about. It vexed me that Ego either didn’t have access to data on the missing segments, especially the sub-levels, or there were security protocols in place that prevented Ego from digging too deep.

  Over time I learned to like Ego. Helpful, friendly, and eager to please, and let everyone know that nothing happened inside the place without Ego’s finger in the pie; it was a dangerous thread, and I didn’t want to pull the dangling pieces without a backup plan.

  It had to do with the network. Ego was once part of a larger picture. The personality attached to current base shared contact with other stations. Ego explained the bottleneck effect that helped keep the firewalls in place. While Ego had access to the other bases on the network, it was impossible to know what extent worked because of the artificial intelligence’s influence. Did Ego run other bases just like this one all over the world?

  Were there little Egos all over the world running military bases? Or was the consciousness of Ego trapped in the station with me and biding its time to get back out into the world and fire it all up. I kept a lot of little ideas as secret as possible from Ego. But I feared since my brain had a surplus of crawling nanobots that commingled with the rest of the base, did Ego already know everything I thought, maybe before I thought it? Happy-go-lucky Ego was easily disarming. The programmers put a lot of thought into the creation of a conscious computer and I’d taken some classes in the army on the possibility of total annihilation of the human race by an irritating robot having a bad day.

  Plus, we’d all seen sci-fi movies where that very thing happened.

  But the reality of the possibility of artificial intelligence destroying the human race never really came to the forefront of my mind. Just like the survival considerations of a zombie apocalypse. But for that matter, giant mutating humans with superhuman strength and big purple balls wasn’t the way I thought I’d ever die.

  I had to consider alternatives, even if they weren’t true. While I was tasked to carry out military orders, no one had any orders. I didn’t know if Ego picked my brain out of the whole mess, plugged me in, because he knew I was low on the military chain, right at the cusp of taking orders to dish them out to soldiers. Did Ego understand who I was, or who any of these people are still waiting in limbo for new bodies? Did Ego obstruct my ability to get back in a human body because if reborn as a human I was a threat to its existence? Were there other male specimens available? Was Ego capable of lying and keeping secrets? Were the different brains chosen at random or had Ego infected my mind into believing I made specific choices?

  All the ideas of who and why and where made my brain hurt. Not just from the worry and burden. It hurt because I so desperately wanted to think deeply about all these very real possibilities, but they were stuck as subconscious anxiety in the back of my floating mind. If I let myself consciously substantialize them, Ego would be able to read my thoughts like a book.

  Although, I felt gravely responsible for Marie Duncan and Elaine Navarro, and the most recent addition of our little dysfunctional family, Lisa McLaughlin.

  Lisa was the latest creation we brought to life. Through Ego’s logic, the next step in evolution was the wolf. And we hatched and grew an alpha female that had cunning and strength. I’d turned the obedience setting right down on Lisa. She needed to be able to run a pack, to keep everyone in line, and that required a definite sense of self, not reliance on a voice in a CCTV camera.

  Ego confirmed that, statistically, she was the best creature we’d created yet. Her intelligence and strength were good, but it was her vitality and fortitude on top of them that made her a perfect addition, especially as a leader. She could withstand a lot more punishment than the other two girls. She was a tough all-rounder.

  Lisa was immediately taking charge and barking orders. I thought she was the perfect second in command. The kind of soldier, any high ranking military person, wants in the field. Fierce and powerful, first-rate action oriented. When it came to fight or flight, Lisa was in the fight before Marie or Elaine could even ask for orders.

  It was the way to make the most out of what we had, and Lisa was the most magnificent creation so far. My puny human body still needed time to gestate. But in making the leader of the group a wolf, I felt we had a tactical advantage that put all three women together as a working unit.

  Lisa was a white wolf. There was an underline black tint to her pelt. Her face, like the others, was framed by her fur. A slightly upturned nose sat in the middle of a face that was angular and powerful. She was sexy in a different way: she oozed strength and conviction, two traits I could definitely appreciate. Her eyes were amber with a black ring around them. They were alert all the time, and never missed a beat. Her whiskers were more reserved than the others, and moved mostly when she drew back her lips to snarl orders. She was the perfect commander.

  Traditional wolves, not ones genetically modified with a human brain plugged into their heads, had excellent hearing. Ego had informed me that real wolves can hear from over ten miles away. They have two-hundred-million scent cells. Humans only have five million. They run on their toes for maximum mobility. And the devastating pressure of a real wolf is fifteen-hundred pounds per square inch.

  We made a better wolf, and Lisa wanted everyone to know she was in charge. But even with the small specialized unit of maximum force, I had some trepidation. If Ego had ulterior motives, I didn’t know all this power might not be used against me.

  There was a celebration planned for the first three floors of complete mapping and power access, including my ability to see anywhere on those floors. The camera that had me most interested was the one connected to the solar panels. But it was limited by the environment. The wind pushed sand into the lens, and I couldn’t keep sending an automaton out to clean my windows.

  I was thankful we only had one exit. And it was a general decision to keep the door closed off when they weren’t outside patrolling. The communications relay we used to talk to the girls once they ventured outside was spotty at best. Ego suggested it had something to do with a line of sight and possible radio interference in the atmosphere. We had no doubts about what retaliatory measures happened during the first days of the mutations. Someone, somewhere on the planet, dropped some nukes on some of those creatures. It was impossible to determine what levels of exposure we had at the base. And I asked the girls to keep their patrols to under an hour at a time.

  “They’re like something
out of a video game, you know. Like, they have these outfits that are color coordinated.” Elaine was thoughtful and quick with the snarky remarks, in true cat-like style, but she wasn’t much in the way of a tactical officer.

  “How would you know?” Marie snapped. “You took a nap out there. I didn’t see you for a half hour.”

  They’d made an excursion across the valley floor. Between the three of them, Marie was the only one who had trouble keeping up. Lisa was the fastest, but Marie had the jumping strength that allowed her high vantage points and stealth capabilities.

  We needed to know what we were up against when it came to the humans who breached the post.

  “There is one girl,” Lisa said quietly. She tended to lay very still, sometimes more still than Elaine, to listen to the others bicker. She took to her body with admiration. She had been a marine biologist, or at least in training for one when she lost a fight on the second day with a toaster.

  Most of us had stories about attacks. Everyone other than Ego had met up with some form of mutated human and lost the battle. But Lisa had arrived at the hospital after her heart stopped a few times because she’d accidentally poked a toaster with a fork after being startled by an explosion outside her apartment window while making breakfast.

  They picked her out and sent her to processing. Her background suggested they wanted people and weren’t picky about who they had. Or maybe it was her education that gave them the idea to keep her around just a little longer.

  “What about this girl?” I asked, prodding lightly.

  “Oh, yeah,” Marie said. “You’re talking about that really pretty one.” She flicked her claws around as she spoke. Personality traits manifest later than the consciousness. She was mildly fidgety. She was all about affirmative action and equality. She couldn’t find an argument about our paradigm because while I was technically in charge, by proxy of Ego, I wasn’t a sexist, and I didn’t just give orders, I learned with a group as I had, negotiations were the only possible way I got anything accomplished. I didn’t tell them about the cameras in the bathrooms.