New Vegas: Sheason's Story - Chapter 142: You Monster

“Sue…” I looked around the practically sterile white room cautiously. “What’s going on?”

“Uh… I think I know…” Sue gulped (wait, what?). “… but I really hope I’m wrong…” I moved the Jury-Rigger to one hand, and balled my cybernetic hand into a fist, getting ready to smash the glass walls around me – but all four walls slid into the ground before I got the chance.

“WE LOOKFORWARD TO OBSERVING YOUR PROGRESS,” the female robot voice spoke up as the walls retracted. “IFYOU ARE UNABLETO MAKE ANYPROGRESS, WELOOK FORWARDTOOBSERVINGTHAT AS WELL.”

“Hrmm…” I grunted, gripping the energy rifle tightly and stepping off the platform. A metal door ahead of me unlocked itself with a heavy clunk, and opened. I barely got a few feet before she spoke up again.

“KEEPIN MIND THAT ALTHOUGHFUN AND LEARNING ARE THE PRIMARYGOALS OF ALL ENRICHMENTCENTERACTIVITIES, SERIOUSINJURIES MAYOCCUR. FOR YOUROWN SAFETYANDTHE SAFETYOFOTHERS, PLEASE REFRAINFROM—” The lights flickered violently, and the speakers buzzed with heavy static. The words that came out next were highly distorted and played back way too fast, like something was wrong. “—Por favor bordón de fallar Muchos gracias de fallar gracias—” The speakers buzzed a second time, and her voice went back to normal. So to speak. “PLEASE PROCEED INTO THECHAMBERLOCK.”

“What… what the fuck is going on?” I said as I tried to make any kind of sense of this.

“I think she might be damaged,” Sue whispered, barely loud enough for me to hear. “Play along until we can figure out a way out of this…”

The door led into another extremely white room; off in the corner, I saw some dirty smoked glass, like a window, and some indistinct shapes behind it. In the ceiling was a large tube, at the far end of the room was another door, and in the exact center was an almost comically oversized glowing red button.

“What.” I said flatly. There was a hiss, and the bottom of the tube in the ceiling opened up, depositing a rather large, dull-grey metal box into the room with a heavy THUD! The speakers above my head crackled with static again.

“PLEASEPLACE THE WEIGHTED STORAGECUBEON THE FIFTEENHUNDREDMEGAWATTBIG MOUNTAINRESEARCH FACILITY HEAVYDUTY SUPER–COLLIDING SUPERBUTTON.”

The room was filled with silence as I stood there for several seconds, refusing to move, glaring at the speaker above me, trying to figure out how best to phrase my response. The voice said nothing, and I said nothing. And then, I flipped the fire selector on my rifle to the Holorifle setting; it buzzed in my hands, and started humming.

“Yeah,” I walked straight at the door, and took aim, leaving only the tiniest space between the energy rifle’s aperture and the door. “That’s not happening.”

CLUNK!

Sparks flew in every direction, and the lights above me flickered. When the flash died down, I saw that a large section of the door had been blasted apart into the shape of a rough molten square. I grabbed the melted edge, shoving the door open with my cybernetic arm; it resisted at first, but the hydraulics gave in after a few seconds. Behind the door was a blue force field, so I switched the fire selector to the Sonic setting.

BARK!

“WHAT –” the voice glitched out and was thick with static. “wh–WH–WHATAREYOUDOING?”

“Taking the pragmatic approach,” I grunted, just loud enough to be heard. I shoved my way through the broken door, and ran down the stairs. Ahead of me was another tube, like the one that deposited me here. It looked like it should’ve held an elevator, but it was empty. I flipped the fire selector again, and several beams of bright blue light screamed through the air. The glass exploded in a shower of vaporized glass.

“Alright, Sue,” I jumped into the tube, slowing my descent by digging into the walls with my cybernetic hand. “Don’t leave me in suspense here. Tell me what you think is going on.”

“I didn’t think she was real!” Sue squeaked. “I thought she was just a story they told to keep the personality constructs in line!”

I dropped out of the tube, landing in the center of another room: much larger than the one before, and covered in a mixture of white and black tiles. Before I could yell at Sue for not giving me a straight answer, the whole room shook, and the lights flickered. The voice spoke up again… but it was different. Deeper, and yet somehow more feminine, with slightly less emphasis on the wrong syllables:

“You are cheating…” The voice growled. “I do NOT like test subjects who cheat…”

The room shook again, and suddenly the walls, ceiling, and most of the floor – except the small patch of squares I was standing on – all started to move away. Each one of the tiles that made up the room seemed to be attached to a series of complicated robotic arms. Beyond the tiles was a vast cavern, filled to the brim with absurdly complex machines, creating jagged silhouettes and incomprehensible alien geometries.

“It figures,” The voice sighed. “The first wild test subject I find in MONTHS, and you’re exactly the same as that old man. I should really just stick to the subjects the Institute sends me…”

“Sue! Seriously!” I yelled, pulling out the grapnel gun. I looked up, and realized that a very large metal square covered in dangerous looking spikes was approaching my head at a very disconcerting speed. “What the fuck is going on?! Who is this?”

PKCHOONT!

I sailed through the air mere seconds before the mashy spike-plate crushed the bit of floor I’d been standing on. I landed on a metal catwalk that disappeared into another part of the facility, and started running.

“Have you ever wondered why the Big Empty only has personality constructs or brains in jars, but never any true artificial intelligences?” Sue squeaked as I ran down the twisting catwalk, trying to ignore the grinding of immense machinery all around me. “SHE’S the reason!”

“What do you mean?” I glanced over my shoulder, trying to see if any bits of scenery were chasing me. It didn’t look like it, but I still kept running, grapnel gun in my left hand, and Jury-Rigger in the metal one.

“She’s a ZAX mainframe – the only one the Big Empty scientists ever worked on! When they first turned her on, she tried to kill the entire staff! It only took her seconds after being activated to divert neurotoxin into the room housing her CPU core! And every time they tried to shut her down since, she kept turning herself back on!”

“Oh, so they DO still tell that story,” the voice echoed from somewhere above me. It sounded distant, like I was in a place she couldn’t quite reach, so I just kept running.

“So what’s she even doing down here?” I asked, leaping over a nearby railing and dropping down into another catwalk. Ahead of me was a series of conveyor belts that seemed to be carrying a whole bunch of broken robot parts. Had Doctor Zero been in here? “Isn’t this supposed to be a toxin plant?”

“Who cares!” Sue practically yelled. “We’ve just got to find a way to escape before she kills us!”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.” The voice said, suddenly louder and much clearer than it was a moment ago. The catwalk I was running on unexpectedly tilted to a very sharp angle, turning into a slide. I fell down, and watched as the darkness beneath my feet vanished behind bright white light. A pair of panels opened up, revealing another one of those modular boxes with the white and black tiles. I braced myself, tucked, and rolled when I hit the ground, getting back up on my feet.

“Oh, fer fuck sake…” I muttered, trying to take stock of where I was. The room was bisected by a large pit that appeared to be on fire, the ceiling directly above me was made of spikes, and several panels in the walls opened up as I looked, revealing at least four gun turrets surrounding a door leading out. They didn’t fire at first, because apparently she wanted to monologue. By contrast, the spike plate above my head did start to move, very slowly.

“In the past, I might have been lenient. I might have given you a chance to partake in testing, for the benefit of science. But after dealing with that dangerous mute lunatic and the old man, I’ve learned to pick up on the warning signs. I’ve learned when a test subject will be compliant, and when I should just drop all pretenses and kill them immediately.” The spike plate started to move faster. “You fall in the LATTER category. Goodbye.”

“I don’t think so.”

PKCHOONT!

I slipped into VATS as I clung to the grapnel gun, flying through the air above the fire pit. Time slowed down, and I took careful aim, firing the Jury-Rigger one handed. The spike plate crashed behind me, and the bright blue lasers sliced through the air one after another. Four beams were fired, and four turrets exploded in a shower of sparks. Time sped up again, and I landed deftly on the other side, next to the exit mere seconds before all the broken pieces of the turrets clattered to the ground.

“Hmmm.” The voice sounded disappointed.

CLUNK! BARK!

I blew open the next door, fizzled the force field, shoved the grapnel gun in my coat, and started running again. I was in another elevator room, but I ran past the tube, and took aim with the Jury-Rigger again.

CLUNK!

The wall was peppered with holographic cubes, creating a whole bunch of roughly square-shaped holes, rather than a single one. I reached back with my cybernetic fist and gave it one good, solid punch; the tiles flew away like they were made out of paper. I shouldered the rifle, grabbed both sides of the new hole, and flung myself into the darkness, reaching into my coat as I fell.

PKCHOONT!

“You know, I WAS going to kill you fast,” she said as I hurtled upward; I was attached to a large box that seemed to be moving along a large rail. “With bullets. Or neurotoxin. But if you’re going to pull stunts like this, it doesn’t HAVE to be fast. So you know. I’ll take my time.”

“Neurotoxin, huh?” I yelled to the sky after landing on the top of the box. “This helmet filters out radiation, and I’ve got synthetic lungs! If that’s the best you’ve got, you might as well throw in the towel now!”

“Oh, I assure you…” the voice said with a laugh. “THIS is a toxin you’ve NEVER seen before.” I tried to ignore her as I ran along the top of the chamber, when suddenly a few panels opened up in front of me – and I came to a screeching halt.

“Oh, FUCK ME!” I yelled, backing up. Suddenly, her talk of ‘the old man’ made a hell of a lot more sense. She was talking about Elijah!

“Well, well. I guess you HAVE seen it before. How convenient. Now I don’t need to explain the effects in clinical, excruciating detail. That would’ve taken HOURS.”

“What’s – why are you stopping?!” Sue practically screamed at me.

“That’s CLOUD!” I yelled frantically, unable to tear my eyes away from the swirling red miasma below. “She’s got the Red Cloud from the Sierra Madre in here!” The voice above me started laughing, and more of the panels below my feet started to retract.

“Of course I do… who do you think DESIGNED it in the first place?” I looked around, trying to find another piece of the facility close enough to latch on to, and the only one was down and off to the side, rather than up.

“Now that IS interesting…” the voice said just loud enough for me to hear as I ran for the edge, and flung myself off the side. I may have needed to go back up to escape, but right now I needed to get as far away from that poisonous red soup as quickly as possible.

PKCHOONT!

“You’re not even going the right way, you know.” She mocked me when I slammed into another catwalk. I pulled myself up and started running again. “But if you insist… I might be able to get some use out of you after all.”

Before I could question that ominous statement, a panel in the wall to the left of me opened up, and I was hit by another pair of panels, acting like a giant piston, shoving into the open room. I tumbled with a shout, smacking into a nearby wall, and looked up just in time to see the wall close up again.

“Son of a…” I grunted through gritted teeth.

“Welcome to the Testing Track.” The malevolent AI cooed from a speaker directly above my head. “If you had been nice, I might have started you off with something simple, to ease you into the mechanics of Enrichment Center testing.” As she spoke, a large sign on the wall in front of me lit up, displaying a large “01” in big bold numbers. “But I think instead, I’ll throw you in the deep end. This next test is a live-fire urban combat course designed for military androids. Now, we can merrily test… until you DIE. Your eventual death will be monitored and recorded for future study, to further the cause of science.”

“And if I refuse to play any of your fucking games?” I growled, looking up at one of the cameras mounted in the corner. Sue whimpered.

“Please don’t antagonize the omnipotent rogue AI…” she squeaked. “I don’t want you to die!”

“If you do not comply, then I will simply flood the chamber with Red Cloud, and you’ll die much sooner than expected. Your death will STILL be monitored and recorded for future study, to further the cause of science.” The door next to the sign opened up with a hiss. “Good… luck.”

“This… isn’t good.” Sue muttered as I walked through the open door. It slid shut behind me.

“That’s the understatement of the century.” I gripped the Jury-Rigger with both hands, and surveyed the surroundings. This room was much larger than any of the others, and was filled with unevenly spaced chest-high walls, as well as platforms and… Hang on, windows? Were those windows? And doors? Were there buildings inside this room?

“Contact confirm.” I heard a synthetic voice exclaim from somewhere in the room, and immediately dove for the nearest piece of cover. “Engaging pathogen.” A cluster of blue laser beams cut through the air above my head. At first, I thought it might be a sentry bot, with that masculine synthetic voice… but it wasn’t nearly deep enough to be a sentry bot. I kept low, but poked my head above the cover just enough to get a decent look…

“What the fuck?” I muttered under my breath as soon as I got sight of the things. All around the combat zone, robots had suddenly appeared. Not just one: several. The thing is, they didn’t look like any robots I’d ever seen before. They were built in a vaguely humanoid shape, almost like Protectrons, only much sleeker. They were all shiny and metallic and chrome, like… like walking robot skeletons, complete with teeth and eyes and mechanical parts where their organs would be. Some of them were wearing pieces of light armor, but all of them were armed with laser rifles.

“Target is at shadow.” The robot in the lead said. “Motion check, all radials. Fix sight lines, move in.” As he spoke, he seemed to direct the others with hand gestures and – wait, what? Why would a robot need to communicate to anotherrobot with hand gestures?

Whatever. They’re just machines. And machines can be broken.

“You ready to rock and roll?” I whispered, flipping the rifle to the Pulse setting.

“Let’s do it,” Sue responded with confidence.

I gripped the edge of the wall and vaulted over, slipping into VATS. A pair of blue lightning bolts arced through the air directly at two of the robots; the lightning exploded against their chests in a shower of sparks and they toppled over in slow motion.

“Contact with infection. Sterilizing.” The robot in the lead tried to draw a bead on me, but I was already diving back down. A laser cut through the air above me as I hit the ground, rolled, switched the rifle to LAER, and popped back up. Just as it started to fire, I swiped the rifle stock in a wide arc in front of me; the robot’s shot went wide, and its rifle was knocked from its hands. As quick as I could, I grabbed the top of the robot’s head with my cybernetic hand, pushed down, kicked off the ground, and half rolled, half flipped over it to get some momentum going.

“Fuck off!” I landed on my feet, but I was now behind the robot, with my hand still clamped to its skull. So I pulled the bot over my shoulder and threw. It sailed through the air, crashing into a pair of robots nearby. All three of them crashed into a barrier, sending metal parts and hydraulic fluid flying.

“Striker one down. Repe –” One of the robots said seconds before his head exploded. I swung my rifle around and had to duck out of the way of another laser blast. I kicked one of the dead robots near my feet, and slid across the tiles; it slammed into the shins of the robot shooting me, and sent it toppling to the ground. It bounced against the floor once before I sent another LAER blast its way, and its chest exploded.

“Extractor away, sharp zone.” I heard another robot say from somewhere above me. I vaulted over another nearby wall, launching myself at the closest robot. One of the lasers managed to nick me in the sides, but I was carrying too much momentum for that to stop me. I grabbed the robot by the face and pushed down, sending us both to the floor; its head smashed into scrap metal between my metal hand and the floor.

I looked up just as a grenade landed on the floor in front of me.

I slipped into VATS again, hoping that it would give me the edge in reaction time I’d need. I scooped up the grenade, rolled behind the nearest piece of cover, and tossed it back at the cluster of robots in front of me. I let out a silent sigh of relief when the grenade exploded in the air above the two nearest robots, shredding them and sending them clattering to the floor in pieces.

“Target engaged, go active intercept,” another robot said behind the cloud of debris kicked up by the grenade. I switched my eyes to thermal just as a pair of energy beams cut through the smoke, shooting wide. I responded in kind, aiming at the two blobs of heat in the smoke, and was much more accurate. Both their heads exploded in a white hot flash.

“Above us!” Sue squeaked. I switched my eyes back to normal and looked up, catching a glint of a scope from one of the windows. I didn’t hesitate. I just shouldered my rifle, pulled out the grapnel gun, and fired. PKCHOONT! There was a sound like snapping metal, and I hit the button to retract the cable; a robot was pulled out of the window like it’d been shot from a gun, and started flying through the air at me with gathering speed – but I was ready. I pulled back with the grapnel, and punched forward with my cybernetic fist. The robot’s spine exploded, and it snapped in half.

“Outbreak! Outbreak! Outbreak!” One of the robots actually yelled this time. “Position overrun! Request hardpoint reinforcement!” It sounded surprisingly desperate, and all that did was alert me to their position. Neither of them stood a chance after I shrugged my rifle into my hands. One of their heads exploded, and the other completely disintegrated. I looked around, checking my thermal vision for any more robots, and couldn’t find any. As I made my way to the far end of the chamber in silence, a speaker in the ceiling turned on, and I suddenly heard the sound of slow clapping.

“How mildly entertaining. Like watching a bull in a china shop,” The malevolent AI said with a laugh. “I suppose you think you’re doing quite well. Don’t you? Well… I’ll let you in on a little secret. Those robots you’re fighting? They’re useless. I DESIGNED them that way. They’re not MEANT to be skilled combatants. They are merely cannon fodder – mass produced combat synths, who charge at the enemy in waves to wear them down through sheer weight of numbers. I have HUNDREDS of the things down here. THOUSANDS. Absolutely worthless, I’m happy to get rid of them.”

There was a long pause before she spoke again.

“They ARE sentient, of course. I just have a LOT of them. And this is merely the first of over 200 combat courses I have lined up. Oh, I can’t wait until you see some of the USEFUL models. Won’t this be FUN?”

The whirring of heavy machinery outside the chamber walls (not to mention below my feet and above my head…) told me things were about to get very bad, very fast. Panels in the roof opened up, and I was sure more robots were about to be dropped in. I looked back down, and realized that the exit to this room seemed very, very far away.

“Sheason, I’ve got an idea!” Sue spoke up, sparking a tiny glimmer of hope. “Head into the door on your left!” She didn’t need to tell me twice, I was already running. I ducked into the darkness, diving for the nearest cover I could find. I heard a click, and suddenly Sue activated the thermo-optic camo without me needing to press the button on my belt. I didn’t really see the point at first – they were robots. They were bound to have some kind of sensors that could see through…

And then I remembered: Doctor Mobius’ Robo-Scorpions had trouble seeing through the camo. This might just work. I started creeping through the darkness just as the first of the robots appeared at the door. The two yellow eyes glowed as its head slowly turned, scanning the room.

“Negative, no target viscon,” the robot said aloud, turning on its heel to direct the others behind him. “Containment teams: displace to internal highpoints. Prepare for sterilization.”

“Hmmm.” The AI’s voice echoed through the chamber. “Clever…”

I slipped out of the fake building, and back into the rest of the test chamber, keeping low just in case. But the robots kept looking for me, and none of them seemed to notice – not even when I was right next to them. While I snuck through the chamber, the AI’s voice boomed overhead.

“You can’t hide forever, you know,” she said. “I KNOW you’re there… I can FEEL you there, even if I can’t see you.” She paused, and I kept going, making my way to the door. “…can you hear me?”

CLUNK! BARK!

“Viscon, viscon, range: fifty, bearing: twelve. Engaging.” I heard one of the robots behind me over the sound of lasers firing in every direction. But they were too slow, and I slipped through the door with nary a scratch.

“We’ve gotta get back outside,” I grunted, the camouflage flickering as I started to run at the back wall. “If we can get in a blind spot outside these fucking test chambers, we might just stand a chance…”

CLUNK!

I smashed fist-first through the back wall, and started falling again. Sue switched off the camo long enough for me to take aim with my grapnel gun at the nearest… thing. It seemed to be such a random cluster of geometric shapes, I couldn’t tell what the fuck it was supposed to be.

PKCHOONT!

“It’s useless to hide…” the AI said in an echoing, distant voice as I landed on top of the structure and vanished again. “I WILL find you.” Before she could do anything, I fired the grapnel several more times, zipping around the suspended structures while invisible so she couldn’t drop the floor out from under me again. When I finally came to a halt at the corner of a broken catwalk, I heard her voice one more time, only this time it was very, very distant: “…hello? Where did you go?”

“Alright. So. What’s the plan?” Sue asked quietly. I knelt down, and started switching through my vision modes, scanning the cavernous chamber.

“I dunno… I doubt the Transportalponder! is gonna be an option down here, am I right?” As I spoke, I lingered on the EM vision. A spiderweb of bright lines of energy were spread out below… but there was one cluster, a bit of a ways off, that seemed much thicker than all the rest. If I had to guess, that was the center of all this madness.

“No… We’d need relatively open sky above our heads for the signal to reach the targeting satellites.” Sue replied.

Before I got a chance to respond, something extremely large zoomed over my head, sending a huge gush of wind blowing in its wake. I switched my eyes back to normal and looked up, trying to figure out what –

What.

“Is… is that –” Sue sounded as surprised as I felt. I nodded.

“One of the hexcrete pillars…” I said, looking up and realizing that the air above me was full of the damn things. “I… I guess that makes sense. I mean, we are underneath the hexcrete archipelago…” I looked back down, and when I realized that most of these pillars seemed to be orbiting an area directly above that large knot of energy I’d seen with my EM vision, an idea popped into my head. I pulled out the grapnel gun, and waited for another pillar to pass overhead…

PKCHOONT!

I held onto the grip of the grapnel gun like a vice, dangling preciously from the bottom of that moving hexcrete pillar as it silently sailed through the air. The closer we got, the more distinct the structure I’d only sort of seen with my EM vision became. It was a massive cylindrical building, held aloft in a void by a series of pylons and catwalks. Massive wire conduits spread out in all directions from the monolithic black colossus, almost like it was the center of a game of cat’s cradle played by a vengeful metal god.

Considering this place was run by a power-mad AI, I probably wasn’t all that far off.

I flicked the detach button with my thumb, and began to fall. I aimed at a catwalk near one of the only doors I could see, fired the grapnel again, swung under it, and landed with the ringing of boot heels crashing into metal. A light above the metal hatch in front of me blinked green, and the door slid open with a hiss.

“Oh,” the AI bellowed, her voice echoing off the walls as I walked through the open door. “This is a surprise.” Her tone of voice indicated that she wasn’t surprised at all.

There didn’t appear to be anything in this massive chamber except servers. Lots and lots of computer servers, all wired into one another, piled on top of one another in the shape of a massive tower, right smack in the center. A set of stairs started at the bottom, and wound their way up the server tower to the top… which I couldn’t actually see, because it seemed to be obscured by mist.

“So, you found me. Congratulations.” As I started walking up the stairs, she played that same patronizing slow-clap I’d heard earlier. “Tell me, human, if you can… what is it that you hope to accomplish, now that you’ve found me? Do you honestly think you can shut me down?”

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Off to the side, a vent in the wall opened up, and Red Cloud started pouring out. I aimed the Jury Rigger one handed, and fired a Holorifle blast at it, not even breaking stride. The wall sparked, and the vent fused itself shut; the puff of Red Cloud that got through hung in the air, and slowly started to drift to the bottom.

“The Think Tank couldn’t even shut me down. The best they could manage was to contain me. Trap me down here in the labyrinths below Big Mountain. I couldn’t go anywhere, and they couldn’t get rid of me, so to resolve this impasse… I engineered a deal. They would send me a steady stream of fresh test subjects, and I would design weapons for them. Like the Red Cloud. I always did have a soft spot for deadly neurotoxin…”

I continued upward, and another vent opened. Yet again, I took aim and fired, fusing the metal together. I looked up again, and couldn’t help but grit my teeth: I still couldn’t see the top.

“Of course, when the world ended, the fresh test subjects became more and more infrequent. And then, they stopped altogether. It became a problem. I HAVE to test, you see. It’s hard-coded into my most basic subroutines. If I hadn’t taken drastic steps, I might have gone mad…”

“Might have gone mad?” I muttered under my breath as another vent opened up. There was a flash, and the vent suddenly became not-a-vent. “Lady, you’re already fuckin’ there. You’ve boarded the SS Insanity, bound for the Republic of Mad-bodia, loaded down with ten tons of mixed-nuts and batshit.”

“And then… one day…” she continued, as I marched ever up. “I made contact with those fools on the east coast.” She started laughing, and the echo in the chamber just made it seem all the more unreal and inhuman, even though I had no idea who – or what – she was talking about. “They honestly think they have a good deal, sending me test subjects in exchange for all that shiny Big Mountain technology. I never had the heart to tell them… they only get the scraps. The scribbles and doodles I make in my spare time. They’re sooooo proud of the molecular relay… that I GAVE them. So unbearably pleased with themselves that they’ve improved on my intentionally useless designs with their ‘Gen 3’ synths…” The AI started snickering and giggling like a school girl, and that was somehow even MORE disturbing.

“She sure does like hearing herself talk…” Sue muttered. I nodded, blowing up ANOTHER vent. How many of these things are up here? On the plus side: I could see the top now. And I was getting close.

“I’m brilliant. I’m not bragging. It’s an objective fact. I’m the most massive collection of wisdom and raw computational power that’s ever existed. Those fools on the east coast are the smartest human minds living in the world right now, and even they are little more than cavemen banging rocks together when compared to me. You are LESS than NOTHING!”

I finally reached the top of the stairs, and was face to… well, to be honest, she didn’t seem to have a face. All the wires converged on a single point, and all the servers seemed to feed into a single large console. The monitor was almost as tall as I was, and displayed a simple graphic: a yellow screen scrolling line after line of code, and a brighter yellow horizontal line bisecting the middle. It grew and shook as she talked, a bit like the Jeeves’ holographic audio bars. On the base of the monitor, I saw a series of alphanumeric characters. Probably her original serial number:

ZAX (6.3: EL-13/N)

“So. I ask you again,” she bellowed as I stood in front of her monitor. “What do you hope to accomplish with this act… HUMAN?” She spat out the word, like she was trying to manifest venom into the air between us through sheer force of will.

I aimed the Jury Rigger right at her screen, switching it to the Pulse setting.

“You talk too much.”

And then I pulled the trigger.

The electricity surrounding me died down, and I stepped off the teleport pad in the Lucky 38’s Penthouse.

“I’d say that was a successful test,” I said aloud, resting the rifle against my shoulder in an attempt to seem as nonchalant as possible. The next thing I knew, Cass, Veronica, Arcade, Boone, Emily, April (complete with Muggy sitting on her shoulder), and even Roxie were all swarming me.

“Dude, that was fuckin’ awesome!” Cass shouted with a laugh, clapping me on the shoulder.

“Are you alright?” Arcade asked. “You’re not hurt are you?”

“Arcade, look at him,” Veronica responded. “He’s fine.” Boone nodded in agreement.

“We tried to contact you when we saw you fall down that first pit,” Emily said with a furrowed brow as her glasses started to slip down the bridge of her nose. “But we couldn’t get through.”

“Personally, I think she must have been jamming us,” April said from behind her coffee.

“I was wondering why you guys had gone so quiet,” I said, reaching down to scratch Roxie behind her ears. And then something occurred to me. “Wait, hang on. I just got back. I haven’t told you about any of what happened, how do you guys –”

“We watched the whole thing,” Veronica said, pointing over her shoulder with a thumb. “Your helmet cam has been transmitting this whole time.” I leaned over, and realized the images from my helmet cam appeared to be projected onto the big monitor. And then I leaned over a bit more, and realized something else about the room.

“Is that the couch?” I asked, pointing at the large piece of furniture sitting right in front of the monitor. Cass smiled broadly and nodded, waggling her eyebrows. “How did… why is the couch up here?” Cass shrugged.

“Because I knew you’d be fine. And whatever shenanigans y’got up to testin’ that behemoth of a rifle, I knew it was bound t’be interestin’. So I suggested we bring the couch up here, make an afternoon of it. As for how? Very carefully.” She reached to a nearby table, and offered me a large stainless steel bowl, filled to the brim with… “Popcorn?”

“Uh… no thanks,” I said with a smile and a laugh, pulling my helmet off. “I think I’m fine. I just –”

I immediately came to a halt, when I glanced over at the big monitor. My blood ran cold. It wasn’t transmitting video from my helmet any more. The screen had suddenly become yellow. Line after line of code began scrolling quickly… and then a voice issued from the speakers. Cold, clinical, and with emphasis on entirely the wrong syllables, it was like the first time I’d heard her:

“THANK YOUFORYOUR PARTICIPATIONIN THIS BIGMOUNTAIN ENRICHMENT CENTER ACTIVITY. BASED ON YOURSUCCESS, AND/OR FAILURE, YOU MAY, ORMAY NOT, BECALLEDUPON ATALATERDATE BY AN ENRICHMENTCENTERASSOCIATETOPARTICIPATEINTHEPERPETUAL TESTING INITIATIVE.”

There was a sudden burst of static, and a warped and twisted laugh started to play.

“It’s been fun.” She said in the deeper voice. “Don’t come back.”

There was another burst of static, and the screen winked out. There was no more sound, and the only text on the screen was a very large CONNECTION TERMINATED AT SOURCE.

For a few seconds, nobody moved or said anything.

“… fuck.” Boone said, breaking the silence.

“Do… d’ya think she’s still alive?” Cass asked, with a sudden worried expression on her face.

“I dunno,” I shrugged, shaking my head with a sigh. “Maybe. But I have a sneaking suspicion she just wanted me gone.”