Crushing the Resistance (Half Life Droneification) (Patreon)

How's it going folks? Still on break over here, but I have a backlog of stories I'm trying to get through for you all - here's one today! This one was a bit different from my usual fare, but I hope you all enjoy none the less!

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Alyx Vance groaned as she slowly awoke, her head throbbing like a reactor emergency light. What had she been doing last night? The last thing she remembered was breaking into one of the combine’s monitoring facilities to find out what they were up to this week – pretty standard stuff, she’d been doing it since she was twelve. There had been something different this time though, more activity than normal. She remembered sneaking over to a computer console, and then the sound of a door opening behind her, and…

And then everything went black.

Wait… No. No no no… Where was she, she needed to open her eyes and-

With a jolt of terror, she realised her eyes were open – she just couldn’t see anything. The world around her was pitch black. And when she attempted to move, she realised why. She could feel metal restraints around her arms and legs – she could even feel the cold metal directly against her skin (where were her clothes?!) – and when she tried to shift her neck she could feel a tight metal hood wrapped around her head.

Horror crept into the young resistance fighter’s mind. She knew where she was. She’d seen pictures of this place in her worst nightmares. This was Nova Prospect. She must have been knocked out, captured and shipped directly to the combine’s prison factory, where… Where people were… Turned.

They had strung her up in one of their machines. She could picture herself, hung up on one of their capture walls, dangling high above the ground, at the mercy of their tech – just one of dozens, maybe even hundreds, of other prisoners hanging in rows up here. They hadn’t even allowed her the dignity of wearing any clothing – she was completely naked from head to toe.

She wasn’t sure what these machines… No, she knew exactly what these machines did. They turned ordinary men and women, resistance fighters or civilians, into soldiers for the combine. That was their purpose. But she didn’t know how they did it. No one in the resistance had ever gotten close enough to find out – not without coming out the other end as a loyal combine thrall.

She had no desire to find out, either. Escape. She had to escape, right now, before this thing got started. That shouldn’t be hard. She’d gotten out of worse scrapes before… right?

Well if she was going to do so now, she had better act fast. There was a buzz running through the machine, and the captured freedom fighter suddenly felt the whole contraption she was bound in lurch to the left. She could hear the low pitched hum of electronics starting to heat up. Had this thing activated? Grunting, she tried to raise her arms to force this metal hood off of her face…

Only for the device to light up before she could even lift her wrists out of their bindings. Bright, white light, shocking, even painful after the sheer darkness she’d been enveloped in, hit her eyes like a freight train. Alyx couldn’t help but gasp and squirm uncomfortably, though her bindings kept her from moving far. Damnit, it had already started? She needed to get free fast…

Slamming her eyes shut, she tried to find a way to get loose, twisting her body this way and that. But combine technology was ahead of her here – they knew exactly how to build an inescapable restraint for a human after all these years. She couldn’t find any give at all.

[Subject 8507X12 prepared.] Suddenly a mechanical, echoing voice spoke directly into her ears. The voice of the combine. There were speakers hidden in this thing? [Beginning conversion sequence.]

“Like hell!” Alyx yelled, defiance surging – but she could barely even hear her own voice over the noise of heavy static which filled her ears. A discordant symphony of notes and sounds rumbled through her head, scrambling her thoughts with a surprising intensity. She tried to pull herself together, tried to focus on resisting whatever they were about to try, but it was so hard to think through all this racket – everything she tried got interrupted, smothered by the din.

If the combine thought that would be enough to break her, though, they had another thing coming. Snarling, the feisty resistance fighter gathered her will, pure stubbornness defying the dizzying cacophony to fight back. With firm, jerky motions, she raised her arms, once again struggling with her bindings. She could swear she felt them starting to give – in a moment, she’d be able to lift them up and tear this helmet off her head…

But in her struggles, Miss Vance missed the true threat. For while the loud, heavy beating static thrummed through her brain, there was another sound, all but drowned out by its louder counterpart. It was a smooth, sharp, pitch-perfect note, the kind that might run along a tuning fork. Quiet, even – at least in comparison to the static. Easy to ignore.

And yet, it was this sound that was the more dangerous. For as the machine’s captive struggled against her restraints, and against the thundering static, it was the quiet, subtle sound that buzzed into her ears and vibrated through her skull, whispering into her mind beneath her awareness…

[Relax…]

The word appeared in the middle of her jumbled thoughts, indistinguishable from the chaos around it. It resounded through her head, sinking into every part of her mind.

Relax? Why had she thought that? No, she needed to fight, she had to-

[Stop fighting.]

She had to stop fighting and… And, wait…

[Everything is fine.]

Everything is… fine? Alyx frowned, confusion filling her mind. Why was this fine…?

[Lure them into a false sense of security.]

… Oh! Right, of course! If she made it look like this was working on her, then it would end faster, and she could escape! That made perfect sense. It was a way better plan than trying to break out of metal restraints. All she had to do was-

[Relax]

A small smirk danced on her lips as she let her body go limp, her struggling arms starting to settle. Yes, this was it. As long as she made it look convincing, she’d out of here in no time. She just had to relax and-

[Open your eyes.]

-open her- !!!!

A blur of colour was waiting for her, greens and blues and reds and yellows, whirling in front of her eyes at speeds so fast that the instinct shapes seemed to strobe across her irises, leaving bright after images that dazzled and dazed her even further. The sight was dizzying beyond belief, especially with noise still pumping into her ears, her head spinning and spinning. It was overwhelming, overpowering, too much stimulation, too much information, too much, too much…

[Relax.]

Alyx’s thoughts were formless noise, a whirling cacophony of chaos. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t move – all she could do was stare into the flashing screen like a deer caught in the headlights. But words made their way in anyway – slipping into her mind. Relax. She had to relax. Relax.

Her already limp body slumped in its restraints, all of her remaining strength slipping out of her as her mind was overwhelmed, jaw slowly dropping to hang slack, hands loose at her sides.

[Sleep.]

Her mind plunged even deeper, dragged under by a maelstrom of colours and sounds, pulled inexorably into the dark by a relentless tide. The soft, sweet words that made up the entirety of her conscious thoughts guided her down smoothly, almost gently, and she clung to them like a sailor in a storm. Slowly, even the chaotic mess that was her mind began to lessen, to shrink, as she fell into a sleep-like state, a trance, her mind slowing to a crawl, until what was left…

[Stop thinking.]

… Was halted completely.

Alyx Vance went slack, staring, drooling, in her harness – her mind empty and void.

[Subject has been rendered docile. Proceeding with conversion.]

The colours dimmed, their work done, fading away to leave only white light – white light that started to quickly grow in intensity, flickering like a neon bulb. But there was more to this than just mere light. It poured into her eyes, flooding into her brain, and her blank mind was helpless to resist it. And slowly, steadily, its victim completely oblivious to what was happening, it began to erase everything that lay in its path.

Memories, emotions, personality, everything that made Alyx who she was, all of it was washed away by the tide of light, bleached into nothingness, leaving nothing but pure white nothingness behind. It moved through her from the highest heights, shining away all concept of ‘thought’ from her head, to her deepest depths – bleaching her right down to her soul. All that was left was mechanical knowledge – how to walk, how to breathe – and information that the combine would deem useful – things like resistance base locations, and important figures. Everything else was purged.

Even the name Alyx Vance was obliterated from her reduced consciousness, fading like a shadow before the dawn. All that was left was a blank slate.

And only then, once the woman who had once been Alyx was completely empty, did her retraining begin. The white screen flickered, and then began to fill with images, words and meaning. Information that poured unfiltered into brain at a lightning fast rate, leaving the hollowed out husk of a person no choice but to accept it all as it moulded and reshaped her, filled her with orders and obedience.

Her sense of self, her very identity, had already been removed. Now, a new one was constructed. One with no sense of will, or direction – other than what her orders demanded. One that knew only how to obey, and do as she was told. One that would kill without thought, and die without complaint. A ruthless tool, and nothing more.

The designation 8507X12-A was branded into her soul.

Her mind wasn’t the only thing being modified, of course. Now that she had been tamed, all sorts of modifications were being given to her body. Drugs that would enhance her muscles were being injected, armour that would sheathe her flesh was being wrapped around her. Liquid latex was being moulded along her legs and arms, while tight, form fitting plastic was being stretched across her behind and waist – flexible and lithe, just as she would be in her new role.

Soon, she was settled in the uniform of a Combine Assassin drone – completely indistinguishable from every other such unit, save for her face. But now, even that would be taken from her – the helmet that had wiped her old life away rising to make room for two shaped plastic pieces, coming together around her head from front and back. The pair joined together, sealing with a hiss as the connecting parts sealed themselves permanently, forming a new kind of helmet – a white, rounded one with a single orange eye staring out of it.

Inside it, 8507X12-A stared blankly as a new screen lit up before her eyes, orders scrolling across it in bright orange text. Orders she could do nothing but obey.

And with that, it was done. The processing unit let out a quiet ding to signify the completion of another unit, and then lowered the new Combine Assassin down to the ground, releasing her onto the floor of Nova Prospect, standing on her own two feet.

Alyx would have run there and then.

8507X12-A waited patiently, until her screen ordered her to walk north through the doors, and head towards unit storage to await deployment. Then she did so without a second – or first – thought.

-

The Citadel had many rooms – most of them dedicated to purposes that had no need for ordinary, unmodified humans. But some space had been set aside for the occasional human collaborator – when they had a purpose to serve. It was to one of these rooms that 8507X12-A marched now, her hips swaying under the influence of her smooth, steady gait.

She stepped into the office and closed the door behind her, just as her orders told her to. Then she walked over to a desk, and bent over, resting her armoured stomach on the wood, just as her orders told her to. With an assassin’s grace and flexibility, she reached back between her legs and unzipped a small flap, revealing the only part of her flesh and blood body that could ever be exposed to the air now – just as her orders told her to.

Her orders said nothing about the male figure in the room who stepped up behind her, already naked from the waist down, so she paid him no mind. She simply gripped the desk, and prepared for penetration.

Just as her orders told her to.