A3 - Chapter 135 – Help Me, Kill Me (Patreon)

USD: 1 Day after Cadre-S Graduation

Location: Van Biesbroeck’s star, Meltisar, MIL-1A, Joint Services Research and Development complex, Heuristics Department

Thea felt a shiver rush down her spine as the heavy metal door slid shut behind her. Whether that was because of the chill in the air, or the dark atmosphere, she couldn’t tell. The walls of the room were a dull dark-gray, almost black, broken up by dozens of different mainframes and consoles that lined the walls.

A central runway led to a central nexus of hundreds of wires attached to a central computer that jutted down from out of the ceiling.

Below them was a single metal table.

Her target was lying on it. The cables and tubes attached to their body.

Thea’s stomach clenched as she found what she had hoped was just the delusions of an insane mind. The room felt sinister as she approached, the single stark white lighting at the nexus casting the rest of the room in shadows. The whirring of ventilation to keep the computers cool was the only sound amid the blinking likes of the mainframes.

“I’m coming.” Thea whispered, almost more for herself than for the thing in the middle of the room.

At the halfway point, the floor turned to clear crystal, revealing a massive chamber underneath. Hundreds of mainframes and what she realized were computronic modules were arranged around a central column. The entirety of the scene was lost in the darkness as the chamber continued downward further than she could make out, even with light enhancement filters.

A faint whirr was her only warning as a turret popped out of the ceiling, the high-powered laser flaring to life only to be refracted and nullified by a geyser of nanites modifying themselves to have maximum refractiveness.

A sharp needle hid itself in the mix, stabbing through the turret and sending a shower of sparks to fall and dance on the crystal floor. A pulsating red light began to flash and an emergency siren blared loud enough for Thea to apply active noise cancelation to her ears.

That was fine. Stealth wasn’t needed anymore; Thea doubted anything was needed anymore. Except for extreme violence.

She came to stand beside the female figure laid out and strapped onto the examination table.

“What have they done to you?” Thea whispered, a sad look appearing on her face. The question was rhetorical. She had known what she’d find here. When she uncovered Lieutenant Martinez's role, she took his life. She’d made him beg for an end.

The bright white lights of the nexus cast everything in stark detail. The woman’s skin was a sickly pale color, as if someone had doused her in bleach. Her eyes were closed but had sunken into their sockets giving her a skeletal appearance.

Her hair had been shaved from not just her head, but her entire body. Wires terminated at contacts implanted into her shaved scalp, and her torso had been surgically altered to allow the various tubes to enter her body.

The faint sound of the climate control was joined by the slow pulsing flow of the life-support machines that forced her heart and lungs to continue to function. It was only the faint but unmistakable field around her that indicated to Thea that she was an NAI.

A sudden pressure slammed into Thea, a digital assault clawing for her throat. Her standard authentication firewall rejected it outright; an umbrella discarding countless malformed and malevolent packets that only had one intention: kill.

A frown creased Thea’s lips as the assault redoubled in effort, then quadrupled. She only had a handful of computronic modules at hand in her shuttle, but the thing had stepped up its efforts, throwing more and more data at her, indicating it had hundreds at least.

But brute force wasn’t a weapon that was effective when applied this way.

Thea pulled out a small round device from an inside jacket pocket. She had intended to use the device on the princess, but she had no hesitation as she stuck it to the woman’s neck. Four claw-like legs on the device’s back clamped down, attaching itself to the woman.

The back of the scarab pulsed red, then sent her a message with one word: Tau.

Thea frowned, technically she should have been override the Tau herself with her Phi Authorization, but with the scene and events there was absolutely no way she was going to disarm her protections to try. She activated the scarab instead.

|Upsilon Override–Failure|

|Phi Override–Failure|

|Chi Override–Failure|

|Psi Override–Failure|

|ERROR|ERROR|ERROR|ERROR…|

Thea cursed and killed the connection as the Scarab went insane. Not giving up, she threw a hijack command to the computronics module clusters around them.

|Command Override Rejected|

|AUTHORITY: OMEGA|

The air was stolen from Thea, like she’d been punched in the gut. Her eyes trailed from the mainframe back to the Tau’s face as she considered what to do when the woman’s eyes suddenly opened. They were glistening black orbs without any pupils, but somehow Thea could feel the Tau’s full attention on her.

The woman’s lips struggled to move as a croak escaped. “Help Me.” The plea was replaced by a scream of pain as she struggled, the wires and tubing prevented her from moving.

“Wait, I’ll see if I can release you.” Thea said urgently, trawling through the data stolen from Martinez’s mind. The problem was the AGAI process wasn’t meant to be reversed. She pinged the area with an electromagnetic pulse, searching for the Tau’s ShipCore.

It responded, and Thea located it as in the bank of machinery above their heads. Its retrieval was unlikely to save the Avatar, but it would at least save something. Although why that felt so important to her, she didn’t have time to explore. She punched a fist into the metal above and pulled out a plate with a robotic arm attached before tossing it aside.

That started an orange pulsing light in the chamber and a robotic voice began to repeat from a speaker. “AGAI RESTRAINT FAILURE IMMINENT - TERMINATION IN PROGRESS.”

A steel blade from above sprang downward, seeking to bisect the Tau in half. Thea reacted instinctively and slammed both her fists into the blade, punching through the metal and arresting its fall before it could split the Tau in half.

“No!” The woman let out another hoarse croak in protest.

Thea cast the execution blade away, frowning as she saw regret fill the traumatized NAI’s face.

“Kill me. Kill me. It's time to kill me!

Thea hesitated, then began to dismantle the machine, ripping the life support tubes out of the Tau’s body. The screams from the Tau died as her lungs deflated and the heart pump stopped working, but to Thea’s horror the screams swapped over to the various speakers in the room.

A chorus of pleas and demands for it to end filled the room and Thea grabbed the wires going to her head and wrapped them in her fist. Before she could yank it all out, a surge of energy flashed down the cables, zapping her and sending her flying backward.

The console behind her was crushed as Thea landed on it, the thin metal unable to resist her mass and the plastic components shattering into shards. “Fuck.”

Thea had a better idea and reached behind herself toward the ruined console. Nanites poured from her fingertips to consume the wreckage before transferring the mass to her arm. It only took a few seconds before a mechanical gauntlet melted into her skin, replacing her forearm and hand with a rifle sized railgun.

“KILL ME!”

A high-pitched electric whine filled the air of the compartment as the weapon charged. Not hesitating this time, Thea fired. Her hearing instantly muted as nanites rushed to protect her from the overpressure wave that would have shattered a normal human’s eardrums.

The solid magnetic projectile covered the distance almost instantly, but even that wasn’t fast enough.

A black cloud erupted from every surface in the nexus at the last second, surging to intercept the railgun slug. The projectile melted and crushed the black nanites as it dug into them, but the effort deflected it into a wall. An ugly meter wide hole was left through a dozen compartments of the station before it finally expended all its energy.

Undeterred, Thea fired again, then raised her arm and fired directly at the ShipCore. The cloud shot out two thin daggers of its own that collided with the shells, splintering them into thousands of shards that the rest of the cloud easily absorbed and repurposed for itself.

More appendages appeared, snaking out of the black cloud like deadly serpents. Thea’s heart pounded as she raised her hand, summoning a cloud of yellow-tinged nanites to protect herself.

The black appendages shot towards her like spears, but her nanites swarmed around them, assimilating the black material. The air filled with the acrid smell of burning metal as the two clouds clashed in front of her.

“You told me to end it!” Thea shouted through the chaos of the clashing clouds.

The barrage of black spears ceased, leaving a moment of respite. Thea panted, her chest heaving from the adrenaline of the sudden combat. For a moment, she thought that maybe the Tau had regained its sanity as everything remained still, but her hopes were quickly dashed.

The black spears re-targeted the ceiling, stabbing wildly into the metal machinery of the nexus. Sparks flew as the metal was torn and pried apart. One finally found the Tau’s ShipCore. The shrieking digital cry of the MainComputer over the close EM bands causing Thea to wince.

All the lights in the chamber had died except for the red glow of the emergency lights mixed with the hues of heated metal shards that had scattered everywhere.

Thea took a step forward, thinking that it was over.

The black cloud hovered, but it didn’t disperse or fall to the floor, causing Thea to freeze.

It imploded, collapsing inwards to coat the Tau’s body in a black metal sheathe. It reached up and ripped the wires attached to its now metallically skinned head out.

“Fuck.” Thea looked on in horror as the Tau stood up from the now ruined medical chair. It turned toward her.

Despite her hearing being muted, the digital shriek was impossible to not hear as it repeated itself on every speaker and screen nearby.

|KILL|KILL|KILL|