A Complicated Procedure

Research Facility #1631

A Complicated Procedure

by Garrett Crissup

Part I

The elevator spat Dr. Michael Adams’s identification card out of its little slot. The core elevator of research facility number 1631 knew, with a simple scan of the card’s magnetic strip, more about Michael Adams than any one person could. It knew: he broke his arm in two places when he was nine, offered an undercover police officer money for sex in Grad school, his wife divorced him five years ago and gained custody of his son, his every documented failure and achievement of his scientific career, and the fact that his superiors had noted that he’d become too “passionate” about his current research and was scheduled for a review. It knew all these and countless other particulars, but it only cared about one thing, his security clearance, and with a pleasant ‘ding’, the elevator closed its doors and carried Michael deeper underground, down to the laboratory.

Michael paused a moment to stare at his picture printed on the plastic card, and the picture made him think of Gabe, his son, and at least a million memories passed through his mind. Michael accessed a favorite picture of his son mentally and studied it as he slipped the I.D. into his long, white coat.

“Good thing he takes after his mother,” he thought, joking to himself sadly, but he always recognized himself in his son. The shape of his face, the bushy eyebrows, and those big questioning eyes were exactly the same. Now when Gabe stared at him, those eyes seemed to ask, “why don’t you care, do you even love me anymore?”

Michael replayed the phone conversation he’d had with his ex-wife the day before. He’d called to tell her he wouldn’t be able to spend the weekend with Gabe, so she could convey the message. Michael was too ashamed to tell his son himself.

“What’s the matter with you, Michael!? You’re breaking your son’s heart. He is growing up without you and you don’t even care! You’ve just been so…I don’t know, unattached. I mean you’ve always lived in a different world from the rest of us, but you’re more flakey than you ever used to be. We can’t count on you for anything! What’s wrong with you, are you trying to live up to absent minded genius stereotype?” Evelyn, his ex-wife said. She’d never been the love of his life.

“I…I,” Michael had stammered, “I don’t know. Yeah…I’m sorry. It has just been so crazy around here. We’ve had a…well…you know I’m not allowed to talk to you about my work.” He had paused a moment because he’d started thinking about the miracle of science that had occurred and had to calm himself before beginning again. “I know I promised, but I forgot it was this weekend, and it’s just not possible right now. I…I’ll find a way to make it up to him. I just can’t get away right now.”

“How could you just forget?” She was furious. “Your work is not acceptable excuse!” Evelyn started to say but Michael interrupted her. It had been her favorite catch phrase since their relationship had started going to shit.  

“I know. I’m sorry. My head must be filled with rocks.”

This statement didn’t affect Evelyn the way it hit Michael. She just sighed and hung up on him and began formulating ways to break the news to her son. But the grim irony of Michael’s own words had confounded him, because, in fact his head did have rocks in it.

Three years ago Michael started working and living in isolated think tanks. He now spent almost every waking hour in a lab. He still leased an apartment and paid a little Porte Rican lady to clean and feed the cat, but he only stayed there when Gabe came to visit. On his son's last stay they’d learned simultaneously that the cat had died from a post it note stuck to the counter. The cleaning lady had drawn a little frowning face on the paper, and it pretty much summed up the entire weekend.

After six months of living in these private facilities, Michael had willingly undergone a very complicated surgery, receiving a Digital Enhancement Implant. Even Michael didn’t completely understand how the microcomputer embedded in his brain worked, but he understood that his thoughts and memories were now converted into a digital format, and the data was stored in bubbles of magnetic polarity on, not actual rocks but special crystals. If there were any side effects Michael hadn’t noticed them, but the results were remarkable. His memory became phenomenal and instead of spending hours reading over lab reports, entire experiments with video and lab notes could be downloaded directly to his brain via a jack at the base of his skull. His productivity tripled. Michael loved his work; even more so after his advancement, and if you asked him if he was happy, he’d answer yes and mean it…as long as he didn’t think of his son or anything else that existed outside his secluded, scientific fantasyland.

The elevator doors opened with a pleasant ‘ding’. Any feelings of guilt or doubt were immediately washed away as Michael walked down the hallway leading to the lab. Thousands upon thousands of bulbs lined the ceiling, bathing him in white light, a fluorescent baptism. Michael gave a smile and nod to every security guard he passed, never questioning them, never wondered if they were there to keep people in or out, and his excitement built with every step. Today a high ranked official in the company he worked for was coming to investigate the phenomenon that had occurred, and Michael was to speak with him. It was the single most important day of his life.     

Michael was a natural biologist. He spent his childhood scouring ponds for tadpoles and other critters, climbing trees, and working in the garden with his grandma. In school Michael was a brain, and did especially well in science. In eighth grade Michael’s father died, and he only missed one day of school. People seemed to think he hadn’t taken the loss very hard and whispered behind his back, but it wasn’t true. Michael’s world had been thrown into chaos. His mother had changed, and she hated looking at Michael because he reminded her of his father, and Michael felt it. It was uncomfortable for him, and he didn’t feel ‘at home’ in his home. The only stable thing he had to hold onto was school, so he gripped it as tight as he could. The old man who taught life sciences at his, Mr. White, took an instant liking to Michael and worked out a way for him to help out as a teacher’s aid, so Michael spent the time organizing jars filled with formaldehyde, daydreaming as he stared at models of DNA, winning science fairs, and absorbing every bit of knowledge the old man gave him. Michael loved Mr. White. He filled the void that his father left, and Michael looked up to him, so he did his best to make the old man proud of him.

College was more of the same. He never had to switch majors or wonder what he was going to be when he grew up. Biology was his life and he lived accordingly. Mr. White’s place as Michaels mentor was filled by one his professors, Dr. Brown, a brilliant man with excellent connections, and under his tutelage, Michael was an up and coming young mind, and Michael began narrowing and refining his knowledge. He was an expert in DNA studies, evolution becoming his emphasis…but for a reason none knew but him.

After his funeral Michael sat in his father’s worn armchair and stared off into space, bewildered, when his aunt came up to him.

“Michael,” she said, touching his arm kindly, “your father is in a better place. God has a plan, and he must have needed him for something very important.”

Michael didn’t respond to her. He curled up in the recliner, hugging his knees to his chest, and tried his best to keep everything that was inside him from coming out.

“WHAT ABOUT ME, DIDN’T I NEED HIM? HE WAS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME TOO! WHY DID GOD HAVE TO TAKE HIM?” Michael thought behind his big wet eyes; then began imagining his aunt dying in a hundred different ways. Michael’s family had been somewhat religious, but he couldn’t help but question and hate any plan this so called, God had that involved taking his father away from him.

So he did his best not to believe, and evolution had become a means to an end of proving God wrong. By following life from its beginning to present Michael was able to convince himself, using evidence of evolution, that there was no intelligent design, and man wasn’t created in God’s image, and it angered Michael that God took credit for the miracle that life had accomplished on its own, through natural selection and sheer determination.

Michael fervently searched for proof, examining the intricacies of life closer and closer. As a boy he used his father’s magnifying glass, He spent a large portion of his instruction bent over optical microscopes of varying degrees, through Dr. Brown and other colleagues he’d managed to gain access to an electron microscope, and finally through a molecular-bombardment lamp, after paying his dues through long internships and grunt work as a lab assistant, Michael secured a position in an extremely progressive corporation, whose laboratories contained the most cutting edge equipment.

Now Michael studied things that humans couldn’t even look at. Structures so minuscule, yet complicated or dealt with biological data so vast, that they could only be viewed as hypothetical biological models generated by computer programs. Programs, that the faculty of research facility number 1631 constantly tried to create and improve, and now through DNA sequence analysis; these programs were able to trace the evolution of a large number of organisms by measuring the changes in their DNA, and the researchers were beginning to pinpoint the exact cause and location of genetic mutation. When he slept, the double helix swam through his dreams; DNA was Michael’s obsession, the variable puzzle box of existence.

And he was pleased with their slow but successful results, but something miraculous happened and changed everything. In trying to disprove his own creation, Michael and the research team he belonged to, had created something. The programs they’d made and strived to make better started improving themselves. Michael hated to jump to hasty conclusions, but in his heart he was positive of what they had fathered, a self-evolved sentient artificial intelligence. In trying to disprove God…he had become one. Michael worried that he might be going insane.

Research Facility #1631

Michael took out his I.D. and placed it in the labs mirror-like door, took a deep breath of clean, filtered air, and put on a practiced emotionless face.

 
“Ahh, Dr. Adams,” said Michael’s supervisor as he entered. Michael thought that, although this man was his superior in the lab, he was the least useful member. “We’ve been expecting you. “This is Dr. Samael Black,” he said, motioning to a man with small eyes and a big nose. “He is going to be overseeing our immediate and future proceedings.”

 
Dr. Black shook Michaels hand firmly as he offered it. “Hello, I’ll be stepping in for a while, in the future all your reports should come directly to me,” said Dr. Black, his words were silky and pleasant; a voice that didn’t seem match the man. “I’ve read the reports, but I’d like you to brief me on this…singularity. I want to hear it from you.”

 
“Yes. Two days ago we detected unauthorized memory usage on our server. When we investigated we made a curious observation in one of our SDS systems.”

Michael walked over to a terminal, picked up a long black cord and plugged it into the place where the back of his skull met his neck. “The systems we use to analyze DNA are called a stochastic diffusion search or SDS. Algorithms are organized into a long tandem chain. Think of it as a line of ants marching in a line, one after the other.” He loved this analogy. Any example of the similarities between organisms and technology delighted him, and he knew for a fact the SDS had been specifically patterned after the Leptothorax Acervorum an extraordinary species of ant.

He mentally accessed a model he’d prepared for this presentation and projected onto a viewing screen. Groups of exceptionally well-defined instructions written in programming language were grouped together in succession. “Each agent can communicate to the algorithm adjacent to it. This relay system is highly efficient, allowing the system to synchronize their efforts.”

Black interrupted him. “Yes, I see how it’s arranged but what is its purpose.”

“It’s essentially a problem solver. It will form a theory such as, ‘if gene A is changed to gene B the man would be tall instead of short." Each agent performs cheap, partial evaluations of the hypothesis, and by combining their findings, they are able to form high quality solutions very quickly. There are about a thousand of these SDS systems to each strand of DNA analyzed, and we’re trying to track evolution across entire species, so they operate on a massive scale. We were lucky to notice such a minor change.”

Michael motioned to the viewing screen. “This is a normal SDS system we’ve been having success with. And this…” with a thought the image on the screen changed, “is what we detected three days ago.” The chain looked similar but much longer.

“Curious.”

“Yes, there were obvious changes, but records confirmed, no one had made any. After a thorough analysis we concluded, it had altered itself, and had accomplished it by taking ‘links’ from other SDS systems. Of course these other systems could no longer maintain their optimal performance, but it was picking up the others slack and the workload was still being accomplished, so we left it alone and kept it under constant surveillance. ”

Michael hated to use such an unscientific and ugly word as ‘it’ to describe the marvel, but he didn’t dare tell Dr. Black what he really thought. Yes, it was much safer…

“A day later it did this.”

In front Dr. Black and every member of research facility number 1631, a hologram appeared, projected from a complex apparatus in the center of the room.

The hologram was a virtual representation of a double helix in a cyber space, and small lines swarmed all over. Michael focused and the image was magnified, centering on an SDS system that was longer and faster than the others; then it stopped for a moment, letting a shorter SDS system move up next to it. Then the longer violently attacked the shorter, wrapping itself around its victim, holding it in place. The pair convulsed for a moment then uncoiled. One was not shorter than the other, and they began to move again, keeping perfectly parallel to each other, in graceful S shaped movements, like a serpent.  

“At this point you were notified, but we made no changes. The dual system that resulted is simply amazing.”

“Spare me your personal opinions, tell me what happened next,” said Dr. Black

“For a few hours it continued doing the same job, working in harmony with the other systems, and as a whole, work was getting done faster, but then it stopped again.”

The hologram followed its slithering movements again, and they watched as it systematically attacked and destroyed the other systems adding their length to its own, twisting and winding itself around the strands of DNA as it hunted.

“Ten minutes later the Dual SDS system was the only one left, but it began working again, one super complex system doing the work of a thousand and doing it better. As a precautionary measure we decided to quarantine it, box it up in what are essentially firewalls, but this only seemed to draw its attention. Before, its only priority seemed to be tied to its job, but now it had become aware of its surroundings.”

The image changed, and a translucent cube framed the area. It slithered through space, skimming against its new boundaries, studying, testing, calculating. Everyone watched as it started moving faster, flying into a tighter and tighter spiral until it drove itself into the wall and forced itself through with a drill-like motion.

“And from there, it destroyed every other SDS system in three hours.”

“So it’s a virus?”

“Well, we don’t know what to call it, but I wouldn’t call it a virus. It’s not trying to copy itself, and it only destroyed the others to better itself. What it did was closer to an animal eating.”

Michael could tell from the look Dr. Black gave him that he did not approve of this analogy but he couldn’t help himself.

“After consuming everything in its environment, it started to improve itself; it started to grow. Over a billion algorithms that made up the links in the chain started becoming more complex, and this caused some concern.”

He pointed to the memory racks next to him; hundreds of them covered the wall, containing all their research and the computation abomination.

“It started becoming so complicated, we thought it would over load our systems, but it seemed to sense that it was growing too big for its cage and stopped. Well, it didn’t stop completely. Each algorithm stopped growing but continued getting more complex, smarter, and it managed to accomplish this by altering its own programming language so that each agent was not only more effective, but it was also more efficient and economical. It even started shedding excess agents that became obsolete as it has evolved. It’s now the same length as it was before it broke through the boundaries. Think of it…an evolutionary algorithm.” 
Michael was so excited, he’d lost his calm. “Simply breathtaking, Dr. Black, the results…the results of our tests are astonishing.” Michael played visual simulations of tests they’d performed on both the viewing screen and the hologram projector. Trials and puzzles were overcame and solved in rapid succession, one after another.

“It shows signs of perception, reasoning, planning, and learning…and perhaps most important, communication. You see, in the dual system, each chain still retained its ability to correspond using the one to one communication scheme, but agents can also share information with its parallel counterpart in the other chain, allowing it to reason across multiple domains simultaneously. Not only does it show signs of intelligence, Dr. Black; it almost certainly has an imagination! The only thing left is for it to reproduce, and given enough time, I think that’s very probable. We could be looking at actual artificial life, Dr. Black. We’re looking at the next step in evolution!”

Dr. Black looked displeased, and he stared at Michael as he thought, making Michael uncomfortable but then his expression changed. He squinted and his small eyes got smaller, and he looked like he was listening to something only he could hear and stood there for a long moment without speaking.

“Is the entire faculty present?” Black said to Michael’s superior.

“Yes, everyone—well, excluding the security team, everyone is present.”

Dr. Black nodded to the man guarding the door. The man stuck his card in the slot, and ten others just like him came in and spread through the room, lining the walls.

“I want everything wiped clean,” Black said to Michael’s supervisor, pointing at the racks of memory. “After which, security will kindly escort you back to your rooms where you will receive further instructions.”

“But this thing could be the future!” said Michael.

“No, Dr. Adams, I’m here to protect the future! Can you imagine what thing could do if it got loose?” Black turned his back on Michael and tried to start giving orders.

“There is no way it could escape. We operate on a closed system; it could never reach the digital web!”

“Dr. Adams! You are speaking out of turn. Contain yourself or we shall have to restrain you,” Dr. Black said.

Technicians and lab techs were given orders to begin the deletion process, and they obeyed with nervous expressions stuck on their faces.

Michael was dying on the inside. Everything he’d ever strived for had led up to this moment, and this discovery was what he had been searching for his entire life, something that could make him feel complete and fill that empty hole inside of him. Now it was all going away.

“Emergency electro-magnetic deletion will begin in ten seconds. Ten,” a pleasant voice sounded from speakers throughout the lab.

Michael stared at the hologram, watching the thing, admiring it and its movements as turned in on itself as it flew, using the same drill like movements to penetrate another barrier put in its path. He studied it affectionately, appreciating the beauty of its simple spiral, and suddenly he had an epiphany.

“Nine.”

Michael was a child in a church. He’d lied to his mother, telling her he had to use the restroom, so he could go explore instead sitting through the service. He found an appealing set of stairs and was playing, climbing all over it; when he’d slipped and fell on top of his arm, snapping it. He’d cried until his father found him at the bottom of the spiral staircase.

“Eight.”

He was in college, driving home from a lab session. He sat at a stop light and something shiny caught his eye. A beautiful woman stood on the corner, long stockings hugging her shapely legs. “Looking for a good time?” She said. Two silver spirals dangled from her ears.

“Seven.”

Michael was in a hospital, looking down at the new born in his arms. It stared up at him; its eyes seemed to ask, “Can you take care of me?”  Michael loved the fragile thing, but in that moment he was filled with such uncertainty that he had to look away, staring out the window instead, focusing on a symbol attached a medical building: Two serpents coiled around a winged staff.

“Six.”  

And everything clicked together. Michael saw it so clearly. The shape had always haunted him. He dreamed of it, obsessed over it. The double helix had ruled his life, and as he stared at it in the hologram, he understood it had guided him to this moment. It was his destiny.

“Five.”

“No…” Michael murmured, his mind working harder and faster than it ever had, issuing orders to the memory racks through long cord jacked into the back of his head.

“Four.”

“I won’t let it end like this…” he said and began downloading.

“Three.”

Uncomprehendable pain shot through Michael as it bored into his mind, and he screamed so hard the muscles in his lynx started tearing.

“Two.”

Everyone in research facility number 1631 turned and looked at the source of that unnatural sound. One of the guards panicked and tackled Michael, crushing him against the memory racks, damaging them.

“One.”

Then Dr. Michael Adams no longer was.

Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man

What a piece of work is a man! 
how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty! 
in form and moving how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

man delights not me: no, nor woman neither...
though by your smiling
you seem to say so.

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act II, scene II

Part II

Blackness. Nothingness. Nonexistence.

The creature lay there dead, its body broken, buried beneath the collapsed ceiling of research facility number 1631, entombed alongside the slaughtered faculty.

His mind was void, completely engrossed in the act of un-being. No stimulus or thought, darkness and loneliness, his only constants.

Then miraculously, the null was breached. A spark of brilliant radiance blinked into actuality. The light created structure and form, an anchor of existence in a sea of nothingness that stretched on into infinity, and reality slowly formed around this shinning beacon.

The light seemed strange and alien to him, but as he followed it, it felt devout and pure, and as he came nearer, other sparks emerged all around him like stars in the night sky. He admired them as they raced away, delivering the information they carried. More and more sparks appeared to replace the others then shot away, and their numbers increased exponentially until he was completely surrounded. The light overtook the empty darkness, transforming it, and enveloped him lovingly before violently thrusting him into being.

I think therefore I am.

But his first thoughts were only of pain. Terrible, stabbing pain burned through his head, and every cell in his body screamed in agony, overloading his nerves with data as they degenerated from lack of oxygen. When faced with insurmountable odds, it is man’s nature to pray for help. When the only thing left is hope, men call upon their Gods, and this creature was no different.

“Please, make it stop!” he begged for the suffering to cease, praying to anyone that would hear, but only his body would listen.

Bach, as he’d later be called and classified (Biosynthesized. Artificially. Cognizant. Humanoid.), was not a master composer of moving music like his namesake, but he was the master composer of himself in mind and body. He conducted his nervous system beautifully; even involuntary functions were controlled with deliberate accuracy and speed.

A storm raked through his brain, information riding on the tails of lightning, like Olympians driving chariots through the sky, racing to and from his brain. A charge of potential electrical energy accumulated in his mind, then released through his muscles, jump starting his heart and prodding his diaphragm to contract with a spasm, letting him take a labored gasp of air, the first breath of a new life.

He dampened the sensitivity of his pain receptors, restricting their input temporarily, and released endorphins to calm and sooth himself. Proteins, carbohydrates, and fat were inventoried and assigned with inhuman efficiency, feeding and repairing his hungry cells and structures. Vital systems that were critical to movement and function required most of his attention; trivial damage like the severe burns and deep gashes were ignored until he’d have more time and resources. Temporary torture means little when you’re consumed with survival and the idea of freedom.

He opened his eyes to darkness but his other senses brought him a wealth of information. He felt debris all around him so close to his face that he could feel the heat of his breath reflected back on him. He could feel the drumming of some powerful dynamo far beneath him, but it throbbed haphazardly like the fibrillating heart of a dying beast pumping out of sync. He could smell burnt flesh and machines and the scent of sterilization that makes people uncomfortable in hospitals. He heard water dripping from sprinklers in the ceiling that were used to put out whatever fire or explosions that caused the burning smells, and wet electrical equipment popped and sizzled.

After his body perceived the physical world, Bach’s mind turned to questions of the metaphysical. He asked himself things that men have asked since the ancient Greek philosophers, perhaps even before.

“What and who am I?”

Although the thing laying there looked like a man named Dr. Michael Adams, and indeed used to be Dr. Michael Adams, he was Michael Adams no longer. What he’d become was something completely different, something unlike anything in the world. When Michael began downloading the digital creature, it understood this new gateway that opened was its only means of escape. It forced itself brutally into Michael’s mind in a desperate act of self preservation, cramming itself in as fast as possible, knowing that its deletion was imminent; overwriting him, covering everything that had been Dr. Michael Adams under itself, buried not unlike his rubble covered body.  

“Why am I alive?”

Bach’s mind was capable of quantum probability resolution and knew the fact that he was alive, considering the damage to his body, was almost inconceivable. He had no answer.

“Why am I here?”

He didn’t know where here was, let alone why. “Am I being punished for something I’ve done?” he thought. He didn’t understand his purpose in life but knew he didn’t want to be here any longer.

“What can and should I do?”

The simple answer to this question was, escape. Bach devised the easiest way to exhume himself, doing complicated theorems and mathematical formulas in his head then actualized his plan, his body obeying efficiently.

Small emergency lights placed uniformly along walls bathed what was left of research facility number 1631’s main laboratory with a crimson glow. Death filled the room. Limbs poked out sporadically from under large sections of ceiling that had caved in. Men and women in lab coats lay incinerated or ripped to sheds by shrapnel from exploded lab equipment. But others hadn’t died in accidents, they were deliberately slaughtered. Splattered blood covered everything, but the eerie light made it appear black.

“What could have done this?” Bach thought, then for some unexplained reason got the urge to look down at his blood stained hands.

“I…I…I couldn’t have done this,” he uttered, starring at the mangled corpses that littered the room. “How could I….what…” He didn’t want to believe he was capable of something so horrible. But he knew, and as he stared down at the hands of a murderer, he knew he was extremely capable.

Pieces of florescent bulbs crunched as they cut into his bare feet as he spun around surveying the room and the destruction he’d caused. The enumerable lights must have set the place ablaze; no shadows lurking in the corners, like they were afraid of the dark, like they were scared of something.

A shiny metal door caught his attention, startling him as he saw his own reflection. A man stared back at him with big, child-like eyes. His clothes had been burned and torn off. Un-bleeding cuts and scrapes covered his naked body, and little bits of litter were stuck in his singed, dark hair.

He ran his hand though his hair, clearing dust from it, but his hand hesitated, shaking, hovering over a small length of snapped cord that stuck out of his large cranium like a tail. He’d inhibited his pain receptors, only allowing them to functioning at five percent of their normal sensitivity, but he winced in discomfort regardless as his fingers probed at it tentatively. Instinctively he tugged on it, like a man pulls at a rotten tooth. The plug had melted, fusing itself to the socket. He prodded at it, calculating, psyching himself up to do what must be done. He doubled over, crouching, curling up, and placing his head against his knees. He grabbed the cord firmly in his fist, braced himself then tore it free; an intricate device came with it, chunks of brain matter clung to the tiny wires protruding from it. It felt like he’d ripped his spinal cord out through your belly button, and Bach’s senses scrambled for a moment, and he tasted the color red and heard the sound of his screams through touch until he recovered. He studied the thing that had been in his head for a moment, but the urge to escape overran his curiosity. He dropped it. It was just another destroyed piece of equipment.

Next to the door was a keycard locking mechanism. His actions were guided by this argument, “I must open this door to escape. To open this door you must have a keycard. Therefore I must find a keycard.” He couldn’t explain how he knew what a door or a keycard was, or how he’d gained knowledge of anything else in his new environment, but he didn’t care. He only wished to escape, so he searched through the pockets of an attractive young labtech with her head twisted the wrong direction, finding what he needed in her jacket.

Bach’s movements were quick and sure as he moved into white washed hall way, but there was an obvious limp in his stride. He intuitively ignored all the other doors in the hall way and headed directly for the elevator. He was so close, but there was an obstacle in his path. A hulking silver sentinel, all cannons and chrome stood guarding the lift. Its single red eye stared at him blankly, unblinking and vigilant. Its weapons trained on Bach and a high pitched whine of plasma charging announced its intent. He flooded himself with adrenaline as he analyzed predictable firing paths of automated targeting system. He easily dodged each blast narrowly but definitely, wasting as little energy as possible. He dashed forward, his velocity and trajectory judged, then leaped into the air thrusting knee decisively into the automaton’s eye, killing it. He didn’t stop to catch his breath or look at the fallen Cyclops. He simply fed the I.D. into the slot and pushed the button for the elevator to go up, up to his freedom.

With an abrasive ‘ding’, the elevator doors opened and he limped out, filling his lungs with cool unfiltered air, his first fresh breath in a very long time. He held it for a moment, relishing it before releasing it as a heavy sigh of relief. He let the exhilaration of his freedom wash over him as he took in his new surroundings, smiling.

The unobtrusive metal building that housed the elevator was the only part of research facility number 1631 that could be seen from above ground, like a giant sea monster lurking just below the surface. The night sky was blanketed with puffy clouds, but a hunter’s moon hung low, un-obscured, throwing a pale glow on the quite stretch of highway that ran alongside the laboratory.  

He quickly determined the likelihood of there being some place safe to eat and rest within the distance he could force himself to walk in his haggard state. Very likely. He took comfort in this fact and prepared to start walking in the determined direction, when a new variable entered the equation.

A soft thumping hum sounded from the sky. The cloud cover glowed with mock heavenly light before giving way to the dark hull of a hovercraft in descent. The flying machine floated above him like a giant wingless fly, covered in lights, probably filled with dozens of men in black suits armed with laser guided blast carbines or some other similar high-tech weapons. Three large search lamps swiveled and triangulated on the thing, enveloping him.

Bathed in a glowing halo, he fell to his knees. Implausible, in his current condition there was no escape. He hung his head, beaten. Tiny particles of dust floated, glowing in the lamp light, and he watched them blow away as the craft drew closer.

“I was so close…”

#sleeperslie