Moriarty awoke with the memories of his dream fresh in his head. Mostly, they were incoherent, some mumblings about pretty colors and how cold his head was. He dreamed of being wheeled around a lot, having bulky clothing put on him, and how heavy he felt. Like a g-simulator. He began to be frightened after a while, because he couldn't move, and constantly felt like he was falling. It wasn’t a pleasant dream, anyway.
He was semi-conscious when he first felt the cold metal behind his ear. The anesthetic still made his brain thick, so it took him several minutes to think to lift his hand and feel what was there. It felt like…a hearing aid. It took him another few minutes to figure out what it was.
Oh yeah. The VR motion sickness fixer-upper-thingys.
His brain was still groggy, so he didn’t notice the contradiction right away. They were firmly seated in his ear, and when he gave a slight tug there was a sharp pain from deep in his head. He didn’t do it again. Sim looks pretty good already.
His muscles were very weak from the anesthetic, so every time he tried to lift his head, a few seconds later the muscles would give out and let his head bonk on the hard stone floor. Where the hell am I? he thought. He didn’t move for fifteen minutes. He was comfortable where he was.
Finally the strength came and he was able to sit up straight. He looked around, with wobbly eyes at first, but when they came into focus he was puzzled. He was in a small, damp, and musty cobblestone room. The floor, the ceiling, and the walls were all covered with cobblestones. There was no door. Arrayed in rows along the walls were large boxes full of various ammunition – shotgun shells, slugs (whatever those are), rockets, and cells. Several pieces of maroon body armor sat in the corners. It was all very puzzling to him, especially since his plugs were still not firing in time with the cylinders. He laid back down to ponder what it all meant.
As he slid back down into supine position, his shoulder caught on something. There was a large rifle-like weapon leaning against the wall next to him. Upon closer examination, it was quite a bit different from a rifle. At the joint where the stock connects to the barrel, and where the opening for the breech was, there was a three-inch wheel projecting out the left side. The rest of the gun was tecchy-looking, with a fancy sighting system, LCD display on the top of the stock, and a very large diameter barrel. He put his palm around the grip, flexing his fingers. It fit him perfectly. He knew his way around guns, but never saw anything like this before. A small blinking light on the base of the stock went solid, and began beeping. He pressed the small button next to it; immediately the beeping stopped, but the light stayed solid. The LCD display said "Fully charged."
What the hell, let’s shoot something. That’s what I’m here for, right?
He pulled up the gun and sighted down the short barrel. He targeted a spot on the wall and let a round rip.
It happened very slowly in his mind, even though it lasted less than a quarter of a second. After pressing the trigger the small wheel sticking out of the breech began to whine. He was sitting down, so the wheel caught on a loose fold on his jacket and tore it as it started to spin. Almost instantly the gun jerked to the right. Instantly a spiral trail of smoke appeared out of nowhere, like a light being turned on, connecting the muzzle of the gun to the wall (the spinning wheel had thrown his aim). The wheel stopped with an electronic whir. Shocked at the process, it took him a few seconds to realize what the projectile had done. A three inch diameter hole had been punched in, extending like a cone into the stone wall until it terminated six inches in. An area with a radius of about a foot was severely cracked and had started to cave inward, in the direction of the cone.
DEAR GOD.
An acrid odor filled the air. He stared at the hole for a good second or two, and then jumped when the gun emitted a high-pitched charging sound. The light was solid and "Fully charged" displayed in the window again.
I’m gonna have fun with this. Thanks Wally.
Firing the weapon had cleared his senses. I wonder what would’ve happened if that was human. He shivered.
Whatever the hell this thing was, it was powerful. A double-barreled shotgun was stashed behind some of the armor. He was at a loss as to where he should carry it, when he realized that there was a sling on his back which seemed like it was custom fit for the 12 gauge. He slid it in, and it fit perfectly, the end of the barrel resting comfortably around the small of his back. He was ready for whatever the hell he was here to do.
The jacket he was wearing had a bandoleer stashed in one of the side pockets, and after he donned it he filled it with shells and slugs. Just as he finished, he heard a weak pounding and garbled yelling on the other side of the wall.
A section of the wall suddenly opened up and admitted a truly horrific sight. A thick trail of blood, accented with pools presumably this man had stopped to rest on his journey, led up to the door in the wall. The first thing Moriarty remembered consciously sensing was the horrible sound. It was this man (if you could call this piece of ground beef human) choking on his own blood. He was trying to drag himself in with his one arm, his legs dragging uselessly behind. Blood was spurting from him in several places, mostly out of the horrible puncture wounds covering his body and armor. Automatically Moriarty suppressed the urge to vomit, grabbed the man by the shredded coat, and yanked him inside, just as the hidden door slammed down and disappeared again. Moriarty tried to attend to the man’s wounds, but they were numerous as well as being filled with some sort of pus, presumably an infection. How could this guy get an infection if his wounds are this fresh? Weird…very weird. Blood was pouring profusely from his mouth now, creating an ever-widening puddle of cloudy red and brown fluid. What the hell? Blood isn’t brown…
A crackle and distorted voices announced the presence of a radio on the man. Miraculously, it was undamaged, and he keyed the mic and began a petition for help.
"Help! Is anyone out there? I’ve got a wounded man here, I need help immediately!"
A short pause, then, "Yeah, this is Jameson, what’s up?"
"Wounded man in, uh, the, uh, shit, I don’t know where I am!"
"What’s the room look like?" Moriarty heard a voice in the background say, "Damn, new guy…"
"It’s cobblestone. Look, you should be able to follow the blood trail to it, this guy crawled here himself, you could water-ski on it."
"On my way."
In the meantime Moriarty tried to do something to help the man. He was very lightly armored, with very worn clothing and armor. It reminded him of a guy working in a car garage. He saw no gun. The horrible gurgling continued, but it was obvious the guy had passed out. Moriarty scanned the room for something useful, and saw a box with the medical cross on it. He ripped the top open (which was hard to do, it was metal) to inspect the contents, but all he saw was a white-colored powder. He jumped as the hidden door leaped open again and a man dressed in medical garb rushed over to him. The four-barreled gun caught his eye.
Without a word the medic (he presumed that’s what he was) grabbed the medical box and liberally spread the entire contents of the box all over the bleeding body. A furious chemical reaction ensued. Then it got weird. He pulled a small device out of his flak jacket and lifted the skin off the back of the wounded man’s head, revealing electronic circuitry. He plugged the device into a socket and it began chirping, data rapidly scrolling down the small green screen.
"What the hell is that? And what is this guy?" Moriarty demanded.
"You mean you don’t know?" He said something under his breath along the lines of "they’re not even briefing them anymore." "He’s our only biologically enhanced bot. Part human, part machine. Make great handy-men, for precise stuff. Looks like our sentry guns are screwed now... See that brown stuff? Lubrication. Cooling. Red is from his flesh."
Well, Wally and the boys are being imaginative, aren’t they?
"Looks like he's done for, too," the medic lamented. He rolled off his haunches and sat down in frustration. "Sonnova...we're never going to win this damn war. I'm tired of these blasted sims."
"How long have you been here?"
"Oh, I think I lost count around three weeks. That's not real-time though, the whole thing could be lasting a couple hours on the computers. Not even that. The worst thing about it is, they even make you sleep. If this was my damn sim I wouldn't do that...keep you too involved. It's too real. Crap like this gets to you, even if you know deep down it's all in your head."
Moriarty reflected on that for a while. What was it that was setting off alarm bells in his head? They both sat there in silence, facing each other, with the corpse (rubbish pile?) sitting between them emitting pathetic groans and watering the cobblestones. Finally, Jameson got up, swore in frustration, and jammed the interface device down into the back of the bot's skull. The neck contracted and brought the crushed head up to a painfully sharp angle, and he almost touched his back with his ear. There was a sickeningly real sound of tendons cracking and snapping under the pressure of the stretched skin and buckled spinal cord. The machine's neck and face was exposed. It was the first time he had seen it.
It was human.
And it was dead.
He added his stomach contents to the growing reddish-brown pool.