Ripper Bot Rampage and Rose's Call
Rose's guard robot's torn mouth lunged right up to my nose, but my shot rang out faster. Ting! Sparks erupted from its shoulder, making it flinch for a split second, but it barreled straight into me anyway. Crack. Its blood-soaked hand clamped around my neck, but the protector saved me from having my throat ripped out. Still, I heard the instant crumpling sound as it squeezed.
The guard robot, failing to deliver a fatal blow on the first strike, simply hurled me aside. "Huff!" I tucked and rolled with the fall, springing right back up—but it was already on me. Thud. "Gah." Its kick sent me sprawling backward. Damn it! When a nimble enemy steals the initiative with a surprise attack, you're just along for the ride. The riot suit was keeping fatal wounds at bay, but I couldn't last forever.
Boom! No time to turn—I rolled sideways as its metal foot smashed into where I'd just been. "Screeeeech!" The moment it raised its foot again, I poured everything into kicking its opposite ankle, the one anchoring it. Crash. It toppled, balance lost, but its right hand shot out and seized my neck anyway. The protector crumpled even more, choking me tight. No emotion in that machine's eyes, but an obsessive fixation on my vitals oozed from it.
Bang! I smashed its jaw with the heel of my walker boot and broke free. "Screeeeech—!" In full mount position, the guard robot unleashed a murder punch. Boom! The marble floor where my head had been exploded into shards. Flying debris trickled into my neck, prickling unpleasantly.
Boom! I barely dodged the second punch, then fired the shotgun point-blank at its neck. It just flinched. Bang! The second shot made the flinch drag on longer. Bang! The third struck true. Hiss. The hydraulics and cables I'd zeroed in on—from head through neck down the shoulder—shredded under close-range fire, buckling its frame. Clang! A kick sent it tumbling limply away.
Wise judgment.
"Whew. A shotgun on that hunk of metal? All it'd do is scratch the paint."
Up until I'd opened the main gate in the upper sector and made it here, a few drops of sweat were all I'd worked up. Now, after just one minute of fighting, I was drenched head to toe.
"If it had been Major Kim, he'd have taken it down easy, huh?"
[Major Kim?]
She knew almost everything about my profile, career, and life up to now, but not the people around me.
"A buddy from my army days. We were the only two facility seizure platoons—I led one, he led the other. Guy had enhancement implants, so he always edged me out in training."
Scion of a wealthy family, I presume?
Each little procedure cost a fortune.
"Son of a multi-generational general family. If he'd lived a few more years, he'd have been my CO."
Why did he die?
"Training's a spec contest, but combat's about cold judgment and decision-making. I knew how to survive—he didn't. Wasn't really officer material anyway."
He had promotions guaranteed without ever seeing real action, but that wasn't enough. He craved a faster track. A past of never failing. The superiority from his 'performance' amplified his greed, and he died pointlessly.
"Screech. Creak." The guard robot flailed on the floor—commands from its head weren't reaching its limbs.
Software damage is too severe for some reason—no room left to process my commands.
I stowed the shotgun and drew my axe. Boom! Boom! Boom! A few more whacks finished off the half-severed hydraulics and cables. Its movements stopped completely. Eyes still darting wildly, though.
Hold on. Something's off. Pry open the robot's mouth.
"The mouth?"
Yes.
Its mouth was still grotesque, evoking those urban legend slit-mouthed women. With the eyeballs right above spinning like mad, it was even creepier.
"Not touching that with my hands."
I stomped the lower jaw with my booted foot and wedged the axe handle in to force it open.
"What the hell?"
Clinging to the roof of the guard robot's mouth was a bizarre creature I'd never seen before. Click. I instinctively drew and aimed the shotgun.
It's already dead.
The shoulder cam switched to lantern mode, illuminating the robot's mouth.
Been desiccated for ages.
Sure enough, prodding it with the axe handle made bits flake off the surface. Long dead. It resembled an octopus, but only five tentacles—and instead of suckers, they bristled with hooks. Once latched on somewhere, it wouldn't come off easy.
"Try the hacking tool again? Should be able to pull logs on what happened."
Do it.
Blue light pierced the robot's head, and its wildly shaking eyes went still. Moments later, her exclamation came through.
Ah, so that's what happened.
"Care to explain?"
That creature is a type of infected. One that's evolved to interface with machines.
A video transferred to my PDA.
Playing back a fragment from the robot's memory.
"So the machine got infected?"
Logs suggest it's akin to hacking. Think organic tissue as living terminals and cables.
"Then why's this one dead?" I prodded the octopus-thing with the axe handle.
"When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back," as Nietzsche said?
Accessing machines means the infected's brain is vulnerable too. Two-way street.
"And?"
The guard robot's a security model—with firewalls against unauthorized access. Hacking attempt triggered countermeasures, overloading the infected's brain. Brain death. Infected died, but robot took heavy damage and rampaged. The rest is what we saw.
A story that left me speechless, but one question lingered.
"Evolved to target machines, yet mutual destruction? Kinda sloppy, no?"
That's evolution for you—learns from bitter lessons, over many trials. Only I can evolve without failure, peering into the future myself.
To Artemis, this infected was just a mildly intriguing counterexample affirming her superiority.
Or perhaps it panicked—its mechanism utterly unlike any machines it's hit before.
"Machines it's hit before?"
Artemis didn't answer, but my mind flashed to the spaceship in Mars orbit. She was probably thinking the same.
Too speculative for now. Let's shelve this incident—focus on what's important. Research can wait until everything stabilizes.
Her voice always lit up at the word 'research.' After that, things smoothed out. I summoned a tram from the platform controls and rode it for some downtime. Occasional thuds like hitting something echoed midway, but I ignored them.
Until I checked my PDA. "Haha, you're joking, right?"
What?
The infected kill count on my PDA had updated. She'd tallied the ones squashed by the tram. I couldn't help but chuckle.
"Pretty solid humor."
Not meant to be funny. Even trivial records matter.
Ping. The count ticked up again.
"Oh, and one more thing to thank you for." I pulled off the neck protector. It was badly crumpled from the fight—now even hindering my breathing a bit.
"Saved my life. Without your tip, that scrap might've ended me."
Though you barely needed it against the infected themselves.
I set the protector on the floor, pressed the flat side of the fire axe against it, and stomped a few times. The worst dents eased out a bit. A few taps with the handle refined it, then I strapped it back on. That brief respite ended as the tram reached its stop.
"Quiet around here."
No infected on this platform. PDA showed minimal confirmed ones en route up the dead escalator—easy to skirt.
Then a faint voice crackled from the PDA. Incoming external comms.
A young woman's voice—cold and dry, yet laced with restrained intellect. Nothing like Artemis's confident poise.
I switched from PDA speaker to my earpiece comm for stealth and replied, "I hear you loud and clear."
"Never dreamed there'd be survivors."
My voice brimmed with genuine delight.
"Pardon?"
What? Communicating like this, yet not a survivor?
Artemis and I exchanged glances. Well, precisely, she glanced at my shoulder cam.