My last moments from the time of when I was still me are confusing and indistinct. I can remember only pain, urgent voices and brilliant lights being shinning in my eyes. A searing pain shoots through my chest as my body convulses wildly. Emotions ripped through me in quick succession: panic, fear and terror. The pain comes again and I arch my body involuntarily, when it has passed I slump back. It takes a long time for the commotion around me to cease, but at last it stops. I felt a creeping lassitude as it began to seep into me. It would be so easy to just lie back and relax. Whatever happens, it wouldn’t matter to me now. As I rested, the pains which I had felt slowly faded away. Darkness descended and shut out the too bright light. I found that my senses were deserted me, one by one. I did not fight their departure, I just let them go. At last I could only listen to the voices around me until they too faded and were gone. I turned without moving and found myself facing a far gentler light than I had ever seen before. This, I knew, was where I was meant to go and at last have peace. As I was to soon discover, the peace it offered would not be mine just yet. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Merior Stories With the Aid and Assistance of Natsuko Motivation Unlimited (Jusenkyo Branch) Proudly presents Soul of the Machine Part 1: An End & A Beginning By Richard Drysdale Live from the | Bubble | Gum | Crisis | Universe *Insert all necessary disclaimers here* Author’s Note: Many apologies to the writer of Psychedelix, I really didn’t think about how similar what I had written was to the introduction of your story until I re-read Psychedelix. Once I realized this I deliberately ‘borrowed’ the title sequence. Please, please give me the benefit of the doubt and finish reading this _before_ flaming me to death. It isn’t the same story, honestly it _is_ different. Or so it seems to me. This story came about because of a comment on the FFML that, whenever anybody turned up in Mega-Tokyo, they always joined the Knight Sabers. Well, I decided to write something where the character dare not go anywhere near Sylia and company. I hope you enjoy it. This is a revised version of this story. Many thanks to Damon Casale for his help with both spelling and grammar. C&C are highly sought because they show somebody actually read this, so please send lots to me at merior@wintermute.co.uk ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -One------- Slowly I drifted closer to the beautiful light. As I did so ghostly scenes and frozen images became apparent to me. At some I lingered to watch for a while, seeing snatches of life and love pass me by before continuing on my journey. One scene in particular drew my attention like none of the others could. A man stood by a panel of lights, his head lowered in defeat. To his other side a machine in the shape of a woman lay on a slab, waiting for the machines around her to breathe life into her inanimate frame. The panels still bore random traces from the previous tries at supplying animation, but he ignored these and laboriously reset the system for another attempt. As he did so he altered a variable here and tweaked a parameter there in the hope of achieving success. >From my abstracted view point, I could see it was not to be. This attempt, as all those previous had, too would fail. The man’s path ended soon afterwards, cut off before it reached its peak by his own hand. This I could sympathize with; in this I could feel for him. I wanted to do something to help him instead of letting his life go to waste. He growled his frustration and finished his manipulations of the controls for this final attempt. I could not hear what he said, but I mouthed the words along with him. "Work." We said as one, neither of us hearing the other. He altered a setting and experimentally entered a sequence. Nothing. "Work!" We said as he glared at the unresponsive machine. I could almost feel his frustration and rage at this obstacle. Tears of defeat streaming from his eyes, he keyed in a final set of commands. "Live, god damn you." We begged. He drove his hand flat against the keyboard, I reached out to the body. He wanted it to work, we wanted it to work. I reached out without arms into the body and tried to make it move. Contact. The world spun and was full of pain. I was dragged from the disembodied, detached plane I had been on and was being crammed into a material shell. I lost sight of the light as pains which made me want to scream wracked me, worse than dying. I could not scream because I had not yet a voice. The pains of birth tortured me. No, they were rebirth pains which I felt when I returned to life in a body which was not my own. Thoughts and memories were split in twain. For me, now slid into then until the past finally became mere memories again. -Two------- The man watched with dead eyes as the console in front of him displayed a picture of chaos. The jagged lines and fluctuating bars showed the status of the machine which lay on the diagnostic table to one side. This is hopeless, he thought, I should never have even tried this. He could taste bitter defeat in his mouth as the traces which should have been rhythmic and flowing instead jumped seemingly at random. This was what he staked his entire reputation and life on: a useless pile of junk. He remembered how confident he had been that he was the best designer of Boomers anywhere. His boomers would be perfect and wipe the floor with the other designs. If they would have just let him prove it to them They wouldn’t even let him try. In the end he had acquired the materials and tools needed to make a single Boomer. Only one, but once he had finished it, then they would see. He had diverted them to this disused warehouse and once everything had been ready he had set out to produce a Boomer. They would have forgiven him when he showed them what he would do, they wouldn’t have punished him but rewarded him. It was painstaking work to design and build it by himself, but he managed it. Everything about the BU-33AS was better than they could imagine. Except it wouldn’t work. The AI which had taken weeks of solid work to program just gave out gibberish instead of effortlessly controlling the body he had built for it. This had been his eleventh and final attempt at activating it. Each time, he had made a small adjustment to those variables he could still alter. He had betrayed Genom. People didn’t get a chance to do that twice. If only he’d had something to show them then all would have been forgiven. All he had was a lifeless shell. Looking down at his hands he realized that he had been wrapping a length of cable about one of his hands until it was white. This cable is strong enough, he thought. He had made his decision. Behind him, as he stood himself on a chair, the readouts were changing. Gradually they were resolving into smooth curves and steady fluctuations. -Three----- It seemed to take forever for my mind to make the journey from the first sparks of awareness to full alertness. My first proper thought was to notice the absence of pain. This was a good thing, I decided. I opened my eyes and sat up cautiously, wondering where on Earth I was. After a moment, adjusting for the dim lighting, my eyes snapped into clear focus. Unfortunately the first thing that I saw was a man dangling from a rope by his neck. This was not one of the best things to see just after awaking up. Restraining an almost overwhelming urge to scream, I peered at the figure’s face. It was the man whom I’d wanted to help. I frowned for a moment as I thought about that, attempting to pin down the memory. For some reason my mind seemed full of fog, obscuring most of my past. The moment since I had died was there, but trying to remember something from before then was like digging through mud. It was exhausting and if I paused all my effort would just disappear. For a second I could not understand how I was here and not headed towards that beautiful light. Then I looked down at myself and understood. The body had lacked one thing: a vital force, a mind. Call it what you will, but it had been lacking that. Without my interference the body would have remained inert. With it I had inadvertently supplied the mind for it. At least it’s not ugly, I thought absently as I examined the body which was now my own. A word came to me as I thought of myself. Sexaroid. A frown creased my brow as I tried to discover where that thought had come from, to no avail. Slowly I got up and walked over to a computer at one side of the room, feeling off balance and unused to my new form. More quickly than I could believe my balance sorted itself out so that I did not run the risk of falling with each step I took. I managed to reach the console and slumped down into the chair which sat in front of it. It had taken me much more effort than I had thought it would to just cross those few of meters space. With one hand I clutched my forehead for a moment before something seemed to burst within my mind. It was as if all I had heard before was silence and a fanfare of trumpets had just rung out. -Four------ Unsure of what had just happened and what to do next I stood up again, this time without any problems or the expenditure of excessive effort. Seeing a small mirror balanced by a sink I walked over to it. After wiping off some flecks of shaving foam from its surface I peered at my own reflection. The first things I noticed was my hair and eyes: short, white hair framed a delicate face and wide purple eyes stared back out at me. The combination was startling and surprisingly attractive. As for the rest of me, a glance told me three things. One, I possessed respectable proportions. Two, the man who made me hadn’t bothered to clean me off since a splattering of gunk still covered my limbs. Three, I was stark naked. Blushing slightly, I looked around the room but couldn’t see anything which even vaguely resembled clothing. What in the world did he think I was going to wear? Nothing at all? I looked again and realized that there was only one set available that I could possibly use. Gingerly I approached the dangling corpse and started getting it down from where it hung. -Five------ The clothes were, for the most part, a good fit. Admittedly the shirt was uncomfortable and the trouser the wrong size, but at least I could wear them without major problems. It had taken a while, but I had managed to clean the trousers up into a fit enough state to wear. The faint odor of fecal matter still permeated them though. My flesh still creeped at the thought that I was wearing a dead man’s clothes, but I struggled to ignore this fact. First, fetching the chair over, I sat down at the computer and booted it up. I was unsure exactly how I did it, but within minutes I had the system at my mercy. Calling up the most recent files I discovered that they were all about me! Well, they were about the body that I had inadvertently taken as my own. Digging a little deeper I discovered an overview of the project which I had become. They called it the BU-33AS. I began avidly reading, skimming through the more technical sections. "...potential uses include assassinations, infiltration and espionage. In particular long term infiltrations are practical as this Sexaroid variant is completely maintenance free and virtually indistinguishable from a human being, under normal circumstances, even to the most advanced sensors.....of all the options that its advanced hypnotic capabilities make possible.....Due to its covert nature the strength and resilience of this model is limited, but under emergency conditions it can exhibit bursts of strength comparable to that of a C- Series Boomer....semi-autonomous dedicated co-processors can handle specialist situations with an efficiency no other processor can match." I smiled as I finished reading even though most of what I had read made little sense. I had no love for Genom and certainly had no wish to let them get their paws on me. Indistinguishable from a human being, huh. Even if they knew I existed that would make it mighty hard to find me. I had no wish to be tracked down like Sylvie and Anri had... Wait a second! I’m a boomer in Mega-Tokyo? How the hell did I get here? It’s just a place in the Bubblegum Crisis series. What am I going to do, go find the Knight Sabers? On second thought that didn’t seem like a very good idea. What would I say? "Hi everyone, I know all of your secrets and that you’re the Knight Sabers. You don’t know anything about me at all, and I’m not really an infiltration/assassination boomer, but a guy who got lost after he died." I can imagine that any attempt to go near them and explain would end with Priss introducing me to Mister Rail gun. The things that would happen next would not be... For a second time my train of though screeched to a halt as I frantically backtrack over something I had thought about. I’m a _guy_ who got lost after he died? I’m a guy? No matter which way I looked at it, the thought still rang true. A quick glance down at myself made me decide to restate that point. I _had been_ a guy who got lost after he died. A noise off to one side drew my attention back from my thoughts. Glancing in that direction I could see a solidly built man wearing a uniform and sunglasses standing there. For a moment he just stood there then looked first at the body on the ground nearby, and then at me. "Uh, hi!" I said, "This isn’t like it seems you know. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation..." As I spoke I edged slowly away from him. Or, I feared it would be more accurately to say, it. Who wears sunglasses inside? My suspicions were immediately proven correct as the boomer in front of me burst out of both it’s clothing and it’s skin. A small part of me noted that it looked much worse close up and that when I watched it nobody got their face plastered by small scraps of fake skin. The rest of me was too busy diving out of the way and scrabbling for an escape route to be bothered by such trivialities at a time like this. Well, I lied. One part of me wasn’t doing either. Instead it was just wanted to scream in stark terror as the boomer’s arm swung around towards me. -Six------- Scrambling hastily away I managed to avoid the boomer’s attack and the punch wasted itself uselessly on an expensive looking piece of equipment. Shards of metal and plastic flew everywhere. Pain flared in my side as a piece of the shrapnel tore a gash there. The wound itself wasn’t serious, but its implications were. It would slow me down and at the moment my speed and agility was all that kept me from becoming a very thin smear. As I backpeddled out of its reach something I had read earlier came back to me. "...under emergency conditions it can exhibit bursts of strength comparable to that of a C-Series Boomer." Well, I couldn’t remember what a C-Series Boomer was, but I needed even the smallest advantage. Unsure of what exactly to do I just told myself that I needed to be stronger, to win this fight. A kind of rumble, like that of thunder, rolled through my consciousness and pain shot through me. It was like I had over strained every muscle in my body. The sensation receded to mere annoyance and as it did so, something changed. Almost like a puppeteer I directed my body to fight and it did. The precise actions were beyond my control as I felt myself scoop up a long piece of metal in one hand as I rolled away from yet another attack. With a jerk I found myself leaping forward between the boomer’s arms and passing over its shoulder. The arm holding the shard slammed into its back as I passed. I landed and suddenly regained complete control of myself. The first thing I did was collapse to the floor from the pain. After a few moments I looked up again and saw that I was not the only one who had collapsed. The boomer was on the floor with the piece of metal jutting from its spine. Looking back over what I had just done I realized that I had managed to sever a control run of some kind in its spine. Lucky shot, but was it luck? When it happened my actions were sure and completely certain and performed with a speed and strength I was sure I couldn’t normally match. So that was what a "semi-autonomous specialized coprocessor" is. A berserker on a leash. I shuddered. I don’t think I want to try that again any time soon. With one arm I tried to push myself off of the floor, but gave up hurriedly as pain spiked through my hand. It was the one I had held the shard in and the flesh was cut open to the bone. It hurt like hell, but I could push it away. Absently I turned the hand and saw the lights gleam off of the metallic surface of the bone. Reaching into the pocket of the shirt I wore I pulled out a handkerchief. Gingerly I tied it around my palm. For some reason it did not have hurt as much as I thought it would have, but it still hurt a lot. Having finally managed to tie a knot one handed and, having regained a measure of my strength, I attempted to stagger to my feet. Success! Now what? -Seven----- I took my time before leaving the building. Meticulously I gathered up every single thing I could find about the BU-33AS and sorted it out. Anything useful I transferred on to a laptop computer which had been in one corner of the room. Then I put everything I had gathered in a big pile in the middle of the room. Fifteen minutes later I walked out as the fire began taking hold of everything inside. Once outside I almost regretted committing this act of arson. The man who had built me deserved better, but he was already dead and I needed to stay both alive and undiscovered. Hopefully he hadn’t told anybody else about me, but that was probably a vain hope. Leaning against the wall of an adjacent building I stood and waited. I didn’t have to wait for long until I could see a red glow coming from within and smell the scent of smoke and ashes. The fire seemed to be intent on devouring the building so I silently wished it good appetite and left it to its meal. I walked along a couple of blocks before sitting down on a bench to consider everything. I tried to work out what exactly I needed to be able to live and survive in Mega-Tokyo. First up, a way to get money. Second, an identity. Thirdly, a way to hide from Genom. These weren’t in order of importance obviously, if I couldn’t get the third then the other two would unfortunately not be necessary. An identity shouldn’t be too hard to set up, the BU-33AS was designed for assassinations and _infiltration_. I had an entire suite of code breaking and hacking routine’s sitting in my head at that very moment. Once I had an identity, a legitimate job shouldn’t be hard to get, as I could fake the qualifications. A job as a secretary would be a bit demeaning, but I didn’t know enough myself to get anything better. Those jobs I could get using the things I had recently, and suddenly, learned were either illegal or distasteful. Frowning slightly I considered the problem. Where could I hide in a city where no one would look? It was a tricky problem and I took care to examine it from all sides. Then I slapped my forehead at my own stupidity. Anybody who might look for me would start looking in the out of the way corners. That’s where anyone who might wish to hide would go What I wanted was somewhere no boomer would go near if they could possibly help it, somewhere I could hide in plain sight. I grinned evilly at the idea which came to me and laughed quietly for quite some time. After I had calmed down I opened the laptop and, using its cellular modem, set to work trying to create exactly the type of false identity I wanted and required. I needed it to be just perfect to go with my application to join the AD Police.