Althea loaded up a brand new combat-ready Persona before her eyes finished adjusting to the light. At first, all she could see was the stained concrete floor beneath the step on her prison. As her eyes cleared, she could attach a source to the massive cacophony hitting her from all sides.
A crowd surged from their seats as an announcer called out her name:
“Mouse of Steel! Facing, the Main City Mutilator!”
Still trying to find her bearings, Althea spotted a figure emerge from the opposite side of the circular arena. Holding their arms up triumphantly, they wore a suit of steel armor shaped to resemble medieval gothic plate.
The top of the figure’s helmet looked like half an industrial saw blade. In its arms, it swung a massive axe whose head looked like the other half of the saw blade. Arranged with the blade facing away from the haft, it looked like a frowning face when the figure held it over head.
The invisible announcer shouted, “Begin” and the figure charged Althea.
Hesitation left her at the entrance to her prison. For a moment, she considered jumping back into the box, but handlers on the other side of a set of filthy steel bars menaced her with EM batons.
Althea looked around and could not find a weapon for herself and her armored opponent had trashed his breaks and steered for her like an out of control semi truck. Taking a step toward the bars and puffing her bare metallic chest out like a monkey threatening a tribe member, she got what she wanted. An overeager handler tried to tap her out.
She grabbed the man’s hand in her chrome arms and fell away from the bars, kicking into them with her legs as she did. The man slammed into the bars with a sickening crunch, his eyes went vacant and she pulled his shoulder part of the way of his socket before she released his hand.
Without checking to see if he was dead, she rolled away from the bars having dropped her weapon the process. For a second she could not find the Mutilator on the arena flood anywhere in sight. Then Pontikos limned him with a red glow and Althea could see that he stood just less than a meter way within grabbing distance.
Having grown used to the process so far, Althea was unsurprised when her body reacted automatically and instinctively. The CQC-1 combat protocol outmatched the meager skills of the Mutilator by orders of magnitude.
Blading her body toward the man she stepped on the haft of his axe and pushed off, trying to shove her chromed shoulders into the man’s chest to divest him of his weapon. Instead, Althea felt her side tear as alerts appeared in her vision warning her of an injury.
She jumped away without hurting the Mutilator in the least. But as she spun, she spotted the dark red stains on his upper thighs and waist where she had ripped her side against blades and spikes mounted on his armor.
Pontikos appeared and said,
“I am managing blood loss, but you damaged some organic muscles in your side. I am making live adjustments to your battle protocols.”
The Mutilator roared at Althea and charged after her. She could see his glowing red eyes through his helmet.
Even he had ocular implants. Darnit.
Althea had never desired to grow up a chrome head. But if she were going to lose her arms and breasts, then she might as well jettison every other part she could manage.
Though she could tell her battle implants were better than the Mutilator’s own, she could not manage to find time to counter attack. Other than the single first attack where he seemed to invite the challenge, the man swept her away with wide arcs of his axe that never again clanged into the ground.
When her back hit a wall, the crowd around her screamed. Based on Pontikos’s assessment, the fight had only taken thirty-one seconds. Desperation and raw instinct had her raise her arms to shield herself from the Mutilator’s attack. The blade of the axe slammed into her arms with enough force to rip a person clean in half. Althea knew that because the Negative Pressure response systems in her torso informed her of the exact angular force.
And nothing happened.
Not even a yellow light on the status display for her cybernetic arms. For the first time since she woke up with metal instead of flesh for limbs, she felt happy about it.
“You’re fucking kidding me right now.”
Althea looked up with a grin as she spoke, clutching the Mutilator’s axe in hand as she did. He strained against her as he tried to take the weapon back. When he lifted his foot to attack her, Althea could not help but crack a knowing grin.
Releasing the axe and slamming into the Mutilator’s chest felt good. The man who had been harrying her around the arena’s pit found himself at a significant disadvantage now that Althea disarmed him.
She ripped pieces of his armor off while she raced after him. What started with haughty chortles and mockery ended with the Mutilator back-crawling away from Althea as she advanced. Armor-less and weapon-less the gladiator seemed far less threatening now.
The only surprising thing about the Mutilator was his age. She had been expecting a youth, someone older than twenty, but younger than fifty. The shock of white hair and age lines of the Mutilator’s head gave Althea enough pause for him to scramble even further away, toward where Althea had been inserted into the arena.
Taking a moment to fully engage with her surroundings seemed like a good idea. Steel bars, these far cleaner than the ones at ground level, formed a ceiling through which she would have considerable trouble passing. Based on the thickness of the bars, she would need a pulse weapon or high powered laser to get through.
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Althea highly doubted her captors intended to toss her an energy weapon, so she shrugged and resumed her advance on the Mutilator. Though her pause had been brief, just long enough to take in the whole arena, she had taken her attention off of the Mutilator for a moment. And now he looked less worried, less panicked than before.
Pontikos warned her:
“Something has clearly changed in his body language. And we cannot see the contents of his left hand.”
Althea looked where Pontikos indicated and sure enough, the Mutilator seemed to rest on his hand as if trying to hide something without being obvious about it. Guessing at what he clutched, Althea sneered as she put her foot down right between his legs, just a paper’s width from his crotch. She made her best, “unbalanced, but threatening stance” to lure out the Mutilator’s response.
And her ploy worked.
His left arm snaked out, the EM rod in hand and tried to hit her with the end. Because she anticipated the move, she lifted her foot just enough for the EM rod to pass under her sole. Then she brought the full force of her weight down on the rod, and on the Mutilator’s groin.
The volume of the man’s howl could not possibly cover the sickening crunch her foot made as she broke the EM rod on his body. The crunching snap traveled up her legs into her hips. Fortunately for Althea, she jumped away as the rod sparked and fizzled, sending the full force of its charge through the Mutilator’s tender flesh and into the Earth.
By the time he finished twitching, the announcer had already declared Althea the victor. Watching her attacker twitch and die on the pavement proved harder than anything she had done so far, and brought home the reality of the choices Althea had made recently.
Part of her wanted to reach down and scoop up the shattered parts of the EM rod. Those would be useful. But that would require touching the body of the dead grandpa at her feet. When her handlers applied their own shock rods and hooded her, Althea felt a tiny measure of relief.
Not enough to save off the guilt that started to consume her. But darkness was preferable to soul searching right then.
They removed the hood before they locked her isolation cell. Althea could barely move her arms in this place, likely because if she had been able to build momentum, she could have torn through the holding cell with enough time.
But that would not be happening. Her captors could not know that, they probably expected her to rattle and shake her cage all night. Instead, Althea stood in her prison castigating herself.
“He was someone’s dad, someone’s grandpa, Pontikos. Did you see what I did to him?”
Ponikos fluttered into Althea’s vision and said,
“Of course I saw. And technically you do not know if he is someone’s father or grandfather.”
She knew that her Persona adjustments created this situation, but she could not help but shed tears over the old man’s fate.
“What about the three guards back in TP?”
Althea knew that she danced around her real concern, verbally shuffling her worries to keep what really terrified her at bay.
Pontikos said,
“What about them?”
“I bet you could tell me all three of their names, couldn’t you?”
“Perhaps, but I do not consider that a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“You are fragile and just killed your first person with premeditation. I do not believe you need to put a name to the first people you were forced to kill.”
“Forced, hardly. I could have found a better way to deal with them.”
Pontikos shook a second and then displayed a first person perspective view of that fight, starting with Maxwell’s death. At each beat, she stopped and said,
“What do you think you should have done here? Surrendered? Asked them kindly to stop firing and let you go?”
“What about…”
“Yes?”
“I could have done something non-lethal. Like just injured them?”
“How? You had nearly zero visibility and faced a foe with superior weapons and professional training. The only reason you are alive is that you activated the SLIDE and close quarters combat protocols. Nothing else could have saved you, Mistress.”
Althea nodded as her assistant spoke. She could not honestly argue with Pontikos’s points. The real argument clung to the shadows, lurking just on the edge of words.
And Althea let them all spill out.
“What about the people in the apartment building, all of those people I killed…”
Though she could not move her physical hands, in the space of her augmented reality, she covered her face with her armored hands.
Pontikos started to speak, but Althea’s cries drowned out the AI. The pain in her heart made her want to shift her Persona back to something else, someone who did not care about people and would not cry for those who happened to stand in her way. At the same time, she could not bring herself to embrace that attitude, even with the switch firmly in hand, she feared what would happen if she gave her body and mind free rein.
Pontikos grew in size as she approached Althea’s face and said,
“Are you done? Can I give you information now?”
Anger flashed through Althea as she removed her hands from over her face.
“What do you mean?”
“How many people did you kill with your little explosion? Do you know?”
“Dozens? Hundreds?”
Pontikos shook her head and wrinkled her nose like she bit something off,
“No. Did you even look up the incident on the news feeds?”
Althea felt like sneering.
“No. Why would I do that?”
Pontikos said,
“Because you would learn that the apartment building had finished evacuation before you blew the floors up.”
“Really? So I didn’t kill anyone?”
Pontikos looked downcast, as if she had been hoping Althea would not ask that exact question.
“No, you killed someone, I am sorry, Althea.”
“Who?”
“His name was Jasper Aire. He died of complications arising from a heart attack.”
“What? How did I kill him then?”
Pontikos spread her hands and said,
“The concussion combined with the panic around the blast. He experienced a cardiac event and as a low-income retiree, did not have his heart monitors active online. No one found him for minutes after the episode during which he suffered irreparable brain damage.”
Pontikos delivered the clinical details without passion or remorse. Althea provided her own color commentary. From one view, she could not be happier that she did not kill hundreds of innocent people. From another view, she killed an innocent old man who had presumably been just minding his own business.
Celebration and horror mixed in her mind, creating a cocktail of self recrimination and woe that even her permanent head-companion could not break through.
Three hours after being locked in her casket, an aperture opened in the faceplate in front of her. Althea waited to see what would happen as a small cascade of musty smelling gruel slid down the chute to her face.
Partially covered in synthetic grain and amino acids, Althea lapped up what she could and wept. Halfway through her pseudo meal, she activated her Persona Management.
Pontikos appeared in her view,
“Mistress, I warned you about this. Please do not…”
Althea’s response was vehement and delivered out loud as a shout,
“I don’t care! If I go fucking crazy at least I will stop hurting!”
Pontikos quivered once and her wings shook as she opened her little pixie mouth and closed it again.
“Very well mistress.”
Althea dropped her Empathy and Compassion to zero. She raised her discomfort tolerance to the max and red-lined her ruthlessness, drive and focus. Using the CC-0 load out as a guide, and updating her Persona as she made each change, the crushing existential self-hate faded as her Persona took the new attributes.
Soon, she found herself savoring the gruel on her face. Nothing more or less than a biological need, Althea would rely on every calorie they fed her to survive and escape this place. For now, she did not have a plan. But in a few days, something would come up.
That night she did not even dream.
