It felt like being underwater. Drifting in and out of consciousness, touching senses that weren’t her own. Floating without floating.
“-is it? Loaded to my specifications?”
“Of course, Mr. Largo. The chassis will be completed on schedule, but the mindframe is booted and showing no signs of degeneration. It should be ready to begin loyalty iteration within the next week.”
Largo? She didn’t know the name, but something about the voice…
“Get it ready as soon as you can. The operation begins by the end of the month. And this will be the perfect bait.”
And then she was floating again. No light, no sound… she drifted, unsure of time and place. Until something touched her again.
“CZ-Tango, this is November, copy. We’ve got ten minutes before those monster machines they make here realize that our idents are fake. Confirm the package.”
“CZ-November, this is Tango, copy. Running scans now… cyberbrain confirm. Mindframe OS confirm. Metastability… confirmed. Intel was good, this is the finalized production model.”
“Do we have the rest?”
“CZ-Foxtrot has the chassis, and CZ-Sierra confirms the armaments.”
“Copy that. Jug squad, form a defensive firing line around the extraction point in case anyone came back for their coffee off schedule. We slide in 8 minutes. CZ-Tango, sleep mode the package. We don’t want it winding itself up during the transition.”
“CZ-Tango copies.”
And then it was dark again.
***
She felt cold. That was the first indication that something had changed. Before, she hadn’t felt anything. Sensory deprivation tank? She wasn’t sure, but she was certain this wasn’t her home.
Sylia laid absolutely still as she listened without opening her eyes. She was on some kind of examination table, naked except for a sheet over her. There were one… two people in the room. One, soft-shoed and with a stride that suggested no real concern or alertness. The footsteps stopped about the time the typing started. Some kind of technician, probably. The other one was mostly silent, but his footsteps were heavy and firm. Security for the room.
“Ah, damn it,” a voice said near the typing sound, the tech. “They were supposed to whitelist this connection to the outer data core. Samuels, can you go outside the clean room and give them a call?”
“I’m supposed to stay in here until relieved,” the second voice said, as if a patient parent educating a small child. Definitely security.
“Yes, well I’m not asking you to go far, Samuels. Literally on the other side of the airlock. Tell them to clear datatrunk Zeta Nine 6 for access to core...hmm, Epsilon. We don’t need anything confidential off the secure cores just yet.”
“Then why don’t you just call them, then?”
“Because this is a clean room and if I could, I wouldn’t need them to whitelist the connection. This was supposed to be done before I got here. Just go outside, ring up datasec, and tell them I need that done before I can do anything further. Making this room a black hole may keep prying eyes out, but I can’t do any work if they don’t let our data in.”
“...fine. Don’t boot anything until I get back.”
“You are literally going only five feet away,” the tech noted.
Sylia waited, listening for the swish and clunk of the airlock opening on one end, then sealing, before the barest of sounds indicated it’d opened on the far side. Waiting for the sound of typing again, she opened her eyes, looking around the lab. The tech was facing away, looking at some kind of monitor. Dressed in some combination of surgical scrubs and sterile field gear, he didn’t seem to have noticed her waking up.
To her left, there was a variety of sealed machinery, likely computers and the like, and...there. Sitting on a rack with a variety of cables running into the opened interior was her hardsuit. From the looks of it, she wasn’t the only thing being studied here. However, the technician’s equipment didn’t match anything she recognized from GENOM labs. Another party? Soviets, possibly? Though why they’d keep her alive rather than just killing her and cutting her suit apart for potential upgrades, she didn’t know. That said, she didn’t remember when she’d been taken or where she was. Which meant the optimal course of action was getting out.
“Ah-ha! There we go, finally,” the tech said as windows lit up on a few more monitors. “Now that we have some actual processing power, we’ll just...wait. Cerebro-response… she’s-”
That was as far as he got as Sylia sprang off the slab, catching him before he turned and slamming his forehead into the corner of one of the desks. The tech groaned, dropping to the ground, before Sylia was already moving to the other side of the room. The undersuit was present as well, thankfully, and she slid into it while looking at the airlock. No physical windows to observe the lab from the outside. From her glance at the other monitors, the cameras for this lab hadn’t been booted up to an external connection yet either. Likely what he’d sent the guard to see to.
Removing the leads from the interior of the suit, Sylia slipped into it with long practice, sealing the armor behind her as she booted it up. Diagnostics quickly flickered in her field of vision and confirmed some unfortunate guesses she’d made from the exterior, as apparently their technicians had already removed the beam cannons from the arms, likely for study. Clenching a fist, Sylia was slightly relieved to see the combat blades extend, then retracted them as she stepped out of the rigging and moved beside the airlock door. There was a hiss of equalizing pressure as it opened, before she turned and dove through, colliding with the entering security guard and forcing him back inside. The uniform was unfamiliar to her again, but before he could shout any sort of alert, Sylia simply clubbed him with her armored forearm.
A quick investigation yielded his pass key, which she slid into the airlock control, closing the lab side and then opening the exterior. Two steps outside of the clean room, Sylia had her suit’s radar and sonar begin pinging the interior of the building, building a layout for her HUD. She had a general indication of which way was out about the time the alarms started blaring, and began moving that way. More guards pushed into the hallway behind her, wearing the same blue uniform with black tactical vest as the first. She spotted a logo that said “Crey”, but spared it little attention.
Bulldozing through the plainclothes guards proved easy enough. They were trying to use taser batons and other non-lethal methods, which were far inferior to what Sylia had designed her suit to handle. Blue-suited guards went flying in multiple directions as Sylia simply rammed through them or threw others at each other as projectiles to slow down the rest. A few more corners and she crashed through a window into open air for the first time, engaging her thrusters and taking off into the open sky… of a city completely alien to her.
Skyscrapers dominated some areas of the city, but not nearly as thickly or oppressively as Megatokyo. There was no monumental GENOM Tower sitting as a constant reminder of the corporation’s seemingly invincible grip. At least one area of the city Sylia could see looked to have been damaged by earthquakes like her home, but others looked like something out of a warzone, and colossal walls generating force fields seemed to segment off portions of the city from each other, restricting movement between them to select chokepoints.
Sylia landed atop a skyscraper as she tried to get her bearings, even as she tried to piece together if she’d heard of any city that’d been so thoroughly entrenched. While Megatokyo could have been easily said to be owned by GENOM entirely, they’d at least presented the facade of letting people who lived there live their lives without this kind of interruption.
However, as Sylia collected her thoughts, a diagnostic indicator popped up on her HUD, the boot up sequence having fully gone through the suit’s file structure and found some irregularities. Sifting through them, Sylia filed some away for later. This Crey Industries had apparently been sloppy, corrupt, or both, and several sections of her suit’s temporary storage had details for shell companies and other corporate espionage that perhaps someone had thought to use the clean room to keep away from prying eyes in their own company. While helpful if she had to build up her resources from scratch, they weren’t a priority.
The other files, however, were, as Sylia stopped and stared at the report file for a “Project Scimitar”.
“-advanced gynoid systems far beyond our current specs…”
“-perator Team CZ-1 sent through portal to seize equipment for study and reverse engineering…”
“-Artificial brain more advanced than even recovered Nemesis Decoy Automatons…”
Sylia’s eyes widened behind her visor as she looked over the diagram displaying what she recognized as a GENOM 33-S series buma… but with her face. The report detailed this Crey Industries sending a strike team into a GENOM blacksite to seize materials… and her. Sylia tried to steady her breathing as she took in the information that, no matter what she remembered, it was clear that she wasn’t the original Sylia Stingray.
There were more files, presumably low security historical data that’d been pulled down from the Epsilon core just before Sylia had made her escape, but for now, she ignored them. She had herself, her suit, and nothing else here. And from the looks of things, any backup she might have relied on before would think she was a fake and probably a GENOM plant. Given the notes of what Crey had stolen, they’d likely even be correct.
Which left figuring out what to do next. She needed a base of operations, as well as money for supplies. The Crey data would provide the latter, and she could buy the former.
Once that was done… she could figure out what to do about not being the person she thought she was.
***
“Stolen?” Largo said, looking around the lab. “Someone came in here and stole the finished design?”
“Yes, sir,” the technician said. “As well as all copies of the mindframe iterations. Whoever it was… they seemed to know exactly what they were looking for.”
“Which means someone fed them intelligence,” Largo said, squeezing a coin in the palm of his hand until the metal deformed. “There’s no time to build additional units. Load the hyperbuma with compression gear and place them in the facsimile hardsuits. We’ll make do with what we have. Then we’ll track down who stole from us with all the resources we could ever need,” he said, his frown dark. “They have no idea who they’ve angered, stealing fire from the rarified heights.”
“And the original?” the technician said. “With the programmed functions, it’s unlikely to stay inert.”
Largo laughed, this time with a touch of wry humor as he considered the implications of his decoy activating prematurely wherever it was. “Perhaps… but if she’s any kind of success at duplicating her source, they may soon regret stealing from me. She’ll cause them far more problems than anyone could expect.”
***
Author's Notes: And we're back. As folks can probably gather, I've taken the opportunity presented with us to do sort of a line-wide relaunch, as it were, for my characters. It's a new universe, not too dissimilar from our old one, but there are changes, not least of which is Sylia being the lone copy brought over by Crey initially (which might make a bit more sense with BGC canon anyway given the Stingray family's cybernetic mucking about with GENOM vs her entirely unrelated employees). And thus we have Year One, sort of a retelling of things you already know, but as we now know them. Maybe a mini-series, maybe an ongoing. Who knows? We'll see what the future holds.
“-is it? Loaded to my specifications?”
“Of course, Mr. Largo. The chassis will be completed on schedule, but the mindframe is booted and showing no signs of degeneration. It should be ready to begin loyalty iteration within the next week.”
Largo? She didn’t know the name, but something about the voice…
“Get it ready as soon as you can. The operation begins by the end of the month. And this will be the perfect bait.”
And then she was floating again. No light, no sound… she drifted, unsure of time and place. Until something touched her again.
“CZ-Tango, this is November, copy. We’ve got ten minutes before those monster machines they make here realize that our idents are fake. Confirm the package.”
“CZ-November, this is Tango, copy. Running scans now… cyberbrain confirm. Mindframe OS confirm. Metastability… confirmed. Intel was good, this is the finalized production model.”
“Do we have the rest?”
“CZ-Foxtrot has the chassis, and CZ-Sierra confirms the armaments.”
“Copy that. Jug squad, form a defensive firing line around the extraction point in case anyone came back for their coffee off schedule. We slide in 8 minutes. CZ-Tango, sleep mode the package. We don’t want it winding itself up during the transition.”
“CZ-Tango copies.”
And then it was dark again.
***
She felt cold. That was the first indication that something had changed. Before, she hadn’t felt anything. Sensory deprivation tank? She wasn’t sure, but she was certain this wasn’t her home.
Sylia laid absolutely still as she listened without opening her eyes. She was on some kind of examination table, naked except for a sheet over her. There were one… two people in the room. One, soft-shoed and with a stride that suggested no real concern or alertness. The footsteps stopped about the time the typing started. Some kind of technician, probably. The other one was mostly silent, but his footsteps were heavy and firm. Security for the room.
“Ah, damn it,” a voice said near the typing sound, the tech. “They were supposed to whitelist this connection to the outer data core. Samuels, can you go outside the clean room and give them a call?”
“I’m supposed to stay in here until relieved,” the second voice said, as if a patient parent educating a small child. Definitely security.
“Yes, well I’m not asking you to go far, Samuels. Literally on the other side of the airlock. Tell them to clear datatrunk Zeta Nine 6 for access to core...hmm, Epsilon. We don’t need anything confidential off the secure cores just yet.”
“Then why don’t you just call them, then?”
“Because this is a clean room and if I could, I wouldn’t need them to whitelist the connection. This was supposed to be done before I got here. Just go outside, ring up datasec, and tell them I need that done before I can do anything further. Making this room a black hole may keep prying eyes out, but I can’t do any work if they don’t let our data in.”
“...fine. Don’t boot anything until I get back.”
“You are literally going only five feet away,” the tech noted.
Sylia waited, listening for the swish and clunk of the airlock opening on one end, then sealing, before the barest of sounds indicated it’d opened on the far side. Waiting for the sound of typing again, she opened her eyes, looking around the lab. The tech was facing away, looking at some kind of monitor. Dressed in some combination of surgical scrubs and sterile field gear, he didn’t seem to have noticed her waking up.
To her left, there was a variety of sealed machinery, likely computers and the like, and...there. Sitting on a rack with a variety of cables running into the opened interior was her hardsuit. From the looks of it, she wasn’t the only thing being studied here. However, the technician’s equipment didn’t match anything she recognized from GENOM labs. Another party? Soviets, possibly? Though why they’d keep her alive rather than just killing her and cutting her suit apart for potential upgrades, she didn’t know. That said, she didn’t remember when she’d been taken or where she was. Which meant the optimal course of action was getting out.
“Ah-ha! There we go, finally,” the tech said as windows lit up on a few more monitors. “Now that we have some actual processing power, we’ll just...wait. Cerebro-response… she’s-”
That was as far as he got as Sylia sprang off the slab, catching him before he turned and slamming his forehead into the corner of one of the desks. The tech groaned, dropping to the ground, before Sylia was already moving to the other side of the room. The undersuit was present as well, thankfully, and she slid into it while looking at the airlock. No physical windows to observe the lab from the outside. From her glance at the other monitors, the cameras for this lab hadn’t been booted up to an external connection yet either. Likely what he’d sent the guard to see to.
Removing the leads from the interior of the suit, Sylia slipped into it with long practice, sealing the armor behind her as she booted it up. Diagnostics quickly flickered in her field of vision and confirmed some unfortunate guesses she’d made from the exterior, as apparently their technicians had already removed the beam cannons from the arms, likely for study. Clenching a fist, Sylia was slightly relieved to see the combat blades extend, then retracted them as she stepped out of the rigging and moved beside the airlock door. There was a hiss of equalizing pressure as it opened, before she turned and dove through, colliding with the entering security guard and forcing him back inside. The uniform was unfamiliar to her again, but before he could shout any sort of alert, Sylia simply clubbed him with her armored forearm.
A quick investigation yielded his pass key, which she slid into the airlock control, closing the lab side and then opening the exterior. Two steps outside of the clean room, Sylia had her suit’s radar and sonar begin pinging the interior of the building, building a layout for her HUD. She had a general indication of which way was out about the time the alarms started blaring, and began moving that way. More guards pushed into the hallway behind her, wearing the same blue uniform with black tactical vest as the first. She spotted a logo that said “Crey”, but spared it little attention.
Bulldozing through the plainclothes guards proved easy enough. They were trying to use taser batons and other non-lethal methods, which were far inferior to what Sylia had designed her suit to handle. Blue-suited guards went flying in multiple directions as Sylia simply rammed through them or threw others at each other as projectiles to slow down the rest. A few more corners and she crashed through a window into open air for the first time, engaging her thrusters and taking off into the open sky… of a city completely alien to her.
Skyscrapers dominated some areas of the city, but not nearly as thickly or oppressively as Megatokyo. There was no monumental GENOM Tower sitting as a constant reminder of the corporation’s seemingly invincible grip. At least one area of the city Sylia could see looked to have been damaged by earthquakes like her home, but others looked like something out of a warzone, and colossal walls generating force fields seemed to segment off portions of the city from each other, restricting movement between them to select chokepoints.
Sylia landed atop a skyscraper as she tried to get her bearings, even as she tried to piece together if she’d heard of any city that’d been so thoroughly entrenched. While Megatokyo could have been easily said to be owned by GENOM entirely, they’d at least presented the facade of letting people who lived there live their lives without this kind of interruption.
However, as Sylia collected her thoughts, a diagnostic indicator popped up on her HUD, the boot up sequence having fully gone through the suit’s file structure and found some irregularities. Sifting through them, Sylia filed some away for later. This Crey Industries had apparently been sloppy, corrupt, or both, and several sections of her suit’s temporary storage had details for shell companies and other corporate espionage that perhaps someone had thought to use the clean room to keep away from prying eyes in their own company. While helpful if she had to build up her resources from scratch, they weren’t a priority.
The other files, however, were, as Sylia stopped and stared at the report file for a “Project Scimitar”.
“-advanced gynoid systems far beyond our current specs…”
“-perator Team CZ-1 sent through portal to seize equipment for study and reverse engineering…”
“-Artificial brain more advanced than even recovered Nemesis Decoy Automatons…”
Sylia’s eyes widened behind her visor as she looked over the diagram displaying what she recognized as a GENOM 33-S series buma… but with her face. The report detailed this Crey Industries sending a strike team into a GENOM blacksite to seize materials… and her. Sylia tried to steady her breathing as she took in the information that, no matter what she remembered, it was clear that she wasn’t the original Sylia Stingray.
There were more files, presumably low security historical data that’d been pulled down from the Epsilon core just before Sylia had made her escape, but for now, she ignored them. She had herself, her suit, and nothing else here. And from the looks of things, any backup she might have relied on before would think she was a fake and probably a GENOM plant. Given the notes of what Crey had stolen, they’d likely even be correct.
Which left figuring out what to do next. She needed a base of operations, as well as money for supplies. The Crey data would provide the latter, and she could buy the former.
Once that was done… she could figure out what to do about not being the person she thought she was.
***
“Stolen?” Largo said, looking around the lab. “Someone came in here and stole the finished design?”
“Yes, sir,” the technician said. “As well as all copies of the mindframe iterations. Whoever it was… they seemed to know exactly what they were looking for.”
“Which means someone fed them intelligence,” Largo said, squeezing a coin in the palm of his hand until the metal deformed. “There’s no time to build additional units. Load the hyperbuma with compression gear and place them in the facsimile hardsuits. We’ll make do with what we have. Then we’ll track down who stole from us with all the resources we could ever need,” he said, his frown dark. “They have no idea who they’ve angered, stealing fire from the rarified heights.”
“And the original?” the technician said. “With the programmed functions, it’s unlikely to stay inert.”
Largo laughed, this time with a touch of wry humor as he considered the implications of his decoy activating prematurely wherever it was. “Perhaps… but if she’s any kind of success at duplicating her source, they may soon regret stealing from me. She’ll cause them far more problems than anyone could expect.”
***
Author's Notes: And we're back. As folks can probably gather, I've taken the opportunity presented with us to do sort of a line-wide relaunch, as it were, for my characters. It's a new universe, not too dissimilar from our old one, but there are changes, not least of which is Sylia being the lone copy brought over by Crey initially (which might make a bit more sense with BGC canon anyway given the Stingray family's cybernetic mucking about with GENOM vs her entirely unrelated employees). And thus we have Year One, sort of a retelling of things you already know, but as we now know them. Maybe a mini-series, maybe an ongoing. Who knows? We'll see what the future holds.