"Genesis of War" - Part Four

Part Four

            “What is this creature? Is it man and machine?!”

            Leela’s confusion was justified. Until then, she hadn’t seen a Terminator up close. Neither had Al-Lee, for that matter. Her first encounter with one was in that steel mill, a couple of weeks ago. From what she had seen of it, she knew to run away if she encountered it again.

            Only she wasn’t running this time.

            The Terminator they found in the truck had not moved since the moment they uncovered it. Al-Lee cautiously inched close to its face, seeing that its exposed robotic eye was not flickering red as it did before.

            “It’s been switched off,” she indicated.

            “But what is it?” Leela repeated her earlier inquiry.

            “A Terminator – at least, that’s what Neas called it,” Al-Lee explained. “It’s an enemy from his past… or maybe his future – it’s a little difficult to say.”

            “And it does not react to our movements?”

            Al-Lee shook her head. “No…which is good for us. We have to warn Neas and the Doctor about this.”

            They sealed the Terminator up in the crate and turned to sneak back out of the truck. Unfortunately, waiting for them outside were the deliverymen, who returned with assault rifles, aimed directly at Al-Lee and Leela.

-------------------

            Neas almost couldn’t believe how far he and the Doctor had come with the RoboCop project. In a mere couple of weeks, they transformed a battered police officer on the brink of death into a superhuman cyborg law enforcer. K-9, Major, and especially Officer Lewis kept them company the entire time, anxious to witness the full completion.

            “I have to confess something,” the Doctor stated. “I’ve never converted a man into a machine before. Leela was right – it’s a lot like cyber-conversion.” He earnestly pondered for a second and asked, “Does that make us Cybermen?”

            “If this works, it’ll make us legends,” Neas answered with a breath of confidence.

            He and the Doctor proceeded to simultaneously direct their sonic screwdrivers toward the RoboCop and activate him. For the first time in his cybernetic resurrection, Murphy opened his eyes. The world around him looked somewhat pixelated, but his systems managed to identify the people standing in front of him, from his creators to his partner, Anne Lewis.

            “Happy Birthday!” the Doctor exuberantly shouted to him.

            Neas took the matter more seriously by conducting auditory and visual tests to assure Murphy was functioning properly. Afterward, he asked the RoboCop, “What are your prime directives?”

            The directives themselves appeared in Murphy’s new digitized vision, overlapping his view of Neas’s smiling face. A fourth directive, labeled as nothing else but “Classified,” flashed beneath the other three. Within the human side of his consciousness, Murphy questioned what it meant; yet the computerized half of his consciousness kept him from doing so.

            Suddenly, a small window appeared at the lower right corner of Murphy’s field of vision, displaying live surveillance footage of two women being held at gunpoint by a couple of deliverymen.

            “Hostage situation in process,” he automatically alerted.

            The Doctor stood amused at Murphy’s sudden first act as a RoboCop. “First day on the job, and he’s already picked up a case!”

            “Where’s the crisis taking place, Murphy?” Lewis inquired.

            “Back alley of the O.C.P. headquarters,” Murphy informed. “Two hostages. Female. Caucasian. One standing at five-foot-four with brown hair, blue eyes, and twenty years of age. One standing at five-foot-twelve with black hair, blue eyes, and thirty years of age. Twenty-year-old female dressed in unidentifiable clothing, armed with a knife holstered at her left hip.”

            The descriptions Murphy gave matched with those of Leela and Al-Lee.

            To the shock of Neas and the Doctor, they realized their companions had failed to return to the lab within the last half hour.

            “I have identified the make and license plate of the suspects’ getaway vehicle and its intended destination,” Murphy notified. This prompted Neas to download the information from RoboCop’s systems to his sonic screwdriver, subsequently uploading it into the onboard computer of his TARDIS.

            “Let’s go find them,” he beckoned to the Doctor, K-9, Lewis, and Murphy.

            While the rescue team dematerialized out of the O.C.P. headquarters, down in the building’s sublevels – currently suited as a Cyberman fortress – the Cyber-Controller was electronically warned of Neas and the Doctor’s upstanding achievement.

            “The RoboCop has been activated! Cyber-Force, initiate launch!”

----------------

            D.S.P. (“Director of Special Projects”) Miles Dyson picked the wrong day to come to work at Cyberdyne Systems. Out of nowhere, the facility was overrun with a vicious gang of criminals, led by the notorious Clarence Boddicker, a man Dyson had seen on television but never hoped to see in person. Luck just wasn’t on his side that day.

            Boddicker and his gang killed most of security and held Dyson and the other technicians hostage. “You the man in charge, right?” Boddicker asked Dyson with a shotgun shoved in his face.

            “Y-Yes, I am,” Dyson stammered. “J-Ju-Just…please…don’t kill me.”

            “Now why would we want to go and do a thing like that?” Boddicker mockingly queried. “You’re our special friend. We need your big brain for an operation…and your patient’s gonna be arriving real soon.”

            Another group arrived shortly thereafter.

            Two women, who themselves were being held at gunpoint, walked in with some deliverymen that carted in a human-sized crate. “Clarence,” one of the deliverymen addressed the psychopath. “We caught these chicks pokin’ around in the truck. The big one looks familiar.”

            Boddicker approached the tall, dark-haired woman, his scarred face uncomfortably close to her beautiful visage. “You’re right, Emil,” he told the deliveryman, who was a member of his gang. “She was at the steel mill when we iced that cop.” He rested his shotgun on one of her broad shoulders and coldly whispered in her ear, “You just keep showin’ at the wrong place at the wrong time, sweetheart.” He then stepped back, putting enough space between him and the woman to aim his shotgun straight at her face.

            “NO!” shrieked the woman’s accomplice (the shorter, younger brunette in a crazy outfit), as she drew a knife holstered at her left hip and cut off the hand Boddicker held the shotgun with. “You will not harm her!”

            Angered and in agony, Boddicker roared to his men, “Kill ‘em!!!”

            His men were about to follow through with the order until all the windows and walls around them exploded in a hail of glass and mortar. A legion of Cybermen rocketed in and fired bolts of lasers at Boddicker’s gang, wiping each man out of existence right in front of Boddicker.

            “What are you tin-canned morons doing?!” he yelled. “We’re supposed to be on the same side!”

            “We are the Cyber-Force,” the Cybermen collectively declared. “And we serve to no one but our own!” At this, one of the Cybermen gripped Boddicker’s head and emitted an overwhelming electro-magnetic pulse through his body, killing him. With the gang leader and his cronies dead, the hostages were left at the mercy of the Cyber-Force.

"Genesis of War" - Part Three

Part Three

            Words failed to formulate in the heads of Neas and Al-Lee. Standing right there in front of them were the two most influential figures of their lives: the Doctor and Leela. The former, Neas’s mentor/friend/fellow Time Lord, was in his fourth incarnation – the one with the teeth, curls, ridiculously long scarf, and a pocketful of Jelly Babies. Leela’s companionship clued Neas on how soon it was in his travels before he took a little girl from a Georgia farm on a journey that led her to becoming the Time Lord he was that day.

            “Fascinating model TARDIS,” he barely heard the Doctor tell him. “I’ve never seen one quite like it.”

            Neas responded with a raspy “Thank you.”

            “I assume you’re here to take me back,” the Doctor said.

            “Thank you back?” Neas queried.

            “To Gallifrey,” the Doctor clarified. “I suppose I’m in trouble again with the great and all-powerful majesties that are the Time Lords.”

            This was an encounter Neas knew he had to get himself and Al-Lee out of, more for Al-Lee’s sake than his own. He thought hard on a crafty escape plan; something that had as much finesse as it did dexterity.

            “Excuse us!”

            His tone was high in pitch and quick in pace as he muttered that exclamation.

            Nowhere near as dexterous as he had intended.

            He retreated inside his TARDIS, tugging Al-Lee along with him by the back of her leggings, being careful not to give her a wedgie. The poor woman was spellbound as her light blue eyes were fixated on Leela, her great ancestor. “That’s her,” she said as soon as she and Neas were within the privacy of his TARDIS. “That’s the woman who’s given meaning to my whole existence!”

            “But you cannot – under any circumstances – let her know that,” Neas forewarned.

            “I know, I know,” Al-Lee calmly consented. “The rules of fixed points in time are very strict. You’ve made that clear in the days we traveled with Zoe.”

            “Exactly, and it was difficult enough having that girl around when she did eventually find out she would become a Time Lord, ergo becoming me! The only changes I hope to make while we’re here are those relative to stopping the Cyber War.”

            “So how’re we going to explain ourselves to them?”

            “Well, we are here to help Murphy, and I can’t think of anyone better to help than the Doctor. He needs one after all, doesn’t he?”

Two Weeks Later…

            Bob Morton’s day could not have turned out any happier with the latest updates he received regarding progress on the RoboCop program. He was in such a merry mood that he whistled the theme tune to his favorite show, It’s Not My Problem!, on his way into the men’s bathroom.

            And, just like that, his positive vibes were shattered.

            Standing right at the stalls was Dick Jones. There were only a few stalls in the room and Jones stood at the one in the middle. It was like he knew Morton was coming, so he picked the one stall where he would bump elbows with the man to his left or right.

            Unfortunately, that man had to be Morton, and he chose the left.

            “Morning, Bobby,” Jones greeted in an unusually spirited tone. “How’s it going?”

            “Going great,” Morton answered, maintaining his own jovial demeanor. “The RoboCop program’s nearing completion. Apparently, our guy – the Doctor – has gotten some extra help from another expert, which has us months ahead of schedule.”

            Jones didn’t seem fazed at this. “Congratulations,” he told Morton, much to Bob’s surprise. Once the two men finished their business at the stalls, they washed hands and Jones even extended his to follow up on his congrats. A cautious Morton hesitated for a moment to accept the gesture, expecting an attack.

            Nothing happened. Jones didn’t make any sort of cheap shot.

            Instead, he invited Morton, “Come on downstairs with me, Bob. There’s a private project I’ve been working on myself that I wanna show ya.”

            Morton’s radar flared up again. “I’ve really gotta get back to—”

            “C’mon, Bobby. Won’t take but a sec. You can spare a couple of minutes.”

            Morton didn’t know what Jones’s game was, but he kept his guard up all the way down the elevator. He was amazed to see they were taking it much further than the lobby. They were headed to the sublevels; a section of the OCP headquarters Morton had never been to before or even know the existence of until that moment.

            The two men arrived in what looked like a boiler room to Bob – even felt like one.

            “So, uh, what’ve you been workin’ on down here, Dick?”

            Jones remained fairly silent, merely motioning for Morton to walk ahead of him.

            Bob began to sweat and not from the sweltering atmosphere around them. It seemed like the perfect spot for a murder – deep underground where there were no witnesses and no one would hear the gunshots or screaming. Jones had more than enough incentive to kill him. He was the one who ruined his career and life’s work, after getting the Old Man to sanction off on the RoboCop program that proved to be a rousing success.

            Desperate, he pleaded, “Look, Dick, I was only doing my—”

            He stopped just as he saw a swarm of blinking lights from a series of tall supercomputers. In the midst of them was what looked to be some sort of high-tech suit of armor, sitting on a mechanized throne.

            “What the…?” Morton uttered in a mix of uncertainty and wonderment. “Is this the thing you’ve been working on, Dick?”

            There was no answer from Jones.

            Morton turned to see that he had disappeared, leaving him completely alone with the suit of armor. He began to suspect this not to have been a murder plot but some kind of sick practical joke.

            He was about to leave until he saw the suit of armor spring to life, lifting its chrome-plated head and looking directly at him. It made him recoil in fear, his back slamming against the wall. He only realized not a second after that the wall would not have been that close to him.

            Turning around, he froze when he saw another armored robot, designed similarly to the one on the throne, and a dozen others just like it. Each of them sparked with life, closing in on the horrified Morton.

            “What are you things?!” he cried.

            “They’re called Cybermen, Bob,” said Jones, materializing from the shadows. Morton could hardly see him past the imposing robotic soldiers, who didn’t react to Jones’s presence whatsoever. It was a trap. “You made a mistake, Bob. Now it’s time I’ve erased that mistake.”

            Two of the Cybermen snatched Morton by the arms and dragged him away, with the young executive flailing and screaming.

            Jones watched on with the utmost delight, longing for the day to see Bob Morton beg for his life since he and the Doctor interfered in his business with the Old Man. He turned his attention to the Cyber-Controller thereafter and informed, “They’re close to completing that abomination upstairs.”

            “Excellent,” the Cyber-Controller remarked.

            Jones hadn’t anticipated this response. “I thought that thing and the Doctor were a cause for concern to our plans.”

            “The RoboCop will lead our Cyber-Force to the future,” the Cyber-Controller refuted. “You, however, have betrayed our cause!  You have allied with the enemies of the Cyber-Force!”

            Dick wasn’t sure what the machine meant until it played recorded footage off an analog television set looming overhead. The footage was of him and Boddicker, two weeks ago in his office, discussing the Terminator prior to its unexpected arrival. The last words he said to Boddicker were looped for emphasis…

            Depends on which boss you mean: the old man upstairs or the machine downstairs?

            “Is that what I am to you…a machine?!”

            There was a hint of anger in the Cyber-Controller’s automated, monotone voice.

            Jones’s heart raced as he now found himself at the mercy of a dozen more Cybermen that surrounded him. Impulsively, he reached behind him to take out the handgun he had tucked in the back of his pants. He fired a shot at the Cyber-Controller. The bullet ricocheted off its chrome-plated head, clattering uselessly to the floor.

            It was a futile effort on Jones’s part, which only got worse when a Cybermen grabbed his arm with enough force to break it. He howled in agony as his gun dropped out of his hand, no longer any use for him.

            “Take this feeble organic with the other for cyber-conversion,” the Cyber-Controller ordered.

            Just like Morton, Jones flailed and screamed as he was dragged away.

-----------------

            For the longest time since she had been present in the OCP building with the Doctor, Leela hesitated to step out of the laboratory they and their new friends, Neas and Al-Lee, worked in. Everything in the building was based on technology, and Leela couldn’t understand any of it. She did know that she hungered for food, and the only source of it was the vending machines in the coffee room adjacent to the lobby.

            Up until then, she only counted on the others to supply the food for her. But, when everyone else was either busy or unavailable, she summoned her courage to go herself. It was a trial to her, not like those she partook with the Sevateem tribe. Or, perhaps it was, considering their god, Xoanon, was a machine itself.

            She used the method that the Doctor taught her: inserting the money into the machine, entering the letter/number code for the snack she wanted, and waiting for the food to drop out. It all appeared to work just as he described until the snack got lodged in between the slot and the glass.

            “NO!” Leela roared, unsheathing her knife. “Provide me with my sustenance, you evil machine, or I will tear you apart!”

            Her violent rants scared away the few OCP employees gathered in the room.

            One individual, on the other hand, stayed to give Leela the assistance she so desperately needed. She intervened just in time before Leela nearly broke the vending machine and fined herself with thousands of dollars she didn’t have.

            “Neas taught me how to deal with these things. Let me show you.”

            Leela was relieved to see Al-Lee. She watched as the dark-haired woman, whose tall, muscular stature was the telltale sign of a fierce warrior, firmly banged her elbow against the vending machine and got Leela’s snack free. It fell to the open compartment at the bottom, allowing Leela to reach inside and retrieve it.

            “Thank you,” she told Al-Lee. “I would have done much worse.”

            “I know you would have,” Al-Lee snickered.

            “I will also thank Neas when I see him. His wisdom is as great as the Doctor’s.”

            “Well, they are Time Lords.”

            “And you are not?”

            “No. I’m as human as you are.”

            Munching on her bag of potato chips, Leela eyed Al-Lee intently. “You or Neas have neither said much about where you come from. What are you both hiding?”

            Al-Lee greatly hesitated to tell her the truth, foregoing Neas’s warnings.

            She nearly did just that before she looked past Leela and saw someone familiar pass by the coffee room. It was the man from the steel mill, the one Officer Lewis identified as Clarence Boddicker. Al-Lee tailed him, with a curious Leela joining her. They followed him out to the back alley where he ordered a group of deliverymen to carefully load a man-sized crate onto the back of a delivery truck.

            Soon after Boddicker drove away to an undetermined destination and the deliverymen were out of sight, Al-Lee and Leela climbed aboard the back of the truck to open the crate and see what was inside.

            They jolted in alarm when they saw it to be the Terminator.

"Genesis of War" - Part Two

Part Two

            Al-Lee had never seen such fear in Neas’s eyes. Their intense gaze was frozen on the man with the metal skeleton beneath an exterior of flesh that was real enough to bleed. What was it that Neas called it? A Terminator? She never heard or seen one until that moment. And, by the look on his face, there was no question whether it was dangerous or not.

            Their focus on the Terminator shifted to the one that fired the shotgun rounds into his face: a purple-haired woman in a grey skintight outfit and a trench coat. She leapt from the shadows, firing more rounds into the Terminator.

            Boddicker and his gang attempted to provide backup for their cyborg gang member, but Officer Lewis and Neas – brandishing a Mulcher he had hidden beneath his hoodie – fired at them.

            “Forget this,” Boddicker cursed. “Let’s get outta here!”

            He and his cronies made a hasty retreat, leaving the Terminator behind to deal with the purple-haired woman. She was fast and agile enough to dodge every bit of returning fire the Terminator unleashed on her. Eventually, she relinquished all of her ammunition and resorted to hand-to-hand combat. She managed to damage his face even further with a few lefts and rights, possessing strength that was superior to his.

            Still, the Terminator gained the upper hand, seizing the woman by the throat and hurling her body through some steel supports. The act brought part of the foundation of the steel mill over the Terminator’s head.

            More of it rained down, prompting Neas, Al-Lee, and Officer Lewis to make their own retreat. Lewis and Al-Lee retrieved the ravaged body of Lewis’s partner, Officer Murphy, while Neas did the same for the purple-haired woman. Together, they escaped the steel mill in Neas’s TARDIS before they were caught under the rubble, just like the Terminator.

            As soon as they were aboard, Neas stabilized the dying Murphy and set course for the nearest hospital in Detroit for him.

            “No, he doesn’t need a hospital,” the purple-haired woman objected. “He needs OCP!”

            “What’s that? Some kind of new pharmaceutical drug?” Neas queried.

            “It’s a mega-corporation,” Lewis clarified. “They’ve been privatizing our police force in hopes of rebuilding Old Detroit.” Her face contorted with confusion as she addressed the purple-haired woman. “But they’re not a medical facility. They only do robotics and stuff. How can they help Murphy?”

            “And who are you anyway?” Al-Lee asked the purple-haired woman.

            “Her name’s Major Motoko Kusanagi,” Neas answered for the woman. “She’s an old ally of mine from the Cyber War…and so is he.” He gestured to the shredded, badly hemorrhaging body of Alex Murphy. “In the war, he fought as a full body prosthetic cyborg named RoboCop. That’s why Major came to his rescue, because he was targeted for termination.”

            The Major questionably frowned at the Time Lord. “How do you know that?”

            “It’s me, Motoko…it’s Gen,” Neas told her.

            The eyes of the Major widened in disbelief. “But…that’s impossible!” She circled him, looking up and down at his tall, masculine frame. “I-Is this some sort of new cybernetic body they transplanted your brain in?”

            Neas snickered. “It’s not quite as simple as that, I’m afraid.”

            “What ‘Cyber War’ do you mean, Neas?” Al-Lee asked.

            He sighed, forced into opening up about a part of his past that was more painful than the experimentation Rassilon subjected him to as a teenager. “In the final years of my previous lifetime, when I wasn’t spending most of it dying from Regen-8 exposure, I took part in a war that was twice the nightmare that the Time War was. The cybernetic forces of the Cybermen and the Terminators fought with the remnants of humanity in a particular dimension ravaged by the combined efforts of a self-aware computer called Skynet and the Cyber Controller.

            I, of course, led the charge for as long as I could. Armed with nothing else than an Elven sword I kept from the battles I won over Middle-earth, capable of slicing through any machine in my path, I fought alongside so many brave human souls and so many cybernetic lifeforms out of other dimensions. Would you believe we had even Optimus Prime and the Autobots on our side?”

            “Who’s Optimus Prime?” Al-Lee inquired.

            Neas shrugged at her impassive reply. “Well, I thought it was cool.”

            “We used their time displacement equipment to bring me directly from the future to this current present,” Major divulged.

            This was news that surprised Neas – and not in a good way.

            “That means this dimension we’ve come to is where it all began…the genesis of the Cyber War itself,” he exclaimed in realization. “We have the chance to prevent the war from ever happening!”

            He suddenly felt a massive, forceful grip come over his left arm, seeing Officer Lewis as the one behind it. With a fiery gaze she shot at him, she uttered only two words, “Help Murphy.”

            “I intend to,” he calmly assured her. “Setting a course for OCP headquarters now.”

-------------------

            “I’ve gotta hand it to Mr. Morton. The schematics for this ‘RoboCop’ of his are beyond astonishing. They require a human donor, melding modern technology and years of on-the-street experience into the best hybrid police machine the world has ever seen!”

            Leela felt nauseated from the Doctor’s description.

            She stood around the laboratory provided to them by Morton and his team of technicians, surrounded by technology and blueprints she barely understood. The Doctor, on the other hand, was marveled by it all.

            “It’s monstrous,” she uttered in her disgust. “Just like those Cybermen we fought.”

            “Negative, Mistress,” K-9 said. “There is one differential method in the conversion. In this method, the donor has been deceased before the conversion, essentially bringing the subject back to life.”

            “Albeit less human and more mechanized,” the Doctor added.

            “I see no difference,” Leela expressed. “The person is robbed of their humanity either way.”

            The debate ceased once they heard heavy grinding and humming that reverberated throughout the lab. They identified it as the TARDIS engines during dematerialization, yet the TARDIS was standing in the corner, completely secured. That’s when they saw a tall, flat black rectangular solid materialize across from where the blue police box stood.

            Leela’s hand went to her knife, startled by the arrival of the peculiar structure, whereas the Doctor was more calm, petrified with fascination.

            “What is it, Doctor?” Leela asked him. “It makes a sound like the TARDIS.”

            “No, no, Leela,” the Doctor negated. “Not like the TARDIS. Like a TARDIS.”

            A set of doors manifested on the solid’s front side (or what they presumed was its front), permitting the exit of two beings that appeared human by appearance. Both were tall – slightly taller than even the Doctor. One was a young gentleman possibly of African descent wearing a black hoodie and a loosened necktie. The other was a young raven-haired woman with an athletic figure, accentuated by the black muscle shirt and grey leggings she wore.

            The Doctor and Leela recognized neither of them.

            But, in the way these two other travelers looked at them, they seemed to have known who they were.

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            “You just left it there?!”

            “I wasn’t gonna get crushed to death over that thing, Dick!”

            Clarence Boddicker lounged away in the top-floor executive office of Dick Jones, while being chastised by the Senior Vice President himself for abandoning the Terminator at the steel mill – or where the steel mill used to be.

            “We had the whole thing under control ‘til that purple-haired chick had our ‘buddy’ on the ropes and killed him,” Boddicker testified.

            “It’s a machine, you idiot!” Jones stormed. “It can’t die. It can only…”

            The doors to Jones’s office busted open with such superhuman force that they unlatched from their hinges. He and Boddicker were alarmed by the sudden intrusion and even more so when they realized the intruder to be the Terminator itself. Despite missing half of its face and part of its left arm, it still functioned well enough to return to the OCP headquarters. How it got past security and staff without creating a scene was a mystery Jones didn’t care to ponder over.

            “I require repair,” it said with its hauntingly monotone voice, accompanied by an Austrian accent.

            Jones devilishly grinned. “Boddicker…take him back to Cyberdyne for repairs.”

            “OCP’s biggest competitor,” Boddicker sneered in amusement. “What would your boss think of you selling out to the competition?”

            “Depends on which boss you mean: the old man upstairs or the machine downstairs?” Jones smugly remarked.