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.
------------------
“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?”
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