((Here's something more...significant for you to peruse. It's a story that I've been working on for some time and putting a lot of effort into.
Any similarities to real persons or events are purely coincidental. Mostly. >D ))
Prologue
Word reached some colonies faster, and others at a snail’s pace. It was whispered from person to person along the streets, talked about in the highest circles of society, calling forth the strongest of forgotten desires and the worst of hidden fears. Still, despite all the talk, high and low, no one believed it.
“The King is dead.”
The thought was preposterous, even foreign. King Xenos couldn’t be dead. Xenos was barely thirty years old, and in any case he was a “mech”, a humanoid machine. Mechs, as far as anyone knew (and the idea of living forever was a new one), did not age. Xenos was the best fighter in the country, and could take any of the other lords single-handedly. No one could defeat him, and most did not want to. He was their symbol of hope. Their light in the darkness.
Yet, in a cold room inside the base of a creature unknown yet feared, cogs and machinery turned away, dripping with the blue blood of the king.
Breathing harshly, standing in the broken room with a look of mad triumph on his face, was a lone mech. The mech was shaking terribly, as if he were about to fall apart at any moment. Black scars covered every inch of his exposed metal body, and wires sizzled and seared every second. His green eyes were cracked and muddled, blurring his already terrible vision. Despite all of this, however, the mech was happy. His nightmare, King Xenos, was gone and dead.
Unlike the good king, this mad creature, with his lust for life, would survive.
He would probably become a king himself.
Or perhaps an emperor instead. Beginnings
Research Facility Number Eight-Hundred and Twenty-Seven was never hospitable, even in its better days. The entire place consisted of twenty gray buildings, rusted with age and a complete lack of attention to their upkeep. It was, like most facilities of its type, located in an odd man-made valley of sorts that dipped inwards like a hole, with the buildings at the center. Deviant Reform Division members surrounded the valley on its edge; their weapons trained at the center spot in case of any sudden movements by its occupants. But such guard was a bit overdone for the most part. The facility boasted one of the Empire of Mechanicae’s top security systems, custom-built right at the facility itself.
For Number Eight-Hundred and Twenty-Seven was the grounds where such security devices were made.
In the seventeenth building of the twenty buildings in the valley, inside a small, unpleasant, twelve-by-fifteen cell, there lived a young human girl whose job it was to test all of these security systems. Her name was Meg. Just Meg. It’s not like humans were given last names.
Meg was Asian, although it’s not like Meg would ever know this. Things were no longer defined in terms of race. At least, not the kind of race that humanity was once so obsessed with. In Meg’s world, you were either machine or human, and humanity was enslaved. Non-sentient. Barely worth enough to shine the feet of a proper, upstanding machine. Meg had long, disheveled black hair and dark brown eyes.
These eyes however, were unique. They were very, very alert.
Meg closely examined the walls of her tiny prison, analyzing their substance.
Hmm. They’re made of a high-quality alloy. Too hard to break with anything less than a freaking bulldozer. The bars are more bendable. If I had the right tools, I could do it. I will eventually. Meg glanced to the ceiling.
Invisible camera right on the left-hand side. I’ve been to the camera room before. Cameras all along the walkway. This is going to be really complicated. Such musings helped Meg pass the time between examinations and tests. For that was all Meg’s life was. A long series of tests, each more difficult and exciting than the last.
Meg had tested every collar, every security gate, every fence, every wall, and every computer system ever made to keep anything in (at least, in this region) ever. In this case, biology really was destiny. Meg was biologically engineered to escape from everything that Number Eight Hundred and Thirty-Seven had to throw at her. Naturally, Number Eight Hundred and Twenty-Seven’s defenses were also engineered to stop Meg. The facility’s most recent security system had passed “the Meg test.” Meg had been doing a lot of thinking however, and now she was fairly sure that she had figured out how to beat it. A grin formed on her face.
Look out, you DRD bastards. Nothing’s going to stop me now. HAH! You just try! T
The plan was fairly simple, if not the greatest plan ever (as Meg called it.) The only problem was that the whole thing hinged on there being another person to help Meg, and Meg had yet to actually locate one willing soul. None of the other humans in the facility liked Meg, as Meg’s job granted her what passed for special treatment from the place. As in, the “kind folks” who ran it didn’t call her “pond scum” and whip her with an electric shock every five minutes. Life in the Pits really wasn’t pretty, and nobody liked a person who could get away with three semi-edible meals a day. It wasn’t like the employees were going to help her either. She’d asked.
Today, however, was Meg’s day. Meg just knew it somehow; from the way the blaring, mildly annoying bell rang for breakfast in…exactly the same way it always did. Oh well. Meg yawned and sat up, quickly stretching and bending in awkward positions to iron out the cramps in her body. The beds in Number Eight Hundred and Twenty-Seven were so awkwardly designed that rumor had it that the company that manufactured this sub-standard crap had actually made them that way on purpose. Meg figured that the rumor wasn’t too far off from the truth.
The camera-filled hallway that the door in Meg’s cell hissed open to reveal was extremely dull, and it was one that Meg had seen every single day of her life. Meg counted the seconds numbly until the DRD guard who led her to breakfast would show up.
Seven…six…five…four…three…there he is. Three seconds early. Go figure. The worst part about meeting this guy every day was that he treated her like a child. I mean, come on! Meg was nine years old!
“Good morning sweetie,” the guard said in a reprehensible, condescending voice. “It’s time for your breakfast, you know. You can’t sleep in forever.”
Meg grumbled an incredibly unintelligible response. The guard slanted his head awkwardly towards Meg’s voice.
“What was that, dear?” he said in a childish whisper. “You’ll have to speak up. DRD guard senses weren’t made for cute little human voices.”
Meg groaned, glaring at the guard. “Listen, Twenty-Three. Can we just get this over with and go to breakfast? My stomach is rumbling and I think I might be in for a good day. Maybe.”
The guard smiled. Or, well sort of. Twenty-Three was pretty much faceless, as he was part of the 35LX robotic overseer series. This translated to a pretty imposing and utterly inhuman appearance. Your friendly neighborhood taskmasters. This meant that for more reasons than one, Meg wasn’t thrilled about meeting this guy every morning. She was well aware of the fact that if he wanted to, Twenty-Three’s massive robotic hand could crush every single bone in her body. You can see why, with people like this around, escape attempts weren’t easy to plan in Number Eight Hundred and Twenty-Seven.
Meg’s building was large, but it actually only provided room and board for one slave: her. The hallway was designed in such a way so that it passed through three security gates before actually coming to the exit of the compound. All three gates were heavily guarded and could only opened by a guard’s cardkey, and they were utterly impossible to scale. Not to mention that getting to the top was actually pointless, as the gates reached the ceiling of the walkway. Believe it or not, Meg had actually worked out a way through these gates, but her main objective right now was dinner. Save the great escape artist acts for a full stomach.
The walkway, when cleared, led out into the Yard, which was basically what the slaves called the massive inclined valley where the facility existed. Almost none of the slaves who lived in the valley had ever actually been outside of it, so the rumor mill was running constantly about what the Outside might be like. Not that any of this interested Meg, except for the legends that suggested that human beings on the Outside could become mechs through certain means. If there was anything that Meg truly wanted it was to become like her captors. To have the strength and cunning, the power of a mech.
The other inmates of Number Eight Hundred and Twenty-Seven jeered at Meg as she passed, mumbling things under their breath like “DRD suck-up” and “Little pet.” Meg would have grumbled equally nasty things under her breath, but she was fairly sure Twenty-Three’s hearing was in fact far better than he suggested it was. Mumbling unpleasant things right in the earshot of a DRD guard wouldn’t be the best move.
Twenty-Three led Meg up to one of the gray buildings located in the Yard and stopped, standing at attention. Meg didn’t really know why this was. Although the building they were standing in front of was in fact the Cafeteria (As noted by the rusting sign hanging on its left side, which was basically the
only thing different about it from any of the others), they should have walked right inside. Twenty-Three’s gesture made sense about five minutes later.
An old 35LX model, powerful in appearance and black as night, stepped out of the Cafeteria in full regalia. This was strange as well, because “full regalia” meant that the model was fully armored. Most of the guards shed their outer layers of armor in order to increase their movement speed, as the outer layers made them a bit clunky when they walked. Whoever this guy was, he was someone important. This was further emphasized by the fact that he was carrying a red lightning whip, as compared to the blue ones most of the guards had with them. Meg rolled her eyes.
A DRD hotshot, eh? Wonder what he’s doing in a rundown place like this. The strange mech didn’t even stop to greet Twenty-Three. He just walked right past the two of them with a confident air. It was as if he owned the place. Meg groaned out loud, at least until Twenty-Three jabbed her in the stomach.
Who does this guy think he is, the Emperor? Twenty-Three gave Meg another nudge that meant, “I wouldn’t make that guy angry if I were you; let’s move along” and hurriedly ushered her inside the Cafeteria building. The Cafeteria was as loud and unpleasant as ever. It consisted of a kitchen, a table around the kitchen functioning as the serving area, and small metal tables in various states of disrepair. For most people in the Pits this was their only meal of the day, and so you had to make it count. That didn’t exactly stop most of the slaves however from chattering rather than eating with what little time they had. Meg wondered earlier in her life why on earth the DRD didn’t stop them from talking, but realized that there was probably nothing they could do.
Meg quickly got into position along the serving line. Twenty-Three had long since moved to the edge of the room, waiting for Meg to finish her meal (or the bell to ring that signified it was time to work. Whichever happened first.). The usual unidentified mystery meat (or whatever that red slop they ate every day was supposed to be) was on the menu. Everything seemed completely normal. That is, except for one thing. There was someone new sitting at the cafeteria tables.
((I suppose I'll stop here? ))
