The War for the Wasteland

Chapter 5

|SP-16C|

"This is a major breach, our enemies now have information on Overlord! We cannot let this slide!" Katrina Lloyd burst with anger and shock upon hearing the news. The cameras in her temporary office at the New Nevada Desert facility were positioned behind her desk, hidden by Callus Mariartus so that he could spy on her. Little did he know that SP hacked the cameras. "We need to find the source of the breach and patch it up, then we need to move our plans forward!" She spoke with Callus Mariartus, or spoke at him.

"I've already traced back some sources..." Callus Mariartus spoke coldly, the slight tings of irritation in his voice. "They will live for some time yet, until I can find their families..."

Katrina Lloyd nodded. "Keep that off the record, Deborah doesn't approve of those methods." Katrina Lloyd sat at her desk, skimming through some files.

"I've begun to reorganise the meeting in San Francisco, we need to pull it drastically forward. I can have Overlord ready in a fortnight's time, assuming I replicate the final piece in time." Callus Mariartus explained, his face suggesting that he was lost in thought. A dangerous mind, creating dangerous plans.

"I'll speak with Deborah. Our best bet is to leave from here in a days time, we'll go straight to the Capital and then you'll go back to Cisco..." Lloyd planned. Her file was empty, there was nothing there for SP to send back to Felicia Pratt. Not that she could anyway. "I'll get the board up to Cisco and we can head from there."

"I'll be honest, Overlord will need to be rushed. It's a very complex device... There are certain aspects I'll need to skip refining in order to get it ready..." Mariartus sat down, holding his face in one hand.

Lloyd nodded. "How much to expect to increase casualties by?"

"A million, maybe two. Perhaps we'll wipe out a region or two more than planned." He's lying. He knows what will happen when he launches Overlord.

"That's fine. I'll get Deborah on board."

SP-16C cut the feed, slunking down in her containment unit to process the data. It was intriguing, what Callus planned to with The Overlord, but it violated SP's programming. I was created for the betterment of mankind, for the survival of mankind. I cannot allow this to happen. All of SP's attempts to stop Callus had already failed, and some intercepted messages to Felicia Pratt left SP without a direct way to get in contact with her. SP was still able to get into Callus' most private databanks, Callus believed it was a scientist working for him who fed the information out of Nevada and not SP.

A beacon opened every so often from Glade, but SP couldn't risk answering it. Exposing the Pratt's meant their certain deaths. Callus would kill Felicia Pratt, Andrew Pratt, Kersti Pratt, Joshua Pratt and Deborah Fisher herself. SP was left with no options but to leave a digital breadcrumb trail to her, yet no one seemed to pick up.

"Professor Mariartus, we've picked up some unusual movement south of here." A scientists voice alerted SP to another camera.

She opened on the central terminal room, where files were logged and data was recorded. Callus seemed to be thinking still, at the centre of the room behind a large terminal. "Who is it?" He eventually asked.

"A woman, by our estimate late teens or early twenties. She appears to be armed." The scientist informed.

"No matter. The beast in the desert will take her, if not at least poison her to death." Mariartus shrugged off the scientist. "Alert San Francisco, I'll be returning in a day or two, and I want things to pick up."

The scientist nodded, scurrying off. SP closed the camera and returned to her processors. Callus Mariartus means to move to San Francisco dangerously soon. He's lying to Katrina Lloyd, he isn't removing the refinement process. It doesn't exist, The Overlord isn't meant to be a controlled measure of culling the population. It's a doomsday device designed to wipe humanity off the face of the Earth, and allow the planet to prosper without humanity. SP knew all she needed to know about The Overlord. It was dangerous, and it had a deadly high chance of being efficient.

The Apex was Callus' first measure to kill humanity, they are what's attracting the coming threat. Callus doesn't mean to be alive after his work is done, he means to beat the coming enemies to it. When they arrive, Earth will have no sentient life left, and they'll have no one to conquer. The Decimators, as Callus refers to them, are an unidentified threat coming for Earth. They're getting too close for Callus' liking as well, he's pushing things forward. The Apex failed to achieve it's primary goal, so now Callus must resort to The Overlord to incinerate the surface of the planet.

SP-16C had to stop that fate from unfolding...