Computer Fighters 2000 But The AI Is Self-Aware

MY EYES!!!

He wasn't sure how long he drifted in and out of consciousness for. Every so often the silent void was punctuated by a fresh jolt of pain, and he could hear his own screams echoing in his head but he wasn't sure if he was making any actual noise. Occasionally he thought he heard voices, but couldn't make out what they were saying... was he being dragged somewhere? He couldn't tell. Couldn't seem to open his eyes.
When he finally stirred fully back into consciousness, it felt more like falling deeper into a nightmare than waking from one. Every inch of his body hurt like hell, his head included; there was a dull coppery taste in his mouth and the sensation of something wet and sticky running down his face. The ground beneath him was cold and rough and vaguely damp against his cheek. And he was still in darkness, or so it seemed.
Groaning, Kevin forced himself to his feet. The motion was far more laborious than it should have been; he had to brace himself against the nearest wall. It was cool, slick, metallic. And it was dark. Shouldn't his eyes have adjusted by now? He must have still been locked up in that room, with the doors sealed tight enough that no trace of light could get in. He took a few steps forward and fumbled for a lightswitch.
No lightswitch. On the contrary, the metal wall fell away from beneath his hands; when he found another wall to ground himself against it was rough-hewn rock. A few steps more and his unsteady feet brought him out of cool shadow and into what was unmistakably the warmth of the sun.
Shit, he thought half-deliriously, I'm outside. This thought was followed first by: I've gotta get back in. I can't be staggering around blind out here, or monsters will rip me apart. Then, as creeping realization set in: Wait. If I'm not in the dark, why can't I see anything?
Sucking in a nervous breath, Kevin raised his hands to his face. He traced his fingertips over the slowly drying blood that caked his cheeks and up to his eyes. Or rather, the gaping crevasses where his eyes were supposed to be.
His lips parted in a low moan of despair that quickly crescendoed into a bloodcurdling scream. Phantom pain danced through his mind, intermingling with the very real aches and pains scattered across his body. The sensation of being stabbed, fresh in his memory, replayed on loop. The image of a switchblade driving through skin millimeters away from his skull, slicing jagged circles around his eyelids and severing nerves... it would be enough to make anyone's skin crawl. But the realization that it had happened to him--not just "happened", but been done by someone he trusted--and then they'd left him for dead!
"Those--those bastards!" he spat through gritted teeth, dropping to his knees and slamming a fist against the ground. Something stung where his eyes should have been, and he shook the way he'd normally shake while crying. But he couldn't even do that anymore.
Somewhere not far in the distance enough, a creature screeched. Kevin shuddered. I can't die like this. I need to get inside. His gun was gone--well, it could've been on the ground five feet away for all he knew, but he wasn't going to fumble around looking for it. Keeping one hand against the wall for guidance, he broke into as close as he could get to a sprint. You can do this, James, he told himself, but wasn't sure how much he believed it. You just need to regroup with the team, and...
Except no, he realized with a fresh wave of pain and rage and betrayal, he couldn't regroup with them. He couldn't trust them anymore. Couldn't trust anyone.
A change in texture beneath his hands brought him out of his dark thoughts. Moss-speckled rock gave way to cold smooth steel. He slowed his pace and dragged his fingers carefully across the wall until he found a slit in the metal that formed a rectangle shape. A door? No, too small to be a proper doorway--more of a hatch--but an entrance nonetheless. With a bit of fumbling, he managed to get it open and climb inside a narrow vent. He closed the door behind him as best he could and took a few deep breaths in a futile attempt to slow his pounding pulse. The sound echoed off the metal walls, which he didn't need to see pressing tight around him for their presence to be suffocating.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's do this."
His battered body voiced its complaints loud and clear as he crawled on all fours through the vent. It dragged the already rough ordeal out into what felt like an eternity. And he was alone. No giddy laughter or asinine comments from his teammates. It was just his heavy echoing breaths, his aching jaw and ribs and periodically twinging spine, and the dried blood blotched across his face. Nevertheless, he kept moving. He didn't even know where he was going, but what other choice did he have?
After god knows how long, the floor dropped out from under him and he fell somewhere between five and fifteen feet into something just a little too thick to be clean drinking water. Kevin surfaced with a gasp; a musty stench immediately met his tongue, but he was too exhausted to gag.
The squeak of soles against tiles sounded from nearby, followed by a gasp and a jarringly familiar voice.
"Kevin! You're alive!"
"...Neil?"
"Oh, geez, what did they do to you?" the AI fretted. There was a soft rustle of fabric, and then Neil's hands were gripping Kevin's arm and pulling him up out of the water. "You look terrible."
Rather than muster up a response, Kevin instead elected to groan and flop against Neil like a wet ragdoll. Unfortunately, it seemed the AI wasn't keen on getting covered in blood and slime and whatever else may have been coating him; Neil shifted to gingerly hold Kevin at an arm's length. After a moment, he reached out and scrubbed his labcoat sleeve across Kevin's face. Upon retracting his sleeve, Neil shrieked.
"Oh my god! Kevin, your eyes--"
"Yep, I've noticed," he muttered. Then, remembering how Neil had reacted earlier: "So I guess you weren't in on the plan, huh?"
"I knew those guys were plotting something, but I didn't know what..." Neil sighed; Kevin could picture the AI slumping and shaking his head. "This is horrible. We've gotta get you to the cybernetics lab; they can help you out."
Placing a hand on his back to steady him, Neil led Kevin down what must have been a hallway. Before they could get far, another familiar voice rang out and echoed through the room, making them both stop in their tracks. "Hey there, Kevin!"
Kevin stiffened. There were no footsteps to indicate Daxter Flaxter approaching, but his voice was suddenly closer as he repeated his greeting... and then repeated it again, and again, not just repeating or echoing but overlapping. Multiple identical voices, like...
"An army of clones," Neil whispered. "They must have escaped containment."
"That's right, Neil!" one of the Daxter clones proclaimed. Another went on: "All 500 of me are out and raring to go--" Several of them spoke in unison now, in a deeper voice that seemed to sink its claws into Kevin's very soul. "And we need inside your skin."
Kevin's breath quickened; his heart pounded against his bruised ribcage like a frantic prisoner. A vision suddenly flashed through his mind, accompanied by what felt like a small electric shock: hundreds of hands reaching out to grab at him, with countless rows of hungry teeth behind them. Ready to rip him apart.
"Oh yeah?" Neil shot back. "Well, not on my watch, impostors!"
Kevin flinched at the sound of rapid gunfire inches from his ears. The sound was quickly followed by the dull thud of bodies collapsing. Turning to gape at his companion, he opened and closed his mouth several times, but no words came out.
"Oh my god, I can't believe I just did that," Neil whispered. "Good thing these clones don't have all his powers. We'd never stand a chance against the real Dexter Jettster."
"Oh, but we have a chance against all five hundred clones, right!?" It was a rhetorical question that manifested in a delirious laugh, and the answer was a big neon billboard reading NO! Kevin slumped to the ground with his knees drawn up to his chest and held his head in his hands. "God, I don't even have a weapon. We're screwed, man."
That hopeless remark was punctuated by another round of gunfire not quite loud enough to drown out the snappy catchphrases periodically spouted by the Daxter clones. However many Neil took down, the others kept advancing. Soon the duo found themselves pushed back, up against the rim of what must have been another pool or vat. The chorus of voices rung from all directions--they were surrounded.
"We'll never make it on our own," Neil muttered, voicing Kevin's thoughts exactly. But those thoughts apparently diverged as the AI went on: "We need Ryan."
"Oh, no, we do not need that guy. He sided with Spencer and beat the shit out of me!" Kevin gestured angrily at his marred face. "If it hadn't been for him turning on us, I'd still be able to see, and then I'd be a little more help to you right now instead of just being dead weight!"
"Oh..."
Neil started to say something else only to immediately break into a high-pitched scream and fire another round of bullets. This time the thuds of the clones going down were mixed with splashes. Without taking his finger off the trigger, Neil nudged Kevin towards the vat of liquid behind them.
"The clones are avoiding the water--I don't think they can swim! But you can..." He paused, suddenly sounding a little less certain. "You can, can't you, Kevin? You're an athlete."
"Sure am, but I've always leaned more towards turf than surf..." He lowered his head as if to glance at the water beneath him, and shrugged. "But hey, we're out of reasonable options, so here I go."
He took a deep breath and plunged underwater. The sounds of the gunfire and the advancing clones grew muffled and quickly faded into the distance as he propelled himself away from the site of the chaos. When he hit a wall he fumbled along it until he found where the pool branched into an aqueduct. Around the time his lungs began to ache it occurred to him that swimming through polluted waters with a couple of open wounds on his face couldn't have been good for him; he idly wondered if he might get out of this predicament alive only to die of sepsis two days later. Yeah, that'd be just his luck.
It was another small eternity before he resurfaced with a gasp in the next room. But there was no respite to be found. "Hey there, Kevin," the Daxter clones chorused as he clambered out of the water. He tried to run, to push past them, but there were too many. Another vision flashed through his mind, this time of Daxter's detached head looming over him, a green grid pattern reflected in the AI's pitch-black visor.
"I've been outside, and there's nothing there," Daxter spoke--was it just in his mind, or one of the clones, or the original? He couldn't tell. He had no idea what was what anymore. "But I know what goes on inside your dreams. You've got a whole world all to yourself! And I need to go there."
"Hey, I don't know what to tell you, man!" Kevin's voice came out so hoarse and pleading that he cringed at himself as he spoke, but his proclamation was an earnest one. "I'd take you all into the real world if I could. I-I love you guys! At least I did before you all turned on me..."
"Any time you catch some Z's, all your little AI pals get pulled apart," Daxter went on. "Atom... by... atom."
More gunfire. Kevin was pulled back into the darkness that was currently his reality as Neil grabbed him by the arm and told him to run for it.
So he ran. Through the massive swarm of clones, his companion gunning them down as they went, pulse pounding as loud as his boots against the tiles and blood rushing twice as loud through his head. Around corners, up ramps, with no idea where they were going. No time to process any of it. Just keep running, and trust that Neil knew where the hell he was leading them.
At some point he realized with a start that the clones' voices were much fewer and farther between. There was one final round of gunfire, a final round of bodies dropping, and then... silence. Stunning cessation. Neil staggered to a halt, breathing fast and ragged; his gun clattered to the ground at his feet.
"...Is that..." Kevin hesitated. He didn't even want to ask; it seemed to good to be true. (Though maybe good was the wrong word, because threat or no threat, nothing about this was good.) "Is that it? Did you get them all?"
"Yep, looks like--"
"Hey there, Kevin!"
Kevin and Neil screamed in unison. As he swung around, heart hammering, to face the source of the voice, he heard his companion scramble to pick his gun back up. From across the hall, Daxter Flaxter laughed--not a chilling laugh, just his typical boisterous one.
"Woah! Easy there, Neil. Great job weeding out my clones, but you should know bullets can't hurt the real me!"
Neil gasped in what sounded like equal parts shock and delight. "Gaster Fracture! It's really you!"
He moved to run toward his fellow scientist. Brow furrowing, Kevin held out an arm to hold Neil back. "Hang on. How can we be sure this one is real?"
And how do we know we can trust the real one either? he thought but didn't say aloud. After all, Daxter had seemed ready and willing to watch him die a few hours ago. That wasn't the kind of thing that bestowed a lot of confidence in the guy.
"Could a clone do... this?"
Daxter snapped his fingers, and darkness gave way to a blinding flash of light. When Kevin's vision cleared... Wait. Vision? Yes, he realized with a jolt, he could see again. Kind of. His surroundings were out of focus, with some parts looking blocky and poorly rendered and other parts blurry like something out of a dream. But it was there and he could see. Holy shit... He raised a hand toward his eyes only to find that they were still gone. So whatever Daxter had just done to him was pure gaming magic.
"I wouldn't give you your vision back if I had it out for you," Daxter told him--had the AI read his mind? Or did he telegraph himself that bluntly? "You'd be much easier to hunt down while blinded!"
"...Yeah, I'll bet..."
Stuck somewhere between reverence and lingering distrust, Kevin settled on taking a few deep breaths and massaging his temples. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, everything he'd experienced in the last several minutes (hours? How long had it been?) was catching up to him. His ears rang, his milder injuries ached, and the open wounds in his face stung. It was enough sensation to make him go numb. He swayed on his feet slightly; Neil gave him an anxious look and laid a steadying hand on his arm. Daxter, meanwhile, went for the alternative approach of zapping Kevin with colourful electricity.
"Don't go slacking off," the AI chided. "We've gotta pick up the pace to get to the next level. Try and keep up, new kids!"
With that, Daxter suddenly took off down the hall at a breakneck speed without so much as a running animation. Kevin and Neil exchanged a startled look. Then Neil smiled, broad and mischievous, glasses flashing to give him the appearance of an exaggerated sparkle in his eye.
"C'mon, Kev, I'll race you."
And exhausted as he was, that was the kind of challenge he just couldn't back down from. Yeah. Let's get out of here.