𝘾𝘼𝙏𝙉𝙄𝙋 | 𝘽𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙠 𝘾𝙖𝙩! 𝙈𝙞𝙜𝙪𝙚𝙡 𝙊'𝙃𝙖𝙧𝙖 𝙭 𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧

𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙊𝙣𝙚

⚠️CONTENT WARNINGS⚠️

Body horror
Death
Violence
Mental health issues

......

𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐍𝐈𝐏

𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐎𝐧𝐞: 𝐂𝐲𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞

When you were a kid, you would linger on the overbridge on your way back from school just to gaze upon the city skyline. The lights of the grand Alchemax R&D building had a way of hypnotising you, the colossal structure shooting several meters past its peers so that its spire seemed to pierce the moon. The megastructure was visible from thousands of miles off the East Coast, a symbol of modern-day corporate America. You would promise yourself each night that you would one day live in one of the opulent apartments of the Babylon Towers and watch the sunset over Nueva York from the balcony each evening while drinking expensive wines.

You would later fulfill that promise to yourself by scoring a full scholarship at the Alchemax School for Gifted Youngsters, much to the joy of your blue-collar parents. It was a ticket out of the sordid, violent streets of Downtown Nueva York where you had grown up, and you would use it to the fullest, leave, and never look back.

Years later, a sense of fulfillment and pride would fill you up as the scanners of the Alchemax Genetics Programme recognized your retinal imprint and registered you as the lead scientist of its Corporate Raider Programme in its logs. The nodding heads, the sharp salutes, and the smiles that would meet you each time you strode down the glossy white corridors of the R&D building seemed to be worth the ruthless bullying and the loneliness of your youth. Your dream apartment in the Babylon Towers was yours, the sunsets were just as enchanting as you had imagined them to be.

The fragrance of the roses had blinded you to their serrated thorns, and by the time you had noticed, they already had their sharp edges digging into your flesh, sapping your blood.

Months later, as you crawl through the ventilation shafts leading into the destroyed lab that you had worked in, you hope that the facility's bio scanners wouldn't recognise you. You stop and duck each time a mounted security scanner sends a laser beam flitting through the steel tubes of the ventilation ducts, looking for intruders. You make quick work of the scanners and focus on getting into the lab.

You crawl a few more inches forward and the device on your wrist beeps. The voice of your holoagent, ISAAC rings in your ears.

"Heads up, boss, we're here."

The wristwatch projects a soft green holo-image of the lab underneath you. You count three robotic outlines in red patrolling the area alongside two sweeper bots. You frown as you notice the rather humanoid forms of the patrol bots and the familiar face designs.

"Are those the ones we reverse-engineered from the Stark-Fujikawa sentinel bots? Like those archaic Ultron models?"

"Affirmative boss, Iron Sentry models SX-2100, the latest ones. I've tried to hack into their protocol but the firewalls are too strong. Looks like you gotta go through them or sneak past them."

As you watch, ISAAC's minimised human form walks out of a curtain of glitching, shifting panels filling the ventilation shaft with a comforting green glow.