Sigma/Star

Chapter 23: Omnicorp, Ochenkov, and Others Part 3

Sigma was screaming. Up within the sky he was floating atop a cloud in a serene sleep just moments before, and now the terror of memory had struck his mind. And it was unbearable. He was remembering things, of metal being grafted onto his body, when they would take out organs on a surgical table and cut holes to insert tubes along his skin.

He remembered when they took his chest off, when his ribs had been opened up and removed, and the chest plate had been entered. Or when they went into his brain. When his existence had been transferred to a computer. All of it was flooding back through his system and he could hardly stand it. And so he screamed. He screamed until he thought he felt pain his mouth and his throat but it must have been just a lingering phantom feeling from his time as a human.

Time as a human. Was he human still? Or something else? He wanted to be human, wanted to think he was, but one look down at the purple metal across his body told him otherwise. He didn't want to be this way anymore. Sometimes he rather enjoyed it, the power, the stability, while other times he wanted to be normal again, and to not be flying thousands of feet above Earth or viewing the world through the telescopic eyes of an android.

There was a new memory bubbling up in his mind, of Sigma sitting in a vat, a large tube, suspended in liquids and fed through extraneous tubes. A memory of people outside the glass looking in, fuzzy and faded through the waters but visible, and of him using his own human lungs and having a natural heartbeat and he thought he could hear things around outside from the people out there. Mumbling words out that slurred and sounded so odd inside the liquids.

Sounded like Sigma. That was easy, that was his name. That was what he was called. That's what he had always been called. But then other words floated in and one stood out among others: Leif. It was so familiar sounding, so...right. It belonged to Sigma.

Was that my name? he thought. It must be my name. From before I became a machine. Sigma trembled in the air, shudders passing through his android's body. He had a name before all of this, before he became this weapon called Sigma.

Another name came in through the memory, sifting through the liquid and the glass to reach Sigma's ears. This one seemed familiar too but it did not belong to Sigma. This one belonged to someone else, but who it was he could not tell. He could only just make it out through the fogs of his mind before it slipped away again: Porter.

Who was Porter? The scientist who worked on him? An administrator who oversaw it all? He didn't know, but he knew the name somehow. And he also knew where to go now to find out more. It was time to learn a little about Sigma, about Leif. It was time to go back to the womb.

* * * * *

Grimsley trembled in the cockpit of the tank as he watched the field of battle unfold. He didn't know what he should do right now. His commanding team had been knocked out as soldiers crawled from the wreckage of the ship. All he was left to do was to push forward in his vehicle, slowly approaching the main battlefield.

Goliaths were zipping around in continuous combat and his targeting systems were starting to pick up different enemies. He couldn't get a lock on anything yet but he could feel his heartbeat getting faster as he drew ever closer to the moment of war.

This was what he had signed up for. What he had dreamed of. To fight the good fight for the women of the world, to protect and save them, regardless of the fact that many females piloted Goliaths these days. He was doing it for Raven and Aunt Shauna and Gretta and parts of him were doing it for his father, for the one he had lost. Or for his mother, whom he had never known.

Grimsley felt the reverberations of the shot throughout his body as it rattled the metal hull. The bullet he had launched pierced through the cockpit of a Goliath that had strayed nearby and detonated in a flowery explosion of shrapnel and oils. The enormous battlesuit tumbled backwards and exploded once more, this time throughout its frame.