The vent above Simon exploded with a metallic shriek as the first Proxy dropped into the chamber. Its eyeless face was twisted in a permanent scream, thick pustules pulsating across its bloated torso. Tubes jutted from its skin like grotesque veins, and its swollen arms twitched within the fleshy prison of its mutated upper body.
More followed, crashing to the floor in a sickening rhythm—fifteen in total. Simon stood motionless, calcuting.
His nano-ceramic bdes were already extended, glinting under the dim emergency lighting.
'Fifteen,' he though.
In a blur of motion, he dashed forward, cleaving the first Proxy cleanly in two.
Another lunged. Simon ducked low, rolled across the slick floor, and rose into a seamless strike, driving his bde deep into the creature’s distended abdomen. It convulsed and dropped, twitching violently as the structure gel inside began to congeal.
A third approached from behind.
Simon spun and sshed upward in a brutal arc, carving deep into the bloated upper body. Bck gel sprayed across his pting.
Then, the swarm descended.
The chamber filled with a cacophony of wet, uneven footsteps and inhuman screeches. Simon let out a defiant roar and unched into the horde.
His foot smmed into a Proxy’s chest, hurling it backward into another. He spun, slicing through two more with surgical precision. Pustules burst like grotesque fireworks, coating the walls and floor in thick bck ooze.
One tackled him from the side, shrieking in a pitch that rattled his audio sensors.
Simon grabbed the mass of flesh that was once its shoulder, twisted, and smmed it headfirst into the floor, the impact cracking both skull and concrete. Another swung at him with a malformed limb—Simon blocked, then drove a crushing elbow into its deformed upper mass.
He vaulted over one crawling toward him and drove both bdes down through its hunched back, pinning it to the floor.
Three more charged.
Simon activated his electromagnetic pulse device. It hummed to life with a rising frequency, and he thrust his hand forward.
The pulse detonated.
Structure gel inside the Proxies spasmed and crackled. Two froze mid-lunge, their bodies locked in spasms. Simon surged forward and carved deep into the soft mass where their head was bent backward.
The third, only dazed, recovered quickly and swung wildly.
Simon ducked, sshed across its legs, and delivered a devastating kick to its chest, sending it crashing into a steel support beam.
He issued a command.
The second stunned Proxy stilled, then rose under Simon’s control. His system synced with its corrupted neural cluster. The creature turned to him, obedient.
"Hold them off," Simon commanded.
The Proxy shrieked and hurled itself into the oncoming attackers.
Simon charged after it.
The st wave closed in. He ducked a swipe, drove a boot into one’s chest, twisted, and plunged his elbow bde deep into another’s torso. It gurgled as bck gel erupted from the wound.
Another lunged from behind.
Simon spun, caught it by the dense upper flesh, smmed it into the ground, and severed it in one brutal motion.
His hijacked Proxy was overwhelmed—torn apart by three attackers.
Simon didn’t hesitate.
He activated his overdrive. Energy surged through his limbs, his strength amplified.
With inhuman force, he grabbed two Proxies by their bloated torsos and smashed them together. Bone shattered, and gel exploded in every direction.
The st Proxy staggered back, its grotesque head twitching.
Simon raised his arm. A bde unched from his forearm, slicing through the air.
It pierced the creature’s center mass and pinned it to the far wall. It writhed once, then went still.
Silence.
Only the sound of Simon’s steady, mechanical breathing and the faint ping of cooling metal remained.
Fifteen mutited abominations y in ruin.
Simon stood alone among the wreckage, bdes retracting with a hiss.
He walked to the st creature and retrieved his bde, sliding it back into its slot with a solid click.
The drones crawled out from the broken vent hatch, one by one, their legs skittering softly across the floor. Simon crouched down, collecting them with care and precision, pcing each into the storage unit on his back.
He moved to a nearby panel, plugging in. Power surged into his systems, replenishing his reserves.
Then, without a word, he turned and strode toward the decompression door, leaving the mangled corpses of the Proxies behind. The massive inner doors sealed with a heavy groan behind him. The chamber hissed as it began to flood, water rushing in to equalize the pressure. Bubbles danced around him like ghosts.
The outer doors parted slowly, revealing the vast, cold darkness of the ocean.
Simon stepped out.
The path ahead was faintly illuminated by flickering lights affixed to metal poles, casting thin beams through the murky abyss. Around him, the ruins of decaying metal structures jutted from the seabed like the broken ribs of some long-dead leviathan. Antennas bent under their own rusted weight, conduits torn apart by pressure and time.
To his right, he spotted a broken aquatic robot sprawled across the sand, barely intact. Its body was tangled with dark tendrils of structure gel.
Robin.
He froze, staring at the machine that held her.
It contained the brain scan of Robin Bass, a woman who had taken her own life after uploading her consciousness. When he had first met her, she had been cheerful, convinced she was living in the paradise of the ARK. She spoke with hope, with ughter, unaware of her twisted metal prison.
Simon had told her nothing.
He let her dream live.
But in the end, he had shut her down.
"Mercy," he whispered, voice distorted and hollow.
That’s what he had told himself.
But the guilt never left.
Inside Theta, he had wandered through her old living quarters. Found the dried blood on her sheets, the straight razor still lying in the sink. He saw the note she left, the one scrawled with shaky hands. She had believed in the ARK. Believed in something better.
He looked away, pushing the memory aside.
His mind was already fractured—Theta had taken its toll.
He moved forward, his footsteps muffled in the sand, until he reached the distant ptform where the zeppelin still waited. Thick cables tethered it to the dock, swaying gently in the current.
The zeppelin looked like a bloated, albino worm—bulbous and swollen, its hull dented and peeling.
Simon stepped onto the ptform and pced his hand on the control panel. Lights flickered. The ptform rose, shuddering to life, and slowly began to move.
He cast one st look back at Site Theta.
The massive facility stood like a fallen god, built into the side of a colossal stone wall. A rusted behemoth whose bowels stretched deep into the Earth.
He was leaving it behind.
But not forever.
He would return.
For the dreamers still trapped within.
He closed his eyes as the zeppelin floated into the deep.
The ocean swallowed Theta behind him.
But the ghosts came with him.
Not long after leaving the site, Simon’s whisker sensors—those fine, sensitive fiments mounted at the back of his helmet—picked up movement.
To his left.
Something big was approaching.
His optics darted toward the motion.
A massive shadow was gliding through the murky deep, silent and deliberate.
“Jerry, hold tight,” Simon said, voice tight with urgency as he activated his propulsion jets.
Before he could gain distance, a tremendous force smmed into the zeppelin ptform. The impact rattled the entire structure, sending tremors through the cables and twisting metal like paper. Sparks scattered, flickering in the gloom.
His sensors fred crimson.
The silhouette was as rge as the zeppelin—the size of a big car.
“That’s the DUNBAT,” Simon whispered, fear creeping into his voice.
The submersible—once a beacon of hope—had become a monster. Corrupted by a rogue neurograph, the DUNBAT had been transformed into a Mockingbird: a vessel of madness, and vengeance.
The DUNBAT smmed into the zeppelin again, jagged arms tearing away massive chunks of the hull. Metal groaned and peeled like bark from a dying tree. The wreckage spiraled downward, the machine dragging it into the abyss like a predator devouring its prey.
Simon unched himself from the ptform just in time, his propulsion system fring as he shot through the water.
He didn’t look back.
He couldn’t.
If that thing catches me...
His mind fshed to Jerry—the little rodent curled inside the submersible on his back. If anything happened to him... if Simon lost him too...
His fists clenched. He pushed harder, cutting through the dark like a spear.
Then came the sound.
Screaming.
Twisted. Warped. Drenched in fury.
“CATHERINE!” the voice bellowed, distorted and full of agony. “You left me! You LIED! You made me THIS!”
The DUNBAT.
It had seen him.
Simon’s sensors shrieked warnings. The DUNBAT was closing in, relentless. A predator born of betrayal, grief, and rage.
His right arm shifted, ptes retracting to reveal the glowing coil of his repulsor cannon.
His breathing slowed. He needed precision.
The ocean roiled behind him as the DUNBAT surged forward, a hulking blur in the distance. Its searchlight cut through the dark like a hateful eye.
Closer…
Closer…
Now.
Simon triggered the electromagnetic pulse.
A white-hot shockwave rippled outward, crackling through the water. The DUNBAT convulsed mid-charge, its lights sputtering as its systems stuttered.
It wasn’t enough to disable it—too much structure gel—but it gave Simon the opening he needed.
He fired the repulsor cannon.
The bst struck hard, sending him rocketing away like a torpedo. The recoil jolted his systems, but he tumbled far beyond the creature’s reach.
Without hesitation, he activated his cloaking field.
His form shimmered—and vanished.
Silence fell.
The DUNBAT howled into the void, its corrupted rage echoing through the bck, but its prey was gone. It thrashed, scanning, sensing—blind.
Simon floated still among the currents, invisible and silent.
He touched the submersible on his back.
Jerry was still there. Quiet. Safe.
Simon gently pced a hand over the small dome of the submersible.
"I got you," he whispered.
And then, without a sound, he drifted onward, leaving the scream of the DUNBAT behind.
Simon nded on the circur concrete ptform with a soft thud, dispcing a small cloud of sand beneath his feet. He rose slowly, his eyes scanning the surroundings with grim familiarity.
He was at Delta now.
Once a vital test site for PATHOS-II, Delta stood atop a guyot along the Mid-Atntic Ridge—now a drowned monument to the past. Time and neglect had reduced it to rusting steel, cracked concrete, and silent, haunted machinery.
To his right, something moved.
A grotesque heap of flesh and structure gel twitched faintly in the dim light. At its center, the remains of a human body—still breathing, still alive in the most nightmarish sense.
Its face had melted away into a featureless mask of flesh. No eyes. No mouth. Just a pulsating, veiny surface that shimmered faintly beneath the gel. It existed, barely, trapped in an organic prison that refused to let go.
Simon turned away.
He had seen enough.
Farther ahead, fused to the base of a metal beam beneath the battered sign reading "Zeppelin Transport Theta," was another victim. This one, too, was alive—barely. Entombed in a writhing mass of flesh and structure gel, the its diving suit still mostly intact. A helmet clung to its head, though the visor had long since been overgrown by flesh, thick ridges curling over it like roots ciming abandoned stone.
These were Akers’ victims.
People mutited in his madness.
He stepped into the main courtyard, the silence of the pce pressing against him like a weight.
To the left, the remains of the control room and assembly line stood silent. Robotic arms hung limply from overhead rails, corroded by salt and time. They looked like the limbs of skeletal giants, frozen mid-motion.
Toward the edge of the guyot, half-buried beneath sand and rubble, he could just make out the fractured hull of the escape vessel. Scarred and likely useless—caused by Curie’s explosion.
To the right, a metal structure crowned with a shattered gss dome slumped inward, the ocean having long since cimed its interior. It stood like a cracked skull, hollow and dead.
And then… there was the room.
Akers’ sanctuary of madness.
Simon’s synthetic muscles tensed. The memory surfaced unbidden: the dried blood, the desperate, looping scrawl etched into the walls with trembling hands, and the two decayed eyes resting on the floor like offerings to something unspeakable.
And this was the pce where he had killed her.
Imogen Reed.
Or at least the K8 drone that carried her mind.
He still didn’t understand what he felt. The sorrow didn’t belong to him entirely—it was something that had bled into him from WAU, fragments of another self, echoes of someone else’s pain. And yet, when he thought of her voice, her ugh, her presence...
It felt real.
Not quite love. Not quite guilt.
But something.
Nearby, the Bull UH3—a bulky submersible drone—glided through the water in slow, zy arcs. Its lights blinked like sleepy eyes, and it mumbled softly to itself as it patrolled the area.
Simon watched it drift.
That machine housed the stolen brain scan of Javid Goya. Another soul unaware, trapped in steel and silence.
And then, deeper beneath the ruins, something more.
The underground complex.
PATHOS-II’s primary space gun capsule manufacturing center. A pce long sealed. A pce he hadn’t been able to reach—until now.
The main entrance had once been sealed by yers of rust and pressure. But with the high-powered welder in his forearm, he could break through.
If he wanted to survive this pce…
He had to go down there.
I could swim to Lambda, Simon thought, but what if the DUNBAT finds me again?
He could still hear its shrieking voice. Remember the tearing of metal. The rage.
The Mockingbird submersible wasn’t just dangerous.
It was hunting him.
Simon clenched his fists.
Maybe there’s something here—something in the manufacturing complex that can help me fight back.
I’m done running.
His thoughts sharpened. His processors aligned. A pn began to form.
Delta wasn’t just another waypoint.
It was the staging ground for war.
And Simon had every intention of winning.
He walked toward the door.
As he approached, his arm shifted. Ptes unfolded with a soft mechanical hiss as the welder extended from his forearm like a second limb.
He pressed the tool to the door’s edge and began to cut, moving in slow arcs along the circur frame. Molten metal hissed and bubbled, steam rising into the water around him like phantom breath.
Sparks burst in short fres as the seal gave way. Finally, with a metallic groan, the heavy door slid open—just enough for Simon to pull it free.
A narrow depressurization chamber stood before him.
Dark. Still. Silent.
The control panel on the wall was miraculously intact, untouched by time or disaster.
Simon stepped inside.
And paused.
He reached up and connected to the terminal.
Instantly, the world expanded.
Code flowed across his vision—data streams, access logs, residual memories etched into the digital architecture of the station.
Lord_Turtle_the_first
