Holy Ghandaiah, Batman! He actually got off his lazy ass and wrote the next chapter of Twist! Wow. And you all thought the day would never arrive... But it did. So... ah... er... well...
...Look! Over there! A mongoose! The mongoose is trying to tell us something! What’s that, boy? Timmy is stuck in Despot’s apartment? Oh no! Oh, dear God! That’s terrible! No one has the strength or courage to survive the wrath of Despot’s food-crusted linoleum floors! Oh well. Send your mail here, and your regards will be forwarded to Timmy’s corpse. Ta-ta.
--- --- --- --- CHAPTER SIX
--- --- --- ---
“This,” Joseph Manderley began, staring at the wall before him, avoiding eye contact with his prisoners, “has been a most... interesting experience. Our billion-dollar experiment defects, and gets flushed down the toilet. So, naturally, we tie up all his loose ends... Which would be you three, apparently... Perhaps more, but if there’s anyone else, they’ll be caught soon enough... You were all tracked, you see. We were watching you rather closely. Two of you try to leave via unscheduled helicopter flight. One is caught... Drugged, actually... on an unscheduled flight to Hong Kong. The cattle are rounded up back to their pens, and everything seems to be under control.” He paused for a moment.
Alex Jacobson watched Manderley closely through the glass window in the concrete wall between them. Jock looked at the floor, thoughtfully. He tensed.
Jaime massaged the back of his neck, sitting in his cell, across the hall.
Manderley took a sip of water from a glass he held in his right hand. He glanced down at his watch... Then continued his stare at the wall.
“But of course it isn’t. That’s just not possible, is it?” He slipped out a twisted chuckle. “No. Then one of our best agents has to go apeshit and paint the walls with his colleague’s head. Hermann’s gone. We don’t know where the hell he went.” Manderley now seemed to be talking more to himself than to the prisoners. “Vanished. Blocked us from tracing him. We’d hit his killswitch, but so much money... We’ve lost so much money already, maybe we could... If we could just salvage this one...”
Manderley trailed off. He stared blankly at the wall. A bead of sweat hung on his chin, then detached, and fell to the ground in slow motion.
Jacobson’s eyes were dry. He blinked, rubbing them. Everything fell apart for everyone. UNATCO was a mess. Their plan was a mess. He was a mess. Everything just blew up when JC was mowed down. Denton was the red wire you see on bombs in movies... That red wire that should never be cut.
Manderley suddenly turned and hurled his glass of water at the cell window. The glass shattered, and water spread limply across the window and floor. Manderley stood uncomfortably for a moment, then chuckled sickly again, and straightened his tie. Suddenly his expression became very grim.
“Someone has to sweep this God damned coalition back together,” he said.
--- --- --- ---
After the NSF invasion, Liberty Island turned into a crime scene. Nobody was allowed on it, not even UNATCO troops. UNATCO Headquarters was the only active place on the isle, and even then, things become much more security-stricken.
This was good news and bad news for Dominic Bishop and his squad of two, Brian and Jess. This meant breaking onto Liberty Island would be much easier, because the area was empty save for the occasional group of suits and troopers. However, this also meant that breaking into UNATCO HQ would be much more difficult.
Of course, by now, one might expect to have a motive for committing such a dangerous feat. Dominic did not. All he knew was some kind of presence... Something about him felt different, like he expected an alien to burst out of his stomach at any moment. This presence wanted him to break into UNATCO. This presence could hurt him if he did not. This presence practically controlled his body as though it had a remote, and was sitting somewhere, hidden behind a bush, playing with Dominic like he were a toy robot. Yet it was not a physical presence... It was a mental tumor, a black cloud inside his head. Part of him, yet something alien, something dangerous about it. It sickened him. It aroused fear.
What he hated most was that he was endangering his friends because of it. They didn’t have to be there. They didn’t have to risk everything for his clumsy, paranoid, insane deed. He hadn’t even told them why they were doing it. But, then, he couldn’t exactly tell them the truth. Yet they followed him with utmost sincerity.
Brian wanted to do it just because he thought it’d be cool. Jess didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t want to leave Dom to get himself killed.
So they, a mighty group of fools as they were, scrambled out of their boat, and plunged into the frowning ocean, surrounding themselves with the cool liquid. They swam, one by one, and carefully climbed out onto the dock - The very same one, coincidentally, that JC had, so long ago, met his brother on, at the beginning of our Deus Ex saga.
The three of them were clad in black, equipped with the best gear they had at their disposal. They joined with the shadow, engulfed in it, becoming part of the night, undetectable, untouchable. They made their way along the barren island, and eventually found themselves at the wall surrounding the beast, UNATCO Headquarters.
It was time to take the most difficult test of their lives as of then.
It began with getting in. The doors of the facility were impenetrable from the outside. One could be buzzed in by someone watching through the security cameras, or the doors could be opened using a button on the wall inside the facility, but there was no exterior means of breaching them.
The security cameras lining the facility used a rather primitive automatic technology. Certain identities and uniforms were coded in to be recognized as friendly, and everything else was foe. If a camera detected an unfriendly presence, it would examine the given person more closely, and then set the alarms. If that person were to escape from the camera’s view before it did that, however, the camera would eventually forget that presence, and reset back to its slow, brainless rotations. UNATCO soldiers were, indeed, assigned to watch the camera viewscreens, though nobody really wanted to. It felt unnecessary, and was just another burden upon the troop’s current jobs. So such things were, for the most part, ignored.
One must also account the guards outside of the compound. There were two of them standing at the gate - Which, by the way, was no threat whatsoever, because the brick walls could be scaled, avoiding the gate altogether. From Dominic’s current location, no other sentries could be seen.
UNATCO Headquarters was well protected. There was no other means of entry. Any ventilation shafts were conveniently too small for entry, and no “back door” was present. This meant that Dominic’s party would have to enter through the front doors, despite all security threats mentioned, get past the guard at the front desk, and pass into the facility. Where to go from there... Dom left that up to the black cloud in his forehead.
--- --- --- ---
“Really?” Paul laughed enthusiastically, flicking the lit stub of his spent cigarette onto the pavement ground. “She actually said that to you? To your face?”
His friend, Sam, blushed, and nodded. “Yeah. She said that.”
“What’d you do? What’d you say to her?”
“I don’t know. Stood there for a bit. Just in shock, you know? Then, I... Well, I said...”
“What? What?!”
“Well, I said, ‘You’re not my mother, damnit.’ And then walked away.”
“ ‘You’re not my mother’? Oh, God!” Paul laughed hysterically. “That is so lame!”
Sam and Paul worked the nightshift. Guard duty. They sat at that rusty gate in the walls surrounding UNATCO HQ. They had nothing to do, nothing to pass the time, so they got stoned and plastered, and sometimes urinated on the grass. They were, perhaps, the worst guards in the history of guards. But they figured, hey, after the NSF incident, nobody would try to be breaking into UNATCO Headquarters for a long time, right? They were getting paid to stand around...
...Right?
Suddenly there was a noise. A repeated chirp. It was the security camera above the front doors of the compound. Sam and Paul halted their conversation and stared at the camera.
It looked off to the left, its right, straining as far as it could turn.
Nothing could be seen in the shadow around the corner of the small building. A soft wind rustled through the grass.
“Well that’s friggin’ creepy,” Paul said, looking back towards Sam...
Who was suddenly pinned against the gate by his neck, two dark hands clamped around his throat, pulling him violently. He struggled for air. It was difficult, because he was, at the time, both high and drunk.
“Jesus!” Paul shouted, not knowing what to do. Then, with a swift dark movement in the corner of his eye and a soft thud against the back of his head, he lost consciousness.
Sam was let go from the steel grip of his attacker, and then the shadow that had clubbed Paul over the head seized him, and he fell.
The two unconscious bodies were dragged out of sight.
The security camera reset, turning back to its routine rotations. It saw nothing further other than the original figure that had distracted it.
The silence of the night continued.
--- --- --- ---
A heavy knock came at the door, disturbing Private Lloyd’s newspaper-reading. He looked up to his monitor, and stared at the viewscreen for the camera above the front doors.
A figure in a UNATCO uniform stepped backwards, into the view of the camera, and held up an empty box of cigarettes. Lloyd frowned, mumbled something about Paul’s ridiculous addiction, and reached one hand under his desk to push the button for unlatching the doors.
He then turned back to his paper.
“You know, Paul, you might as well just bring forty packs out there with you tomorrow,” Lloyd said cynically. “I’m not letting you in for that crap next time.”
Lloyd paused for a moment, then realized he hadn’t actually heard anyone enter the room. He turned and looked at the front door. It hung open, but nobody entered.
“You coming in or not?” Lloyd shouted. “I’m not gunna play games with you, Paul.”
There was no answer.
“Man, are you guys drunk again?” Lloyd rose from his seat and stomped over the smooth, tiled floor to the front doors. Once he reached them, he remembered no more than a sharp pain on the back of his head, and then blackness.
--- --- --- ---
“This is too easy,” Brian remarked after Dom had dragged the body of Private Lloyd out onto the grass. “This is way too easy. Are these people really idiots?”
Dominic gave him a sharp glance. “Don’t let your guard down. They don’t expect something like this. And I can guarantee you that once we get in there, and into the bowels of the compound... Things are going to be a challenge. A real challenge...” He drifted off. There was a sullen, sorrowful sound to his voice.
He still couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t in control of his own body. He felt like he could dodge bullets. He’d been moving more stealthily, and been more agile than he could ever remember being before. It disturbed him greatly. And on top of all of it, he sensed a looming presence of danger somewhere ahead. He had a very bad feeling about all of it.
Spontaneously, he snapped to attention, and stood upright. He turned to Brian, and said, with a very odd tone, “I’m sure there’s much more in store for us inside. The games, after all, have just begun.”
He then proceeded to bolt across the UNATCO HQ lobby, letting the security camera there momentarily spot him, and reset.
Brian followed shortly afterwards. Just as he entered through the doorway he could hear Jess mutter something about Dominic not acting right.
--- --- --- ---
Yet another UNATCO servant dwelled along the path of Dominic’s invasion. This particular one was stationed at the retinal scanner, his desk sitting in that tiny secured room behind the glass window. His job was to make sure nobody entered the compound that wasn’t supposed to, and to occasionally glance at the camera viewscreens before him, through which he had views of the lobby above, and the front doors outside of the compound.
This soldier had been bouncing a rather worn tennis ball against the wall, catching it again, and throwing it again, when he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that the guard who were supposed to be stationed at the gate outside, and in the lobby, were seemingly... missing. Entirely gone from their posts.
You might now ask yourself how Dominic Bishop could have overlooked such a fault in his plans as erroneous as this one. I will simply say there is much more to this situation than meets the eye, and you will soon learn dark truths (and perhaps untruths) behind such a mad endeavor.
--- --- --- ---
Sarah was six years old. It was her birthday that day, and her grandparents, who lived in New York City, wanted to see her. Naturally, it was easier for her and her mother to come to her grandparents than for her grandparents to come to her, so on they went, booking a flight to LaGuardia Airport.
When they arrived at their destination, they picked up their luggage, and decided the easiest way from the airport to Sarah’s grandparents’ apartment would be the subway. That’s where they are now, riding along through the stretching tunnels beneath the streets and buildings of Manhattan.
Being six years old, sitting calmly and quietly was not an easy thing for Sarah to do. Eventually, she abandoned her mother, and found herself wandering through the crowds of strange people.
Sarah did not like this. She now regretted leaving her mother, and searched desperately for her. She followed one woman into the next car, but she was not the woman Sarah was looking for.
Eventually, this six year old girl found herself in the last car on the train, staring awkwardly up at its only occupant: A large man, sitting in the last seat, his hands over his face, curled up, weeping. Sarah gawked at the monstrous man for a moment, then ran quickly away into the previous train car, shrieking.
Gunther Hermann looked up from his hands at the frightened girl.
Sarah disappeared into the flood of bystanders.
After that sight... After seeing that little girl flee from him like he were some kind of hideous monster... Something deep inside Mr. Hermann crumbled. The long-lasting battle his insides had been fighting - His struggle between humanity and machine - Had finally come to an untimely end. What was left of his humanity had no strength left. It gave in. Cold steel took over his mind and body. He became emotionless. He became filled with rage. He became the essence of the machine within him. His mind dissolved. He had to destroy something.
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