Tales of the Parodyverse

Premiere #0


Post By

The Hooded Hood officially launches SECRET ORIGIN WEEK with this Technopolitan treatise on the world's first Science Hero
Sun Jun 15, 2003 at 04:39:31 am EDT
[ Reply ] [ New ] [ Tales of the Parodyverse ]

Premiere #0

Premiere Archive (Previous episodes)
Who's Who in the Technoverse
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse




The rioters burst through the prohibitory force-fields at the corners of Enlightenment and Change Streets and swarmed along the elevated causeways towards Discovery Square. The Science Police stopped being gentle and deployed heavy combat drones to hold them back, buying them time to set up new personal containment screens and begin the arrests.
“They should have brought in the grav-nets,” considered Victor Brooke as he watched the operation from the seventy-second floor of Science Research Block Sigma Epsilon 7. “Less messy and it would have completely blown out any of those force-screen disruption units the techno-anarchists are packing.”
“If you’re so keen to go and oversee riot control, why are you up here?” Mirelle asked bitterly. She was crying again, hugging her arms across her breasts as she stalked up and down the preparation room.
“We’ve been through this before, love,” Victor told her. He reached out to comfort her but she shrugged him away and stalked to the other side of the room. “It’s something I feel I have to do.”
“To throw away your future – our future?” snapped the fair-haired woman in the hyperponics tech uniform.
“We discussed this.”
“You discussed this. You didn’t listen to anything I said back,” Mirelle accused. “You’re here aren’t you?”
“I’m where I feel I have to be, doing what I feel I have to do.”
The woman turned away from the full wall picture window where the first flashes of neural disruptor fire were sparking down in the plaza. “You’re an idiot,” she accused her lover. “It’s not enough that you throw away all that academic promise to join the Science Police. Oh no. Now you have to volunteer for the suicide program as well.”
Victor ran his hand through his short regulation haircut. “It’s not suicide. The process is getting closer every time…”
“Oh yes. I’ve seen the reports. Some of the latest test subjects for metahuman advancement can still walk a little, and a few even know their own names.”
“Dr Hazlenen thinks it’s all a matter of willpower,” Victor explained. “When the metagenetic process is applied and the mutation cascade begins, it’s only a matter of… holding on.”
Mirelle shook her head disbelievingly. “It’s all theory. Nobody has survived the process intact. The closest they’ve got so far are abominations that have to be locked away forever, like that Fever Dream thing or the Whisperer. Monsters. Even the Sov-Blok mutations are more like a pack of hunting dogs than human beings!”
Victor tried to convince her. “That’s why we have to get it right, Mirelle! The Sov-Blok has leapt ahead of us in metahuman technology. The balance of power is broken. You’ve seen the news-coms, the overrunning of the Buffer States, the Arctic Domes incursion, the gathering of forces in Hy Brazil. War is coming, unless we can back them off.” He glanced down at the seething protest below. “Cybernetic enhancement won’t do it, and nor will more combat robot squads. If we can’t make a breakthrough it’ll all come down to transuranic weapons packages, and then we’re all dead.”
“And you think letting Hazlenen and his band of merry butchers turn you into a drooling cripple with the IQ of a cucumber is going to save the world?”
“I think that somebody has to try. I think there are some things important enough to make sacrifices for, and that sometimes those sacrifices have to be made.”
Mirelle Unteller wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked at him angrily. “And I’m one of them? I won’t be here for you, Vic.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean if you go into that process, whether you come out as a ruptured spastic or a demigod I won’t be there. I’m gone. You don’t value me, you don’t value what we have, and you… you’re throwing yourself away on some patriotic pipe dream as if you could make any difference to a world that’s going mad.”
“I can make a difference,” Victor Brooke answered. “I have to.”
Nothing about her. Nothing about her value. He realised too late that he’d mis-spoken. “Wait, I mean…”
“I hope you die!” shouted Mirelle as she stormed out of the door.
“Trouble in paradise?” asked Assak Malevi, from the adjoining internal room. He poked his handsome head round the corner with a rueful smile.
“I think paradise has just dumped me,” answered Victor. “It’s not like I was likely to be coming back to her in any fit state to enter into a long-term relationship agreement though, is it?”
“They’re ready for us now,” Assak told him. “We’re wanted in the metagene lab.”
Toby Kohler appeared in his grav-chair to escort them and the other eighteen candidates down to the lab.
“How’s things?” Victor asked the Science Officer veteran as they used the null-G tubes down to the basement.
Kohler lifted his prosthetic right arm, still a mess of silver panels and bundled wires. “They say they can graft some better tech onto me if I can handle the control systems,” he replied. “At least those Cybernation nuts will like me.”
“I heard they were considering you for the first total psyche transfer,” Assak Malevi told him. “The first human mind in a robot brain and a robot body. A perfect clockwork soldier.”
“Maybe,” shrugged Kohler, but his servo-motors whirred unevenly as he tried to perform even the smallest of human gestures.
“You’re a brave man,” Victor assured him. “You were brave when you entered that bombed toxic dump to rescue those people and you’re brave now.”
“I’m not the one going down to be strapped into those metagenic alteration units,” Kohler replied.
They walked along in silence until Victor said, “Somebody has to.”
The security on the metagenics research lab was heavy, as befitted the most important Science Council initiative in Technopolis, on the day that the pro-gene purity riots were at their height. The Science Police present were all armed with heavy duty weapons packages, their harnesses charged up and ready to deploy.
Inside technicians and white-coated scientists scurried about making last minute adjustments to the genetic modification tubes. On the command and control balcony Dr Zalas was screaming at some junior tech who had failed to complete a pre-test computer simulation on one of the ancillary back-ups.
“Ah, ladies and gentlemen,” Dr Hazlenen called across to the candidates. “Come in, come in.” The Science Councillor sounded like he was inviting them for cocktails, not to strap them into machines that so far has a 100% success rate in killing and maiming. “Welcome indeed. Now this will be just like we rehearsed it. Let your tech team take you to your units, go through the usual checks and preps, and let me know when you’re ready.”
A last minute mortal fear assailed Victor as the rubber-suited technicians led him away. He was going to die, or worse to be maimed and yet still cling onto some pathetic broken half-life, dribbling away the rest of his years in some research asylum somewhere. He had thrown everything away, even Mirelle, for a stupid dream.
“No,” he whispered to himself. Sometimes the world needed heroes. They didn’t have to be special people, particularly brave or clever. They just had to be willing to get the job done. To pay the price.
He was ready to pay the price. People were counting on him.
The metagenic manipulation array was centred around a huge bell-jar laced with electromagnetic coils that could alter the bio-field of a human strapped inside. The theory was that the computers would analyse and modify the billions of variation of the life aura around the subject, selecting those parts that could be enhanced to accept new coding, backing it up with an infusion of high energy sources to power a transformation. That same theory held that failure so far was less due to computer error – although there had been many, despite the terraquads of capacity available – than to the inability of the human mind to take charge of the changes and remain sane enough to see the transformation through.
It all came down to willpower and belief.
One by one the tech-crews did their work and passed the go-signal up to the C&C balcony. Dr Hazlenen made a short, unmemorable speech that nobody listened to, then keyed in the codes to begin the transformations.
Victor Brooke was blind, deaf, mute. He could feel nothing at all, and none of the sensory deprivation training helped him. This wasn’t just his body in a null-gee fluid tank. This was parts of himself peeling away, being lost. It was the very DNA and RNA that made him a person unravelling and drifting off.
He knew that he’s made a huge mistake.
“Report,” Hazlenen commanded Zalas.
“Not much different to Trial 32,” the other scientist replied dispassionately. “We’ve already lost subjects 1,3,9, 11, 14, 15, 17, and 20. 2 is rupturing. The auto-shut down has cut in for 7 and 19. And we have an unfortunate metagenic cascade in number 10.”
“What about the others?” Hazlenen demanded. “Cut in the new protocols we discussed, see if we can modulate the psychometric feedback.”
The explosion rocked the room and sprayed the lab with chunks of plasteel. The Science Police by the sundered doorway were literally plastered across the floor. Pointless security sirens wailed as two dozen orange-jacketed creatures scrambled over the wreckage and started to attack anything that lived.
“Security screens!” screeched Zalas.
The command and control gallery was encased with a level four force barrier just in time. A couple of the deformed humanoid invaders skittered up the walls and clawed at the shimmering energy wall.
“What is this?” demanded the terrifed Hazlenen. “They can’t be here! They can’t be!”
Zalas looked at the distorted mockeries of broken humanity that were gradually picking their way through the force barrier. Nothing was left alive on the lab floor below except for the dying subjects in their metagentic chambers. “Sov-Blok Mutation Hounds?” the scientist answered. “I don’t think anyone told them that.”
“How did they…? They can’t be here!” repeated the Head of the Science Council.
Zalas thought fast. “The riots. All those sill techno-anarchists with their force-field diverters, thousands of people running around, Gene-Luddites clashing with Cyber-Fetishists, generating out hundreds of spurious security tags. We’ve been set up!”
The screaming mindless products of the Sov-Blok’s own metahuman experimentation continued to scrape at the wall. Some of them must have had energy-manipulation enhancements, because they were making some headway.
“Where are the Science Police?” screamed Hazlenen.
“Trapped behind out emergency exclusion screens,” Zalas answered. “If we let down the force walls so they can get in, we let those things in too.”
“Do something!”
“There’s nothing we can do.”
There was another explosion on the lab floor. Subject 8’s metagenic array was shattered into fragments, the whole complex equipment stack bursting open in a shower of coloured sparks. And in the middle of the wreckage stood Victor Brooke.
The Hound Handler’s full body combat suit warned him of the newcomer. Helmet display readings warned of an unusually dense cellular structure and considerable energy distortions around the Science Policeman but the software had never seen anything quite like it to properly report.
“Get him,” he hissed into his command mike, channelling the simple orders into the control chip implants in the Hounds’ brains.
Most of the mutates abandoned their assault on the balcony for a moment and sped at superhuman speeds towards their prey.
Premiere moved faster. The first two Hounds to arrive were smashed together with too much force and split like sacks of pus. The third was slaughtered with a punch that broke right through its stomach and out of its back. By the time of the fourth and fifth Victor had compensated for his strength and used just enough force and speed to snap their necks.
But the Hounds had been trained as a pack. While he was distracted others leaped on him from behind, razor prosthetics raking at his back and face. He shrugged them off, rising into the air as if he was in a grav harness. He didn’t need a grav harness.
Suddenly he was aware of everything. He could hear the Hound Handler’s whispered commands, smell the stale sweat on the beasts’ bodies, perceive the electronic susurrus in the instrumentation on the command balcony. He could hear the rabid heartbeats of the mutates, and he could hear them stop as he put them down.
The Hound Handler watched in disbelief as twenty-four of the nastiest genetic errors his nation could produce were reduced to gobbets of meat by a single Science Policeman. Then he realised his duty and pulled out the Dimensional Bomb. If he couldn’t come back alive he could at least complete his mission. A five mile section of Technopolis was about to be spread across the multiverse molecule by molecule.
Premiere reached out to him and a spray of heat lanced from his fingertips. The dimensional bomb heated to melting, then evaporated along with the Hound Handler’s arm. Before he could even scream Premiere had ripped the power units from his battle suit and he was lying helplessly on the floor.
And then it all went quiet.
Premiere floated up to the balcony, shorted out the force field with a thermal pulse, and joined Dr Hazlenen. “All contained, sir. Nothing to worry about.”
“You… you survived.”
“I was needed,” Premiere answered. “I couldn’t let people down.” He cocked his head and listened. “There are more of those Hounds and Handlers in the area,” he warned. “I’d better contain them. Excuse me, sir.”
And the First Science Hero blurred off to save the world.

Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.


tcp (212.159.106.10)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
[ Reply ] [ New ] [ Tales of the Parodyverse ]
Follow-Ups:

Echo™ v1.1 © 2003 Powermad Software
Copyright © 2003 by Mangacool Adventure