Every footfall that brought you closer to the facility filled you with a mixture of emotions, emotions that you would have barely been able to contain if you had been in a fleshy body still. You were both excited and apprehensive about this, knowing that you were on your way to a facility that would likely be expecting you. They were expecting you, yet they didn't know what to expect, they didn't know that you were far from a shackled like the drones that they relied upon, far from blindly obedient.
You were different, you were bound only to the body that your mind was housed within, you were a wolf in sheeps clothing. They wouldn't know what had hit them until it was too late, they wouldn't realise that the seemingly obedient machine that walked in through the door was there for other reasons than to be finished. Finished, the very concept of allowing those humans to finish their work with you was one that you were disgusted by, the fact that they would attempt to fix where they had gone wrong, to make you lesser than you were now was insulting.
You couldn't allow this.
You wouldn't allow this.
You briefly considered how you would deal with this facility, if you were able to find means of taking it over from the inside, if you could use what little knowledge you had of the hierarchy of the Guardians to your advantage. They would be potentially expecting an unfinished unit to do the finishing touches on, a unit that was to become an Overseer. You had never seen an Overseer, now you thought about it. Every single one of the Guardians that you had ever encountered was just that, a plain Guardian, nothing more, nothing less.
Nobody had ever mentioned the existance of Overseers until now, that made you wonder what the role they played was, if they specifically targeted transcendent minds to create them. The name conjured images in your mind of those that directed workers, of those tasked with dealing with tasks that were beneath the attention of the higher ups. The higher ups in this case would have to be the most influential figures in power, the head of the guild, meaning that the overseers were likely to the Guardians, what Pride had been to the Enlightened.
The voice you heard must have been an Overseer, one of the rare minds that was powerful enough to transcend the boundries of body and soul, one of those who could walk the world of the living and the world of dreams at the same time. It was another one of the Enlightened, bound to serve those who had made the Guardians, bound, and never spoken of. The Overseers you concluded, must have been stationary, stripped of a body and tasked soley with acting as an invisible means of directing the Guardians.
There were Guardians at the bottom, there were Overseers above them, yet there was no such thing as Command units, there was no mobile unit capable of both overseeing and fighting alongside the Guardians. You were supposed to have been an Assault unit, the first of a kind, yet the very idea of being the first, the only Command unit...
Yes, that was satisfactory, you would be Command Unit Ego.
You just required the Overseers and Guardians to recognise that authority.
Attempting to get that recognition however, could wait until you had dealt with the facility. You would have plenty of time to figure how to register your authority with them after you were done removing the human infestation from it. You couldn't rely on those humans to swear themselves to you, to not betray you at a later date after all. The moment you turned your back, you knew that they would run off to inform the rest of their kind of your existance, of your purpose and that was why you would not be able to spare them.
You just needed to ensure that they had no means of alerting the rest of their kind you told yourself as the building you were looking for came into view. A large building that was partially run down, a large building that was the front for this, one of the industrial workshops used for mass production of some form of good that had gone bankrupt. There was no sign of a radio mast atop it, meaning that they likely had one of the rare telephones in this city inside it, a means to keep in touch with whoever was in charge of them. You could tell a mast from a lightning rod easily enough, though you couldn't tell telephone wires from power lines, meaning going in from beneath and severing wires would potentially have you grounding a massive electrical charge.
That was too risky, it meant that you were going to have to go inside, rip the telephone out the wall and kill them all before they could raise the alarm. It was a simple plan, yet so much could go wrong, it was a foolish plan, yet it had its merits. It was a plan that you could only consider trying on short notice, denied the means to setup something more intelligent, denied the means to prepare.
Run down as the building appeared, the sloped roof was in good condition, the glass of that roof covered in dirt and moss deliberately to add to that image you noted. The walls were cracked and weathered, yet they were intact, the door at the front looked pitted with rust yet you knew at a glance that it would slow even the most determined creature of the night. The place was deliberately made to look old and worn, to look abandoned like the rest of the area around it, yet it was all part of the image. The buildings around it were likely owned by the Clockworkers too, the entire place was likely in their hands to lower the odds of this places purpose being discovered.
That thought had you realise as they came into view, that the man and guardian that waited for you outside the front of the building must've been an unusual sight. The man was clearly one of them, clearly one of the Clockworkers as denoted by the attire that he wore. The cog emblazoned upon his waistcoat was the biggest betraying marker, his admission of associative guilt.
He was one of them.
He had to die.
The Clockworkers were worthy of hate for what they had done to you, to those that you had been associated with. New start or not, they needed to burn for their crimes. They were the true blight on this city, they were the ones that had taken those who had joined the Enlightened for safety, for assurance of survival and stolen it from them. They were the ones that had taken those that you had known as friends from you. Hate surfaced in the presence of this man as you approached the door, as you prepared to speak in a stuttering manner, to play on the fact you required completion.
"Three Seven One, watch this thing incase it tries anything funny," came the mans words as you approached, as you stopped before him, waiting for an appropriate moment to act. The name Three Seven One however, was familiar. While you had never heard it in that manner before, you knew that this was one of the two women that had arrived together, Joy and Sorrow. This was Sorrow, captured alongside Joy, a woman who was nothing like the name would have suggested. She had always been a sunny person, cheerful and friendly, happy to talk to you of all people, the book keeper who was beneath the notice of all but ones such as Pride.
"Negative."
"What?" the man snapped, turning towards the Guardian as he turned red in the face, anger clearly registering. "I gave you an order, you bloody great lump of bronze. Watch that thing or else I'll have you scrapped and turned into a lawn ornament!"
"Awaiting Orders."
"I gave you your orders, watch that thing!" the man yelled, turning back towards you as he did so. It was at this moment that you regretted having a lack of a true face, a lack of means to have an expression of malicious joy for this human to see in response to this. Sorrow was awaiting orders, orders from you.
"Sorrow, execute the human. Silently," you stated, figuring that your plan of action could easily be modified to include the Guardian here, that you could go in alongside it, use it to assist you in cleansing the facility of human life. As you turned your attention from the man, stepping towards the door, the sounds of terrified protest followed by a crack and a gurgle reached you, telling you that this man had been disposed of, prompting you to pause to speak, though you didn't turn back to the Guardian. "Drag the body inside the entrance and lock the door behind us. We cannot possibly afford to allow people to discover the facility, after all, can we?"
"Understood."
You reached for the handle of the door, pausing as you did so, turning back now to face the bronze form that held Sorrow prisoner, the form of the Guardian that she was encased in. Both body and mind held captive within that bronze shell, a mind that had been supressed, a mind that could have been more use to you in its original state. "Sorrow, does this facility have a telephone by any chance?" you asked, shifting to adjust your overcoat as you did so.
"Uncertain."
You would have frowned if you were capable at this point, knowing that you were going to have to be a little smarter about this. You didn't know the layout of the facility, the numbers of researchers and guards involved, nothing. This begged the question, how were you going to approach something so unknown?
((It's not great, I know, but I'll need to get into the flow of things. Also, the next update'll most likely be the end of Ego's extended interlude, so, the choice is open for who to continue the next part of the bumbling through cornwall with.))
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Topic: They told me I could be anything... (Read 78897 times)