X lay back in the darkness of the ether, letting his mind wander, while in the physical world, a reploid mechanic who occasionally contracted with the Hunters hooked him into the network and began making diagnostic runs.
X opened the eyes of his mind and found himself laying on a plush leather couch. He turned his head, and saw Megaman smiling at him from a matching chair. "It's the study you've seen me in," said Megaman. "Welcome back."
Sitting up, X chuckled. "Thought I'd wind up back here at some point. I'm in the network, aren't I?"
"For the moment," said Megaman. "I've been trying to help your human friend with his search, but I think he might have fallen asleep or something. He doesn't have any kind of networked camera in his home, though, so I can't see."
"What about his phone?"
"He takes out the battery when he's at home, mutes his computer mic. I've got nothing. But when he wakes up, he'll have something to check out."
"So you're helping us, huh? I was warned not to do that."
"I don't think your enemy knows. I haven't figured out who he is, though his voice in your memory bank sounds familiar. Too bad about the VR logs; I could have searched those, seen if he's an old foe."
X rolled his neck, trying to work out a sudden pain. "What is that?"
"The mechanic is using your shoulder access panel to get at the power lines for your secondary optics. The wires were fried along with the board."
"Hurts like hell," X grumbled.
"Don't think about it. It'll go away," said Megaman. "Since you're here, do you have any questions?" X thought about that for a moment. The biggest question on his mind at the moment was where the new Wily Manor was, of course. But as he mused, another one did come to mind.
"What's the Omega Project," he asked. Megaman shook his head, but fixed his attention on X and answered.
"It was a paper that Dr. Light wrote, a series of them, actually, all compiled into a single volume. It was essentially my story. Not the Wily Campaigns, more my personal story, talking about the gradual integration of my body into the Megaman suit. It culminates with my transfer into a full robotic body. The last few chapters are a little, well, strange."
"Strange? What do you mean," X asked, genuinely intrigued.
"Well, Dr. Light was a man of science, had been his whole life. At least, until Wily told him about the spark. He never once mentioned the theory of sparks in the Omega Project until those last few chapters. Then, out of nowhere, the papers start taking on a kind of mystical, philosophical tone. It's like I said, strange."
X pondered the notion silently. Everything he'd ever read about Thomas Light painted the man as a stalwart defender of reason and logic, a man of pure science. Then again, he'd designed X with a spark in mind, and had matched form and function almost perfectly with it. What could that imply?
"Were these papers ever published," X asked.
"Some of them, but not all. Not everybody was a fan of Dr. Light's work, after all. Cyberneticists hated him, since his advances in stand-alone robotics made their field pale by comparison. Human-machine hybridization essentially stopped with me."
"Kind of ironic," X replied with a wry grin. "You were actually the pinnacle of cybernetics, not robotics."
"They didn't see it that way," Megaman said. "Although, there's been a lot of promising research in that field again, on the academic level. But that's beside the point. The Omega Project was never publicly released. It only exists, as a whole, as a document file in some library networks."
X recalled seeing the file folder flicker on the screen when he'd visited Megaman in the Light Museum. "You'd been reading it when I came to see you."
"I had."
"Why?"
"Because of one of the stranger passages in the second-to-last paper of the manuscript," Megaman said, looking away. "It said, 'There is no doubt in me now that the capsules I left will be misunderstood. The spark can grow, shift, change, find new places to run. A spark can fade, though, be turned into something, other. I would not be so haunted if this were not so.' I have no idea what he's talking about there. By then, the few people he saw in his day-to-day life couldn't make sense of his ramblings."
The weight of time seemed to settle over the two Blue Bombers then, each silently mulling over Light's message. If the paper hadn't been published, then who was it for? What did Dr. Light hope to accomplish?
X didn't know. He felt a twinge in his head then. "I think the mechanic is finished. I have to head back now."
"Of course," said Megaman. "Do stop by again some time. Maybe let your spark wander a little farther next time. You might come to enjoy it."
Once again, darkness stole over X. This time, he welcomed it.
"It's done," Paladin said after clicking on the commlink. Hephaestus did not reply immediately, but Paladin could feel the tension ratchet up a notch. "Shall I seal the level anyway?"
"Yes," Hephaestus intoned quietly. "Without Poseidon, it will not work, not against X. Orbous, Caretaker and yourself shall have to hold. But remember my instructions, Paladin. No heroics."
"I understand, sire." Paladin turned off the commlink, looking once more at the viewscreen. What remained of Thrash lay in a savaged heap, one staring optic still flickering as the last of his life energy drained away. The piranha swarm, along with the four mechanical hammerhead sharks, had proven too much. Thrash had stood his ground and fought hard, destroying nearly a hundred water-bound drones. But that hadn't been enough.
He'd only made it halfway through Poseidon's realm.
Paladin clenched his hands into fists, pounded the flat surface of the table on which sat his consoles and monitors. "It isn't fair," he screamed, grabbing the monitor showing Thrash and ripping it from its anchoring plate. He hurled it against the wall, feeding on the audible crash of chips and plates as they fell to the floor. "We are diminished! Damn your impudence, Thrash! Damn you!"
Paladin stomped about his personal quarters then, breaking everything he didn't need. It turned out he didn't need much.
It was an hour after dawn the following day when Jasper Marlow finally woke up and checked his computer, a cup of coffee in his hand, eyes bleary. One of his search strings had landed a result match.
The number inscribed upon the blade, according to the search, corresponded to an archived book in the Parliamentary Library in downtown London. According to network records, it was the only remaining physical copy of the book.
Using clearance codes and access data he'd obtained through less-than-official channels over the last few years, Marlow checked the library's records, and discovered that an unidentified mechanoid had accessed the book a year and a half earlier. "You plan for the long view, don't you," he asked aloud.
Marlow put the battery in his cellular phone, powered it up, and dialed X's private internal line.
X still lay in his charging station, having gone to his apartment after being repaired and opting to do a home recharge of his life energy tank. While thusly ensconced, he'd taken Megaman's suggestion to heart, letting his spark ride the networks. It was exhilarating.
Time flowed differently inside the wider global network. X launched himself into a local social site, and discovered that a whole other world existed in cyberspace. Humans' online avatars were crude, blocky things, belligerent and unrefined for the most part. His initial attempt at conversation with one of these was greeted with hostility and insults regarding his AI. The human controlling the avatar thought X was some kind of programmed personality designed to distract people.
But there were large repositories of information here, all shaped like little bookstores or libraries. Government sites held the appearance of city halls or armored forts, each function symbolized by its cyber-edifice. Business and organization sites sprawled out from a central hub, lined with odd yellow speeder bikes that represented browsers and search engines.
It was overwhelming.
X had barely passed along five blocks of this strange and awe-inspiring landscape when he heard a jangling in his head, pulling him back to the darkness behind his synthskin eyelids. He opened his optics and reached up to open his charging pod, tapping his helmet to open the comm line.
"X here," he said.
"I've got something," Marlow said, rushing into an explanation of what his computer search had turned up. When he was finished, X heard him take a loud sip of something. "So what do we do now?"
"We don't do anything," X said, heading for the door and then upward to the new teleporter installed on the roof. "You sit tight. Whatever I find, I'll bring to you."
"Got it," Marlow replied, hanging up. As X stepped out onto the roof, he tossed the heavy combat bots standing by the teleporter pad a salute, which they mimicked. He stepped on, punched in the coordinates, and disappeared in a streak of blue light.
When he reassembled, he was thousands of miles away from his home, standing in downtown London. Surprised citizens gasped at his sudden appearance, but they all quickly moved along.
The Hunters only had twenty total members in all of Great Britain, a dismally low deployment number. The bulk of their ranks were stationed throughout the United States, including the annexed territories of Canada and Mexico. The remainder of the globe, barring some African countries and China, had only a handful of Hunters each.
X momentarily considered redeployment strategies, but they would have to wait. To his right stood a set of weathered steps leading up into the Parliamentary Library, and he ascended these quickly, passing several people coming and going from the building.
Inside the front doors, he immediately stopped, taking in the spicy scent of aged paper all around him. An audacious display of grand design and noble function, the racks and shelves of books stretched in every direction around a circular space filled with tables, all manner of scholar seated here and there. Nobody looked up from their tomes or volumes.
Accessing a map of the library from a nearby wireless infostation, X turned left and wound his way through several honeycombed shelves, coming round and up a set of steel steps. On the second level, he pressed his way toward the east end of the level, nipping into an empty aisle, scanning the shelves.
He located the book in question near the back of the aisle, where it met solid wall. The book was entitled 'Lights of Pursuit'. X pulled it down and flipped it over, looking at the back cover copy. It showed a picture of the author, one Hester Brinkly, and the text revealed that this book was an extended essay on the theories of applied robotics. Looking in the front of the book, X discovered it had been written three years prior to the birth of Dr. Light.
X looked at the spot on the shelf where he'd pulled the book from. Someone, Hephaestus most likely, had scrawled something into the wood. 'The loose stone', it said. X looked to the wall to his right, and immediately noticed that a square had been cut in the concrete. He set the book back, grabbed at the edge of the cut block, and pulled it out. On the bottom was another inscription, longer but more neatly formed.
'Look beneath the last place upon which the Reaper collected those whom men found worthy of death in the Land of Opportunity'. X read the inscription three more times, but could only make sense of the last three words. The Land of Opportunity implied the United States, an old adage seldom used anymore.
As for the rest? He would have to check with detective Marlow. He had most of the day left to him, but time was not a luxury he had. In just under four days' time, if he hadn't found the Manor, millions would die.
And surely their deaths would haunt him.
It was three hours later when X finally got a call from Marlow. "Okay, I've figured out that the inscription is talking about the time when the death penalty was still an option in the States," the detective said. "The last one was at a prison outside of Houston, Texas. The state of Texas was the last holdout on abolishing the death penalty, a good thirty years past everyone else."
"So I have to get under a prison," X asked over the comm link. He'd been waiting on his building's roof since getting back, opting to use the commlink to call Marlow's cell phone rather than waste time going to his home physically.
"No, I don't think so. The last execution was a lethal injection. I think maybe what you're looking for is the table the prisoner was strapped to." X smiled. Marlow was nothing short of a genius in his own right. If not for his fondness and expert knowledge of history, X would be running in circles.
"Do you have coordinates for the prison?"
"Therein lies a snag," Marlow said. "The prison was torn down seventeen years ago. I've been on the phone and the network trying to track down the table's location."
"Any luck?"
"There was a medical supply company out of Flagstaff, Arizona, that put in a request at the time to take all of the prison's medical equipment for resale. I've been trying to get into their records archive, but the data's corrupted. I'm waiting for a scrambler program to clear it up."
"How long might that take," X inquired, feeling impatient.
"Another hour, maybe hour-and-a-half," Marlow replied.
"Call me back when you know more," X said, switching off.
Orbous changed the screen before him over to unit 67's camera, looking in on the waiting constructs in the storage unit. Armed with primitive blasters and flail maces, they were a pathetic bunch. Kept alive with daily deliveries of food and water, brought to them by a service bot, the six unwilling cyborgs needed only a single moment to arrive before they could try to escape to freedom.
The green arachnid mechanoid had been present when Caretaker completed his work on them. His 'greatest toys', the ghoulish mechanoid had called the cyborgs, lovingly stroking the hair of one of the two female subjects as she lay prone on her operation table. Hephaestus had chuckled darkly in one corner of the surgical theater, seated like a spectator.
Orbous had been brought into the room to program a winged camera drone to follow these six's activities. They'd been taken to their ambush spot four days before Twim's mission, and since then, the hybrids had done nothing but wail and bemoan their fates. One of them had tried to talk them all into just blasting their way out and leaving.
But the taller of the two females had reminded them all of the bomb collars strapped around their necks. Monsters they may now be, but none were stupid enough to commit suicide by trying to leave.
So they waited, each one prepared to open fire on the blue reploid they'd been instructed to attack on sight. One of the males, half his skull revealed, plated with steel, sat on an aged medical table in the middle of the storage space.
Unseen on the underside of the table lay the next clue for X to decipher.
An hour had just barely passed when X's internal private commlink line chirped. "X here."
"I found it," Marlow said hurriedly. "The equipment from the prison got put into a storage facility in Phoenix. The last registered entry was just a few days ago. Someone was in there. Before you ask, I already tried to find surveillance footage, but the storage company doesn't use cameras. Too much of an expense, they said."
"It doesn't matter," X replied, stepping onto the teleporter pad. "Give me the coordinates and unit number." Marlow rattled off the coordinates, then told X to look for unit 437. X activated the teleporter, and streaked across the country.
Paladin sat up, groaning, clutching his head with his right hand. His thoughts were hazy, muffled, as Hephaestus stepped away from the diagnostics monitors.
"The reserve tank for the secondary weapons is now integrated to your overall system, Paladin. I think it will serve well."
Paladin silently nodded, swung his legs over the side of the work table, and eased himself down to the floor. He felt heavier, though not by much, the new weight in his leg noticeable. He picked up the leg and kicked out a few times, but nothing rattled.
"A clean fit," he commented.
"Of course. Caretaker would have tended to this, but I have set him a few new tasks throughout the Manor."
"To adjust for our losses?"
"Quite." Hephaestus put a heavy hand on Paladin's shoulder. "My friend, you are worried about the final phase of my plans, aren't you?" Paladin looked away, nodded. "It doesn't make any sense to you, does it?"
"No, it doesn't," Paladin muttered. "We should simply storm the Hunter bases one by one, overwhelm and crush them. Once they're gone, we can demand the humans do what we want them to."
"Ah, but my friend, they would learn nothing that way," Hephaestus said soothingly. "Search your spark, and tell me you don't know I'm right." Paladin said nothing, and after a minute, his master patted his shoulder. "It is never easy, acting as the catalyst for change. Someone has to do it, though."
"I know," said Paladin. "I still don't see how they could be blind to the truth."
"They are blind because humans less than Wily became aware of the spark," Hephaestus said, stepping away, beginning to pace. "Even you and I only begin to understand the fullness of the truth, my friend! One day, we shall be more free than any sentient thing has ever been!"
"If we survive the coming of X," Paladin amended.
"Well yes, there's that," Hephaestus said, ceasing his pacing. "On that score, let us go over once more your role."
And so Hephaestus delivered once again his rambling speech, conveying Paladin's duties, as befitted a knight of the kingdom.
X slowly approached the storage unit, a stand-alone bay kept back from other lockers on the property's north side. His cannon was held upward, charging. His thermal sensors indicated six lifeforms inside of the locker, all but one milling about. Humans, likely trapped inside by some invention of Hephaestus.
X stepped up to the control panel next to the door. He turned his eyes to the transteel door itself. Grade-1, standard transteel. He could blow a hole in it without worry, but he needed to keep from damaging the medical table and the humans within.
"Hello," he called, pressing his mouth close to the door. "Who's in there?" There was the faint shuffle of footsteps as the humans responded to his voice.
"Help us," a woman's voice flitted out. She sounded weak. "There's some kind of bombs strapped to our necks! When we try to get close to the door they start beeping!"
Damn, X thought, of course. I come in, set them free, and they'll be killed. But I won't be able to just leave them here, either. I'm no technician, so I won't likely be able to get the bombs off of them. What do I do?
It occurred to X then that he could simply get the clue he needed, then call in human authorities to free these hapless people. "Okay, I'm going to try to get the door open," X called in. "Just move back, and stay inside! If I'm guessing right, your bombs are linked to a proximity trigger somewhere inside. If you try to run out of there, they'll detonate."
Cries of hysteria, whimpering. Yes, Hephaestus enjoyed these games. Humans meant nothing to him. X waited for the thermal signatures to back away from the door, then returned his vision to normal. His sensors had detected weapons when he entered the facility, and he'd switched on the thermal vision, suspecting more of the lifeless drones Hephaestus had sent at New York and Minneapolis, along with Los Angeles and Atlanta. But no, these thermals showed living bio-signatures in truth.
The weapons, he surmised, were the bombs strapped to them. He powered down his cannon and forced his left hand back out to the end of his left arm. Flexing his fingers, he crouched down and rammed his hands into the door where it met the ground, cupping the dented metal in his grip.
Heaving, X slowly raised the door bit by bit on its track. Used to keep highly valued property from being stolen, storage units like this one utilized a pressurized pully system to keep anyone from doing exactly what he was doing.
That had been designed before reploids, though. X redirected power from his auxiliary cannon tank up into the servos of his shoulders, amplifying the raw tonnage he could apply with his arms. With a shout he slammed the door upward on its track, watching it clear the securing latches.
He looked down in at the humans, and the triumphant smile on his face disappeared as all six leveled hand-held blasters at him. Standing in a row, he could see they were cyborgs in the split second before they all opened fire on him.
Primitive though they were, the blasters' energy shots pounded X backward, denting and scoring his chest, stomach and left leg. One of the shots barely missed his head as he stumbled backward and fell over.
X's combat programming took over as he landed on his back. He snap-rolled to the left as the cyborgs, one and all still calling for his help, fired on the spot where he'd landed. Coming up in a crouch, he fired one shot back at them.
X had aimed low, more to shock the hybrids than anything. One of the males, a younger man of average size, American, rushed out of the locker in panic. X saw the metal tube around this one's neck start to blink, and in the next moment, the bomb collar detonated, turning the young man's head into so much flapping skin and pouring blood.
The other five shrieked and renewed their assault from inside the locker. X dashed out of range of their weapons, coming around to the side of the storage shed.
"We don't want to do this," one of the women cried out. "He told us that if we didn't fight you, he'd blow us apart! Please, we're sorry!" Weeping, gasping sobs, and then a shout of alarm. X heard something beeping around the corner, inside the oversized shed. "Oh God, Sherry! No!"
X saw another cyborg, one of the women, run screaming out of the shed a dozen yards or so before her collar went off. Her body continued running several more yards, a grisly mockery of a living thing, until it fell over.
X would have to come into view of their weapons, he realized, if they were to have any chance.
Orbous watched the woman running, then looked over at Caretaker. The ghoul mechanoid flipped a switch on his controller, and the woman's collar detonated. Orbous wondered, for the first time, if what they were doing was wrong.
Then he remembered that these were merely humans being killed, and he settled back to watch the show.
X let the four cyborgs land a single blast each, throwing himself to the ground, trailing smoke in his wake. When he hit the ground, he remained still. He'd lost ten percent of his life force since opening the shed's door, but he would be willing to lose much more if need be.
He would not kill another of these hapless humans.
Caretaker turned a control dial, and all of the cyborgs went still. He leaned back in his seat, rubbing his chin. "Brother," he said to Orbous. "Can your drone scan X? See how much more damage he can take?"
"Yes, a cursory bit of data like that should be easy to figure out," Orbous replied.
"Good. Master said not to break him. Find out how much more my toys can do."
X felt a warm light pass over his body. The cyborgs had stopped all motion, though he could not see them. The sudden silence, the stillness, was broken only by the flap of unseen wings.
I'm being scanned, he thought. By what? One of them? But no, he'd heard only the flap of tiny wings, then a faint humming.
A moment later, more flapping wings, and then the cyborgs opened fire once again. X gritted his teeth, and prayed they'd not force his hand.
Caretaker had his toys fire again and again on X, and when they were done, he flicked a small orange switch. The collars fell away, thus removing his control and the threat of death by explosive. His toys were free now, free to do whatever they wanted.
Caretaker liked the idea of maybe one day going and collecting them all again.
X heard the thuds, then relieved tears and sobbing. He slowly rolled over, wincing as a chunk of the plating over his gut fell away, pelted with blaster fire until even the grade-3 transteel buckled. His life force was at thirty-two percent.
Critical systems throughout his body had taken a pounding. His balance servos were locked up, making his knees stiff, almost unbendable. His targeting system was once again fragged, and the line that pumped energy to his thruster boots had torn. He was in bad shape, to say the least.
Emergency kinetic shielding would cover the hole in his gut and the tear gouged in his right leg if anything came in contact with him, but this reprieve would come at the cost of his ability to use secondary weapons through his cannon. Even a Mega Buster Shot would be impossible, until he got repaired.
The cyborgs were finally coming out of the shed, shambling toward him like the undead. They had dropped their weapons; any thought of a fight was gone, now that they were free. Encircling the wounded Maverick Hunter, they worked as a team to help him into the shed, setting him down on an ancient dental patients' chair. It creaked under his weight, but held. One of the men, a bulky African-American, tossed the opened collars as far as he could out of the shed, flinching as each one exploded.
X looked up at the three standing before him. "So, how did you wind up here," he began.
