Detective Marlow transferred the data X provided him with to a new folder titled 'Sept 14, 2152', and shook his head. Nothing seemed to have advanced much, in his opinion, since the first Labor Bot had been released in 2019. Sure, weapons and defense and even medical technologies had thrived, but the advent of intelligent robots had driven any other technological considerations so deep into the ground that only a mole could get at them. A mole on crack, he thought with a wry grin.
Take the famous reploid standing a few feet away, for example. Marlow didn't like him; it wasn't anything personal. He knew the history of X, like any other human on Earth. But meeting him in person felt no different than meeting any other mechanoid. There was a natural distrust wrapped around his mind of such things.
"I have a couple more questions for you, X," Marlow said, jotting down his question with a pen on a small notebook. X turned to face Marlow, and immediately felt his temper rise to a dangerous level. He didn't like this detective, not a bit. It wasn't anything personal; he was just too much of an anachronism for comfort. The man had arrived in an early-20th century sedan, the kind with no autopilot. Everything about the vehicle was manually operated, except for a gps system to navigate by. He used an old writing implement and notebook instead of a datapad for notation. And a minor detail, but telling to X's deep-ray analysis scanners; the man shaved with an old manual razor, instead of an Auto-Groomer.
Old world and new world met in a front that could spiral into a tornado under the right circumstances. These were not such, but close enough to keep everyone else on the scene well away from the human and the reploid.
"Ask, then," X said, clearly exasperated.
"How well did you know Mr. Fellows?"
"Not well at all," X said evenly, eyes on Marlow's hand as he scribbled on the pad. "I recall seeing him at the desk frequently."
"Mr. X, Mr. Fellows had been working here as a doorman and desk clerk for nine years. You mean to tell me you didn't know him at least a little bit?"
"Not to be rude, but he hardly registers in my memory banks," X huffed. "I've usually been too busy to notice him. Until recently, I rarely even made use of my apartment."
"So, you don't know if anyone might've wanted to harm him?"
"No, I don't. I know only his name, the fact that he worked the desk, and that he was apparently killed in a horrible fashion."
"You can say that again," chimed in the middle-aged medical examiner. Of course, middle-aged nowadays meant mid-to-late sixties; the average human life expectancy in 2152 was 140 to 150 years. "The shallow slashes came first, then the stab wounds to the major nerves. The bleeding from his throat finished him off, but he took a few minutes to die. My scanner says he bled out before he could drown on his own blood, but only by a minute or so. This man died badly."
X and Marlow looked each other in the eyes silently for a moment. Whoever had done this had been absolutely ruthless. Both men were now wondering who could possibly be so cruel, and how they had managed to disable the cameras in the lobby before killing Andrew Fellows.
When detective Marlow left, he had a sneaking suspicion a Maverick was finally active again, and that X and his organization had dropped the ball.
X, watching the detective leave, suspected the humans had a new psychotic on their hands, and that they had been the ones to mess things up. Each man was wrong, and only time would tell them how.
X tried not to think about the scene down in the lobby, but even as he pulled up his personal archives, his mind wandered back to the body. Fellows had been butchered, that much was plain. That such meticulous wounds had been delivered in a frenzy was out of range, though. He realized that now.
Each slash and stab had been crippling and clean. His own on-board analysis programs told him each wound had been delivered in less than a second. The whole attack had lasted maybe ten seconds.
No human was that fast, even with two knives.
So, a bot. A malfunctioning service bot, perhaps, but only the soldier-class ones would know how to wield weapons like that. Soldier-class bots all stayed on their assigned bases, though. Even malfunctioning ones could not leave their assigned zones.
Worker bots didn't have enough finesse for this either, he thought. That left only one possibility for X; a Maverick. There were over six-thousand reploids in Central City. Any one of them could have gone rogue. But of those six-thousand, only five-hundred were combat-readied. Of those, three-hundred and twelve were Hunters.
The remainder worked for law enforcement agencies. X shook his head, deciding to leave that trail go for the time being. He wasn't a cop. Until the local authorities could confirm the presence of a Maverick, he would not get involved.
So X used his home console to enter the restricted zone coordinates from Veris's gathered reports. The system immediately spat back information files, and he opened the first three.
The first one said 'Bubble Man Zone', and what followed was a description of a kind of half-submerged operations base. At the end of the report, the words "Wily Campaign 2. Summarily defeated by Megaman. Closed off for eventual recovery.'
X blinked numbly at the screen. He moved on to the second report. 'Gemini Man Zone', ending with "Wily Campaign 3. Summarily defeated by Megaman and Rush. Closed off for condemnation and recovery." The third one was the same, but for "Crystal Man Zone".
X didn't even have to go through the rest of the reports to figure out what he thought might be going on. Instead, he shut down his archive system, looked out of his window to the darkened city, and decided it was time to finally have a talk with his predecessor.
"Time to see you, Megaman," he whispered.
"You must submit to weapons lockdown, sir," the camouflaged, tank-like reploid said sternly. An exact twin of the heavy mechanoid stood to X's left, a giant turret cannon on its shoulder aimed squarely at his head. "There are no exceptions," the first one was saying.
X had expected high security at the Light Complex, but this seemed ridiculous. He and Zero were the senior most Hunters, for God'd sakes! Why would either of them cause trouble? With a sigh, he held out his left arm. The first heavy-duty reploid clamped a silvery ring device on it, and turned a key on the top, pulling it out.
"Sorry, sir. It's policy," the big man said in a humbled, almost ashamed, tone.
"It's okay," said X gently. "You're doing your duty. I commend you both." Even the silent twin looked away at that, and the meshed gates slid silently open for him. X stalked quickly inside the building.
The entrance chamber was a sprawling museum of sorts to Dr. Light and his achievements, the last of which was the design and initial stages of building Megaman X. X looked at the schematics of himself on a holographic display, and shuddered. He'd been so underpowered at first, it was a wonder he wasn't dead.
Curiously, there was no such display for Zero. X made a mental note of this, then passed into a long, narrow corridor filled on either side with enlarged photos of his predecessor, Megaman. Originally a young man in a mechanized suit, Rock had been forced to be fused into the suit over the course of his third and fourth campaigns against Dr. Wily, due to injuries sustained in battles. The last photo on the right before the hallway ended in a set of imposing black metal doors showed a weary Rock lying on a surgical table.
Under the framed photo was a digital reader, which X scanned through. It was a report/essay written by Dr. Light, talking about the very final procedure Rock had, the transfer of his brain and spinal cord into a brand new suit after his sixth campaign against Wily. Light delved into the philosophical throughout the paper, which was a rare departure for the esteemed roboticist.
Yet the project had paved the way for the advent of the reploid race. Shortly after Rock's eighth war against Wily and his robots, Light discovered in the wreckage of a recovered Robot Master something he called 'The Spark', a form of energy previously unidentified. In essence, Thomas Light had discovered the artificial soul of all sentient mechanoids.
A cult-like group of human scientists began studying spark phenomena shortly after Light's death in 2055. Reploids began making their appearance throughout the world three years later.
X shook off these thoughts and pushed through the black doors into a surprisingly normal-sized lounge of some sort. There were three plush leather couches in the center of the room, arranged in an incomplete square. Dominating the left wall was an enormous flat screen monitor. X felt a floor panel click under his feet as he looked right, spotting an open bathroom and a small dining area.
The screen on his left flickered to life, showing a maintenance chamber. Standing in the middle of the screen, tall and pale blue, was a smiling Megaman. Speakers hidden around the room crackled to life. "Well, I was starting to think you'd never visit," Megaman said with a smirk. X stared in wide wonder at the screen, squaring himself to face his predecessor.
"Sir, it is an honor," X said, snapping off a smart salute. Megaman returned the gesture.
"Have a seat," Megaman said, and X did, directly across from him. "So, I imagine you have a lot of questions."
"I'm sorry, I do, but it's taking me a moment to get used to this. Um, how are you in there? Your brain was organic."
"Dr. Light was able to use a brain scan to copy my thoughts and brainwave activity," Megaman said. "He then installed a miniature scanner in my helmet to record everything. I'm Rock, but I'm also not. My organic brain died back in 2061."
"Oh," said X quietly. "Then, your personality?"
"Dr. Tenkian, chairman of the Spark Research Council, was able to find what he called a 'Blank Spark' to install into this network. I have a spark, same as you."
"Ah, I see. This is all very confusing," X admitted.
"Tell me about it," Megaman replied wryly. "So, what did you want to know?"
"Okay, I suppose my first question is this; when you defeated Wily's Robot Masters, how did you absorb their weapon programs?" There was a pause as the scene on the monitor changed. Megaman was suddenly standing in a large power generator room, on the left side of the screen. Duct work and power panels lay broken, live wires slapping about everywhere. On the right side of the screen, crouched down, was a wounded robot with a stylized lightning bolt for a faceplate; Elecman.
Megaman's voice spoke from the speakers. "The program operation wasn't difficult. When I fired the final shot," Megaman said, as his representation on-screen fired a white power bullet at Elecman. The spheroid struck, and Elecman was thrown back, clouds of smoke and bits and pieces of metal frame flying apart. "My cannon immediately turned back into a hand. Then, the absorbing program began running."
X watched as Megaman stalked up to the downed Robot Master, opening a panel on his arm. He pulled out a connection cord, and pried open the side of Elecman's head unit. He plugged the cord in, and flashed twice with a red energy. "The cannon adapted the Robot Master's attack into a form I could use."
X contemplated the image before him as it began to fade, replaced by the previous view with one exception. Megaman was now seated in a tall-backed leather chair. "That's a little different than my own cannon. Mine absorbs latent energy from Mavericks' weapons systems throughout battle and reconfigures it to mimic their attacks."
"I know," said Megaman. "I have access to all but a dozen or so systems in the Hunter Organization. Those ones I can't get into employ some extremely potent defense setups. I can similarly access any civilian or external network if they're open and running defenses I can work through. There are plenty that I can't, and I don't do it often. But I do get bored in here sometimes."
"Are you aware of time passing?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes," Megaman said with a sigh, folding his arms over his chest. "I frequently turn off the internal clock on my primary drive so that I don't get antsy or bored. Now, anything else?"
X looked away for a minute, organizing his thoughts. He lined up several questions in his mind, then proceeded. "Do you know about the murder in my building earlier tonight?"
"Yes. Detective Marlow has already filed his initial report. He suspects a Maverick is on the prowl."
"Okay," said X. "Do you have access to the building's video surveillance logs?"
"Yes," said Megaman. There was a pause, then the screen flickered a moment before settling back to normal. "Sorry, I was retrieving the files for view and analysis."
"Good. Is there any sign of who cut the surveillance feed," X asked. He noticed a moment before, when the screen first came back on after the flicker, a small glitch in the lower-right portion of the screen. It had flashed by in milliseconds, but X knew what he'd seen.
It had been part of a file folder icon, and X had caught sight of the word 'Project' in the title. He would ruminate on that later.
"There is no visual trace of who cut the footage," Megaman said. "However, system readings from the building's security network show that a service panel along the roof was manually unlocked and opened. There's a trace of an access cable being disconnected in the basement core fifteen minutes later."
X blinked rapidly at this information. "Anything else?"
"Yes," said Megaman. "According to the logs, that maintenance panel didn't close again until after detective Marlow had left the scene. Footage from the street lamp across the road shows him leaving, and five minutes later, the access panel closed."
"Then the killer was still there," X breathed. "He was watching us."
"That does seem likely," said Megaman. Another flicker from the screen. X caught sight of the file folder in the bottom right corner of the screen this time; 'Omega Project'. Again, he filed this away for later consideration. "Listen, I'll soon have to go into a sweep mode to check for anomalies. I'm sure you've noticed some issues already with this interface."
"I did," said X evenly. "I didn't want to point it out. Thought it might be rude."
"That's never stopped you before, has it, X?" X grinned guiltily and shook his head. "I can take one last question. Anything you want." X thought for a moment, and decided to indulge one of his most recent curiosities.
"Megaman, I was designed by Dr. Light. Who was Zero first designed by?"
"Ah, yes, I've only been asked that by one other reploid, Zero himself. He visited just before heading to Moon Base 2."
"And?"
"Zero was initially designed by Dr. Franklin Reginald Wily, X." X gasped, staring wide-eyed at the monitor as it began to fade to black. "Your reaction to this information is about the same as Zero's was. Sorry if I've upset you."
And then the screen was dark, and X was left in silence.
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