Chapter Forty Nine

Gerald

Gerald glances down at his watch one more time before slowing to a panting walk. He’s been running for an hour straight now. He still can’t believe he escaped with his life. He damn near broke both of his legs sliding sixty feet down the slanted metal side of the precinct and then falling another fifteen to the pavement. With so much destruction going on all around, no one was able to catch him escaping. He had to ditch his rifle, armor, phone, and everything he could that might get him caught. Now, he’s just some sweaty dude in pants and a grey t-shirt. Despite being in a tough spot again, he grins as big as he ever has in his life.

“You did it, you finally got those fuckers!”

It never crossed his mind what he’d do after getting ahold of the pendants. Escaping was merely an afterthought that he pulled off on the spur of the moment. Anything he gets after this is a bonus. If there’s a chance in hell of him getting scooped up by a Lion’s Group crew somewhere, he might just get that island life he and Cris had talked about. Now that the hard part is over, he’s starting to come down off his adrenaline rush, and it’s making him crash. He needs to find somewhere to hunker down and stay out of sight for the night, doesn’t matter where.

Before turning down an alley, he looks behind himself one more time. There’s still smoke rising above the metropolis, and trailing all the way to SSS too. As fast as the robots were tearing through the city, he figures they got to Sy with time to spare. They probably got stomped real good. It makes him so damn happy, it’s crazy. Maybe one day he’ll be thought of as a hero for doing what had to be done. Either way, avenging Cris will always be enough for him.

Down in the lab, Gabriel’s freshly dead body lays piled up on a flat stainless steel cart out front of the clean-room. Valerie has tried to get Five to wake up, but she’s completely unresponsive. She doesn’t have enough time to figure out what’s wrong with her and also save what’s left of Gabriel. It’s one or the other. She’s already on the verge of a panic attack and now, of all times, the whole responsibility of a mind transfer has been heaped upon her.

If it were simply her choice alone, she’d love to dump the entire body in the waste bin and forget about it. The irony is just fantastic. Five would be beside herself if she let Gabriel rot though. That, and everyone else is expecting her to prove herself and the project. Sy has been patiently waiting for this, the main event, the day they prove they can still pull it off. If she doesn’t come through on this, he’ll throw her out on her ass for sure. He already counts her as being trouble.

She takes the huge knife out of the sheath on Five’s thigh and looks at it. The handle of it is shaped just like Arma, but she has big long horns coming out of her head that are bonded to the blade. It reminds her of Aaron’s knife. The thing is way too heavy, and ungodly sharp. Instead of muscling Gabriel’s entire body over to the meat saw, she raises the knife up over her head and slams the length of it down across his neck. His head comes off quick and clean, almost rolling over the edge and onto the floor.

Even after going through all of the meat and bone, the obtuse angle of the tanto blade still manages to punch a hole through the top of the cart. All the warm blood that’s been pooling in the shallow stainless pan is now drizzling all over the floor. The sudden warm smell of it makes her retch. She almost empties her stomach yet again when she looks down on his dead face. His bloody, wet, mop-like hair sags down between her fingers while she holds it. It’s a lot heavier than she expected, and incredibly slippery in her black nitrile gloves. His fat face is all squishy and still warm. She’ll never be able to cook a ham again after this, not in her life.

She dumps Gabriel’s severed head in the transfer drawer and quickly gowns up to go in on the other side. While holding her chin up and keeping only one eye open, she picks the severed head up by its hair again and clamps it into the pronged cranium vice on the countertop. Just like she was taught, she scalps his head, pulls the surrounding flesh down, and gently cuts the top half of the skull off.

More steamy vapor pours off his brain into the cold air in the room when she uncaps it. She finds it strange that he never mentioned anything about how gory all this would be when he was teaching them. It makes her think about how many times he’s done this all by himself. She counts Five, Arma, Paul, and then Aaron. She heard that he was quite the sight after he was burned alive.

When she unintentionally takes in a full breath, catching the full smell of the raw brain, it’s finally too much for her. She scurries over to the waste barrel and heaves up everything she can. After berating herself for being so squeamish, she musters the courage to go back and keep on going. With Gabriel’s instructive voice replaying in her head, she methodically removes more surrounding bone, pulls his brain out, rinses it off in cold water, and starts bathing it in the aldehyde mix to stabilize it.

For the next hour, she continuously agitates his brain in the chemical bath and injects more of the fluid into everywhere she’s supposed to. Her notes are on the table, but she hasn’t needed to look at them eve once. After a while, when the brain starts to become noticeably more solid. She can really feel the difference of it in her hands now. The whole thing has become quite firm, like it were made of wax. After taking it out of the bath, she lets it drip off on a soft pad in the cooling hood and gets everything ready for the next step.

Like the three of them had practiced, she floats the brain mass in the blue holding gel at half the depth of the clear mold box and waits for it to start firming up. While she waits for the gel to finish curing, she boots up the scanning system and goes through the checklist to make sure it will all function correctly. If it goes down in the middle of an operation, it could cause a serious problem, and she’s not as tech savvy as the other two.

After powering it up and initiating the operation prep program, the slicing machine raises its cutting drum up to the home position and then goes through the motions of a few practice cuts. The imager inside flashes a couple times and gives her a diagnostic readout. Onscreen, it tells her that it did not discover any artifacts or anomalies in the blank base images, giving her the all-clear.

After she pours the next batch of the gel-set into the mold box to finish completely encasing the brain, she waits and frets about Five. She tries to take a break while things finish setting up for a few hours, but she can’t get herself to wind down. She’s so nervous, she’s shaking. Out of nowhere, tears start to run down her face. She really needed Five for this.

When she gets back over to where she left Five, on another one of the stainless carts next to where Gabriel was, she shakes her one more time to see if there’s any kind of a response. Her body is in bad shape again. Most of one of her arms is missing, and what’s left is burnt all to hell. The others said she had used a lightning cannon to bring down the mech. If it fried her too, it’s going to mean a complete rebuild. Five will lose the entire last week. She’ll lose Aaron and Arma all over again, and who knows what else.

She closes her eyes and wipes her face off before feeling for and finding the seam in the skin on Five’s side. It has about the same feel to it as a scar from a surgical incision. She peels up the self-sticking layer and then pulls the locking seam apart. If she got fried, it should be evident enough on the main power bus inside of her. In a big wave of relief, she finds everything to be spotless inside. Her heart jumps at the sight of what’s causing her to be offline like this. Her thermal circuit has been thrown, but not from being shocked. Her eyes go wide at the thought of what it took to make such a thing happen. Her battery had to have nearly caught fire, It’s the last failsafe before some pretty serious damage.

Even after resetting the thermal switch, the status bar on her battery won’t even blink when she pushes on its soft check-button. Praying that’s all it is, she scurries into the lab to grab a fresh new cell out of the supply cabinet. She hasn’t forgotten what happened with Marco, when he plugged a new battery into Arma after she hadn’t been shut down properly. Not wanting to drag Five all the way into the scanning lab to secure her in the tilting frame, she climbs on top of her, and holds her down with her weight. She takes one last look at Five’s gentle face and lets out a long anxious breath.

The second she plugs the new battery in, she braces for a rough start. Five jerks and twists underneath her. Her arm flies up in front of her face, as if trying to protect herself from being struck by something. Her mouth opens wide to scream, but nothing comes out. Slowly, Five calms down and takes a peak around herself, confused. She looks like she can’t believe she’s there, and alive.

“Holy crap. I was having the craziest… wait… are we in the lab?”

Valerie laughs and wipes the tears off her face. “Yeah, we’re in the lab Five. We’re all ok.” The timer on her wrist communicator starts chirping, and she looks behind herself to the processing room. “Well, almost all of us.”

Five spots the soles of a pair of shoes hanging over the end of a steel cart behind Valerie. “Oh no. How many did we lose? Who was it?”

“Just one… Gabriel.”

Five’s mouth drops open in shock. “Wha… how the hell’d that happen? He fall down the stairs?”

That gets her to laugh, but then she tries to be serious. “No, he’s the one who stole the flatbed and rammed it into that mech. What they found of him was not pretty.”

Five nudges Valerie up off of her and rolls over to get up. For a minute, she’d forgotten half her arm got blown off. “Sy’s not gonna be happy about this.”

Valerie’s eyebrows are up again. “You literally saved home base, singlehandedly. You took down a fukin war mech by yourself Five. Sy, and everyone else, owes you whatever you want, for the rest of your life.”

“Wow. Yeah I guess. Did Gabriel really do that?”

She looks back to the clean room and then down to her wrist com again. “Yeah. He’s ready to slice up right now. All I need to do is plop his brain block in the deli slicer. Machine’s already all warmed up.”

For the moment, all Five can seem to do is stare at everything in disbelief. “Um, ok. So whatta we do now?”

While she gowns back up to finish processing Gabriel’s brain, she has Five stay out in the main room to take care of the other work, like making a label for his memory drive and confirming the first data transfer. After that, Five resigns to getting the mop out, for all the blood. There’s quite a mess to clean up.

After Valerie gently sets the firm gel block down in the slicing machine’s holding box, she steps back and touches the green cycle start icon on its screen. Even though she’s seen the thing operate before, its abrupt startup still makes her jump. The big white spinning drum winds up to RPM, abruptly drops down to the starting level, and starts rapidly chopping away at the solid blue cube.

As each nearly clear thin layer is sliced off of the brain, the vacuum system sucks it away and tosses it in the fifty five gallon waste drum over in the corner of the room. For a few minutes, she watches the hypnotic flashing of the scanner as it strobes over each new exposed layer of the pinkish grey tissue.

When she turns around to head out, Five is standing at the window with one of her hands held to the glass. She’s sad about what happened to Gabriel, and is afraid for him. They both know it’s never a guarantee that the process will be a success. If anything goes wrong with the slicer at any time, they could lose him for good. They still have hundreds of thousands of layers to go. The real surprise is that it has worked at all so far, let alone flawlessly over the last four scans. Failure is only statistically inevitable at some point, and it feels like they’re playing roulette with their souls.