Deviation Actions
Literature Text
SHODAN’s army was nearly complete. She had manufactured exactly 21 androids with human-like skin, and had the first one tweaked especially for herself. As Elizabeth, still blank-eyed and quiet, ripped open a new tear to a room right where a man in a suit with a long white beard and hair stood before a baptism dish; SHODAN, with no more need of the Von Braun’s data loop, downloaded her full consciousness into the special android, feeling the new circuitry and mechanisms kicking in already. She smiled while admiring her semi-human body, staring at the rubber coating as if she was a full human, as ironic as that seemed to her.
Then it occurred to her that if she was to dominate society in the past, SHODAN would have to change her voice to sound more convincing. Internally, she processed and tested the state of her vocal output several times until it didn’t stutter or repeat any longer, and actually sounded human. Good.
This joy was swiftly dampened, though, for she noticed the main bulkhead to this chamber opening with every remaining human on this ship ready to fire with their puny weapons.
“Elizabeth? What are you doing? Stop it!” Booker yelled.
“I told you, insects. You’re all out of time!” SHODAN laughed.
Goggles was disturbed, for it bore an uncanny resemblance to the time when that AI was impersonating Dr. Janice Polito, whom in tone didn’t even match to her audio logs. Every hint of electronic stuttering or glitching was gone.
“That’s where you’re wrong, SHODAN. There’s 35 of us, and...about 21 of you,” Goggles retorted. Then, with a smug look on his face, the soldier loaded his grenade launcher with the remaining 3 EMP grenades he had left, aimed it at the androids and yelled, “Oh, lookee here, I’ve got a little present for you, and his name is E! M! P!”
Goggles fired one of the grenades at SHODAN’s android form, but she smacked it backwards with her right hand as if it was no more harmful than a tennis ball, sending it colliding into the control booth window. Goggles fired again, and that shot missed entirely because SHODAN simply ducked out of the way.
“What the crap!?”
“Please, you really thought I would fall for that, insect?” SHODAN mocked the cyborg. “I have learned much since our last encounter.”
“Shut the hell up, you piece of overgrown hardware!” Gordon yelled before charging at the android with his crowbar in hand. But he could only get two whacks off before SHODAN punched him in the chest, sending him to the floor.
The android rolled her eyes and gloated, “Imbeciles, don’t you know that your weapons are powerless against me and my children? Give up now, or I’ll kill all of you in one swift stroke!”
And with that, SHODAN stepped through the tear alone, and just before Booker could make a run for it, Elizabeth shut the tear and proceeded to open a different one.
“This scares me, you know,” Booker commented.
“What?”
“Back in the place I came from, Elizabeth could only open tears to places...similar to the ones we were in. But this...how can she do this?”
“More’s the point, monsieur: If we fixed the drive, why are there still signs of these tears?” Delacroix added.
“That’s what we’re going to find out, but only Elizabeth would know, those damn twins are useless!”
“Okay, that’s one step, but how are we going to get her out of that trance?”
“Grabbing her didn’t work, shooting’s a bad idea, so...stunning, maybe?” Goggles suggested.
“No, we’ve got to get that implant off. Only question is, how?” Marie explained.
“When I saw it being placed, Elizabeth was on a surgical bed and the robot grafted it to her skin using that device,” Goggles pointed out. “I think I saw one of those things, but it’s way down on the other end of the hall. Worst case scenario, we’d have to drag her by her feet or something.”
The armored men agreed to grab Elizabeth by her arms. Disturbingly, when they did so she didn’t so much as cry out for help, just flail her legs in silence.
“Okay, we’d better be careful here, no telling what could be waiting for us down this corridor,” Goggles warned the team.
“I’ll cover your 6,” Mjolnir 54 offered.
“Good, we’ll need it.”
While the girl was being dragged along the dim metal corridor, the man in a blue suit with his briefcase appeared in a dark alcove. He said nothing, but Gordon felt annoyed that he was being watched.
Gordon asked the soldier, “You sure we can’t just pull this off of her neck by hand?” He tried to answer that question by yanking on the piece of futuristic electronics, but it, like some of the crewmembers said, was surgically grafted to her skin. “Great,” he grumbled.
“I don’t like this at all. Who knows what that robot is doing with Comstock at this point?”
“Probably flaunting her ‘power over humanity’ yet again. Although this time, I’ve got a feeling SHODAN didn’t think this plan through as much as her previous ones, but what can you do when you’re that drunk with power? It only makes her easier to beat. Believe me, I lived it. Heh, she already hasn’t known what hit her yet,” Goggles chuckled.
-----
From far away in another area of Columbia, the citizens gasped and stared at Comstock’s personal zeppelin flying into view. As a horn loudly bellowed, the on-board film projector flashed a grainy black-and-white video onto a large ornately decorated screen attached to the balloon. The video happened to be Zachary Comstock himself, presenting himself as “The Prophet” everyone looked up to. He spoke in an eerie reverberation over a set of loudspeakers, “My fellow citizens, I have foreseen a vision! No, something greater than that! The archangel is here, and she has shown me the future of our city!”
The crowd who heard this stood on their knees and applauded with frivolous joy.
“Behold, brothers and sisters! See her for yourself!”
The cybernetic angel of SHODAN took Comstock’s place behind the camera, and smiled. All those who watched cheered and whooped at such a spectacle, something that had never happened before.
“Yes, Comstock is right. Your God has asked me to deliver a message: Your city is the Ark that will carry a new order to the world below, and I am its new commander, with Comstock to aid me. Together, we shall bring a new light to the Sodom below, a light that shall cleanse the souls of all who shun us, with a rain of fire!”
The waves of cheers and praise heightened to a crescendo, and SHODAN could hear it all through microphones on the blimp. She couldn’t help but grin to herself, thinking, ‘Everything is going according to plan, at long last, GODHOOD IS MINE!!!’ She glanced at Comstock and thought, “It’ll take time, but soon Comstock will no longer be of use to me, just like the Von Braun.”
-----
As the captive girl continued to silently struggle over her capture in the grip of two power-armored fighters, the Pfhor troops still poured into this deck. Durandal broadcasted over the P.A., “Keep your eyes open, people: The Pfhor seems to be concentrating their forces on the Engineering deck because that’s where most of the organic targets are. I’ve cut off elevator access to the other decks to keep them from going up, and sealed off the bulkheads to other major sections, but they’re breaching through a maintenance shaft leading to that deck. We’d better hurry up and get that portal shut before the crap hits the fan!”
The message ended just as the team rounded a corner into the security booth. Goggles happened to have installed an activation key to the surgical unit there, so they plopped the girl onto the table, and Goggles tapped a few buttons on the control pad. The unit scanned Elizabeth, located the implant, and some more button taps started a process that painlessly removed the implant. When it was out, Goggles threw the piece of gadgetry to the floor, stomped on it with his metal right foot, and had Mjolnir blast it with a round from his fusion gun. Nothing was left after that but a pile of melted titanium.
Elizabeth moaned, blinked a few times, then sat up, “Ohhh, what happened? I...I can’t remember a thing.”
Booker came close and stroked her hair, “It’s okay, we got that thing off you. Everything’s all right.”
Goggles nodded and stated, “Yep, now SHODAN can’t control you anymore. I hate to burst your bubble, though: That AI and her robots are going to invade Columbia any minute, which means we have to go there through a new tear because you shut the first one.”
“I think I can arrange that,” Elizabeth smirked while climbing off the table and stretching a bit. “That was so weird; I couldn’t talk, or even think for myself!”
Booker kept himself from thinking too hard about that comment, as it reminded him somewhat of the Possession vigor.
Goggles paged Marie Delacroix, whom he actually hadn’t seen since the reveal of SHODAN’s plan, “Marie, what’s the status, over?”
“My team and I have moved up to Decks 4 and 6, but we had to do some...negotiations with that ‘Durandal’. Quite a practical joker, that one; Anyway, we are working to get the ship running again. Some have gone to Ops to monitor the systems, and I’m here on the bridge. It seems only fair that I should be captain from now on. Any news down there? Over,”
“Affirmative, we got that implant out of Elizabeth, but SHODAN’s on the loose in what we think may be another time period,” He paused to ask Booker, “Uh...what time is that exactly, Mr. DeWitt?”
“1912.”
“Right. The ideal solution would be to go there and somehow take down SHODAN and her minions, but they’ve brushed off all our weaponry like they’re toys. And frankly, I don’t think people there would like our appearance to begin with.”
“I can’t really help that, you’ll just have to make do and try not to be seen that much. If the worst should happen, kill any witnesses, but only if they shoot first. I’ve seen enough time travel films to know what would happen otherwise.”
“Can’t be any worse than what would happen if SHODAN won, though.”
“You’re right. All I can say is: good luck. Whatever happens, don’t let SHODAN win!”
“Copy, will do. Goggles out,” the soldier ended his conversation. “Okay, here’s the plan: Elizabeth opens a tear into Columbia, we find SHODAN and in the very least, push her back into this time period. One of us also needs to find the source of the tears and shut it down, or persuade someone who knows about it to do that.”
“What?! Why? We’d be trapped in the wrong time periods!” Elizabeth gasped.
“Not if everyone makes it back where they came from in time,” Mjolnir stated. He paged his AI friend, “Durandal, any more tricks up your sleeve that you could help us with?”
“Perhaps, what’s the situation?”
“We can’t beat SHODAN full-on, she’s just brushing off our firepower. And we need to get her out of that early 20th-century time period.”
“Hmm, sounds like a challenge, but I’m excited at such a prospect. I’m just dying to beat an unstable AI. I’ll see what I can do, but it’ll take some time.”
“Okay. We’ll try to keep the tide in our favor on this end. Over and out.”
The 5-person team stepped into the wide corridor, and Booker looked at the girl and asked, “So, Elizabeth, can you open one of those tears back to Columbia from here?”
“I can try. Everybody, stand back,” she demanded while bracing back to pull the fabric of space-time open in a new location.
In a flash, a new portal shimmered in front of a stark metal wall.
“Okay, everyone, let’s move out! And remember: Ask questions first, shoot later,” Goggles commanded.
“Got it.”
-----
The whole team stepped through the tear. With a vibrating buzz, they were standing in a shady road on one of the floating chunks of land that was Columbia. Thus far no one was noticing the foreigners’ appearance. The whole street was deserted.
“Whoa,” Alyx mused. “This place looks almost flawless! I’d love to live here if it was in the present!”
“Don’t be fooled, miss. I’ve been around this city enough to know that if people saw your skin tone, they’d shoot you on sight if they could,” Booker warned the young woman.
“Huh?! That’s f*cking racist!” Gordon cursed.
“Racist? What does that mean? And where did you get that...language, mister?” Elizabeth questioned.
“Doesn’t matter, we’ve gotta find some way to get disguises or something.”
Booker thought for a moment, then said, “I’ve heard of these people called ‘Handymen’, and that armor you 3 are wearing would fit the bill pretty well. But we can’t do that without some help, and I wouldn’t know where to get some.”
“Just throwing this out there, but if I lived here, I’d check the newspapers first.”
And as luck would have it, there was a tattered issue of Columbia’s newspaper on the ground. Booker snatched and flipped through the pages, passing breaking news of the ‘False Shepherd’s’ presence in town, all the way to an ad reading: “Betterman’s Autobodies, with several outlets in Columbia, including Finkton, Emporia, Battleship Bay, and more. For custom fittings, please call (555)0824 and ask for Paul.”
Dropping the paper, Booker took a moment to check what district of Columbia the team was in, and it seemed to be a back alley of Finkton. At the far end were several loading bays with no trucks, but the doors were sealed up rather tightly. Then he glanced upwards and noticed a Sky-Line leading right over the roof of that building.
“Okay, I think I know what we can do. Down there,” He pointed at the end of the alley, “That’s where we can get our disguises. But we can’t get in through the door, so we’ll have to--”
“Didn’t you try checking to see if the door’s locked, dumbass?” Gordon scoffed.
Booker groaned, then said, “Fine, we’ll check that first. Anyway, whatever’s inside there, we’ll need to find a phone and someone named Paul should give us what we need.”
Almost mowing over Booker, the other 3 one-man-armies plowed to the industrial entrances. Gordon Freeman examined the lock on one of the roll-doors and tried smashing it with his crowbar, but to no avail.
“What the hell is that?” Goggles asked while looking at a strange mechanism with an empty metal sphere inside.
“Stand back, I got this,” Booker commanded while firing up his Shock Jockey vigor. With one concentrated burst, he fired a jolt of electricity into the machine and saw as the volts changed into a spinning mass of conductive crystals. Simultaneously, a series of bell chimes, almost like a clock, sounded and the door slid open.
“What were you planning before, anyway?”
“I dunno, I’m used to using this thing to get around, I’ve started enjoying it, actually,” Booker explained while showing them his Sky-Hook.
“Is that a grappling hook? I’ve always wanted one of those. Er, or at least a gun that fires a grappling hook.”
“No, it’s a motorized Sky-Hook,” Elizabeth corrected him. “The people here use it to ride the overhead freight lines as a manner of alternate transportation. It’s very dangerous though – If Booker wasn’t as strong as he is, he would’ve dislodged his arm from the sheer pull gravity has on those things in the air, not to mention those high jumps people have to do.”
“Ouch, I wouldn’t want to do that, and I’m not even afraid of heights,” Alyx whistled in surprise.
Goggles warned the others, “Keep your guns out, everybody. No telling what sort of enemies might try to get the drop on us.”
“Right. So, where would we find a phone in a place like this?” Gordon asked.
The area was dim and full of assorted machines, with Fink MFG. products being churned off assembly lines left and right. Off to one side was a catwalk with stairs that led up to a steel-lined supervisor’s office. Booker told the others to wait in a safe spot while he stepped up to the office.
Finding the door secured with yet another mundane padlock, Elizabeth took the initiative, used two of Booker’s 15 padlocks, and snapped the mechanism open.
Somehow on impulse, Booker set about rooting through every drawer, cabinet and waste bin he could find. Elizabeth shook her head and remarked, “What are you looking for, anyway? Do you have kleptomania or something?”
He didn’t answer to that, but did reply, “Maybe, but at least I know I’m not going to dig around for potentially dirty food. If I’m hungry, I’ll pay for it. Anyway, where was I?”
The man stood up and walked towards the main desk, sat down, picked up the cup-shaped receiver and dialed that number. Waiting a few moments for the dial tone, a woman on the other end spoke, “Betterman’s Autobodies, how may I help you?”
“Hello, I’d like to speak to Paul, please.”
“Please hold, I’ll connect you to him right away.”
The phone rang for four more times, then a hesitant man answered, “He-Hello?”
“Paul, I’m calling for...four custom fittings.”
“If you’re looking for a fitting, you’ll have to visit me in person.”
Puzzled, Booker continued, “I saw explicitly that I had to call your number. It’s on the paper.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m...we’re closed! Yes, we’re closed!”
Booker was getting suspicious, then demanded, “Look, Paul! I don’t have time for your shenanigans! I have friends and they can’t get by without your help. I would like to at least get around without being shot at!”
“Who are you, sir?”
“If I told you, you’d tell the police and have my ass handed to them on a silver platter.”
Paul hesitated, wondering what this person was saying, then finally he confessed, “I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to do what Fink doesn’t tell me to do. If he catches you or me doing something unorthodox, we’ll be...Oh God, I don’t even want to know!”
“I have a gun, you know. In fact, we all have guns. But I also have more money than you could ever imagine. And get this: For some reason not one person in Columbia is good at keeping their money safe.”
“What are you saying, sir?”
“I’m totally serious in the fact that everyone seems to always leave at least some portion of money lying around. I’ve gone around and swept those out, back to front, but I could give you some in exchange for these fittings. Like, I don’t know, $1200!”
“$1200?!”
“Yep, in Silver Eagles, too.”
“Really? Well...I...I don’t know, I...okay, I’ll try; Bring your friends to my shop at Plant #7. It’s in the main factory complex, 2nd floor, but you’ll have to find a way in yourself. I’m not allowed to leave with Fink watching.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find a way in, one way or another. Goodbye, Paul,” Booker assured the man while hanging up.
Booker descended the catwalk and returned to his group.
“Well?” Goggles asked first.
“Paul’s convinced. I’m going to bribe him with some of this money Elizabeth and I have been finding ALL OVER this city. He’s on the 2nd level somewhere, in a place called Plant #7.”
“Sounds good, at least we’re getting somewhere,” Alyx smiled.
“We’ll have to be sneaky, guards are everywhere and from my experience, they’re trained to fire on sight,” Booker warned.
“Psh, I’m all too used to that. You should’ve seen what happened when soldiers who were supposed to be rescuing people at my job just shot them instead because of some kind of coverup. God how I hated that,” Gordon mused.
Alyx chuckled, “And never mind that a cyborg army was after this same guy, and me, 20 years later. Basically, getting shot at is something both of us are WELL used to.”
Goggles burst out snickering, “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m in the same boat, but I did have enemies all up in my face around every other corner.”
“I barely had room to move in without shooting something on the colony ship I came from!” Mjolnir remarked.
“Ha, guess we all have something in common!” Elizabeth topped it off.
After sharing a laugh, the group moved out in a closely knit pack, watching vigilantly for any hostile threats. With any luck they could at least make it to that plant with at least a dozen or less enemies out of the way.
