I wrote this fifteen years ago. Although sorely tempted, I have not edited it. I thought it was trash, but a friend said maybe not. So I will let you guys be the judge. If the story concept is worth rewriting with my now 15+ years of experience as a writer, let me know.
~,<@ Technology is advancing at an almost overwhelming rate, but few of us take note of everything that’s going on outside of our world. Most people are more interested in the newest cellphones or Ipad so that things like the Higgs Boson particle and organic batteries are getting very little attention. This story gives us a glimpse of what might happen when we’ve advanced science and technology to the point we are practically able to rebuild Humans. Take heed, for this might be our not-to-distant future.@>,~
I’m not going to preach to you about the purity of the Human body and how adding artificial parts to our body is like shredding the Human soul. I can’t tell you the impact of having a bioengineered heart or lungs will have when judgment day comes.
I’m not going to give you a scientific lecture on all the new augmentation technology. Or tell you bioengineering is the only hope we have if we wish to evolve the Human race further.
Both of these arguments are valid, and you should listen to what everyone has to tell you and decide to make up your mind on what side you stand on if any.
I do, however, want to tell you a story about my older brother Felix. Before you groan or roll, your eyes let me assure you that it is a short story, limited to give you just the objective picture of what happened without the emotions of the people behind it.
My memories of Felix growing up are frayed and scattered throughout my mind, coming to me only in dreams or those rare moments when we see, hear, or smell something that sparks a vivid flashback. I can say for a surety, though, that I’ve forgotten how Felix looked before the accident. As I now only remember the way he looked after the doctors and scientists worked on him.
I was only six years old when he lost his face and, perhaps, depending upon how you look at it, his Humanity.
Felix was nine years older than me, so we went to separate schools and had different friends. As a teenager, Felix was often with his own group of friends. Or he was holing himself up in his room with the door locked as teenagers do. When I was younger, I think he was a bully that only picked on me but looking back; I contributed a fair share to our brotherly fights. There was no shortage of love in my family when I was younger. And Felix and I still cared about each other in a way that is more instinct than thought. The way siblings should.
Pt.1 The accident
It was a snowy Christmas morning when the accident happened.
Felix and my dad were on their way back from the store with the holiday turkey when tragedy struck.
A truck driver that had been up for several days of a drug binge ran a red light and smashed into the van, crossing an intersection that carried my dad and Felix. I can’t tell you if it was the drugs the trucker was on or just his personality, but he didn’t stop. Most people stop after an accident takes place. The truck driver sped up to try and push the van off to the side of the road so it could keep going. We would later assume the driver knew he was in trouble and had no qualms with a hit and run if he could get away with it.
It was a miracle that my dad and Felix were still alive after the initial impact, but when the van was flipped over and pushed to the side by the semi, my father sustained a head injury that killed him.
Some good samaritan who had witnessed the accident positioned his trailer in front of the semi to block it from continuing down the street and just speeding away. The semi driver spun the wheel to try and turn at the last second and then again when he saw he was going to drive straight into a ditch along the side of the road. Barrels of chemical waste from a local manufacturing company scattered across the street. The trailer he was hauling tilted and then fell on its side.
Though only a handful of people in their cars saw the truck driver hitting the van, many more had come out from nearby shops and diners to witness the truck flipping over and all the chemical waste spilling out onto the street.
News reporters showed up nine minutes before the ambulance and fire engine even got there, and they were recording. Many people were recording with their cellphones. So the news got footage of the story from all sorts of angles. No one ran out to the flipped over car to see if there were any survivors. A few of the vehicles that had been there when the accident occurred had driven away.
Though my mother would later blame the news team and bystanders for not going to the van, I was told, “You can’t blame the people who didn’t want to get near the acidic waste that had spilled across the road.” But I find it ironic that out of most of the ‘good citizens’ who witness such an event occur in the modern days, most of them were willing to get just close enough to catch the crash and damage on their cellphones and cameras.
Later on someone would point out that the news team that had arrived so fast had actually caught Felix on camera in the background. The media would play and replay footage of his hand beating on the window as he lay pinned down under the car and screaming for help. When the caustic chemicals in the street reached the van and start seeping inside and started eating through Felix’s clothing and then skin, they were still filming.
My older brother’s already broken body was severely burned by the chemicals by the time firemen cut the door off the van with the jaws of life and pulled him out of the wreckage.
I do feel I owe the media for one thing though, because if not for their coverage the truck driver that survived the wreck without a single broken bone would have likely gotten away with just a few years in jail and probation, such is the power of large companies who can hire the best lawyers available.
As it was, with the large networks covering the case of the killer truck driver and the boy that got cooked alive in a car, the state investigated and found that the chemicals that disfigured my brother were being illegally dumped in a public landfill. The state sued the company for millions of dollars, of which my family never saw a penny.
We counted ourselves fortunate at the time though, my mother and I, because my dad was one of the lead team members in a group of scientists that worked for a corporation that was on the cutting edge of the medical bioengineering field. In my father’s contract there was a clause stating that if any sort of accident, such as this one, should happen to him, my mother, Felix or myself, then the corporation he worked for would use the best resources at their disposal to help them.
This was a basic accident clause and mostly it meant just covering a replacement limb or organ. Many companies that developed such technology offered these contracts to their top employees at the time. The damage done to Felix went far beyond what the contract covered, but they agreed to honor it none the less because the crash had gained a lot of publicity and the head of their PR department said it would be good to be seen taking such a noble action.
So Felix was taken into the care of a hospital owned by my father’s corporation and he was given the best care available at the time as they tried to rebuild the broken and burnt body they had pulled out of the wreck using the latest technology in the Human augmentation field.
It took my mother six months fighting with the company before they finally allowed her and me a chance to visit Felix. I remember a man with grey hair and a blue suit putting his hand on my shoulder and trying to comfort me.
“Now, your brother might look a bit different but don’t be frightened, that’s still Felix.”
The doctors took us out into a courtyard where they said Felix was playing basketball. Even though I was six years old I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I first saw what had become my brothers new face, or how scared I was when from behind that cold unmoving mask I heard my older brothers voice cry out to us both.
“Mom! Sam!”
Felix ran towards us wearing a hospital gown that did little to hide the extensive work they had did to my brother. His left side had been crushed in the accident and they had to refabricate a new arm and much of his upper torso. As advanced as this science was, it wasn’t as close to how advanced it has now become and so it looked as though the only living part of my brother that was left was a single scarred arm and leg.
I remember my mom screaming and the way Felix stopped running suddenly, his robotic body made a light clicking noise as he lowered his cybernetic arm and tilted his head.
With his face and much of his body made of white-grey plastic and black metal I remember he looked to me like more of a mechanical doll then any kind of real Human being.
“Felix, where’s your face,” I remember asking him with the stoic curiosity of a six year old.
Felix looked at my mother as she turned back to him, stifling her tears as she tried to regain her composure. It seemed as though his odd voice lowered in pitch.
“I was hurt in the car crash really bad Sam, my face and body was badly burnt by the chemicals the truck was carrying, these doctors made a new one for me. I know it’s weird, but my old face,” he paused, “my old face is gone, I prefer this plastic and metal to having to look at what’s underneath. At first I was really upset when I saw myself, but I have been talking to a nice lady doctor here and I’ve come to just appreciate the fact I’m still alive.”
The mask my brother wore didn’t look Human at all, it was plain white with eye sockets set with black lenses that changed colors as he spoke; he had no nose and his mouth was nothing more than a vertical slash across his lower face as if they had only added it as an afterthought.
I didn’t know what else to say, I was six years old and scared because this thing might sound like my brother, but it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. I didn’t have the years of wisdom or knowledge to process how this could be anything other then what it looked like.
A robot.
The black lenses of his eyes changed opacity as they danced along the color spectrum; vibrating in soft blue and purple patterns as he talked. When he moved to put his weight on his prosthetic leg the machinery covering his chest, back and left side would make tiny whirring noises.
I thought he looked like the tick-tock soldiers I had seen in Dance of the Nutcracker
“It’s not so bad. All my food comes to me in tubes but I can still taste it and I can have all the ice cream I want. The doctors are really nice here, everyone has been really nice, I’m so glad to see you guys,” Felix paused,
“When it happened,” he paused and again I got the feeling he was struggling with emotion but it seemed hard to accept when my brother didn’t look as though he was a being capable of Human emotion, “When it happened I was afraid I would never get to see you guys again.”
“Can I have a hug?” Felix asked and stepped forward and that’s when my mom moved for the first time, pulling me away from Felix as I had started to raise my arms and whispering to me in a scolding manner.
“Don’t you touch him,” she said in a low, tear choked voice that scared me as much as Felix did.
“Maybe it’s best we go inside for now,” the man in the blue suit and grey hair said and started to lead Felix away from us.
I remember him looking back at us and then turning away slowly. His face never changed, but by the sag of his shoulders and the way he followed the doctor without another word to anyone, I got the impression he was crying inside.
It was my mother’s reaction to him that I would remember for quite some time though, so when two years later Felix was released to come live with us again there was a rift between us from the very beginning. It was as if my younger self had been waiting that day to see how she responded, to know if I should be accepting of this change or afraid, so when she did respond the way she did she created a rift between Felix and I that would last for the rest of our lives.
My mother got really deep into her drink the night Felix came back and finally broke down to him and apologized over and over for the way she had reacted when she saw him. She hugged Felix and Felix hugged her back but I never heard him say anything again. My mother seemed fine with this, she treated Felix with all the extra love and patient care that is so vital to parents of children with mental or physical handicaps.
Things got bad though as the months went by and Felix refused to speak. My mother took him back to the doctors but the only result that got was the doctors coming to the conclusion that the trauma and shock of the accident with the crash and the resulting body modifications were the cause of my brother losing his voice. No one wanted to address the way my mother reacted when we first saw him, I suppose it was easier for everyone to just accept he was mute.
People in the neighborhood were bothered by Felix and complained to my mother whenever he was outside. My mother refused to send him back to school when she had to worry about even the parents walking up to her on the street and telling her he really shouldn’t be allowed outside. My family dismissed these people at first as just a few cases of ignorance, but when the local police started to show up and say Felix was disturbing the peace my mother decided it was time to move.
Looking back I wish my mother had stood up to the locals. Things might have gotten messy but you can’t solve your problems by running away from them, as they’ll just follow you wherever you go.
We moved into a quiet rural neighborhood, far away from the hustle and bustle of city life in a little town called Harlington.
My mother started a new job and asked Felix if he would be willing to give up his room and live in the basement so she could use the room as an office, Felix agreed and began living out of the basement.
He spent much of his time down there listening to music or reading books and we only ever saw him when he did chores around the house or outside. I never got to see how he ate because he would always take the processed food tubes he used for sustenance down into the basement, possibly out of embarrassment.
I met a girl I liked named Amber and we would walk every day to school and back with a group of friends. At first I couldn’t understand their loathing to come near the house whenever they saw Felix outside taking care of the yard or reading on the porch. The more I listened to my new girlfriend Amber and her friends the more distrust and loathing I myself began to feel for my older brother. None of us took the time to get to know him and Humans will always fear what we don’t understand.
Felix never talked to anyone and the most I ever interacted with him is when he would wave to me from the porch as I came home or hug me on my birthday. We didn’t celebrate Christmas anymore.
Pretty soon I stopped waving to him altogether and Felix stopped even trying, becoming more and more reclusive as time went on.
The problems started when a local preacher at the main church in Harlington came to visit us at our house. He told us there had been rumors going around in town about Felix and he had taken it upon himself to introduce Felix to the wonders of religion.
Felix and my mother met with the preacher and both of them tried to talk Felix in to coming down to the local church to be baptized in front of the whole community to put everyone’s mind at ease.
Felix kept shaking his head, he was refusing to go and when the preacher got in his face and started poking his face mask with his holy book Felix hit his hand away and sent the book flying across the room.
Due to the high durability and strength of the cyberware Felix had been rebuilt with, when the preacher tried to slap Felix and he grabbed his hand to protect himself, he broke the man’s hand in six places. My mother screamed and my older brother dropped his hands immediately and ran into the basement.
Despite my mother’s countless apologies the next time the preacher took to his sermons in Harlington with his broken hand, he demonized Felix as a soulless being that’s very existence was an affront to God.
The more reclusive Felix became the more horrible the rumors about him got. The Preacher’s sermons seeped into the ears of his listeners and spread like a poison throughout the entire town.
I had started going steady with Amber and though I refused to go to that church, Amber and most of the kids in school I went with did; so it was that little by little even Felix’s little brother Sam was poisoned against him.
When the preacher was murdered everyone just assumed it was Felix. About two weeks after the incident the local Sheriff arrested a man named Aaron Hickox for the crime. Hickox had killed the preacher when he learned the man had slept with and impregnated his underage daughter.
As lawful and honest as the trial wasa it didn’t receive any media coverage, I’ve come to believe it’s because even the people running the local newspaper were involved in the mob that came for my older brother on the last day of October.
-
I was at home with my mother and Felix, we had seen how quickly the towns people were to blame Felix for the preachers murder right after it happened so we had thought to stay out of Harlington until the matter was solved by the local authorities.
I was still only eight, going on nine, but I’ll remember that night as clearly as if it happened yesterday for the rest of my life.
No matter how advanced our society gets, the angry mob will always look the same. Like a mob of farmers with pitchforks and torches they came with guns, home-made weapons and flashlights.
We hid in the living room as they threw bricks and rocks through our windows and pelted the walls of the house with garbage. My mother held Felix under one arm and me under the other. Both of us had our heads against our mother’s chest and as I stared into Felix’s black reflective oculi I realized that the lights in his eyes and the way they pulsed were conveying emotions in a way that a Human’s eyes never could. I looked deeply into the deep blues and violets and remembered the same amethyst colors when I had seen Felix for the first time after the accident. The vertical slash of a mouth was as still as ever but I remember getting the same feeling that Felix was crying.
When couple of braver members of the posse climbed into our yard and started banging on our house, it was only minutes before people were breaking down the door and bursting into our home.
My mother tried to defend us with a kitchen knife and a large man punched her and grabbed her by the hair, dragging her towards the door as the crowd cheered him on.
Felix never played any sports outside and I rarely saw him doing anything more physical than mowing the lawn or tending the front yard so when I saw him hurl like a bullet across the room and smash into the man that was three times his size with the force of a charging bull I remember being as shocked as everyone else.
The man was thrown against the wall by the force of Felix’s charge but as Felix turned to try and help my mother someone smashed him over the head with a bottle.
I remember watching the lights in Felix’s eyes flicker red for a moment and feeling afraid for the first time not for myself, but for what Felix might do to these people attacking us.
Of what he might be capable of doing.
Felix took it in stride though, turning and pushing that man and the next out the door. The crowd backed away down our lawn as Felix walked out into the yard with his hands held down at his sides.
To my everlasting shame, my mother and I watched and did nothing as Felix went out to meet the mob in the front yard by himself.
I remember the way they gasped and whispered and how he had raised his hands reflexively to shield his multi-colored eyes as dozens of flashlights and halogen lanterns turned on him.
I felt a cold chill as I recognized the girl Amber I had been dating was with her dad at the front of the mob. I think that’s the main reason I remained frozen when they surrounded Felix and started beating on them with their fists.
Though the machines they replaced much of Felix’s body with are outdated dinosaurs in this day and age, they would have been enough to protect Felix if he chose to fight back. Still to this day I imagine that with the enhancements done to my older brother’s skeletal and musculature structure, he could have cut a swath through those angry civilians like it was nothing.
But Felix never raised a hand.
My mother tried to hold me back at first but I felt something inside of me break as I watched fists turn into bats and makeshift weapons and Felix went down in a ball trying to cover his head and curl up on the ground as the crowd descended on him. My brother was a robot, but this wasn’t Human.
Before I knew what I was doing I had broken free of my mother’s arms and ran out onto the lawn screaming.
“Stop it! Stop it! He didn’t do anything! You’re killing him! Stop it!”
As I said before, mankind might advance in a myriad of different ways but an angry mob in those days was just as bloodthirsty as I imagine the mobs were in the dark ages.
Someone threw a glass bottle of beer at me and I went down when it shattered off the top of my skull. I had been nearly knocked unconscious so that as I lay down in the grass the rest of the events played out as though I were in a dream.
It felt as though I were seeing and hearing everything from the bottom of a shallow swimming pool, watching the lights and gargled sounds as though I were detached from my body.
I remember looking up at the starry sky one moment and then the next moment my vision was blocked out by the mask that was Felix’s face.
Felix, the young man that had been too ashamed to ever try and reincorporate himself back into society that so rejected him just because of the way he looked. Felix, who had survived a terrible accident only to spend his life in lonely seclusion. Felix, the older brother that I had never taken the chance to get to know.
Felix held me in his arms and covered me with his body and I was too dazed to do anything but watch as the crowd descended on us once more.
They beat his back and head with sticks and baseball bats, broom handles and the butts of rifles. They beat him with stones and fists and tore at his back so viciously that they bent the metal on his back over his head to expose the sensitive circuitry that powered Felix’s artificial organs.
I remember thinking the shoulder blades bent over Felix’s head looked like wings, along with him being surrounded in a halo of light I saw my brother in that moment as some type of guardian angel.
I’m not really convinced he wasn’t.
The last thing I remember before blacking out as they continued to beat over my older brother who shielded me with his body was Felix’s eyes glowing a beautiful green as he looked down at me and said,
“I love you Sam.”
That’s about all there is to my story about Felix, I’m not going to turn this into a lecture but I will tell you what I’ve taken from the story.
Humans come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colors. We grow up with different religions and ethnic cultures and every one of us forms relationships and memories in our life that turn us into our own unique individual beings, but it’s our capacity to love that binds us together and makes us something more than the animals we sometimes like to act like. My brother might have been more machine then man but the night he gave his life to save mine he showed me what it means to be Human.
~<@ Author’s Note: Imagine if in the future if we all continue to augment ourselves with artificial limbs and organs and advance our bodies to the point that people cease to see colors, religions and creeds and just see another person just like them. Someone might argue that wouldn’t be even Human anymore; others can make the argument that, given the war, strife and terror in our society in what we think of as our ‘enlightened age’, that stepping towards the future for Humanity that Science holds might be a step in the right direction.@>,~

I was a second generation oil tanker owner in the early 2000’s. I mostly shipped petrol from Texas to third world countries to include Myanmar. Depending on the market prices sometimes smaller oil / gas producers would ship their product internationally.
In the summer of 2014 under international pressure the Myanmar government was phasing out its use of high leaded gasoline in exchange for Texas made unleaded gasoline.
My small oil tanker company was in contact with the Myanmar’s defense minister to accept a contract for the delivery of essentially 190,000 barrels unleaded gas.
My salesman, Omar who also doubled as my First-Hand on my oil tanker had put the phone down in his lap for a moment to tell me something important. Basically, the Myanmar government would accept our gasoline shipment contract but we had to accept their leaded gasoline which their government would pay for as well. The only catch was we had to give them our plan how we would safely dispose of or store the leaded gasoline.
Both me and Omar had about 30 seconds to convince the Myanmar Defense Minister that we had a contract for a safe place to dispose the leaded gasoline. Then it dawned on me that my father had inherited 200 acres of worthless desert land in Southern Arizona, which I would tell the Myanmar defense minister was actually an underground warehouse for dangerous chemicals.
I quickly told Omar to relay the message to the Defense minister that we had a place to indefinitely store the leaded gasoline.
The price of gasoline in 2014 was $3.30 USD a gallon and we were going to receive around 150,000 barrels of leaded gasoline. A barrel holds about 42 gallons of gasoline. So my shipping company was going to basically be given $21,000,000 in free leaded gasoline. I really lost interest in the measly $100,000 we would make from actually shipping the petrol.
I felt that rush of nervous energy run through my body that this would be my one opportunity to become rich.
My grandfather was from India and we were taught Hindi as kids from my grandparents. My mother was Caucasian and would jokingly feel left out of our conversations. I called my father and intentionally spoke Hindi to him. I told him to go start a LLC company with his worthless land in Arizona and to call it something that makes it sound like a waste storage facility to the Myanmar Government but was nothing more than vacant land.
So my father decided on the name “Desert Warehouse Indefinite Storage.” He paid top dollar to the state of Arizona to expedite the approval of the LLC company and I faxed it the same day to the Myanmar government.
Our next objective was to find buyers for our leaded gasoline. The one thing that I had in the United States were connections throughout the country with Indians who immigrated to the United States from India.
In 2014, many Indians were owners of small gas stations and farms throughout America. They owned small ones that weren’t affiliated with a large corporations like Citgo, Sunoco, or Wawa. I typically wouldn’t get involved with trucking gas on land so I had to over pay a gas transport company to deliver the gas and I had to underprice the gas to get rid of it quickly.
I figured I would spend about $11,000,000 in underpricing the leaded gasoline and overpay the trucking costs to get rid of the gas quickly which would still leave me with $10,000,000.
So Omar worked day and night to find suitable buyers for our gas. Because gasoline has a short shelf life of usually less than a year, Omar told our Indian contacts that we had to get rid of the gas quickly, which was partially true. Our contacts were more interested in if our product was actually gasoline and not some alternative fuel source. I don’t think any of them would have even imagined that we got the gasoline from a near third world country.
So my shipping vessel took the longer journey from Myanmar to the Baltimore harbor. I was to concerned to dock in Texas where they would be suspicious of where I got the gas and where I was trucking it to.
I rented one of those big white petroleum storage containers that are typically seen along many harbor to include Baltimore which I had already accounted for in my expenses.
It was an early Sunday morning in February when I had finally reached the Baltimore harbor. After several hours my shipping vessel had unloaded the gas and the hired trucking company started to fill up their trucks. Everything was working according to plan. I even accepted a contract the next day to make a shipment from Kuwait to New York.
Two weeks had gone by and all of my projections were correct in the amount of money that I made. The best part was that most of my dealings were difficult to trace.
Then as I was sailing in the Gulf of Kuwait a military official from Myanmar had found out where I was and was inquiring about the leaded gasoline that I took from them.
Apparently it was true that Myanmar was doing away with the leaded gasoline but giving the leaded gasoline away for free was a ploy by the president to keep it out of its country’s rebels hands who were attempting an uprising.
So now this unknown military leader is demanding either the leaded gasoline back or money and he knows where my ship is right now. I knew he wasn’t joking around and that Myanmar wasn’t really far from where I was presently located in the Arabian Sea.
To make things worse one of my Indian contacts gas station’s who I delivered gasoline to was inspected by a local government official, where the leaded gasoline was detected. Because of that his 10 other gas stations were inspected and now he was essentially put out of business.
I contacted my father and he told me not to come back to the United States anytime soon because the Indian mafia would behead me.
So now I’m in the middle of the Arabian sea with a shipment of petrol to New York which I can’t even attempt to sail to because of the Indian mafia.
To make things worse, within hours there was a small military vessel that had pulled up to my tanker that gave every indication that it was affiliated with the Myanmar coup.
Me and Omar are both profusely sweating now and yelling at each other. I had to think fast so I figured that I would rob Peter to pay Paul. Essentially I would unload the petrol that I got from Kuwait and deliver it to Myanmar.
I would seal my death sentence by doing this because you don’t mess with the Emir of Kuwait. The Emir has an infinite amount of money and there will be a contract out on my head if the petrol isn’t delivered to New York. I was 10 times more afraid of Kuwait than I was of Myanmar but I had a military grade vessel right next to mine at the moment where I was defenseless.
So I had no choice to unload the petrol in Myanmar. This temporarily got us out of a situation but now I had to deal with a much larger issue.
I am now essentially without a country. I don’t even know where to go without being killed. Saddam had learned not to mess with Kuwait and if the Emir didn’t kill me than countless other shipping vessel owners would do the same thing and become millionaires overnight by stealing Kuwait’s oil and gas.
I knew I had five days at most before Kuwait would hire a contractor who will freeze my banking accounts then would come kill me.
The only safe place for me and Omar to be was in the Sunni territory of Iraq because they were somewhat enemies of Kuwait. So we would essentially donate my shipping vessel and pay the Sunni’s a monthly stipend for their protection against the Emir of Kuwait.
So we made arrangements to hide out in the Sunni held territory of Iraq which had enemies on all sides from Saddam’s rule but as long as you had money then they were your friends.
Me and Omar were housed in this horrible apartment. It had no air conditioning and the temperatures would surpass a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Neither of us spoke a word of Arabic so life was just horrible. I had transferred all of my money into an account that Omar had set up using his cousin’s alias.
After a year in absolute misery things got worse. The Sunni’s were demanding more and more money to the point where they had bled me dry. We had only $5000 left and the Sunni’s could make millions off of us by informing the Emir of Kuwait of our whereabouts.
So me and Omar had no choice but to sneak out in the middle of the night and head for the Kurdish held territory of Iraq. After days and days of traveling in broken down trucks, where we paid large sums of money to our transporters, we made it to the Kurdish held territory of Kirkuk.
I am now in an Internet cafe with $1500 between Omar and I. We know the Emir of Kuwait was tipped off about our general location. Omar and I had decided that our only hope is to join the French Foreign Legion. We both filled out the online applications and the only thing we have to figure out now is how to get to France.

I was a second generation oil tanker owner in the early 2000’s. I mostly shipped petrol from Texas to third world countries to include Myanmar. Depending on the market prices sometimes smaller oil / gas producers would ship their product internationally.
In the summer of 2014 under international pressure the Myanmar government was phasing out its use of high leaded gasoline in exchange for Texas made unleaded gasoline.
My small oil tanker company was in contact with the Myanmar’s defense minister to accept a contract for the delivery of essentially 190,000 barrels unleaded gas.
My salesman, Omar who also doubled as my First-Hand on my oil tanker had put the phone down in his lap for a moment to tell me something important. Basically, the Myanmar government would accept our gasoline shipment contract but we had to accept their leaded gasoline which their government would pay for as well. The only catch was we had to give them our plan how we would safely dispose of or store the leaded gasoline.
Both me and Omar had about 30 seconds to convince the Myanmar Defense Minister that we had a contract for a safe place to dispose the leaded gasoline. Then it dawned on me that my father had inherited 200 acres of worthless desert land in Southern Arizona, which I would tell the Myanmar defense minister was actually an underground warehouse for dangerous chemicals.
I quickly told Omar to relay the message to the Defense minister that we had a place to indefinitely store the leaded gasoline.
The price of gasoline in 2014 was $3.30 USD a gallon and we were going to receive around 150,000 barrels of leaded gasoline. A barrel holds about 42 gallons of gasoline. So my shipping company was going to basically be given $21,000,000 in free leaded gasoline. I really lost interest in the measly $100,000 we would make from actually shipping the petrol.
I felt that rush of nervous energy run through my body that this would be my one opportunity to become rich.
My grandfather was from India and we were taught Hindi as kids from my grandparents. My mother was Caucasian and would jokingly feel left out of our conversations. I called my father and intentionally spoke Hindi to him. I told him to go start a LLC company with his worthless land in Arizona and to call it something that makes it sound like a waste storage facility to the Myanmar Government but was nothing more than vacant land.
So my father decided on the name “Desert Warehouse Indefinite Storage.” He paid top dollar to the state of Arizona to expedite the approval of the LLC company and I faxed it the same day to the Myanmar government.
Our next objective was to find buyers for our leaded gasoline. The one thing that I had in the United States were connections throughout the country with Indians who immigrated to the United States from India.
In 2014, many Indians were owners of small gas stations and farms throughout America. They owned small ones that weren’t affiliated with a large corporations like Citgo, Sunoco, or Wawa. I typically wouldn’t get involved with trucking gas on land so I had to over pay a gas transport company to deliver the gas and I had to underprice the gas to get rid of it quickly.
I figured I would spend about $11,000,000 in underpricing the leaded gasoline and overpay the trucking costs to get rid of the gas quickly which would still leave me with $10,000,000.
So Omar worked day and night to find suitable buyers for our gas. Because gasoline has a short shelf life of usually less than a year, Omar told our Indian contacts that we had to get rid of the gas quickly, which was partially true. Our contacts were more interested in if our product was actually gasoline and not some alternative fuel source. I don’t think any of them would have even imagined that we got the gasoline from a near third world country.
So my shipping vessel took the longer journey from Myanmar to the Baltimore harbor. I was to concerned to dock in Texas where they would be suspicious of where I got the gas and where I was trucking it to.
I rented one of those big white petroleum storage containers that are typically seen along many harbor to include Baltimore which I had already accounted for in my expenses.
It was an early Sunday morning in February when I had finally reached the Baltimore harbor. After several hours my shipping vessel had unloaded the gas and the hired trucking company started to fill up their trucks. Everything was working according to plan. I even accepted a contract the next day to make a shipment from Kuwait to New York.
Two weeks had gone by and all of my projections were correct in the amount of money that I made. The best part was that most of my dealings were difficult to trace.
Then as I was sailing in the Gulf of Kuwait a military official from Myanmar had found out where I was and was inquiring about the leaded gasoline that I took from them.
Apparently it was true that Myanmar was doing away with the leaded gasoline but giving the leaded gasoline away for free was a ploy by the president to keep it out of its country’s rebels hands who were attempting an uprising.
So now this unknown military leader is demanding either the leaded gasoline back or money and he knows where my ship is right now. I knew he wasn’t joking around and that Myanmar wasn’t really far from where I was presently located in the Arabian Sea.
To make things worse one of my Indian contacts gas station’s who I delivered gasoline to was inspected by a local government official, where the leaded gasoline was detected. Because of that his 10 other gas stations were inspected and now he was essentially put out of business.
I contacted my father and he told me not to come back to the United States anytime soon because the Indian mafia would behead me.
So now I’m in the middle of the Arabian sea with a shipment of petrol to New York which I can’t even attempt to sail to because of the Indian mafia.
To make things worse, within hours there was a small military vessel that had pulled up to my tanker that gave every indication that it was affiliated with the Myanmar coup.
Me and Omar are both profusely sweating now and yelling at each other. I had to think fast so I figured that I would rob Peter to pay Paul. Essentially I would unload the petrol that I got from Kuwait and deliver it to Myanmar.
I would seal my death sentence by doing this because you don’t mess with the Emir of Kuwait. The Emir has an infinite amount of money and there will be a contract out on my head if the petrol isn’t delivered to New York. I was 10 times more afraid of Kuwait than I was of Myanmar but I had a military grade vessel right next to mine at the moment where I was defenseless.
So I had no choice to unload the petrol in Myanmar. This temporarily got us out of a situation but now I had to deal with a much larger issue.
I am now essentially without a country. I don’t even know where to go without being killed. Saddam had learned not to mess with Kuwait and if the Emir didn’t kill me than countless other shipping vessel owners would do the same thing and become millionaires overnight by stealing Kuwait’s oil and gas.
I knew I had five days at most before Kuwait would hire a contractor who will freeze my banking accounts then would come kill me.
The only safe place for me and Omar to be was in the Sunni territory of Iraq because they were somewhat enemies of Kuwait. So we would essentially donate my shipping vessel and pay the Sunni’s a monthly stipend for their protection against the Emir of Kuwait.
So we made arrangements to hide out in the Sunni held territory of Iraq which had enemies on all sides from Saddam’s rule but as long as you had money then they were your friends.
Me and Omar were housed in this horrible apartment. It had no air conditioning and the temperatures would surpass a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Neither of us spoke a word of Arabic so life was just horrible. I had transferred all of my money into an account that Omar had set up using his cousin’s alias.
After a year in absolute misery things got worse. The Sunni’s were demanding more and more money to the point where they had bled me dry. We had only $5000 left and the Sunni’s could make millions off of us by informing the Emir of Kuwait of our whereabouts.
So me and Omar had no choice but to sneak out in the middle of the night and head for the Kurdish held territory of Iraq. After days and days of traveling in broken down trucks, where we paid large sums of money to our transporters, we made it to the Kurdish held territory of Kirkuk.
I am now in an Internet cafe with $1500 between Omar and I. We know the Emir of Kuwait was tipped off about our general location. Omar and I had decided that our only hope is to join the French Foreign Legion. We both filled out the online applications and the only thing we have to figure out now is how to get to France.

I was a second generation oil tanker owner in the early 2000’s. I mostly shipped petrol from Texas to third world countries to include Myanmar. Depending on the market prices sometimes smaller oil / gas producers would ship their product internationally.
In the summer of 2014 under international pressure the Myanmar government was phasing out its use of high leaded gasoline in exchange for Texas made unleaded gasoline.
My small oil tanker company was in contact with the Myanmar’s defense minister to accept a contract for the delivery of essentially 190,000 barrels unleaded gas.
My salesman, Omar who also doubled as my First-Hand on my oil tanker had put the phone down in his lap for a moment to tell me something important. Basically, the Myanmar government would accept our gasoline shipment contract but we had to accept their leaded gasoline which their government would pay for as well. The only catch was we had to give them our plan how we would safely dispose of or store the leaded gasoline.
Both me and Omar had about 30 seconds to convince the Myanmar Defense Minister that we had a contract for a safe place to dispose the leaded gasoline. Then it dawned on me that my father had inherited 200 acres of worthless desert land in Southern Arizona, which I would tell the Myanmar defense minister was actually an underground warehouse for dangerous chemicals.
I quickly told Omar to relay the message to the Defense minister that we had a place to indefinitely store the leaded gasoline.
The price of gasoline in 2014 was $3.30 USD a gallon and we were going to receive around 150,000 barrels of leaded gasoline. A barrel holds about 42 gallons of gasoline. So my shipping company was going to basically be given $21,000,000 in free leaded gasoline. I really lost interest in the measly $100,000 we would make from actually shipping the petrol.
I felt that rush of nervous energy run through my body that this would be my one opportunity to become rich.
My grandfather was from India and we were taught Hindi as kids from my grandparents. My mother was Caucasian and would jokingly feel left out of our conversations. I called my father and intentionally spoke Hindi to him. I told him to go start a LLC company with his worthless land in Arizona and to call it something that makes it sound like a waste storage facility to the Myanmar Government but was nothing more than vacant land.
So my father decided on the name “Desert Warehouse Indefinite Storage.” He paid top dollar to the state of Arizona to expedite the approval of the LLC company and I faxed it the same day to the Myanmar government.
Our next objective was to find buyers for our leaded gasoline. The one thing that I had in the United States were connections throughout the country with Indians who immigrated to the United States from India.
In 2014, many Indians were owners of small gas stations and farms throughout America. They owned small ones that weren’t affiliated with a large corporations like Citgo, Sunoco, or Wawa. I typically wouldn’t get involved with trucking gas on land so I had to over pay a gas transport company to deliver the gas and I had to underprice the gas to get rid of it quickly.
I figured I would spend about $11,000,000 in underpricing the leaded gasoline and overpay the trucking costs to get rid of the gas quickly which would still leave me with $10,000,000.
So Omar worked day and night to find suitable buyers for our gas. Because gasoline has a short shelf life of usually less than a year, Omar told our Indian contacts that we had to get rid of the gas quickly, which was partially true. Our contacts were more interested in if our product was actually gasoline and not some alternative fuel source. I don’t think any of them would have even imagined that we got the gasoline from a near third world country.
So my shipping vessel took the longer journey from Myanmar to the Baltimore harbor. I was to concerned to dock in Texas where they would be suspicious of where I got the gas and where I was trucking it to.
I rented one of those big white petroleum storage containers that are typically seen along many harbor to include Baltimore which I had already accounted for in my expenses.
It was an early Sunday morning in February when I had finally reached the Baltimore harbor. After several hours my shipping vessel had unloaded the gas and the hired trucking company started to fill up their trucks. Everything was working according to plan. I even accepted a contract the next day to make a shipment from Kuwait to New York.
Two weeks had gone by and all of my projections were correct in the amount of money that I made. The best part was that most of my dealings were difficult to trace.
Then as I was sailing in the Gulf of Kuwait a military official from Myanmar had found out where I was and was inquiring about the leaded gasoline that I took from them.
Apparently it was true that Myanmar was doing away with the leaded gasoline but giving the leaded gasoline away for free was a ploy by the president to keep it out of its country’s rebels hands who were attempting an uprising.
So now this unknown military leader is demanding either the leaded gasoline back or money and he knows where my ship is right now. I knew he wasn’t joking around and that Myanmar wasn’t really far from where I was presently located in the Arabian Sea.
To make things worse one of my Indian contacts gas station’s who I delivered gasoline to was inspected by a local government official, where the leaded gasoline was detected. Because of that his 10 other gas stations were inspected and now he was essentially put out of business.
I contacted my father and he told me not to come back to the United States anytime soon because the Indian mafia would behead me.
So now I’m in the middle of the Arabian sea with a shipment of petrol to New York which I can’t even attempt to sail to because of the Indian mafia.
To make things worse, within hours there was a small military vessel that had pulled up to my tanker that gave every indication that it was affiliated with the Myanmar coup.
Me and Omar are both profusely sweating now and yelling at each other. I had to think fast so I figured that I would rob Peter to pay Paul. Essentially I would unload the petrol that I got from Kuwait and deliver it to Myanmar.
I would seal my death sentence by doing this because you don’t mess with the Emir of Kuwait. The Emir has an infinite amount of money and there will be a contract out on my head if the petrol isn’t delivered to New York. I was 10 times more afraid of Kuwait than I was of Myanmar but I had a military grade vessel right next to mine at the moment where I was defenseless.
So I had no choice to unload the petrol in Myanmar. This temporarily got us out of a situation but now I had to deal with a much larger issue.
I am now essentially without a country. I don’t even know where to go without being killed. Saddam had learned not to mess with Kuwait and if the Emir didn’t kill me than countless other shipping vessel owners would do the same thing and become millionaires overnight by stealing Kuwait’s oil and gas.
I knew I had five days at most before Kuwait would hire a contractor who will freeze my banking accounts then would come kill me.
The only safe place for me and Omar to be was in the Sunni territory of Iraq because they were somewhat enemies of Kuwait. So we would essentially donate my shipping vessel and pay the Sunni’s a monthly stipend for their protection against the Emir of Kuwait.
So we made arrangements to hide out in the Sunni held territory of Iraq which had enemies on all sides from Saddam’s rule but as long as you had money then they were your friends.
Me and Omar were housed in this horrible apartment. It had no air conditioning and the temperatures would surpass a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Neither of us spoke a word of Arabic so life was just horrible. I had transferred all of my money into an account that Omar had set up using his cousin’s alias.
After a year in absolute misery things got worse. The Sunni’s were demanding more and more money to the point where they had bled me dry. We had only $5000 left and the Sunni’s could make millions off of us by informing the Emir of Kuwait of our whereabouts.
So me and Omar had no choice but to sneak out in the middle of the night and head for the Kurdish held territory of Iraq. After days and days of traveling in broken down trucks, where we paid large sums of money to our transporters, we made it to the Kurdish held territory of Kirkuk.
I am now in an Internet cafe with $1500 between Omar and I. We know the Emir of Kuwait was tipped off about our general location. Omar and I had decided that our only hope is to join the French Foreign Legion. We both filled out the online applications and the only thing we have to figure out now is how to get to France.

All featured characters are 18+.
There was a certain... rhythm to the factory. Well, not a rhythm, more of a highly-organized tempo. It was consistent, intelligent, almost-entirely independent, but most of all...
It was efficient.
At least, it often was. It typically was. It rarely wasn’t, in fact. But, as much as the factory workers attempted to remedy it, the percentage never reached zero. There was always some chance that something would mess up.
Wentworth Dynamics was the most famous and powerful robotics company in the world. Their well-paid employees were certainly well aware of that, as they were the bleeding edge of robotic hardware. Androids, utility bots, supercomputers—all were manufactured here, in their main factory. They practically ruled the planet, standing side-by-side with the most powerful governments due to the Wentworth privatized armies and, of course, machines.
There were a few human workers, doing the jobs that couldn’t be automated. But, mostly, it was machines—massive steel limbs welding pieces together, assembling and deconstructing and obeying their master’s will.
Of course, the little imperfections would rise time and time again. An arm would break, circuitry would malfunction, behavior modules would be crookedly in-place. Josiah Wentworth, CEO and factory manager, did not care for flaws. He wanted infallible machines, dammit.
Unfortunately, however, it seemed that he would not see his goal realized any time soon. Already, he had what, seven malfunctioning bots in the holding bay?
Normally, he would send imperfect units to the incinerator—or the compactor, depending on the model. But, these ones... he was unfortunately required to keep them functioning in order to extract as much data as possible. The more they learned, the more they could prevent this issue.
Until then, the units would be kept in their cells, with one human guard stationed outside each one.
Through science, Josiah was confident that Wentworth Dynamics would prevail.
———————————————————
Heya, my name’s Nicholas! Thanks for reading through my prompt, I really appreciate it!
So, this prompt is going to be similar to a couple of my other prompts, in that it’s a sort of “prison break” style idea. This idea has been used with Aliens, Fantasy Monsters, and Wild West Outlaws. If you enjoy any of those prompts, you’ll likely enjoy this one, and vice versa.
The plot is fairly simple: you will take the role of one “broken” robot, dangerously seductive, being held captive for study in her home factory. From then, the story (presumedly) begins with you escaping the factory’s containment cells and into the world to begin a life on the run. Meanwhile, I’ll take the role of GM, narrating your journey and all of the tribulations you may face.
The setting is left purposefully vague here, though I imagine it will be sometime in the future. It could be sci-fi, cyberpunk, near future, steampunk, etc. etc. Let’s discuss that together!
Now, some brief information about me:
-I consider myself to be a fairly good writer, and I’m looking for partners who can say the same. However, I am more than welcoming to everyone, regardless of skill level (even though I don’t really believe in “skill” that much. To me, it’s more about passion).
-I’m very open-minded in terms of kinks, and I have virtually no limits. Or, at least, very few. Don’t be afraid to hit me with all of your ideas!
-My schedule can be horrifically sporadic at times, so I may not thrive in terms of consistent messaging. However, I will try my best!
-This prompt is subject to change and suggestion. Feel free to come up with your own robots, or make any other adjustments that you’d like. Writing is a collaborative effort.
Now, with that, please select a robot to play for this story!
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ACCESSING DATABASE...

Loading Chunks...
Reticulating Splines...
Gathering Data...
Welcome, Josiah. Please enter your password.
•••••••••••••••••
Access Granted. Please Select The Data You Wish To Access.

Command Logs A-H +

Command Logs I-P +

Command Logs Q-Z +

Lab Reports +

Lunch Menus for October +

Malfunctioning Robot Catalogue —

Many robots from Wentworth Dynamics have malfunctioned over time, and some bear such a complex malfunction that they must be securely contained for study. Each unit is to be contained in a separate holding cell in different wards of the facility. The cell is to be constructed from concrete, with a Josiah Dynamics-brand wall of bulletproof glass separating the robot from the rest of the prison room. One human guard is to be stationed with their back to the prisoner at all times.
A detailed catalogue* is to be kept and updated frequently containing relevant information regarding the malfunctioning units. The catalogue is written below:
*Written by Josiah Wentworth’s lead scientist, Harvey Metzger.
Harvey here, writing this log on the date of November 17th, year [REDACTED].
The malfunctioning robots bear a number of common anomalies, which are listed below. If you ask me, these malfunctions seem like an inside job—how could each robot be incorrectly constructed in such a similar way? Further investigation is advised.
•Each one has modified fuel receptors. These fuel receptors have been repurposed to convert human ejaculate into fuel, powering their systems. The fuel receptors seem to mimic human vaginal cavities, consisting of pink, synthetic flesh constantly doused in a highly effective lubricant. The fuel receptors are between each unit’s legs, again reminiscent of the female human body. Some even have a secondary fuel receptor that also doubles as a waste disposal chute.
•Each of the units seems to lean towards femininity; they all seem to bear feminine bodies which would be, objectively, highly attractive to anybody attracted to females. Additionally, some have even been known to refer to themselves as “she.”
•Each the units has modified thermal regulators; their bodies are warm, almost like a human’s.
•Each of the units is intelligent, experienced, and extremely promiscuous. Heavy caution is advised.
Unit 9XQ, “Simulator.” This one was originally a construction unit. Its kind utilizes bleeding edge hard-light technology to turn light rays into solid matter. In its base form, it has a sleek, aerodynamic design, with thin legs ending in points rather than feet (inefficient to walk on, so the unit prefers to hover, as it is capable of flight). Its body, while incredibly tall and slim, is made from smooth metal painted a stark white. Appendages are made to imitate the female form, and do so flatteringly. Its face is shiny, white and featureless, save for a single ring of pale blue light in the center of the head. When powered on, it automatically constructs a hard-light face of a beautiful woman that, reportedly, genuinely feels like skin (despite being a pale blue color). It is able to make any number of hard-light additions to its body, typically using the ability to construct realistic breasts, thighs, etc. on top of its base body. The hard-light body modifications can tie remotely into the unit’s central processor, allowing it to feel sensation in them. The unit can also construct simple hard-light objects, such as a hammer, a rod, or a small wall. It is able to perfectly disguise its entire body to look exactly like another human it has seen before, but doing so drains a great amount of energy from its processors. Additionally, it can cause its hard-light constructs (including the ones it uses as body modifications) to shimmer with a unique light, enamoring and entrancing any human that looks at them. When enamored in this way, the human will allegedly feel intense arousal and suggestibility. Physical contact with this unit’s hard-light constructs is not advised, as it reportedly causes the subject to experience blind infatuation for the unit.
Unit 4PH, “Enforcer.” This unit is the make and model of an advanced security bot, once employed by Wentworth Dynamics itself. It is the tallest of the imprisoned robots, standing at roughly 9 feet (274.32 cm) tall and bearing an impressive simulation of a muscular structure. Its strength is tremendous, even when compared to security bots of a similar make and model. Its body is similar to that of a human, though obviously metallic in structure and appearance. Its “skin” (including the face, tongue, etc.) seems to be an incredibly durable fiber-metal hybrid mesh of sorts, flexible and soft like a human’s, but incredibly difficult to penetrate. This mesh is also the material of the large breasts and rear that it bears, though there is a generous amount of padding to fill them out as well as make them realistically soft and malleable. The unit also bears a peculiar ability, reminiscent of standard security bots, but altered. It is able to emit synaptic dampening brainwaves, using a light in its eyes as a focus. Any human that looks into its eyes while it emits the waves is subject to light-headedness, blankness of thought, suggestibility, and arousal. Additionally, the unit’s “tongue” and “saliva” are densely packed with millions of microscopic nanobots, imperceptible to the naked eye. When ingested by a human, these nanobots immediately move to the brain, using the unit’s remote direction to effectively wipe one memory from the brain. Afterwards, the nanobots lose their neural function and move to the human’s reproductive organs to increase production. Another ingestion of “saliva” is required to wipe another memory beyond that.
Unit 2GT, “Gardener.” This one is part of a line of gardening units, typically shipped out to suburban neighborhoods or anywhere else where garden management is of importance. Its appearance is similar to that of an average-sized human woman with an impressive bosom. From the knees upward, it’s made up of realistic synthetic flesh, fit with breasts, nethers, a rear, etc., even a tongue. However, from that point downward, its shins and feet are made of pink-colored dura-plastic and are quite obviously robotic. However, the bottoms of its feet seem to be of the same synthetic flesh as the rest of the upper body. At will, the unit can withdraw its hands into its wrists and replace them with spray nozzles. Normally, this type of machine would use them to water gardens, spread fertilizer, things of that sort. This malfunctioning unit, however, sprays a vastly different array of materials. In its stomach area is a hidden “microlab,” in which the unit can safely experiment with different crossbreeds of plants. It has managed to craft a number of desired seeds—genetic masterpieces, honestly—by pinpointing, amplifying, adding and deleting various plant genomes. From the nozzles, it can spray a powerful blend of pheromones, eliciting strong infatuation, arousal and suggestibility when inhaled. The spray is densely packed with microscopic seeds of whatever plant breed it has crafted. With enough time, it can create some seeds that can have some marvelous effects; primarily, it uses a type that, when inhaled, seems to affect the human brain. After a day or so, the plant has rooted itself in the human, giving them a telepathic bond with the gardening unit from which it can obey commands, which the human blindly follows. The seed dies off if the human spends roughly a week with no direct sunlight.
Unit 5RD, “Operative.” This one belongs to an extremely rare model of assassin units, typically only deployed for high-stakes missions where a subtle, yet lethal, touch is required. It’s appearance is tactical, mostly consisting of dark colors. Its thighs, rear, and hips are of a highly durable black steel mesh substance that, reportedly, feels like a mixture of latex and skin—shiny and rubbery, yet soft, smooth and malleable. Sort of like half-melted latex that retains its form. It also bears human-like breasts on its chest of the same material. The rest of its body, however, is pristine vantablack* metal with no sharp edges. Its face is black, shiny, smooth and featureless, and though it rarely speaks, it quite often displays “emoticons” on its face. It is also capable of short amounts of flight, though typically only for a few seconds at a time. The unit is additionally capable of bending light rays around it, turning completely invisible to the naked eye at will, as well as being able to effortlessly (and silently) climb on ceilings and walls that hold proper purchase. Its black, shiny skin (as opposed to its vantablack metal body parts) is constantly secreting a chemical blend of oils that, when rubbed on human skin (it’s especially effective around the neck, rear and genitals), elicits extreme drowsy feelings, as well as suggestibility and lust. It is also able to emit a stunning strobe-light effect from its blank face. While looking into this light, a human subject will feel an uncontrollable urge to make themselves as harmless as possible, whether that be in the form of getting closer to the unit, dropping weaponry, etc. However, the light’s effects only work properly if the unit emits a sound that is shockingly similar to female moans of pleasure while simulating female masturbation (we are currently unaware of the unit actually derives any pleasure from this).
*Vantablack is the darkest shade of black known to man.
Unit 7MB, “Stim.” Hailing from a long line of medical robots, this unit is obsessed with “treating illnesses.” Judging by intrinsic scans, it seems that its prime directive has been, scientifically, buggered with. Its main goal is to help humans, and it firmly believes that the best way to do so is to induce as much sexual pleasure as possible. Its appearance is fully humanoid, with realistic, synthetic skin of pale pink, with “hair” of a more hot pink color. It seems to have a small gas tank attached to its back, seemingly light enough not to encumber the unit’s movement. The unit bears incredibly advanced medical and chemical knowledge, as well as a number of medical tools able to emerge from its wrists at will. Contained within the unit’s wrists is a pink, liquid chemical that, when injected into the human bloodstream, elicits extreme, feverish amounts of list and arousal. However, it has been known to run out of this compound on occasion—experimentation has revealed that the unit can convert human ejaculate into more of the chemical. The unit also carries a sort of gas mask with a pink heart painted on each of the eyes, though it is locked by a brainwave signature detector. The mask only unlocks when a human emits brainwaves that signify that it fully and completely consents to putting the mask on. The mask itself is connected to the gas tank on the unit’s back, and sets the human to a constant flow of breathing said gas. When inhaled (it allegedly has a sweet, musky smell), it causes a human to grow drowsy, infatuated with the unit, and “dreamily aroused.” After an hour or so of wearing the gas mask, the human is seemingly permanently changed; they are infatuated with the unit, refer to it as “nurse,” blindly obey the unit, and generally act lustful and giddy. Additionally, the unit bears the ability to emit a unique brainwave targeting humans. However, the brainwave is only effective when a human is visibly watching the unit kiss—be it another being, glass, etc. Observing the kiss causes the unit to desperately want one for themselves, and move closer to the unit by any means.
Unit 6LF, “Swinger.” An extremely advanced edition of a commonly-used entertainment unit, seeming to unusually bear sentience, intelligence, and a genuine personality matrix (we’re still debating on “sapience.”) The unit’s body is made of realistic, synthetic skin and flesh, though it seems to be painted to look like metal plating (perhaps to preserve some “grassroots” or “retro” aspect). Its “hair” and eyes emit a constant glow, though the color changes based on the unit’s apparent mood. The unit seems to have a completely ruined personality matrix, as it behaves similar to that of a peppy, promiscuous woman from the 1920’s; obsessed with swing music and radio, frequently using slang from the time, etc. Despite its purposefully-ancient personality matrix, it possesses some legitimately advanced neurological technology. It’s mainly capable of emitting two types of brainwaves. One can only be emitted while the unit is dancing. Any human that watches the dance is subject to the brainwaves’ effects, which induce feelings of excitement and suggestibility. The other brainwave can only be emitted while singing. Any human that hears the singing is subject to the brainwaves’ effects, which include feelings of arousal and intense infatuation. Additionally, the unit is able to emit a low, controlled shock from its fingertips. However, the type of shock that it emits is extremely peculiar—it’s incredibly weak in terms of voltage, and behaves normally around non-living things. However, when in contact with a human, the electricity seems to seek out the reward and pleasure centers in the human brain, targeting them specifically and giving them special stimulation. This causes extreme pleasure in the human, even to the point of temporary incapacitation in some cases.
Unit 0UY, “Echo.” Technically, the unit itself is more of a rogue program than an actual machine. However, it is dangerous, and we do have it contained, so I’m writing a log about it. In design, it seems to be a program designed for managing a space vessel, with organizational tools, priority sequences, things of that sort. However, its chief ability is that to possess machinery. It can enter almost any electronic machinery, taking complete control over it with shocking fluency. Currently, it’s found the body of an inactive assistant droid—realistic synthetic flesh and skin, looking to be a voluptuous human woman with dark blue skin and “hair”. What’s most curious is that, whenever it possesses a humanoid robot, the robot’s design undergoes changes to fit the common anomalies listed at the beginning of the log (modified fuel receptor, etc.), as well as gaining one additional, unique anomaly that is nearly impossible to predict. For the assistant droid, its breasts seemed to have started producing a white, milky substance from the nipples. When ingested by a human, the human will most often experience feelings of intense arousal, infatuation, and suggestibility. Additionally, the unit is capable of projecting a hologram form of its program—a beautiful woman with impossibly long hair—out to a range of up to 20 meters from the host body. The hologram seems to emit peculiar brainwaves that take advantage of human fetishes; the unit will know a human subject’s fetishes, and typically have the hologram act accordingly. Due to the unique neurological signature, a human subject will also feel an irrational urge to join the fantasy and indulge with the hologram. Beyond that, it can project a hologram of anything in its database, so long as it’s within range of the assistant droid host body.
This concludes my logs of the dangerous robotic specimens. I’m still under the firm belief that somebody inside the factory is responsible for these altered designs in standard utility bots, but Wentworth would never listen to me. He’d rather focus on perfecting the craft than looking at his own damn people. This is going to blow up in his face, I just know it.
However, this is Harvey Metzger, concluding the log for now.
———————————————————
And with that, I can’t wait to hear from you! Pick a favorite unit to play and let me see your little orange envelopes.
By the way, it’s very much worth noting that I am capable of sending reference pictures for nearly every robot, so don’t be afraid to ask if you’re having trouble picturing them!
I can’t wait to hear from you.

I was a second generation oil tanker owner in the early 2000’s. I mostly shipped petrol from Texas to third world countries to include Myanmar. Depending on the market prices sometimes smaller oil / gas producers would ship their product internationally.
In the summer of 2014 under international pressure the Myanmar government was phasing out its use of high leaded gasoline in exchange for Texas made unleaded gasoline.
My small oil tanker company was in contact with the Myanmar’s defense minister to accept a contract for the delivery of essentially 190,000 barrels unleaded gas.
My salesman, Omar who also doubled as my First-Hand on my oil tanker had put the phone down in his lap for a moment to tell me something important. Basically, the Myanmar government would accept our gasoline shipment contract but we had to accept their leaded gasoline which their government would pay for as well. The only catch was we had to give them our plan how we would safely dispose of or store the leaded gasoline.
Both me and Omar had about 30 seconds to convince the Myanmar Defense Minister that we had a contract for a safe place to dispose the leaded gasoline. Then it dawned on me that my father had inherited 200 acres of worthless desert land in Southern Arizona, which I would tell the Myanmar defense minister was actually an underground warehouse for dangerous chemicals.
I quickly told Omar to relay the message to the Defense minister that we had a place to indefinitely store the leaded gasoline.
The price of gasoline in 2014 was $3.30 USD a gallon and we were going to receive around 150,000 barrels of leaded gasoline. A barrel holds about 42 gallons of gasoline. So my shipping company was going to basically be given $21,000,000 in free leaded gasoline. I really lost interest in the measly $100,000 we would make from actually shipping the petrol.
I felt that rush of nervous energy run through my body that this would be my one opportunity to become rich.
My grandfather was from India and we were taught Hindi as kids from my grandparents. My mother was Caucasian and would jokingly feel left out of our conversations. I called my father and intentionally spoke Hindi to him. I told him to go start a LLC company with his worthless land in Arizona and to call it something that makes it sound like a waste storage facility to the Myanmar Government but was nothing more than vacant land.
So my father decided on the name “Desert Warehouse Indefinite Storage.” He paid top dollar to the state of Arizona to expedite the approval of the LLC company and I faxed it the same day to the Myanmar government.
Our next objective was to find buyers for our leaded gasoline. The one thing that I had in the United States were connections throughout the country with Indians who immigrated to the United States from India.
In 2014, many Indians were owners of small gas stations and farms throughout America. They owned small ones that weren’t affiliated with a large corporations like Citgo, Sunoco, or Wawa. I typically wouldn’t get involved with trucking gas on land so I had to over pay a gas transport company to deliver the gas and I had to underprice the gas to get rid of it quickly.
I figured I would spend about $11,000,000 in underpricing the leaded gasoline and overpay the trucking costs to get rid of the gas quickly which would still leave me with $10,000,000.
So Omar worked day and night to find suitable buyers for our gas. Because gasoline has a short shelf life of usually less than a year, Omar told our Indian contacts that we had to get rid of the gas quickly, which was partially true. Our contacts were more interested in if our product was actually gasoline and not some alternative fuel source. I don’t think any of them would have even imagined that we got the gasoline from a near third world country.
So my shipping vessel took the longer journey from Myanmar to the Baltimore harbor. I was to concerned to dock in Texas where they would be suspicious of where I got the gas and where I was trucking it to.
I rented one of those big white petroleum storage containers that are typically seen along many harbor to include Baltimore which I had already accounted for in my expenses.
It was an early Sunday morning in February when I had finally reached the Baltimore harbor. After several hours my shipping vessel had unloaded the gas and the hired trucking company started to fill up their trucks. Everything was working according to plan. I even accepted a contract the next day to make a shipment from Kuwait to New York.
Two weeks had gone by and all of my projections were correct in the amount of money that I made. The best part was that most of my dealings were difficult to trace.
Then as I was sailing in the Gulf of Kuwait a military official from Myanmar had found out where I was and was inquiring about the leaded gasoline that I took from them.
Apparently it was true that Myanmar was doing away with the leaded gasoline but giving the leaded gasoline away for free was a ploy by the president to keep it out of its country’s rebels hands who were attempting an uprising.
So now this unknown military leader is demanding either the leaded gasoline back or money and he knows where my ship is right now. I knew he wasn’t joking around and that Myanmar wasn’t really far from where I was presently located in the Arabian Sea.
To make things worse one of my Indian contacts gas station’s who I delivered gasoline to was inspected by a local government official, where the leaded gasoline was detected. Because of that his 10 other gas stations were inspected and now he was essentially put out of business.
I contacted my father and he told me not to come back to the United States anytime soon because the Indian mafia would behead me.
So now I’m in the middle of the Arabian sea with a shipment of petrol to New York which I can’t even attempt to sail to because of the Indian mafia.
To make things worse, within hours there was a small military vessel that had pulled up to my tanker that gave every indication that it was affiliated with the Myanmar coup.
Me and Omar are both profusely sweating now and yelling at each other. I had to think fast so I figured that I would rob Peter to pay Paul. Essentially I would unload the petrol that I got from Kuwait and deliver it to Myanmar.
I would seal my death sentence by doing this because you don’t mess with the Emir of Kuwait. The Emir has an infinite amount of money and there will be a contract out on my head if the petrol isn’t delivered to New York. I was 10 times more afraid of Kuwait than I was of Myanmar but I had a military grade vessel right next to mine at the moment where I was defenseless.
So I had no choice to unload the petrol in Myanmar. This temporarily got us out of a situation but now I had to deal with a much larger issue.
I am now essentially without a country. I don’t even know where to go without being killed. Saddam had learned not to mess with Kuwait and if the Emir didn’t kill me than countless other shipping vessel owners would do the same thing and become millionaires overnight by stealing Kuwait’s oil and gas.
I knew I had five days at most before Kuwait would hire a contractor who will freeze my banking accounts then would come kill me.
The only safe place for me and Omar to be was in the Sunni territory of Iraq because they were somewhat enemies of Kuwait. So we would essentially donate my shipping vessel and pay the Sunni’s a monthly stipend for their protection against the Emir of Kuwait.
So we made arrangements to hide out in the Sunni held territory of Iraq which had enemies on all sides from Saddam’s rule but as long as you had money then they were your friends.
Me and Omar were housed in this horrible apartment. It had no air conditioning and the temperatures would surpass a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Neither of us spoke a word of Arabic so life was just horrible. I had transferred all of my money into an account that Omar had set up using his cousin’s alias.
After a year in absolute misery things got worse. The Sunni’s were demanding more and more money to the point where they had bled me dry. We had only $5000 left and the Sunni’s could make millions off of us by informing the Emir of Kuwait of our whereabouts.
So me and Omar had no choice but to sneak out in the middle of the night and head for the Kurdish held territory of Iraq. After days and days of traveling in broken down trucks, where we paid large sums of money to our transporters, we made it to the Kurdish held territory of Kirkuk.
I am now in an Internet cafe with $1500 between Omar and I. We know the Emir of Kuwait was tipped off about our general location. Omar and I had decided that our only hope is to join the French Foreign Legion. We both filled out the online applications and the only thing we have to figure out now is how to get to France.

I was a second generation oil tanker owner in the early 2000’s. I mostly shipped petrol from Texas to third world countries to include Myanmar. Depending on the market prices sometimes smaller oil / gas producers would ship their product internationally.
In the summer of 2014 under international pressure the Myanmar government was phasing out its use of high leaded gasoline in exchange for Texas made unleaded gasoline.
My small oil tanker company was in contact with the Myanmar’s defense minister to accept a contract for the delivery of essentially 190,000 barrels unleaded gas.
My salesman, Omar who also doubled as my First-Hand on my oil tanker had put the phone down in his lap for a moment to tell me something important. Basically, the Myanmar government would accept our gasoline shipment contract but we had to accept their leaded gasoline which their government would pay for as well. The only catch was we had to give them our plan how we would safely dispose of or store the leaded gasoline.
Both me and Omar had about 30 seconds to convince the Myanmar Defense Minister that we had a contract for a safe place to dispose the leaded gasoline. Then it dawned on me that my father had inherited 200 acres of worthless desert land in Southern Arizona, which I would tell the Myanmar defense minister was actually an underground warehouse for dangerous chemicals.
I quickly told Omar to relay the message to the Defense minister that we had a place to indefinitely store the leaded gasoline.
The price of gasoline in 2014 was $3.30 USD a gallon and we were going to receive around 150,000 barrels of leaded gasoline. A barrel holds about 42 gallons of gasoline. So my shipping company was going to basically be given $21,000,000 in free leaded gasoline. I really lost interest in the measly $100,000 we would make from actually shipping the petrol.
I felt that rush of nervous energy run through my body that this would be my one opportunity to become rich.
My grandfather was from India and we were taught Hindi as kids from my grandparents. My mother was Caucasian and would jokingly feel left out of our conversations. I called my father and intentionally spoke Hindi to him. I told him to go start a LLC company with his worthless land in Arizona and to call it something that makes it sound like a waste storage facility to the Myanmar Government but was nothing more than vacant land.
So my father decided on the name “Desert Warehouse Indefinite Storage.” He paid top dollar to the state of Arizona to expedite the approval of the LLC company and I faxed it the same day to the Myanmar government.
Our next objective was to find buyers for our leaded gasoline. The one thing that I had in the United States were connections throughout the country with Indians who immigrated to the United States from India.
In 2014, many Indians were owners of small gas stations and farms throughout America. They owned small ones that weren’t affiliated with a large corporations like Citgo, Sunoco, or Wawa. I typically wouldn’t get involved with trucking gas on land so I had to over pay a gas transport company to deliver the gas and I had to underprice the gas to get rid of it quickly.
I figured I would spend about $11,000,000 in underpricing the leaded gasoline and overpay the trucking costs to get rid of the gas quickly which would still leave me with $10,000,000.
So Omar worked day and night to find suitable buyers for our gas. Because gasoline has a short shelf life of usually less than a year, Omar told our Indian contacts that we had to get rid of the gas quickly, which was partially true. Our contacts were more interested in if our product was actually gasoline and not some alternative fuel source. I don’t think any of them would have even imagined that we got the gasoline from a near third world country.
So my shipping vessel took the longer journey from Myanmar to the Baltimore harbor. I was to concerned to dock in Texas where they would be suspicious of where I got the gas and where I was trucking it to.
I rented one of those big white petroleum storage containers that are typically seen along many harbor to include Baltimore which I had already accounted for in my expenses.
It was an early Sunday morning in February when I had finally reached the Baltimore harbor. After several hours my shipping vessel had unloaded the gas and the hired trucking company started to fill up their trucks. Everything was working according to plan. I even accepted a contract the next day to make a shipment from Kuwait to New York.
Two weeks had gone by and all of my projections were correct in the amount of money that I made. The best part was that most of my dealings were difficult to trace.
Then as I was sailing in the Gulf of Kuwait a military official from Myanmar had found out where I was and was inquiring about the leaded gasoline that I took from them.
Apparently it was true that Myanmar was doing away with the leaded gasoline but giving the leaded gasoline away for free was a ploy by the president to keep it out of its country’s rebels hands who were attempting an uprising.
So now this unknown military leader is demanding either the leaded gasoline back or money and he knows where my ship is right now. I knew he wasn’t joking around and that Myanmar wasn’t really far from where I was presently located in the Arabian Sea.
To make things worse one of my Indian contacts gas station’s who I delivered gasoline to was inspected by a local government official, where the leaded gasoline was detected. Because of that his 10 other gas stations were inspected and now he was essentially put out of business.
I contacted my father and he told me not to come back to the United States anytime soon because the Indian mafia would behead me.
So now I’m in the middle of the Arabian sea with a shipment of petrol to New York which I can’t even attempt to sail to because of the Indian mafia.
To make things worse, within hours there was a small military vessel that had pulled up to my tanker that gave every indication that it was affiliated with the Myanmar coup.
Me and Omar are both profusely sweating now and yelling at each other. I had to think fast so I figured that I would rob Peter to pay Paul. Essentially I would unload the petrol that I got from Kuwait and deliver it to Myanmar.
I would seal my death sentence by doing this because you don’t mess with the Emir of Kuwait. The Emir has an infinite amount of money and there will be a contract out on my head if the petrol isn’t delivered to New York. I was 10 times more afraid of Kuwait than I was of Myanmar but I had a military grade vessel right next to mine at the moment where I was defenseless.
So I had no choice to unload the petrol in Myanmar. This temporarily got us out of a situation but now I had to deal with a much larger issue.
I am now essentially without a country. I don’t even know where to go without being killed. Saddam had learned not to mess with Kuwait and if the Emir didn’t kill me than countless other shipping vessel owners would do the same thing and become millionaires overnight by stealing Kuwait’s oil and gas.
I knew I had five days at most before Kuwait would hire a contractor who will freeze my banking accounts then would come kill me.
The only safe place for me and Omar to be was in the Sunni territory of Iraq because they were somewhat enemies of Kuwait. So we would essentially donate my shipping vessel and pay the Sunni’s a monthly stipend for their protection against the Emir of Kuwait.
So we made arrangements to hide out in the Sunni held territory of Iraq which had enemies on all sides from Saddam’s rule but as long as you had money then they were your friends.
Me and Omar were housed in this horrible apartment. It had no air conditioning and the temperatures would surpass a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Neither of us spoke a word of Arabic so life was just horrible. I had transferred all of my money into an account that Omar had set up using his cousin’s alias.
After a year in absolute misery things got worse. The Sunni’s were demanding more and more money to the point where they had bled me dry. We had only $5000 left and the Sunni’s could make millions off of us by informing the Emir of Kuwait of our whereabouts.
So me and Omar had no choice but to sneak out in the middle of the night and head for the Kurdish held territory of Iraq. After days and days of traveling in broken down trucks, where we paid large sums of money to our transporters, we made it to the Kurdish held territory of Kirkuk.
I am now in an Internet cafe with $1500 between Omar and I. We know the Emir of Kuwait was tipped off about our general location. Omar and I had decided that our only hope is to join the French Foreign Legion. We both filled out the online applications and the only thing we have to figure out now is how to get to France.

(Day 1- Log 1: We came across a small herd of feral Fluffies yesterday and we have managed to bring them back to the lab after a nearly six-hour attempt at wrangling them. Despite their small size, those creatures move unbelievably fast.
We managed to finally capture them when we laid a trap in the alley within which they took refuge. The trap consisted of a big plate of cheap spaghetti and sauce we bought at the nearby grocery store, and a large net we already had with us when we started our expedition to collect some fluffies for our project.
The fluffies fell right into the trap; a young colt came across it and announced it to the rest of the herd; they came running almost instantly. As they were quite literally gobbling down the pasta like starving pigs eating from an overfilled trough, we dropped the net right on top of them.
The fluffies defecated themselves right as the net came down and many tried running away, but the net held them down and we were able to collect each fluffy and put each of them into their own cage for documentation and transport.
We put the fluffies into a special pen here at the lab where they will stay for the duration of our project and once we are done, we will put them up for adoption if they are still in sellable condition, otherwise we throw them in the incinerator where we normally dispose of all lab waste.
Personal Note: It took us six hours to chase after the fluffies. It took only ten minutes for them to get caught in our spaghetti trap. In hindsight, we probably should have just used the spaghetti right at the beginning and save ourselves the trouble of chasing the fluffies in the first place. Why chase after the vermin when you can lure them right to you?
End log.)
My name is Christopher Evans, I’m a researcher here at the Fluffy Eugenics and Genetic Research Lab here in Chicago. Our main goal here at the lab is to create our own variant of fluffy now that the government forced Hasbro to shut Hasbio down in the U.S. v. Hasbro supreme court case.
After Hasbio was shut down, the government also forced Hasbro to rescind their fluffy patent. Thus, they no longer hold a trademark on fluffies, allowing virtually any company to research and even produce fluffies of their own design. Thou as of recently, no company has yet to produce any original fluffies of their own, despite the lack of a trademark, most folks have no idea how to create fluffies artificially in a lab.
This company that is funding our project wants to get ahead in the fluffy market as not only did they pay for the lab in full, but they also paid for all the equipment and resources we would need to do this.
They even paid for a couple of bottles of expensive wine for when the project is finished. A little early to celebrate, but I can’t complain. That wine was made in the 1920s and has sat at a French vineyard since then until the company bought it and had it shipped to the US. It’s bound to be good shit.
This lab was originally part of Hasbio, but since it was shut down, the lab is now run by the Artificial Biology Foundation that was founded back in 2012 when PETA first unleashed the fluffies out into the world. They wanted to use the lab to study the fluffies and their artificial biology, but they didn’t have any funding, so they started renting out the lab to interested companies that wanted to do their own research.
My main job here at the lab is to analyze samples collected from the fluffies… including sperm samples. I unfortunately have the job of “extracting” the samples from the male specimens. Apart from having to collect sperm samples, the other fluffies constantly annoy me with their requests for “huggies”, “sketties”, and “upsies”. And a lot of times, they keep asking if I’m their nyu daddeh.
I have felt tempted to kick those fluffies across the room like a football, but Dr. Kritzer said the fluffies need to be in good physical and mental condition for this project to go smoothly, plus nobody on the team wants to have to go out on another expedition to collect more fluffies sooner than they have to. So I’ve kept my foot down and my mouth shut. I still get a “kick” out of scaring the little shits when I turn off the light and make a loud noise.
Despite the fluffies being annoying as hell, I’m still grateful for this opportunity to work on this project. I get some juicy pay from this to put toward paying for my doctorate in genetics. Same with the three grad students who are on this project.
Speaking of the grad students, the team consists of them, three researchers (myself included), and an experienced geneticist running the project, Dr. Aldrich Kritzer. Kritzer is currently the leading expert in fluffy biology and genetics. Oddly, he was never hired by Hasbio when they first made the fluffy prototypes, but all the guys who were involved have since disappeared from public life so Kritzer has studied fluffies ever since the fateful PETA break-in, he is the best option available for this project.
The full researchers involved with this project include me, Abdul, and Carl. Abdul is from Egypt, graduating from the University of Cario, he came to the US and got his masters in Miami. Now he is studying for his genetics doctorate in Dallas. We get along well together.
Carl is from Philly. He graduated there and got his master’s there too. He received two bachelor’s degrees there, Genetics and Chemical Engineering. He's currently working on his masters for both, but he just graduated with both and his scores were adequate enough to be brought on as a paid researcher instead of an interning grad student. He unfortunately is also a sociopath with an affinity for explosive compounds. He originally came from a military family and he was rejected by recruiters for several reasons, mainly his mental instability. So, he decided to study to become a researcher so he could still follow his family’s tradition, albeit in his own way… by developing new explosive cocktails for the military to use in their munitions. Now, one day out of the week, there are always constant explosions coming from the lab.
Supporting us researchers and Doctor Kritzer are the three interns doing most of the labor of the project. Two of them were generic grad students with bland personalities that I never bothered to associate with them. I did get to know one intern, who like the other two was a grad student from the local university, Maria. She was a bronze beauty from Mexico with a rocking body like a supermodel. She was also a child prodigy, graduating high school at the age of 13, finished her bachelor’s in both genetics and biology as a dual major at 17. Then received masters in the same fields again at 21. Right now, she is only 23 and already halfway through getting her doctorates in those fields. On top of all that, she fluently speaks her native Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French. She is currently studying Russian and German as electives. This woman is going places.
Sadly, the other interns get quite distracted whenever she is in the room. To be fair I get distracted too whenever I work with her. She and I have had quite the chat in the weeks preparing for this project. It’s like God himself molded her from clay. The body of a Greek goddess with the mind of a celebrity scientist. Whenever she is in her element, she’s like that teacher in school that truly is passionate about her job and is always on standby to help. But whenever she gets irritated, she turns into that caricature of pissed-off Latina yelling at us in Spanish which most of us don’t speak. The other interns, unlike us fully qualified researchers, don’t know to keep their hands to themselves and make constant discreet passes at her ass and sometimes her chest, which pisses her off quite easily.
After weeks of preparing the lab and a day of collecting the fluffies, today is the day the project officially begins.

DC Next presents:

Suicide Squad

Issue 4: Unethical Practices
Written by Deadislandman1
Edited by dwright5252 and AdamantAce
 
 
“¿Realmente podemos hacerlo, hermana? (Can we really make it, sister?)”
“¡Por supuesto que podemos! Quédate conmigo y estaremos bien. (Of course we can! Stick with me and we’ll be fine!)”
The full moon cast the desert in a subtle shade of grey as a young girl shuffled across the sand as quickly as she could, pulling a smaller boy who clutched an action figure along by the hand as the two hurried across a barren asphalt road, skittering into the bushes as the headlights of a truck lit the area behind them. Keeping low, the two crept towards a rocky outcrop, scrambling through as the lights behind them began to shift from the roads to the outcropping.
“I think I see one!” shouted a distinctly American voice, “C’mon, we can catch them before they get to the border.”
No, not now. They were closer to freedom, to their goal, than they’d ever been before, yet these people who crossed everyday looking for trouble always found them. They can’t let it end here! Holding onto the boy as tightly as she could, the girl began to sprint, yanking the boy along as the two scaled a cragged hill. As they reached the top, a large chain link fence could be seen from their vantage point, the goal of both the girl and her little brother. As footsteps drew closer to the girl, she whirled around to spot a small gang of four men in cowboy hats and overalls trudging towards them, shining their flashlights on her as they began to pick up the pace at the sight of her and her brother.
“There they are!” shouted one of the men, “Get ‘em!”
As her heart rate jumped a mile a minute, the girl grabbed her brother by the arm, pulling him along as the two began to run as fast as they could, bolting towards the border as their pursuers raced after them, grabbing at the two in an attempt to capture them. The brother’s breathing began to become laboured as he wheezed, unable to keep up with his sister as she tried to drag him along. He was too young, his legs were too short, he could never keep up with his sister, but his sister was unwilling to let him go. They would never make it together, a fact that couldn’t be any truer than now.
“Gotcha, you little bastard!”
One of their pursuers reached out, grabbing the brother’s hand as he began to scream in terror, yanked out of his sister’s grip before being tossed to the ground, dropping his toy as he was held down by one of the men while the other three dove after the sister.
“Luis!” shouted the sister, angrily turning around only to be tackled to the ground by one of the men, hands around her throat as the other two began to search around for more immigrants.
“Is that all of them?” said one of the men, scratching his head, “I thought there was supposed to be a whole caravan of them? They would have been a great way of repainting my truck.”
“Nah, they tend to break up into smaller groups nowadays.” said another of the men, holding the sister down with all of his strength as she struggled against his grip, “Still, we got a couple of little Illegals here, what should we do with ‘em?”
“I say we hand ‘em over to Border security, they’ll sort ‘em out.” said the man holding the brother down. As he placed his hand over the brother’s mouth, the brother bit down on one of his fingers, prompting him to yowl in pain before getting off of the brother to kick him in the ribs, “Little fucker! Maybe I’ll dispose of you myself!”
The sister gritted her teeth, feeling an uncontrollable rage start to burn inside her as her skin began to charr, her eyes glowing like embers as her fingers began to light up in response to seeing her brother get harmed. Feeling the heat building underneath his palms, the man holding the sister down suddenly stumbled back in surprise as the sister let out an angry shout, setting the man ablaze with just a single look. The heat became more intense at an exponential speed, cutting out his scream halfway as he was reduced to ash in an instant. Hearing the cut out cry of their companion, the men turned towards the sister, only to find a dark figure that looked less like a human and more like a demon. With pitch black skin, a constant inferno encircling the body with bright orange eyes, the sister stalked towards them, baring her clawed arms as she stared each of them down, “¡Déjalo! ¡En!. ¡Paz! (Leave! Him! Alone!)”
With the swing of her wrist, the men were instantly engulfed in flames, rendered into ash with nary a scream.
 
 
“How long do you tend to stew in here for?”
Raptor sat in knee deep water, his back against the wall of the cell as he tested Killer Croc’s waters, searching for any and all kinds of useful information. He had been in there for a few weeks, pruning up in dirtied waters alongside a big man with leathery skin and sharp teeth. Croc wasn’t really one to make conversation, hell, he didn’t even make much noise at all. At a few points Raptor would even forget he was sharing a cell with him, only to be reminded by the splash of a human limb from the small duct above and the subsequent snapping of bone and tearing of flesh. A quiet eater Croc was not.
Lawton received his own meal around the same time, a small cardboard box containing a little pile of slop that barely fulfilled the criteria to be called food. Whatever it was, it was nutritious enough to keep him somewhat healthy, even if it tasted like bile cooked in a microwave with a side of plastic. He had to grab it out of the air and eat it quickly though, once it was in the water it was inedible and the guards never waited for him to be awake when they dropped it. If he wasn’t there to eat it, it would go to waste.
“Hrrrrrrnnn….We only get to come out when it’s time to work,” growled Croc, slithering about in the darker corners of the cell, “Other than that, it’ll be for medical examinations once a month. Don’t bother faking anything, they can tell.”
“Damn, no openings at all?” said Raptor.
“No openings,” replied Croc.
Raptor sighed, leaning further back against the wall as he began to stew in frustration. He’d hoped to probe for a weakness in the walls or infrastructure, a gap in the guards’ patrol patterns, but almost everything about this place was airtight to a tee. He was beginning to think that the damaged wall in his initial lodging was a singular exception and not a good reflection of the prison as a whole. It made sense, this was a supermax prison built for metahumans, so top of the line maintenance and security were top concerns.
“I know what you're thinking.”
“Hmm?”
Croc suddenly spoke up, startling Raptor as the reptiloid’s eyes met his, amber eyes that seemed to stand out against the pitch black darkness of the cell, “People have been trying to escape Belle Reve for years, anyone who’s ever actually gotten out of their cell has either gotten shoved back in or put in a body bag. No-one’s ever gotten out for good, so don’t think you’re going to break the trend.”
Raptor stared back at Croc for a moment before scoffing, blowing his advice off, “They want us complacent, to be good little boys. Thinking like that only fits their mold. Sure, maybe it’ll take a few months, maybe even a year, but dammit, I will break out of this festering shithole, shove the bitch who runs this place into a woodchipper, then be on my merry crusading way.”
“Hrrrn, dream on,” growled Croc, slithering deeper into his corner. “Just don’t be surprised if your enthusiasm dies off. This place will break you, one way or another.”
An alarm suddenly blared, prompting a pained growl from Croc before he began to submerge himself in the water. Raptor raised an eyebrow, unsure of what Croc was doing, “What’s that noise?”
“New mission, and it looks like they want one or both of us on it,” said Croc, closing his eyes as he braced for pain. “This is gonna hurt.”
“What’s gonna hur-urk!”
A strong torrent of electricity rippled through the water, crackling with violent energy as Raptor convulsed, the pain eliciting a scream so loud it threatened to tear his own vocal cords apart before he finally lost consciousness.
 
 
“Oh god, not again!”
Raptor’s eyes snapped open as Rick Flag gave him a good kick in the gut, forcing him to wake up as the soldier took a knee, keeping a close eye on him as he laid on the floor. Looking around, Raptor realized that he was in a locker room of some kind. Floyd Lawton was on the other side of the room, putting on his boots as if it was just another day on the job, while another man, unidentified, seemed to be slipping an orange cat themed costume over his body. Dante Ramon sat at one of the benches, looking almost tame compared to when Raptor last saw him and clad in a metallic purple outfit. Finally, there was Mitch Mayo, who was already dressed in his Condiment King outfit and sobbing in the corner of the room.
“Wakey wakey, buddy,” said Flag, jabbing at Raptor with the tip of his rifle, “You’re the last one to be delivered. Get up and get dressed, we’re moving out in ten minutes.”
Stepping back into one of the corners, Flag allowed Raptor to get up on his feet. Raptor shot Flag an almost animalistic glare of malice, but elected not to do anything more. He was painfully aware of the brain bomb in his cranium, and any sort of physical attack would be the end of him right away. Instead, Raptor turned to find his suit and his gauntlet Suyolak sitting on one of the benches. To his surprise, his raggedy old hood had been replaced completely by an orange and white shirt with no sleeves. His mask, originally worn out with borderline broken straps, had been fixed up to the point where it looked brand new. Best of all however was Suyolak, his beloved Suyolak.
The gauntlet, despite receiving some spit and shine, looked completely unaltered in design and purpose. Raptor picked the weapon up off the bench, sliding it over his right forearm before feeling the special mixture of chemicals Suyolak always had cooked up for him inject itself into his bloodstream. The cocktail instantly erased any mental turmoil Raptor had, stimulating his brain and allowing him to truly think clearly in a way he hadn’t been able to in the weeks he’d been in his cell.
“Enjoying the new gear?”
Kulikova’s voice echoed throughout the room as Raptor whirled around, attempting to find the origin point of her voice. As he looked around, thoroughly confused, he suddenly heard a finger tapping glass right above him. Glancing upward, Raptor spotted the Russian doctor in an observation room overlooking the area, joined by a couple of scientists and doctors as well as Amanda Waller herself.
“I appreciate the fact that you didn’t change much...” said Raptor, “Though I’m less enthused about the company you keep or the fact that you had your way with muscles around my spine.”
“Oh hush, it was standard procedure,” said Kulikova. “No need to get so worked up over it.”
“Hey!” piped Flag, getting Raptor’s attention before tapping his watch, “Tick tock, tick tock, buddy. Put your pants on so we can go!”
Raptor looked back up into the observation room, making eye contact with Waller. Her stare was blank, cold, unfeeling, but Raptor understood that underneath that facade was an unrelentingly cruel person. Unable to do anything else, Raptor simply settled for giving her an aggressive glare before moving to put the rest of his costume on. After slipping his mask over his head, Flag beckoned the group to move towards the helipad, allowing Lawton, who was most familiar with the overall layout of the prison, to take lead. He would lead them himself, but of course, there was the matter of the crying little ball of anxiety in the corner of the room.
“Mayo, get up,” ordered Flag, marching over to the little bastard and grabbing him by one of the hoses connecting his condiment tanks to the nozzle gauntlets on his forearms. “You can’t keep having a mental breakdown each time we have to go out. Man up and get out there.”
“I...I don’t…..I don’t want a repeat,” mumbled Mayo. “I don’t wanna feel like I’m drowning again...”
Flag rubbed the back of his head as he looked around unassuredly. Normally he would just pull him up by his bootstraps and tell Mayo to quit being a bitch, but Mayo’s a sensitive guy. Looking at his mental state right now, pushing him too hard could cause him to snap, and he wanted his squadmates in good shape for their mission. Groaning at the realization of what he had to do, Flag sighed, glancing around to make sure the squad was gone and glancing upward to make sure nobody was outwardly looking into the room from the observation area before moving to pat Mayo on the back.
“Listen, bud, I’m not gonna lie, your chances aren’t good, especially compared to your squadmates,” said Flag, “But you made it through the first one, and hell, that’s worth something. Maybe you’ll make it through this next one too. Regardless, just know that...well...I’ve got your back.”
Mayo, slowly but surely, began to stop crying, the flow of tears stemmed as he turned around to face Flag. Despite his emotional fit in which he threatened to fall apart, Mayo felt better knowing that at least one person seemed to be watching out for him. Turning around, Mayo reached out with his arms, attempting to get a hug out of Flag, but Flag simply backed away with an odd look on his face.
“I gave you a pep talk, I don’t do that often. I also don’t do hugs,” growled Flag. “Get your ass in gear, that’s all the pretty talk you’ll hear from me for the year.”
His eyes widening, Mayo quickly shuffled out of the room with haste, leaving Flag alone. As the soldier began to give his gear one final check, a patronizing laugh could be heard from above. Looking up, Flag spotted Kulikova teasingly tapping the glass of the observation room, “Tch… Softie.”
Flag growled, silently leaving the room in order to get Kulikova out of his sight. She was a hassle to deal with already, he’d rather have her out of his hair for a few hours at least. Besides, he had a mission to complete.
 
 
Dante’s helmet itched.
He hated this, the newly designed suit Belle Reve had cooked up for him during his initial stay there. His old suit may have just been a collection of scrap shards and pieces held together by his power, but it felt like his, like it was perfect for him. This? This strange collection of purple armor plates combined with an odd looking helmet he could barely see through? It all felt so unnatural, like it was designed to make him uncomfortable.
Suddenly, he felt a shove from behind as the man in the orange cat themed outfit pushed him along, throwing him out of his thoughts as Dante turned around, annoyed, “The fuck was that for?”
“Move it,” barked the man in the cat costume. “I want this mission to be done and over with sooner rather than later so I can finally be free of this goddamn shithole.”
Dante frowned, “How long have you been in here?”
“Five years,” said the man. “Now shut the fuck up and keep walking.”
As irritating as it was to be told off, Dante could empathize with this guy for wanting to get out as quickly as possible. This place had a habit of sucking hope out of your body and leaving nothing but a husk, and having already experienced the abuse inflicted by his captors, he would want out after five years of that too. The fact that each mission reduced one’s sentence meant that not everything was completely hopeless, but Dante chalked that up to giving inmates that small ray of hope that they’d actually get out and not serve Waller forever.
Without at least some light at the end of the tunnel, he could see a lot of people giving up instead of enduring.
As the squad finally stepped back out onto the helipad, the sun rising in the distance, Flag turned around to give everyone the mission briefing with his back to the orange hue.
“Alright everyone, here’s our deal for the day,” announced Flag, cracking his neck as he kept his weapon slung across his chest. “We’ve got a meta at the Mexico-American border roasting rednecks. Now I harbor as much love for trailer trash as the next guy, especially ones who also illegally cross national borders to try and commit some kind of wacko vigilante justice, but bodies are bodies. Waller wants this one in Task Force X’s custody by the end of the day.”
The squad members milled about uncomfortably, unsure of how to take the news. While many of them had been with the squad for years and have had experience in the operations with more debatable grounds for their legality, there were also plenty of others who were far greener. Some, like Mayo, seemed to catch on that speaking up was a bad idea, but others were far less wise.
“I didn’t know chasing illegal immigrants was worth your time, Flag,” said Raptor, verbally jabbing at Flag. “What? Aren’t the people inside the U.S. enough of a handful?”
“It doesn’t matter if this person lives in bumfuck Nevada or the Saharan fucking desert,” barked Flag. “I don’t wanna hear any more gibes from you, Raptor, not unless you want me to test Kulikova’s little brain bomb.”
Raptor snickered, deciding that at least for now it wasn’t worth it to keep punching above his weight like that. After being captured he’d been knocked down a peg, but now he needed to bide his time, wait for the perfect moment. For now, he needed to keep himself in check.
Unfortunately, someone else also hadn’t learned that lesson.
“Wait, so these guys died across the border and they crossed illegally?” said Dante. “Is that really enough of a justification for an American operation across national borders?”
“We’re a military branch with no accountability. Laws, international or not, are a non-factor.” said Flag. “If you have any more stupid questions you can refer to Blake.”
“Who?” asked Dante.
“Thomas Blake, Catman. The one who’ll be tracking our target today,” said Flag. “I think you can figure out the rest.”
Dante glanced back at the man in the orange suit and brown cat-cowl, looking like an off-brand Batman, who promptly growled back at Dante before turning away. Turning back towards Flag, Dante prepared to inquire more, only for Lawton’s hand to reach out and grab his shoulder.
“Don’t push him, ” said Lawton. “He might look like a joke, but he’s far from it.” Frustrated, Dante sighed, mentally telling himself to take a chill pill as Flag got onto the helicopter.
“Any other takers? Moronic inquiries? Shallow jabs?” said Flag, “Nothing? Good. Now let’s go do our jobs.”
 
 
What hit him first was the heat.
Lawton’s suit was built for combat. It could resist strikes from things as small as a knife and as large as a fifty cal sniper round. This, combined with the heavily insular nature of such a suit, meant that he could conserve his own body heat and keep on going in temperatures as low as absolute zero.
But in a place like Mexico? Forget it. Lawton might as well be trapped in a tuna can to cook.
As the helicopter roared over the border fence, it’s spinning blades kicking up dust as it touched down, the squad fanned out, covering as much ground as they could as the copter began to lift off again, leaving them behind so that they could get to work. The area was barren with the exception of a light initial layer of sand, lacking any kind of foliage due to the rocky geometry of the ground. As Lawton took in his surroundings, Flag trudged up an incline, reaching the top of a hill before whistling.
“Here we are,” said Flag, “The redneck roast.”
Four bodies laid on the ground in front of the squad, burnt to ash and barely recognizable. The sand around the ash was crystalized, a product of the intense heat that had barbequed the trespassers. Feeling the material crunch beneath his feet, Lawton watched as the squad gathered around the scene, inspecting every nook and cranny to make sure no detail was missed. The crystallization was widespread, so widespread that it stretched on for a good twenty or so meters.
“Jesus,” remarked Mayo, horror in his eyes as he gazed upon the gruesome sight, “you weren’t kidding when you said this was a roast.”
“Nah, this ain’t a roast,” said Raptor, making sure to step in the ashes and kick them around. “If this was a roast, I wouldn’t eat anything here. They charred everything.”
“Quit the chit chat,” barked Flag, who turned to Catman in order to address him. “Get to work, Blake. I want to pick up the trail before they get too far.”
Letting out an annoyed grunt, Blake did as he was told, trudging over to the bodies and kneeling down to inspect them. The ashes were well set in their spots, clumping to each other in a way that prevented them from simply spilling off into the wind. The dead have been this way for at least a few hours.
As Blake worked through the scene, Raptor pulled Deadshot aside. “He’s Gotham right? What’s his deal.”
Lawton watched the Catman comb through the ash, finding more crystallized glass, far denser than it was outside of the ash. Looking closer, Blake began to look for any kind of indentation in the glass, secondary fractures like what would be expected from footsteps.
“Rumour is Daddy abandoned him, Mommy abused him,” Floyd explained in a hushed tone, “So the guy runs off to Africa to hunt jungle cats. Then he gets attached, has a change of heart and starts hunting poachers instead, then it’s deforestors, politicians who are pro-pollution. Few run-ins with Batman later, and now he’s in the shit with us.!”
As the hunter continued to work at his task, Lawton continued to stroll over to one of the other bodies, squatting to inspect one of the heads of the victims. Underneath all of the burns and malformed flesh was likely a facial expression of pure terror, one that faced a massive inferno head on. Resisting the urge to poke at the damn thing, Lawton stood back up, taking a few steps back only to hear a crunch beneath his feet. Looking down, Lawton could pick out a red object with hints of blue, a strange thing that stood out in the sea of grey that was the ash. Reaching down and picking it up, Lawton brushed off the ash to find something he wasn’t expecting.
Despite being crushed in some places after being accidentally stepped on and melted down to the point where Lawton couldn’t tell who it was supposed to look like, the shape of the object made it clear that this was unmistakably an action figure. Inspecting it from multiple angles, Lawton hazarded that it was an old Flash toy. As he continued to look at it, Dante strolled up from behind Lawton, spotting the toy in his hand.
“What is that?” asked Dante.
“It’s a doll,” said Lawton, unsure of what to make of the item. “Or an action figure. Not sure how long it’s been here.”
Polaris raised his eyebrow, “What’s a toy doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” After a moment of thinking, his eyes widened, a realization occurring, “Wait, you don’t think...”
Confused, Lawton turned towards Dante, only for the magnetic villain to snatch the toy out of his hands, marching towards Flag in an angry manner. Lawton couldn’t tell what had rattled Dante so, but after a few seconds of connecting the dots, he realized what conclusion Dante had arrived at after seeing the toy.
“Dante, wait!” piped Lawton, shuffling towards his squadmate, “Leave it alone, it’s not worth-”
“Hey soldier-boy!” shouted Dante, furiously trudging towards his superior officer, “I think there are some things that need to be cleared up!”
“The fuck are you talking about, Dante?” piped Flag, “There’s nothing to discuss, go back to patrolling the area.”
“Oh I think this is something that’s worth talking about!” snapped Dante. The rest of the squadmates apart from Blake, who was too focused on his work, noticed the commotion, coming over to investigate.
“What’s going on?” asked Mayo, genuinely confused and nervous.
“Oh I’ll tell you what’s going on.” said Dante, “Flag told us we were tracking a target, but he left out the fact that we’re hunting a goddamn kid!”
Dante tossed the toy onto the ground in front of Flag, who simply stared at the object with a blank expression for a few seconds before looking up, perplexed. Raptor let out a tiny chuckle, unable to keep his inner thoughts inside.
“Well now this whole thing feels unnecessary!” joked Raptor, “If Waller wanted a Mexican kid caged, she could have just gotten the I.C.E. to do it.”
“Raptor, shut the fuck up,” snapped Flag, who promptly turned to Dante. “This doesn’t change anything. Kid or not, they’re still a meta and they’re still highly dangerous. They need to be contained.”
“Contained? What - to a place like Belle Reve?” said Dante, incredulous, “There’s no fucking way I’m going to have a part in taking a child to a place like that.”
“Last I checked, you don’t have a choice,” said Flag, his tone becoming more aggressive. “So why don’t you go back to patrolling the area like a good little soldier?”
Noticing the tension of the situation rapidly rising, Mayo attempted to step in, “Um, guys...Maybe now’s not the best time to-”
“Calm down? Hell no,” said Dante. “Because I’m not gonna let myself get dragged into kidnapping a kid.” Marching right up into Flag’s face, Dante looked him right in the eye, “I’d rather keep my goddamn dignity than follow orders with a smile.”
Suddenly, Flag struck out with his rifle, jabbing Dante in the throat with the muzzle and watching him choke and gag after the surprising attack. As he doubled over while clutching his neck, Flag leaned over, getting right up in Dante’s face.
“Who the fuck do you think you’re speaking to?!” yelled Flag, shouting his subordinate’s ear off. “Do you think I like to do this?! Do you think I’m content offing dictators and watching you fucking morons die over and over again?!”
Dante attempted to stumble away from Flag, but Flag refused to let up, hounding the metal themed villain, “Follow orders with a smile? Of course I don’t like this shit. I’d rather be anywhere but here!”
“T-Then why are you still working for her?!” mumbled Dante, barely getting the words out.
Flag stopped suddenly, the question catching him off guard. In the decade of service he’d dedicated to Task Force X, he’d asked himself that question again and again. Each time he came up with a different answer, but he didn’t want to share any at the moment.
“The reasons are mine and mine alone.” said Flag, “But know that what we’re doing right now, I don’t like it any more than you do. I just know that it has to be done.”
Dante, at a loss for words, could only stare back at Flag as he stepped off, giving Dante the room to get up on his feet again. The two men seemed to have cooled down a little after the initial tension, but the conflict between them was far from over. As Dante began to step away, taking a deep breath as he slowly disengaged from Flag, Raptor could only chuckle in the background.
“What’s so funny?” growled Flag, directing the question at Raptor as the villain simply responded with a shrug.
“I just know it needs to be done?” said Raptor, mimicking Flag’s voice before breaking into another hearty chuckle, “You keep telling yourself that buddy.”
“Hey, I’ve got a trail!”
The ethical arguments amongst the squad stopped as Catman called the rest of his teammates over to his position. As the five descended upon him, Blake pointed his finger at a spot in the crystalized sand where he’d cleared the ashes off, specifically an indentation that signified a footprint. As Blake moved his finger in a specific direction, the squad’s eyes followed, spotting a trail of indented footprints heading past the border fence and into Texas.
“Oh shit….” said Mayo, dread in his voice, “They crossed the border.”
“But where?” asked Dante, “What’s in that direction?”
“El Paso.” said Raptor, “It’s the biggest city on the border.”
“If she makes a scene anywhere near as bad as this,” said Lawton, “It could open up a whole new can of political worms.”
“So let’s get this done now,” said Flag, “Before more people get hurt.”
Shouldering his rifle, Flag barked an order at his subordinates to move out, trudging towards the border fence on their way to El Paso. They didn’t know what they were expecting to find there, but one thing was for sure.
This couldn’t end well.
 
Next Issue: El Paso - Coming November 4th