Demon Cyborg
By
Roy Marshall
Striding
purposefully toward the two cowering young men, the uniformed giant was
obviously angry. The two wearing now
dirty white lab coats stood next to each other amongst the debris of what
remained of the lab. The giant's dark
blue uniform with colorful ribbons and medals adorning his chest, gold stars on
his huge shoulders, his bearing gave credence to his position, and instilled
fear in all before him. The crowd of
lesser men hurrying behind him were all in awe of the destruction. Fear was evident on their faces, they feared
the General in front of them, and they feared the repercussions. The two lab geeks were completely paralyzed with
fear as he approached them.
The General effortlessly
picked up and tossed aside a huge table that had been overturned and lay in his
path toward the cowering pair. The two
huddled closer together, trembling as the giant approached them. “What the hell happened here?” he bellowed at
the two who only trembled all the more at the outburst. “Well, I’m waiting for an explanation.” He
said after a few short moments.
The tallest of the
pair began in stuttering tones, “Well, sir, you see, well, it was the demon. The Cyborg Demon. He grew bigger and stronger than we thought
he would, and well, well, he broke down the cage bars and sort of went on a
rampage.”
The General looked
down at the pair with the oddest look of incredulity on his face. “What the hell are you talking about, what
demon?”
“Well, sir, the
demon we made. I know, I know, we
weren’t supposed to make demons, that wasn’t part of the project.”
“No, it
wasn’t!” The General directed at
them.
“Well it was an
experiment, research. We needed the
opportunity to try out various combinations of DNA to find the ones that would
accept the cyborg configuration that you wanted us to develop.”
“Well,” the
General looked at the pair again, with less hatred. “Okay, what exactly was going on here then?”
The smaller of the
two geeks took over and began his explanation, “We started to go over that data
you sent us from your other project, the one about recombinant gene
building. You know, those guys did some
fantastic work. Those dinosaur creatures
and the dragons that they made and all, it was incredible.”
“Hmmm. A hundred million dollars for 4 dragons and a
triceratops. Damn dragons are just plain
stupid little things. They have tried
everything and they can’t train them to do anything. Not even to crap in one spot in their cage
for God’s sake. All they do is eat, shit
and fart. They won’t blow fire, but
their damn farts would kill an elephant.
And take the paint right off anything in the area. The damn things never broke out of their
cages though.”
And the smaller geek did look around at the
destruction around him and began again.
“Yes sir, again, we are very sorry about this. We did underestimate the potential. But then we are getting a lot of information
from all of this. We started to use some
of their research and we began to look for the traits that you needed, you required
actually, and to do that, we needed to make a few creatures.”
The taller one
then took over, “Yes sir, and we did make some tremendous developments as we
looked at the areas that we needed to target in order to accentuate that compatibility. We had the cyborg frameworks, very cool
indeed. Thank you for those. But as you know, human, and even animal
tissues won’t respond and accept them.
We were looking for specific gene combinations that would work well for
us. We made some mistakes, but we learned
a lot from them.”
“Yeah, very cool
mechanicals General, thank you.” The
short one began again. “We did hundreds
of gene tests, lots of failures. But we
did find some that accepted the mechanicals, and we then came to the next
step. We thought that we could develop
an organism, just as an exercise in getting the right genes into it, so that we
could build, well, create from scratch, something that would meet all of our
requirements.”
“We were very
lucky, on our third try we got the organism to accept all the mechanicals
perfectly.”
The General looked
at them, shaking his head he then asked, “So whose idea was it to create a
demon? I mean that is what you decided
on right, a demon. Not some anthropoid
or half intelligent monkey or something we could use, who thought of the demon
as a perfect cyborg creation?”
The little geek’s
face went white, “Sir, General, please, it wasn’t meant as the final product,
it was just a developmental stage, a stepping stone toward what you hired us to
produce. That’s all. We only needed the information about the
mechanicals, so we build it.”
“Yes General, sir,
we were just needing the info. We sort
of just played around a little with what we could produce. You know, sort of a Mr. Potato Head type of
thing. We really did need the
information, that was the whole reason behind it all.”
“A demon. A damn demon that you could make into a
cyborg. Why?”
“Well, just for
fun I guess. We needed a bipedal
creature, so we started with some remains from a Neanderthal. You know, big bones, massive chest. Perfect for this. Not that we needed a skeletal structure per
say, the mechanicals are the actual skeleton.
And so we just thought, what the heck, it isn’t going to live long. We just needed the information it would
provide for us. So we sort of took
things in a different direction.
Demonesque. We gave it cloven
hooves, you know, like a demon. And
horns.”
“Well sir, it was
just sort of perfecting our technique, selecting horns.
Face from a goat, you know, just some demon attributes. With your cool technology we were able to
grow it in less than 3 weeks. This one
took the cyborg implants quite well.
When we took it out of the growth tank, it seemed to be doing really
well. You know, really well.”
"Really really
well General." chimed in the smaller geek.
“All right, define
really well for me please gentlemen.”
“Well, there was
no rejection of the mechanicals, its skin and remaining musculature worked
well, flexing as needed without tearing or in any way ripping when stressed. That was a big problem in most of our other
subjects. This subject appeared to have some cognizance, it responded to verbal
commands, did things when ordered to, sit, stand, bend over, eat and
stuff. Well, I mean, it exceeded our
expectations.”
“And then what
happened?”
Both of the geeks
turned white again. The smaller began,
“Well, sir, at first we didn't think anything of it. But the demon cage was sort of next to that
area over there where we take our breaks and eat. There was a television there, and we sort of
noticed that it spent a lot of time watching the TV. Just watching. This morning, well, it broke the bars of the
cage and went on a rampage. We think
everyone will live. There are a few in
the hospital.”
“So, it went on a
rampage. Any idea what started it all?”
The tall one began
very timidly, “Well sir, there is one small detail we did not notice until this
morning.”
“And, what is it?”
“It spoke sir, it
actually spoke to us today.”
“What did it say?”
“Ehhh, well, it
was weird. It said that it needed a
little blue pill to treat its ED problem.
Then it stood and bent the bars of the cage, tossed everything around. We tried to stop it, we really did, but the
thing is incredibly strong. And then it took
off out the front of the building.”
"ED?"
“Erectile
Dysfunction. Probably got the concept
from commercials. On the TV.”
“That part did strike
us as odd, I mean we didn't give it genetalia. Maybe that’s why it went on the
rampage, you know, after it looked down and found out there was nothing
there. Anyway, it took off and we haven't
seen it since. That’s why we called you
and your people. To, well you know, kill
it.”
"Kill
it? Let's just think about that a
moment. Tell me some more about this
thing, like how intelligent is it? You
said it spoke, it watched television, it must have some intellectual
abilities. What are they?" The General asked of the two before him.
The taller of the
pair began, "Well, that was in fact part of the experiment. We had the skeletal mechanicals, and the
interfaces, the controls, and of course we had the computer system to run it
all in a very tiny package. The trick
was to make living flesh work with all the cyber systems. So it has living human brain material, and it
has a very powerful computer that has some pretty spectacular
capabilities."
"We seem to
have been able to achieve that interface between living tissue and mechanical,
and it does look like it learns, all on its own. Although we did pack a lot of information
into the memory, so it has a pretty fair working knowledge of the world, if it
can access that part of the system."
"So it can
think?"
"Yes sir,
it's pretty obvious now. That makes it
all the more dangerous and imperative that you destroy it, we just don't know
what it will do?"
The General looked
around him at the lab that was in disarray.
Shaking his head he began, “I think you boys might have a rather limited
view about this creature. It spoke. It has the strength of ten men or more, it
has a rather frightening appearance.
Probably will be pretty hard to kill as well. No, I think I have some plans for this
beast. Let me ask you this, regular
tranquilizers should have the same effect and just knock it out, right?”
“Yes, yes, sure. Essentially it's just a living being with a
massive mechanical skeletal structure with a huge storage memory and processing
capacity. At its core it's just a human
brain with human like circulatory system.”
“Then we're going
to capture this demon and see what we can do with it.” And with that, the General and his men took
off and walked to the front of the building.
There he turned and threw back his orders, "And you two, I want
more of these things. Not necessarily
with the horns and all that, but big, smart, scary. Work on training them better. Get what you need from my office. Anything."
The two scientists
looked at each other, smiles on their faces.
It was like they struck gold.
They started ordering the others to get the placed cleaned up, and then
they began working on a list of things to buy. The race to build was on.
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