Thursday, April 23, 2015

Demon Cyborg

Some fiction from the mind of a chef




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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