Here is part one. I hope you like it, please feel free to leave feedback. <!—s:)—>{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif<!—s:)—>
Bleeding and torn, Phillip-310 was perched precariously in the highest branches of what could be called a tree only through excessive generosity. Its old and dessicated limbs hadn’t seen a leaf in a generation and every time Phillip had to resettle his weight the whole thing creaked ominously and threatened to collapse beneath him. It was by no means an ideal place to be, but then again his alternatives weren’t numerous or savory. In reality his choices boiled down to only two - remain in the tree or take his chances with the dogs circling below.
Phillip both hated and feared dogs like no other creature on earth. At first he hadn’t been sure why, but his Drill Instructor knew his fears very well and put words to them easily;
"Dogs are your enemies Troopers!" the grey haired, bull necked ogre bellowed at the platoon one day, "they can hear you coming no matter how little sound you make, they can track you by smell alone, they are usually faster than you are and they hunt in groups. But the most despicable thing about a dog is that it will fight for the enemy and even die for them! If you encounter dogs expect no mercy and give none except a quick death! Hoo-ah!?"
"Hoo-ah." Phillip muttered to himself as it began to rain. It was good rain, fat and cool. He tilted his head up, opened his mouth and drank from heaven, forgetting his predicament for a moment. As he drank, the water washed his wounds and he winced a little, but it was nothing. Pain was good. It meant you were alive and alert. That’s what his Drill Instructor said. He said a lot of things, and any normal man might not be able to remember them all, but Phillip-310 was no normal man. Phillip-310 was bio-engineered. Birthed in a lab from a genetic template that had been fine-tuned like a race car, he was created for one purpose and one purpose only – to be a ghost.
His Drill Instructor, the genechanics who fashioned him out of protein and amino acid mush – everyone – called it the MotherCorp. The proper name of his creators was the GeneCom International Consortium. Somewhere along the line a corporate sloganeer had decided that the Consortium was “The mother who took pride in all their success”. From that idea came the abbreviation ‘MotherCorp’ and it stuck. Of course, not every employee of GeneCom spoke that abbreviation with reverence, but everyone who came in contact with Phillip-310 in his formative years did.
Everything was for the MotherCorp. You trained to be her best. You undertook every mission for her. You accepted every wound in her name. You laid every victory as an offering at her feet. She was every reason to live - every reason to die. There was nothing else. Phillip had absorbed it all instinctively. If GeneCom was his Mother, then the indoctrination he was bombarded with every day along with his training was her milk. Like all hungry little boys, he lapped it all up – sucked it into his very pores. The MotherCorp was everything.
Except now the MotherCorp was gone and he was bleeding, torn and stuck up in a tree. And oh yeah…the dogs. They were wild, only one step removed from wolves. The pure breeds of the past had long ago been fed into a melting pot that took away all the traits mankind had striven to isolate and accentuate throughout four thousand years of animal husbandry. Now the only pure-bred in the canis family was canis lupus – the wolf. Everything else was a mongrel, with only the odd trace here and there of proud and segregated genetic lineage. Spotted, blotchy things with hungry eyes and mangy coats, they were pure rapaciousness made flesh.
Of course since they were dogs they had detected him long before he was aware of their presence. By the time he knew something was wrong they had already singled him out as a target and begun to close in. He counted them as quickly as they appeared and by the time his count hit eight he knew he couldn’t stand his ground. Half a dozen he could have taken on, but many more than that and his chances of being brought to the ground increased exponentially. Once they had him down it was only a matter of time before one of them went for his throat - and then the probability of his survival took a serious nosedive.
So Phillip summoned every ounce of vat-grown strength in his legs and ran. Even though running was bad tactics and antithetical to his general mission he had no choice. It was run or die.
That was twelve hours ago. He had kept up a sprinter’s pace for half a day. His carefully augmented vision allowed him to run all night long without stumbling or colliding with anything. His enhanced lungs rammed oxygen into his muscles at a measured pace without spasm or constriction. His muscles had their lactic acid shunted away by internal mechanisms only genechanics understood but that served to keep his legs from cramping up. The chemicals released as part of a runner’s high were modified slightly so that not only did they begin to secrete sooner but their pain-killing and mildly euphoric properties didn’t dull Phillip’s judgment. His heart worked at an almost laconic rate of sixty beats per minute – but that rate was increasing. As the sun began to creep up over the horizon the bio-engineered soldier realized he couldn’t keep up this pace much longer. Even the most exceptional Cobble could maintain a sprint at top speed for at best ten minutes. He had exceeded that by a factor of seventy-two. Even though he couldn’t feel it yet he knew his body was beginning to break down. If he didn’t rest soon he could do himself permanent harm.
Unfortunately dogs were made for running too, and most of the ones who’d begun the chase were still hounding him only a few yards behind. When Phillip began to slow that distance was eaten up and by the time he spotted the lonely dead tree in the middle of a grassy field he had already been bitten several times around the legs and ankles.
Any Cobble would have dropped dead long ago. Even if his heart hadn’t popped like a grape, his legs would have seized up when his substandard lungs began to fail and his muscles started burning glucose instead of oxygen. And even if those things hadn’t happened the poor creature would have been too exhausted to climb a tree after such an ordeal. Indeed the sudden cessation of heavy activity without a subsequent ‘cool-down’ period could very well have led the Cobble to cardiac arrest. One way or another the dogs would have feasted by now.
But he would be no meal if he had anything to say about it. So he ran when it was time to run, climbed when it was time to climb and whilst in the tree he played a complicated game of exerting some muscle groups while relaxing others so none would cramp up. He wished he had the tree’s geometry on his side, but the dead branches were laid out in such a way that he had to work to stay in them. One slip and he would fall to the waiting jaws below.
But even as he worked so very hard to stay alive, there was a small voice inside his head reminding him that he had no reason to do so. The MotherCorp was gone. His reason for everything was gone. A few days ago he woke up all alone. No Tac-Comm, no orders, no mission. Nothing. Static on the comm. channels, static on the dedicated secure data feeds – nothing but static and silence. Any other trooper might have simply dug in and waited for orders. He wasn’t any other trooper.
Phillip-310 was recon. Long range recon. His job was to cover vast distances alone and with little backup. He was to catalogue everything he saw – particularly as it pertained to the enemies of the MotherCorp – distill that raw data down and transmit the important parts of it to Tactical Command. Part of his job was asking questions and getting answers from any source available to him. Normally in the field that simply meant his eyes and ears. Recon’s task was to scout the enemy and most of the time the enemy was astonishingly easy to learn about. But sometimes he needed help and he knew where to go to get it.
The year was 2280 and after a couple of centuries of turmoil and anarchy, information was now once again the by-product of humanity’s collective respiration. Cobbles were sloppy about intel. Everything they did they broadcast. It took Phillip no time at all to learn what had happened – though he didn’t fully understand what it all meant.
The news-feeds had called it a ‘hostile takeover’. They had shown holo of a burned out corporate headquarters, smoke rising from twisted metals and melted polymers, bodies strewn everywhere. Phillip made a wry face. It was all very sloppy. He had been taught that when he had to kill, it was to be neat and clean wherever possible. These Cobbles looked like they had been opened up like paint cans and splashed all over everything. The utter lack of technique left him in mild disgust.
As he was watching, the coverage changed to mark what had happened to Tac-Comm and the rest of the MotherCorp’s Security Arm. It looked like they were harder to kill. They went down swinging, taking as many of the enemy with them as they could. Military analysts appeared between panoramic views of battlefield carnage to remark on how swift and brutal the whole thing had been. Phillip wondered why the feed outlets would employ individuals who clearly knew so little about war to speak with authority on it. Had they asked him or his Drill Instructor they would know that all war was brutal and swift.
It took him all of fifteen minutes to learn that he had been cast adrift. There was no one left to give him orders. There never would be again.
And as Phillip - 310 clung to his tree in the rain that realization came crashing down on him in waves. With each wave came a cold dread that settled in the pit of his stomach and reached out to his mind and heart with slick tendrils of despair. One simple, unanswerable question hammered away at him over and over – what was he to do now? No one had ever prepared him for that question. It was always expected that he would perish and the MotherCorp would live on. It was an immutable fact the same way that grass was green and the sun was yellow. He had no standing orders for this sort of thing. Beyond survival he had no purpose.
For the first time he admired the blithe existences of the Cobbles. He had been told that many of them go through their entire lives in a freeform drift, trying to match up their slap-dash talents and skill sets with the demands of purposes clearly outside their abilities. The Cobbles were innately suited to nothing but respiration and procreation. They weren’t born with a purpose, they strove to meet one. He couldn’t imagine what that must be like, yet now he could (and did) envy it. The Cobbles didn’t need any reason to be. He did.
The dogs were patient. They lay on the ground near his tree and watched him carefully. Some with their tongues lolling out, others with heads rested on front paws. They knew sooner or later he would have to come down. They were prepared to wait. Phillip wished he’d had some ammo for his weapons. Just one full magazine in his pistol could have ended this problem long ago. Unfortunately the dogs had jumped him while he was heading for a supply cache, so not only did he not have any ammunition but no water, food or medical supplies either.
For two more days the standoff continued. Hunger was beginning to gnaw away at Phillip and his stomach was rumbling so loudly that it made the dogs’ ears perk up. That wasn’t what was worrying him though. His chief worry was lack of water. He had drunk up as much of the rain as he could but it hadn’t rained in a day and a half and his thirst was going to be a problem if he couldn’t find water in another day or so. He decided that come nightfall he would make another break for it, head south and try to find a populated area. He was in the southern portion of what had once been the old American state of South Carolina. If he pushed hard, he could make it to Farthington – a city built on what was once Atlanta in Georgia – in a couple of days. The MotherCorp maintained digicaches of Trust for their long range recon operatives in a lot of major and not so major cities. Farthington was one of them. If he could get there, he could regroup and resupply – then go on to deal with more weighty matters at his leisure.
But first he would have to shake those damn dogs somehow.
