I heard the incomprehensible murmuring of voices fading into echoes. Something has affected me. A drug in the air, perhaps?
Then my vision cleared and in front of me was the thick mechanical door of a Kamuy battle cruiser. It slid open abruptly with a loud shriek to reveal the training deck.
I racked my brain hard to make sense of the environment until a shadow fell on me and I looked up.
Something isn't right with the location. Wasn't I somewhere else? Or am I in a dream?
"Didn't they train you not to flinch?" A strange familiar voice spoke.
A slender figure of a small male child with silvery long hair leaned on the sides of the open doorway. His pair of icy grey eyes pierced through me like a shard.
Old Kamuy cadet uniform usually ran large to account for sizing, but the child looked tiny in his. The green uniform dropped off his shoulders and his sleeves folded. His pant legs dragged on the floor. Nothing about this child, screamed Kamuy.
Above the doorway, etched the engraved smoothened words 'Dominate and Intimidate'.
"AH FUCK!" my first thought shouted through the battle cruiser training deck without my mouth moving.
I closed my eyes, realising that I was not in reality.
The child in front of me is a simulation for fighting, which activates in my sleep state when the neural chip in my brain failed to wake me up.
Maybe I shouldn't enter false hibernation.
False hibernation cancelled out other warnings to reduce signal detection.
The cybernetic sensors calculated the probability of physical trouble based on an assessment of the situation and triggered the simulation to prepare.
What the hell is going on?
Last I remember was shutting down some operations in my neural link to fake a hibernation state on a Battle Fortress, certainly not this Kamuy battle cruiser.
A wry grin grew on the child's face as though reading my mind.
"Where the heck am I?" I mumbled in frustration.
"Cryogenic chamber," he replied with sweeping nonchalance. "Atomites detected the extreme temperature originating from nitrogen fumes. We are the -120 environmental mark."
"No way, those lab rats said maintain at that —"
"And you believe the shit they tell you? Man, you've gone soft," the child huffed in disgust at my reply as I hung my head.
Something isn't right about his attitude. I may have inserted some military type of dialogues but his dialogue felt a little off.
"What do you want?" I stepped back when he took a step forward.
The simulation program behaved differently.
Then again, a long time passed since this simulation was last activated.
"It's been a while since we savoured the metallic scent of blood," the child squealed with delight.
He took a whiff in the air while his silvery hair slowly turned black at the roots.
The black colour cascaded through his hair to their very ends while his eyes deepened to a brown and then red. For a moment, I thought I was looking at a splitting image of myself, a much younger self.
I don't remember programming those effects into the simulation.
"Ha-HAHAHAA!" He cackled in the laugher as flashes of the cadet training camp appeared. Screams and shrieks reverberated throughout the area of the battlecruiser.
I don't recall adding this scenario inside too.
In a flash, the background of the battle cruiser melted away into my old cadet camp site along with the apparition.
I remembered coding this area.
"Remember, only one can walk out alive," he declared loudly, spinning around.
These are the last words I never wanted to hear or even add to the program. My memory remained very clear about that.
The child had repeated what the instructor said to me before they sent a group of us into the wilderness of the forests for 'training' when I was ten galactic cycles old.
I recreated this scenario because the memories of the event traumatised me the most. The Kamuy military had a method of eliminating defective or unworthy personnel from entering the rigorous cadet training.
We killed to get into the program.
Not kill, as in a desire frequently expressed by others.
The more I trained using it, the more desensitised to emotions I became because we killed our own to make the place, and to prove we didn't hesitate.
The simulation program reminded me to be on caution at all times, and failure to detect danger triggered the pain receptors in the muscles, depending on which part of the body took a hit.
This is really going to fucking hurt.
[Loading program…]
***
A splatter of blood sprayed across the khaki green tarpaulin of the ten, only to slide down in thin artistic slopes.
In a blink of an eye, I held a fellow Kamuy desperately clawing away at my hand, clasping his neck firmly.
A strong, intoxicating feeling of power overwhelmed me. My fingers felt the warm maroon viscous liquid flowing out from his neck, like a fountain.
His eyes widened in a death knell and mouth gasped while I met his piercing gaze until all the light in his eyes dulled, resembling a dead prey. The clawing stopped as his hands brushed past me, as his arms flopped down.
I threw him down like a piece of trash onto the mud path.
My eyes slowly moved to my other hand, now smaller, which twirled a blood-stained dagger.
The twirling stopped as I gripped the handle.
Like in some sort of trance, my hand automatically lifted the dagger and plunged it into his body with full force.
My face turned towards the clearing where the bloodied bodies of eight other Kamuy laying motionless in pools of blood streaming in the path.
"You timed slower," the child suddenly appeared with a displeasing smirk.
"By how much?"
"In relative measurement, 120 nanosec."
I sat myself down and looked wearily at him, unhappy about the fact that my body was out of shape because of a lack of practice. Or maybe I'm getting older and too tired to get into fights. The only recent fight was to stop an assassin.
"Not optimal condition, too. Your aggression quotient is poor."
My body didn't release enough hormones to elicit the prime 'fight or flight' response. The cybernetic neural link timed the hormonal release and sustained levels in my blood to calculate the aggression quotient.
In fights, the sustained release of the hormones increased speed, agility, and stamina while the cybernetic implants enhanced the performance. Poor aggression quotient meant my reaction slowed, my stamina sucked and my agility fell into a blackhole.
"Well, what do you expect? Not in the military anymore."
"Hey, I'm just bits and bobs of code you programmed. So don't explain to me."
Why does he sound so much like Arabaki? And since when did I code a simulation to talk back to me this way?
Arabaki used that phrase 'bits and bobs of coding' on me a long time ago.
"Come here," I abruptly jumped to my feet, making the child flee at top running speed from me.
"Fucking piece of shit - DID ARABAKI REPROGRAM YOU WHEN HE DID MAINTENANCE ON MY FUCKING IMPLANT?" I hollered after the running child turned around and stuck out his tongue.
Arabaki must have screwed around with a program in the implant way back when I told him to check my cortical sensor, which showed signs of some ageing.
The bastard droid swarm is more dangerous than I realised.
I stopped in my tracks and said, "check system program. Initiate security bypass."
A holographic sphere of my brain appeared as I swirled it around to input the pattern code with my fingers quickly on the regions.
[Security bypass activated]
[Maintenance of simulation: last schedule 70965.5 GST]
[Alteration of simulation: last schedule 70965.5 GST]
[Alteration content: Base trigger simulation]
[No other further alteration]
[Alter signature: Atomite recognition - Droid Swarm]
Fucking Arabaki did screw around with the simulation program, as I watched the yellow highlighted areas of the code change in the 3-dimensional hologram.
The droid swarm gave the damn simulation program enough artificial intelligence to create a personality. Is he trying to create a mutiny in my body, using my cybernetic implants against me?
I opened the coded areas in yellow, but only one remained and no matter how I hacked in, I couldn't see the raw programming inside.
What the hell did Arabaki add, other than an isolated artificial intelligence program?
[Alert: Atomites resuming production]
"Temperature is rising," the child's voice echoed from the surroundings. "Gotta go before the usual temp reaches for instruments to detect the signal."
My vision faded into darkness and I fell a tap on my shoulder.
"OPEN YOUR EYES!" I heard a female voice calling out sternly, pulling me into another realm of shrill beeping noises.
A dot of light appeared in front of me as I waved my hand to reach out for it.
Fuck Arabaki… wait til I get back, you meddling droid swarm, I swore silently.
I needed to get back to my war cruiser and thump the crap out of the droid swarm.
"STAND BACK" another male voice shouted.
My eyes sprung open to two blurry figures of a female and a male looking over at me. A sensation of being confined to a small cold space made me uncomfortable, especially after being frozen.