Human Pet
Chapter 5
The bunker was certainly one of the largest Zerok had ever seen. The wartime fortifications were large enough, but at some point someone had done some extensive redecorating and expansion.
“This looks like a laboratory.” Zerok said as they entered a particularly large room.”
“Looks like this room partly caved in.”
“Or was destroyed then covered over. There are no vent shafts up top, and this was clearly a bunker built and used by humans. See those huge air ducts? My guess is this room is where they pumped air in from outside. You’d need an above ground air shaft for that. When they abandoned it they blew it up and covered it over.”
“A couple of those computers on the floor look intact.” Molly said.
“Grab them and anything related you can find.”
A good bit of scavenging, and a bit of luck later, they managed to piece together a working computer. The ancient piece of technology had no wireless interface. All input had to be done via keyboard and mouse. The machine booted up and they came to a login screen. Zerok selected an administrator account. he didn’t know the password , and he couldn’t directly interface with the machine to crack its likely weak security. However there was a password hint option. He clicked it.
“Number of reactors. Number of vent shafts. The year new construction began.”
The first two were easy enough to guess. One reactor and likely only one vent shaft. The year was trickier. However, that electrical cabling might provide the answer. He went back down to the lower level and examined the cabiling for a date code. He soon found it, an 8 digit number that decoded into a date set 28 years ago. Did that computer want the actual year, or the date code? He went back to it. He typed in the password with the full date code. The input stopped one letter short of full entry. He deleted the date code, put in the four digit year and hit the Enter key.
“Gotta love human mnemonic devices.” he said as the login went through.
The directory structure was somewhat organized, but the icons scattered about indicated that whoever used this computer was not naturally inclined to be organized. At least the folders were somewhat in alphabetical order.
“This looks like something.”
He opened a folder titled “LAB”. Inside were encrypted text files configured to open with a program. He opened one, and the program decrypted the file.”
“Day 7: Test subject has been responding as predicted to the drugs. We have been able to overwrite some of his long term memories. Work on subverting the short term memory has come to a dead end. However with the breakthrough in long term neural alteration, we can still proceed on schedule.”
“They were doing brain work.”
“This is probably where Jessica was turned into a pet.” Molly replied.
He opened another file.
“Error opening file. Bad data clusters detected.”
He opened another file.
“These power fluxuations have gotten annoying to the point where the test results are being skewed. The solar array must be replaced by something more reliable ASAP!”
He opened another, longer file.
“Day 38: The brainwashing has been a success. Test subject demonstrates strong fear and hatred of inorganics. The implanted military knowledge has taken a good hold with the subject demonstrating competency in firearms and hand to hand combat, as well as other skills he had previously lacked.
We can create more soldiers this way, but soldiers alone won’t be enough at this point. The king nerds up in the mountains are trying to come up with a solution to this problem.”
“They were making soldiers. Heh, they wanted to start another war.”
He wasn’t surprised at all. Why else would they pour recources into this old bunker out in the middle of nowhere? He opened another file.
“Error opening file. Bad data clusters detected.”
He got the same error on the next file he tried, then the next one, and so forth. Finally he pulled up some storage scanning software. The results it displayed were not encouraging.
“No good. The storage matrix in this thing hasn’t seen electricity in a good twenty years. It’s degraded.”
An idea came to him.
“Wait a minute. This program decrypts files, so it has a decryption key in it. I wonder...”
He began searching through the program’s options. He soon found a tab for decryption settings.
“Hey Molly, try this decryption key on that data in your head: 7-1-1-7-B-8-3-Q-1-9-2-Z-7-7-5”
Molly lined up the key with the data pattern, and it meshed. The data began to decrypt.
Zerok watched as Molly froze up. She went completely dead. There was nothing to do but wait. If she didn’t come back in a few minutes, he’d have to force restart her.
He was getting ready to do just that when she moved. She turned her head to look at him.
Then she tried to attack him.
“Die you inorganic bastard!”
She landed a punch. She actually landed a punch! Zerok went into full combat mode, expecting to disable her in a few seconds. However her speed had increased. She was holding his own against him.
“What the fuck Molly?!”
“The name’s Jessica! Private First Class Jessica Simms. I am ordered to destroy all inorganics!”
She landed another blow. His integrated armor took it easily, but the force of impact disturbed him. His systems had aged since he had last been in combat, and that degradation impacted his performance. He needed to distract her.
“So you’ve been ordered to kill inorganics? Does that also include yourself? Look at yourself! Look at your hands! That isn’t flesh on your fingers.”
The moment of shock and realization was all he needed. He landed a blow on her neck, breaking one of the connections between her head and body.
She stumbled forward awkwardly, fell over and started screaming.
“I WILL PULL YOUR FUCKING CIRCUITS OUT YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF TRASH! I’LL TURN YOU INTO SCRAP METAL! YOU-WILL-FEAR-ME! YOU-WILL-FEAR-ME!!”
It was just noise at this point. She wasn’t much of a problem now, just writhing and trying to compensate for the damaged connection. She looked like an infant human who hadn’t mastered their motor skills yet.
Zerok had heard about code injection, but he had never met someone who had experienced it before. It was possible to inject an alternate personality into the conscious memory of an inorganic human. However, code injection required high sophistication to work, and usually it was done through external means such as a data connection.
He had never heard of it done this way, and a nasty realisation occurred to him. Molly was a sleeper unit. Someone had corrupted her at some point and stealth loaded a dangerous personality. Jessica’s personality!
No, it wasn’t Jessica’s personality.
Was he sure about that?
Yes he was. Jessica was brain damaged and her memory gone, but the emotional centers in her brain were intact. While she feared inorganics, she didn’t have any hostility towards them. Also she didn’t have the physical build of a soldier.
Had they been trying to brainwash her into becoming a soldier, only to have her escape? If she had escaped, then how did she end up brain damaged?
Molly/Jessica was trying to crawl away. He had to get inside her head. Well, he had one way in. He just hoped that Molly wouldn’t remember it.
He held her down and initiated a sexual data connection. Molly/Jessica began to writhe and moan.
The inside of Molly’s head was in turmoil. The Jessica personality had taken hold of all systems. He had to look for the injection code and damage it. Whoever had put that personality there, they had picked the wrong unit for it. Being a civillian unit, Molly had minimal protections against data tampering. Useful to whoever had hacked her, but that same lack of defenses now worked to help Zerok locate and damage the injection code.
Now all that was needed was a force reboot.
Using his hands, he sent an electrical pulse through her head. It was enough. She stopped moving. For a moment he thought he had fried something, then her eyes flickered to life.
“What happened?”
She tried to get up.
“Zerok I can’t control my limbs!”
“You have a sleeper personality inside you. Decrypting it caused it to inject its code into your consciousness. I had to go in and break the injector. Look at the data but don’t write to it!”
She spent a few seconds scanning it and gasped.
“Holy shit! It is Jessica! These are her memories! This is her!”
“No it’s not. It could be anything, something coded by an elite hacker who used Jessica’s personality as a template.”
“It feels so real. This was her. She was stationed in the Gusev research outpost on Mars.”
“That would make her over 150 years old.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. But other parts fit. She knows this desert. She and her brother used to go up and down what used to be I-10, trading and selling items. That’s where the memory of the desert fits in. That city we were in... That was her home later on. She knows it street by street. That building we broke into, that’s Dattech. They... Hm. She used to know what they did, but that information was removed.”
She tried to get up again. Zerok bent down.
“I’m going to have to open up your neck. When Jessica or whatever that was took you over I had to disable your main motor pathway.”
“Proceed.”
He cut open the skin and grabbed the connectors. That’s all the motor pathway was, just two connecting wires. He popped the connectors back in place. Molly tested her limbs, then stood up.
“That should hold until we get to a clinic.”
The sun was rising, and the coyotes retreated for the day. Back in the van, Zerok removed the sleeping chip from Jessica’s DBC port. Jessica stirred, shifted, then buried her face in the seat cushion. She didn’t want to get up.
“Wakey wakey my pet. It’s a new day.”
He leaned over and scratched her head. She opened her eyes, yawned then stretched out. She looked up at Zerok with sleepy eyes.
Out of the van now, she stretched again and looked around. She tilted her head curiously as she noticed the damage to Molly’s neck.
“I had a little accident in that old bunker. It’s okay I’m fine.”
Jessica gave her a tiny smile, then walked over to a rock to examine it.
“Yeah I think you’re right. I think parts of this code inside my head may have been her, but as a whole, it’s not her. There’s too many inconsistencies, like no memories of any military training, yet skills only trained soldiers would possess.”
“I think that Dattech building will have more answers.”
“I don’t think we should go there Zerok. The memories of that place were wiped, but there’s a bad feeling in her memories that’s associated with it.”
“Like walking into the lion’s den?”
“Yes.”
“Lets see what else we can find in this bunker then. The more we know the better prepared we’ll be.”
While Zerok worked on trying to extract data from the aging storage matrixes, Molly went back to the van to interact with Jessica. She kept looking at Molly’s damaged skin and frowning, but she had become far less skittish.
“Hey, will you let me pet you?”
She hesitated, then scooted closer to Molly. She looked at the damaged skin, then at Molly with an inquisitive look on her face. Molly studied her face, and how much easier this would be if Jessica could still talk, but she had an idea of what Jessica was thinking about.
“It doesn’t hurt if that’s what you’re wondering. When we get back home, I’ll go to a clinic and it’ll be good as new in no time.”
Jessica smiled. Molly started petting her head. Jessica sat there for a few minutes. Then she got up and picked up the stuffed mouse. She started running her hands over it, feeling its faux fur, feeling the hard plastic bits that were its eyes, feeling the seams where it had been sewn together. She looked fascinated by it. She couldn’t stop touching it.
“You like that thing, huh?”
She ignored Molly.
The storage matrixes were degraded, but not totally lost. Zerok had found enough data to know that even 30 years ago their security was a joke. That encryption key opened up all enrypted files, and it was not only stored in the decrypting program, but it was also stored in unencrypted plain text files, located in several user folders that were tied to accounts with no password protection.
They had performed experiments in brainwashing people into soldiers, some of them quite successful. There were refrences to people in the mountains and an ‘Artifical soldier” program.
That probably meant Molly.
The files related to that were lost to time, at least in this location. Sorting by date, the last file mentioned they were “closing up shop due to the satellites”.
They closed up shop in a hurry, right before the inorganics started doing satellite sweeps of this area. They packed up, blew up the air shaft, smashed some of the computers and high tailed it out of there.
Molly climbed down the ladder and entered the room where Zerok was still browsing through files.
“Jessica’s doing something weird. She’s become obsessed with that stuffed toy. She won’t stop touching it.”
“Oh, yeah that’s normal for her. She’s got a thing for textured surfaces. You know those bumpy balls they sell at pet stores? I bought her one, and well you could leave her alone in a room, and she’d play with it for hours. She only does it when she’s calm though. She’ll become completely oblivious to the outside world. Speaking of which, bad idea to leave her alone in case someone, or something comes by.”
They headed back up to the surface. Jessica was safe and sound in the van, squeezing and caressing the stuffed mouse.
“So are we off to Dattech?” Molly asked.
“Not yet. We need a plan.”