A couple of weeks ago inside the ARC Complex.
Wonder if it’s night or day? The lack of personnel around led her to believe it was night-time but time no longer mattered to her anymore. It hadn’t for a long, long time. Annie sat down by her console, not that she needed to sit of course but she wanted to do as many normal things as she could. She didn’t eat as others did nor did she need to sleep, or even rest for that matter. In fact there weren’t many things that she did need to do anymore thanks to her father’s botched attempts to save her life. Damn him! Damn him to the deepest darkest depths of hell!
If it wasn’t for the failsafe’s in the container, her own personal jail, this metal prison that housed her head, she’d have killed herself long before now.
When daddy’s accident had destroyed the lab and her body, why hadn’t he allowed her to die? Or at least transfer her mind to another body instead of this, this nightmare of an existence trapped inside a giant, inhuman containment suit!
Yes, the staff at the ARC were nice to her and they had given her a job of sorts, but they didn’t really treat her as a human being, as a young woman with human emotions even if she could no longer feel in a physical sense. They also didn’t fully trust her. She blamed her beloved and oh so respected father for that! Who would risk trusting the machine-resurrected daughter of the infamous Dr. Phillippe Moreau, Biologist Supreme even if he and his cronies, science junkies all, hadn’t formed the Foundry all those years ago?
Only the Challenger-Wildeman family really bothered to get to know her as an actual person and treated her as a friend. It helped their grandfather, the Doctor was an A.I. she supposed and that their family consisted of an android (Alex), a Sasquatch nanny and all sorts of weird and wonderful.
God, she hated that she was trapped inside this place. She wanted desperately to go outside, go for a walk, actually have friends (other than the kids of course), talk to people without that look of fear and distrust, but she knew the response she evoked when others saw her. If Alex was robotic Armageddon in the public perception, she was the nightmare monster under the bed or in the closet, the inhuman shape of warped science. There but for the grace of God…
Damn it! This feeling sorry for herself wasn’t helping… Focus! Ok, so did she want to guest DJ a slot for Alex on Radio Argos tonight or web-surf? Despite Alex’s attempts to make her feel part of his media empire she lacked the confidence to really enjoy DJing… She knew she still needed to try though, her voice was the only part of her others didn’t judge and the contact with others over the airwaves were the highlight of her miserable little existence. But not tonight, not when she felt like this. So…
Surrounding her was her creation – a hybrid computer system consisting of dozens of cutting edge computers networked together optically and even more screens. For years she’d been restricted to a single point of contact with the web until Max had forced the staff to stop being so paranoid. God, when Max and the kids had given her access to all this as a birthday present last year, the staff from the Director down had had kittens. It was the only thing that kept her sane though. Thanks to Frankie (ok not the most pc name for her computer but it was her abomination of a creation after all) she could monitor hundreds of internet feeds at the same time yet the staff still tried to monitor her. Good luck with that.
Time for pseudo-Annie, her oh so goody, goody computer-generated avatar, to come out to play while mamma does what mamma does best…
Wonder what the Director would say if she found out what her top of the line security system was really tracking all the time? Ho, hum!
Ok so what to do first – a quick check of her ‘friends’ on the hacktivist community forums found a request from Jamaican Tommy; he wanted to know about a missing patient called Mallory Brooks who’d vanished from a Reading Hospital. All her records had vanished as though she had never existed. That took skill, real skill equal to her own, to pull something like that off. She’d need to check CCTV, telephone lines and automatic back-ups and that took time as most such systems were pretty basic and the links primitive.
So while she was doing that, what else could she do to alleviate the boredom? Perhaps she should try again to get inside the Ziru Sirka’s embassy’s data-matrix? She got caught last time and only escaped because she’d booby-trapped with info-mines her ‘scape route.
Bored! Bored! Bored!
So who or what were the Unity that scared them so much? She started to build a program to emulate an ambassadorial request for full disclosure of the AAB. Of course it meant she had to learn Old High Vilani (or Bilanidin to use its proper name). That should keep her occupied for a day or possibly even two. It was a difficult language after all.
A few days ago in the ARC Complex.
That was a surprise. She was so sure that the visitors would freak when they saw her but the cute mutant one had smiled; actually and honestly smiled at her when she arrived to assist them. Damn Max he should have warned her that he was bringing in guests – to see her, not this monstrosity she rode inside. Was he a meta-human or an alien, do you think, with the wings and the sad eyes..? He’d looked her in the eyes, not the torso, the eyes and smiled! He smiled… At her!!!
Then reality hit. So what! She was likely to remain here until her power cells ran out or she withered and died of old age inside her nutrient tank… Oh why did she have to be a monster?
She set Pseudo-Annie lose on the internal network so she could obediently deal with all the staff’s mundane enquires in real-time and opened a channel so she could chat with Ophelia. Another enslaved creature! I wonder..?
A few seconds later she had a three-way conversation going with Motherboard. Order for two possibly?
Oh and while she was doing that Jamaican Tommy had again posted a request – he wanted to find out about something called P.I.S.C.E.S.? Black ops? Her hacktivist friends were covering the conspiracy forums with the usual fakery, mistakery; about men in black, aliens and fish-gods for him so perhaps she should check out the good stuff..?
Disabling the security protocols that the Director insisted on imposing on her darkweb access (and she acknowledged, with good reason) she used that to surf from server to server until she reached the secure MI-6 mainframes.
“I know of no reason why treason should ever be forgot…ten, nine, eight, sev… In!” Damn she was rusty, taking several seconds to access one of the most secure systems in the world? She was getting slow. She carried out a search – and found very little. This group was so far off the books that they were like phantoms… Still it was enough to give Jamaican Tommy a clue or three.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 