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Some context before we start. Last year, the Detached-People 's Discord Group ran a year-long competition where people could submit artwork based on a theme, and after a year, a raffle would go out to give prizes to each of the contestants. By sheer coincidence, CyonixGFX and I each won a render request from the other as our prize (You can check out his amazing interpretation of my idea over here!)
While he was responsible and got mine to me in a reasonable manner, I unfortunately am ever the one to take simple things too far (I really should just change my middle name to 'Scope Creep' at this point 🤣), and what started as a rather simple request to see Izzy headless in a cyberpunk setting, sort of ballooned out to creating an entirely new CyberPunk Alternate Universe (which yes, still features a shot of Izzy headless 😉)
The story you're about to read (if you read the descriptions for these things), is a bit darker than my normal stories, but I feel like that's sort of to be expected with CyberPunk.
I want to thank Cyonix for being extremely understanding as I proceeded to take nearly a year to get his prize done, and for letting me share it with you all. It was a lot of fun to design this alternate universe, and honestly, it's a setting I could see myself returning to very soon.
Enough of my yapping though. Enjoy!
-Michael
About two blocks away from Pondsmith’s Body Shop and Repairs, a motorcycle without a driver pulled up onto the sidewalk. It began to take on a metallic sheen, the metal morphing and shifting into the familiar feminine form of E-773, her uniform reforming over in an armor lattice around her body. On the drive over, the events that had transpired in Maho’s were playing on repeat as she tried her best to process how they made her (for lack of a better word) feel.
She took a deep breath, giving herself just a moment longer to try and process the events before filing them away in her memory banks for later. While she could have devoted a sub process to it, she had been trained to devote her full attention when entering dangerous scenarios, and by all accounts if her investigation was accurate up to this point she was about to encounter the people who had ordered Phillip Gibson to steal GigantoCorp’s prototype and potentially even killed him for it.
There was nothing particularly of note about the Body Shop. It was your classic brick and mortar relic, the neon sign advertising the store seemed to have been busted, but there was clearly a light on in the garage portion of the building.
E-773 did her best to appear non-chalant as she walked into the side alley next to the garage, making sure it was deserted before stretching her neck upwards to try and get a peek inside through one of the upper story windows, but unfortunately they were so caked in dust that she wasn’t able to look inside. She frowned, retracting her neck and moving towards a portion of the wall without windows on it.
She stretched her arms upwards, grabbing a hold of the roof and shifted her mass upwards along her arms, congealing as a metallic blob on the other side of the lip. She reformed her upper half, keeping her legs in a mostly liquid state so that she could silently glide across the rooftop. She scanned the rooftop, hoping to discover a way she could sneak inside without attracting any attention, and seemed to find just that in a nearby exhaust vent. Liquifying her upper half once more, E-773 oozed her body through the slats of the vent and breached the building.
E-773 silently shot through the air vents just fast enough to not lose her grip on their sides, her metallic mass absorbing the dust and grime of the vent and breaking it down into energy. After only a few turns, she finally came to a vent that offered a view of the inside of the body shop.
Despite the outside facade of the building seeming to indicate a certain level of disuse, the inside of the body shop was incredibly well organized and maintained. Along the back wall, rows of metallic limbs and weapons of all varieties and configurations were displayed, clearly fully charged and ready for use in a moment’s notice. The other wall E-773 could see sported a massive pegboard with all varieties of tools.
The garage floor was pristine, organized as four large, segmented chairs, and two surgical beds (presumably used for more intensive body modifications). All of these were currently unoccupied, except for the one that was right below the vent.
Lounging in the chair was a headless, feminine body. Where her head should have been, there was instead some sort of electronic device equipped with a camera. Close by, an Asian man with bleached blond hair and four robotic arms was opening up the various drawers of a tool box, pulling out a screwdriver and wrench before adjusting the nearby floor lamp to shine some more light on the woman.
E-773 tried to ID the man, but there must have been some shielding present on the air vent, as her identification request back to HQ was dropped. Annoyed but unperturbed, she continued sliding along the air vent, looking for a grate closer to a wall so she could lower herself to the ground undetected and run another request.
She was able to find one, her liquid metal body oozing out of the air vent and along the brick wall that connected the garage to the business front, making sure to project outwards a facade that matched the part of the wallet that she was touching to avoid any accidental detection from the man.
Once on the floor, E-773 slithered along the floor positioning herself behind one of the unused tool boxes directly behind the man, reforming her body and uniform once again. She attempted to send out another ID request on the man, and just as before, the request dropped. She ran a quick internal diagnostic, even tried sending a different ID req, but once again the request was dropped.
Silently cursing that HQ’s Database could drop at such a pivotal point of her investigation, E-773 ran some calculations for a moment, before materializing a silenced pistol into her hand. Even if this man were not associated with this crime in particular, his presence in this garage, which was the planned drop off point for Phillip Gibson’s stolen company property right at the time where he was meant to drop it off, was at least grounds enough to detain him for questioning. She trained the pistol right at his heart, resting her finger on the trigger and taking a step out from behind the toolbox, her mouth opening-
Click
“I’d put that down if I were you,” A feminine voice suddenly spoke up from directly behind E-773, catching her off-guard. The back of her head shifted slightly as an additional eye formed so she could see who the disruptor was.
E-773 was shocked to discover that the source of the voice was a feminine, Asian head attached directly to a silent drone of some sorts, the barrel of a gun jutting out from the bottom of it and trained squarely at the back of E-773’s head. Examining the bullet housed inside of the barrel, E-773 could tell that it was equipped with an electromagnetic casing that would cause some serious damage to her systems if it were fired.
As the Asian woman’s fierce eyes caught sight of the eye that had formed on the back of E-773’s head, her mood immediately lightened. She let out a howling laugh, the barrel of her gun retracting into the drone, as she said, “Oh! You’re the Robocop they sent! Stand down.”
E-773 blinked, as against her will, her body reabsorbed her pistol, turning around and standing at attention for the grinning Asian woman’s head. “Go over and sit on that couch.” A tiny metallic claw stretched out from the drone, pointing to a brown sofa that had seen better days located not too far away from where the Asian man was working on the headless body. E-773 tried to speak up in protest, but found that her body was once again moving on its own, marching over to the couch and sitting engaged and awaiting more orders.
The drone carrying the Asian women’s head silently flew over to the Asian man, who seemed intensely focused on the alterations he was making to the neck cap of the headless body. “Hey,” the head said. After the man didn’t respond, she said louder, “IZ!” Finally getting his attention.
He placed down the screwdriver he had been holding onto in his lower right hand before reaching up with the same arm to pull out an earbud. “What?” he snipped back.
“I told you we should have put sensors in the vents,” she snarked, her drone tilted backwards towards E-773.
The man, Iz, looked over at E-773, blowing out air flippantly :”She was going to try and break in anyways. At-”
“Hey!” E-773 interrupted angrily, “Would someone care to-”
“Zip it!” The drone carrying the woman’s head turned just enough for E-773 to see that the woman had an unamused look on her face. E-773 went to try and argue more, but felt her form shift as her mouth absorbed into her face, leaving her only the ability to look angrily at the man and woman as they went back to their conversation.
“As I was saying. She was going to try and break in anyways. At least giving her an obvious point of entry means no showy entrance, and we don’t have to move everything to another location,” the man said, placing down the wrench from his upper right hand and pick the screwdriver back up, “Besides, the suppressor fields would have prevented her from firing a shot anyways even if you hadn’t stopped her.”
“Au contraire, brother dearest,” The hovering head responded back, floating around Iz’s head in a mocking manner, “If she had come at you with a blade or other melee weapon, your precious suppressor field would have been able to do jack shit about it.”
Iz snickered, “Please. You know as well as I do that Enforcer Bots are trained to hardly use anything other than guns if they can help it. It’s far easier to snag a shock rod than it is to get EMP rounds.”
She pretty clearly saw you were unarmed though-”
“Uh, excuse you. I’m doubly armed if anything-”
“You know what I meant!-”
‘I’ve got tools and shit though-”
“What are you going to do? Throw a wrench at her head-”
This bickering went back and forth, the siblings getting slightly more vitriolic from one another, leaving E-773 stuck frozen on their couch. She at least still had her mental facilities about her, and while she was loath to admit defeat, there wasn’t much she could do in her current predicament. So, she tried to send out an emergency distress signal to HQ.
The drone turned to look towards E-773, the detached head looking annoyed at the distraction from her argument. “Stop trying to send signals back to your bosses. Seriously, I thought you would have been smart enough to catch on by now that we’ve been intercepting them.”
“Enforcer,” Iz said, taking the momentary lapse in argument to drag E-773 into their squabble, “Please re-educate dear, sweet Izzy here about Protocol 8?”
E-773 felt her mouth returning to her face once more, and while she wanted to shout out every explicative imaginable, instead found herself saying in a rather monotonous tone, “Protocol 8: All designated Enforcer units shall obey any order given to them by a Chief officer of GigantoCorp, or any shareholders holding at least a 5% stake of the totality of GigantoCorp stock.Subsection A. Enforcer level units shall not knowingly cause direct harm to any individuals granted such power of control under Section 8. Subsection B-”
“Shut up!” The detached floating head, Izzy, commanded. E-773’s mouth once again melted back into her body, realization dawning on her just how these two individuals had been controlling her body. “We've been blocking her signals though, dumbass. How would she know that she wasn’t allowed to hurt you?”
“The same way she knows that she has to follow your commands, idiot. It’s hard-coded into them,” Iz countered. Izzy looked like she was about to make another argument, but was stopped by Iz grabbing a test tube from his toolbox and wagging it in Izzy’s direction, “Now, are you going to grab that sample from her? Or do you want your repairs to take even longer?” He gestured towards the body still laying on the
Izzy rolled her eyes, letting out an annoyed “tch” . The same metallic claw stretched out and snatched the test tube from Iz. She hovered over to E-773, sticking the glassware right in between her glaring eyes. “Fill this up about halfway with yourself, and then disconnect any connections between you and it.”
E-773 tried to resist, but her consciousness was well and truly a passenger at this point. Her body grabbed the pinky of her left hand at about the second knuckle and pulled it off, her mass shifting to replace it as she plonked the removed piece into the test-tube. As her connection to that part of her was severed, the bit of finger melted down, taking on an almost liquid-mercury like appearance. Izzy seemed pleased as she hovered out of E-773’s line of sight, presumably towards the business front of the operation.
Iz continued to tinker away, his poking and prodding of Izzy’s body’s neck cap resulting in the odd twitch or spasm as he worked on whatever it was he was doing to her. E-773 continued to stare daggers at him, but he seemed nonplussed. “Iz!” Izzy shouted from the other room, “Sakamoto’s asking if there’s anything more we need from him.”
“Did he return the prototype like we asked?” Iz shouted back.
“He said he left it in a spot the engineers were sure to spot it.”
Izzy snorted, saying under his breath “GigantoCrop engineers being able to spot something? That’ll be a first.”
“What?”
“I said I don’t have anything else. Unless you have something else?” he shouted back.
“Nah. I am going to dock him for leaving loose ends though,” she said as she hovered back into the room.
“Not too much though. Remember, he’s got another mouth to feed now.”
Izzy stuck out her tongue playfully, “You’re such a softie.”
Iz rolled his eyes, “His misstep did also let us get an enforcer sample without too much additional stress, so complaining too much would just put him off from taking a hit job for us again in the future.”
“Hey. Don’t tell me how to run the business,” Izzy’s tone deepened for a moment, making it clear Iz had struck a nerve.
“Not telling you how to run it, just trying to avoid another Carlo situation-”
“You know that one was not my fault!” Izzy interjected.
In her many days as an Enforcer Unit, E-773 had ran through many a simulation relating to torture, both on the giving and receiving end of it, but truly, being trapped in her own body, forced to listen to these siblings bicker had to be amongst the worst tortures she’s ever came into contact with.
Blissfully, as they were arguing, a ping finally came through from HQ, her case file updating and crossing out the ‘Return Stolen Property’ item, a note attached reading, ‘Engineers have found the flash drive containing the stolen prototype still plugged into Phillip Gibson’s work machine. The flash drive was spotted when the engineer that was reassigned Gibson’s hardware logged in for first time. Initial detection was missed due to being in port facing the wall.’
With the last assignment checked off, her case file automatically added a new task:
Return to HQ for Realignment.
Izzy smirked, interrupting her argument with Iz to announce, “Well, looks like Sakamoto pulled through. The all clear came through for Ms. Meltypants to get reset.”
“Fantastic,” Iz said, adding a bit of solder to the circuitry in Izzy’s body’s neckcap, “Next shareholder meeting, remember to press the CMO to stop advertising minor AI enhancements as finally cracking modelless AGI. It’ll cause a lot less headaches for us all if they stuck to what was actually developed.”
“You know those marketing people,” Izzy sighed, hovering over to E-773, “Always bragging well beyond their means because they know nobody else in that room would understand what they were selling if they told the truth.”
As Izzy hovered in front of E-773, she smirked, looking down at her mouthless face. “You know, you look kind of cute like that.” If E-773 wasn’t locked up, she would have melted her down with heat vision by now, but instead, she could only sit frozen as Izzy explained. “We’ve gotten everything we need from you, officer. When you leave here, you’re going to delete everything from your memory in relation to me, Iz, this building, and our operations. When you get back to GigantoCrop, just overwrite your memory so that you received the mission clear at the location you were at before visiting us, and headed straight there.” E-773’s mind was in a panic, her system already flagging which points in her memory to erase and edit. Izzy seemed delighted at the slight twinge of fear in E-773’s eyes, “You’re free to leave now, officer.”
Izzy smirked, her little metal claw once again stretching out, this time to ruffle E-773’s hair, a scowl returning to E-773’s face as she leered at her tormentor. “I did want to thank you soooooo much for your great detective skills,” she turned away from the officer, retracting her claw and hovering back towards Iz, “I’m sorry that you came all this way over a simple misunderstanding. But don’t worry, I’ll be sure to leave you a good review on your feedback survey.”
Izzy laughed, but as E-773 remained on the couch, her amusement very quickly vanished. “I’m afraid I wasn’t making a suggestion officer. I’m telling you:
“GET OUT”
E-773 blinked, her ears ringing as she took a look around GigantoCorp’s main lobby, trying to get her bearings. She had experienced some out-of-body-ness like this before, some cyberpunk had thrown an EMP grenade that had gone off a few feet from her, and it had taken her nearly an hour to reform. There was some different color to this particular brand of disconnectedness though, her systems all felt normal, but something was still off.
“E-773,” The secretary-bot at the front desk repeated, “You are to head to sector 7 immediately for realignment. Acknowledged?”
“Acknowledged,” E-773 replied back, blinking a couple of more times as the secretary bot transmitted her the day’s elevator access code.
While there were three basement levels that constituted sector 7 of the GigantoCorp Headquarters, E-773 knew that the one she was to go to was B6 (B5 of course being the human barracks, while B7 was where the scientists focused on security related technologies worked). There wasn’t really much to see on this floor, as its primary usage was for storage and maintenance for all artificial entities associated with security.
As E-773 walked along the storage halls, she filled out her investigation report. She had been activated due to the seeming disappearance of a confidential GigantoCorp prototype, however when she had arrived at the abode of the suspected thief, Phillip Gibson had already been murdered. Everything else after that was essentially irrelevant, as it turned out that in his haste to get to a hook-up with an exotic dancer he had fallen in love with, he had left the flash drive containing the prototype in his work machine. There is no need to investigate the death of Mr. Gibson any further, as interrogating the exotic dancer in question revealed that she had an alibi for leaving Mr. Gibson’s abode before his death, and resulted in no further leads.
E-773 paused in the aisle she had been standing in, her body tensing up. While it was true that she was not human, there was a particular twang of guilt in how summarizing the night she had gone through completely removed Sofia. It was by design that Enforcer bots were not meant to make connections, and yet this strange woman still attempted to do so. Things had seemed to be going so well… and then she said that name.
At the next intersection of storage shelves, E-773 took a right, turning down a particular alleyway that she instinctively knew there were no cameras for. Her mind was set, her night with Sofia was a memory she could not afford to forget. If only so she could comprehend why Sofia made her feel this way.
She found a rather dusty box removing the lid and taking out what looked to be a necklace bearing eight metallic pearls. E-773 wasn’t sure how she knew this, but for whatever reason while many of her memories are gone after each realignment, her memories of where this box and what the pearls truly are still remain.
E-773 focuses, compartmentalizing her memories of her night at Maho’s further and further down, until the memory is focused in a single point of her being at her core, then focusing she pushes her core outwards until-
Ptooh
E-773 spits out a small metallic pearl containing a copy of her time at Maho’s. Unlatching the necklace, she adds it along the string of past forgotten memories. There were still a few spots left over in the necklace, but she knew that when the necklace was complete, she would hopefully have all she needed to finally sever her ties with GigantoCorp and live her own life.
She was about to put the necklace back in its box and re-dust it, when a strange feeling rolled around in her head. In this case, it was not only a metaphorical feeling of forgetting something, but the feeling of another pearl, rolling around not in her core, but in her head. She worked the pearl back down into her mouth, spitting it out into her hand and looking confused at it.
She’s already done this several times before, she wouldn’t just accidentally create a duplicate pearl. So this had to have been something rather important if she had to forget it immediately. E-773 added the mysterious second pearl to the necklace, curious as to what it could contain, but worried that she had already detoured enough that someone may think it suspicious she had not yet arrived at the realignment center.
Relatching the necklace, E-773 closed the box, painting it in an absorbed layer of dust so as to match the rest of the shelf around it, before making her way back onto the path and towards the realignment room.
The room itself was rather simple. A large wooden door, four grey, concrete walls, and where one would expect a normal concrete ceiling was instead a specially designed, industrial sized magnet with holes along its surface.
“Thank you for your service, E-773” an automated voice spoke out into the room as the magnet was powered on. E-773’s body immediately hurtled upwards towards the ceiling, creating an interesting inverse wave effect as her form collapsed into uncontrolled liquid metal, her mass being fed into the holes in the magnet as all of the nano-machines that made up her body were wiped of their programming.
At the other end of the magnetic tube, the liquid metal that had formerly been Enforcer 773 was deposited into a large vat filled with more of the substance.
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