**** Elysium 1986 ****

The three men in white lab coats immediately stopped what they were doing and looked alarmed toward the door as the TRAP team burst into the lab with guns drawn.
“Get down on the floor and don’t move,” Harry yelled. While two of them followed his order, the third ran to the north wall where some switches were mounted on a panel. He probably wanted to set off an alarm. Yuri fired in his direction, but deliberately aimed past him, and the projectile hit the wall at head height. A piece of tile broke off and fell to the floor. The man’s courage left him instantly, he put his hands up and stopped. Abigail quickly closed the lab door, hoping the attack hadn’t been heard by anyone outside, while Harry rushed over to the men lying on the floor.
“Where’s the prototype?” he demanded. He had already had a quick look around. There was nothing in the room that looked like an industrial robot. None of the men said a word; they pressed their lips together. He walked over to the one lying closest to him on the floor and held the blade of his sword to his throat. “I will ask exactly one more time. Where…is…the…” as he enunciated each word abundantly, his eyes fell on a relatively shallow plastic basin the size of a tray. It was filled with a clear liquid, and in that liquid was a human left hand, severed at the wrist. It looked delicate, even flawless, as far as he could see from here. The stump of flesh was black and somewhat charred, but the cut had been made perfectly in line. “What the fuck are you crazy bastards doing here?” he blurted out, pressing his blade a little harder against the man’s throat, who groaned miserably in response.
“What’s going on?” asked Yuri, coming closer. Abigail had luckily found the lab key on a table and had now manually locked the door from the inside. She also looked at Harry questioningly.
“Look at this shit,” he said, pointing to the pool. They both came closer and took a look at the liquid as well.
“That’s disgusting,” Abigail hissed. Angrily, she walked over to the man who was still standing motionless with his hands raised in front of the control panel on the wall. She kicked him in the back of the left knee with a swift kick and the man fell to his knees. Then she grabbed his hair and held the Colt to his temple. The man shook, his mouth dry with fear.
“What are you bastards doing in this lab? Cutting people apart piece by piece? Is that it? What kind of disgusting experiments are you doing here?” she shouted at him.
“No… this is…” the man croaked. Abigail cocked the hammer of her gun, slowly but surely sending him into a panic. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and glanced over. Harry looked at her gravely and shook his head.
“It’s not worth it. We’re going to find out anyway,” he told her in a reassuring voice. Then he pointed to a door behind her that had a sign with Japanese characters screwed on it. “It says Sterile Zone. I think we’ll find out more in there.” Yuri had watched the scene wordlessly.
“I’ll be right there. But first tie up the men and…” he pointed to the basin “I take this thing with me. Got feeling we will need it,” he said.
“Good idea,” Harry said, giving Abigail a quick encouraging pat on the shoulder. Then he went to the computers standing around and pulled out some cables which he and Yuri used to bind and gag the men one by one while Abigail kept them at bay with her gun. After a quick search, Yuri found some clear plastic wrap to put the hand in, and put it in his pocket after quickly wiping it on the lab coat of one of the bound men.
“Depending on what we find in there, I’m going to come right back out and shoot every one of you fuckers…” Abigail said coolly to the men who were squatting on the floor in an uncomfortable position, grunting anxiously as speech was no longer possible through the gags. Then she took a deep breath, slipped her Colt into her pocket and stomped for the door. Yuri nodded to Harry and they both followed.

Abigail entered the room first and held her breath. She could not believe the sight before her. Her two companions paused as well, stunned by the grotesque image. The three of them slowly approached the scene. In the middle of the large room was a metal examination table on which lay a young woman who appeared to be dead. She was dressed in a thin green surgical gown that barely covered her torso and pelvis. From the looks of it, she was somewhere between 25 and 30 years old, it was hard to guess. Her skin was as pale as if she had never spent a minute in the sun. Her straight, shoulder-length hair was a vivid dark purple that shimmered in the indirect light from the walls. Despite her petite stature, her feet and arms were shackled to the examination table with heavy iron restraints. In addition, her body was connected to countless electrodes. The cables ran to various machines positioned around the table, which simultaneously displayed various real-time readings on six different screens. Her left arm was missing its hand, and the stump on her forearm was charred, but the cut was absolutely straight. Also on that forearm was a display the size of a pack of cigarettes, embedded in the skin. The small display had some numbers glowing and a battery symbol flickering slightly, indicating about a 50 percent charge. In addition, on the left side of the table was a larger machine with a swivel arm and a cylindrical black attachment.
“Looks like we found the laser,” Harry said quietly, pointing to the machine. Abigail’s eyes grew moist. She gritted her teeth and swallowed, feeling a lump in her throat. Then she ran her sleeve over her face and took another deep breath. The sight had affected her the most of the three. It was simply horrible. The woman looked so helpless, she must have been terrified in her final hours. Alone here, among those terrible scientists.
“What have they done to her? What kind of nightmare is this?” she whispered softly, her voice trembling.
“Can you see anything on the monitors?” asked Yuri, slowly circling the table and then crouching down to look at the examination table from below. “She even has wires in her back…” he said.
“What? Oh shit…” Harry replied, kneeling down as well. It was true. There was a circular hole in the table top, and a thicker cable ran through it as well, into some sort of socket about level with the woman’s lower lumbar vertebrae. Abigail briefly tried to make sense of the data on the screen, but then slowly shook her head.
“These aren’t life support systems or meters like you’d use in a hospital. There’s no heartbeat monitoring, no lung function or anything like that. These are energy meters and… Measurements for data transmission? I don’t understand…” she trailed off.
“Data transmission?” asked Yuri and Harry almost simultaneously, to which Abigail just nodded.
“What we do now?” asked Yuri, rubbing his aching shoulder. “There’s no car-building robot here to bring back, mission fucked.” Then he made a dismissive hand gesture and tried to sound detached. But the opposite was true, and the other two could see it clearly on his face. The giant kept looking worriedly at the woman on the table, barely able to take his eyes off her. But even he was at his wit’s end. Abigail walked over to the table and looked at the woman for a few moments. She felt tears welling up in her eyes again. One more minute, then she would leave this room and shoot the three men outside. Then she reached out her right hand and gently caressed her face.
“What they did to you, what happened here…” she whispered. She paused for a moment. The woman’s face was not cold, as she had expected. It had normal body temperature. Abigail slid her fingers carefully down to the carotid artery, but found no pulse. And this woman was not breathing. Even as Abigail stared, the woman’s eyelids began to flicker slightly, then she opened her eyes. Abigail withdrew her hand in shock.
“What’s wrong?” asked Harry, coming closer to the table with Yuri. Then they understood the programmer’s reaction. The woman slowly turned her head towards Abigail and looked at her with her large eyes. Her pupils were the same striking dark purple color as her hair, which contrasted sharply with her pale skin.
“Hello,” the woman whispered. Her voice was soft, almost girlish.
“You’re… alive…?” stammered Abigail. The woman tilted her head and looked down at herself as best her restraints would allow.
“Not sure,” she replied quietly. Then she noticed Harry and Yuri. “Hello,” she greeted them as well, and they returned the greeting in complete confusion.
“We’ve got to get these damn shackles off her, now!” Abigail urged her companions. The three of them immediately set to work on the shackles, quickly discovering a safety handle on the side that allowed the iron clamps to snap open with a little pressure. Then they quickly began to remove the electrodes from her.
“Thank you,” the woman said, visibly surprised that someone was helping her free herself. Only now did she notice that her left hand was missing. She stared at her forearm in disbelief.
“You must be in terrible pain,” Abigail said in a slightly shaky voice. The woman looked at her and smiled slightly.
“No, I’m fine,” she said, still quietly. “I can shut it off for the most part…” Then she slowly rose to a sitting position, pulling the thick cable at her back quite far through the hole in the tabletop.
“Careful!” Harry exclaimed to her worriedly, “There’s a cable in your back…!” The woman paused for a moment and reached behind her with her remaining hand. She took the end of the cable and twisted it until it clicked. Then, with a quick motion, she pulled it out from behind her. As she did so, a few small electrical discharges flashed from the socket. She pulled the end of the cable up to her face, looked at it briefly, and dropped it. The remaining opening in her back closed, but the socket was still visible through a small bump under her skin. The TRAP team had watched in disbelief.
“What… who… who or what are you?” asked Harry. The woman hesitated a bit.
“My name is Yanny. Thank you for helping me,” she replied, smiling again.
“Yanny?!” said Abigail. “You…”
“…are the prototype,” Harry finished her sentence.
“You don’t look like car-building robot,” Yuri explained, confused. Yanny giggled, her laughter so contagious that the others began to grin as well.
“That’s a nice compliment, I think. Thank you,” she said to Yuri. Then the TRAP members introduced themselves.
“Can you stand?” asked Abigail. Yanny thought for a moment and seemed to listen to herself.
“Yes,” she replied. Then she slowly rose from the table, the others helping her. She stood and took a few steps as a test. If you looked closely, her gait seemed a little wooden as she moved. “It works fine,” she nodded happily. Suddenly, a deafening siren sounded.
“Damn, the alarm!” Harry shouted to the others. “They must have found the engineer. We’ve got to get out of here! Quickly!”
“But how? Do we shoot our way out?” asked Yuri, drawing his pistol. Yanny, on the other hand, pointed to the ceiling of the room; there was a wide grate between the tiles.
“Up there is the air purification system. It runs through the entire complex. We can use the duct system to get to the lobby where the elevator is,” she explained.
“But we can never, ever use the elevator,” Harry said. “When the alarm goes off, the elevator will be the first thing security puts under heavy guard.” Yanny nodded.
“We don’t have to use the elevator. There is a security door by the locker rooms that seals off a shaft with a ladder. The door can be opened with standard level 2 smartcards. The shaft goes through behind the elevator to the roof because no one would suspect the entrance there. The roof hatch can also be opened with the card, but only from the inside. You can get out from there, but not in,” Yanny continued.
“How do you know all this? Did they show you around?” asked Abigail incredulously.
“No,” Yanny replied with a grin, shaking her head so that a few strands of hair fell down her face. “When they first hooked me up to the mainframe here for experimental purposes, I was able to download floor plans of the entire facility.” She tapped her head.
“Let’s do it,” Yuri grumbled, leaning on the metal table Yanny had been lying on and pushing it under the ventilation grate with all his might.
“We’ll radio Ralph on the walkie-talkie when we get to the roof. Then we’ll figure something out…” Harry explained.
“Who’s Ralph?” Yanny asked, the siren still unpleasantly wailing around them. Without waiting for an answer, she climbed onto the metal table, crouched down a bit, jumped up to the grate, grabbed it by the slats with her right hand, and with the same movement, tore it from its moorings and landed back on the table. She held the grate, which must have weighed at least 15 kilos, as if it had no weight, as if it were a piece of paper in her hand. Then she tossed it slightly behind her, and it landed on the floor with a clatter. “The way is clear,” she said with a smile, straightening her scrubs, which had almost fallen off during the action.
“I already know who will carry washing machine if it breaks,” Yuri noted, running a hand through his beard.

Categorized as: Novel 1 (EN) | Novel Chapter (EN)

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