5. Robocop and Sleeping Beauty

Dmytryk demonstrates that the more educated you are in one field, the more clueless you are about others. Also, he blows up a wall.

5

 

By some stroke of dumb luck he managed to get into the actual test room without setting off alarms. Of course, as soon as someone found any of the people he’d stunned and stashed on the way, the alarms would sound for sure. No alarms yet. Things were looking good.

 

Well, not good per se, good would be him going back to his bunk room like a good boy and minding his own business. Good would be keeping his head down. If he was a good boy he wouldn’t even know this place existed, much less spent the last four years here. But it was too late to change any of that now. He’d already broken into the test room. He was already walking past four empty beds. The two doctors in the room were already slumped against the wall, their ID badges were already in his bag. He was already standing over the girl who’d run into his research lab three and a half weeks earlier.

 

She was unconscious and heavily strapped down, as was the young man next to her. He must be R53. This was something he hadn’t anticipated, that they’d be completely unconscious. He had no chance of getting out if he had to carry her. And he definitely couldn’t carry both of them. Though, to be fair, he really didn’t have any chance of getting out anyway. Even if she was awake and full of the fire she’d obviously had to have escaped on the day he’d first seen her.

 

He hesitated a moment longer, only to be startled by a sudden thrashing in the bed behind him. The man’s eyes were squeezed shut, but he was gnashing his teeth and seizing in his binds. It was almost like the guard had said the day Ada came into his lab. They went into panic mode. He remembered how easily Ada had followed them after they’d drugged her. They keep them sedated for their safety. He wondered how much of that was true. The man convulsed violently and Dmytryk panicked. There were two vials of dark liquid on the table between the beds, and two syringes. He uncapped a needle and with shaky hands filled it from the nearest vial. He didn’t trust what the man had said that day, but clearly the man in front of him needed to be calmed before he injured himself, and hell they already had a sedative set out, so maybe this was normal?  

 

But if the man was still coherent enough to follow maybe he’d be able to get him out too. As best he could with the man thrashing wildly in his binds, Dmytryk stuck him in the leg with the syringe and, as best he could, injected him with half of the syringe’s contents. Maybe that would calm him without knocking him out.

 

Nope. He looked at the vial he’d drawn from and cursed. R54. That was meant for Ada. Maybe they had their own formula or something? Maybe they were the same. They were probably the same. Maybe he needed the whole dose. Dmytryk new approximately nothing about that sort of thing, but figured to be safe he’d give him half of the other vial, since really they did look the same. To the plastics engineer, it seemed like a solid idea. Dmytryk had absolutely no idea what he was doing but it sort of seemed to make sense in his head, so he grabbed the other syringe and the second vial, drew up half the liquid and jabbed it into the man’s leg. After a few more thrashes the man stilled and the readings on the monitors slowly stopped flashing red. Dmytryk’s heart pounded. According to the machines, the man was stable, but he was also out cold.

 

Ada, however, was not. He turned to find her staring at him, confusion crinkling her brow. “We have to get out.” Dmytryk breathed, relieved at finding her at least somewhat conscious. She nodded. Good sign. “I’m going to cut you out. Hold still.” She nodded again. All good.

 

One of the projects he’d worked on, not terribly recent but still in prototype phase, was the size of a pen, a variation of the same porcelain-textured white polymer that he contributed to every project he worked on. There was a button on it, and it almost functioned like a pen too, or perhaps like an exacto blade. Except it wasn’t a blade. It was a laser cutter, superheating a small focused point to cut it without setting it on fire. He’d taken the only two prototypes, one of which he pulled from his pocket and set to work using it to cut the binds off the girl in front of him. It was focused enough that there really wasn’t a risk of hurting her, and it made relatively short work of the binds. When he finished she sat up and pushed the heavy binds off, then swung out of the bed and stood beside him.

 

“We’re doing a runner?” She asked, head cocked slightly and forehead still crinkled in confusion. He nodded. She didn’t look all there, but maybe enough to follow along.

 

“Sure are. I brought you a jumpsuit, hopefully it will fit. It’s the smallest I could find. But hurry.” He pulled a white uniform jumpsuit out of the bag strung across his back. Dmytryk turned away to watch the door, fully aware that the room had surveilance cameras and that a welcome committee was undoubtedly on the way. Or waiting in the hall. The later was the one thing he actually had planned for, hoped for even.

 

“Okay, let’s go.” He heard the suit zip and turned to see Ada step forward to stand next to him. The jumpsuit was the full body type, complete with boots, that left only the hands and head exposed. He hadn’t grabbed gloves or a mask because hell they knew who she was, fingerprints and face scans weren’t really a concern. The big black numbers and letters across the suit said where it came from though, and Level 12 wasn’t anywhere near here. It wouldn’t take them long to figure out who he was, even with the mask obscuring most of his face.

 

“They’ll be waiting for us in the hall, I’m sure, so I checked the floor layout and I think it would be best if we went through the wall instead. Ada looked at him like he was either crazy or brilliant or maybe both, or maybe she actually was too drugged to understand what he’d even said, but then she replied with something he was really not expecting to hear.

 

“I bet they made the door even heavier since the last time, I don’t even know if I could get it open now. It would be easier to knock a hole in the wall anyway. I mean, it’s probably the only way we even could go.”

 

He was talking to a supersoldier prototype. She wasn’t done yet, but she was still a lot more than human. It was hard to match that with her stature and appearance. She looked so small and pale in that jumpsuit. Dmytryk shook his head. “I got it.” He pulled out a spray can and kicked her bed aside then spray painted an arch doorway on the wall. “Step back.” He tucked her behind him with one arm and pulled out the laser cutter pen again. A quick click of the pen ignited the spray strip and burned through the wall, which he kicked. It crumbled under his boot and he pulled Astrid after him through the gap. They hit the floor on the other side running.

 

Dmytryk led her down a memorized path out to the exit, firing at everything that moved in their path. The gun was set to stun, functioning something like a cross between a taser and a staple gun, and rattled out shots with a “chhhht!”. He dropped the empty ammunition clip as they ran, sliding another into the slot with a click. Of course his time in the army was spent doing R&D, but he’d still done basic training and it was kicking in.