First Contact

Chapter Eighty-Five

EARTH-525

MEGALOPOLIS-18

STARZ LABZ

The figure was human but inhuman in its perfection. Optimal muscle placement, handsome good looks, perfect ratios, clear brown skin. The cybernetic parts complimented the figure rather than took away from it. It stared into the flickering light that shone into its eyes as it laid naked on the examination table. Despite recent events there were no injuries, no damaged cybernetics, no marring to the physical perfection.

Done with the eyes the laser passed over the body, widening, covering it with a grid and passing several brighter lines through the grid.

Behind a shield two humans watched. One female, one male, both of them attractive in a bookish way, the female with oversized vision correcting spectacles.

Plugs of muscle-metal squirmed and plugged into the ports that dialed open as the end of the plugs tapped on the cybernetics. High speed data flowed in midair, displayed by a faint hologram, as the massive supercomputers beneath the room did their work.

Finally the plugs released and squirmed away in a strange imitation of biological life.

The figure laid there for a long moment, slowly breathing, as if they were asleep with their one flesh and blood eye still open.

"Klark? Are you all right?" the female asked.

"Seems to be taking me a bit longer recently to resynch with my cyberware," the figure said, it's voice calm and reassuring. "That's another reason I came in."

"Give us a few moments to go over everything. You can get dressed now," the male said.

"Thank you," Klark-77215 replied, slowly sitting up. He kept himself from wincing, barely, at a muscle in his back that had been bothering him for several days. A muscle that no longer existed, replaced by cyberware over a century ago.

Once he was dressed, in a hospital gown instead of his red and blue uniform, he moved from the table to a hallway to an examination room, sitting up on the examination table. He looked around, saw a magazine devoted to steam powered ground car enthusiasts and picked it up. The brass and hand polished wood looked good, the fusion powered steam engines not as fascinating to Klark as the coal or wood powered ones.

Someone on Zentradi-221 had gotten together with friends and built an entire network of railroad tracks, by hand, over a period of a decade, and then built steam engines and cargo cars. It had started out as a hobby project but the magazine showed people riding the train to connected cities as well as cargo being moved.

Klark was deep into the article the was arguing the pros and cons of fusion or fission steam power versus coal or wood versus laser steam production when the door opened and both of the doctors came in, looking rather serious.

He set the magazine down after making an annotation to himself to get a subscription to the magazine. Steam power looked like an interesting hobby to undertake someday and he liked the outfits.

After all, one should always look good when they did something.

Both doctors sat down. Close enough to touch, but far away to give him space.

"Klark, we have bad news," the female said.

Klark nodded and sat up straight. "Give me the worst of it first."

"That last fight you were in, with InJustice League-882 against the Precursors?" she said.

"The one where Songbird-7361 was killed?" Klark asked.

They all nodded. The female looked at her chart. "You got pretty beat up. You and Doomsday-9021, when you boarded that last Goliath."

Klark nodded. He'd known Doomsday-9021 for decades. Good fighter, good LARPer, took things serious when they needed to. Despite the skinjob the player wore they were a good one to have around.

"All right. How bad is it?" Klark asked.

The looked at each other then back at him. "How long have you been playing?"

"Three hundred fifty six years. Been a Klark for over half that time," he replied.

"How old are you?" the male asked.

"Five hundred and thirty eight," Klark answered.

"Any feeling of deep apathy? Any sign of Methuselah Depression or Anxiety?" the female asked.

Klark shook his head. "No. I'm pretty active and with this Precursor War things are pretty exciting."

They looked at each other again.

"Give me the bad news. I can handle it," Klark said.

"It's time, Klark," the female said.

Klark felt like he'd punched in the chest by an Apocalypse level Darksyde. "Oh."

"Your SUDS is showing degradation. Your nervous system is starting to show signs of hero-class cyberware rejection. You're going to have to at least take a break from LARPing for a few decades or you'll start to suffer from Gameplay Identification Syndrome," the male said.

Idoicy, Klark thought to himself with a chill. Anything but that.

"So, that's it. Time to hang up the cape, right, Doc?" he said, smiling. It hurt to do, but a Klark showed strength even in the darkest times.

"You'll want to avoid anything dangerous. You'll have to go off of real-time SUDS update, restrict it to either yearly or a non-update version. No Mat-Trans. No stringdrive or slipspace or slipstream or hellspace jumps. Try to stick to the middle hyperspace bands or jumpspace," The male doctor said. "You'll want to stick to a basic level three pure strain body as possible."

Klark nodded slowly.

"You'll want some muscle and reflex bioware, some dermal upgrades too, and some vision upgrades, just to keep you from hurting yourself with reflexes. We're going to have to do a muscle-memory and reflex cortex wipe," the female said. "As far as cyberware goes, you'll want to stick with SUDS and datalink only, and even then, you'll need to go easy on the options."

Again, Klark nodded. He glanced at the magazine then back at the doctors. They went through the possible complications, side effects, and mental health aspects.

Every hero knows, eventually, you either die in the tights or hang up the capes, he thought to himself.

The glossy magazine cover gleamed, the brass and hand polished wood a comfort in his peripheral vision.

-------------------

The creature was massive. Eight tons of bone, muscle, sinew, and skin as durable as a heavy frigate's armor. It was gray, with red eyes, and dermal bone spurs covering it. It wore a sash stating "OOC" in flashing lights with "OOC - MEDICAL CHECK" over its head, projected by the sash.

The two doctors, a male and a female that could be, and possibly were, clones of the others came in and sat down.

"How bad is it?" The massive creature rumbled.

"We'll be honest, it's bad. That last battle took everything you had and to be honest, you shouldn't have participated in it. Destroying a Hellcore with your fists is valiant but not too healthy. You're starting to suffer cellular degeneration, SUDS fragmentation, personality implant leakage, Hellspace disruption to your nervous system, as well as neo-cancerous growth down your spinal cord," the male doctor said.

"You have options. Not many, but some," the female doctor said.

"Hit me, doctors," the creature said, the words carrying a liltingly exotic accent that belied the creature's appearance.

"How old are you?" the male asked.

"Six hundred thirty eight. I've been a Doomsday for nearly two-hundred years, been LARPing for nearly four hundred years," the creature told them.

"Any signs of Methuselah Disorder?" the female asked.

"Before I went Doomsday I had a bit of nihilism and apathy but it cleared up after about ten years in this class," the creature said, shrugging.

"You were a Confed Marine before this, yes?" the male asked.

"Planetary Drop Assault. Robot power armor pilot," the creature said. "Good years. Signed up at twenty. Did my hundred and got out. Was Planetary Distress Force for another century after that."

"When it comes to options then," the female started.

"Give me the one with the highest survival rating. The Confederacy is at war, they're going to need someone to help pick up the pieces when it's over. I'm a Citizen so I'll probably get drafted to colony rehabilitation or something else during Reconstruction," the monstrous being said.

The two doctors looked at each other, nodded, and looked back to the creature.

"Highest survival recommendation is a complete rollback respec. Pure Strain Human with as few mods as we can get away with. You'll want strength, durability, and possibly optical bioware mods. No cyberware beyond a bare-bones high latency SUDS and a bare-back datalink," the male said.

"This body's pretty fast. I'll need a muscle memory and reflex cortex wash," the monster said, shrugging. It sighed. "I'm pretty sure I can handle it."

The doctors went over the options with the creature, making notes. It was already considering where it would go and how it would decide.

Sooner or later, every monster dies, every villain falls, the creature thought to itself.

----------------

NU-U MALL

Victor-998146 smiled at the Klark as he came in and sat down. He knew an Apocalypse Level Klark when he saw it. The Klark tabbed through the options on the viewscreen and Victor wondered what it was doing. It took decades, sometimes centuries to rise to Apocalypse level on the ranking scales, why would one be looking over new body options?

It finally leaned back from the touchscreen and hit the icon for a living customer service representative. That made Victor raise his eyes. Usually those guys preferred not to deal with non-automated systems.

Victor moved up, hoping for a sale but figuring the Klark just had some questions.

"How may I help you, sir?" Victor asked.

The Klark looked up, holding a data-wafer case in his fingers. "I need a custom skinjob. I've got the base data here but I need some custom work done," the Klark said.

"Very good, sir," Victor said, his expression carefully neutral even as his brain recalled an eons old joke: No dog food for Victor tonight.

The Klark handed him the wafer case and Victor slotted it in, looking over the data.

Pure Strain Human base. Level-6 muscle augmentation with time decay strength until it was human normal. Level 2 reflex adjustment, again, the decay type. Level three dermal increase, again, with a time decay. Night vision with a data display link. A bare bones SUDS. A bare bone datalink. A SUDS error checker and sector repair link.

Victor looked up at the Klark. "That's a long drop, sir. Are you sure?"

The Klark nodded. "One too many heroics against the Precursors, friend. Doc says its time to hang up the cape."

Victor didn't show any trace of his surprise. Usually Klarks died in the cape. "Well, allow me to thank you for your service to the galactic community, sir."

The Klark just nodded.

"Do you have any skin or hair preferences, sir?" Victor asked.

"There's a genetic profile in the wafer-drive. Is it still viable?" the Klark asked.

Victor checked it quickly. There was some degradation, it was obviously taken from a SUDS medical file that had gotten partially corrupted. Brown skin, a vat-job for blue hair, brown eyes, human standard circa-five centuries ago. There'd been a few genome improvements since then, most of them optional.

Victor went over the options with the Klark, startled at how few changes he wanted. Most people updated their genome at least every decade. The Klark had his hair reset back to black and tight curls.

When Victor was done, the Klark transferred the credits for use of the cloning banks, rapid growth systems, the cyberware, and the shop's minor fee. He waived his discount for fifty years of government service as well as his Citizen discount.

"It'll take about ninety minutes to transfer your SUDS. Normally it would be almost instanteous but we've got additional software for error checking and recovery that I think will help you," Victor said as he tightened down the straps to hold the Klark in the pod. "It's already through human trials and the Space Force and Clone Worlds use it. I highly recommend it myself. I'm throwing it in for free."

The Klark nodded. He closed his eyes as the two probes touched his temples.

He didn't dream. It was like he had just blinked.

When he opened his eyes Victor was staring down at him.

"Good morning, John Reginald Dix," Victor said. He held out his hand. "Lets get you on your feet so we can do a few test. My diagnostics show that everything went perfect."

Klark/John looked at his hands, clenched them, and relaxed. He felt a little slow, a little heavy, but other than that, he felt all right.

"All right," Klark/John said. He inhaled and sighed without having to worry about damage he might cause.

It felt...

...freeing.

-------------------------

Victor-998146 watched as the Klark's memories, desires, personality, everything that made him up was slowly error checked. There was a ping of someone breaking the IR beam at the doorway. When he looked up his blood ran cold.

Massive, grey skin, red eyes, bone spurs punched through the skin.

Victor stood up. "This is neutral ground! No fighting!" he said. His fingers went under the desk to the button that would force a SUDS into a hard reset.

The creature looked down, realized its sash had gotten twisted, and untwisted it. The action revealed the hologram over its head that had gotten obscured by the hanging sign.

OOC - MEDICAL EMERGENGY

"I apologize most profusely, gentlebeing," Victor said, spreading his outs in a soothing motion.

"You have a hero doing a transfer?" The massive scarred and dangerous looking Doomsday rumbled. It had an odd lilting exotic accent.

"Yes."

"Well, I wouldn't want to be attacked during a transfer," The Doomsday said, giving a chuckle that sounded like gravel being crushed. "I'm a customer."

"Well, how can Clone-My-Shit-Up help you?" Victor asked.

The wafer-case was inside a larger case, made so that the Doomsday could hold it easily. The outer case was of durasteel, the inner one of plas. Victor took it with a smile, sitting down. He motioned at the chair as the computer went through the files on the wafer, handed the wafer the medical code for the clinic, and began decrypting them.

"The chairs can hold your weight. We sometimes deal with Mechanex," Victor said.

The Doomsday chuckled again. "Yup, them 'Necks can weigh a lot," it slowly sat down.

"Let me just check the files. Feel free to browse our options. We have the latest ladder-rank Doomsday options, some of the best," Victor said.

The Doomsday turned the monitor carefully and delicately used one massive fingertip to begin perusing the options.

Victor blinked and double-checked the file header.

Two almost identical files in the same day. Hellscorch, SUDS drift, neo-cancer, personality implant leakage, memory degradation, nerve fiber unravelling, dendrite snaps. The body initial specifications were labeled medical necessity just like the other.

Unlike the other one, the baseline genome file was complete. It had a Terran Space Force Marine Corps lock on it but Victor scanned it just in case. Another Ancient. Over five hundred years, but he could see that some correction had been done by the Marine Corps, some enhancements.

The medical chart necessitated that those be removed.

"Problem?" the Doomsday asked.

"No problem. Your baseline genome is your old Corps one, and your medical file requires me to remove some of your allowable decommissioned military mods," Victor said. "It will just take me a few moments."

"As few mods as possible, please. As close to Pure Strain as possible," The Doomsday said.

Victor nodded, getting to work. Switching out sections of the genetic code. Unlike his peers, he always ran a compile before adding more, as well as doing an error check. It slowed him on easy cases but prevented problems with more complex cases.

"You're careful," The Doomsday said.

"Yes. You have to live in this body," Victor said, not taking his eyes from the screen.

"I appreciate your attention to detail," The Doomsday answered.

Eight times he was forced to find and use alternate gene sequences when the compiling and error checking threw out errors. The Doomsday would have gone blind in six months by one, developed pancreatic cancer with another one, sprouted feathers in their armpits after two years in another.

Finally he was done. He knew he had been perspiring from the concentration, a slight flaw in his own genetic sequence that made him different then the other ten thousand clones of his batch that he refused to remove. It made him different and he had found out long ago that he liked that.

"All right, here's how your body will look. I readded pubic and other hair, removed the neural bioware for a direct linkage neural jack since you won't have that," Victor said, tossing the 3D model of the Doomsday's human body on the screen. "I, of course, repaired the genetic malady you had been suffering from before you joined the Corps."

The Doomsday nodded, staring at the image. It reached forward, touching the hologram almost gently.

"I forgot that's how I used to look," it said.

"Now, there is a genetic quirk. I am unsure if you wanted it restored or repaired. The old method of removing it was superceded about two hundred years ago by repair," Victor said.

"Quirk?" the Doomsday asked.

"The... um... sexual arousal amplification trigger synapses," Victor said.

The Doomsday somehow managed to look embarassed. "Oh. I had forgotten about that. What are the drawbacks to repairing it. When the Corps fixed it I found out that taste and smell as well as tactile pleasures were all reduced slightly."

Victor nodded. "There will be some reduction to tactile pleasure responses, but only by roughly 18%. Probably 12% in your case according to my simulation."

"Leave it as is. I'll just learn to deal with getting turned on by a warm breeze," the Doomsday said.

"Excellent. Excellent. That actually reduces the amount of adjustments needed to be done. Do you have any preference for hair and eye color? Skin color? Mood reflecting fingernails?" Victor asked.

The Doomsday shook its head. "No. Let's just go with the old skin."

"I've ensured that your strength, reflex, and dermal enhancements will degrade over time until your at Pure Strain Human normal. It will take approximately two years, but after that, you'll be a healthy close to your original genome," Victor said.

The Doomsday nodded. "Thank you. And thank you for understand that I don't want any additional mods and not trying to upsell me."

"Of course. This is a major transfer, let's not increase any risk or uncomfortable feelings. All right, I've ordered the clone banks to go ahead and start. Normally it's only about fifteen minutes to do the SUDS transfer but I would recommend the newer system. It's slower, but it's used by the Marine Corps and the Clone Worlds Military Cloning Authority. It has a lot of error checking, SUDS template rebuilding. You'd be asleep the whole time, of course," Victor said.

"That sounds good. No dream generator. Just take me offline," the Doomsday said.

"All right. Let's go ahead and go to payment," Victor said. He punched it up, applied veteran, civil service, Citizen, and medical necessity codes and presented the price. The Doomsday looked at him.

"Is that right, it seems a little low," It rumbled.

"Due to your genetic damage as a child a new skin is free of charge. The additional mods are all you are being charged for," Victor smiled, standing up. The Doomsday copied him, following him into the transfer room.

"Oh, I see why you were worried," The Doomsday said when it saw the Klark sleeping.

"Again, I apologize," Victor said.

"No, no, your responsibility to your patients comes before hurt feelings," the Doomsday said, chuckling again. It laid down, letting Victor strap it in.

"See you on the other side, hotshot," the Doomsday rumbled.

"We will meet again," Victor answered.

---------------

"John Reginald Dix?" the gate attendant asked, looking around. Boarding for the shuttle had already completed but they were missing a passenger and there was a lone man sitting in the lounge. When she had queried his implant it had just replied "UPDATING" without throwing out any additional information.

The man kept reading the magazine.

She reached out and touched his shoulder. "Sir?"

"Huh?" the man looked up.

"Are you John Reginald Dix?" the attendant asked.

"No. I mean, yes. Sorry. I had a personality matrix repair," Klark/John said.

"Oh. You should have said something. We would assigned an attendant like we did to the other person. Did you have it done by Victor?" The attendant asked.

John nodded. "At the Clone-My-Shit-Up shop."

She smiled and held out her hand. When John took it she helped him up, then put his hand in the crook of her arm and started leading him slowly to the shuttle. "He does good work. He used to work for the Space Force in SUDS recovery. I had to go to him after a sky-surfing accident. A newbie hit me right in the SUDS pack with the leading edge of his board. My SUDS tried to upload a damaged template right as I hit the pavement."

John nodded. For some reason her arm helped him feel less shakey.

"It scrambled my SUDS but Victor was able to clean out the damaged template and I only lost about a day, which probably would have been therapied away anyway. My counselor told me I was lucky it was Victor who did it," The attendant said, more to keep John moving than anything.

She understood being shocky after a personality repair.

"Here we are," the attendant said. She pinged the Chief Flight Attendant. A blue and pink bipedal wolf in an attendant uniform came up. "This is John Reginald Dix. He just had a personality repair done. He's going to need a little assistance on his flight."

The wolf nodded, holding out an arm. "If you come with me, I'll take you to your seat."

John nodded and went along. When he was seated he looked around as the wolf motioned over a green skinned human woman with long silver hair dressed in an attendants uniform. The shuttle was almost empty, just another passenger sitting with an attendant that he couldn't see over the seat and a family of six. The green woman sat down next to him, patting his arm.

"Where are you going?" The attendant asked. She noted how shaky John was, how even simple questions took him a moment to answer.

"Evixta 279, a colony out in the Long Dark," John said.

"Ah. Answering the volunteer call?" The attendant asked.

John nodded. "I used to be a mechanic. Used to teach too."

The attendant nodded and smiled. "Wow, a real life teacher. I've never met one before."

John smiled shyly.

-------------------

The trip had taken nearly three weeks. John had slept most of it, his brain slowly decompressing the template and applying it to his neural tissue. He had chosen that version instead of the instantaneous upload at Victor's recommendation.

By the time the ship reached the colony he felt much better. He'd requested that his time as a Klark be largely put in deep storage memory, the slow access part of long term memory. It had been fun, it had been exciting, he had good stories, but that part of his life was over now.

When he stepped out of the spaceport's concourse and lounge, which consisted of all of one room, he stood in the light of the bluish white sun, blinking. It took his eyes a moment to adjust, something he wasn't really used to.

He found himself standing next to a short, attractive Pure Strain Human female, who was holding a small bag in her hands, with no other luggage, the same as him.

"Hi," she said, smiling. Her accent was lilting and exotic.

"Hi," John said. "John Dix. Here for the colony stabilization program."

"Samantha Krikaktak Woolvet, same here," the woman said. She frowned. "You know, you seem familiar for some reason."

John laughed. "Doubt that. This is the first time I've been Pure Strain in long time."

Samantha chuckled. A gravelly sound that didn't fit a short woman like her. "Same here. What were you doing?"

John smiled. "I was a ladder ranked LARPer. A Klark."

Samantha laughed. "I was a Doomsday. So that's what a Klark looks like without the glasses."

John laughed with her. "So that's what's hiding inside a Doomsday."

A hovertaxi pulled up and Samantha nodded toward it. "You OK with sharing a cab with a Doomsday, Klark?"

John nodded. "Yeah, I am. And call me John."

"Call me Sammy."