M.A.I.D.S. [season 1]

Episode 5: The Unexpected

Well, this just won’t do, thought Pandora as she reviewed the scene in her helmet display.  Emergency vehicles were arriving and cordoning off the area, and it was now a battle against time for the terrorists who had stormed the Manufactory.  Even though the longer the battle went, the worse it would be for the attackers, Pandora still wanted to ensure a speedy victory for FIST 8.

A nearby civilian transport gave Pandora what she needed to accomplish her goal.  She quickly overrode the vehicle’s electronic locks and let herself in.  It was a tight squeeze for the fully-armored Synthia, but she managed.  After a few heartbeats she jumpstarted the vehicle and drove it directly at the damaged area of the building.  Shots rained down on her from the shooters in the Manufactory, but her transport and armor protected her.  Within moments she crashed into the smoldering wreck of the vehicle bomb that started the whole mess, dismounted, and entered the damaged building.

Row after row of Synthia tanks greeted her, all of them shattered and destroyed.  Pandora ran over to the body of an incomplete Synthia and knelt beside it.  The inert thing on the floor before her was a nightmarish mockery of what it would have become if it hadn’t been aborted by the terrorists.

It’s still alive!

Pandora observed the strange chest rise and fall, which clearly showed her that the apparatus around the Synthia’s face was both intact and functional.  The Synthia was clearly very far along its growing process.  It had ten fingers and ten toes, and its hourglass figure was well-defined.  The breasts were perfectly smooth mounds of flesh (sans nipples), only a handful each.  The Synthia’s skin pigment was dark, like chocolate.  It had no hair on top of its head, which Pandora suspected was a design choice as the hair was usually added early in the Synthia creation process.

Her superior mind racing as she worked, Pandora managed to get the monitor at the finishing station working.

"Customer Order Number RPB01-21520127-21741130-090-02.  Status:  165:05:09 until completion.  Special Instructions:  Employee Customer enhancements enabled.  Valued Customer enhancements enabled.  Scheduled for in-store pickup Wednesday, May 17, 2175, undetermined time.”

So it has a week left before it’s finished?  Pandora wondered as she ran a basic test on its vitals.  The Synthia was alive and stable.  On her PCG Pandora brought up a schematic of the Manufactory she was in, making adjustments for the damage.  The results were disconcerting.

This entire building will collapse in upon itself in four minutes, she thought gravely.  She grabbed a TIGER reader from a nearby finishing station and used it to replace the one on station # 90.  Pandora had to work quickly.

“You there! The hell you think you’re doing?!” shouted one of the rag-tag terrorists from the opposite end of the room.  He leveled his assault rifle at Pandora, who was still kneeling over the unfinished Synthia.

Pandora dove between the finishing stations, drawing the man’s attention away from the Synthia.  Pandora recognized his accent as Indian, but didn’t have time to dwell on this information.  Gripping her assault rifle, she steeled herself for what was about to happen.

“Where did you—” the man began, but when Pandora popped up from behind the finishing station, she did so with her assault rifle up.  She did not spray the man with automatic fire, but rather rose up, planted her feet, knocked a small box off of the finishing station because it was in her way, took aim, and fired a controlled pair that struck him center mass.  She did this all so smoothly and fast that the man never had a chance to twist his weapon toward her.  Two shots, both of which found their final rest in the man’s heart.  Pandora had put the safety back on her rifle and slung it before the man fell to the ground, newly dead.  She tugged off her right gauntlet and removed her helmet so she could interact with TIGER, then quickly put her gear back on in case more thugs found her in the Finishing Room.