#;maddy

@droidsrus

         {★} Maddy, or normally known as “M.A.D” the Medical Assistance Droid, made her way down the hallway to the meeting room, she had been requested formally which surprised her. SH very rarely got to go anywhere other than her maker’s lab. “Hello!” She was chipper and excited as she came into the room, looking this way and that. 

     {★} Maddy was in Lily’ lab, she was a assistant medical droid after all. It made her frown a little, Lily was gone on a mission and she felt a little lonely. She looked up hearing someone enter, her head on a table in a depressed manner. “I am sorry but the lab is closed until miss lily comes back....”

In which SMC programming takes Dekker for a spin.

“He’s not gonna fall for this. He’s not gonna fall for this.”

Alix’s hands shook along with his voice, but at least he was moving—and doing it as fast as he could. Cross leaned a little harder into the doorway, feeling the reassuring solidity of Analeigha’s bulkhead between his shoulder blades. She was there at his back, so he could keep his gaze ahead, down the dark, emergency-lit corridor.

“They made him broken,” the doctor moaned yet again. This time the phrase warbled from under one of the workbenches. But this time she had more to add. “I stopped them before, but they won. They made him broken. He’s not perfect. He’s not perfect anymore!”

Ezebel edged closer to the older woman to wrap a trembling arm around her shoulders, in as much an attempt for simple comfort as it was to keep the doctor quiet. Alix shot a frown at them both, even as his fingers continued flying through holographic interfaces.

“I believe what Madeline means to say is that he will fall for it.”

The calm voice of the blood priest made everyone stall. He regarded their stares with curiosity and even a shred of amusement. As if their mad scramble to survive the literal killing machine smashing through sealed bulkheads was nothing more than a colorful flashy vid.

“Ian Dekker has lost that which made him the perfect synthetic soldier,” Reaper went on. “His freewill. Ironically, while under SMC control, he will not be the efficient killer they desire. He will walk into traps without consideration because he’s following orders rather than reasoning for himself the best course of action.”

The moment of contemplative silence ended with the shrieking of heavy-plated metal being torn and bent. Cross’s gaze snapped back down the hall, pistol raised once more, gripped and steady in both hands. He was deadly enough with two. Focused on one target, he could put anything down. Anything but…that.

Dekker climbed through the remains of the final security door, expression still shockingly blank. His exposed circuitry glowed hot, purring audibly even from a distance. His eyes shifted, lights tracking over the inky black surface and targeting every heartbeat in the time it took to breathe. But he was still zoned in on the captain.

Cross put another round in his chestplate, but it hardly scuffed the armor. Swallowing, hesitating just a little, he aimed higher. The slug ricocheted off the cyborg’s jaw, tearing synthetic skin to reveal dull metal underneath. Dekker’s head jerked to one side as though he’d taken a light slap across the face. Then he refocused. He took a single, menacing step.

Cross didn’t dare take his eyes from the threat. “Alix…?!”

Alix waved frantically, his other hand still hard at work. “Go!”

Without a word, Cross spun around the bulkhead and took off down the corridor away from his first officer’s entry point. Still adhered to the captain’s biosignature, Dekker stormed after him, picking up speed with every stride. Closing like a heat-seeking missile. 

Alix had never moved faster in his life despite the panic that shook his frame. Fairly punching the last control node, he lurched to the doorway and yanked the loose ceiling plate down, releasing a mess of overloaded and stripped conduits into the cyborg’s path. 

The noise Dekker released was probably involuntary, but it still struck them all as being startlingly human. And painful.

Maddy cried out with him, tried to scramble out from under the table. Reaper caught her arm and Ezebel gripped her waist and the doctor collapsed, letting out the choked sob of a horrified mother. Dekker sank to his knees in fits and starts, still hopelessly tangled in power cording, teeth locked and body vibrating with the full force of Analeigha’s generators running through him.

His head hung low, but as Cross crept back toward their sprung trap, Dekker looked up and focused on him through the pain, his voice synthesizer gone haywire with the overload.

“C-C-Cap-t-t-tain.”

“What? No more ‘Primary Target’? I was just getting used to that.”

"The shock must’ve been strong enough to hit a reset," Alix whispered. He sank to a seat right there on the floor, hands dug into his hair as he gasped for breath. "Shit, that’s…that’s bad. It must’ve fried most of his internals."

Cross took another step closer. Alix already started to protest, citing the danger the cyborg still posed, even in his state, but Cross silenced him with a wave, settling into a crouch in front of the hissing synthetic soldier.

"Feeling better, Sparky?"

“M-My b-body betr-trays m-m-me. You mussssst disman-n-n-tle me—me.”

Cross laughed. His wry smile tinged with concern only at the very edges, almost imperceptible. Almost. “Dismantle? That sounds complicated.”

The soldier didn’t blink. “The b-boy cannnnnn do it.”

Cross’s smile faded several shades, eyebrows coming closer together. Alix swallowed hard, looking between the two like a small child watching parents fight. Except for the fact that everyone involved was remarkably calm. Dekker stared straight back into the captain’s eyes, that familiar determination very clearly Ian and not the programming.

“I…wwill not s-s-stop. Y-You m-must—”

“The only thing I must do, is have a shower after all this is over.” 

Cross stood, holstering his pistol, satisfied to see the cyborg’s pained grit take on a hint of confusion and anger at the captain’s decision to—yet again—ignore advice given. Cross smirked at him, full of mischief, as if they were going to drop in on a party instead of hovering on the edge of killing him, and turned to Alix. 

“How long will this hold him?”

The mechaneer stared at Dekker a moment before shaking himself and turning on the floor, clambering up to look at the screen and judge the power feeds. He shook his head. “Day or so, but that doesn’t solve—”

“Cross,” Dekker growled.

“Shh.” The captain lifted a finger without looking at him. “You tried to kill me five minutes ago—you don’t get a vote.” Then going on to Alix: “Can you work on him like this?”

“No!” Alix said, frustration rising. “Not the level of delicate work that needs done.”

Cross glanced down at the glowering cyborg. “What about his power unit? If you pull that, it forces a shutdown, yes?”

“It’s als-so very pa-ainful,” Dekker muttered.

“You’d rather be dead?” Cross shot back, arching an eyebrow at him.

Dekker brooded (pouted) at the wall, still jerking and hissing in his supercharged bonds. At first contact, the conduits had burned through whatever synthetic skin was left. Now the augs had begun to melt and smoke. And he still simply locked his jaw and twitched.

Alix shook his head, gesturing at the web that spanned the corridor and divided them. “I can’t get to his power unit from here.”

Cross settled to a crouch again, and then to his knees. “Right. Talk me through it.”

“You?” Maddy yelped.

Cross waggled long fingers with a half-grin. “Half as good as any surgeon, darling—swear it.”

"Okay." Alix took a deep breath and a step closer. "Okay. Whatever you do, don’t touch the conduits."

"I’d figured that much out for myself, thank you, Alix."

Dekker studied his captain’s face, eyebrows knit together. “You’ve got to be the most irrational human being I’ve ever met.”

Cross smirked without looking up, his focus on maneuvering around the deathtrap web of cords carrying enough power to kill a man at a single brush. 

"You haven’t spent much time in Venus orbit, have you? I’m delightfully well-adjusted by certain standards."

Dekker glanced around the sleek examination room, clearly either already bored or simply restless in a non-militarized space. Even at this point in his life, free of all but the most basic augments, he'd seen more combat hardware than civilian.

He paced from one corner to another, studying displays for cosmetic augmentations with a squint, glazing over flashy advert vids with disinterest. He was the antsy satellite to the calm center of the room: the girl and her doctor.

Her phalangeal augments had both been removed, the connection points at her wrists covered in the softly glowing apparatus that kept the tissue intact and clean while the doctor adjusted the artificial hands on his sidetable.

Eventually Dekker grew agitated enough to pick up a pen from the doctor’s tray, grin, and toss it at the girl with a mischievous: “Namona—catch!”

The pen bounced off her collarbone, her handless wrists remaining gently in her lap. But she did move to roll her head onto her shoulder and glare at him, lips twitching but remaining flat.

“Hmm,” the doctor intoned in his High Planet accent. “Are you military, young man?”

Namona snorted. “You can tell that by his terrible jokes?”

Dekker’s grin barely reached professional now, and he glanced slyly at the girl on the bench, smothering laughter, but he did stand a little straighter. “Sergeant Ian Dekker, Phoenix Squad, SMTI.”

“Hmm.”

The doctor’s wordless noise reeked of disapproval and something twitched on Dekker’s face. 

“It’s to be expected," the doctor went on. "The training they put you through is meant to desensitize you to common decency. Anything that makes you human.”

Dekker’s relaxed expression went beyond a twitch and into stormy and he took a half step forward.

“Doc, it’s okay,” Namona was quick to jump in. “I don’t—”

The images paused, hovering on the coldly-illuminated screen in the dark lab. Maddy Stirling stared for a moment, fidgeting with her lower lip before reaching out and touching the tracking bar, dragging it backward a few seconds. The figures, displayed from a top corner camera whose recordings she now possessed, jittered and then settled. Another touch and the scene replayed.

“—desensitize you to common decency. Anything that makes you human.”

She paused it this time exactly on the emotional switchover on Dekker's face. Whispers under her breath rose in volume as she zoomed the image so his expression filled the screen.

“Angry. No, upset. At the doctor? The words make him distrust. Distrust the medical professional or distrust his superiors? Does he know? Could he know?”

She rewound again. To the first flinch of something after the doctor’s quiet hum. She followed the way the soldier's facial muscles twisted. It went beyond his features, she noted this time, tightening in his shoulders—slightly less broad without all of the plating and electronics--and winding down to his fingers. But why? Why why why?

“Hey, doc?”

The doctor grunted and waved her hand aimlessly at the voice. “Shh.”

Alix ventured closer instead, watching her replay the scene again. Recognizing the man, he abruptly leaned close over her shoulder. “Shit, is that Dekker? Is this what they brought back from that base?”

“Shhhh.”

“When was this recorded? Holy shit, he looks like another fucking person.”

“Shush! I am studying.”

The boy went quiet until, after three more repeats of those collection of seconds, he finally let out a huff. “Never seen him so pissed. It’s weird. Bet if that was our Dekker, he’d have killed the guy. He really doesn’t like him.”

“Shh—wait. Say that again.”

“It’s weird?”

“No, after that. The end bit.”

“Dekker really doesn’t like that doctor guy.”

“How can you tell?”

Alix only stared at her a moment before shrugging, shifting, glancing away. “I dunno—body language. The guy’s a dick. Normal hints.”

She looked back at the screen, blinking without speaking for a long moment. “I couldn’t see it.”

“Hey…doc…when’s the last time you ate?”

She didn’t respond, not even to glance at him. It was as though he’d ceased to exist. She just kept replaying the clip. Questions hardly registered. Nothing registered. She muttered to herself and watched two minutes of a time long gone, repeated over and over again.

Original purpose in the infirmary forgotten, Alix slipped out his datapad and sat down on one of the gurneys. When she had a lucid moment, he'd ask for access to these mysterious new files she had on Dekker. After all, even if they were hardly the most efficient duo, they were all the guy had now.

Not a hundred meters away in the crew mess, "the guy" in question had accidentally knocked over a glass—thankfully empty—and growled, briefly considering smashing it to slivers. Existential crises did that to a person. So did Venusian whiskey.

"Well, I know for a fact you're still a man." Cross leaned over the table to right Ian's glass and fill it again. "Know how? I can still get you drunk."

"That was one time." Dekker stared at the bluish-black liquid in the glass. He frowned, swayed a little. "...That was three times. And I don't...think intentionally disabling my filtration system counts."

"Shhhhhhh--drink." Cross pushed the glass back toward the cyborg. “If you can still say ‘filtration system’ you’re not there yet.”

“Not where yet?”

Dekker’s scowl vanished into mirth as his own words struck him as silly and he laughed. Laughed. Like this, he was almost human again. Fully and completely. He didn't care about the answer to his question. He closed metallic fingers around the glass with ginger practice and tipped it back against his lips.