Republic Insa: The House Of God

I am Insane

*Beep*

One (1) new message. Click here to view.

"Attn: Wisco Robertson
Cc: Shrike Nainsev, B-1
Sender: Tamica Kofay
Subject: Danger for Shrike

Possible mole in Chip Group. Bill passed banning all androids with organic components. No idea who the mole is. Keep mute. Planet votes bailout."

Wisco turned the computer off. He had no idea on the mole either, and Shrike had been absent for a while now... Worse, the Chip Group had decided to excuse her from the Chip Group, for fear of its own safety.

A knock at the door, followed by a click. The room burst into light as the door was opened, letting in the flow of the headlights of a car. Shrike then presented herself in the frame.

"Hey pops... Look what I managed to do!"

She raised her right arm. Her blades were clenching an unrecognizable mass of muscles, deformed bones and incomplete organs. Dark red blood stained the floor and ran over to the drain in the middle of the room.

Wisco immediately stood up and walked towards her.

"What are you doing; get this outta here now!!"

Shrike raised one of her shields. Wisco bumped face first into it.

"Chill it..." She said calmly. "This thing I've got here... Well, it was tiny as this just a few minutes ago (she showed how much with the tips of two blades.) I've found out something really great. Really, really great. You know, those animals on Ragol? Well, all of them are mutated out of some demon that lives down there, we know all that. But what we didn't know was that the mutation was spontaneous and only responded to a control input. That means, using a piece of mutated monster, by just giving it the okay code, will form into a new clone. It simply thinks it's being given orders by the demon, and thus takes in some dark energy to grow into a full-scale being."

She threw the body away. Wisco was undecided as to how he should respond to this...

"But the best thing is - check this out, check this - is that it also works on mags." She said before letting him the chance to speak up. "C'mere Sierra!"

What walked into the door frame was a tiny android, no more than four feet in height. She had the same basic features as Shrike, except she didn't seem to sport any monstruous organic components. That, and her plates were electric blue instead of green.

Shrike grinned.

"I'm a mom now. I didn't get to enjoy the sex part, but I didn't have to suffer through the givin' birth part either!"

She laughed quietly. Wisco backed away, and sat on his mobile chair.

"Good for you... Now look at what your lack of stealth has given us."

...

She stood still at the announcement she heard.

"Say that again?"

Wisco took a deep breath.

"The cops are after your ass. Hardcore. And there's nothing I can do about it."

"Okay, so, what's it gonna do to me."

"Rephrase it this way: what's it gonna do to us?"

An awkward silence.

"You can't stay with us anymore. The Chip Group voted so in a planet meeting." Wisco toned.

"Why not? I'm just a little different from last time, I mean, they're after me; they won't do anything about you!"

"Yes, they will! Hey, if they catch you, they have full access to your hard drives, that means they will know all that we've done undercover, and that, I don't want it to happen. So you have two choices. One, you format yourself and start back at zero on your own. Two, you find a way to counter this merge."

"Screw you!!"

*     *     *     *     *

Gabrielle heard a doorslam. She stepped out of the maintenance room.

"Pops called here." She said. "He says you're disinherited."

"The hell with Pops." Shrike snapped. "I don't care about him firing me from the team. He thinks we'll all die because I'm wanted, and he's so wrong he doesn't believe anything else."

Gabrielle didn't move when Shrike walked towards the maintenance room. The blue android crossed her arms over her chest.

"Listen Shrike. Put yourselves in our shoes. You're like a big green flashing beacon that screams "CAPTURE ME!" to everyone around you. It matters to us, because right now, we are risking our own lives trying to keep you alive! Don't you think we're doing a bit too much here? Sacrifying an entire black market group to keep only ONE person alive? Hey, my life before anyone else's, thank you very much."

"Your tongue's clumsy; my life before anyone else's too, find the error."

Gabrielle growled in frustration. Shrike put her elbows on the door frame, blocking the way out.

"I want to live as much as you all want to. But you are all angry at me because I can now enjoy the abilities of both a human and an android at the same time! True?"

"..."

"So whenever you dimwits find that someone is a little too high, you strike him down? That's what you do?! And I thought I was with a good family when I settled here... BULLs***! You guys bail out the treasure at the first sign of trouble! We ain't done nothin' wrong we're innocent save us baby Jesus boo-hoo-hoo, for a black market group you sure have a lot of heart!!"

Gabrielle had hit the back of the room. She attempted a last verbal attack.

"Understand us! You're dangerous! You are too dangerous for the police! It's not us you should be angry at, it's them!! THEM!!"

A hand grabbed her and raised her to the ceiling.

"You know what I'm gonna do?" Shrike snarled. "I'm gonna hate both of you. Government because they think I'm a monster, and you guys because you are too scared to fight like real people."

Her organic spike deployed itself as she spoke.

"You guys suck. Hardcore. Seems the only people who have as much guts as me are the animals on Ragol. You want me to remind you of something? It's not even my fault, if you recall! You try to control a fight when it's jumping all over the place. You try to fight a Delsaber yourself, YOU put yourself in my shoes!!!"

Her movement was so swift Gabrielle didn't even move down from the ceiling. The hand stabbed her clean and straight into the key components, but her agressor had carefully avoided the motherboard.

The organic spike found a way in, and connected. The other hand pressed the trigger of a syringe and sprayed alien blood all over the spike's area. Immediately, it grew and expanded, taking on gruesome shapes, forming organs, muscles, eyes, brains. The nerves connected to the motherboard, and for the first time in her life, Gabrielle screamed in pain, the pain of a human when her stomach rips apart in thousands of pieces.

"What are you doing?!" She gasped between two convulsions.

"I'm putting you into my shoes, that's what I am doing!!" Shrike screamed with a hint of a smile. "You have no idea what it is to be me, you have no idea what I have gone through to end up here, and you have even less of a f****** idea what I am about to do to a government that doesn't have an ounce of common sense!!"

Gabrielle's simu-skin was stretching and melting into unrecognizable masses. Organism and computer merged into a purposely incompatible mixture, corrupting systems, rejecting organs. Her mouth was forced open as dozens of tiny versions of her own head grew at alarming speed. Her new organic appendages seemed to be pure gore falling on the floor, attaching itself to anything it found, soon encasing the android's body into a hideous compound of tentacles.

Shrike ordered the grown process to stop, for just enough time to whisper:

"Welcome to my body. I've backed up your data and feelings into my hard drive to guarantee the success of the next android mutation I plan to create. Oh, and as a thank you note, I'll let you enjoy a bit of sex..."

Gabrielle's eyes rolled back, and she was taken by an intense shudder... Until she felt Shrike's middle finger run through her pleasure area and rip the entire organ apart.

Her scream became deafening, so much Shrike retracted her spike, and punched her face in pieces, effectively cutting off all sensory links, except tactical.

The groups of heads had grown to a respectable, if still small size.

"...Not!" Shrike snarled with a grin.

The heads whispered "Damn you..." in chorus, before settling down on the disformed body, and then ripping away from the common neck, becoming liquid blood upon touching the floor. The organs became lifeless. Bright red blood was covering most of the floor and walls.

Shrike walked away from the apartment. She didn't feel like setting it on fire, though. She wanted to let the others check out what she could do. She wanted to show everyone she was able to kick ass as much as anybody could. She was going to make a celebrity out of the name Shrike "Shurikane" Naïnsev.

"Mom, can we go yet?" A quiet voice said. Sierra was standing next to the car, boring herself to death.

"Sure. Let's find a spot where I'll be able to clean myself, and then we're on our way." The black and green android replied as she unlocked the doors and sat down.

Later, as she was driving through the back streets, she heard her daughter say this:

"Say... If we are a robot and an animal put together... What's our name?"

Shrike had to think for a few seconds. She passed into fourth to take the freeway, and simply toned:

"Let us call ourselves the Insa."