IT’S OKAY. YOU SURVIVED. I’M HERE.
Hi, Roll.
-F- GET EQUIPPED WITH FLASH STOPPER
Roll, what do you know about the Mechs?
-F- GET EQUIPPED WITH FLASH STOPPER
Listen, Roll! You know the hierarchy, don’t you?
DR. LIGHT. HUMANS. MEGA MAN. MIP. SENTIENT BOTS. NON-SENTIENT BOTS. MACHINES. SIMPLE MACHINES. DR. WILY.
Right. Well, the Mech’s are just fucking up the whole arrangement.
THIS GAME CANNOT UNDERSTAND SUCH A COMPLEX AND WELL-CONSTRUCTED SENTENCE-
Just stop it and please listen to me. The Mechs are humans, working for MIP’s.
MANY MIP WORK FOR DR. WILY.
Yes, but that distinction in the hierarchy is only Dr. Light’s evaluation of value. This is humans obeying bots, and I don’t understand it yet.
DR. LIGHT IS OUR MASTER
Please listen. Flashman was a right bastard. A straight-up prick. I couldn’t piece it together before I absorbed his essence, but he was just toying with me.
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE DEFEATED FLASH MAN!
Yes, I know. But look at the stage he created. No spikes. No bottomless pits. Nothing that could seriously harm me except for the Mechs, but even those weren’t so tough. I think he didn’t care what happened to anything in his lair. He just wanted to soften me up so he could kill me himself.
INCOMING MESSAGE FROM DR. LIGHT!!
Roll, this is serious! We’ve got MIPs out there who don’t care about other bots, and are happy to put humans in the line of fire just to fulfill their own sadistic ends. We need to look into this!
-3- GET EQUIPPED WITH ITEM 3!!
Thank you, Roll.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Chapter One
23 October, 200X
-----
It’s cold.
More accurately, I register the fact that it is cold. I do not experience this in any real way, aside from a brisk feeling across my cheeks that fails to mean anything to the rest of my system. A thermometer doesn’t shiver. My own simply opens a small subprogram to release the appropriate amount of anti-freeze. I can still smell it, though: that odd scent of sub-zero temperatures, somehow simultaneously fresh and dead, even underground in this shining fortress.
Speaking of death, my first hostile encounter comes quickly. It’s a ridiculous, googly-eyed sphere, firing off pellets haphazardly in my general direction – a simple gunbot. It’s got legs, but I quickly get the sense that they are purely aesthetic. The gunbot doesn’t appear to have any faculty of movement aside from changing the angle of trajectory based on my proximity.
I stop to get a read on how best to handle the situation, but have forgotten my limited traction on this icy floor, and slide directly over the edge, into this lower corridor, face to face with the bot, giving up the higher ground. No matter. I’ve got nothing but my primary weapon to work with now anyway, so all that the elevation would’ve granted me was time. I shoot off a few rounds.
That seems to be enough to dispatch the bot, but one of his random shots found its true, and my Temporary Defense Mechanism flashes to life for a second or two. Damn. I sense an energy capsule within reach – and a large one at that – but I still hate getting hit. I usually don’t feel it, of course, but the TDM’s blinking has a habit of causing as many problems as it solves – taking precedent over what should be higher functions, slowing down my response time, and generally acting as a distraction for the goals at hand. I’m fine now, but I worry for what might be to come if this occurs in a more precarious circumstance.
I grab the capsule and come across a couple more of the gunbots. The first is on the same elevation with me, and I’ve got enough room to take him down from outside his range. That’s just fine. The execution of correct strategy sends a signal up my spinal cord to release endorphins. But the next bot is facing away from me. He can’t even move. His blaster reaches its highest arc, but that still fires in my opposite direction. I unload three rounds into his back while he fights in vain against his coding and placement – I have to get past him somehow, after all – and I start making some judgments about this “Flashman” character.
------
When Light Industries Ltd began, the grand majority of its investments and orders came from Japan, requiring the designs to work within the late-twentieth-century aspects of kawaii – that Nipponese “cuteness” that signified so much of their pop-culture for so long. Dr. Light’s creations eventually adapted kawaii into his signature “look,” which Dr. Wily was quick to plagiarize, lacking Light’s creativity in these matters.
This is all a roundabout way of explaining that the googly-eyes didn’t represent any personality or sentience. They were simply dolled-up sensors feeding the data of how near an approaching intruder is, and running a simple logarithm from that data to shift the blaster to the more optimal of two possible arcs. These gunbots, in other words, are roughly as sentient as a warm-air hand-dryer like you’d find in an airport washroom. That’s not my issue.
You see, the Japanese also gave Dr. Light (and by extension Dr. Wily) the rights to use their patented AI technology – designed by the Japanese Military starting with extremely primitive experiments during the fifties when the country’s armed forces were effectively prevented from showing any use of actual force, and perfected near the end of the millennium as the American tech-boom helped fuel the Nikkei index. So these “Major Initiative Projects” were granted systems that many – I for one – would consider both self-aware and responsible for their actions.
One of those responsibilities was the design, upkeep, and – most importantly for my purposes – security of their own domain. Any MIP would quickly come to terms with the fact that any bots they used for security were likely to be destroyed, but in general there was a code to try to give them the best fighting chances they could get, even if they lacked basic agency of their own. Flashman seemed not to care about the fates of his forces, which gave me cause to worry, even if I didn’t understand it quite yet.
As it were, there was a more immediate and comprehensible worry staring me right in the face.
------
Shit.
I’d fought my way through to a dead-end. Or, at least, an end with a clear and definable barrier that I had no way of dealing with. My shots simply ricochet off, and thus I’m forced to turn back, as the bots re-spawn and I take them down anew. Flashman had built his lair as a maze, of sorts, it seemed, and now I’m preoccupied with what manner of MIP thinks this way. What does it gain him, not to harm or kill an intruder like this, but simply to frustrate him?
I take the lower route I’d forsaken earlier for the energy capsule, wishing now that I’d been able to hold off until that capsule would be most useful. I blast through the bots, all of them seemingly placed with the same degree of strategy as their random projectiles. I pass underneath an essence regenerator, which would be useful as hell, if only there were some way for me to get to it, but there isn’t. Shortly later, I pass under a series of these same strange barriers. It occurs to me that I once had a way to deal with this sort of thing, but no matter. It's lost to me now.
I know there was something, though...
A moment later, and I’m falling – an exhilarating experience for the human part of me, knowing that I won’t suffer harm as long as I land on solid ground. When I do manage to hit the floor, however, I meet my first Mech.
I’d heard about these guys from Dr. Light – flesh-and-blood mercenaries operating massive, hopping chicken-walkers with wild pellet-spray – but never seen one personally. So much for the gunbots; this thing towered over me, relentless, run not by AI, but by actual, genuine-article human intelligence, albeit that of the high-school drop-out variety. It hits me a couple of times – nothing life-threatening, but not good either, and as the TDM kicks in the things jumps in the air to land on me.
I dash underneath, desperately wishing my suit would allow me the flexibility to slide in this sort of situation, and the TDM shuts off just as the heel of this monstrosity catches me in the noggin. God-dammit. Now, not only is the TDM kicking back into action, but my heart is racing, which means that my auxiliary cerebellum starts up to maintain my pulse. It’s a disorienting, unpleasant feeling, to have one’s heartbeat artificially held to a standard rhythm while adrenaline nonetheless courses through your biological veins. I last dealt with this when I was dispatching the Yellow Devil, and it isn’t as much of a help as you’d think.
I can barely concentrate as I spin around and fire wildly. Thankfully, that seems like it was enough, and the Mech-suit falls to pieces, leaving just the mercenary, shooting off three slow-moving rounds at a time. I cool down enough to dodge the shots, and take him out without too much effort. I’m hurting, though. Those stomps can pack a whollop.
I continue to drop down through the gleams of the ice, choosing my course at random, not knowing what I may face at any given path. I have to jump around a couple of Squiggles, which deal me a little more damage that I’d really rather not deal with right now, but Squiggles are like toddlers, and once you’re past them only some twisted sense of vengeance would make you want to destroy them. Of all the machines, they know the least what they do.
Thankfully, I fall past another gunbot, as well as a dustbin stack, and once I find steady ground again I land directly on a life-saving energy capsule, guarded – if you can call it that – by a particularly ill-placed Mech. There’s a wall between him and me, with enough room for me to run and fire through, but not enough for his machine to get past, so his jumps are almost comically futile. Moreover, the capsule was placed in a little hole, which gives me cover once the mercenary drops down to the ground. I don’t know what kind of training would keep the Merc from rushing me, but it must have taken a lobotomy to override his biological fight-or-flight mechanism in this way. I drop down again.
What the hell…?
My scanners read a number of Mechs below me, but Flashman has seemingly designed a series of blocks for me to safely jump across without any other impediments in my way. Does he think he’s the only one who could manage this feat? And why would he need to, with the Mechs at his own control? I hop across, my constant jumping keeping me relatively stable on the slippery blocks, and find an E-Tank, which makes even less sense until I continue on and meet up again with one of these strange, orange barriers.
Flash must have put this here for his own safekeeping, and expected that anyone else would fall to the clutches of his army below, or else…
I got it.
Whatever these orange barriers are, they can only be controlled by Wily’s bots, meaning that I have to back-track, and deal with the Mechs. It’s a little genius, in its own way. Something about it still bothers me, though.
I run back and tumble to the floor. The only immediate Mech is on a platform above me, which makes it easily outmaneuverable, as it keeps stomping on my vertical location, without considering the horizontal plane. A few deft jumps lead me out of its path and towards Flashman’s inner sanctum. I hop up and slap the top of the entrance for good luck, and follow it through to the final corridor.
------
Normally I’d equip in here, but my primary weapon is all I’ve got. Instead I stop to consider all I’ve just been through to get to this point. The gunbots, so primitive that I could picture their BASIC code without reading it:
10: INPUT INTRUDER PROXIMITY
20: FOR PROXIMITY > 3m GOTO 40
30: FOR PROXIMITY < 3m GOTO 50
40: FIRE AT POSITION 1
50: FIRE AT POSITION 2
60: GOTO 10
That’s it. Six lines of code wired to rudimentary scanners and a weak pistol. I don’t feel any worse about taking them out than I would disarming any alarm system, most of which display a much higher degree of competence than these things did, but then…
The Squiggles. These things don’t even have scanners. They just fire off short-term-sustainable energy fields automatically. They’re less sophisticated than a television remote control, but in the robot world, there’s something disturbing about sending out something that can’t even run through code, let alone think for itself, to do your bidding.
And then the Mechs. I don’t know what to think about the Mechs yet, but the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.
I tag the next entrance. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m going to need all the luck I can get.
-------
Flashman is smart, I’ll give you that. He starts off immediately going for the personal collision, and he’s built his inner sanctum such that it’s difficult to dodge him. The personal collision hurts, and he hits me more than once before I get a sense of his strategy and begin jumping over him for higher ground from which to fire. My scanners detect that he’s fairly weak, defense-wise, but on offense, damned if he isn’t bold.
As he rushes me to get to an elevated position, I jump, narrowly dodging his attack, but then something happens that I couldn’t have expected: I stop dead in mid air.
Time is frozen, and my back is turned to him as several shots nail me right in the spine. The time-lapse seems to have disabled my TDM, and I just have to take it.
I don’t have time to consider the ramifications of this information once I find my feet again. I spin to return fire, trying to keep to the high ground and keep jumping in case he tries this trick again. I’ve got to keep my eyes on him this time around.
Luckily, when he freezes me once more, I’m facing him, and have jumped high enough to avoid his scattershot spray. When I land, I have just enough time to shoot twice more before he’s on me once again and-
That’s it. He’s done. I stick around for a moment to take in the Essence (in reality nothing but residual fragments of RAM, but Dr. Light likes to anthropomorphize to the point of spiritualism) and then, with a jolt, I’m jerked back home.
-----
It’s cold.
More accurately, I register the fact that it is cold. I do not experience this in any real way, aside from a brisk feeling across my cheeks that fails to mean anything to the rest of my system. A thermometer doesn’t shiver. My own simply opens a small subprogram to release the appropriate amount of anti-freeze. I can still smell it, though: that odd scent of sub-zero temperatures, somehow simultaneously fresh and dead, even underground in this shining fortress.
Speaking of death, my first hostile encounter comes quickly. It’s a ridiculous, googly-eyed sphere, firing off pellets haphazardly in my general direction – a simple gunbot. It’s got legs, but I quickly get the sense that they are purely aesthetic. The gunbot doesn’t appear to have any faculty of movement aside from changing the angle of trajectory based on my proximity.
I stop to get a read on how best to handle the situation, but have forgotten my limited traction on this icy floor, and slide directly over the edge, into this lower corridor, face to face with the bot, giving up the higher ground. No matter. I’ve got nothing but my primary weapon to work with now anyway, so all that the elevation would’ve granted me was time. I shoot off a few rounds.
That seems to be enough to dispatch the bot, but one of his random shots found its true, and my Temporary Defense Mechanism flashes to life for a second or two. Damn. I sense an energy capsule within reach – and a large one at that – but I still hate getting hit. I usually don’t feel it, of course, but the TDM’s blinking has a habit of causing as many problems as it solves – taking precedent over what should be higher functions, slowing down my response time, and generally acting as a distraction for the goals at hand. I’m fine now, but I worry for what might be to come if this occurs in a more precarious circumstance.
I grab the capsule and come across a couple more of the gunbots. The first is on the same elevation with me, and I’ve got enough room to take him down from outside his range. That’s just fine. The execution of correct strategy sends a signal up my spinal cord to release endorphins. But the next bot is facing away from me. He can’t even move. His blaster reaches its highest arc, but that still fires in my opposite direction. I unload three rounds into his back while he fights in vain against his coding and placement – I have to get past him somehow, after all – and I start making some judgments about this “Flashman” character.
------
When Light Industries Ltd began, the grand majority of its investments and orders came from Japan, requiring the designs to work within the late-twentieth-century aspects of kawaii – that Nipponese “cuteness” that signified so much of their pop-culture for so long. Dr. Light’s creations eventually adapted kawaii into his signature “look,” which Dr. Wily was quick to plagiarize, lacking Light’s creativity in these matters.
This is all a roundabout way of explaining that the googly-eyes didn’t represent any personality or sentience. They were simply dolled-up sensors feeding the data of how near an approaching intruder is, and running a simple logarithm from that data to shift the blaster to the more optimal of two possible arcs. These gunbots, in other words, are roughly as sentient as a warm-air hand-dryer like you’d find in an airport washroom. That’s not my issue.
You see, the Japanese also gave Dr. Light (and by extension Dr. Wily) the rights to use their patented AI technology – designed by the Japanese Military starting with extremely primitive experiments during the fifties when the country’s armed forces were effectively prevented from showing any use of actual force, and perfected near the end of the millennium as the American tech-boom helped fuel the Nikkei index. So these “Major Initiative Projects” were granted systems that many – I for one – would consider both self-aware and responsible for their actions.
One of those responsibilities was the design, upkeep, and – most importantly for my purposes – security of their own domain. Any MIP would quickly come to terms with the fact that any bots they used for security were likely to be destroyed, but in general there was a code to try to give them the best fighting chances they could get, even if they lacked basic agency of their own. Flashman seemed not to care about the fates of his forces, which gave me cause to worry, even if I didn’t understand it quite yet.
As it were, there was a more immediate and comprehensible worry staring me right in the face.
------
Shit.
I’d fought my way through to a dead-end. Or, at least, an end with a clear and definable barrier that I had no way of dealing with. My shots simply ricochet off, and thus I’m forced to turn back, as the bots re-spawn and I take them down anew. Flashman had built his lair as a maze, of sorts, it seemed, and now I’m preoccupied with what manner of MIP thinks this way. What does it gain him, not to harm or kill an intruder like this, but simply to frustrate him?
I take the lower route I’d forsaken earlier for the energy capsule, wishing now that I’d been able to hold off until that capsule would be most useful. I blast through the bots, all of them seemingly placed with the same degree of strategy as their random projectiles. I pass underneath an essence regenerator, which would be useful as hell, if only there were some way for me to get to it, but there isn’t. Shortly later, I pass under a series of these same strange barriers. It occurs to me that I once had a way to deal with this sort of thing, but no matter. It's lost to me now.
I know there was something, though...
A moment later, and I’m falling – an exhilarating experience for the human part of me, knowing that I won’t suffer harm as long as I land on solid ground. When I do manage to hit the floor, however, I meet my first Mech.
I’d heard about these guys from Dr. Light – flesh-and-blood mercenaries operating massive, hopping chicken-walkers with wild pellet-spray – but never seen one personally. So much for the gunbots; this thing towered over me, relentless, run not by AI, but by actual, genuine-article human intelligence, albeit that of the high-school drop-out variety. It hits me a couple of times – nothing life-threatening, but not good either, and as the TDM kicks in the things jumps in the air to land on me.
I dash underneath, desperately wishing my suit would allow me the flexibility to slide in this sort of situation, and the TDM shuts off just as the heel of this monstrosity catches me in the noggin. God-dammit. Now, not only is the TDM kicking back into action, but my heart is racing, which means that my auxiliary cerebellum starts up to maintain my pulse. It’s a disorienting, unpleasant feeling, to have one’s heartbeat artificially held to a standard rhythm while adrenaline nonetheless courses through your biological veins. I last dealt with this when I was dispatching the Yellow Devil, and it isn’t as much of a help as you’d think.
I can barely concentrate as I spin around and fire wildly. Thankfully, that seems like it was enough, and the Mech-suit falls to pieces, leaving just the mercenary, shooting off three slow-moving rounds at a time. I cool down enough to dodge the shots, and take him out without too much effort. I’m hurting, though. Those stomps can pack a whollop.
I continue to drop down through the gleams of the ice, choosing my course at random, not knowing what I may face at any given path. I have to jump around a couple of Squiggles, which deal me a little more damage that I’d really rather not deal with right now, but Squiggles are like toddlers, and once you’re past them only some twisted sense of vengeance would make you want to destroy them. Of all the machines, they know the least what they do.
Thankfully, I fall past another gunbot, as well as a dustbin stack, and once I find steady ground again I land directly on a life-saving energy capsule, guarded – if you can call it that – by a particularly ill-placed Mech. There’s a wall between him and me, with enough room for me to run and fire through, but not enough for his machine to get past, so his jumps are almost comically futile. Moreover, the capsule was placed in a little hole, which gives me cover once the mercenary drops down to the ground. I don’t know what kind of training would keep the Merc from rushing me, but it must have taken a lobotomy to override his biological fight-or-flight mechanism in this way. I drop down again.
What the hell…?
My scanners read a number of Mechs below me, but Flashman has seemingly designed a series of blocks for me to safely jump across without any other impediments in my way. Does he think he’s the only one who could manage this feat? And why would he need to, with the Mechs at his own control? I hop across, my constant jumping keeping me relatively stable on the slippery blocks, and find an E-Tank, which makes even less sense until I continue on and meet up again with one of these strange, orange barriers.
Flash must have put this here for his own safekeeping, and expected that anyone else would fall to the clutches of his army below, or else…
I got it.
Whatever these orange barriers are, they can only be controlled by Wily’s bots, meaning that I have to back-track, and deal with the Mechs. It’s a little genius, in its own way. Something about it still bothers me, though.
I run back and tumble to the floor. The only immediate Mech is on a platform above me, which makes it easily outmaneuverable, as it keeps stomping on my vertical location, without considering the horizontal plane. A few deft jumps lead me out of its path and towards Flashman’s inner sanctum. I hop up and slap the top of the entrance for good luck, and follow it through to the final corridor.
------
Normally I’d equip in here, but my primary weapon is all I’ve got. Instead I stop to consider all I’ve just been through to get to this point. The gunbots, so primitive that I could picture their BASIC code without reading it:
10: INPUT INTRUDER PROXIMITY
20: FOR PROXIMITY > 3m GOTO 40
30: FOR PROXIMITY < 3m GOTO 50
40: FIRE AT POSITION 1
50: FIRE AT POSITION 2
60: GOTO 10
That’s it. Six lines of code wired to rudimentary scanners and a weak pistol. I don’t feel any worse about taking them out than I would disarming any alarm system, most of which display a much higher degree of competence than these things did, but then…
The Squiggles. These things don’t even have scanners. They just fire off short-term-sustainable energy fields automatically. They’re less sophisticated than a television remote control, but in the robot world, there’s something disturbing about sending out something that can’t even run through code, let alone think for itself, to do your bidding.
And then the Mechs. I don’t know what to think about the Mechs yet, but the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.
I tag the next entrance. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m going to need all the luck I can get.
-------
Flashman is smart, I’ll give you that. He starts off immediately going for the personal collision, and he’s built his inner sanctum such that it’s difficult to dodge him. The personal collision hurts, and he hits me more than once before I get a sense of his strategy and begin jumping over him for higher ground from which to fire. My scanners detect that he’s fairly weak, defense-wise, but on offense, damned if he isn’t bold.
As he rushes me to get to an elevated position, I jump, narrowly dodging his attack, but then something happens that I couldn’t have expected: I stop dead in mid air.
Time is frozen, and my back is turned to him as several shots nail me right in the spine. The time-lapse seems to have disabled my TDM, and I just have to take it.
I don’t have time to consider the ramifications of this information once I find my feet again. I spin to return fire, trying to keep to the high ground and keep jumping in case he tries this trick again. I’ve got to keep my eyes on him this time around.
Luckily, when he freezes me once more, I’m facing him, and have jumped high enough to avoid his scattershot spray. When I land, I have just enough time to shoot twice more before he’s on me once again and-
That’s it. He’s done. I stick around for a moment to take in the Essence (in reality nothing but residual fragments of RAM, but Dr. Light likes to anthropomorphize to the point of spiritualism) and then, with a jolt, I’m jerked back home.
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