Sitting on the chair in the Restricted lab of Helios, one could easily tell that this wasn’t a place designed for anything resembling the civilian sector. Not only were the researhers here barely aware of the end users of their work, they were almost startled and offended to see someone outside of themselves walking among them. Like a hive of naked mole rats in labcoats.
“C’mon, I ain’t got all day, Jack wants me planetside by four and giving him alpha data on this shit.” She snapped to get them moving. Plenty of upgrades and new programs to load in, and with the low-impact processor she was sporting it would take a while for them to re-optimize and adjust the electrical pull to within tolerance.
As she waited for their ports to load, she doodled calculations on a notepad, trying to keep her mind sharp and remember all the components she used to mess with when all her stuff was bandit make and targeting had to be all hand done. Now the mods could take over your entire body to hit apples at three miles, or pilot a missile like it was either get the role of Cavalier in the fuckin Nutcracker or another six months of ramen noodles and dealing with wannabe dance moms screaming about how little Natalie who hasn’t figured out she has feet on the ends of her legs yet should be STARFISH #1 and not CRAB #2 in the upcoming dance recital. ((Munny would like to apologize for the previous sentence being an absolute insult to all things relating to the written word and the art of storytelling.)) In essence, steering a missile with a great deal of finesse despite literally having milliseconds to correct course. All very useful for the general of Hyperion’s army, but growing dependent on tech was the last thing she needed to do.
Hell, it took a great deal of convincing to even get the ECHO eye installed, and even then she insisted on the color matching her natural eyes. An honest answer, as well as the one she actually gave, was that anything new about her or any new weapons she possessed should be kept secret from the enemy until such a time as their knowledge would be either pointless (as they shall soon be annihilated) or detrimental in some fashion. No need to throw away a good ace in the hole just because you wanted a neon glowing eyeball ‘cause it’s shiny. Another reason was that she was growing somewhat afraid as to the degree of which Jack made up her entire life, and sporting voluntary heterochromia seemed to be unnecessary indoctrination.
But it was in there now, and she closed her right eye to shut out the intrusive half-binocular vision blurring as the upgrades adjusted the aperture and frame speed settings of the camera. “At least Nakayama isn’t here, the slimeball” She thought to herself, before remembering why Nakayama wasn’t there.
She killed him because there was no one there to tell her not to.
Nakayama was gone and it was nicer to be in the lab and knowing that no more would Jack’s dick go into that filthy mouth of his. Truly, it was repulsive. In no universe did she want to have in her body anything that was in Nakayama’s anything.
The bandit glanced around her surroundings, bored now that she had finished her calculations and waited for the mods to finish before checking her answers. She was bored. BORED!!! And there was very little to fidget with in a lab consisting of 87 percent sterile dust-free nanotech space and 8 percent coffee/drugs space, leaving a whopping 5 percent for all desks, chairs, computers, macrotech tools, and the lab chair she was sitting in.
To her left on the table near her was a flash drive, etched into the label “ECHO Jack”
As much as everyone in Hyperion (including herself, despite her attempts for otherwise) was a Jack-worshipping bootlicker, naming random things after him was discouraged to avoid confusion with the things he named after himself. After running the scans to make sure it wasn’t malware or a virus or whatever, she-
“Put that down!!” One of the researchers had the nerve to speak to her like that. Oh boy.
Torn between the petty urge to shoot him for giving her a command, and the petty urge to have him watch her jam it into her port, she gave him a wide eyed look and let him realize just who he was talking to.
The complex spread of emotions on his face betrayed that he probably had a poster of her either in the trappings of his recent college days or still had it up now that he had degrees to his name. “You really don’t want to download that- it’s not meant for personal ECHO mods.”
Alright, she was gonna do both. Download whatever was on the drive, and then murder the fucker. Delicately, she slid the pocket drive into the port in her head.