“Who am I?” Eighty-Three’s hand went to Eckert’s neck. The fingers sinking in felt every bit as good as he thought they would.
Eckert’s eyes began to bulge.
Just like he thought. “Who am I?” Eighty-Three hissed again. From below, he heard Fury and Claire shouting – he thought in battle. And suddenly, he didn’t much care who he’d been before. At least, not as much as he cared about who he was right then.
He squeezed harder. Eckert’s eyes bulged a little more, and began to go from jaundiced to pink around the edges. “Turn off the network,” Eighty-Three said. “The whole thing. Or I crush whatever is left of your throat.”
Fingers clamped. Rotors in his knuckles began to whir.
“There are files,” Eckert croaked. “I can find out... what you... want to know.”
Thinking about this proposition for a moment, Eighty-Three squeezed harder. “I want you to let those bears go. Open the cages, turn off the network.”
“Turn off the...” Eckert whistle-croaked. “You’re crazy, I... I can’t breathe, let me breathe!”
Eighty-Three uncurled his fingers slightly, letting the man breathe.
“I can’t turn off the network, if I do that, they’ll all go insane! They’ll tear this place apart!”
Dispassionately, Eighty-Three tightened his hand. “Who am I?”
“You’re a special one,” Eckert admitted, tongue hanging out one drooping corner of his mouth. “You weren’t like the rest.”
“Meaning?”
Down below there was another crash, more roaring. Someone was getting torn up, and it didn’t sound like it was Claire and Fury on the losing end. Eckert fumbled with something on the underside of his desk, and instantly, Eighty-Three shoved him backwards, rolling him away from whatever he was diddling. With one arm, the black-clad man tipped the huge desk and flipped it over. Eckert squealed as wires snapped.
“What did you do?” the sweating scientist blubbered. “You broke the connection, you—“
“I can fix it,” Eighty-Three said. “But not unless you tell me who I am.”
Eckert sighed, or more accurately, whistled in irritation. “Dr. James Thurston. Harvard neuroscientist. You invented the method by which all of these beautiful creatures were made. You were burned in a lab fire fifteen years ago, and willed your body to us. Somehow, your brain, your heart, and about half of your liver were still functioning when they came to us. Your wife and kid are out there somewhere, but I don’t’ know anything about them. Didn’t need to. Is that enough?”
Nodding slowly, it all started to make sense. The memories, the understanding of the neural network, the way he calculated every single action he made, and why he knew so much about the compound and everything else. “I... made myself.”
“Machines made you,” Eckert sneered. “You just came up with the method.”
“I,” Eighty-Three... no, James, said. “I did this? All of this?”
“You were the third one made. The point of your donation was so that no one else had to be experimented on until the results were known. Martyr to your own god.”
“I’d really like to choke you to death,” James whispered.
“You used a contraction? That’s interesting, I—“
James squelched the doctor with another squeeze. With the next breath, he lifted him out of the chair and stared into his eyes for a long second. “I don’t think I’ll turn that back on.”
“You... you can’t! Everything will be ruined – me, GlasCorp’s plans for the future, you can’t just let the whole thing burn out of some sense of childish vengeance!”
“Watch me.”
James dropped Eckert, who plopped to the ground with a slick, wet thud.
As his former experiment turned on his heel and strode confidently out the door from which he came, Dr. Eckert wailed, then coughed, then whistled, and then collapsed into a sweaty, heaving, yellow heap. As his heavy, watery eyes began to fall closed, he saw that bastard, that rogue experiment he never should have allowed, and he watched the creature stalk back from the door into his office.
He crouched and effortlessly punched a hole in the top of the desk, and fetched something from inside. Eckert burbled something that he meant to be “what the hell are you doing?” but came out more like a dying catfish trying to bark at the fisherman who caught it.
“James Thurston,” it said. “Someday maybe I’ll be James again. But for now? I think I’m fine with Eighty-Three.”
The static-laden voice from the respirator came again, but this time, it was a laugh. A real one – an honest, human laugh. And that’s when Eckert realized what the idiot had taken. He had the failsafe. In his idiot, robotic hand, was an electromagnetic bomb strong enough to fry every circuit in the entire compound, should he use it.