"Supposed to be dead?" echoed the synthesized-sounding boy's voice. "What, you think I'm not?"

He laughed in a way that verged on cackling. For a few seconds, there was a strange rumbling, and all the lights on the craft dimmed and flickered, as if suffering some sort of dip in power, while an odd, aurora-like glow washed over the immense skylight. Everything continued normally ("normally" we should say, quotes included) from there.

"Well, don't I have some neeews for you! Happy day, throw a party! I'm dead! I'm about as dead as they come!" Seven's voice was dripping with bitterness and false enthusiasm. "The Chimera made sure of it when he went and snapped my neck and threw my body in an incinerator. But look, it's not all bad. Because, if there's one thing I ever did learn from Rock, it's that you don't really have to be alive in any 'conventional' sense just to kill people. And guess what I'm here for today?!"

He had all the pep of some sort of sadistic little clown.

The battle upstairs experienced a rather sudden shift in the tides. It wasn't that the fighters were suddenly no longer a threat—instead, it was that all their robotic backup turned on them at once. Egg Gunners chased and shot at General Green and the rest of the Chimera fighter ships, and almost every single defense the ship had at its disposal to send their way was indeed headed their way, guns blazing.

"You don't even really know what you did...!" Rock blurted with a nearly-disbelieving accusatory edge as he shot darting glances where the panda gestured, and squinted with immense concern.

It took a second to process. He had to take a moment to glance around, see where he was exactly in the maintenance shaft, and reference it with what he had learned from the schematics of the Typhaon's mainframe, which themselves were abstract diagrams more than actual physical representations—diagrams that he and Tau had indeed gone over in great detail when they came into ownership of the enormous vessel.

Points of reference were quickly identified: things he did recognize, components of which he did know the function and placement, and could thus by inference determine the relative position of others.

It took maybe three seconds of silent staring at the severed hose-like conduits for him to draw a breath and clench his teeth.

"That was... just a junction box," he mumbled, realization slow to set in, as pieces still fell into place, discovered by his mind one at a time on its imaginary flight through reams of diagrams. "That cut the CPU's power from the generator... causing it to tap the cannon power supply as auxiliary power..."

A memory flashed through his mind.


He looked at Fenn gravely.

"You just gave Project Seven access to the targeting system of a replica Eclipse Cannon."

He slung the panda right-side-up and back toward the section of ladder above that he'd originally seized him from with a shout of "Climb!"

"Thank you, Sigmund the Hedgehog, for exhuming from the grave of my consciousness the inmost desires of my tortured soul!" answered Seven blithely, hatefully sarcastic. "You sure do have everything figured out! I'm glad you took this moment to try to understand me."

He abruptly changed gears, breathlessly leaving no room for reply.

"No, you understand this, ass-for-brains: I want you to live in the world I'm making for you. Nobody on that stupid planet ever cared a thing for me, and I'm done being anybody's tool. And the first thing I'm going to do to prove it is kill pretty much everybody responsible for me! And all their families, and everything they care about, aaand basically anybody and everybody else in the area for whatever reason I feel like! Now what's the name of that little town you're from, again?"

The monitors were already showing a satellite image of Central City.

All the while, chaos continued to reign in the atrium sky. As severely outnumbered as they abruptly were, the fighters were having a time of it just trying to keep from being blown apart at a given instant. Every movement they made was hard, fast, and born out of a venomous mixture of instinct and life-flashing-before-your-eyes anxiety. If robots could actually see their lives flashing before their eyes, anyway.

There was a burst from an engine, a sharp, descending break to the right, and a canopy flashed open, whipping into the air. Down plummeted Magnet toward the atrium's treetops, no doubt pursued by the sights of at least a hundred different guns. "AAAAAAHHHHH I DON'T LIKE PARTIES ANYMORE"

Green kept enough composure to keep from cursing aloud. Perhaps through some deep robotic function he didn't understand he was able to maintain a cool head, or perhaps he simply had enough trust in his own abilities. Or he'd been blessed by some goddess of war and that was the only reason he wasn't bits and pieces of gears and scorched metal. A blessing didn't exactly negate the various Egg Gunners taking pot shots at him, along with what felt like every other gun in the universe. "Maintain your composure, and trust in yourself. The tide of battle can be changed as easily as--"

He shut up the instant he heard Jam's voice. It was distorted, either from distance or whatever else was interfering with the radio channels, but it was there.

He listened, listened to the fear in her, so intently that he nearly let a missile lock last an instant too long.

"I'm on my way," the general said simply, but with a sense of urgency meant to be reassuring.

The fighter banked hard and burned the skies, torching a path down into the corridor he assumed she must have taken toward Tau's lab, judging by her aircraft's position on his display. The entrance to the corridor sat silently, then Green's fighter roared into it. Seconds later it was followed by a huge blast of wind, treetops and brush whipping violently.

"General!"

"Stay out here," he said evenly, walls rushing by at what looked like lightspeed. "And stay alive."

It might have been insanity to be flying a fighter jet down a tight corridor at even faster speeds than his simian comrade had attempted shortly earlier, but General Green was a robot. Things like sanity and insanity didn't apply to him... or at least he told himself that as he glanced at several mangled things splattered along the wall as they raced by in a flash. It distantly occurred to him that perhaps he should slow down.

So he sped up.

"I told you, I am dead," came Seven's answer to Geoff's desperate shout. "I just have a lot of energy left over! I suppose I can't expect you to understand how that can be, though, and since it looks like you're a captive enough audience, and I've already got everything I need... I'll monologue for the benefit of your understanding!"

He was for real.

The monitors blackened, then slowly lit to show a ghastly form—something undulating and unsteady, synthesized, covered with video artifacts, twitching, jolting, and out of sync with the words being spoken. An image of Seven, or some unsettling digital apparition of an attempt at projecting himself visually, even though he no longer had a body or image to record and transmit.

"See, when I say that old cliche, 'you and me aren't so different,' I actually mean something by it. I am human, but I'm also not. G.U.N. has been frightened for a long time by the frail state of humanity. Scared of what humans couldn't do that other sapients could. Scared of being handicapped for forever. That's what they thought it was like, anyway."

"The researchers working on my project made a really huge discovery: that there's a legitimate reason humans aren't doing what guys like us do. Look at us! Triple-axle somersaulting around in the midst of mortal danger, fighting with our super chaos energy powers, warring over super weapons, risking our lives without even batting an eye, living like some sort of movie heroes and villains... And for what? Insanity. Literally!"

"See, that's what chaos energy does. It causes madness. It amplifies and is amplified by intent, feelings, emotions, 'the heart.' And all but a very, very small percentage of humans utterly lack the genes necessary to detect, channel, or use it in any way. Them and chaos energy—completely inert. And it turns out that is why most humans are so. very. boring."

"But it's also what made them stable and level-headed on the whole. But, G.U.N. wanted power. That's why they made us. Me, and all the others like me. And, of all the thousands of subjects, I was the sanest, most stable one they made that was still capable of harnessing chaos energy. And no, you don't even have to comment, I am self-aware enough to see the macabre humor in that."

"I digress. What that really meant was that I was also the weakest they made. But they found a way around it. Remember that little hole on my neck I used to have? The one where I plugged in the emerald cell? Yeah. I was supposed to run without it for as long as I could, then when things went south, plug it in. Go nuts. Save the day. That's what I was actually about to do right here in this command center, on the day you all killed me. I dropped the cell, though... and, true to form, one of you fuzzy punks made sure to snatch it up, because you just love anything that glows with your crazy-juice super energy. Don'tcha, Geoff. Yeah, I heard how you earned your sparkles."

"Anyway, the hang-up about that is... I had already used that particular cell before. I had used it enough that I left a little bit of an 'impression' on it, and that emerald... well, a lot of an impression. The very one you're talking to right now, actually. That's the thing about chaos energy — those feelings, emotions, thoughts, if strong enough, can get stored away, just like data."

"That's why I don't have a body anymore... unless you count this chaos-energy-harnessing cannon these buffoons plugged me into. And the ship's computer the cannon's connected to. And the internet it's connected to. And just about every computer on the internet. Yeah, did I mention I'm on the internet now? It's actually not a bad afterlife, between the games, and the forums, and... well, that's aside the point. The point is, you'll never, ever manage to kill me again."

Finally, the electronic voice paused.

"So, are you ready to accept this reality? You might save a few lives if you want to own up to your mistakes..."

It was all still a big game to him. If there was ever a doubt about it, it became clear then that he was still just as genuinely looney as ever he was, and that no matter how tormented or unloved or uncared for he ever was, he didn't have the conscience to be alive in the first place.



It could have been some kind of unsettling silence that finally followed in the wake of his lengthy speech were it not for the frothing-over pot of aerial warfare still stewing right above their heads. GUN's forces had been diminished. Stranded there on the platform; cut off from their command; motorized incursion team dead; the majority of the team tasked with holding the command center dead or dying. And what for? They had just helped make everything worse. These weren't dumb or ill-informed grunts. They were professionals, and they had studied their history lessons. Some had even been there, albeit in the background, for many a bomb blast and shady dealing involving Seven. The weight of what it all meant was upon them very nearly as much as anyone else, even though they held dear none of the personal vendetta. It was still their home, their country, their capital, and their families and friends all on the line. Yet, for whatever reason, it was their enemies and Geoff that the undead psycho wanted to speak to, so it left most of them watching with a certain glum resignation that at least some small measure of their fate indeed pivoted on the answer a civilian green hedgehog issued.

"Data synchronization complete. Digital assets have been transferred as requested."

A monotone voice spoke to Tau, who loomed over one of the larger consoles in the laboratory connected to him by a small cable attached to his forearm. While the battle picked up outside as Seven quickly gained near full control of vessel and its automated defenses, Tau was in the process of finalizing the transfer of not only the vessel's remaining secure data archives, but every secure Chimera network the vessel could connect to, planet-side or otherwise, at right about the time Jam's distress call went out.

"I will be able to to assist you soon. However, as I am not currently able to do so right now, I have dispatched several projects to assist you. Make use of them as you see fit." Tau's reply would follow shortly after General Green's.

Though Tau himself was not close enough to provide assistance to the distressed primate right away, the sealed laboratory wing doors slowly slid open and the protective shielding flicked and faded, giving way to a large entry room filled with storage assorted sized containers and sealed at the other end by another set of reinforced and shielded doors.

Inside the room were nearly two dozen robots that appeared to be modified variants of Egg GunnersUnlike the rest of Chimera's robots, Tau had long since switched his personal lackeys and guards to a highly secure independent standalone network not suitable for large amounts of robots., which had already taken up defensive positions behind storage containers. Though they were fewer in number than the former Chimera forces in the area, they were each equipped with prototype ranged energy-draining weapons Tau had been developing and had already begun to open fire on the traitorous forces by the time it had opened. Further back in the newly-opened room, dwarfing the Egg Gunners (which were barely shin height to it) stood what looked to be something vaguely based off a 'Hotshot' class G.U.N. Walker, sporting its own defensive energy shield. It let loose a barrage of energy-based artillery fire into a cluster of enemy machinery.

"I will join the fight after I finish a personal upgrade..." Tau said over the com shortly after his small squad had already opened fire.

Elsewhere, deeper in the research wing, Tau had already relocated to one of the more secure labs, not so as to hide, but to access a project he been working on for some time, and now deemed appropriate for use in the current situation. Looming in front of the A.I.'s robotic form was a large, reinforced glass and ceramic tank containing a translucent liquid.

"You're not gonna believe that crap, are you?"

Another electronic-sounding voice entered the fray on the command center deck loudly through the built-in speaker of a closed helmet. Rock had actually dared to show up right in the middle of the action, having clambered out of the maintenance hatch there with Fenn—albeit very close to the panda, with a hand on his shoulder, just some scant degrees shy of overtly using him like a meatshield.

His navy spacesuit, with its familiar red stripes up the legs and arms, differed in that it looked a bit more armored than it used to, with black, reinforced plates protecting vital areas, and a more complex-looking silver helmet and gold visor that may have been capable of folding away, but otherwise similar enough to recognize from their last cooperative venture to space. It was unlikely he actually trusted it to save him if every gun turned; knowing Rock, it was more likely that he expected his reputation to precede him, and the majority of the agents to be too shocked by his boogeyman-like presence to react immediately without direct orders. That, and the Fenn-shield.

"You know, you should all really be killing him about now," said Seven in the background. "He's going to kill you all if you don't. He does that."