Issue 4 - Murderworld

[Narrator]

This is what he'd known since his abduction. This... game. Was it a game? Endless scenarios like the RTS matches he'd enjoyed on his computer. Strategy, flanking, defending his base. Sometimes the scenery changed, but it was always a tactical challenge for him. The latest map that loaded had an objective he had to defend, a shield generator. He had several defense turrets throughout the building the generator was in, as well as the means to produce troops to bolster its hallways.

As the scenario was about to begin, the leering face of Doctor Tomorrow hovered over the map, wearing what appeared to be a red wig and a bowtie.

"Ten, nine, eight, seven..."

[Madrox Saavedra]

"This is bad enough without the supervillain cosplay," Madrox's avatar grumbled in his command booth.

[Narrator]

"Six, five, four, three, two, one..."

As the match started, Madrox could see seven figures approaching his base's main entrance. Six ghouls, and a batlord, which was a flying unit.

[Madrox Saavedra]

"Going for the big door eh?" he pondered as one of the ghouls approached. He then chose to 'construct' a number of cheap turrets and traps in the area beyond to buy himself time to strengthen his deeper defenses.

[Narrator]

The batlord had just finished freeing the ghouls after the turrets were destroyed. One of the ghouls ran ahead, but fell into one of the booby traps that had been laid, tumbling below the corridor and down a chute.

[Madrox Saavedra]

Madrox routed the chute into a "Wheel of Misfortune" chamber and sent his troops to box the others in.

[Narrator]

Somehow, the ghoul escaped the chute in the direction he came from. Madrox's display showed waves of some sort of power coming from one of the other ghouls as this happened.

That... technically shouldn't be possible. It certainly hadn't happened in any of the previous scenarios.

[Madrox Saavedra]

"That's... new. I guess I'll have to turn up the heat," he said to himself as he began to prepare the next volley of traps. Yet there was a certain uneasy feeling in the back of his mind.

[Narrator]

On the display, more anomalous power discharges were coming from the ghouls, as one of his troops went tumbling down the chute.

[Madrox Saavedra]

After a few moments in the fight, Madrox had a disturbing thought.

"Could this be... mutant powers? Need to be sure... but how?"

"Maybe..."

He commanded a ceiling turret to drop down and laser an X symbol on the floor, hoping it'd survive long enough to do so.

[Narrator]

One of the ghouls fired a bolt of energy at the turret, overloading it before Madrox's message could be delivered.

[Madrox Saavedra]

"Crap."

"...duh..."

He tried again, leaving several X's in the next room. He also ordered a retreat of the few remaining troops. He'd have more waiting if he was wrong.

[Narrator]

The intruders made their way into the room where Madrox had lasered the X symbols into the floor and paused, apparently considering them.

[Madrox Saavedra]

"No reason to react if they are just simulations. Something clearly isn't right here."

With that he looked up at the image of Dr. Tomorrow and back to his screens. He attempted to hack the flow of information he was receiving, looking to filter out any possible distortions... hoping this was his chance to get free.

[Narrator]

As Madrox probed, he started to get into other subsystems. The manufacturing lines that he had initially thought were for churning out 'troops' were... oddly specific for an RTS. There were schematics in there for a wide variety of robotic parts, down to the exact materials, circuitry layouts. There were even a number of them that looked like variations on Madrox's own body...

[Madrox Saavedra]

"All that time looking for the 'door' when I could have just looked out the 'window'..."

He tried to get a direct visual of the intruders while also trying to locate the system holding him.

[Narrator]

Access to the actual camera systems resisted him a bit. There was a fair bit of security involved in subsystems sequestering them from the 'wargame' Madrox was 'playing,' designed to translate their input into what he had been seeing. However, he could push against that security.

[Madrox Saavedra]

He did push, with quite a bit of force.

[Narrator]

And finally, he was able to route through the security blocking him, and gain a video feed from the room the turrets were in. There he saw some rather familiar faces...

[Madrox Saavedra]

He turned off the turrets and attempted to rig up a projector, or at least a speaker.

[Narrator]

There were no projectors in this room, but given Arcade's habit of taunting his victims there were speakers aplenty.

[Madrox Saavedra]

"Oh thank God."

[Narrator]

Madrox would however find that the speech synthesis programs that he had access to were... somewhat eccentrically designed.

[Madrox Saavedra]

"Oh great, a supervillain voice... got to word things more carefully."

[Madrox Saavedra]

After deploying the guide monkey, Madrox sent very specific designs to the assembly room and hacked the hell out of his prison environment.

[Narrator]

It was fairly difficult to find a way to interface his AI directly with a body, even a freshly manufactured one. Doctor Tomorrow was a fan of clanking monstrosities with fairly heinous combat AI implanted in them. Still, Madrox was making progress...

[Madrox Saavedra]

Fortunately for Madrox, the system had no true intelligence. He could bend it to his will. He just hoped he could do it before it was too late. To that end, he put every resource into it that he had .