Episode IX — Beneath the Planet of the Apes^^^^Mutants

When last we left our intrepid pals, Weptish and K'pok were being carried off in one direction by a creepy creaky zombiebot each, and the unconscious Kappo was being carried off in another by three of the biomechanical horrors. Jek Porkins bravely chased after the three carting off Kappo, regrettably unaware of the plight of his other two comrades, and ran hell-for-leather after them through the pitch black bowels of the building. Through room after room he followed, guided by the squeaking and clattering of their mechanical legs and the occasional glimpse of them in the light of his suit lamp, until finally they came to a stop in an elevator. The doors slid shut as Jek galloped up to them.

Jek pressed his helmet up against the doors and could could hear the elevator car descending; immediately he set to forcing the doors open by means of his huge bulging manly muscles to reveal a moving cable. Looking down he was just in time to see the roof of the elevator car descending rapidly, out of the rangle of his puny suit light. A man of action, he hesitated not and leaped out to grab the elevator cable, intending to shinny down on to the roof of the car. Alas! The thickly-greased cable offered virtually no purchase, though he squeezed like buggery, and he plummeted downwards barely more slowly than if he had simply jumped. He smashed straight through the relatively flimsy roof of the car, but fortunately did not smash straight through the slightly less flimsy floor, ending up in a heap on the floor of the car covered in elevator debris.

Picking himself up and shaking off the remains of the ceiling, Jek once again exerted his mighty heavyworlder muscles and forced open the doors, finding himself at the end of a duct-lined concrete passage. There was no sign, neither sight nor sound, of his quarry. Undeterred, he trotted off down the passage, reasoning that there was no other way they could have gone.

After jogging along for maybe 50 or 60 metres, he came to a steel door blocking the passage, where he stopped for a moment to clarify the tactical situation. He tried to raise Kappo on his communicator, but got no reply; he had no better luck with K'pok, but at last he managed to raise Weptish who (with a certain amount of panicky blubbering and pleas for immediate assistance) described the area he was being carried through. Jek opened the door and resumed his steady trot in what he sincerely hoped was the right direction.

Shortly thereafter, he began to pass flattish ovoid pods, about 2.5m long, mounted on the walls of the passages. Some of them (about one in four or five) showed blinking LED telltales, but most appeared completely inert. Weptish's cries for help became more urgent, so Jek picked up the pace and galloped through the passages as fast as he could go, eventually coming out into a huge open space filled with towering racks full of the same sort of pods he'd been passing earlier. Stopping briefly to take stock, he glimpsed a moving light far off through the racks bobbing up and down, but could make out no details.

Meanwhile, Kappo had arrived at his destination, a nexus of control panels and indecipherable machinery surrounded by enormous pod-racks fading out into the darkness. Operating everything was a squat cylindrical cyborg, about two metres tall, and considerably more cyb than org — it appeared to be wholly mechanical, except for what was obviously a brain floating in a transparent dome on top. Four flexible and extensible limbs spaced equidistantly around its torso reached every point within the nexus, making adjustments and pressing buttons and what-not.

When the zombiebots arrived with Kappo, it immediately left what it had been doing and rolled over to inspect him.

TUT TUT THIS IS INCORRECT PROCEDURE it blared in a toneless buzzing electronic voice. WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT YOU SHOULD NOT BE OUT IT IS NOT SAFE YET YOU MUST GO BACK OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS YOU ARE DAMAGED YOU ARE BADLY DAMAGED I WILL FIX YOU SO THAT YOU CAN GO BACK.

Working rapidly and precisely it detached Kappo's head and installed it in a small life support module, from where he could see the thing go to work on the rest of his body. It was an odd sensation to say the least, to be able to watch from across the room as his body was opened up, organs taken out, inspected and either replaced or discarded into a sump beneath the operating slab. A genuine out-of-body experience.

At about this point, Weptish and K'pok also arrived, firmly in the grip of their zombiebots. K'pok had recovered consciousness by now, and was struggling to get free, thus far without success. The zombiebots stopped and shut down, becoming inert.

Jek followed closely behind. The combined lights from K'pok's and Weptish's suits provided enough illumination that he could see what was going on, and he didn't like the looks of it one little bit. Neither, for that matter, did K'pok, and Weptish was especially alarmed when the cyborg looked up at him from his work and said YOU ARE DAMAGED ALSO I WILL ATTEND TO YOU WHEN I HAVE COMPLETED THIS ONE. Jek found himself in something of a quandrary; if he followed his immediate impulse — which was to smash the thing's brain case to bits with his crowbar — then he may very well impair Kappo's chances of recovery. On the other hand, if he did nothing, then Kappo looked like being turned into one of the ghastly zombiebots, which was also not an optimal result. He decided to let the cyborg finish mending Kappo, on the grounds that if he were still at least partially alive then he could maybe be rebuilt back in civilization (assuming he had really really good health insurance), whereas if he were dead he'd really just be good for compost.

Jek decided instead to attempt to free Weptish. He crept up behind the zombiebot holding him captive and taking careful aim, shot with his auto-pistol into the general vicinity of its shoulder-joint. Alas! Poor Weptish. Jek's terrible shooting missed the zombiebot completely, tearing a great hole in Weptish's arm instead. “These guns are completely fucking useless!” cried Jek, and he threw his pistol away into the darkness in a fit of pique. Weptish just made pathetic squealing noises as blood began to pool in the glove of his environment suit. Gort (the cyborg's name is Gort) became alarmed at Jek damaging one of his charges and decided that he should be restrained before he could do any further harm. He zapped at him with a powerful neuralizer, but missed and accidentally hit Weptish, adding to the misery of an already miserable day for him. Weptish slumped into a flaccid drooling mass, unable to move or speak.

K'pok took advantage of Gort's distraction to break free of her restraints. She charged at the harrassed cyborg, but not fast enough — it got off a shot at her with its neuralizer which hit its target this time, and K'pok slumped bonelessly to the floor. Meanwhile, Jek climbed bodily up on to Weptish's zombiebot and heaved at its arm with all his might and main, bending and snapping the shoulder joint; its claw relaxed and Weptish slumped, ending up hanging head-downwards. Jek transferred his attention to the other shoulder of the inert 'bot, smashing that in its turn and causing Weptish to drop to the floor, still unable to move a muscle. Fortunately his environment suit took the brunt of the fall as he landed head-first on the concrete.

Gort now took the opportunity to neuralize Jek who also fell down, his mighty muscles now limp and useless. Now that all of the disruptive elements had been neutralized, it returned its full attention to rebuilding Kappo's eviscerated and dissected carcass. It replacing most of his internal organs with mechanical replacements, applied exoskeletal joints to his neck and shoulders, and discarded his badly crushed legs entirely, mounting the remains of the torso on a six-legged mechanical walking chassis.

K'pok had been fighting off the effects of the neuralization by gathering her highly-disciplined Vulcan mind, and suddenly found herself free of the effect again. She took advantage of Gort's concentration to sneak up on it and punch it right in the brain-bubble, cracking the plastic and causing a leak. EXERCISE CAUTION! he blared. YOUR ACTIONS ARE CAUSING DAMAGE TO THIS UNIT! Since K'pok showed no immediate signs of showing caution and avoiding causing damage to this unit, it zapped her again and rushed off to slap a patch of duct-tape over the crack to stop the leak.

Gort returned a few minutes later, and returned to the reconstruction of Kappo. It took his head from the life support unit and reattached it to the neck-stump, connecting a variety of transparent fluid-pumping hoses between his skull and torso. It ran a series of command and response diagnostics, closely observing readouts on one of its panels; Kappo attempted to dissemble and make it believe that he was its slave, but it was not satisfied with the results and kept making further adjustments in the composition and flow of the various substances squirting through the plastic tubes.

K'pok once again rallied her mental powers and regained control of her voluntary muscles. She decided to atttempt to persuasion rather than violence this time, asking Gort to let them all go. Gort declined — I AM SORRY IT IS NOT YET TIME IT IS NOT SAFE YET FOR YOU TO BE OUT YOU MUST GO BACK UNTIL IT IS SAFE I WILL CALL YOU OUT WHEN IT IS SAFE

K'pok briefly considered smashing Gort's brain-bubble again, but on reflection decided that it was a bona fide AI and therefore a life form, and her respect for life got the better of her. She asked instead if she could mind meld with it, and Gort agreed to indulge her while he attended to the damaged and bleeding Weptish. The meld was wildly successful; K'pok scanned deeply into Gort's memories, finding the all-clear code. She withdrew from the meld and gave him the code.

Gort was overjoyed that his mission had been successfully completed, and immediately set about reopening all of the stasis pods. Lights flickered back on, revealing a vast space containing stacked racks of pods, tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of them. Gort moved rapidly from pod to pod, initiating revivication procedures, with K'pok following behind. As the lids hissed open she saw the inhabitants — pale, thin humanoids, now beginning to move ever so slightly, trembling and drooling as their metabolisms began to rise back to normality.

Some of them, anyway. More often than not, a pod would open to reveal the dessicated remains of a long-dead corpse.

K'pok suddenly realised the implications of her impetuousity — by giving Gort the all-clear code, she had started something she could not stop. Gort, following his instructions implicitly, was releasing his charges into an environment which was decidedly not safe. None of them could hope to survive for long unprotected outside of this deeply-buried chamber, and there was no food for them down here that she could find. The Vulcan word for “oops!” was heard.

Kappo meanwhile grabbed the limp neuralized Weptish and Jek and dragged them back upstairs, storing them in a crate for six hours while he searches unsuccessfully for data crystals. K'pok meanwhile followed Gort as he carried out his duty, pleading with him to stop and trying to convince him that a mistake had been made. Gort insisted that the system was foolproof, and that she should set her mind at ease since it was now safe and time to wake everyone. How could it be otherwise, since the verified all-clear code had been given?

She then tried to get it to give her the location of the data crystals, but Gort insisted that the information was classified and required the appropriate access codes before he could release it to her. She tried another mind meld to find the codes, but this time could not get deep enough to find them.

After six fruitless hours of searching, Kappo retrieved his assault rifle from where he'd dropped it when he was knocked out, picked up the now thoroughly irradiated bodies of Jek and Weptish from the crate in which he'd stored them, and dragged them all the way back down to the stasis chamber. He tried to persuade Gort to give him the location and access codes for the data crystals, but with no more success than K'pok had had. He then attempted to interrogate the recovering stasis patients, but got nothing more than moans and dribbles out of them.

At last, frustrated and angry, Kappo opened fire on Gort to stop it from opening any more of the pods. CAUTION! YOUR ACTIONS ARE CAUSING SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THIS UNIT! trumpeted the unfortunate Gort. IF YOU PERSIST IN THIS COURSE OF ACTION YOU MAY CAUSE IRREPARABLE DAMAGE TO THIS UNIT! I URGE YOU TO CON...SIIIIII.....derrrrrrr.............

Poor old Gort, its century and more of loyal and selfless service tragically terminated in hail of gunfire. Poor old Gort.