Jorlem: Your Viking army doesn't have openings. It makes openings in other armies. Incidentally, would you mind making a few openings in the Mediterranean tonight?
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Entry 28 (Day 247)So I decided to read back through a bunch of my old logs, and wow. I start WAY TOO MANY of them with the same sort of comment. Probably shouldn't write them all after something exciting happens, huh?Sadly for my literary cred, this entry immediately follows another interesting event.
My last entry had Tre dragging me off for another training session. I managed to get in one hit on her, after which she proceeded to totally demolish me, pin me to the ground, and then ask me some rather unpleasant questions.
She'd been beating me like a drum, so by the time she started to berate me, I'd been rather thoroughly discombobulated. On top of that, what she said rather resembled a... painful... incident in my past. That combination did me no favors.
My memories of yesterday stop, rather abruptly, during Tre's monologue. The next thing I remember is waking up in my room... and the explanation I got when I charged into the main lab.
It turned out that the entire incident- wearing me down, beating me up, hitting me with questions most people would find unpleasant- was on Scaglietti's orders. Once they explained what had happened, I wasn't really surprised to hear why it was done, or who ordered it. It fits his MO to a T.
See, we (and by 'we', I mean me, and by extension, the doctor) had a problem. I'd been made into a combat cyborg, designed to exceed human limitations in almost every way... except I wasn't. I was, in fact, performing at average human levels in every way, right down the line. Strength, speed, endurance, uptime... you name it, I was failing at it.
The doctor did some scans, looked at my blueprints, and couldn't find a single thing wrong with my body. I was capable of inhuman performance- he'd made sure of that!- so why wasn't I?
The problem clearly wasn't in the hardware, he'd reasoned, so it must be in the software. I was the only combat cyborg ever made that hadn't grown up as one, so maybe I didn't have the same feel for what I could do as a born cyborg did.
Of course, being Jail Scaglietti, his solution was to have his pet Number wear me out, beat me senseless, and then try to hit as many emotional weak spots as he could guess at, just in the hopes one of them would make me angry enough to pull out all the stops. That man has a gift for accomplishing wondrous results in the most sadistically painful of ways. I sometimes wonder if the cruelty was programmed in alongside the genius, or if he came by it honestly.
Anyway, his mad plan worked. Sure, it induced a temporary psychotic episode which almost killed Tre, but it worked, and that's what matters... to him. I'm a little less sanguine about it, and I'm definitely going to be more on my guard in the future, but what can I do?
Well, apart from apologizing to Tre, anyway.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
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Entry 28 (Day 247)So I decided to read back through a bunch of my old logs, and wow. I start WAY TOO MANY of them with the same sort of comment. Probably shouldn't write them all after something exciting happens, huh?Sadly for my literary cred, this entry immediately follows another interesting event.
My last entry had Tre dragging me off for another training session. I managed to get in one hit on her, after which she proceeded to totally demolish me, pin me to the ground, and then ask me some rather unpleasant questions.
She'd been beating me like a drum, so by the time she started to berate me, I'd been rather thoroughly discombobulated. On top of that, what she said rather resembled a... painful... incident in my past. That combination did me no favors.
My memories of yesterday stop, rather abruptly, during Tre's monologue. The next thing I remember is waking up in my room... and the explanation I got when I charged into the main lab.
It turned out that the entire incident- wearing me down, beating me up, hitting me with questions most people would find unpleasant- was on Scaglietti's orders. Once they explained what had happened, I wasn't really surprised to hear why it was done, or who ordered it. It fits his MO to a T.
See, we (and by 'we', I mean me, and by extension, the doctor) had a problem. I'd been made into a combat cyborg, designed to exceed human limitations in almost every way... except I wasn't. I was, in fact, performing at average human levels in every way, right down the line. Strength, speed, endurance, uptime... you name it, I was failing at it.
The doctor did some scans, looked at my blueprints, and couldn't find a single thing wrong with my body. I was capable of inhuman performance- he'd made sure of that!- so why wasn't I?
The problem clearly wasn't in the hardware, he'd reasoned, so it must be in the software. I was the only combat cyborg ever made that hadn't grown up as one, so maybe I didn't have the same feel for what I could do as a born cyborg did.
Of course, being Jail Scaglietti, his solution was to have his pet Number wear me out, beat me senseless, and then try to hit as many emotional weak spots as he could guess at, just in the hopes one of them would make me angry enough to pull out all the stops. That man has a gift for accomplishing wondrous results in the most sadistically painful of ways. I sometimes wonder if the cruelty was programmed in alongside the genius, or if he came by it honestly.
Anyway, his mad plan worked. Sure, it induced a temporary psychotic episode which almost killed Tre, but it worked, and that's what matters... to him. I'm a little less sanguine about it, and I'm definitely going to be more on my guard in the future, but what can I do?
Well, apart from apologizing to Tre, anyway.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.