Pregnant Pause, part one: Nesting - Tales of the Parodyverse

Previously: In a desperate bid to save Miiri’s unborn child, NTU, Fleabot, the Diabolical Dr. Moo and Hallie hatch a plan to transfer the child to Hallie’s computer world, where she can gestate it in a virtual womb designed to fix the baby’s rapidly decaying genetic structure, while freeing Miiri to receive treatment to save her own life as well. The risky procedure may be the only chance to thwart a mysterious curse placed on mother and child… provided any of them can survive the process.

“Whoomf!” Hallie exclaimed as data poured into her at an unfathomable rate. She blanked her mind to accept it all, acting on instinct rather than deeper thought, feeling like a two quart pitcher that was now being asked to hold two gallons, without spilling a single drop.

It wasn’t just the sheer amount of the raw data, (already well more than she had calculated before the transfer… had Miiri secretly dallied with an elephant instead?!), but the speed at which she had to assimilate it. The matter to energy transfer was near instantaneous, and the living energy of the child was conducted into her being with almost no resistance. The seconds of the initial transfer felt stretched beyond belief until finally the cascade of information ceased, and she could rush to shore up their symbiotic programming, which was near to bursting at the seams.

First however, she saw to the mental completion of the containment “womb”, following the virtual schematics of Dr. Moo and Enty with absolute precision. Holding on to all that living data was like trying to wrestle a live sea bass without using one’s hands. She desperately needed to contain it all before any slipped away and more damage was done to the child.

The Mansion and the surrounding power grid blacked out momentarily as she drew any and all resources in for the job. Any processor that wasn’t up to the task was switched out for the nearest and fastest one she could access throughout the web… She didn’t have any room to spare within her own mainframes, as it was taking everything she could muster to hold herself and the child within her together. Luckily, she knew of at least 15 back doors set up by Hacker 9 for a rainy day’s amusement. NORAD’s systems found themselves calculating conversion rates for electrical current to nutrient flow through virtual space, and Pixar’s latest animated feature was briefly overrun by genetic sequencing realignment codes for a Caphan/Human hybrid. And possibly coincidentally, for 2.67 minutes all Google searches worldwide resulted in sites about the castration of males of every species on earth.

Finally, the program complete and running, Hallie collapsed within her virtual realm, her chest heaving with the exertion and her limbs shaking from the effort, despite it being completely mental.. “If getting knocked up was that bad…” she sighed, her eyes closed, her hands resting on her now swollen stomach, “I don’t even want to think about the delivery.”

“She’s in” Fleabot confirmed. “Cut ‘em.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” Hatman interrupted, coming around the corner just in time to find the Ausgardian gods Donar and Harlagaz grinning and hefting fire axes. “This simply can not be a good thing. What’s going on?”

“Emergency security upgrades” Fleabot explained succinctly, then nodded to Donar. “The schematic shows the line should be right behind that wall.

The god glanced to the elegant polished-oak paneled wall of the stately mansion interior and casually cleaved a trench down the surface of it with a swing of the axe. “There art multiple lines of wires within” he observed, peering through the gap. “Which are to be cut in twain?”

“Ah… lemme check…” Fleabot answered, somehow flipping through large blueprints of the mansion’s construction. “This would be so much easier if we could access the database…”

Harlagaz, apparently feeling left out, looked about and ultimately chopped through the opposing wall with a exploratory swing of his own axe. “Pipes” he reported his findings dutifully, as water instantly came spraying out to drench the hallway.

“Emergency security upgrades?” Hatman pressed pointedly, brushing splinters off of himself and shielding water from his face as Harlagaz wandered further down the hall. “What kind of upgrades? Who authorized them? Why can’t we access the database?”

“’Tis emergency measures, at fair Hallie’s demand” Donar replied, rubbing his chin. “Methinks we should sever the red wires. ‘Tis what MacGuyver would doeth.” He reached into the wall and yanked out a large section of electrical conduit painted red, trailing shredded fiber optic lines.

“Hey!!! Cables out!” Kerry’s voice wafted up the stairs.

“Dammit, this would be much easier if blueprints came in full color...” the tiny robot flea muttered, tracing multiple paths on the hardcopy documents.

There was a thwacking sound, followed by a quick shriek of surprise from down the hallway. “Mistress April’s shower be behind this one” Harlagaz called back.

“Not every wall panel like that needs to be cut into!” Fleabot yelled out. “Just… hang on, and no more cleaving until I say so!”

“Yes, let’s all just stop with the cleaving!” Hatman ordered, slapping on a Steeler’s cap. He was beginning to think this was the wrong week to get promoted. He reached into the wall and pinched shut the severed water pipe before removing the hat and returning it to his belt. “Now someone explain what’s going on.”

“The virtual gestation of Miiri’s baby in Hallie’s programming is taking a little more memory space than originally estimated…” Fleabot began.

“How much more?”

“Eh… maybe half again? A fifty percent overrun really isn’t that unusual in a case like this, where we’re working on theoretical equations to begin with…”

“Wait…” Jay said blinking. “Half again? I thought Hallie would only barely have enough memory space to try this and keep the minimum systems running in the mansion?”

The was a ripping sound, and the lights of the hallway flickered and died. “Dammit ‘Gaz, what did I just say?!” Fleabot yelled out.

“T’was really more of a reaving that time…” the young demigod’s voice answered sheepishly. “Honestly, t’is not the same as cleaving.”

“Aye, that doth be a completely different thing” Donar agreed wisely.

Fleabot sighed. “So… yeah. About those minimum system requirements… We’ve pretty much exceeded them. Everything has to go offline.”

“What do you mean?” the acting deputy leader asked.

“I mean that Hallie’s going to be using up every last bit of memory and processing power she can find within the mansion’s lower levels to run the womb simulation and cycle the child’s genetic code through it. All of the mainframes. All of her Holographic Emitter Drones. All of the memory capacity of her malfunctioning robot body. She’s got a bit left for emergency usage, but that’s all. And that means there are no baseline programs running any longer. There’s no firewall. There’s no virus protection. She’s an open book, and all of the data stored in her and the Legion’s mainframes will be unprotected when she activates Moo’s genetic repair program for the fetus, which she will do in… four minutes and thirty nine seconds. So we need to physically cut every line that leads to the mainframes. Right now.”

Jay grimaced as he took in this news and sighed. Reaching into his belt, he pulled out a Con Ed helmet and slapped it on his head. “Right” he growled with the displeasure of every Union utility foreman who found some yutz messing up his jobsite. He snatched up the blueprints and quickly reviewed them. “Cut the yellow conduit” he instructed Donar. “Take a good foot out of the center of it. And sever the other yellow ones here, here, here and here. Then get the phone lines here, here and here, and the satellite linkage here.” He scratched his neck absently. “That’ll leave us with connection to the communication computers on the operations levels only.”

“Hallie’s shunted all the basic data to those computers that she can” Fleabot noted. “They’ll work, just don’t expect to go digging though the database for info anytime soon.”

Hatman nodded, then sighed wearily. “Is she alright? And the baby?”

“It’s… looking good. I think we’ll squeak through this” the robotic flea observed. “I wouldn’t worry too much. We’ve got the best minds around working on it.”

An alarm klaxon began to sound, and red emergency lights deployed from the ceiling and bathed the already darkened hallway in dizzying flashing light. “Er…” Donar noted, peering into the gap in the wall intently. “Upon reflection, t’would seem that one doth be more orangeth.”

Hallie shuddered as she felt her mind being sealed off from outside connections. It reminded her too much of that horrible time when the Apostate had conspired to lock her away in the mainframes that housed her, severing her connection with the Lair Legion. She had been all too happy to go along with Visionary’s asinine plan to step out of the virtual world and pose as his successor when he came and released her again… Overcompensation, perhaps, after being trapped alone for what seemed like forever. But ever since, she had kept one foot in the real world whenever possible, finding new ways to twist technology to let her exist outside of virtual space. Anything to keep from being alone again.

Of course, this time she wasn’t exactly alone, was she? The feeling was incredible… indescribable, really. She could feel the edges of the life within her… tattered and frayed though it may be. Pitifully wounded by a wanton act of cruelty before even being born. Miiri’s baby stubbornly hung on, however, though the very genetic code of the child was unraveling like a poorly knit sweater.

“Let’s see what we can do about that, sweetie” she said softly as the last of the outside connections were severed. 24 hours to run the baseline program to stabilize the fetus, then the two of them could poke their head back out of their burrow, and see what was happening in the Mansion. There they would be confined for the next few weeks while the damage was repaired. No surfing the net far and wide. No multitasking at all. “I can handle that” she assured herself as she began Dr. Moo’s treatment. In truth, she felt she could endure much more for this little one. The intensity of the feelings surprised her.

Her last conscious thought before the program activated was of Miiri. If Hallie felt so full, then how was the genetic mother to be feeling now? “Best make this all worth it” she observed. And then with resolve she went to her task, bowing all of her considerable attention to the job at hand.

“I told ya” Sid sneered to his accomplices. “Just like I said… That green alien bitch is here. Jenny wouldn’t lie to me after the good time I showed her under the pier. The slut’ll do anything for me.”

“Yeah, that’s great” Brad whispered dryly. “So is your candy-striper girlfriend gonna beat up all the supertypes hanging around the waiting room for us?” He looked nervously to the young green man with the rather ominous sword strapped to his belt standing right outside the hospital room door.

Sid snorted. “Relax. Stu has faith in me, even if you jackoffs don’t. This is gonna make us big in the MetaWatch… just you see.”

“Is that him?” Hans prodded, nodding to the tired looking man in the yellow coat staring out the window into the dark rainy night beyond. He was talking on his cel phone while a tall black woman and another green one hovered nearby, waiting for some kind of news. “Doesn’t look so tough… Hell, my dad could whoop his ass. How’d he get in the high and mighty Legion?”

“Who cares? He’s gonna get the message that he never shoulda joined up soon enough.” Sid snorted and ushered the other two around the corner and out of sight, then pushed a wad of cloth out to Brad. “Here… hold this bandage over your eye.”

“What? Why?” Brad asked. “I’m not cut.”

“Yeah, that would help, wouldn’t it?” Stu hissed in reply, flipping out a switchblade and slashing the other teen across the eyebrow while muffling him with his palm. “Now are you gonna quit being a little bitch and do as I say, or do I need to make this look more convincing yet?”

Wide eyed, Brad nodded and clasped the wadding to his bleeding scalp.

“Right then, follow me.” The MetaWatch cell member led them down the hall past the suspiciously glowering green swordsman. They stared straight ahead and kept going to the end of the corridor and around the corner, then down the next and around another corner. “225… 227… 229!” Sid announced triumphantly, opening the door and ushering the others into the darkened room on the other side. “Jenny says the alien broad’s on the other side of that wall” he gestured, pushing a crash cart up to it and climbing up on the bed. He pushed up the acoustical tile and stuck his head into the crawlspace above. “And it ain’t load-bearing” he whispered down, before climbing the rest of the way up and gesturing for the others to follow.

Once above the alien’s room, they pried up a tile to check below. The green woman lay in bed, eyes closed, her hair plastered to her pale and wan face, oxygen tubes running to her nose and multiple IVs to her arms. Various monitor devices chirped rhythmically around her while a lab technician tended to them and wrote something down on a clipboard. The set up was perfect.

“You” Sid growled down in a hushed voice as he pointed a silenced Beretta down through the ceiling directly at the tech’s head. “Pull the curtain around the bed, and keep everything nice and calm, or your pretty white lab coat’s gonna be coated in brains.”

The woman considered the threat then silently and slowly nodded assent, drawing the curtain to give the back half of the room privacy from the doorway. Sid had the other two slide down first and grab the blonde woman’s arms, then dropped to the ground beside the bed as well. “I’m afraid your patient’s not going to make it, nursie.” He grinned, flicking open his knife. He was going to have fun carving this one up...

“That’s Doctor” the woman stated flatly. “And I took a solemn oath to first do no harm to my patients… what makes you think I’m going to allow you to do it for me?”

“Well, you did cross your fingers when you took the oath, as I recall…” a voice sounded from the bed. The Metawatcher’s eyes nearly bugged out of their heads as they saw the talking lab rat standing on its hind feet and polishing it’s claws on the front of its furry chest.

“That just means I get to decide when it applies and when it doesn’t… not these bozos.”

“So it’s more of a Hypocritical Oath”

“Exactly” the woman agreed.

“Wha…?” Stu gasped just before he felt the shooting pains in his stomach. Brad and Hans felt it too, and all three men were soon choking in agony on the floor.

The Doctor stepped over them with her hoof-shaped boots, her lab coat flaring out to reveal it was turned inside-out, hiding a pattern of large black splotches. “Sorry boys, but this one piques my scientific curiosity. Your lowbrow racist antics are far too commonplace to be entertaining anyway… So you’ll have to forgive me if I cause the dairy products you had at breakfast this morning to cripple your digestive tracks.”

“Graahhh…” Brad gurgled in pain, clutching his distended stomach. “Wha… What about doing no harm?”

“Well, that really only applies to patients. We have a whole other term in the medical community for you…”

Stu tried to stretch for his dropped gun, but the agony redoubled itself in his gut, and he curled in on himself, looking up at the doctor helplessly.

She gave them her most diabolical smile. “…Donors” she dubbed them, just before they passed out.

to be continued…

Post By Visionary Sun Feb 26, 2006 at 07:48:34 pm EST	Subject Pregnant Pause, part one: Nesting

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