6th March 2076 – 1st Galactic Step

Ichiro's quarters – Himitsu Facility

Asia

Earth

Solar System

Ichiro's alarm rang loudly, he woke up coughing violently, and splatters of blood fell onto his bed sheets, like sick raindrops. He quickly reached over for the pain meds and a glass of water from his bedside cabinet.  One by one, he popped the pills in his mouth and swallowed them with a large gulp of water.

Another coughing fit started just as he was trying to down his sixth pill, the little round yellow tablet was launched across the room, with yet more globules of bright red blood. The damage that the chip inside his head had caused was inoperable and thanks to his nasty emperor's childlike tantrums, Ichiro was now at deaths door.

Ichiro was no doctor, but he had plugged himself into one of the medical bay coffins, which had diagnosed him with terminal brain damage. He had dosed himself up on as many drugs as he could find within the hospital complex so that he might stay alive and mobile for just a few days more while he planned his revenge upon his tormentor.

Xu Sing had been furious about the loss of his satellite, mainly because it had not been destroyed, but captured instead. At first Xu had been worried that his enemies would use the Hemel Tref against him, until he learned from an automated spy unit within the station that, they were dismantling the satellite instead. This caused Xu to go into another maddening fit of insatiable anger, which he turned on Ichiro, leaving him quivering on the ground for well over ten minutes.

Ichiro had been very pleased that the remaining humans had been able to disable the weapon; he had tried to help, by slowing down the countdown as much as he could without Xu noticing. He smirked slightly as he remembered that he had managed to get the facility computer to think that there was in fact seventy-five seconds in a minute instead of sixty.

Now however, it was time to make his final act of defiance against his cruel oppressor, he planned to sneak down into the depths of the Himitsu complex and deactivate the computer core. This would hopefully trap Xu down here forever, with no means of hurting anybody else ever again.

He pulled on a thick Kevlar plated soldiers' helmet, in which he had inserted a small dampening device, to help shield his movements and block out Xu's awful pain inducing signal. He picked up his satchel of small devices that he had constructed secretly whilst supposedly building Xu's command robots.

The emperor's desperation to have those units finished quickly grew voraciously when he discovered that Ichiro was dying. His methods of persuasion however took on a strangely sentimental tone, promising Ichiro that he would let him go once he had finished making the new thinking androids. Ichiro had ignored the emperor, knowing that he would not dare hurt him again or risk terminating his top scientist prematurely. He had scoffed loudly, when Xu had offered to have his brain extracted so that Ichiro could live forever in a glass tank next to his own, that sort of offer had made him feel very sick. Luckily, Ichiro was the only one that could perform the operation, so there was no way that Xu could force him into living that sort of a life.

Ichiro pulled the satchel over his shoulder and crept out into the hallway, carefully avoiding being anywhere near the spinning digital cameras that were stationed on long spindly struts at the end of each cross section. He looked at his watch and waited until the display said that it was exactly midnight, and then he flicked a button on his computer-pad, which initiated a level six diagnostic of the camera systems, causing the surveillance recorders to power down for the next two and a half minutes. He looked up, saw the lithe swinging arms slowly stop and sag towards the ground.

Ichiro hobbled forward on his sixty-eight-year-old legs and suddenly he felt every one of those years as he tried to hurry through the dimly lit corridors. The two and a half minutes would not give him enough time to get all the way to the computer core, but it would allow him access to the old unused cantina. From there he planned to get into the underground waste pipes, which led all the way to the access terminal next to the core room.

He stumbled slightly as he hurried along and felt his ankle began to pulse and spasm painfully; he grabbed the wall for support and pulled himself along as quickly as he could. The camera stalks just began to twitch and turn as he crashed into the old musty smelling cantina. There was still one camera inside the room, but it was set back against the far wall, which would make it difficult to see anybody moving around at such a distance away. Ichiro decided that it was still not worth taking the risk, so he carefully crawled along the floor towards the kitchen area. Once inside, he reached up to grab the dusty white counter and pulled himself up to a standing position. He dared to put some weight on his sore ankle and found that even through it hurt, he was still at least able to walk on it unaided.

Ichiro clicked the door handle down to open the large walk-in freezer; the stale smell of mouldy food filled his nostrils and made him gag. The power to the freezer must have been turned off years ago because it seemed warmer inside the freezer than it was outside. Then Ichiro saw what he was looking for, in the middle of the floor was the large grate that opened into the waste pipes. He pulled out an auto-screwdriver and began removing the rusty screws one at a time until eventually he could lift out the grimy stained grill.

He pulled a gas mask out of his backpack and put it on under his helmet, then clambered into the tight yucky smelling pipe and shuffled along following the path that he had been memorising for the past two days. He came across many dead rodents as he crawled along on his hands and knees, but they did not deter him from his rebellion. Ichiro's heart was beating fast from all the physical exertions, but it was also racing because he knew that he was finally doing the right thing and he was revelling in the moment.

Ichiro crawled slowly through the slurry until he reached the access hatch that opened into an antechamber that granted entry into the central computer core. Then his whole body froze as he heard the clanging footsteps of an automated sentry above him. He dared to open the hatch a little and saw one of the big red Kichiku automated infantry units strolling back and forth in front of the door.

After rummaging in his satchel for a few moments, Ichiro took out a small Electro-magnetic pulse circuit. He had expected some resistance, but not this early on in his final adventure, maybe Xu was not as careless as Ichiro believed him to be. The old man slowly pushed the hatch open while the android was facing the opposite direction, then he hobbled quickly behind the Kichiku and slapped the circuit against its cold metal frame and clicked the activation switch. The pulse was immediate, electrical radiation washed over the robot, instantly frying its internal parts, and rendering it totally useless.

The metal giant crashed loudly to the concrete floor and Ichiro knew that it would not be long now, before his defection was realised and the alarms would begin to ring. He hurried to the entrance and found the identification terminal to gain entrance to the core; he put his eye to the scanner and held his left palm up to the fingerprint detector. A series of bleeps and green lights flashed briefly, and the blast door began to rise upwards.

Then it stopped suddenly, the room became bathed in red light and a long rolling alarm starting bleating loudly. Uh-oh, Ichiro thought, he had been discovered already, there was no way he would be able to get into the core now. He hobbled back to the hatch and dropped down into the stinky sewage tunnels. He had planned to not only take down the computer, but also, if he had time, destroy the power generator as well. So, Ichiro decided to go after that secondary objective instead.

He crawled back through the winding and twisting tunnels to a sloping shaft, which led down to the generator far below. Ichiro slid down the tube on his back, as years of muck and slop rushed up his trouser legs and covered him completely. He splashed down into a small pool of rancid water and doggy paddled over to a set of curved steps, while spitting out mouthfuls of the greenish liquid. The tunnels were much wider down here and Ichiro found that he could stand up inside them; he looked down at his stained lab coat and wondered just what his family would have thought of him if they could have seen him now.

Ichiro used the image of his wife and children as the driving force to motivate himself into action again, even though his ankle was screaming at him for rest. He followed the route as best as he could remember it, but soon found himself thoroughly lost, until he found a short ladder leading upwards. He clambered painfully up the rungs of the ladder to the top and carefully opened the cover, red lights were still flashing everywhere, and the camera units were swishing back and forth desperately. Instead of the howling klaxons, all Ichiro could hear was Xu manically calling his name, which made him smile again, as if that would coax him to come back to his harsh master.

Then he saw it, the doorway into the generator compound, it was straight down at the end of the corridor. Ichiro knew there was a sewer tunnel that would take him into where he wanted to go, but he had no idea now how to get there, so he decided that it was time to make a break for it. He levered himself up through the steel hatchway and struggled to stand up on his sore feet. Ichiro took three steps towards the doorway, but he was then forced to stop, as his head started swimming and a fresh wave of bloody coughing plagued his body.

"Ah there you are my friend!" shouted the voice of the emperor. "Come back to the infirmary and we'll get you well again."

Ichiro looked up at the camera that was now firmly fixed upon him and then he spat at it disrespectfully.

"I've had enough of you and your treachery, Xu Sing." Ichiro sneered at the man, who was no longer a man. "I'm going to end it all now."

The old man hobbled forward towards the doorway, swaying from side to side, as the torturous feeling inside his skull got worse and worse. He fell through the opening into the generator room, steam whooshed up at him from the massive turbines and the stink of gasoline flooded his nostrils.

"I will not allow it," Xu said in a crazed voice, "and if it means your death, then so be it!"

Ichiro felt the chip in his head hum slightly, but there was no pain this time, he grinned at the camera above and tapped his helmet lightly. The action made Xu furious, he howled angrily, and his words tumbled out incoherently.

Ichiro reached the railings of the gantry above the first of the three massive engines; he pulled out a grenade from his rucksack, yanked out the pin and tossed it into the churning gears. The explosion was deafening inside the cavern, the walls began to crumble and part of the samurai mural on the wall cracked and fell to the ground.

Ichiro was however already moving on to the next cavern, when from out of nowhere a shower of small rocks crashed down on his head, causing further damage to the inside of his skull. He fell to the ground, and his vision blurred outrageously. Images of his family flooded his mind again as he tried to crawl towards the edge of the platform that looked down on the second generator. Ichiro legs suddenly stopped working and he felt a seizure like shuddering begin in his chest. Using all his remaining strength, he took hold of another grenade, slipped the firing pin out of it, and rolled it along the metal walkway. The green explosive wobbled along the gantry and tumbled over the edge above the rapidly spinning turbine. Ichiro smiled, then everything went instantly black, and Ichiro's free spirit went on to join his family in the land of the dead.