Chapter 1

 The ancient factory stood silent. Its current state barely showed remnants of its golden years, when the factory popped out hundreds of teardrop shaped cars, fitted with long-lasting hover plates and wheels that folded out in case one ever wanted to go off-roading. Today the factory sat in ruins. It was far enough from the big city to have not been completely obliterated when the bombs were dropped, but close enough that the shock waves had toppled the structure. Now, it was just a pile of concrete, tangled metal, and broken machines that hadn't been touched in hundreds of years. It sat to close to the mountains and the mysteries that stood behind them for anyone to try to get close and was to far out in the desert for scavengers to stumble upon the valuable technology within it.

Tucked away in a section of the building where three walls still stood and the fourth leaned over to create an angled ceiling, a sewage pipe lid locked away the secrets of an underground operation. Under the lid was an elevator that went down half a mile, to the buslting life of the Vervian Center for Mission Completion.

The first floor, Administration, color coded in red, was filled with assistant carrying coffee, managers preparing reports for their higher ups and higher up preparing to meet with the big guys from across the mountains. On the other side of the same floor, politicians poured out of the under ground train that had taken them there from the shining city of Verva to its most well funded and least productive laboratory, searching for the answer to the question everybdy back home was asking: Where is all the money going?

The floor below that was the orange employee living spaces, completely empty with everyone preparing for the bigged weekend the lab has had in 8 years. Below that in Yellow, the Employee Healthcare center, also mostly empty. With the exeption of a few emergency personnell stuck there for emergencies, most of the doctors were in one of the bottom three research floors. The green Bio-Chemical weapons ward was right below that. It was the newest lab, only 10 years old in a 50 year project, and the one the people held most of their hopes, and money, in. Below that was the blue Robotic engineering and Weaponry Ward, a thirty year old ward now used mostly for security than anything actually pertaining to the mission, though it sometimes worked with the ward below it.

The purple Human Engineering ward was the last floor in the laboratory, and it was bustling with more anxiety and sweat than the Admin level. The former crown jewel of the project, the Human Engineering ward once took up the entire bottom three floors, and was the original purpose of the project. Begining with dozens of genetically engineered soldier born from test tubes, the ward eventually moved on to changing live humans into the perfect weapons. After being downsized twice and criticized for killing or disabling Vervian volunteers, the ward finally foud its calling in its 142nd subject.

Subject #142 was in Laboratory 4, a bright white testing chamber with purple accents in various places and a foot wide purple line at the twenty foot mark of the thirty foot high room. #142 was tall and lanky, but strong, with lean muscles on his long limbs. His left arm from his shoulder down was robotic, with metal plates and rivets covering the upper arm and two weapons on the lower half. Inside the top part of his forearm, opposite his wrist , was a dagger just as long as his forearm and, at its widest point, almost as wide. On the bottom, the metal slowly raised from halfway down his arm to his wrist, where it abruptly stopped to create a 3/4 inch cliff. In the cliff was a half inch wide hol, pointing out toward his palm. The entire arm was covered in a black protective paint that shined in the bright florescent lighting. His dager was uncovered, and one could see the mechanics that controlled his and and fingers if they looked into the space it fit into. His hand was resting on his knee and he was crouching slightly, staring at the ground as he panted. A bead sweat rolled off his forhead and he watched it fall to the ground just as the alarm sounded, a single beep that told him the test was not over. He looked up to see the door slowly sliding up, alterating in colors from the obvious purple doors to the white ones that blended in completely.

The upper-left corner of his face was the same black metal as his arm, from his cheek bone to his eye, to just past his hairline and back to his templ. His left eye was a large, purple circle with a camera inside, hidden by the bright light the camera emmited. The face peice looked like a patchwork of metal stuck onto his face, while the pieces up his hairline and down to his templ were smoothed to be almost flat with his skull, the pieces on his forhead and cheekbone were clunky pieces of metal bolted into his bones.

The doors opened completely and from them came four different robots that he had never seen before.

Of course.

It had become a new trend in the purple lab, for years he was tested with the same bots he practiced with, they mixed older bots with newer ones, but they never gave him something he'd never seen before on a test, not until a few months ago.

One of them was a box about the size of his head, floating with the help of the magnets under the the lab. It shot fist sized blobs of madeup1 at him, distracting him with the electric goo while a spinning ball from onther door tried to trip him. He dodged both and continued running from them while trying to come up with a plan. The third robot was made of cylinders, all the width of his arm, in a semi-human shape, but without the head. Its arms, whose only joints were at the shoulders, rose up like a zombies, and began shooting fireballs at him

Prototype.

A lot of the new bots were only prototypes, bit this one was obviously old, maybe one of the first editions of the madeup2, a robot he was used to fighting.

The box and the cylinder bot both shot at him at the same time, making it easy to dodge them both, but the sphere came out of nowhere and nearly tripped him. The ball did nothing other than that, it had no weapons and no other purpose but to distract him.

Teams.

The sphere was probably made specifically for this fight, and was meant to be his biggest distraction. He needed to take it out first.

He continued running and dodging, sometimes contorting his body into uncomfortable positions to avoid get hit by all of the shots.

A spider like robot made of thin metal limbs with a fist sized round core jumped out at him, grabbing onto his robot arm like a robtic net. The cylinder bot shot at him with both arms. He lifted up his arm, letting the frst shot hit the center of the spider bot while the other hit the wall. The sphere came at him again, and he kicked it at the flying cube. It got hit with the cube's shot of madeup1 and short circuted, then ran into the cube and crushed it.

"Oh, I love this guy!" The female voice came from the viewing room.

The viewing room was situated at the twenty foot line in the testing chamber. One the longer walls, the one facing the chamber, was nothing but a window, and the other walls were covered in screens that viewed things inside the chamber from all sorts of perspectives. In the middle of the room was a long table, and at that table sat a man in a suit with a purple tie, a man in a purple lab coat, and two other people in white lab coats with purple pockets. The woman stood at the window in a suit, with a big smile on her face.

"I can't wait to see that again," the woman said with her mouth full of a meat cake. She swallowed and continued. "How many different angles we got?"

Th man in the purple tie looked overat the man in the purple lab coat. "Jerry?"

"Well, there's one for each of the robots, and one for One-F-, I mean, Subject One Four Two," Jerry replied in a small voice, "And five others in various places."

"Ten," the man in the purple tie said, loud enough so that the woman could hear. "You can see it from his perspective, or even the perspective of the robot heblew up, Miss Wilson." He was very cheery, but the happiness held a sense of falsity.

"What if we had more of those ball things?"

"Madeup3's? We could add them if you like, right Jerry?"

"Uh, yes sir," Jerry said anxiously. One of his assistants grab the phone on the table and began dialing numbers before Jerry could even tell them to.

"How many would you like, Miss Wilson?" The man in the purple tie said the words with some more anxious cheeriness.

Wilson took another bite of her meat cake and twisted her face in thought. She let the peices of ground meat roll around on her tongue in a soup of sweet and tart madeup4 sauce. "Two," she finally said, "He won't see them coming, plus there'll be an extra one."

Back in the testing chamber, Subject One Four Two was still trying to get rid of the cylinder bot. He knew the thing was made up of madeup5, a metal he could easily bend if he could just get close enough. It shot at him, and he dodged and moved closer. He prepared to dodge the next shot, but something ran into the back of his legs and knocked him flat on his back. He rolled over just in time to see a second sphere bot hit him in the face.

"Oh!" A piece of the meat cake fell out of Wilson's mouth as she watched the struge below her. She wiped her mouth and turned around to the look at the man in the purple tie. "How's you're guy going to get out of this one, Jones?"

Rick Jones stiffened as she turned to look at him. She looked away and he turned back to look at Jerry, who was staring at theTV screens with a worried expression.

"He'll get out of this, right Jerry?" Jones' voice was loud and booming, as if talking loudly would cover the anxiety in his voice.

Jerry was still watching One Four Two on the screen, with his bloody nose, now dodging two spheres on the ground while attemtping to not get hit by fireballs.

"He's a smart kid," Jerry said in a shaky voice. "My lifes work, he'll figure it out."

Jones smiled and gave a hollow laugh. "Well Jerry," he said leaning close to the scientist and grabbing his shoulder. "Let's hope your life's actually worth something." He whispered the words to his underling and pulled away from him with a violent glare.

"Holy s**t!" Wilson called out with a laugh. "I need to see that again, can we replay that, before we get the next round of robots out there. That was amazing!"

Jerry and Jones looked up at her at the same time, startled by the sudden shouting. Then there attention turned to the TV screens that showed One Four Two as the only thing still standing in the testing chamber.

"Yeah, yeah replay that." Jones stood up and motioned to the assistants who got up and went back towards the door, where they fumbled with the video control panel. Jerry followed behind his boss wearily, anxious to see what had happened.

The three stood infront of the screen, with Wilson and Jones side by side and Jerry in behind them, trying to see in between their shoulders.

On the screen, One Four Two dodges another shot from the cylinder bot, and gets ready for another attack from the spheres. The first one comes at his legs and he kicks it up into the path of another fireball, and then drops to the ground to grab the second one. In an instant he scopes up the second ball in his right hand and passes it to his left, where his robotic arm launches it at the cylinder bot. The cylinder bot crashes to the ground, but its stiff arms continued to shoot at the cieling. One Four Two got up and walk to the bot. He grabbed its arms, careful to make sure he wasn't going to get shot, and bent it so the blasts couldn't actualy get out. He didn't the same to the other arm and then ran away from it. A few seconds later it exploded, and One Four Two sat down on the ground.

"My life's work," Jerry said from behind Wilson and Jones. "As you can see, it's been a verry eventful life." He smiled and nudged Wilson.

"Jerry, Jones," Wilson said, turning to look at the two men who had turned to to look at her. "Great work."

The two men smiled as relief flushed their tense bodies.

"How long have I been here?"

Jones, checked his watch quickly, "You've been watching him fight for thirty minutes, but you were in an hour long breifing before that."

"And he was fighting for how long beore I started watching him?"

"About fifteen minutes, ma'am." Jerry said quickly.

"Keep him fighting. Keep him fighting till he can't"

Jerry's face immediatly twisted in confusion. "He has another fight tomor-"

Jones' hand flew up in front on Jerry's face, signalling the scientist to shut up. "Obviously Miss Wilson wants to test One Four Two's endurance. Besides, I'm sure the other politicos will want to see some actual fighting themselves."

"Exactly." Wilson smiled at the two men before going to her table to pack things up. "I know people back home have been hard on this sector of the project," she said as she grabbed her suit case and things, "but we are rooting for you. The bio weapons will be to expensive if we have to use them and them alone, and we'd much rather have a single human start things off than an army of expensive robots."

Jones and Jerry stood side by side listening to her words calmly as their hearts raced insde.

"If things go well for you guys in the big fight, he'll be our man." She smiled one last time and walked at the door.

As soon as the door closed Jerry motioned for his assistants. "Call up the guys down there and tell'em to keep the bots coming."

Jones stood at the table, staring out the window, watching the doors open ad One Four Two prepare for anther fight.

"Do you think we did good, sir?" Jerry asked.

Jones sighed and looked at Jerry. "We still got more Main Assistants to talk to from the other six sectors, then the Feds. There are Minor Assistants touring the facility, tomorrow everyone will be there to see an indepth breifing on the arms and legs, and then there's his vital test... we have so much more to do before we'l know for sure if we're good." Jones looked at jerry with tired eyes. "Then there's the fight, I got no idea what Robotics has been cooking up."

Jerry's expresion drooped, the relief from Wilson's praise drained from his body.

"But," the sound of that word cause Jerry's eyes to shoot up at his boss, looking for that glimmer of hope that their project wouldn't be shut down and that their lives wouldn't be ruined. "If he keeps up like this, I think we got it in the bag."