Getting permission from Star Factories to examine Osprey’s old lab was the tricky bit, but also the sane part. The really insane part came next after the paperwork and that was trying to make sense of what was left of his lab notes and journals. Things got weirder from there. As is well known, Dr. Osprey died while still in the middle of carrying out his research. The man never lived to see his greatest mecha up and running past the prototype stage. Official reports say he succumbed to a previously undiagnosed illness. Drake and I were hedging on that what really happened might not have been so straightforward. Was the official statement by the coroner a cover-up? Osprey had requested cremation for his funeral (and that his ashes be scattered over a mountain range populated by his favorite birds) so it wasn’t like we could do a biopsy. This would make any forensics much harder.
There are a number of possibilities for how the late Dr. Osprey could have met his demise. For example, he may have been poisoned by a jealous rival researcher. It could have been cancer from all the years he spent working in contact with various chemicals and radiation. Alternatively, Osprey could have died from complications of a previous self-experiment. I figured with my status as one of the Galaxy’s few if not only living transfected humans that it might give me some insight on if Osprey had been tinkering with modifying his own DNA.
“Drake, you don’t think he may have uploaded his consciousness into a computer, do ya?” I said casually poking at a Betrus Processor covered in a thick coat of dust.
Drake inspects the processor, “If he did, he died very horribly because the processor would have corrupted in moments scattering his consciousness in excruciating oblivion that would have felt like centuries but in actuality would have been no more than half a minute.”
Dinosaur bones assembled into a partially complete skeleton sat in one corner of Osprey’s lab, gathering cobwebs. Notes on modifying Niode musculature to closer emulate bird tendons were piled on the floor next to it. Scattered amongst these notes were a mixture of anatomical drawings of flightless birds and avian predators with engineering calculations.
Drake picks up the notes, pulls out a device and swipes it over the notes; “For later use.” he says as he looks over at Myco.
I run a scanner on the bones. Nothing comes up so far… but then I see a few test tubes in one of the nearby shelves and scan those. It beeps. “He was doing a little basic DNA recombination, but nothing too far out of the ordinary yet.” I go over to a walk-in storage locker and am inspecting the locks when something internally pings.
“Hey wait,... what kind of stuff was Dr. Osprey exactly working with anyway?” I ask Drake, pointing at the gashes through the thick solid metal of the door.
Drake steps forward to exam the metal, he suddenly smiles noticing DNA left on the metal from whatever slashed it. “Give me a moment and I’ll have it identified. Hmmm strange…….” Drake takes a second sample from the door. “Clone come here.” A clone walks up and Drake hands him the vial, “Get this to the lab and have the AI’s begin analyzing it.”
[Note: Bird excrement often has parasites. Maybe one of his attempts at recreating dinosaurs from DNA grabbed from droppings created the disease that killed him off?]
“You getting any biohazard readings from this storage locker Drake?”
“Well now that you mention it yes I am.” Drake smiles, “This is exciting.”
“I think, I’d be willing to wager you that one of the late doctor’s experiments could have gotten the better of him.” I poke a jar after more clones force the door open. The residue is smelly. “Bird droppings, yes?”
“Yes. A rare species indeed only seen on the reserve planet for their protection.” Drake looks at his map of known gate paths, “Wow, he went really out of his way to get this bird. He had to jump through 30 gates to get there.”
“There’s a saying on Old Mars Drake, and it’s that you shouldn’t breathe bird or bat droppings too much for too long.” Beyond the jars further back in the storage is some sort of long decayed carcass of… what though? I poke at it with a metal rod. “See the claws on this one?” Even the maggots are dead.
Drake points at the claws, “See these sacks? I’m betting that they are some kind of venom glands that coat the claws.”
I squint. “If the bird itself was poisonous, then that would explain what killed the grubs. So now I guess that gives us two possible explanations...” I see a chalkboard on the other wall opposite the dead bird and jot them down. “Either the good doctor breathed in a little too much guano, or one of his pets got to him” I suggest, gesturing at the carcass. “It could even have been from a feeding accident.”
Drake walks around behind the chalkboard, “Check this out. These are designs for a new mech, based on that bird…. oh I see…”
I blink, trying to take it in “A Thunderbird?”
Drake smiles, “There are also notes on incorporating the bird’s DNA, quite brilliant he was going to try and make it like the other living mechs, strange…. he planned to hatch it from an egg like the bird and have it grow to full size, that could be quite dangerous it would have behaved more like an animal than a mech….”
“It’s a shame I never got to meet the guy” I shrug kicking a pile of bird skulls. “Still, I bet you Star Factories will pay some good Niode to have an answer finally. And we could use the blueprints as a bargaining chip, right?”
“Correct.” Drake steps back and hears a crunch, he looks down and see’s eggshells…”Were the claw marks in the door from the inside or outside?”
I hastily double check… “Oh, that’s not good. Well there’s good news and bad news” I say, brandishing the pipe from earlier. “If any of those baby mecha did survive, the pile of skulls means they’re cannibals, so we’re just dealing with one.” That’s the good news.
“The bad news, as you might guess is that the one that ate the others would be bigger.”
“How many years has it been since the good doc died?” Drake starts looking out the labs few windows.
“At least a decade I think. Some reptiles can hibernate… I don’t know that birds can.”
In my haste to explore I hadn’t quite noticed before how bad the storage room stunk.
“Maybe we should take pics of these notes and get back to the mechs and gate before further studying them.” Drake reaches into a pouch.
“I uh… agree. Shoot.” Knocked over another pile of avian bones, these ones picked clean all but for a few dried meat shreds/remnants. “Look up. It’s gross.”
Drake opens his comms, “Alright clones time to head out.” He looks up, “Yes… hmm dead for at least 2-3 years I’m thinking…”
“That has got to be the biggest dead buzzard I have ever seen. Smart too, the piles of bones were stacked neatly.”
Silence answers Drake’s comm signal, “Uh guys respond we’re getting out of here.”
“The lobby. I bet they’d be in there. Saw a vidgame console. Only had flight games on it though.” I add, offering Drake the ferrite rod I’d been using to probe the contents of the locker.
Drake declines the rod, “Ah yes… lets go that way…” Drake seems much more reserved and less chatty than usual, his eyes constantly scanning each window as they walk by.
An overwhelming sense of death and decay was pervasive through the entire building.
Strongest in the lockers. I doubted a human scaled gun could stop something as deadly as that bio engineered mech if one was still alive.
“Lobby looks to be shielded” I think of bringing up. The rod clangs against the wall. “Hello?!”
Drake reaches into his back holster and pulls out his personal hand rail gun, he opens it, “Only four rounds but it’ll punch through 10 feet of ferrite with no trouble.”
All I thought of bringing with me was my standard issue Samurai Mecha Shoto blade and a regular pistol. “That’s not bad. You came better prepared than me.” I draw my short sword and sheepishly show him the mod I made to electrify the edge during critical strokes. “Added a pulse taser; I’m not so good at this weapons making stuff. More of an equipment guy.”
“I dabble in a many fields, been at this for awhile and I would get bored if I focused on a single field of expertise. Nice mods for the sword, you should use the micro processor for the power supply it’ll jump the amps up by at least a magnitude of 20.”
“A Micro, eh? Thanks for the tip. I’ll tell my supplier to stock one the next time I order components.”
The clones (at least some of them) were in the lobby. That isn’t a cartridge game they’ve found among the disks though… it’s an AI.
Drake visibly relaxes at the sight of the clones, and his interest in the AI is obvious to see in his demeanor as he walks forward. “So how advanced are you?....”
Loading Catalogue of Dr. Osprey’s research… it says on the screen. Apparently it is a pre-recorded demo brochure for potential investors. “Would you like to know about the latest in avian/archeao-saurian inspired mecha produced in this lab?” it asks through the console speaker. If I didn’t know any better I’d say the AI was a bit bored, having had nothing but the same old files to index and reindex for roughly more than a decade. It seemed excited at the opportunity to jump into explaining what the lab is for and about to an audience for the first time again in so many cycles but also seemed neither to understand nor accept the “new” information that Dr. Osprey is dead.
On cycling through, the last entry in the AI’s database comes up. “Coming soon, the Thunderbird Mecha promises to be a missile and fire based mech that uses actual large bird DNA in its design. For this project, Dr. Osprey has combed the galaxy to selectively breed rare poisonous birds in order to harvest just the right toxins with which to fuel the Thunderbird’s… more unique subsystems.”
Drake loses interest in the AI fairly quickly but does download a copy of the information just in case any relevant material might be found. He tries reaching the remaining clones that were not in the lounge… nothing, “Well I’m not waiting around for them to show up and if they’re already dead I’ll make more, sure not going to join them.” He heads straight for his Antithesis and climbs into the cockpit. He also subtly powers up the weapon systems, just in case.
“Okay, I’ll report it in. Wouldn’t say the mission was a failure but I still found it a bit… disappointing. Oh well… at the very least we have a better idea now what did Dr. Osprey in. Scored a little tech and the pay will be good, so all in all, not that bad.”
As they leave the living mech approaches the lab, the limb of a clone still in its’ maw. The area that would normally house the cockpit slides open revealing the bodiless head of Dr. Osprey. The still living eyes watch the gate close, then the hatch closes around the head and the mech moves on hunting, ever hunting...
Submitted by Mycobacter & Drake Novum Scientist #712744, #706289