Chapter 5

"Mom?", Trunks asked worriedly, as Bulma was just beginning to descend into a state of panic. She could think of nothing but how stupid she'd been. He'd looked better so she'd simply accepted it at face value, and not even thought to question it. That really hadn't been scientific thinking of her.

"Bulma?", she heard Chichi's voice ask. She hadn't even noticed her coming. "What's going on?"

Right. Focus.

"Radiation poisoning; latency period; I'm an idiot", she quickly summarized. She had known about the latency period, but for some reason hadn't thought about it at all during the past week. Maybe in the back of her mind she'd seen it coming and just tried to deceive herself. That really wasn't a thought she was comfortable with.

"What?", for once Trunks seemed to have given up his act as though he knew everything and now stared at his mother in open confusion.

"It… it gets better, and then it gets worse, and I didn't think of that, I should've known", she said, and ran a hand through her hair, trying to figure out what to do next.

"It what? What gets worse?" Trunks asked. When she didn't reply, he pulled her sleeve. "Mom, what the hell is going on?"

"Language…", she started distractedly. "You know what, nevermind. It's… it's from the bomb. When… when a nuclear bomb goes off, it produces radiation, and that makes people sick." She had a little trouble sorting her thoughts.

"'M fine", a groaning voice next to her said quietly. At least he was aware of people talking about him.

"Don't bullshit me, Vegeta, you are not fine", she said annoyed. Sometimes his tough guy act could really be annoying. But still part of her was relieved he was still acting normally. If he acknowledged being sick it would probably have made her worry even more.

In response to her outburst he just made a lazy waving motion before putting his hand back before his eyes.

"Vegeta, can you tell me what symptoms you're having?", she said, quietly proud of the fact that her voice was shaking only slightly.

"Headache from hell… nausea… have not checked hair." As he was speaking, she noticed that his lips looked oddly red.

"Are your gums bleeding?"

He stopped to consider that for a moment. "… Possibly", he admitted.

"Crap… this is bad", she whispered to herself.

"So… Dad's sick? Why don't we just take him to Dende?", Trunks suggested.

"We already tried that, but it obviously didn't help", Bulma said.

"What? When did you try? he just got sick", Trunks said, bewildered.

"When he first got sick."

"He got sick before? When did that happen?", Trunks asked.

"Well, at least I'm not the only one who never gets told things", Chichi grumbled.

"Just… I thought he was okay!", Bulma snapped. "I didn't tell you, because I thought everything was fine, even though I probably knew it wasn't. I was trying to ignore the obvious. Okay? You two happy now?"

"Um… not particularly?", Trunks said with a raised eyebrow. At that Bulma realized that she had overreacted.

"Sorry… I just… I don't know what to do", she admitted.

"Well, maybe what you should've done from the start is take him to a hospital?", Chichi suggested, clearly a little miffed.

"What's a hospital gonna do? He's an alien. They don't know anything about his physiology, and I don't think drawing attention to that is gonna be particularly helpful."

"So what? Goku is an alien, too, and after his fight with Vegeta they patched him up in the hospital, no problem."

"This isn't a bunch of broken bones! What if they give him something that makes everything worse?"

"Well, you're gonna have to take that risk, because as long as he's sitting in my hallway they can't give him anything to make him better, either", Chichi declared. "Either you take him to the hospital, or come up with something better, fast, if you don't want to watch him slowly die." Under her breath she added quietly: "Not that I'd mind…" but Bulma heard her.

"Oh come on!", she yelled.

"Okay, that was uncalled for. But still, you have to be reasonable. If Dende can't help, as hospital's your best bet."

Bulma sighed. Of course Chichi was right, but that didn't change the fact that she'd much rather rely on magic than on doctors who had no experience at all with saiyans. If only Capsule Corp was still there, they'd have a functioning regen tank filled with synthetic DNA that could probably make radiation poisoning stop being a problem quite easily.

Then again, if Capsule Corp hadn't been destroyed, they wouldn't have any radiation problem, now, anyway.

"He… he's no gonna die, right?", a quite voice next to her asked, and Bulma noticed that her son gone considerably pale at that thought. She looked at him, and her mouth stood open for a moment. Every motherly instinct wanted her to say that everything was gonna be fine and not to worry, but the words just wouldn't cross her lips. She didn't want to lie to her son, and honestly she had no idea whether anything was going to be alright or not.

"I… I hope", she admitted, helplessly, and she could tell that her son wasn't comforted at all by that statement.

The ringing of the doorbell stopped their conversation for a moment. Chichi got up and went to the door, only to come back a moment later. "It's for you, Bulma."

Bulma got up reluctantly. She really didn't want to leave Vegeta alone right now, but something in Chichi's tone told her that it probably be a bad idea not to get this. Whatever that meant.

At the door two men were standing, both in black suits, and one holding up a badge of some sorts.

"Can… I help you?", she asked warily.

"Bulma Briefs, you are under arrest for treason", the shorter one of the two said, and put his badge back in his pocket, while the other guy approached her with a set of handcuffs he seemed to have pulled out of nowhere.

"W-What?", Bulma said, too stunned to shake the guy with the handcuffs off.

"We have evidence of Capsule Corp technology being used in a multitude of attacks against our citizens. The trail led to you", the shorter guy announced.

"But… that's impossible! Capsule Corp doesn't make any military products", Bulma protested.

"It's not me you'll have to convince."

"This programming is amazing. I mean, the intricacies. Making a robot this sophisticated… I don't even know why anyone would want to subject themselves to the sheer workload associated with that. It's cool he did, though", the man with the chubby face announced. He was sitting outside Eighteen's periphery of vision, but he wasn't hard to locate, because he just wouldn't shut up.

Eighteen really wished she had at least enough motor control to speak and tell that guy just where to shove the burrito he was happily munching on right now. Preferably full motion control, though. So she could shove it there herself.

"Yes, it's great", the woman said in a bored tone. "The memory banks are a little messy, though. There's so much data with the silliest cross-references that I can barely make sense of it. Some of this stuff isn't even labelled."

It was surprising how fast you got used to being talked about as if you weren't in the room, or barely above a piece of furniture, but the way they dug through what made up the core of her being and made disrespectful comments about it wouldn't cease to make her mad.

But she was starting to get a little scared, too, even though she tried to avoid admitting that to herself, so they wouldn't pick that up on their screens somewhere. They'd probably be happy about it, and she didn't want to give them the satisfaction. Well maybe chubby wouldn't be all that happy about it, he didn't strike her as particularly sadistic.

"Some of this stuff you just get goose-bumps just from looking at it, you know? And not always in a good way. You wouldn't believe the amount of data that's programmed in on killing", the guy said.

"Well that's finally something interesting, isn't it? Most of this stuff is completely useless, unless you want an elaborate sex toy that can fool itself into thinking it's able to love, but the killer robot stuff, now that's useful."

Eighteen tried not to actively think about it, but all this made her more than uneasy. The amount of access they had to her higher functions was crazy, and pretty scary as well. If the woman could find out which parts of her mind were dedicated to love, she could just as easily delete those. Anything they did could change the core of her being, and losing those things was a frightening prospect.

"Some of these memory files aren't even labeled. It's a mess", the woman resumed her whining. "Like this one. I can't even find the time stamp. Why would anyone make a system assign important things this erratically?"

"Maybe it's something universal, that doesn't have a specific time attached to it? Like a thought, or a routine?", the guy suggested. From the sounds he was making Eighteen was surprised he could still use his keyboard. It should've been drowning in crumbs at that point.

"Well, I'm not sure. Maybe I can access it", the woman said.

There was the sound of a mouse clicking, and immediately Eighteen felt herself thrown into a flashback.

IThe tiny room was damp and dark. The tiny window barely even let any light in during the day, and now, at night, it was hopeless. How long had she been here? By now she had already lost count. Any amount of time was too long, but that barely mattered. /I

Something was off about that file. She couldn't recall that memory at all, and she had no idea when it was. If she could dream she probably would've guessed it was something like that, but in all the years since her initial activation she had never had a dream. Why was there no time stamp?

IThere were no sounds anymore. Was that better than the screaming? She couldn't decide. At least that had told her someone was there. For all she knew, she could be all alone here, now, destined to starve, buried alive in some underground vault no one would ever find. The thought made her shudder. She hadn't eaten in days. Water came pretty regularly, but it didn't really help. She ran her hand along the wall. As the cold stone touched her scabbed over hands it hurt, but at least it told her this was real.

As if that was something to be happy about. Why did this have to happen to her? It was so absurd she never even would have thought about being scared of this happening. Her situation seemed so cartonishly overwrought that it could barely be real.

A sudden sound made her pipe up. The door!

It was being opened. She barely even dared to hope, but what if it was help? Someone to rescue her from this hell…

As the light illuminated the figure in the doorway from behind, she was ready to cry in relief. She quickly got to her feet.

"I'm so glad you…" Then she saw the face. And with the realization of what was wrong with it came the most frightful scream she had ever heard. And she was the one screaming./i

This was probably the strangest memory there could be. As the person's emotions hit her, it was almost like a physical shock. She was pretty sure, now, that whoever remembered this, it wasn't her. She had never, ever, felt emotions as strong as that girl, she was pretty sure she couldn't. The memory didn't look or feel like any of hers, at all. There was no timestamp, and all of it seemed a little hazy, as if she was viewing it through a fog. With the precision and accuracy of her vision it couldn't have been recorded by her. The absence of light simply couldn't look that dark to her.

And what made her sure, that it couldn't be hers, was who the girl was screaming at. Sure, he could be annoying, but her brother's face really wasn't something to scream about.

But before she could continue anaylyzing, the memory took her over again.

IThe eyes! Those eyes. Melissa had thought she couldn't cry anymore, but now she felt the tears rise up again. All of her hopes had been crushed, and what was coming for her… she barely noticed herself saying some incoherent things, as the grip like steel tore her out of her cell, the relative safety of which she immediately regretted leaving.

She tried to struggle against that hand around her arm, but it was completely futile. There was no way she would be able to break free.

God, she knew that corridor so well. The complex notes, pinned carelessly to whichever surface was available, the strange pieces of technology, half of which she couldn't even begin to understand. Could she have seen this coming? Avoided it, maybe? But he'd never seemed anything like the psychopath she now knew he was.

As they arrived in the main lab, it was well lit, but there was no sign of him. There were bloodstains everywhere, though, and as she realized whose they must be, she almost threw up. But before she could even finish that thought, she felt herself thrown roughly on that fearful table. It was as if she weighed absolutely nothing. She tried to struggle, as the restraints were applied, but to no avail. There was nothing she could do, she was very well aware of that, but the idea of accepting her fate seemed the scariest of all.

As she was completely immobilized, the figure removed itself from her field of vision. For a moment nothing could be heard but her sobbing. Not even his breathing. He didn't have to anymore, and the coldness in those unnaturally blue eyes told her that he wasn't even aware of what he had lost.

And suddenly he was there. The psychopath. The doctor. In whom she had trusted, whom she had admired for his genius, whose research she had hoped to help advance. If only she'd had a little bit more of the sixth sense that her brother had had, who hadn't been too happy about taking the two lab assistant positions.

"Please", she whimpered. "Please don't do this. My mom… she's sick. She doesn't have anybody else" she choked on the word, as she said, "anymore. I won't tell anyone, I promise, I'll do anything, just please, let me go."

"My my, I would've thought you of all people would appreciate the gift I'm about to give you", doctor Gero said with a chuckle. He was busying himself attaching all kinds of wires to her. A sudden frantic beeping told her there was a heart monitor, recording her panically beating heart.

"This is…" she stopped before she could say insane. Even though he was a madman, telling him so probably wouldn't be too great for her chances of survival. "This is not a good idea. Just… please don't"

"On the contrary, my dear, this is an excellent idea. You'll become one of the greatest wonders science could ever create. Doesn't that excite you?" He made a short pause, before looking across the room and saying, "Seventeen, come over here, and hold this." She couldn't see what he was pointing at, but she guessed she didn't even want to know.

"His name is Josh", she snapped.

"Not anymore, darling. Just like yours won't be Melissa for much longer." She honestly wasn't sure what was worse, the intention of what he was planning on doing, or the cheerful tone in his voice as he said that.

"Just don't! Please", she said. She didn't even know where the tears running down her face now were coming from. There really hadn't been that much water while she had been awaiting her fate, trying to guess at which point she should've run.

"Sorry. It's all in the name of science. You were always studying to become a scientist. Now this is even better. You're becoming the greatest achievement of science itself!"

"Do you really believe that's what you're doing?"

"Oh, I know so."

He left her field of vision, and noises that sounded suspiciously like a drill started up. Suddenly there was a flash that seemed to come from inside her rather than the outside, as if the brightest possible light and the loudest possible sound were assaulting her at the same time. She couldn't even hear her own screaming.

"Sorry about that", he heard the doctor saying. "The initial neural interface can cause some discomfort, apparently."

He came back into her vision, and she saw him holding a scalpel. "Don't worry. You'll feel like an all new person once I'm done here", he said, and dug his knife deep into her chest.

The last thing she heard, before she lost all feeling, was the long continuous beep that was announcing that her heart had stopped beating. /I

The return to reality came so suddenly, that Eighteen had to blink multiple times before she was quite aware of it. An instant later her internal logs were showing her that she had actually let out a scream herself.

She lifted her hand and stared at the flawless skin. Was it synthetic? She'd never really thought about it, but where else would the scrapes have gone? She'd never had any recollection beyond the point of her first activation as an android, and the sheer terror in that memory, that was making it difficult for her to calm down right now told her that that had probably been for the best.

The emotions were so raw and foreign to her, it was a wonder her processors didn't melt from their intensity. She'd been scared before, for instance when Majin Buu had been chasing them, but it had been nothing like this. Was that what fear was like for humans? Was this to show just how shallow and weak her "simulated" emotions really were?

Her processors and thinking capabilities were usually incredibly fast, unlike any human's could ever be, but right now that wasn't the case. She kept staring at her hand, and only after several seconds came the realization that she could move.

In fact she was sitting up on the table the scientists had put her on, moving her entire body completely freely. And both of them looked scared.

"Well", she said, slowly turning her hand in front of her face. "That was enlightening." She noticed just how different her voice sounded now, compared to that memory. A different pitch, but also colder, less… alive.

"How did…", the guy started helplessly. Apparently he had jumped up, because the contents of his burrito were now spread over the entire lab floor. "I thought motor controls were of…"

"Not anymore", Eighteen announced, and hopped off the table. She turned towards the woman, who was holding her metal clipboard up like a shield.

"That won't help you", the android announced, and ripped the board from the woman's hands, faster than a human eye could follow. And with one single motion, she jerked the board forward and rammed it into the woman's torso.

It was a completely unnecessary thing to do, grotesquely and inappropriately violent, and she knew Krillin would not approve, if he knew, but damn, it felt good.

She pulled the clipboard away, and the scientist, holding her stomach fell down almost immediately. She didn't have a chance. Eighteen walked over to the lab door, but before she left, she turned around to wave at the guy with the chubby face and waved at him with a bloodstained hand.

She was pretty sure she had never seen anyone look that pale before.

She had determined by now that she wasn't on a ship anymore, but that was pretty much all she knew. As Eighteen ran across the corridors, trying to find a way out, she heard the alarms that were now sounding all over the complex. A military base, possibly. She heard people running, and shouting not far away from her, but it seemed what she had done to the scientist had already spread across the base, because none of them had openly engaged her thus far.

The mood she was in, they were doing well to avoid her. She had to be fast, though. The guy with the mustache had a remote for her, and if she blew this chance to escape, she knew she wouldn't get another.

Her processors were already building a pretty accurate map of the corridors she had been running through, but that was hardly helpful. There were so many corridors and so many hatches in each of them that she had no indication whatsoever of whether she was going the right way. Whoever was in charge of painting signs must've had a sick day when she thing had been built.

At least the map she was constructing in her head was accurate enough to be sure she was not going in circles. At the end of several corridors were larger hatches. She guessed that they led to elevators of sorts, but she hadn't tried using one of them yet, because elevators were a tricky place to be when you were being chased.

But if she had to act quickly, so she decided to try one of these doors. At least the labels on the buttons would be able to tell her whether she was above ground or underground. At this point she wasn't really sure.

As she approached the next large hatch, she checked the wall for buttons that would get the door to open, but she couldn't find any. So she raised up her palm and fired a quick ki blast, which reduced the hatch to a pitifully smoking heap of molten metal. Without slowing down she ran in, only to find herself smashing against a railing.

So not an elevator. In fact she was up on some sort of walkway, looking into a huge room. If she weren't able to fly she probably would've found the height of the room dizzying, but as it was, she was wondering whether there was any harm in simply blasting the ceiling away.

But just as she was scanning the ceiling for the ideal point to blast it away, she saw something on the far wall that made her stop in her tracks. On the wall there row after row of robots were attached. They looked kind of similar to a human shape, but they weren't nearly as detailed as any of Gero's creations. It was more like someone had taken a huge lump of metall and tried to unprofessionally carve a Terminator out of it.

None of them were active, simply hanging on the wall, but Eighteen was pretty sure from what the scientists had mentioned about her being expensive, that they probably weren't nearly as advanced as she was, and probably not as powerful, either, but what was really worrying was their number. The approximate number of robots on that huge wall was a number that made Eighteen worry whether her calculations might be flawed. Or rather hope that they were. It was in the thousands, at least. Even if they weren't all that powerful, she wasn't sure if the Z-Fighters could do much, if someone decided to send all of those.

She heard footsteps approaching, and was sure, even before she turned around, who it would be. Mustache man. But this time she was ready for him. It took her less than a nanosecond to locate the remote control in his hands, and even less than that to aim and shot a controlled ki blast at it.

As the device exploded in his hand, he looked mildly surprised. "Now those are some serious reflexes. Interesting."

"You do know that that was your only chance to take me out, right?"

"Oh don't be silly", he said with a wave. "Of course it's not my 'only' chance. I have so many of these things, I barely even know what to do with them all. I thought we could use this opportunity to chat. About your future, you know?"

"Chat? I was thinking more along the lines of me blowing you to pieces. A little garnish for your freakish robot collection", Eighteen replied icily.

"Oh I don't really think you will do that", he said with an infuriatingly unworried smile. "No, what I mean, is that you could have a prominent role in our operation. I'm sure you've gathered, that none of these are quite as advanced, as you are. You could really do well here. Build a career."

"Fuck you", she said calmly, and then raised her hand towards the ceiling. An instant later the ceiling was missing. She took off immediately, flying away as fast as she could. That she actually hadn't blown mustache man to pieces was slightly puzzling to her, but it was better to get out fast. Who knew when one of his men equipped with a remote would come running? Better to distance herself from them.

To her delight, the ceiling she had obliterated actually did lead outside. She had no idea where she was, but for the moment it didn't matter. She simply picked a direction and flew, as fast as possible, to get out of there.

She only slowed down when she was sure that there were at least a hundred klicks between her and that wretched place. Apparently she was now over some huge forest, but she couldn't identify where it was. Still, she lowered her altitude, and flew closer to the treetops, to ensure that they wouldn't locate her on a radar.

As she was flying over the trees, a large bird crossed her flight path. Now that of course, isn't an unusual situation when flying close to the ground, and there were mulitple acceptable solutions to that problem, such as flying a little bit higher to avoid the problem, or simply hovering for a moment, waiting for the bird to pass.

Charging at the bird and ripping it to pieces really wasn't one of these solutions. Not only was it a cruel thing to do, but also needlessly expending energy and staining clothes.

So why would she do that?

As she set down, staring at the remains of what had once been a proud bird, and the blood on her hands, she couldn't recall at any point making that decision. It was almost as if her body had acted on its own volition, without any direction to do so.

Which was, of course, completely impossible.

As her feet sat down on the soft forest earth, there was only one possible conclusion. When she had been unconscious, they had done something to her programming.

Something terrible.

A/N: Sorry about the erratic update times, things have been a little crazy with finals. I'll try to be better next time. Anyway, tell me what you think!