Chapter 168. The Terminator Shift

The wide stainless-steel dissection table, integrated with a deep industrial drain, was ready for use. High-tech surgical instruments, including ultrasonic cutters and bone saws, rested in a recessed side tray. Graduated plastic containers for collecting xenogeneic organs and gray neural substrate stood within easy reach beneath the table's lower edge. I was fully prepared to begin large-scale biomaterial extraction.

Before starting work, I focused on the other employees for a moment, rapidly analyzing their work habits. The first thing my analytical module registered was that only half the butchers on staff wore flexible protective coveralls beneath their rubberized aprons. The vast majority worked in nothing but underwear, heavy rubber boots, and respirators. A few eccentrics had even dispensed with underwear altogether. This had nothing to do with some kind of fetish club. They were simply trying to keep cool and avoid drowning in their own sweat. The facility had powerful ventilation systems and industrial air conditioning. The Corps was a defense agency with a multibillion-dollar budget, not some small private outfit pinching pennies at the expense of its employees' health. Yet even with climate control, the men stripped down to their bare essentials. Manually dismembering the dense bodies of alien creatures required enormous physical effort. Any strenuous physical labor, even in a refrigerated room, made the human body sweat. The only exceptions were the senior forensic pathologists performing microsurgical procedures. They used tweezers to extract delicate ocular crystals and capillary networks from the xenomorphs while remaining fully dressed in their protective gear. And, of course, there was me. Evolution had eliminated sweat production from my body, classifying it as an inefficient biological relic that offered no meaningful advantage to the survival of modern humans.

When I caught my supervisor's heavy, disapproving stare, I shut down passive observation mode. To secure my position at this filthy but critically important facility, which played a vital role in my continued covert evolution, I needed to demonstrate exemplary productivity.

[Special Command: Dissect Loz'an with maximum efficiency within one hour and forty-five minutes.]

I deliberately left a fifteen-minute buffer before the official end of the two-hour shift. My years of accounting experience in the commercial sector had given me a clear understanding of the psychology of hourly workers: as the end of the day approached, employees invariably began winding down ahead of schedule. They cleaned their equipment, returned their tools to the supply staff, and filled out the required logs. Nobody liked spending personal time on those routine chores, so I had factored that into my shift calculations.

The world around me contracted as it always did, narrowing to a single point of focus. My consciousness entered a state of hyperfocus. With professional curiosity, I observed from a third-person perspective the precise algorithms my overclocked brain used to carry out the task.

My fingers clamped around the handle of the unwieldy cargo cart. My feet pushed off the tiled floor with such force that I reached the airtight door of Section 3B in exactly 0.5 seconds. My analytical module calculated that using the hidden reserves of S-Power for instantaneous bursts of speed was worth the energy expenditure if it saved even a few seconds. The butchers on the line caught a fleeting glimpse of a white blur in their peripheral vision, then immediately returned to their work. They had not yet grasped the full extent of the anomaly, but the numbers spoke for themselves: they had one hundred and five minutes left to study the phenomenon known as Thomas Ross.

Inside the refrigerated chamber, I grabbed the two nearest Loz'an bodies and tossed them onto the cart with the same casual ease with which an ordinary shopper dropped pineapples into a grocery cart. Another explosive burst of speed carried me back to the operating table. I braked so abruptly that the two massive carcasses nearly flew off the cart and onto the floor.

This time, my actions caught someone's attention.

"Hey, you little shit!" my supervisor growled, scowling as he set aside his saw. "Why the hell'd you leave the cooler door wide open? You trying to screw up the whole damn climate control system and freeze us all to death in here?"

I ignored him. Verbal garbage wasn't worth the energy. My processor had already calculated the reason: opening the airtight door, securing it, and closing it again cost three seconds per trip. The drop in temperature inside the facility was an external variable that had no effect on my evolved body's thermal balance. The risk was negligible.

"And what the hell are you doing bringing two chickens to the same table?" my supervisor continued, stomping toward my station. "By the time you're done gutting the first one, the second one's gonna start rotting. You got rocks in your head or what, you idiot?"

His tirade cut off when I simultaneously lifted both 240-pound carcasses with a perfectly symmetrical movement and dropped them into the deep steel basin of the sink. The metal groaned and cracked under the tremendous weight.

"Jesus Christ... What the hell is he made of?" one of the butchers at the next station whispered, freezing with his knife in hand. "Did the Pentagon send us a fucking cyborg?"

Then I began dissecting both xenomorphs at once.

My left hand traced the anatomical contours of the specimen on the left with exquisite precision, while my right mirrored every movement on the body to the right. This was far beyond ordinary ambidexterity, in which both hands were equally skilled. My nervous system had split the motor commands into two independent streams running in parallel. I had become a high-throughput industrial assembly line. My hands worked autonomously while my eyes darted rapidly from side to side, scanning the microscopic structure of the tissues and registering even the slightest variations in density.

The next stage of optimization was even more radical. My brain eliminated the standard start-and-stop cycle of the high-frequency cutters, calculating that each operation wasted another three seconds. Instead, I began delivering instantaneous, precisely targeted strikes with my fingertips to key points on the carcasses, channeling microscopic pulses of S-Power at the required frequency through my neoprene gloves. The tissues parted along clean lines, leaving the internal organs intact.

But my analytical module still wasn't satisfied. To maximize efficiency, I pressed my palms firmly against the opened chest cavities of both Loz'an and directed a powerful, tightly focused wave of pure kinetic energy into them. The result surpassed every departmental benchmark. Under the concentrated pressure, the highly viscous gray neural substrate was expelled from the aliens' deep venous channels and major blood vessels directly into the collection tanks in a single second. It was like squeezing the last drops of juice out of a cardboard carton.

With the neural substrate squeezed out to the last drop, my hands switched to disposal with mechanical precision. My S-Power-coated palms sliced the gray-green flesh into neat, uniform sections, ensuring the biological waste would pass through the feed chute into the thermal reactor without getting stuck. I tossed the segments onto the cart, shot to the far end of the room in an explosive burst of speed, dumped the load into the dark maw of the disposal shaft, and raced back for another batch. The entire process, from entering the refrigerated chamber to clearing the dissection table, now took exactly one minute and forty-three seconds. Pure automation.

A deathly silence settled over the room, broken only by the hum of the ventilation system. The men at the neighboring stations stood frozen, their mouths hanging open. They were completely dumbfounded, watching the white blur of my lab coat dart between Section 3B and the dissection table at superhuman speed. A few of the butchers had initially tried to call out to me, ask questions, or stop me, but my analytical module predictably filtered out every incoming voice. Interacting with the staff did nothing to improve productivity. It was simply a waste of precious seconds.

For about fifteen minutes, the dissection crew watched my movements in a state of stunned disbelief, their suspicion growing by the minute. Only after they had convinced themselves that the anomalous newcomer was doing nothing more than his assigned job and showed no signs of unprovoked aggression did they cautiously return to their stations. Even then, wary sidelong glances continued to follow me.

At precisely 4:45 p.m., my internal timer issued the shutdown command. My consciousness snapped back to its normal state. A mild, dull ache immediately developed at the base of my skull, and my internal sensors registered a slight depletion of energy reserves. The lessons of the previous few days had paid off. I had invested every spare moment in expanding my S-Power reservoir, and without that solid foundation, I wouldn't have maintained today's level of performance for even half an hour.

I braced my palms against the steel rim of the sink. Two Loz'an carcasses lay on the table, still midway through segmentation. My hyperfocus had run its course fifteen minutes before I could finish the batch. I wasn't about to risk damaging the specimens by continuing at superhuman speed without full analytical control, so I picked up a standard tool and calmly resumed work at an ordinary human pace.

"Holy shit... Guys, look at him! It... it just shut down!" a muffled voice whispered from the second line.

I slowly turned toward the rest of the room. The grizzled veterans of the dissection floor instinctively took half a step backward in unison, their faces noticeably paling. The situation was almost comical. It was as if we were deep in the wilderness, with me as a massive grizzly bear and the only means of self-defense available to them being toothpicks. Rational analysis called for an immediate effort to ease the tension before the crew's paranoia led them to classify me as a threat and attempt to isolate me.

"Everything's fine. This is my normal operating mode. I'm Awakened," I said flatly through my respirator before returning to the cut along the tendon.

A low buzz of excited whispers erupted behind me. I could hear understanding dawning in the men's voices. Within the Corps, the magic word "Awakened" instantly explained away any violation of the laws of physics or biology. I raised an eyebrow in irritation. Why did the staff spend so much time talking during work hours? There were still fifteen minutes left in the official shift, and they'd turned the place into a damn debating club. Didn't they have anything better to do with their hands?

"Hey, soldier..." My temporary supervisor approached cautiously, moving with exaggerated care as though he were approaching a booby-trapped container. "So you're one of those Awakened guys? What's your actual power, kid? Can you, like, turn into a goddamn Terminator at the snap of your fingers?"

"What makes you think that?" I asked coolly, dropping the last segmented piece of Loz'an onto the cart before wheeling it toward the disposal shaft.

"What else am I supposed to think?!" My supervisor followed, gesturing animatedly. "You've been moving like a CNC machine for the past hour. You haven't reacted to a damn thing around you. Dead eyes, perfect mechanical movements. Nothing exists for you except the job. And you're freakishly strong, too. No normal human can lift two of those things with their bare hands."

"You're absolutely right." I allowed myself a brief, ironic smile beneath my respirator, appreciating the accuracy of his observations. "I'm the Terminator. Model T-800, if that makes it easier for you."

After dumping the remaining flesh into the disposal shaft, I surveyed the room and noticed that the situation had changed. Not a single butcher was still dissecting a specimen. All the men had gathered around the industrial sinks, methodically washing their tools in isopropyl alcohol, scrubbing down the stainless-steel tables, and blasting the remaining lymph and viscera off the tiled floor with high-pressure hoses.

"Getting the work area ready for tomorrow morning's shift," my supervisor explained, catching my gaze as he took the tool tray from me. "We always start shutting things down and doing a full cleanup half an hour before the final buzzer."

"Oh. So I held up the whole crew for fifteen minutes? Do I need to clean up my station myself?"

"Come on, soldier. It's a two-minute job." My supervisor visibly relaxed as he opened the main water valve. "Grab a hose. I'll help you wash off the slime before you strip the threads on every faucet in the place with that Terminator routine of yours."

As we used mops and scrapers to push the gray water toward the drain, I learned an important detail through casual conversation. It turned out I was the only Awakened employee on the entire morgue level. Everyone else was a regular military pathologist or a certified forensic medical examiner whom the Corps had forced into service under threat of court-martial, making them sign lifetime nondisclosure agreements covering state secrets.

Once the cleanup was finished, I indulged my professional curiosity and peered through the observation window into the thermally insulated Section 3B. In just over an hour of hyperfocus, I had single-handedly dissected and disposed of around a hundred massive Loz'an. Yet the enormous gray-green mountain of corpses inside the refrigerated chamber looked as though it hadn't shrunk at all. The volume of incoming material was staggering.

"For the past three weeks, Portals have been opening all along the East Coast almost every twenty-four hours, and those bastards keep pouring through," my supervisor said grimly, stopping beside me and wiping his hands. "The Corps' logistics people keep hauling these chickens in nonstop. We're barely keeping up."

With the paperwork and cleanup out of the way, the entire crew gathered around the massive thermal reactor. Its dark interior now held the day's colossal accumulation of extraterrestrial organic waste mixed with water, resembling some kind of monster soup. My supervisor strained to pull the handle, sealed the heavy armored hatch shut, and secured it with four radial locking bolts. He then stepped over to the control panel, gripped the massive three-phase switch, and slammed it downward.

Through the narrow quartz viewing window, the furnace chamber was instantly flooded with an intensely bright, uniform white light. The glow was so dense and concentrated that it completely obscured the outlines of everything inside, like a miniature nuclear detonation. Exactly sixty seconds later, the flash died out. The reactor's interior was pristine. A molecular annihilator had incinerated the carbon-based organic matter down to elementary particles, leaving not a single molecule of foreign blood on the walls.

"Don't even think about touching that latch before morning, soldier," my supervisor warned me with utmost seriousness as he hung a red warning sign on the switch. "The temperature in there is off the charts right now. Break the seal, and the blast of superheated air will turn every one of us into a pile of ash in a fraction of a second. This thing has to cool down completely before the next shift starts."

And with that, my first shift in the Biological Center's morgue officially came to an end. It was time to shed the white protective suit, put my dress uniform back on, and head to the second floor, to Dr. Richard Castro's office. I needed to find out what ulterior motives the eccentric red-bearded man had for insisting on a confidential meeting after work.