bakerstreet | (no subject)

Sector Thirteen didn't get a lot of APBs. Not when Dredd was on the beat. He'd become even more of a legend since Peach Trees: the Judge who took down an entire city block.

And they didn't often call for a Psi Judge for backup. Everything about this case already screamed bad news, even before Anderson rolled her Lawmaster to a stop outside the Chelsea Clinton Block, the ring of Judges pulling security, weapons trained at the building.

"In there?" she asked. She didn't need the answer, but it was courtesy to ask, something that made the 'mutant' a little less frightening, less weird. At the nod, she stepped inside the ring, heading toward the building, prying off her helmet.

Her weapon was still holstered...for now. She could imagine Dredd scowling at her, judging her for being unprepared, but sometimes, as she'd told him, you didn't solve everything with rounds of Hi-Ex.

She hoped this was one of those times.

She stopped, about ten feet from the entrance, hands raised, looking like she was giving the perp inside a chance to check her out, when she was really reaching out with her mind, trying to get a fix on what she was facing, what had half of Sector Thirteen mobilized.

Red gleamed in the dark, forming a horizontal slit. The mind behind it was an odd mix of man and machine bleeding into each other, fragments of memories and audio/visual logs that should’ve been filed by date but weren’t. Not anymore. The name “Murphy, Alex” floated up, rusty at the edges as if the man hadn’t thought about it too much. The drone part of Alex was run-through with static, the words [PROTOCOL OVERRIDE] glaring larger than life in Cassandra’s mind. The one clear thought was Directive One: serve the public trust. Arrest, pacify. Detain. Judging by the bodies he’d left around Chelsea Clinton Block, his definition of who was innocent and who wasn’t had changed. Whatever shred of Alex was left in there? Couldn’t fight the override by himself.

Alex limped forward into the edge of the light, one graphene leg dragging slightly under him, the ankle joint shot so that his foot was twisted around on its socket and pointing backward. It whirred in protest as he stared at Cassandra for a grand total of 0.65 seconds, long enough for his targeting systems to declare the Psi Judge a threat despite the classic white-flag gesture.

His thigh split open as he ejected the battle rifle into his hand. In one smooth motion he leveled it, aimed, fired.

Then he decided to issue his warning. Alex's voice shook, scrambled with static. “ - will result in incapacitation. On the floor with your hands on your head - your....your head...I repeat - ”

If it weren't for the sudden psiflash, the same one that had told her Kay was going to try something Dredd would call 'funny', that had her moving. It was still too late, an imperfect dodge, the round slamming into the heavy body armor she wore, turning what was a dive to the side into a half-back roll from the impact.

Great, nothing like getting shot in front of witnesses.

"Good!" she called out, for those behind her, to let them know she was still functioning. They'd move in and wipe out half the block if they needed to: she could feel their minds moving toward that.

She sucked in a breath--the impact had knocked the wind out of her, broken her concentration--reaching out again with her mind. She wasn't entirely complying, but for a moment she was lying still, as she concentrated, finding a name floating to the surface of a roiling mass that must be the perp. "Alex!" A pause, because the shouts stung her still bruised ribs. "Alex. It doesn't have to be like this."

His mind fluctuated from almost there, borderline functional to fragments, even simple code scrambled into gibberish. Lethal-force > Miranda rights > Probable Cause > Person of Interest > ??? floated up and twisted around that concept of "Detective Alex Murphy" that was still, miraculously, somewhere in there.

His name being shouted actually brought him to a stop. Servos whirring, he shifted toward her again, his mouth slightly parted as if he was surprised she was still speaking. That was a direct hit to the center of her body mass. She should be dead and waiting quietly for the coroner, not - not fraternizing with a member of the DCPD, her vitals loud and clear. Static fuzzed across his HUD as Alex realized she had body armor he hadn't picked up before...even though it was visible to just about anyone with two eyes. The M2 in his hand lowered a fraction, drifting down with the muzzle trembling slightly.

"I... it. Comply." Alex took another limping step toward the woman, wondering if he knew (knows?) her, if this was someone he had a personal stake with. Blonde hair. He thought he used to like blondes. " - ead or dead, you're coming with me."

The battle rifle came up again...

Edited 2014-03-07 00:49 (UTC)

She could see a face, a quick flash of a pale crescent in the shadows of the entryway. Part of a face, at any rate. W-was he a Judge? Their helmets covered everything but the mouth, too.

Her brows furrowed. Nothing he was saying was making sense. Was he injured? Was he on drugs? There was something....wrong in his head: she couldn't get a fix on him, couldn't hold anything stable. Just the name, and a sense of danger.

All she knew is she has to get closer. Maybe she can help. "All right. I'm coming. No need to shoot." She moved up onto her knees, slowly, keeping her hands in sight, body tense in case she had to dive for cover, the damaged armor obvious under her ribs.

Alex would've looked more like a streamlined, matte black Judge knock-off if it wasn't for the fact his ankle was twisted completely backward. It sparked as he staggered another step and then another toward Cassandra. The M2 remained trained on her, that wobble that would've been unacceptable visible even from her position. Even he wasn't sure if he'd hit her with that same level of accuracy and he was the one holding the gun here.

"Your cooperation is appreciated."

Alex seemed to freeze in place, going as still as a statue except for the gun arm's trembling and the damaged foot. This would be the part where he would scan the criminal records for her face, trying to get a name, answers. Something, really. His head shifted a centimeter to the side, then back again.

[ NO DATA ]

His mind constricts on itself, then seems to throb, as if he might be gearing up for another attack because "no data" didn't sit right with Alex. His hesitation did buy Cassandra a few more precious seconds, close enough to get within arm's reach.

She saw the ankle, and wondered how the hell he put weight on it. More than that, she wondered why she wasn't picking up any pain, any of the white hot spikes across her mind.

"Good." She didn't want to tell him that assault on a Judge carried a death penalty. It was her charge to make, despite the witnesses behind her. "Now, put the weapon down, Alex, and we can talk this out."

She couldn't shake the feeling it wouldn't go down that way, and that feeling flared suddenly in her mind, as she closed the distance, her off-side arm swinging across her body and against his left wrist, trying to knock it loose, or at least off target.

Put the weapon down. Measure eyebrows placement, eye dilation, blood pressure, perspiration levels. All of them pointed at a good cop trying to doing her job with the least amount of bodies. The kind of cop he used to be, before OmniCorp. But allowing himself to be disarmed was one of those base subroutines that still functioned just fine: Cassandra's threat-level went suddenly from “cooperating” to “assault of a police officer”. The slit across his helmet glared red as he suddenly shifted toward her.

Hitting his arm was like trying to punch your way through a graphene wall – no give of flesh, no point where you could go for a nerve or pop a socket, no bones to “encourage” cooperation. Cassandra managed to shove his arm to the side, the shot sizzling past her head close enough to singe hair.

Alex’s thigh hissed as it opened to reveal his other weapon, other hand going down for the unregistered pistol.

Edited (typos) 2014-03-07 07:18 (UTC)

If he wanted to get technical, she'd killed another Judge, in her first day out. Sometimes, especially in Mega City One, shit happened.

Her plan half worked: she could smell the scorch of burnt hair about the same time her forearm screamed pain at her. Was he some kind of mutant? He must be, like one of the Angel gang. Which would explain a lot.

But you learned at the Academy to clear an enemy's field of fire, so she dropped low, spinning on her heels to swing herself behind him. She almost had to jump up to get him, the forearm that was still burning with pain trying to wedge itself between his chin and chest, against his throat, using all 110 pounds of her weight to try to pull him down.

"Alex. Lower the weapon. Don't me do...this." This wasn't the world's likely most ineffectual headlock, it was pushing her mind into his, trying to push through the muddled red and black chaos that tasted like an explosion, trying to find that spirit she had sensed before.

Having a girl in body armor hanging off his neck would've strangled the fight out of him, if Alex was still human. Or if what was left of his throat and lungs were exposed.

The NI-408 started to come up, his flesh hand wobbling as much as his graphene one and without being able to see Cassandra, he couldn’t get an accurate lock on her head. The simulations he ran real-time to map out the two bodies, any possible obstructions he (or she) could use to their advantage, those were all useless right now because the simulations collapsed into trash code before they get anywhere. She couldn’t choke him out and he couldn’t seem to shake her off. The pistol’s muzzle drifted dangerously close to Cassandra as she worked her way into a mind trying to run simulation after simulation and the vague, almost wordless thought that Alex wished he wasn’t so damned armored here.

Alex was built for the traditional threats – drug runners, cartels, other drones. He wasn’t built for psychics. As Cassandra hung on, pressing deeper into a mind fragmented by time and whatever had caused the glitch in his systems, the slower Alex moved until he was half bent over in a kind of crouch, one arm frozen reaching behind him and inches away from grabbing at her leg.

The impression Cassandra would get was exhaustion, a man who shouldn’t be alive but was. Faces, some of them in that too-sharp quality of a drone’s recording, others from a man’s point of view. They smeared. Names tumbled into each other. Wishing he could eat again. A running tally of the criminals still at large. Several times what must’ve been Alex's family struggled to resharpen, the memories blurring. Cassandra’s own faced popped up outlined by a targeting reticule, run-through with feedback. Her own words replayed back at her, broken into fragments – “Good – weapon….lower the weapon – do this.”

Edited (i can type gud) 2014-03-08 06:47 (UTC)

Everything she could think of to try to neutralize him without killing him, she'd tried. Nothing seemed to be working. She could feel her own weight drag down, but he barely seemed to feel it, weapon trying to level at her, as she tried to twist away.

As he bent forward, her weight pressed against his back, more inflexible than the body armor she was used to. He wasn't a machine, but he felt like one here. Just...not in his mind. That was chaos, a swirl of unfamiliar people, places that looked clean and bright and different from the polluted gloom of the megacity.

"Alex." She pushed forward into the chaos, until she was somewhere in his mind, not square in the center. It felt like she was standing on an unstable floor. "You need to stop. We don't want to have to kill you."

Alex's own mental image of himself was skewed - sometimes it was a normal human man, cropped hair and height that used to get "how's the weather up there" jokes from Officer Lewis because he was the king of stupid jokes. Other times it warped into seeing himself as he really was, stuck on a rack with just a head staring back, watching his own larynx bobbling in the mirror, his lungs billowing in and out of some see-through case. Then there was the chassis Cassandra had been personally introduced to, black curves and that red slit instead of eyes.

Alex couldn't seem to settle on which one he was.

He turned toward Cassandra, his mouth moving but his voice out of synch. "I can't. - 'nt. Trying. Something wrong. Who're you?"

For a second he seemed to peer right at Cassandra, as if realizing he wasn't alone. The RoboCop version of him was still convinced that this would be solved by an appropriate application of lethal force. Hadn't he shot her? He was sure he shot her. She looked awfully young to be waving a gun around, Alex's mind starting to wander into reviewing current gun laws.

...at least his partner can joke. If Dredd ever cracked a smile she'd probably pass out. And there was nothing to joke about the shifting chaos that tried to coalesce around her, where she'd normally find a center of focus. Images bled and mixed into each other, like a story played too fast and underwater.

"Cassandra," she said, simply. Leave the 'Judge' part out for now. Just Cassandra. And she showed a bit of her own past, orphan, mutant, outcast. She felt the confusion, a flash of the shot he'd flung at her from some sort of targeting system, saw herself go down. If it confused him less....she rippled, standing before him, and let the tear in the body armor show, where the round had creased her rib plating. He could shoot her here: it wouldn't do anything. "What's wrong? Alex. Talk to me." Talk to me, and for grud's sake don't shoot anyone in the outside.

Dredd cracking a smile would probably be a sign things weren’t just bad, they were hopelessly screwed.

The simulations kept running, now focusing on Cassandra getting shot over and over. Replaying the fall of her body, tracking trajectories, different projected impact points. Alex raised the battle rifle in his hand and tried to center it and realized he couldn’t get a lock or the M2 jammed or suddenly she wasn’t even in the same building anymore. His eyes, when they were visible, darted toward her voice. She had friendly eyes. Brown, from what he could tell. He wanted to trust them, going from the gut instincts that got him through months of undercover work when he had a body that could fit in clothes and he had to worry about getting shot. The AI running haywire would rather just shoot her, to be safe. A dead target was a safe target.

“I was – I was taken. - ffline,” Alex gritted his teeth. He tried to focus on Cassandra’s brown eyes instead of the simulations glitching out around them. “ – line. Suspect. Woke up like this. Virus? Or…damaged chips.”

The M2 in his mind came up, fired at her. Emptied itself, actually, and he still couldn’t seem to take her down. It was the closest thing to what the hell? his programming could manage.

Edited (mixing up tenses oops) 2014-03-10 06:38 (UTC)

One day she'd get Dredd to smile. One day.

Today, when she told him that she went into a building alone with a shooting suspect...would not be that day. His frown would likely reach weaponizable proportions.

"Damaged." He kept slipping, like an eel, almost, through her control, even as she tried to stabilize him. "Radiation. Would radiation do it?" Booth's war's latest casualty, he'd be.

She let the mental construct shoot at her, firing a full magazine, standing patiently. She wasn't really here and he wasn't really shooting, like a virtual reality projection. Normally it was funny when they attacked, but his distress seemed less angry and more confused, almost frantic, like some major law of his world wasn't working. But as long as she kept him in here, he wasn't out there, shooting real people. "You might as well put the weapon down, Alex."

The static blurring at Cassandra’s question was the equivalent of a digital shrug – no clue on the radiation front at this time. Or ever. Yes. Maybe?

Alex actually jerked his head up at the question, panic written across a face that alternated from fourth-degree burns to how he always saw himself, just a cop doing a job that needed doing. “Christ, I’m try – ng. I can’t put – down.”

It was grafted to him like the rest of his body, this claustrophobic graphene shell he wished desperately was just body armor like Cassandra’s, the kind you could take off and hang up and call it a day. She seemed like she knew what she was doing and she had that calm, do what I say and nobody gets hurt tone of voice that he recognized as a cop’s: hell, he’d used it himself enough times to know the difference. Good guy. She’s one of the good guys, Alex thought, as he tried to claw the gun out of his hand.

“Help me – et it off,” Alex pleaded. He knew better than to buy into that tone like a civilian but he was human, too. He wanted to believe just as much as he wanted to shoot her and work his way down the criminal records for the next arsonist.

Right. It would take a Tek Judge to figure that out, anyway. If she could get Alex to him. That was a goal, at least, something to do other than take him down.

She couldn't hide the wince on her expression as his face swirled, coalesced to something that looked...damaged beyond words, like the bodies she'd seen after blockwars. "All right. Okay. We can, just, you know, not shoot anything." In here, it'd be fine, but there's part of her that's monitoring outside, where she was still hanging over his body, clinging almost like a monkey over his large, heavy frame.

Inside his head, she stepped closer, her hand covering his on the weapon, helping him lift it. "We can fix this," she said, trying to project into it far more confidence than she felt. All she had to do was disarm him, and take him out among a crowd of hostile Judges. Sure. No problem.

He really, really wanted to believe despite knowing better, cop to cop. The Alex in his mind actually looked at her with hope in his eyes, while the real-world one, the one grafted into a chassis that was slowly coming to life underneath Cassandra piggybacking him, still thought she was one suspect out of hundreds out there who needed to be pacified. Permanently.

Alex shuddered at her touch, not because he found her repulsive but because it ws…weird. Feeling a human hand on his, skin against skin instead of skin against armor plating. She had smaller hands than his, but they were anything but delicate – Cassandra had the hands of someone who knew how to handle her guns.

“Fix it,” Alex repeated. “How?”

Despair weighed down on the two. On the outside, the hand that had been reaching toward her leg twitched, jerks forward a centimeter, froze in place again. Time wasn’t on her side, even rooting around his skull.

She was beginning to wonder if maybe it wasn't radiation. Maybe something else, the Dark Judges, but she couldn't find any trace of them. If Death was there, he was hiding better than he normally did.

Either way, though, there was someone real and in pain and confusion, almost shocked at her touch. She wondered how long it had been since he'd had a hand to be touched with--where did that thought come from, him or her?

It didn't matter. This kind of contact always had some bleedover--you didn't go into someone's head without letting them into yours. She could sense him, but he could probably sense her, as well, the way she was not quite as calm as she sounded. "....I don't know," she admitted. "But there has to be something." She hoped. "Alex, you have to let me help you."

It was a blending of minds that didn't sit well with Alex - there was an impression that he wanted to hold onto who he was, whatever was left, and he was tired of people rooting around in his brain, sticking computer chips or God knows what in the folds. Having a psychic feeling her way around was treading dangerous territory, no matter how hopeful his human face looked. The hope that was, even as they spoke, dwindling.

He could feel Cassandra's doubt bleeding his way. She wasn't any more convinced about the odds than he was.

"They - said that. That." Alex says, his voice fragmented, going from anger to fear to the disinterest of a drone, incapable of caring about motives when outcomes were all that mattered. "Ended li - ke this. Not letting that happ – en again."

The kernel of distrust, fueled by a healthy dose of deserved paranoia, began to grow. In the outside, his hand was close enough to graze Cassandra’s thigh, his armored head swiveling with a screech of tortured servos.

She could feel herself losing control. It never happened before, not like this, not where she had such a hard time even getting a fix on the person whose head she was in. It was like he wasn't in control either, something else was here, cold and dark and heavy.

...like the hand that suddenly gripped her thigh, digging in hard enough to press the plates of the body armor into her muscle. She bit down on a cry of pain, her arms tightening around his throat, trying to keep the pain and frustration back. "Not letting what happen again? Alex. Please. Talk to me." While she was trying to pull him into a full Nelson. Sure. Made perfect sense.

That sad thing was it was a damn good full Nelson, all things considered. It might even work if the plating covering his larynx wasn't blocking her arm - from the way it was scuffed and jiggling, it must've worked loose in an encounter with a different Judge.

Cassandra might have a chance there after all, if Alex didn't kill her first.

The hand squeezed, then froze like a vice as Alex listened, distracted.

"They said they could help me, but who wa - to live like this?" He radiated distress, feeding off that sense things weren't in control from Cassandra's end of the mental link.

Edited (tenses) 2014-03-14 02:35 (UTC)

Yeah, that was a big if, and Cassandra, despite the Academy training, wasn't that big. She found her grip changing almost to a cling, trying to counter the hand trying to pull her off by her thigh.

She caught the distress: it was hard to miss, roiling around her like a fog, one that smelled like old wire. "You...don't want to?"

Her grip slipped, and she would have fallen off his back if her other leg hadn't hooked, almost instinctively, around his waist, plating of her body armor jammed under part of his armor.

Alex couldn't help it: his first thought jumped to staring at Doctor Dennett Norton for the first time, then seeing his reflection in the mirror. Seeing a head, lungs, one hand attached to a metal rod. Not much left of his body left and knowing it couldn't even be called a body at this point. The memory boiled off him in tendrils, more vivid than even the memory of shooting her only a few minutes ago.

No. He didn't want to.

His hand had continued to squeeze against her thigh, crushing body armor to skin and muscle and now he was starting to lift, trying to drag her off by sheer force...and unlike her, he couldn't get tired, couldn't feel fatigue weakening muscles he didn't have.

A little girl with no psychic shielding, no understanding what she even was or where the images came to her, growing up in a Mega City tower block...saw things most children shouldn't ever see. Even so, the image that rushed at her took her back, like air punched out of her lungs.

"Alex...." She knew she was saying his name, like a mantra, trying to pull him back, give him something to center around, but this time her voice was shaking with emotion. If that was him...what he was...she couldn't feel anything but the shock and pain. Would she want to live like that? And he had, for a long time--he didn't remember the apocalypse war. Everyone he knew, had ever known, was dead.

Outside, she gives a sound, part of pain from the hand on her thigh, part of grief, trying to split herself so that she can stay composed, calm, inside. "Alex. If that's what you want, I-I can help." How many perps had she killed in her day? She wasn't squeamish about killing, not after that first one in Peach Trees.

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let me know if this works?

works for me. Going with glitchy/reprogrammed Alex

;_;

>:D

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sorry about the delay!

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She'll probably have to kill him at the rate he's going

;;_;;

Cyborg death incoming

Cyborg death incoming - just a wrap tag. :)