11

Logan wasn't sure what the “central brain” looked like. He just hoped he'd know it when he saw it.

Taras was helpful, but only up to a point. Truth was, he was a bit fucked in the head – a bit? Who was he kidding? The dude (he was assuming dude; ultimately, he didn't know) was bugfuck nuts. And how could he not be? He was decapitated and hooked up to machines, some kind of artificial intelligence program (he assumed), that kept him believing things that simply weren't true. From what he could tell, he'd been living in a dream world. It was impossible to tell for how long, but long enough for his sanity to degrade considerably. Logan wasn't sure he could trust him, but he could if only because he wanted something from him, and Logan wouldn't deliver until he got what he wanted.

In Taras's mind, the base was huge (true), well staffed (totally false), and kind of like an office building staffed with mostly military personnel (yeah, right). Also, Russia was the dominant world power. Logan wasn't even sure communism had collapsed in his world, meaning he could have been trapped in that super-sized feedback machine for decades. It begged the question why, but from what he'd been able to discern, it was some kind of training module that went far off the rails. Or maybe even a war simulator that got hopelessly mired in bureaucracy, as if the AI became intelligent enough to realize that almost everything in the universe boiled down to paperwork. (What a horrifying thought.)

The kids were grumbling, they wanted more information, but he wasn't inclined to give it to them just yet. Mainly because a lot of what he had didn't make sense, and he felt he'd been a big enough idiot as it was. And no one would be happy with what he had agreed to do for Taras. Well, maybe John and Zehra.

The doorways seemed to lead downwards. In a technical sense, they couldn't, but there was a feeling of gradually sinking that Logan couldn't shake off. Maybe it was just in his head.

The more they went inward, the more the rooms smelled of dust and long emptiness. It got to a point where there wasn't even equipment in the rooms; they were just empty boxes like the ones they'd been trapped in. "This was a prison," Zehra said, and Logan added that to the list of possibilities. Maybe. He got no sense that Taras was a criminal, but Taras's mindscape was so fucked up, he was probably lucky he wasn't crazy too. Well, crazier.

Eventually there was a feeling of vibration through the metal floor plating, a rising and falling thrum that had its own rhythm, like a heartbeat. He seemed to feel it ahead of everyone else, but Kitty was the next to pick it up. "What's that?"

"It's not another sonic weapon, is it?" John asked, sounding annoyed. As soon as they were out of here, Logan had decided to punch him. Not too hard, just enough to wind him for a minute.

"Can't be," Shaheen said. "Kitty gutted that sucker. This is different."

"I'm smelling ozone," Logan said. "Electricity build up. It may be a generator."

"Another one?" Kitty sighed. "I can go ahead and look."

Logan stopped and nodded, and she ran ahead. The doors were still open, but she went intangible anyways, a good safety precaution when you weren't sure what you were facing.

Doubly good, now that the emergency lights flickered and all the open doors suddenly disappeared. "What the fuck..?" John exclaimed.

"Taras could only keep 'em open for so long," Logan said. "Kitty's fine, she didn't need the doors. But if it's the central brain alerted to his betrayal, we could be in trouble."

Piotr came up beside him, one of his muscular arms starting to turn metal. "Suit up?" he asked.

He nodded. "Might as well. Hafta be ready for anything."

"I can take the wall," Zehra said, and he started to smell static electricity around her. Strands of her hair were already starting to float up.

"No, we're saving you. You're our ace in the hole. Nariko, can you burn us through?"

"No problem," she agreed, although he got a slight whiff of fear from her. Still, she didn't hesitate, putting her hands on the wall and tracing out a circle. It crumbled into dirt and fell to the floor at her feet. Logan, right behind her, peered inside and made sure everything was okay before they ventured forth. More empty rooms. Storage rooms? Maybe. No one would keep prisoners - especially mutant prisoners - so close to a power source. That was just asking to be blown up.

Kitty came running back through the next wall before Nariko could burn a hole in it. "Oh my god, it's so weird," she said, panting for breath. She must not have dared to become tangible anywhere in the interim. "It's like Frankenstein's lab crossed with a gay disco."

"Have you been to a gay disco?" John asked.

She shrugged. "I've seen Queer As Folk."

"Close enough," Logan said, ignoring the looks he was getting for obliquely admitting he'd been in a gay disco. Hey, when you were friends with Marc, you went to interesting places, not all of them abandoned military bases. Some were gay nightclubs full of shirtless go-go boys who obviously stuffed their mylar shorts and for some damn reason shaved their chests. But that was neither here nor there. "Take me there. I wanna see if what Taras told me was true. Shaheen, follow us."

"Got it," she said, then added, "Lesbian bars are more sedate."

"I know," he agreed. He'd been in one in Canada once. Accidentally; it took him about half a minute to realize he smelled nothing but women in the place, such an oddity for a bar he knew he'd stumbled into a sanctuary. But it wasn't crowded at that time, and the bartender didn't seem to care, so he had a beer and enjoyed the peace, kind of sorry he couldn't pick up any of the women but also okay with it, as it took the pressure off. He could see why straight women liked male gay bars. Again came the funny looks, although Shaheen just smirked at him, and although Kitty clearly wanted to ask, she just grabbed his arm and lead him through the wall.

They went through five more walls, taking a right turn before coming into a large room about the size of your average airplane hanger. Kitty let go of his arm, letting him become tangible so he could smell the air of the place. A good thing, as it was totally strange. "Can I ask why you've been in gay bars?" Kitty wondered, now tangible herself.

He shrugged. "It's always good to see how other people live."

She shook her head in disbelief. “Every time I'm sure I know you, something pops up that surprises me.”

“If you never remember anything else I've taught ya, darlin', just remember this: predictability kills. Always mix it up, keep 'em guessing, keep alive.” It was good advice, even though it didn't quite fit this context. Oh well, nothing was perfect.

He could see what Kitty meant about the room. There were different stratas of what he took to be emergency and auxiliary lighting on the walls and ceiling, some of it blue and some of it yellow, half of it steady and separate lights flickering due to power loss or simply age – there was no telling how long they'd been on. But it did make it look like there were flashing lights only missing a techno beat to keep time with.

The room itself was mostly concrete and metal, but none of it actually made sense. There were what looked like metal guide tracks in the wall, and random bits of metal embedded in concrete (hooks, loops, rectangular bits that could have part of junction boxes or any damn thing), and things so covered in dust they could have been machines or crates, buried beneath the detritus of age. Farther away, metal glinted under flickering lights, but it looked haphazard. Scrap? That was certainly the impression, but who would store scrap in a place like this? That didn't make sense, and it made him suspicious.

Recessed into shadows on a side of the walls where all the lights had died, he could see hulking shapes, smell dust fried by electricity. “You the “central brain”? It's time to pack it in, pal. Your world doesn't exist anymore.”

As Logan started stomping towards the shadows, there was a metal noise, a sort of ratcheting, grinding screech and groan, like something rusting and mechanical firing up anyways. Two small red pin lights came on, and something lurched from the darkness into the inconstant light. It looked like a boxy suit of armor, only there was no way for anyone to have seen through the solid facemask, and Logan didn't smell anything Human. “Holy shit, it's Iron Man,” Kitty gasped in shock.

“Yeah, well I'm adamantium, so I win.” He popped his claws and was about to launch into a run, hoping that speed would make up for what he lost in bulk to the metal guy, but then twin laser bolts shot from its glowing red eye holes and burnt deep holes into the floor at his feet, making him stop. Oh yeah, that looked like it was gonna hurt.

“Robots?” She exclaimed in disbelief. “This place has killer robots too? All it needs is evil clowns, and we've seen everything.”

“Maneuver number three, kid,” he told her.

“Which – oh, crap. I hate that one.”

The lasers were obviously powering up, so he said, “C'mon, move!” He barely felt her grab the back of his jacket before he started running, her right behind him, and when the robot (?) fired this time the laser passed harmlessly through them and burnt a couple more divots into the floor. He came to a dead stop in front of it and Kitty kept on running, going straight through him and diving into the robot. She disrupted enough circuitry to make it pause with a sort of labored hum, and as she came out the back of it, he sliced through what was probably its neck (its head was basically just balanced on its blocky shoulders; it looked like an early prototype of those bipedal robots they now had in Japan), and with his second set of claws sliced through its midsection, so the two pieces of it fell in opposite directions, leaving its legs standing alone.

“And that's how you kill a robot,” he said, kicking the legs over. They hit the floor with a noise not unlike the door of a '72 Buick Skylark falling off the body. (Yes, he knew that sound specifically.)

Kitty was standing bent over, her hands on her knees, panting for breath. “I don't know why running through you makes me feel bad, but it does.”

“Adamantium's toxic as all fuck.”

“But it shouldn't effect me intangible, should it.” Not a question.

He shrugged. It shouldn't, but he had no answer for her.

He scanned the shadows, searching for further surprises, and belatedly realized that he didn't actually smell the robot. Shouldn't he have? He smelled the same dust and ozone scent as before, the same smell of abandonment and disuse, but there should have been more. Nothing existed without smell; everything had an odor.

He turned back to the fallen machine to get a close up smell of it, and it wasn't there anymore. “It's gone,” he noted. Why wasn't he surprised?

Kitty, who had been searching for other things now that she had straightened up, turned back and seemed even more surprised than before. “What? How the hell – you diced it like a chicken. Robots don't regenerate!” She paused. “Do they?”

“It's not real.” There were still holes in the floor where the lasers had hit, proving the floor was solid and real, but beyond that he supposed everything else was up for grabs.

“What? Bullshit. I know I went through something real, all weird and mechanical and full of wires, and you know you sliced through something solid. Look, the burn holes are still there.”

“It's real, but it's not real. Huh. I should have figured that out with Jeannie. But I guess Taras was augmenting it at the time, so I really didn't have a chance to think straight.”

Kitty shook her head, staring at him in confusion. “Was that a Zen koan?”

“Oh, is that what's going on?” Shaheen said. Nariko had just melted a hole through the back wall, and now everyone else was coming through. “It's not working like the one back at the mansion.”

It figured Shaheen would get where he was going with this. Sometimes he would swear she had a minor bit of telepathy she never told anyone about. “No, it doesn't. But I think the function's different. Back at the mansion it's for training. Here ... I think it's a prison. Or maybe a torture chamber. Both.”

“What the fuck are you guys talking about?” John demanded.

Kitty finally got it. “The Danger Room. You're talking about the Danger Room, aren't you?”

Piotr, still all metaled out, seemed surprised. “Solid holography?”

He nodded. “Something got seriously fucked up here.”

“Isn't that kind of technology super rare?” Nariko asked.

“Oh shit,” John said suddenly. Logan thought maybe he saw a new threat, but he seemed to be turned inward, thinking of something. “Mags – Magneto – once said something like Charles's sacred technology wasn't so sacred anymore. He was talking to Mystique. She seemed to know what he was talking about, but when I asked he said it wasn't important. Could he have known about this? Is that why I saw him?”

“Charles?” Kitty repeated.

He shrugged a single shoulder, somewhat dismissive. “He always called Xavier Charles. Kinda gay, if you ask me.”

“But where does the whole severed head thing come into all of this?” Nariko continued. “Why were we being fed fears and stuff?”

“It's crazy,” Zehra said.

Piotr was still looking at John, stuck on what he said. “Did Magneto sell the technology to someone else? You were going to tell us this when, John?”

But Shaheen pointed to Zehra, and said to Logan, “I bet she's right, you know. The system's nuts.”

Now everybody was staring at Shaheen with varying degrees of disbelief. “Machines can't go crazy,” John snapped. “They can malfunction, but they can't be nuts.”

“Says who?” Logan countered. The more he considered it, the more it seemed possible. “The more sophisticated the AI, the more that can go wrong with it. And wouldn't chaos meet the definition of insanity? At least for a program.”

John seemed surprised. “We're really considering this? Crazy machines.”

“With some Human help,” Logan admitted. “The Human attached to the system – Taras – is completely out of his mind. Maybe one influenced the other.” Something related to PsyOps? Maybe this was the Russian equivalent, augmented by technology. If so, something went horribly, horribly wrong.

“So what's the central brain?” Kitty wondered. “Is it a crazy program or a crazy person?”

As if that invocation was enough to bring them their answer, there was a huge rumbling noise that shook the floor and obliterated any further conversation. Logan turned to see the gay Frankenstein's abandoned disco was gone, replaced by a vista of snow only occasionally marred by a burst of static that caused the image to fade in spots, revealing concrete floors and walls. Shadows emerged grey in the distance, slowly becoming military tanks with huge forward cannons. “We can die here, can't we?” John asked, mostly curious.

“I already have,” Logan said. Or so he thought. Maybe he hadn't; maybe he just had a near death experience. No matter; it was a safe assumption the program had no limits. Maybe it even thought it was defending itself, like Taras thought he was. “Piotr, with me.” Piotr obeyed, and they stood shoulder to shoulder in front of everyone else, a literal Human shield. He wasn't all metal like Piotr, but he was the most expendable, so that counted for something. “Kitty, maneuver one.”

“Oh god, this has been a horrible day,” she said, but Logan knew she would obey. It was simply her grabbing the arms of John and Nariko, ready to go intangible at a millisecond's notice. Shaheen grabbed Nariko's arm and reached out to Zehra, but she slipped away and stepped in front of Logan and Piotr, walking out towards the tanks.

“Is that all you've got?” she sneered, the ozone scent rising as her hair started to frizz with static electricity.

Sheheen put her hand on Logan's shoulder, guaranteeing he'd go intangible if the rest of them did. “Why do I have a feeling this is going to be ugly?” she whispered.

“'Cause it is gonna be ugly,” he replied, as the first cannon boomed.