Chapter Text
The journey back to camp took less time than he expected and upon reentering his small camp, seeing the smiling faces glad to see that their savior was back, it seemed that all his troubles just melted away. Jessica and Kaitlyn were the only ones who seemed off-put.
“I don’t like your new outfit… it looks mean”
Hiram frowned at this, getting down on his knees to better be at her level.
“It’s going to help me fight the zombies better, Kay. You want that, don’t you?” he explained, letting her feel the suit to hopefully relieve some of her tension towards it.
“But… but you said they just need to be helped, not fighted.” she responded, shuffling her feet in the dirt.
“That’s what I used to think, yes, but now I know that the zombies are very bad and need to be destroyed. All of them, eradicated like the pests they are.”
Kaitlyn was scared of his tone. The end of that sentence came out almost like a growl, his eyes narrowing as he looked in the direction of the front of the camp.
“But that’s really mean, you said they’re people too, just like us. You shouldn’t be mean to other people.”
“I’ve seen that they aren’t people anymore, they’ve changed too much. They don’t deserve their lives anymore, Kay.”
Hiram was holding her hand, trying to get her to see eye to eye with his new ideology, but she looked worried and snatched her hand back.
“You’re different, I don’t like you now. You used to be nice.” she said with a huff, going back to play with her sister. Hiram stood up, shocked. He hadn’t changed that much, had he? No… that one little thing couldn’t be it. Perhaps she was just in a bad mood, he had been gone for a few days and the kiddos did miss him when he left. Yeah, that was it. They were just upset that he’d been gone so long. They’d get over it in a few days, they had to.
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“Alright, I’ve brought new weapons to protect from the zombies. They’re still a ways away, I saw them on my trip back, and they’re moving as slow as ever, but I’m thinking of sending a party out to thin them out before they get here.”
Hiram was standing on a podium made of an unsteady stack of old parts but it functioned for addressing the crowd. His gyroscopes made even the bashed-in old CRT monitor a balanceable surface, and while he wasn’t particularly comfortable the black-clad figure on the top of a scrap heap casted a quite intimidating shadow in the late-afternoon sun.
A hand was lifted by one of the members of the crowd.
“Yes! I see I have a question,” Hiram said, clasping his hands before pointing to the person, “what’s on your mind?”
“I thought you said we were to restrain from fighting the zombies, at least as long as we had hope for a cure. Is the cure lost now? My wife… I was hoping I could save her.”
A grim look crossed Hiram’s face as he clasped his hands tighter to his chest, not happy with the explanation he had to give.
“What I saw in the labs back home showed me the hopelessness of this situation. We have to go on the offensive now or risk destruction. I wish we could save your wife, I truly do, but there’s nothing we can do now but put her out of her misery.”
The man in the crowd buried his face in his hands, the person nearest to him giving him a comforting hand on his shoulder. This should have hurt Hiram, even one person he couldn’t save usually wracked him with guilt for days, but he didn’t feel anything but hatred for the shamblers.
“Now, this mission is likely to be highly dangerous. Knowing what I do about how it spreads it's an unfortunate fact that many of you who accompany me will not survive. But it’s for a good cause, think about how many lives you save by taking out these vermin.” he enunciated, his gestures exaggerated to keep the crowd’s attention.
The members of the crowd were exchanging worried glances, though, this wasn’t the Hiram they knew a few days ago. He would have never endangered anyone, let alone actually go out of his way to harm something. Something had happened while he was gone those few days but they couldn’t fathom what.
Some people had been waiting for this moment all along. They didn’t ever quite vibe with Hiram’s prior nonviolence and this was a turn of events in their favor. And so Hiram gathered his volunteers for their mission and set out.
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There were some familiar, well, they once were familiar, faces in the crowd of zombies. Hiram tried to ignore them, the nagging feeling that this wasn’t his purpose beginning to resurface. But he had to have revenge for what they did to Sprint, what they did to all these people alongside him.
He quickly grew accustomed to the weaponry in his hands, it almost seemed like it was made just for him. Exactly to his specifications, meant to play off his already-existing modifications and abilities. It led to some interesting theories about his creation, about what these weapons were for if he was meant for non-violence, but Hiram was too concerned with exterminating the fleshy masses of the undead than worrying about what his creators truly had in store for him.
His intense knowledge for the anatomy of humans, even in their horrifically mutated state, led to him becoming a deadly zombie-killer. Even as the comrades around him perished to the horde, he remained vigilant, each death around him just fueling his need for vengeance.
After what seemed like an eternity the battle was finished, while the zombies may have been superior to Hiram’s ragtag bunch of humans in nearly every way, they didn’t have dangerous experimental prototype weaponry dedicated to the destruction of the opposition. Hiram’s once pristine silvery white chassis was tainted with foul-smelling necrotic blood. Blood that was once a human being’s. The human beings he was sworn to protect.
This was wrong. Everything about this situation screamed that it was some kind of cruel set-up. He wasn’t supposed to be killing anyone, even if he had a personal vendetta it shouldn’t matter. MRM-20, his real name, stood for Multipurpose Rescue Machine, he was meant for saving people. His entire purpose was to help people. What had he become?
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He left the survivors of his side with directions back to the camp, he had places to be and questions to be answered. It seemed as though Pavel was the only one with the answers since seeing as Sprint was gone, who else would have such intimate knowledge of his specifications to create such appalling items?
Hiram stormed to the lab, nearly crushing the identification hand scanner on his way in. Decontamination mist soaked the floor as he cracked through the door of the glass chamber, his mortification with his father’s alleged actions destroying any semblance of reasonability he had left. His moral compass, still as strong as ever, was now pointed in a completely different direction.
The elevator ride down to the medical wing seemed to take an eternity. The confines of the room just exasperated Hiram further, the small space symbolizing his soul, what he knew to be right, trapped in a shell that wasn’t of his own design. The thin metal handrails on the walls were no match for his vice-like grip and by the time he had reached the correct floor they were but bent scraps of metal lying on the elegantly patterned tile.
“Excuse me, sir, but no visitors are allowed at the moment.”
It was Dara Huon, the head doctor of this wing. She had just seen him out of the corner of her eye, not recognizing him at first. Upon seeing it was Hiram, though, a worried look crossed her face.
“Look, Hiram, I know you care about him but you really should go. He’s not in the mood to see you right now, especially considering you were the one who caused this in the first place.” The last part she spoke under her breath, hoping Hiram wouldn’t hear, but his acute hearing wasn’t even fazed by the volume difference. This was an insult. Pavel was his father, Hiram would never want to hurt him intentionally. Not even after what he expected to be right, not even after their attempts to turn him into a killing machine.
“Dr. Huon, we don’t want a repeat of the last situation-”
“No, we don’t, do we? Then leave.”
“I can explain!” he said, his tone growing exasperated.
“We’ve got all the explanation we need from the medical team who took him here last week.”
His rage bubbled through now, stronger than it was last time. Huon only had a few moments of looking into Hiram’s eyes, filled with something she’d never seen, before everything went black.
Her neck had been shattered. That was never his intention. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He was… well, he didn’t know what he was thinking at that moment. She was keeping him from his answers, keeping him from his creator, and so like any obstacle Hiram had faced along this trip he disposed of her. But she was innocent, more innocent than any of those zombies out there. Hell, she was a healer just like him, she had sworn her life to helping others, and Hiram had just… killed her. Like that. Someone who had the potential to save so many more lives ended by someone dedicated to saving them. The sheer irony was overbearing and Hiram wanted more than anything to move on from this moment. Perhaps he would feel some sort of peace when he got his answers.
“Papa, are you there?” he called out, his ear fins fully extended now to triangulate which room Pavel was in.
“Hiram?”
The voice was weak, barely audible from down the hall, but that’s what the fins was meant for detecting. Desperate for the answers to all the nagging questions inside his head he practically sprinted down the hall surprising more than a few of the staff in the rooms along the way.
Peeking inside Pavel’s room was a grisly sight. He looked in far worse shape than when Hiram had seen him last, his face a look of someone who had seen something they can never forget. The look of sleep deprivation masked whatever emotion was being displayed on his face, his whole frame looking gaunt and sickly.
“I-what happened?”
Pavel mustered a smile somehow, adjusting a dial on the side of the medical bed.
“It had all been a long time coming, katyonachyk. I am dying, thanks to you.”
These words hit Hiram like a bullet to the face. He didn’t think Pavel would blame him, it was an accident! The whole situation made him want to shut down, to power off so he didn’t have to feel these horrible feelings inside. And that rage, that rage was bubbling back.
“My fault? My fault? You’re the one who planned to refit me as a killer. You’re the one who made those weapons. If anything, this is all your fault.”
With this Pavel’s smile creeped back just causing more feelings to boil inside him. Now, Hiram was never built to experience strong emotions and when I say boil I mean boil. His internal wiring was beginning to melt, the circuit boards throughout his entire body beginning to fuse. As his blue matter core began to react to the changing temperatures in his body his eyes began to glow a fierce blue, the red film over them almost melting with the power.
“Hiram, son, it was for your own good. The world does not need healers right now, it needs soldiers to fight this plague. I will admit I did not plan it going like this but what is done is done. You need to embrace your new identity to keep going. Do not think about who you were before, think of the living weapon you have become.”
“I was never supposed to be an instrument of genocide!” Hiram shrieked, putting his hands around Pavel’s throat. All the while he kept smiling, almost as if this had been his plan all along, and the smiling made Hiram grip harder.
In a heartbeat he heard a snap, Pavel’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he dropped the now corpse of his father onto the bed. What had he done?!
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Hiram never truly believed in such silly things as karma or superstitions or fate, but this seemed like some sort of cosmic retribution for his actions. A healer corrupted, a savior turned to a murderer, he had brought this all on himself. This… this was sick. This had to be destiny, someone couldn’t be taken this low without dire consequences, and this was his. The death of his second father at his hands. He couldn’t hold back… how could this have happened?
Everything he’d done began to weigh on him, all the people he’d failed to save back when he was solely dedicated to disaster relief, the medical chief with the shattered cheekbone, the scared looks on the children when he came back to the camp, Huon, and now Pavel. The blood was all on his twitching hands. The fusion of his wires had gone so far as to restrain his motor functions, it was likely to be the end for him soon. How poetic.
The murderer ended by the guilt of his own actions.
As the last of his circuitry fused and his core suffered a meltdown, somewhere miles away another bot’s blue matter core ruptured simultaneously to save the world. Two blue matter explosions, one from heartbreak and one to save the hearts of many. How ironic it was that the bot who had dedicated his life to serving others wouldn’t go out in the way that he lived. He would go out in fear, without hope for the future. As the lab was vaporized and the tendrils of reality began to split, the universe that had been destroyed by one Walter Worker’s hubris ceased to exist.
The last thoughts that echoed across the tear in space-time left by the disintegration of a timeline were ones of fear, ones of regret, and ones of anger. Forever a black stain of sorrow would taint the multiverse from the longings of one deeply mournful robot.