STEELSTORM

Chapter 3

ZONE ASSAULT

‘’History is always written by the victor and histories of the vanquished belong to a shrinking circle of those who were there.’’

-SS Standartenfuhrer Joachim Peiper

‘’I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am at that place within me, we shall be one.’’

-Crazy Horse

“You can abandon your own body, but never let go of your honor’’,

-Miyamoto Mushashi

II

LOCATION: S.S.A. Irminsul

YEAR: 3006 A.D. (1023 A.W.D.)

DATE: October 30

Ungern did not often contemplate his decision to take a bride and become a father, thus repudiating his vows, rescinding his commission as a Martyr Caste Executioner (afforded the authority by direct Mandate of Imperium to implement both ceremonial sacrifice within imperial court as well as to command in battle as a Zone Assault Storm Leader. The exceptions were the, now rare, instances when he found himself alone - especially when he purposefully took leave of his family and the few of those among the Spaceborne with whom he enjoyed genuinely intimate rapport - often seated in the chapel observation deck at the conclusion of the call to prayer at dusk. Cloistered within one of the mediation cubicles, enclosed by barely discernible observatory plastic from every vantage perspective, one could not easily overcome the tendency to reflect upon their own discrete existence as they stared outward into the sea of stars similarly enveloped by the void of infinite space.

A man who’d accrued a less remarkable record as a full-fledged Temple Initiated Executioner would have been banished from Imperium territory under pain of death - or at least publicly court martialled and all but ordered at the conclusion of such formalities to commit suicide. Ungern however was a special case. He had of course been immediately excommunicated from the Temple, had endured the reversal of any of the biological modifications that had been performed upon him following his commission as a Temple novice (although not all of such processes could be reversed by surgical intervention, enough could be ‘remedied’ so as to render him quite comparatively ordinary as regards longevity, physical strength and resistance to enfeebling conditions, and intellectual capacity); finally, and most remarkably, he’d found himself assigned to a lifelong tenure of ‘service’ aboard one of the Imperium Fleet’s now obsolete and superfluous Fleet Space Station Arcologies.

The non-military arcologies were retained in service primarily as a benefit afforded to the remaining Spaceborne populations who were the linear descendants of the first human colonial diaspora - the Imperium reasoned that to force such people to adapt to a planetary existence would almost certainly lead to their rapid extinction, and for this reason, linear spaceborn were a protected ethnicity under law. Further, the ancient arcologies were considered to be instructive by every faction of the ruling castes - the Mullahs considered them to be a direct, mortal link between God and the first beneficiaries of the Covenant. The Senators considered their existence to be a prime symbol of the Imperium’s perennial mandate - in addition to embodying the patriotic and religious tendencies that were considered (somewhat sentimentally) to exemplify the ideal human mindset.

This aforementioned latter tendency had ancient precedents, having developed (if not originated) within the minds of great Khans and historical-cum-legendary warrior chieftains, from golden haired, sanguinary and lustful Olympian boy-generals to the brutally aloof (yet incongruously prone to memoirs and battle manuals of ashen lyricism) killer angel savants who presided over mechanized battlefields twenty centuries subsequent.

First among the latter, the Teutonic warlord messiah who deigned (in emulation of Frederick II) to grant Aryan manhood an armed prophet to lead him out of spiritual (and later physical) bondage and in so doing proposed, with fanatical earnest, that a purposefully cultivated and sustained peasant yeomanry was essential to generate an inviolable bond of blood and soil between the population, the territory they inhabited, and the leadership caste that presided over both. The eastern Czars harbored a similar idea, leading in turn to the cultivation and maintenance of a Cossack ethnicity, whose pragmatic role within the empire was to act as a perpetually forward-deployed vanguard of peasant-killers.

Any Executioner in service of the Imperium could recall learning during his time as a novice initiate in the course of studies in what was termed Philosophical Exegesis, the hidden-yet-visible ‘’hand of God’’ in history - that which had driven the apocalyptic mission of the Great Martyrs, those men who had facilitated the transition from the Devil’s reign upon Earth to a just and holy order by way of cleansing nuclear fire - first among them being the one known only as Irminsul

On grounds of these things, Ungern’s exile afforded him and his family a quiet dignity that was of course not accidental, nor apparently punitive in any day to day or moment to moment way - though it was profoundly restrictive and ultimately quite destructive to the will and spirit; as by design.. Ungern could be likened, not inaccurately, to a legendary chieftain of a once-proud tribe of Indian braves, now confined to a governmental reservation from which neither he nor his charges could ever meaningfully stray,

The true test of his willingness to accept the consequences of his apostasy would be forced upon him, to say nothing of his war bride Ayisha, in mere weeks if not days: Ayisha was heavy with child, and the gestation period of a fetus whose mother was not only Pineal Sensitive, but was in fact a verified carrier of epigenetically significant traits was profoundly abrogated. In the case of Ayisha, it was firmly believed by Dr. Al-Husseini that the aforementioned genetic anomalies of which the mother to be was a carrier included the potential for full heritable transmission of discrete consciousness beyond physical death - Quantum Immortality, as it was named colloquially (and increasingly among learned castes ordinarily averse to adopting such argot).

The child, in other words, could very well be a rare instance of a successfully engineered being (albeit resulting from perfectly accidental mate pairing ) who had the capacity to fully access, experience, and embody an inherited consciousness but also to transmit the aforementioned mind to linear descendants.

These rare circumstances (coupled with the fact that Ungern himself was a product of a similarly purposeful genetic engineering program, specifically a program tailored exclusively to generate specimens for Imperial service as Executioners or cloistered Augurs) rendered inevitable the cruel reality that when the child arrived, the newborn boy (it was known to be a male child by Ayisha within weeks of conception without need of clarification by way of ultrasound nor diagnostic hologram), would be ripped immediately from the custody and embrace of his mother and father and delivered into lifetime bondage to the Imperium - the subsequent irony, as Ungern had come to realize during his, increasingly frequent, psychic sojourns spent staring from the observation chamber into the infinite maw of the cosmic abyss, being that they (himself, Ayisha, the entire tribe of the Irminsul spaceborne, all the subjects, slaves, and nobles of the Imperium, the Caliph himself, every living thing in the habitable universe within the anthropic horizon) were fated to be delivered into the bondage of a superhuman Madhi tyrant - a tyrant who would begin life upon emerging from his wife’s womb within days if not hours.

Ungern suddenly felt profoundly aged and profoundly frightened - a fear that made him sick at heart. A fear that robbed a man ordinarily without frailty of his strength, his dignity and his faith in the hidden-yet-visible hand of God. As a barely perceptible, wholly unintentional whimper escaped the old man’s lips, he uttered a prayer offering absolute contrition and begging forgiveness for himself and his bride.

ROBOTA - SHEDDING SKIN

‘’What’s so noble about being dead?’’

-Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

‘’It should be understood that doctors did not want to damage their patients - as a profession, they were sworn to do no harm - but if they committed dastardly acts, they were more easily pardoned if something positive had come of the exercise.’’

-Allan M. Hornblum, Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America.

III

Location: Paradise City, Atlantic Prefect, Planet Earth

Year: 3034 A.D. (1051 A.W.D.)

Date: April 20

Husseini contemplated a cliched, yet timely and poignant, observation that he’d come across in the pages of a vaguely recollected Shakespearean drama in which he’d earnestly performed during his student days - the scripted dialog in question had suggested, with characteristic lyricism, that every man of noble blood who fathers a male child at some point in his lifetime comes to gravely fear the heir that he sires. It cannot after all, to the diligent student of political affairs, be viewed as anomalous that Alexander - the greatest king and most inspired general who ever lived, who was incidentally tutored and learned by the greatest ethical teacher who ever lived prior to the birth of Christ - ascended to an already gilded throne by act of patricide.

Distinguishing the trials and anxieties endured by ancient noblemen, as well as those of the playwrights who memorialized them in their dramas, however of course was that these men, however great, were merely mortal - as was their offspring . The fear that swelled like a malignant bolus of tumor within the breasts of kings upon observing their ferocious progeny grow to manhood was at least tempered by the comforting knowledge that their Oedipal rivals were mere men and were in no way Godly nor more than human..

This shared mortal frailty, despite coveting and wielding worldly power that was often great and terrible, was in fact the source of the ironic tragedies that stalked, consumed and befell them. The fragility of the physical body, through and within which Man was thrust into being in the world, was in fact the source of an intimacy between these star-crossed fathers and the sons that they sired as it represented, albeit more remotely, a similar function between these predatory chieftains and their subjects and thralls.

Husseini shuddered as the obvious but therefore rather hidden realization emerged within his alert contemplation as he sat, lotus position, in semi repose: these ancient kings and their progeny weren’t genetically engineered and cybernetically altered to survive for centuries. Their skin was soft, easily injured and deteriorated rapidly after childhood - the resplendent, iconically fearsome, robotic appearance they were able to achieve when fully armored for ceremony or battle was merely an illusion, albeit one brilliantly engineered.

Beneath their ornate, yet functional, gladiatorial ornamentation was ordinary human flesh and blood. Flesh that wasn’t crafted from iron or steel - nor from kevlar or platinum. Their bones were brittle and became arthritic in middle age - their skeletons weren’t made of titanium alloy nor fortified by exotic, man-made polymers. Homicidally jealous of their father’s power and wealth, ferociously covetous of their harems and envious of the legions they commanded, these ambitious princes might be, nonetheless they were merely jealous men. They weren’t thinking machines or self-aware weapons of mass destruction. They weren’t robotic gods of death with potential active service lives measured in centuries.

They weren’t genetically engineered for biological immortality. They had nothing in common, save perhaps for a loose continuity of vocation, with the Executioners of the cybernetic age that had developed in the first centuries After War Day and that was now reaching a zenith. They were, in every way, just as frail and weak of mind and constitution as the fragile men who had sired them out of desperate instinct to do something- anything - to mitigate the cruel brevity of their own lives; motivated by the vain and perennial conceit that one can defeat death by duplicating oneself through procreation.

Husseini had, rather in spite of himself, acquired the habit of addressing the awe-inspiring organism now before him - a diabolical being that fate had ordained him to sire in some metaphysical way - as ‘’ZARTAX’’; the project that had created it had provided him with the acronym: Husseini had taken notice of it, prominently lettered on the cover page of a sealed, eyes only document, before even reading the contents; Zone Assault Robot: Type eXperimental - Project ZAR-TX.

There was something purposefully brutal in the bureaucratic argot utilized by and within the myriad official fiefdoms of the Imperium - particularly as regarded the Security Echelon Corps of Executioners; from the runic lettering indicating SECE service and concomitant Initiate status to the stylized totenkopf badge that adorned the left lapel of an Executioner’s priestly uniform in lieu of more conventional indicator of rank. Despite the abolition of armies and the soldiering profession, the Security Echelon continued to earnestly mimic the aesthetic trappings of ancient armed forces - at least, a few particularly elite formations known in the ancient past for both lethality and religious commitment, ceremony and fanaticism.

Husseini himself recalled quite vividly an experience he had as a boy of 11 years of age. He had already been slated for a career as a Minister-Surgeon by that time, his father was a Surgeon of some repute and the young Husseini had been subjected to the Professions Aptitude Psychometric Analyses at eight years of age as were all boys (girls were tested at age seven). The only exception(s) being those children who were identified as carrying the trait of Pineal sensitivity and exhibiting a concomitant ability to access ancestral memories - such youths were sent Off-World, studied incessantly and (upon reaching maturity) mated with opposite sex partners who carried the same traits. The purpose of these efforts being to identify and ultimately cultivate in a controlled manner the capacity for an individual human consciousness to be transmitted through biological heritability.

The young Husseini, being neither Pineal sensitive nor carrying any traits of the sort coveted by the Imperium in its unrelenting quest to realize Quantum Immortality, was subjected to the common, primary educational curriculum that all boys of properly superior blood were availed. Looking upon ZARTAX, he recalled an incident of precognitive foreshadowing when, at the primary school to which he’d been assigned, he interfaced with a learning computer, specifically, a virtual reality cognitive sensory immersion device, the subject of study being the History of Warfare in Late Indo-Aryan Civilization. He’d been marginally aware, as every schoolboy and girl was, that a Spartan, Aryan-descended culture - in the generation before the final war and subsequent apocalypse, had sought to accomplish (albeit limited by the crude methods and means of the epoch) what the Imperium had finally achieved and implemented a thousand years subsequent.

Husseini recalled vividly a particular image he viewed during the immersive interface that presented to the viewer actual footage of the final stand of the ancient warriors of this vanquished Reich - the setting of this penultimate and terrible battle was a Terran city located centrally in Varangian Europa that was then called “Budapest’’. These terrible warriors were, to the young Husseini, indistinguishable from the first cybernetically enhanced Executioners, then being fielded by SECE. It was only upon directing a query to the computer that he realized that these apparently contemporary, gladiator-executioners of history had lived in the year 1945 AD - a full millenium before the first cyborgs, in the service of the Corps of Executioners or otherwise, existed.

At that moment, Husseini the man tried to quell an involuntary shudder - the millennial death dealers of this ancient Reich that so frightened and fascinated his youthful intellect were standard bearers of a historical phenomenon that was now emerging to its completion; Husseini himself was the father of a great and terrible phenomenon of pure history. The self-consciously sensitive Arab surgeon briefly became faint - overwhelmed as he was by the gravity of what he had ordained and the apparent suddenness of its full realization.

Continuing to battle vertigo, Husseini’s chief assistant Nurse-Surgeon, a statuesque, seemingly ageless Persian beauty who managed to appear simultaneously elegant and savage, took quick notice, offering and subsequently administering a combination of an ammonia capsule inhalant and an injection cartridge of vitamins and amphetamines to revive and steady him. The world weary Husseini regained full faculty of his senses within moments - at the same instant that ZARTAX’s target optics (implanted in lieu of a right eyeball) began to glow - a green pinpoint within a deeply recessed black oval. History was once again asserting its sovereign dominion over men and their petit designs.

ROBOTA: THE KILLER ANGEL

‘’That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.’’

-Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu.

“Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: 'What a piece of work is man...in action how like an angel!' And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.'”

-Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels.

‘’Martyr Caste Executioners, with exceptions relating to experimental efforts aimed at facilitating the deliberate engineering of ‘epigenetic retention’ do not dream. Artificial neural net enhancements that were insinuated into the subject’s organic central nervous system at the cellular level coupled with a rigorously cultivated category of meditative exercises collectively identified as, integral consciousness technique (‘’ICT’’) generally precluded the experience of discreet dream cycles during regular and rhythmic cycles of wakefulness and sleep.’’

-QUANTUM IMMORTALITY, EUGENICS AND MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, Doctor-Professor Woldemar Mohamet al-Husseini, PhD, MD.

IV

‘’From the inception of PROJECT: ZAR-TX, several years before the ultimate subject, or even prospective candidates, for corporeal salvage, reconstitution and augmentation, had been identified, it had been determined that the chemical dependency which could be presumed* with certainty to afflict the subject who would ultimately be selected for ZAR-TX (*this presumption owing to the candidate pool consisting exclusively of active service Executioners with experience in leading Zone Assault operations in lieu of of service limited to other Temple vocationary functions - i.e. ceremonial sacrifice, death lottery’ duty, judicial warrant execution, and ‘FOZA [‘functions other than zone assault’]) would be not merely preserved but profoundly and deliberately augmented.

The formal record documenting all official matters relating to the planning, inception, execution, and history of all matters relating to ZAR-TX was codified and maintained by the Bureau of Public Information. This record alleged, in unambiguous terms, that as was required by law and customary precedent , a quorum of senior jurists from the Justice Ministry, three of the most consistently reliable Augurs then impaneled as the Quantum Immortal delegation to the Presidium Academia, and a nominally civilian delegation of Minister-Surgeons possessed of rare expertise in epigenetics and robotic neuroscience were purposefully convened.

This elite coterie is said to have vigorously debated every relevant aspect of the program - affording particular attention to the ethical quagmires and technological aspects presented. This claim however was a carefully crafted fiction, of the sort that had become so regular as to be viewed (through the clarifying lens of hindsight) as having become habitual in the five centuries preceding; consequently disadvantaging all but the most diligent students of the present day who are availed to an official record consisting largely of confabulation and propaganda in lieu of rigorous historiography and accurate, honest documentation of the relevant processes of sovereign decision making.

The decision and subsequent order to commence and implement the ZAR-TX program had in fact been ultimately rendered without meaningful discussion or debate by the order of a single man - LeMay Alexis Huber. Huber was, during the time period under analysis, the most senior Martyr Class Temple Executioner and the longest serving Temple acolyte within the Presidium Standing Committee; Huber was also, arguably, the most singularly powerful man on the planet for the majority of the 31st Century AD.* His power was largely unchallenged for over seventy years in large measure because of Huber’s personal mastery of killing techniques, his grossly apostate, yet charismatically persuasive, messianic posturing, his survival of over a dozen Death Lottery selections, and his apparent resolution, at least in part, of the profoundly destructive, and at that time as appearing as mysterious as it was menacing, pandemic of the so-called ‘Space Sickness’ .

Subsequent histories, inspired by holy rather than diabolical impulses, took note that it is the cunning of Providential reason by which LeMay Alexis Huber inadvertently facilitated the destruction of an infernal planetary government of his own devising, made frail by the pestilence of apostasy by giving life a terrible and powerful creation, designed to guarantee the posterity of his grip upon the affairs of men throughout the Solar System only to witness that very creation become the instrumentality of God’s wrath!’’

*For a clarifying explanation of the use and practical conversion of pre-war date notation utilized within this volume, see index I.

-THE MADHI HEADHUNTER: THE PROPHET AS WARLORD - ZRTX, HIS LIFE AND TIMES 3033-3050. Zulfiqar, Aristotle Victor Harold, 3183 AD.

‘’Can you hear me, noble zealot?’’, Husseini asked of the magnificent abomination, carefully affecting the formally deferential tone of the official dialect. ‘’I ask again, noble zeal-’’, ‘’Yes,’’ came the reply - its voice was clipped yet resonant, a deeply layered hiss. It caused the blood of Husseini and the four other observers present to run cold. The surgeon bowed reverently at the waist, hardly noticing that the cyborg had, in one rapidly fluid motion, risen from the reclined platform and swiveled its entire torso and head rightward, presently focusing intently on the youngest man in the room - a robotic weapons technician named Theron.

‘’Allah, in his benevolent wisdom, has gifted you with new life, worthy servant of Providence - may I humbly ask, Great Assassin -’’, Husseini was still speaking when he noticed that Zartax had leapt the fifteen feet between himself and young Theron, having run and processed target acquisition and lethal assault protocol in a thousandth of a second. An immeasurable fraction of a moment subsequent, the killer machine had broken the youth’s robust neck, deployed a secondary weapon system, incorporated into its prosthetic right arm (a single edged fourteen inch bayonet with laser augmented cutting edge) and was utilizing the blade to cut into the dead man’s skull, intent to reach the brain matter beneath and extract the pituitary gland; subsequently to harvest the pulverized fragments for beta-endorphins within the medicinal dosage chamber that was installed just below where the robot’s left ear had been prior to catastrophic injury and subsequent bodily prosthesis.

Instinctively, the novice Executioner situated on the right flank of ZARTAX and his victim raised his battle rifle, aiming for his adversary’s platinum faceplate and squeezing the trigger mechanism in a single, practiced maneuver. The robot parried, with precise agility and economy of motion, in a single fluid movement, severing Theron’s head from the hapless man’s pathetic, broken corpus as flechette rounds struck his armor and ricocheted wildly about the chamber. With sickening power, the robot wielded the severed head in a crushing arc, smashing it flush against his attacker’s face - exploding the bones therein and driving lethal bone shards into the frontal cortex with such terrible force that several emerged through the flesh in the nape of the man’s neck, having pulverized brain matter and severed the target’s spine. The Executioner remained standing despite brain death - his rifle still aloft, trigger finger depressing the mechanism until the internal magazine was emptied.

After several seconds, the man’s lifeless body fell flatly backwards. Husseini vomited as ZARTAX fixed his optics upon him, still gripping a pulp fragment of the severed head that he’d wielded with such lethality moments previously. The surgeon shielded his eyes and began frantically to pray, his admonitions to God were apparently answered as the light flickered within the cyborg’s optic socket and the living weapon dropped to the floor like a cast off marionette. The observers beyond the confines of the secure cell, having activated the fail-safe mechanism, had rendered their magnificent abomination unconscious. The Bureau of Public Information would suggest to Husseini in official debriefing that the delay in operation of the fail safe had been caused by the inherent difficulty in sabotaging the cognitive and central nervous system processes of a cybernetic organism as complex as ZARTAX; Husseini however knew that this was a lie of particularly ignoble type. The War Ministry had wanted to be certain that ZARTAX’s first action upon being given life was an act of remorseless homicide.

***

Victor, fully conscious for the first time since having fallen, mortally injured, while leading the zone assault on the frozen hell Triton, discerned a heightened awareness within himself. A plethora of visual and tactile sensations bombarded his senses, punctuated by an observational discernment capability that was previously unfamiliar. All of this he experienced instantaneously - as a staggeringly rapid, and jarring, series of psychic and physical processes. At the same time, he felt frozen within his strange new body. It was as if he were an altogether passive and empty vessel - perpetually awaiting directive and incapable of spontaneous action no matter how miniscule the effort.

As would a cobra requiring prey to enter its visual field to provoke a limbic response, he too discerned that he was in that moment only capable of contemplation, decision, or action upon perception of external stimuli -for which he felt himself enduring a nearly tangible and voracious ‘’thirst’’. As if information - from the most basic and trivial minutiae (such as the precise position of his body in physical space, the dimensions of the room in which he was situated or the color of the walls within the aforementioned chamber) to the most complex symbolic formula or equation - was a necessity of living moment to moment; as water is to the cells of a human body or oxygen to facilitate the production of energy to fuel those same cells that constitute a biological organism. It invited a peculiar, and sharply felt, sense of intimate vulnerability and shameful embarrassment - he imagined not unlike being exhibited naked before a gallery of strangers.

Concomitantly emergent was the agonizingly familiar, pain of acute endorphin withdrawal. Victor - having died and risen, becoming ZARTAX - had been shorn of virtually all human traits, yet retained (not through cruel oversight nor by negligence but by explicit and purposeful design) the consummately human frailty that had held him in merciless thrall for all of his mortal life. He again rapidly scanned the chamber in which he had awakened, and remained situated.

He had discerned in milliseconds - having accessed data about remaining involuntary functions and sustenance demands of his vestigial biological systems - that the precious substance which so unrelentingly captivated the entirety of his awareness and sensuous being - could in fact be harvested, acquired, processed and administered by his new body. Not only was this a potential capability of his cybernetic physiology, but the central processing unit that had been integrated into his brain structure at the genetic and cellular level had in fact been delicately and purposefully tailored to provide and sustain an enhanced biochemical reward mechanism.

When ZARTAX identified a source of beta-endorphin, his biological brain matter would be drained of serotonin until the process of harvesting the coveted substance was initiated. At the moment of initiation, serotonin and dopamine would flood the brain in reward - upon completion of harvesting and administration of beta-endorphin from the targeted source, the cyborg killer would additionally be availed a truly orgiastic, cathartic reward of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin rushed directly into his vestigial brain by the central processing unit that controlled and regulated every discrete function of his being, organic or mechanical..

It became immediately apparent that the substance that the risen Victor, now ZARTAX, so desperately hungered for was contained - thoroughly embedded - within the soft brain matter encased inside the skulls of the other men in the room with him.

Within his field of vision, a heads up display of sorts emerged - ZARTAX’s programming facilitated this comparatively primitive operation for various primary tasks: military command and control data would display immediately upon receipt so as to confer priority upon such mission orders no matter what other processes or secondary command protocols were underway and being run by the primary mind interface (PMI) of the central processing constellation (CPC). Similarly, a visual targeting assistance program would prioritize adversary targets and establish order of attack when infantry combat within visual range was underway in the course of zone assault operations. What the newborn cyborg was experiencing at this moment however was something remarkably distinguishable from these other core functions.

As the CLEP (Consciousness, Linguistic, Executive-Functionary) Processor - a highly engineered subsidiary component of the primary mind interface that was integrated fully into ZARTAX’s biological brain and that regulated and controlled everything from autonomic functions to the cyborg’s superhuman capacity to reason and calculate as well as governing what remained of vestigial emotions and aesthetic judgments - interpreted hundreds of data inputs that it was receiving moment to moment from highly attuned optic and aural sensors, ZARTAX began to experience a visceral compulsion to attack the humans in proximity and harvest that most precious fluid-substance that would instantly alleviate his excruciating withdrawal symptoms.

The substance that his optic sensors was rapidly scanning the visual range environment in search of - by way of electron magnification behind discrete and task-specific filters - was clearly registering (in the form of symbolic-graphic display representation) deep within the brain matter of the humans in immediate proximity to him. The PMI instantaneously relayed the calculation that the man situated .67 meters from the ridge of ZARTAX’S right hand was within millimeters of ideal targeting distance for secondary weapons. By the time the PMI conclusion appeared in writing on the heads up display, Theron was dead and ZARTAX was alive - the latter having passed the first series of tests of his executive functioning protocols and command and control responsiveness with flying colors.