Signal Noise: The Wily Doctor

[Serak]

Hydraulics whirred, steam hissed, metal clanged, drill motors hummed, and the arcs of welders burned. Flashes from their light illuminated the dimly lit, but expansive underground location they filled. Dozens of faceless androids, with glass spheres for eyes and no distinguishing traits, worked as silently laborers on other androids that laid in still-open pods.

The entire space looked most comparable to a subterranean factory, the likes of which Vegeta only slowly remade in the days after the destruction of Tuffle civilization. It took the Saiyans centuries to redevelop the technology that the Tuffles built in decades, and much of it still laid lost on the planet, underneath the ruins that had yet to be redeveloped.

Only one corner remained perpetually illuminated. A faint, blue glow surrounded a desk, as well as a door guarded by more of those faceless androids that stood statuesque on either side of the metal threshold. Only a small, square, glass window, netted with metal that invisibly ran with Ki to further reinforce it against the super-strength of the universe’s warriors, looked within.

Standing near the desk, eyes on a pair of pods, silhouetted by the light: a man with Earth-style business formal attire – button-up shirt, tie, well-pressed pants and black shoes – beneath a white lab coat. From his shape, on the lower end of obese. Bald on top, except for large tufts of grey hair from the back and either side of his head that jutted outwards wildly. A mustache, just as grandiose, to match.

In the pair of pods, not androids laid.

One, a tanned Saiyan man, eyes partially opened, unmoving, with the pallid look of death across him. He didn’t breathe. Didn’t move. Unlike the pod next to him, no monitors beeped or click with his vitals.

The other, a sun-kissed Saiyan princess with dark hair not quite to her shoulders, spiky and wild in that way only Saiyan hair ever looked. Unconscious, breathing, eye beginning to flutter and to open.

“Ah – she awakes! The prodigal daughter, returned to us!” The man, clearly older from his voice, laughed, calm and steady despite the upbeat lift to his tone. “Slowly, Princess. Don’t struggle. Your restraints won’t permit it. You’ll get no farther than a tiny, little Human girl in irons would, I’m afraid.”

He glanced down at her arms, bound by metal clasps with faintly-glowing tubes that ran into them. She had the same around her lower legs. When she moved—no strength at all.

As if she were a completely untrained civilian in the universe.

When the man shifted, and the light hit him just right, she saw his face: blue eyes, a rounded chin, and that unusual hair a distinct medium-grey.

“Dr. Ryely,” he introduced himself. “You’ve my deepest gratitude, Princess. Your fight with my G-02 was exceptional. So much so that we no longer had any need of that other, royal specimen – your brother, the Prince.”

He glanced to the pod with the corpse just as two more of those black-metal-bodied, faceless androids began to wheel the large and heavy pod away.

“How your energy runs has been astonishing to study. Your potential clearly far greater than his, if not fully realized. Haven’t trained much, have you?” He smiled down at her, his grin bordering on predatory. “Enjoying the finer aspects of your palace and the privileges of your father’s stable rule over this hive of chimps?”

He glanced to some of the monitors around her pod and hummed. Some were her vitals, the same screens that were dead on her brother’s. Most were not, they were something else.

Fennia, learned enough, recognized some of them: statistics on Ki flow and volume, itself not too dissimilar from cardiovascular endurance metrics. But there was more. Anatomical breakdowns. Other analyses that appeared to be pending as cognitive systems performed wide-data analysis of how this applied to…something.

Fennia couldn’t quite follow it that well.

“Not that I can blame you.”

 

[Fennia]

The first thing was the weight.

Her arms lay at her sides like something foreign. She pulled against the restraints. Once. Everything she had. Nothing moved. The metal held without effort or acknowledgment, and what came back to her was not the sensation of resistance. Just absence. Her body, full and vast and able, reduced to the inert weight of someone who had never once thrown a punch.

She let her arms fall limp.

The room arrived in pieces. Noise before light. Machinery, pressure, the smell of something burning somewhere out of sight. Androids moving in silence. A factory in the bones of her planet, and she was in it, and she had tubes running into her arms.

Her eyes went to the pod beside her.

She knew the face, but never did she think she would see it so pale and emaciated.

The androids were already wheeling the pod away.

The man in the coat was speaking. Exceptional. Potential. Far greater. The words arrived a moment after they were said. Haven't trained much, have you.

She looked at him.

"You've a remarkable imagination," she said. "For such a small, ugly man."

Her eyes moved to the monitors.

 

[Serak]

Perfectly white teeth answered her when Fennia gave her sassy reply and an almost depraved sense of satisfaction crossed his eyes. He tapped at the divot between either bulbous side of his chin.

“What, not a fan?” He leaned closer as he asked his question, voice dripping sarcasm.

“After what you went through on Yardrat, and then against G-02, you weren’t looking particularly good yourself when G-02 brought you in,” he answered as the glow of a screen reflected against his eyes.

Not the slightest or faintest vein visible in them. Perfectly un-strained eyes.

“Such a rare thing amongst you Saiyans, your beauty,” he continued without so much as glancing at her. “But your face? Terrible, terrible. Half burnt off.

“You’ll be happy to know that I had you treated and there’ll be no trace of that damage and your reputation will be preserved, Princess – even if I kept you in an induced coma ever since. I’d say that makes us even, or better.”

Another flare of crazed excitement rushed through his eyes when he looked to his side, back over to Fennia still on her back.

“Would you like to venture a guess as to why I had you awakened instead of just keeping you under?” He asked as if, maybe, just maybe, he truly believed she wanted to talk about it.

His voice suddenly dropped lower, flatter – graver.

“Until I killed you as I have your brother, that is.”

 

[Fennia]

He was close enough that she could see up his nose. She wished she hadn't looked.

She leaned into the back of her pod-prison and the chains binding her rattled in response. Even as the haze of her induced coma began to lift, the chains felt no less oppressive.

He'd healed her.

She remembered the brilliant explosion of her Galick Gun piercing straight through the Android's chest — and how that had done nothing to stop it from fueling the white-hot ball of energy it had begun to charge. She remembered, too, the feeling of her own flesh bubbling before darkness took over.

After that, there was nothing. She didn't even feel the effects of a much needed nap. She just felt...

Empty.

He framed his intervention as kindness, as if he weren't the cause of it in the first place.

She scoffed. A single, dry exhale joined by the slightest twitch of her lips.

"Even?" She repeated. Her voice hung like there was more to that comment, but nothing else followed.

Her eyes went to the space where the other pod had been.

She pulled them back.

He said he was going to kill her. Flat. She waited for the current that always ran ahead of that word. The thing that made her feel awake. She waited and found the room exactly as loud and cold as it had been a moment ago.

"Hm, is it because the only way you can get off is by seeing my reactions?" He wanted her to guess, so she did. "I imagine general fear and disgust from women is a familiar reaction to you."

 

[Serak]

“Oh, she still has barbs; would you look at that,” he chuckled as he addressed one of the flat-faced androids standing guard at the door near him.

A beep silenced him before he said anything else. He looked back to the monitors.

As his eyes scanned, a wry smile curled one corner of his mouth.

“No, Princess,” he shook his head and looked back to Fennia. “I’m afraid my vices are far more expensive.”

Ryely clicked his tongue.

“It seems you are not in the mood or not equipped to play that game, then. I am unsurprised by either,” he lamented, though he was not the same quality actor that he was, judged by the facility around them, a man of science.

A finger, thick fingertip tapped at one of the screens.

“This. You’re brighter than most of your kind, Fennia – do you understand this?”

Not entirely, even when she looked it over. But she recognized it despite that: A full model of how every battle-relevant aspect of her body function. Ki flow and energy management was part of it, but also musculature, organ performance, how well bones responded to reinforcement by Ki, and more.

Like a language she couldn’t read or speak, but knew enough of to partially piece together given time.

“That’s a no, then,” the doctor sighed as he saw the absence of total and immediate comprehension in her eyes. “But you got further than most did.”

That comment so flat and mundane it sounded as if he could read her thoughts – such abilities did exist in the universe, after all.

“When you make a machine, Fennia, you should know how it works. The outcome of using it should be deterministic and predictable. Down at our core, we beings of flesh and blood are deterministic as well,” he explained for her. “If you understand the totality of the being and the circumstances around it, everything it does can be predicted.

“Then does it not follow: If I have the totality of you measured and mapped, and then if I witness that system pushed to its limit, I will understand why it was limited? From there, exceeding those limits only becomes a problem of engineering, regardless of mechanical, biological, chemical, nuclear, gravitational, or any other subdiscipline thereof.”

His head turned again and he looked out across the darkened facility around them. Both could still hear all those noises. The volume of activity only revealed to the eyes through the flash of arc welders.

He took a deep breath, as if he were a man staring at a beautiful sunset.

“Doesn’t that excite you?” He asked with a lift to his voice, but didn’t take his eyes away from the darkness around them. "Don't you see why I've awoken you, now? Is it not clear as day?"

 

[Fennia]

The tubes in her arms caught her eye when she reached for something to throw back at that. She only found that emptiness again.

Her gaze moved back to the screen before she'd decided to look. The model of her own body. Ki flow mapped like circulatory data. Bone response to reinforcement. Organ performance under pressure. She had never seen herself from this angle — not as variables, not as a system with legible parts. She found more in it than she'd expected. Her eyes darted across the screen even as Ryely carried the conversation onward.

Limitations she knew existed purely by feeling had been converted into arithmetic. Plain. Measurable.

Improvable.

The doctor's voice had gone contemplative, his eyes on the darkness around them the way she looked at a new planet from orbit.

She understood that feeling. For the first time since she awoke, she tasted something sour in the back of her throat. Disgust.

"You designed them to lose," she said. Not an accusation. A shape she was trying on. "More accurately: to not win. To test and measure."

And collect the subject after the experiment, were the words almost spoken.

G-01 had nearly driven her off Yardrat the moment she landed but left her breathing. G-02 had knocked her unconscious and carried her here. A machine did what it was built to do, and neither outcome had been an accident.

Flashes of light revealed a pair of Androids welding the chest piece of another, powered-down Android. It looked nearly complete.

"Tell me what the model says I'm missing."

 

[Serak]

Slowly, Ryely’s eyes turned and looked Fennia. Then, they closed, and he gave a disappointed shake of her head.

“You didn’t follow at all, Princess. I thought you one of the most intelligent of your people – perhaps I judged too generously,” he intoned, all the excitement from his voice gone.

“Let me walk you through it, Princess: How could I have the results yet to tell you such an answer? I’ve yet to see you pushed to your limits, truly pushed to your limits,” he told her. “G-02 defeated you swiftly. His Eruption Cannon proved far too much for you. You need to be pushed to the very edge of breaking.”

Then, he tilted his head from side to side, as if chewing on something within his mind.

“But you are not wrong, that I built them to be defeated,” he told her. “You’re not correct, either: I built them for specific tasks. G-01 at the Interstellar Market, with Subject-64, he was truly defeated when I did not wish him to be. G-03b’s destruction at the hands of Bellak early on during his conquest of Earth? G-03s successes on Earth, G-02s victories here on Vegeta. Even the state you pushed G-01Y to back on Yardrat. All within parameters.”

He waved a hand.

“But none of this answers why I’ve woken you up,” he refocused the conversation, and looked back down at her again. The monitors still glowed against his right side, his entire body now facing directly at Fennia in her open pod.

“I will give you one more chance to impress. Get the right answer, or close enough that I deem it worthy, and I will reward you, Princess. I will reward you with an answer,” he offered. “To this question:

“You fought G-02. You know your brother was much more powerful than him. How could I possibly have captured him, then; hm?”

 

[Fennia]

She said nothing for a moment. The androids welded in the dark. The monitors hummed. She let the sting of his disappointment sit rather than cover it.

He was correcting her. Not mocking. Correcting. The distinction was small and mattered enormously and she found she had no response to it that felt like the right weight.

The only thing she found was the budding frustration at herself. Her own mind had felt alien this entire conversation. Her body felt like wet paper.

Her eyes moved back to the screen. The model. Ki flow, musculature, bone response — all of it mapped and waiting. She saw the numbers. Saw the hypothesized ranges for various aspects of her entire being. Some wide, others narrow. Only a couple were precise.

Then she understood why it was incomplete.

"You already answered the question," she said. "My data is incomplete and this time you were able to bring back the subject. Subject-64, Bellak, and even that first Android you sent after me. Whether their purpose was served or not, the data you got was limited to those encounters.

"Now you finally have a chance to take a subject and push them even further. All from the comforts of your cave."

She looked at him.

"Now tell me how you took my brother."

 

[Serak]

Disappointment flashed over the doctor’s face at Fennia’s answer.

“Didn’t really think much about what I said, did you?” He sighed. “Perhaps you truly are just a pretty face. Little of your father’s strength seems to be within you – and I may have overestimated your mind.

“A shame.”

Dr. Ryely didn’t look at her again after that. Instead, he turned back to the monitors, and tapped his fingers in the air as if typing at an invisible keyboard. The screens changed, what was across them – once the information on Fennia – changed dramatically into information about the facility they were in and the androids throughout.

“You will be given a few days to acclimate and recover after your induced coma. To remain conscious, to eat, to have your feet beneath you,” he explained without so much as glancing in her direction.

“Then, those tubes will be removed from the clasps around your forearms and your strength will return,” he continued. “After that?”

He turned away from the monitors, from Fennia, and began to walk into the darkness without hesitation—illuminated only by the distant flashes of arc welders.

“Every android that remains in here will try to kill you,” he announced as he left. “Best of luck, Princess.

“You will need it.”

And he was gone.

 

[Fennia]

He didn't look back.

She watched the darkness take him. Yet, the facility worked without interruption, and she was part of it now the same way the empty pod beside her had been.

Pretty face.

Little of your father's strength.

She stared at the ceiling of the pod.

What had Dr. Ryely been looking for in her answer? Wasn't the answer she had given him close enough? His goal was to further test her limits, just as she said. Had he truly expected her to be so specific with her answer?

Doubt spoke in an unfamiliar, sickening tone that made her stomach churn. Born from the emptiness that had swallowed her, the beast defied everything she thought she knew about herself.

She was never wrong.

She was never beaten.

Yet, here she lay. Broken. Humiliated. The last shred of her confidence ripped away by the disappointed scowl of the man who had ruined her life.

The chains rattled and only then did Fennia realize how tight her fists were clenched. Blood oozed between the fingers of her left hand. She forced herself to relax.

She closed her eyes.

The androids kept welding.

---

Days passed at an agonizingly slow pace.

She never saw Dr. Ryely again. Two Androids took turns "caring" for her. A feminine one would bring her food and water on a regular schedule. A masculine stood guard at all times. Occasionally, the masculine one would speak to her to assess her physical state. She never spoke back.

On the third day the masculine Android tapped on the control panel of her pod. The tubes slid free from her arms.

Her strength came back the way feeling returns to a dead limb — wrong first, almost painful, every nerve arriving out of sequence. She shattered the chains that bound her before it finished. The masculine Android remains outside her pod. Uncanny with its stillness, though she knew it was ready for its next directive.

It and every other Android that remained in the facility.

The pod door began to open and —

The lights went out. All of them, all at once, and then the only illumination in the room was the eyes of the androids activating across the floor. Glass spheres, dozens of them. The welders had been building them for three days while she watched and she understood now what they had been building toward.

What followed was not a fight she found her typical joy in. There was no room she could fill with her presence, no warmth she could deploy, no grin she could use as an opening move. She felt no cathartic release at finally being free, nor a sense of rekindled pride when she caved in the head of a faceless robot.

It felt like a chore.

She broke them with her hands when the Ki ran thin, smashed the casing of one against the wall of a pod and felt the metal crumple inward with a sound like a scream cut short, felt something in her own palm crunch in response, and kept moving. She broke one by putting it between herself and the Ki blast meant for her back and felt the shockwave take her off her feet and came down on top of two more that she reduced to components with her elbows and knees before the ringing in her ears resolved back into machine noise and screaming circuitry. She broke them efficiently and without pleasure and when they hit her back she registered the damage the way a body registers weather — present, ongoing, not yet the thing that would stop her.

At some point she went to her knees.

Not because she chose to. The legs made the decision without consulting her. She was on the floor with her hands in the wreckage of something she had already destroyed and there were more coming through the dark and she looked at the glass-sphere eyes of the nearest one and something happened in her chest.

Not anticipation. Not quite. But where excitement lived went warm inside of her chest.

She was back on her feet.

The final androids she took apart with Ki she wasn't confident she had, blasts dragged up from the same place the legs had come from — below the conscious self, from whatever the body reached for when the conscious self had spent everything available to it. The last one she hit three times. It stopped after the second. She hit it a third time because the body still had that much in it and didn't know what else to do with it.

Only then did she feel the stillness of the air around her.

She stood in what the facility had become. Rubble, machine parts, the dark. Blood stained the ragged clothes she was in and she felt the sting of it in her right eye. Her left hand couldn't form a fist anymore. She breathed.

She was still breathing.

She found the section of ceiling the fight had compromised and she climbed. Not heroically. Her left hand made it slow and wrong and she went up through the wreckage. She came out through the gap into the air above and she sat on the edge of the rubble at the surface of her planet and breathed air that hadn't been recycled through a dead man's factory.

She had won.

It didn't feel like a victory.

Somewhere on Earth there was a person who had told her to check in. She had none of the answers she had come here for. She had the empty that had been in her chest since she woke up, and underneath it, the thing that had shifted — slightly different now from what it had been then.

Not excitement. Not yet.

But not the empty, either.

She stood up and started walking anyway.