Dante's Abyss -- 'Contract Signings'

[Karl Jak]

“I told you that I wanted BEEF,” Karl groaned as he waved a hand to dismiss the technicians.

“But, Sir… this model will be excellent in combat once all the brine is removed.”

Karl stared at the vaguely humanoid figure and its swatch of high-textured orange, red, and yellow plating and shook his head. “No, the whole theme was supposed to be retro.”

“But isn—”

“Try harder!” Karl shouted, although his expression seemed to carry all the rage of a soft kitten. “Send in the next crew.”

With a sigh, the third group left, and in their wake, the next quartet entered the display chamber. At first glance, they appeared to have nothing on their person but a…

“Is that a boombox?” Karl asked as he leaned forward and dropped the side of his face into one of his waiting palms. “When I said retro, I—”

“Begging your pardon, Chairman,” the man at the center of the group spoke softly as he gestured for his companion to set down to outdated piece of technology. “It’s just part of the… full package.”

“Well I do like me a full package every now and again,” Karl whispered as he sat at attention. One of the engineers—Birkin or something was his name—grinned widely as he fished a cassette out of his lab coat and fed it into the open deck of the boombox.

“We believe you’ll like this,” the blonde-haired man spoke softly as he depressed the tape and pressed the play switch. After a moment of silence, the box began to belt out the opening chords of a lovely, early-2000s rap anthem. A rather standard introduction started, featuring a variety of dog noises, grunts, and standard rap parlance about this not being any sort of game (Karl found that slice of irony amusing).

The likely bald-headed and overly angry musician then began to mention that this, in fact, was what Karl was hearing and that the Syntech official should continue to listen.

As this repeated, Karl’s ears picked up the distinct thud of heavy footsteps in the hallway outside this repurposed conference room. The steps drew nearer as the song’s intro reached a crescendo. On the soundtrack, the rapper screamed out the phrase ‘X gon give it ya’ as the door of Karl’s conference room exploded into cinders. A beat later, the doorframe itself was shattered as one of the larger men that Karl had seen in the last two weeks literally walked through the wall. Garbed in a black trench coat that concealed almost his entire body, the gray-skinned behemoth had a mute, expressionless visage barely visible underneath the shadow of a fedora.

“Fedora, eh?” Karl shouted above the roar of the rap track still screaming out of the boombox.

It was Birkin who made his voice heard above the music and the still-settling piles of debris at the back of the room. “We wanted to make it look more human, y’know. Let it blend in.

The Chairman and CEO of Syntech smiled at the now still man who stood at the back of the room. “Does the boombox come with the...”

“Tyrant, Chairman Jak. We call it a Tyrant.”

Karl scowled. “That’s a stupid name.” With a snap of the man’s finger, the boombox shut off, and the executive hopped down from his oversized office chair. “Call it Mr. X, instead. That name has a lot more sinister, late-90s vibes.”

One of the scientists smiled at the request. “I like that, Sir! This creation will certainly be the, uh… nemesis of anyone it encounters on the island. I really believe that.”

Rolling his eyes, Karl waved to dismiss the crew. “Go back to tinkering with your viral weapons before I fire you all.”

 

[Karl Jak]

“This looks like another guy from Research and Development who hasn’t seen a cheeseburger in about five years… are you sure he doesn’t work for us already?” Karl had moved the screening process to another part of the facility. This was one of his various executive suites, and he found himself splayed out on a leather couch as the crew stood near the door and sold their pitch. This was the laziest one yet—it was just pictures of some dude on a tablet.

“We assure you, Mr. Jak, that there is more than meets the eye with this one.”

Karl rolled his eyes as he rolled himself into an upright position. “You know, those are the worst sex robots I’ve ever sample,” the executive reached over for his glass of Malbec and ruminated on all the machine parts and weird, siren noises. After a moment he shrugged, “how was I supposed to think he wouldn’t bring lube? Thing was a truck… you’d think there’s just spare oil lying around.”

The crew awkwardly chuckled as they set the tablet down and tapped the display a handful of times. With a crackle of light and sound, a full-sized holographic projection of their captured scientist materialized above the piece of tech. Karl finished the glass and rose to approach the translucent image. The man had dark hair that was going grey from the temples out into the surrounding regions. Faint lines were present on his forehead and around the mouth, but the dark eyes seem to betray a lurking vitality.

“And you just found this guy in a spaceship?” Karl asked as he reached out and pretended to ruffle the hologram’s hair.

“Yes,” the team’s vocal rep spoke as the hologram switched to a derelict space jet of some kind. “For all intents and purposes, the logs on the ship indicate that he should have been dead, so when he wasn’t, we wondered if there was something we weren’t seeing?” The hologram switched back to the man, but this time, he was strapped onto a gurney.

Karl furrowed his brow. “Please, don’t keep me waiting,” he sneered as he turned to refill his glass. As he turned around, he nearly dropped his glass at the sight of the hologram actively writhing and thrashing against the bands. Karl sipped as he watched the holographic image scream silently as it suddenly started to mutate. The flesh bulged outward in all directions as it took on a lovely, earthy shade of green. Enormous green muscles flexed only momentarily beneath the bonds before shattering them, as the now eight-foot entity tore away from the gurney. While the physique was hulking and bore little resemblance to the little man strapped down seconds prior, the facial features were still similar to the scientist, although the sneer that the beast displayed before the hologram went dead spoke to something far more bestial and untethered.

“Well that doesn’t look good,” Karl remarked as the group’s rep picked up the tablet. “How much did that one cost us?”

“Uh… we managed to subdue Doctor Banner an hour or so later, but we did lose a handful of personnel and most of R&D-2.”

“He has a name?”

The group rep nodded. “We pulled it from the ship’s records. From what we can gather, the man was poisoned by radiation but instead of cancer, he turns into a giant rage monster. Lucky, eh?”

Karl sneered. “Nothing is luck here, gentlemen. He’s approved. Just… maybe use some stronger sedation until you transfer him to the island.”

 

[Karl Jak]

With the convention running seamlessly, Karl had retired to one of the operation rooms to oversee some of the final preparations for the event. The crowd of contestants this year was a little retracted, but the Syntech executive owed that to the fact that this felt much like a ‘season premiere’ for many of them, aside from the spattering of tagalongs. Back in the preshow facility, one of Karl’s many faux versions was rubbing elbows with the interstellar assortment of visitors.

Karl sighed as he popped open a bottle of Malbec that the crew had recovered through one of the facility’s various time-warp stations. It had amused the executive so much that the fabric of time here was so much thinner than the old place. Naturally, he had been required to ‘grease’ some of the machines to ensure they ran properly, but that was no skin off his back. If he wanted to, he could probably redo the facility in an afternoon, but that was neither here nor there.

On a nearby mahogany desk, the purple rotary phone started to bleat. Karl slid over to his personal station without leaving his office chair and scooped the receiver from the cradle. “Go for Karl.”

“He’s found it.” An excited voice squealed from the other end of the line.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes, Sir! We’ve already verified that the artefact is the very one you tasked us to locate. Your private operative is very pleased with himself, I might add.”

“I’ll be right over.”

With a sin-laced sneer, Karl set the phone down and adjourned to his nearby personal quarters.

This was the call he had been anticipating, and it had not come a moment too soon.

 

[Karl Jak]

Karl, mere minutes after that phone call, found himself being ushered through the stargate that led to the chamber that housed Syntech’s off-world operations. In the old place, there had been a slightly different mechanism behind long-distance travel, but in this slice of the multiverse, everything was a tad bit more conventional. Here, they operated much like they would have on Karl’s ‘actual’ home, if such a piece of the cosmic, transdimensional pie even existed anymore.

Something about aliens on red horses… I’m sure they’ve wrecked the whole place by now.

From time to time, Karl always got a kick out of reflecting on the fact that he had outlived the rest of his rivals and would-be competition ‘way back then.’ When they had attempted to sideline him to derail his success and shift the focus of the company to Damon and his crew of globalist imbeciles, Karl had managed to scheme and grease his way back into control. He had been on the cusp of realizing his greatest successes when his original world had been burnt to a cinder, much like countless other worlds in countless other galaxies had been destroyed or even simply blipped out of existence.

“Nostalgia is a fun drug,” Karl spoke as he ushered himself into an adjacent chamber. This was one of a few additional observation chambers, with hatches that led to private rooms and other sorts of areas that served purposes that ranged from the altruistic to the… well, spoilers, children.

The crew of workers housed there all turned and gave him polite nods as they hammered away at the variety of computer consoles that lined the walls. “Isn’t there a planet named that? The marketing must create itself.”

A slightly muffled masculine voice spoke from a nearby doorway. “Yea, but I hear they suffer from frequent identity crises.”

 

[Karl Jak]

A smirk on his face, Karl turned his gaze to the other pathway that led out of this observation room. “I trust it that your mission was successful, good sir?” The executive inquired as he made his way out of the computer chamber and through a short succession of corridors. When he reached the end of his jaunt, he stepped through a hissing pneumatic door and found himself traversing a corridor lined by every sort of stupid treasures that Syntech had amassed over the last few years.

“I think you missed the cutoff with this one.” Karl turned around to see that Mister Wilson was wearing an oversized golden glove on his right hand, and his left was tracing the empty sockets near the knuckles of the armament. “Plus, I don’t have enough ball sack on my chin to really pull off the look, though.”

"You’ve never looked nice in gold,” Karl said with a snicker as he pointed to something lying in the corner of the room, half-buried under a handful of 38th century sex robots. “Maybe that’s more your style?”

“You didn’t…” Deadpool gasped in falsetto as he hopped the short railing and brushed aside the cyborg toys to reveal an innocuous-looking sword hilt. Scooping it up, the mercenary laughed as a blade made of a bizarre, twisting mixture of steel and electricity roared to life. “Looks kind of broken… Can I keep it, Karl? Pretty please?”

“Just know that it may have been smuggled through some… chocolate-stained means.” Karl replied as he picked up a book bound in human flesh and lazily tossed it back onto a nearby shelf.

“Is that an anus joke from Alex? Are we reduced to bunghole schtick? Do I need to renegotiate my contract?”

“Hush, now,” Karl snickered. “This place is always such a damn mess,” he added as he bent down to pick up an orange orb that had rolled onto the walkway. The glass-like sphere was adorned with seven stars on its glossy surface. “I’m still not sure how much of this is real and how much are just more fake replicas like the old house.”

“The one in there’s the real deal,” Deadpool said as he pointed to the door at the end of the treasure trove hallway. Above the plain-looking wooden door was a sign that read ‘Processing and Finishing’, where Syntech housed all of the most advanced testing equipment, as well as an exit transmat. “I fished it out of the lake myself.”

 

[Karl Jak]

Leaving behind the various trinkets and baubles that his crews had scavenged and collected from parts far and wide, Karl entered the last stop on his tour. With a grin, he turned his attention to the containment unit. Housed within the maximum-security tube, a mass of black-and-red tissue seethed and writhed. As Karl drew near, the contained organism seethed up the side of its containment device. If it had any eyes, the producer was certain they’d be trying to burn holes through him.

“You know you’ll prefer it here,” Karl whispered as he tapped the glass with a fingertip. “Too bad you didn’t come with your green flesh suit.”

Sneering at the tube, Karl turned away and smiled at what he saw resting upon the table. Despite the gasps from the crew of engineers and other assorted PhDs, the Syntech chairman plucked the object off the table and smiled at it.

“Sir, we can’t rule out that the object may be toxic or otherwise irradiated in some manner. It’s not safe for you to handle it without protection.”

Deadpool put his masked chin on Karl’s shoulder before whispering into his ear in the least discreet manner feasible. “They’re aware that you birthed most of them with your demigod powers, aren’t they?”

“Oh hush, Mister Wilson,” Karl snickered as he gently pushed the mouthy mercenary away from him. The executive turned to man who had spoken earlier. “I take it that you’ve already scanned this and fed it into the device?”

The scientist and his partners all nodded their heads, nearly in unison. “We’re just a few hours away from having a complete restoration, based on the DNA we found here and in the scattered organic pieces that Mr. Pool was able to recover.”

“Splendid,” Karl smiled as he continued to stare through the pair of large holes in the object. “It will be ready for when the island goes live.”

Suddenly, Deadpool cleared his throat behind Karl, eliciting a groan from the producer of the event.

“How may I help you, Wade?”

“You’re going to let me go kill them all, right? That was part of the deal if I found your waterlogged trinket and the squishy, not-copyright-protected thing in the tube.”

“You won’t have his help and guidance… what makes you think you’ll have a better shot at winning?”

Deadpool gasped as if he had been comically impaled. “He’s always with me, Karl.” The mercenary placed a hand on his groin. “Always here my heart, right where I kept him. You know, like Winnie the Pooh.”

Karl Jak laughed softly before waving away the mercenary. “Then go prepare to be in the Barracks.”

As the mercenary skipped and hopped off to the preshow facility, Karl rested the object back on the table. His eyes moved to the crew standing on the opposite side of the pedestal. “Have the finished project ready for when the helicopters load up.”

“We will sir,” one of them replied cheerily as Karl grinned. The man opened his mouth to speak once again but was cut short by a subtle sound that filled the room around them.

Chh chh chh … ahh ahh ahh…

“The hell was that?” One of the scientists muttered as they all started to glance around the room.

Karl, paying one last smiling glance to the ancient, axe-scarred hockey mask on the pedestal in front of him, merely shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing, but you’ll probably want to load some sedatives into your device. Just my two cents.”

With that, the grinning executive snapped his fingers and vanished from the underground facility. When he popped back into existence, he was in his personal suite high above the preshow staging grounds.

“Time to get this show on the road.”