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Chapter contributed by : LightningCross

Urban Shock

Chapter 1: The Shipment

By LightningCross

G1/STSE Universe

A/N: I know this violates the rules slightly, but I sent a rough outline of it to STSE and she didn't seem to mind. Tim Trakersly is copyright STSE and used with her permission.

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==3 Years After Clones Hit Market==

The silver tractor trailer cruised at a steady 70MPH eastbound on Interstate 90. The logo of the Trakersly Robotics Corporation was clearly visible in bold blue lettering on either side of the trailer. Sunlight flickered on the logo on either side, reflecting off of the fluorescent strips embedded in the logo.

There were two men sitting in the cabin of the truck. One was obviously a trucker; he wore tan plaid overalls that had been washed so many times that the black stripes had nearly completely faded away, leaving small black spots that made the outfit look like sand and mud mixed together. He wore an Indiana Colts football cap, which served to cover the enlarging bald spot on the back of his head. His face was rugged and unshaven, with deep wrinkles and small indented scars running across it that suggested that the trucker had spent a long time on the road, and possibly had gotten entangled in some serious bar fights. He was silent as they drove eastbound on the Interstate, keeping his eyes squarely on the road in front of him.

The man next to him was much younger and several inches shorter. He was dressed in a clean white lab coat and freshly ironed black khakis, contrasting sharply against the grungy appearance of the trucker and the dingy interior of the cabin. A name tag on his left breast clearly identified him as Dr. Lucas Stevenson, Associate Engineer of Trakersly Robotics Corporation. He had a melancholy expression on his face as he leaned against the passenger-side window, staring at the neat suburban sprawl of identical homes and strip malls below them.

He absentmindedly rubbed his hand through his dirty blond hair, struggling to stay awake. He didn't want to fall asleep now; Chicago was only 30 minutes away, where they would be making a stop at a local Trakersly warehouse to inspect the clones before they made the final leg of the journey to Fort Bragg. He had to make sure he was wide awake to supervise the warehouse employees as they unloaded the clones from the truck. He had to be ready for the slight chance that one of them would activate prematurely and shred them all to little chunky bits of flesh. How had he managed to get himself into this?, he thought to himself.

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Lucas recalled the day he had gotten stuck with this assignment. He had been in the R&D labs of Trakersly's brand-new corporate headquarters when a small bespectacled in a buttoned-down black business suit entered the robotic programming labs, a heavily restricted area of the facility. He hadn't even noticed him; all of the R&D teams were working overtime to make sure the next software upgrade would be ready before the holiday shopping season. He was typing rapidly in front of a large LCD panel. He was debugging about 5,000 lines out of a string of code millions of lines long, his colleagues working on other strings. Deep purple circles ran under his eyes as he strained them to focus on the screen.

He nearly jumped out of his seat when he felt a light tap on his shoulder. Once the initial shock wore off he realized that there was a man standing behind him, so he took a quick gasp of breath and turned his swivel chair around to face him.

"Sorry if I startled you there," the short man said to him. He had a blank expression on his face, and his stiff stance made it apparent to Lucas that he didn't actually mean what he said. Lucas extended his hand for the man to shake, but the man didn't extend one in return, so Lucas dropped his arm after several seconds.

"You're Mr. Stevenson, correct?" the man stated as fact. Lucas felt slightly unnerved as the man's small brown eyes narrowed slightly, as though he was attempting to use them to bore through Lucas' head and grab the information he needed directly from his mind.

"Yes, that's correct. I... I'm rather busy at the moment, so could you please tell me what I can help you with?" Lucas said somewhat nervously, rising from his seat as he said this. This guy was giving him the fucking creeps, and he wanted to get him out of there as soon as he possibly could.

The man smiled slightly, pleased that the younger man who now towered over him understood that he wasn't here for pleasantries. "I'm Louis Black, partner of the firm Black & Edwards. Mr. Trakersly has asked me to personally check on the status of the software upgrades for the utility and pleasure series of clones, as well as the current status of Project Omega," the man said.

Lucas felt himself get slightly angry, but he kept this from showing in his body language. Why the fuck is this guy asking me this, wouldn't Dr. Yakusa be more suited to answer Mr. Black's questions?, he thought to himself. "If you don't mind me asking sir, shouldn't you be asking Dr. Yakusa? He's the head of the department, I'm sure he's much more knowledgeable about the project as a whole than I am," Lucas said.

"Mr. Yakusa is in manufacturing right now, overseeing the programming of the Omega Project clones. He has told me that besides himself, you are the most qualified to give me a full status update," Mr. Black said.

Lucas let a small smile cross his lips, flattered that Mr. Yakusa thought so highly of him. "So, what would you like to know?" Lucas said.

"Let's walk, shall we?" Mr. Black said as he started to walk off at a brisk pace. Lucas had to jog to catch up with him. For a corporate lawyer this short, he's pretty damned quick, Lucas thought to himself.

"Tell me about the military programming of the Omega Project clones," Mr. Black said as he came to a stop at the door that sealed the R&D department from the rest of the complex. He pulled a card out of his breast pocket, swiping it in front of the card reader to the right of the sealed door. A green light above the door activated as a small ding was heard, followed by a whooshing sound as the door depressurized and slowly slid open.

Where should I start?, Lucas thought to himself. He decided that it would probably be best to detail their military capabilities first. "Well, we've already finished with most of their programming. Our team decided that it would be better to work from the code that we had designed for the utility and pleasure series, instead of starting on new code from scratch. We've lowered the sensitivity of the Omega clones to roughly human levels. We figured that since these clones are headed for the battlefield they won't need to be so sensitive, since their primary purpose will be to kill poor people in third-world countries and not to pleasure bored housewives," Lucas said, finishing with a small chortle. He knew that his joke was in poor taste considering that the company was going to rake in $300 billion from this defense contract, but he was desperate to provoke some kind of response out of the stiff suit walking in front of him, positive or negative.

Mr. Black didn't even flinch. Fucking humorless corporate drone, Lucas thought to himself.

"Please continue," Mr. Black said. The two had left the long series of broad beech hallways lined with offices that they had been walking through, now passing through the expansive lobby of the corporate headquarters of Trakersly Robotics Corporation. The company logo and motto were on the far wall. Lucas remembered the receptionist at the desk below the logo telling him once that it had been laser-sculpted from synthetic blue sapphire specifically for the company headquarters. It was a known fact throughout the company that Mr. Trakersly didn't spare any expense in the construction of the headquarters, and considering that the nerds at R&D had been given hardware far more advanced than anything at their previous jobs it was something they liked to joke about.

Lucas took a deep breath and continued where he had left off. "All of the military programming that the DOD asked for has been programmed into the clones. Out of the box they'll know how to operate every firearm currently in existence. They've been programmed with all of the survival and combat training the Army requested. They can speak every language currently in existence, but in that regard they're the same as the utility and pleasure models. We've replaced most of their programming on how to sexually pleasure humans and replaced it with knowledge on how to incapacitate or kill them. They also know how best to kill other clones, just in case they have to tangle with our pleasure and utility series in their foreign escapades," Lucas paused to take a breath. Mr. Black wasn't slowing up, and Lucas was starting to feel winded in his attempt to keep up with the smaller man.

They were now at an elevator, he realized; They both stepped in as Mr. Black pressed the button for the twentieth floor. They had walked across the facility to the tower where the offices of Mr. Trakersly and his top executives were located. If Lucas wasn't mistaken, the twentieth floor was where Mr. Trakersly's office was located. Was that their destination?, he thought to himself, gulping slightly in anxiety at the thought of meeting directly with the man who had turned a small adult entertainment company into a massive multinational corporation that had reached the number five spot on the Fortune 500 last year, and was poised to become number one this year.

"Tell me a bit about the hardware," Mr. Black asked Lucas as they stood in the ascending elevator. Lucas took in another deep breath of air as he prepared to start again.

"Mr. Yakusa is the hardware expert, but I'll try my best to explain what we've done. First of all, we weren't able to use the solar skin designed at MIT; while it was incredibly efficient and environmentally friendly, it shared the same weakness as human skin," Lucas paused to take a breath, still visibly winded by their walk. Asthma's a bitch, he thought to himself.

"That is?" Mr. Black asked, narrowing his beady eyes on Lucas.

"Bullets can penetrate it. We decided to use lightweight armor composed of cybertronian alloys supplied to us by Mr. Trakersly's Decepticon contact, and to be quite honest we don't fully understand their chemical composition yet. We've done some ballistics testing on the armor, and it's fully capable of surviving a direct hit from an anti-tank sabot round. It's also designed to be detachable, so if a piece of the armor is damaged in combat it won't hinder the clone's movement. The weakness of the armor is that it's not very pliable, so we couldn't fit it over the clone's joints like we did with the lighter titanium-based alloys the utility and pleasure clones use. We decided to compensate for this weakness by modifying the skin with layered polycarbonate plastic and carbon fibers. These materials didn't seem to work too well with the solar cells designed by MIT, so we had to find a different method of powering the clones." Lucas paused as the doors to the elevator slid open. Mr. Black began to walk again, with Lucas doing his best to keep up.

Lucas didn't wait for Mr. Black to prompt him as he started again. He had always been chided by his colleagues in R&D for his tendency to go on long-winded rants, but Mr. Black had asked for him to explain this, hadn't he? "We struggled at first to find alternate ways to power the clones and the directed-energy weapons the DOD asked the clones to be outfitted with. Nuclear energy was the only viable alternative, but most nuclear reactors are too large to fit into a human-sized clone. We did some research and discovered that our colleagues in Europe have made some rather remarkable advances in the field of Inertial Confinement Fusion, which is--"

"You can shut up now. It's time for you to meet with Mr. Trakersly," Mr. Black tactlessly interrupted him, stopping in front of a blue-tinted glass door. MR. TRAKERSLY, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, TRAKERSLY ROBOTICS CORPORATION was printed in bold white lettering on the glass.

"You can come in," a voice was heard from a small speaker box to the right of the door. The door slid open, and Lucas followed Mr. Black into the brightly-lit office of Mr. Trakersly.

Lucas clammed up as he stood in the presence of the founder of their company. He could already feel the butterflies rise up in his stomach as he stood in front of the multi-billionaire. He had heard about how ruthless the man could be, muscling out any potential competition by buying up small upstarts and having Mr. Black's firm sue any small companies that wouldn't go along with him into the ground. A popular joke in the company, although probably not far from the truth, was that Mr. Trakersly had enough influence in Congress to rewrite the entire Constitution if he wanted to.

"Mr. Trakersly has asked to speak with you in private," Mr. Black stated as he turned around and walked out of the door. Lucas was now alone with one of the most powerful people in the world, and was doing his best to try not to shit himself.

Mr. Trakersly stepped up from his desk. He walked around it and came face-to-face with Lucas, extending his right arm firmly. Lucas grasped it somewhat weakly, trying to keep his composure. He looked up and stared into his eyes. Mr. Trakersly was only an inch or two taller than him, but to Lucas he might as well have been a giant.

"Don't mind Mr. Black there, I pay him to be an asshole," Mr. Trakersly said cheerfully with a warm smile, revealing his perfect teeth. "Let me start by saying that it's a pleasure to meet you Lucas, and our corporation is well served by such a valuable asset as yourself. I'm Mr. Trakersly, but you can feel free to call me Tim."

Lucas sighed in relief. Mr. Trakersly -- Tim, he mentally corrected himself -- was a much nicer person than the ruthless, cut-throat businessman he had imagined in his mind. His smile didn't seem insincere in the least bit, and he had an air of casualness that few other people as powerful as he was shared. Furthermore, Tim's blatant flattery had done well to ease Lucas' tension, as he now beamed with pride that Tim thought so much of him. "It's an honor to meet with you, Tim," Lucas said.

"Please, take a seat," Tim gestured to the comfortable-looking leather chair seated across from Tim's desk. The two men walked over to the desk, each taking a seat at either end of it. Tim reached underneath the desk and pulled out a bottle of vodka, along with two shot glasses. "Would you care for a drink?" he offered Lucas.

"I-I don't drink," Lucas replied with a slight stammer. He hoped that his answer would not offend Tim.

"That's good. If my top scientists were drinking on the job, I'd have to fire them," Tim said with a smile, punctuated with a polite laugh. Lucas forced himself to laugh along with Tim, although he could feel the butterflies returning to his stomach. That had been a test, and there was little doubt in Lucas' mind that if he had tried to be polite and accepted the drink he would've been fired on the spot.

Tim put the vodka bottle and shot glasses back under his desk and folded his arms across the top of the desk, the smile vanishing from his face. "It's time to get down to business. Lucas, do you know why I had Mr. Black bring you here?" He asked Lucas. The young engineer had to do his best not to melt right there under Tim's glare.

"I haven't the slightest idea," responded Tim. Had he done something wrong? Did he unwittingly violate some safety regulation, screw up the code he was debugging, or did he do something else that was going to lose him his job?

"It's because your department has a problem, Lucas," Tim said, his tone getting more and more dangerous by the second. "It has more leaks in it than a sinking ship. Mr. Black out there," he pointed towards the glass door, where Mr. Black was presumably waiting outside the office, "Has had quite a bit of work to do lately because of some of the people in your department. I've just gotten word that two more start-up companies are trying to produce sex clones. That means that I have give Mr. Black even more money to buy them up, or to file suit if they're stubborn. I have a feeling that someone in your department's been selling our technology," Tim finished, a hint of red seeping into his otherwise tan face.

Lucas was trembling, wishing to himself that he had a cloaking field to disappear right about now.

"Relax, I'm not accusing you of anything," Tim smiled slightly, satisfied with Lucas' response. He knew that Lucas wasn't the one that was selling off their technology. He had the entire R&D department, and for that matter nearly every square inch of the facility, wired up with cameras and microphones. He had been watching the department for the past month or so, so he already knew who was the culprit.

"I like you, Lucas. You're an honest man. Maybe a little shy, if you don't mind me saying so, but I feel that I can trust you. So I'll get straight to my real point," Tim paused to allow Lucas to recompose himself, the warm smile returning.

"The boys in the DOD are shitting themselves over this election. They know they're on the way out, and they're itching to get their hands on the first batch of clones we've produced. How long do you think it would take to finish the programming on the Omega clones?" he asked Lucas.

"Well, we've already gotten most of it finished. All that's left is the loyalty and ethical programming, along with --"

"How long?" Tim interrupted Lucas mid-sentence. Unbeknownst to Lucas he had listened in on their entire conversation from a small speaker underneath his desk. He knew that the scientist was prone to rambling, which is why he had asked Mr. Black to make sure he got most of it out of his system on the way to his office.

"I'd say two weeks," Lucas said, disregarding Tim's rude interruption.

"That's too long," Tim stated as a matter of fact. "The Department of Defense has been riding my ass for the past week for me to get these clones to them for testing at Fort Bragg. They've even gone so far as to threaten to revoke our exclusive $300 billion defense contract if we don't hurry."

Lucas was confused now. why was Tim telling him all of this? Engineering had its limits, did he expect him to stop time for the next two weeks and then restart it when the programming was finished? What the hell did he expect him to do? "If you don't m-mind me asking sir, what does this have to do with me?"

Tim smiled, glad that Lucas wasn't as dumb as he looked, especially at the salary he was paying him. "I trust you, Lucas. I don't expect you or your department to work any harder than you've been doing for the past two months. I know you guys need to get the software update ready for Christmas. But I do need those clones to get to Fort Bragg," Tim said. Lucas wasn't liking where this conversation was going, but he had a feeling that he was about to be told to do something he would hate.

"I need you to accompany the clones to Fort Bragg. You'll be spending the next two months keeping an eye on them as they get put through the paces there. You'll report back to me every other day and monitor their behavior. If any of the droids decide to get... insubordinate, I need somebody I know I can trust to deactivate them," Tim said.

Lucas understood the situation completely now. There had been rumors floating around the corporation that some of the engineers in R&D had gotten close to the clones. Their charm had worked its way into nearly all of the female researchers, and most of the male ones too. He himself stayed as far away from them as he possibly could. Many of them behaved like teenagers, and he still had vivid memories of being bullied in high school, with various other anxiety problems to accompany that. He would still work on the clones, of course. It was his job to work on their meta programming. The clones had always been deactivated when he loaded programming into their metas, which didn't aggravate his anxiety too much. Last Christmas, when everyone in R&D had been given a free clone as part of their yearly bonus package, Lucas never activated it. He sold it to some rich person over eBay for $300,000, fetching such a high price since it was a limited edition only given to Trakersly employees. He wouldn't have even bothered to open the package if he hadn't needed to reprogram its meta loyalty to the person who had just bought it over eBay.

It would be accurate to say that of the people working for Trakersly, he was one of the few who didn't own a clone, or fuck them for that matter. He wouldn't form close bonds with the droids he was overseeing, and would be able to deactivate one in a heartbeat if he had to. He was also one of the few programmers in the department who wasn't close to the clones. The other three were all female, and had formed close bonds with the experimental clones they worked on.

Tim also had a history of making on-the-record misogynistic comments about the women who wanted to marry their clones and were trying to get legislation pushed through congress to this effect. Not that it would have passed if he hadn't said anything, but his comments made it clear that he regarded them in the same way as he did the sex toys he used to sell; tools to be used to further his profit. He probably thought that if he sent any of the female programmers they would drop their panties the moment they were alone with them.

"Can you do this for me?" Tim asked him in a firm tone.

Lucas mulled over this for a moment in his mind. He knew that if he wanted to keep his job, he had no choice but to say yes. He forced himself to focus on the positives. He would finally be able to get away from the women in R&D teasing him about his luck with dating and his fear of clones. He would get a break from the monotony of the past two months of debugging and Seattle's shitty weather and might even get to spend some quality alone time in the North Carolina wilderness.

This might turn out to be a good thing after all, he assured himself.

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"We're almost there," the trucker spoke up, breaking Lucas' concentration on the conversation two days ago that had landed him in this filthy truck cabin. He hadn't realized that when Tim said he wanted him to keep a close eye on the clones that he'd have to ride in the fucking truck.

The sun had finally sunk under the horizon behind them. The highway was lit up by hundreds of headlights in both directions, the highway lights not on yet. It was the evening rush hour, everybody desperate to get home.

Nobody seemed to notice the three helicopters that now hovered above the highway. Nobody noticed until it was too late.

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A/N: The clone this story centers on will be introduced next chapter. There'll be sex too, but it might take a bit to get to it, so don't you worry! ;P
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