Hand of doom Vs. Hand of moon
Dr. Z. looks down at the patient on the table - "Sick little fucker is playing host to a horde of insects. They swim in his blood and revel and in it's nourishment. We best just carbon-break the specimen and leave it gooed in a containment vessel." Seemed such practice had become routine around the Neo-D labs. This wasn't the first "sick little fucker" to have to go this way.
The hive is growing fat, complacent. Slow, rhythmic ultrasonic buzz of information. Antenna scramblers. Nanoeloptic sensors relay consisting of realtime imagery featuring the nesting insectoids prying their way into the bio-organic fleshy bits. Hollow inside, like a discarded shell. The white-data always reads the same: survival, propagation. Then the swarm hits - counter-hive; the parasite becomes the prey. Carbon devouring nanobots with a self-terminating lifespan rapidly dissolve and metabolize the infected form on the cold metal slab like machine-driven microspagyrics. A white dust, about the consistency of sand is all that remains of the specimen and host after this process is complete.
The unilaterally reformed government has left us out here in the scrapyards to die while fortifying the few remaining colonial cities with anti-insect tuned EMF generators. The rebels in the scrapyard always told us it would turn out this way - those cold-hearted, elitist bastards would undoubtedly sell out the unwashed masses and filthy degenerate street scum time and time again, each chance they got. This time though there was no real refuge from this threat besides their oversexed military grade teched-out cityscape. Their homes had become their prison. Supplies dwindled and were rationed accordingly, distributed to the upper tiers of their caste.
Agent 927 stalks the edge of the ICEwall between the tunnels below and the scrapyards - these are dangerous lands, all the more so by nightside. He carefully attaches the time-displacement bomb with spray-on ultra sticky nanofibers; securing it tightly with his burgundy, dust-covered glove. A sharp smile comes to a perfect, demented point along the center line of his face as he watches a few tin-teethmen start the rickety, rigged munitions van headed for the city. The driver grits his metal, shimmering teeth - hopped up on some psychedehlic amphetamine, mostly likely a variation of DOM mixed with O-Acetylpsilocin in time-released nano-emulsions. Strange high: has been known to make all sorts do the craziest, most violent shit you'd never expect from their daily, less-skewed runs.
Seems there's about one or so surviving outcrops of the resistance left on some odd semi-organic machine island floating in ruins off the western coast where the great noble forest of time once stood. Filled with low rent goggle-sporting bandits equipped with atemporal and repurposed tech. Dated and hacked neural interfaces, a few six-armed robotic man suits, some crashpods, weird circuit dust lining the floor..bits of metal, resistors and chips. A few commanders left wearing your standard red & blue space marine garbs. All their battle suit droids sit empty and broken on the far edge of the city, near the seeming endless desert.
Right now the pedal under the foot of the driver feels like the face of every future-child melting across his leg to greet him with utter hatred in the form of neon toxick sunshine. He wants to kick it harder, through the floorboard if he could, show the sad abandoned little bastards who owns the future as his rear wheels careen out of control across the desert toward the heavenly, ivory city. A smog-god monolith beaconing him and his van full of explosives towards their home in the Asgardian palace of bliss and forgetful slumber.
See, if you manage to time-displace even a small temporal-spacial zone of the city wall, you effectively negate it's networked insect-counter measures. Soon deadly swarms of alien bees would make the city their waxen datahive.
All the corporate tycoons of the Zaibatsus in sector 147 of this particular Colonial city give praise to the ancient Spider God of Sh'Aoxkov every 6th day of the week. This usually involves the bringing of offerings to the great webbing for the elder spider hierarchlings to drain and feast upon in exchange for their cooperation in certain underhanded, quasi-magickal favors. Zaibatsus usually operated along these lines, praying to some godform of malice to succeed in unending games of corporate espionage. Mammon was a right and proper candidate, but also a free agent likely to sell you out. Even old Lenisker was known to contract through the Behemoth club from time to time.
Silver Twilight Lodge overlook, Orbital space - below the Sky colonies - a sort of odd lobby or hotel to stop off at on the space elevator. Realtime materia transponder linked up to an odd garden of glowing, foreign shapes stationed on the moon. All-seeing reflective satellite. Monitors in the station seem to slow-replay the scenes developing on the ground through an IV optical datadrip. Etherships acting as cargo transports for information - docking, landing and unloading in/through the iris. Pineal traffic: Nanoscaled thoughtform mining operations - harvesting feedback engines through pituitary tunnels. Ikipr laughs, pleased the scenarios he sees transpiring in the scrapyards and cities. We're going freefloat when the nanodiamond tether breaks.
High octane time shifting burst near the southern a perimiter of the city. Some fluorescent green metapuke shift out of the linear axis. 36 degree angular distortion. Decibels of the thunking boom shake nearby crystalline housing structures. The alliance of the unireformation oversees these complex yet precise housing arrangements which naturally grow into designated shape and form. A spew of chunky biomatter rips across the xenodimenal time toroid from the tins-teeth man innards. Alchemical sacrifice of the metal in his grill.
In the void of the impact stands a solitary, somewhat familiar figure with tattered purple cloak about his distorted mechanical muscular exoskeleton. The head of Colonel Purple hangs low, wires network across his insect form. Six legs woven in data pulsing nervous system overclocked in some daemonic alien transfiguration. Zombie alien biomorphed. Mi-go mecha Kung Fu battle ensues against imperial troops. Swift, multihanded godform combat. Squirrels on the outlands stalk the battlefield of the gap in time smuggling EMP field proxies care of the rebels.
Snakeskin man slithers a forked tongue and smiles - he still thinks himself the operator of his Doom Engine. Silver twilight lodge may beg to differ though. The Colonial Soldier's blood splashes against the wall leaving trails not unlike those the dark-robotic oracles divine from. Cruel games, hijacks, diversions, ruthless betrayal. The battle couldn't be left unfought. Always some void to fill, abyss to bridge, tower to build and tear down. Each little narrator in their node, playing their assigned role. Atemporally programmed. Illusionary story behind the fake red curtain.