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Episode 01x11 - Cow Complex

Icepunk:

I lean back in my chair and sigh. I’m so young, yet I’m going to be killed over a little misunderstanding between myself and the CIA. Life sucks.

Man, if they’re going to kill me, they could at least be punctual about it. It’s been at least three hours since Agent Twit left. I’m going to go see where that ninny is and demand that he kill me.

I stride across the tiny room and try the doorknob. The door opens and I find myself in a hallway. Apparently they didn’t expect me to be smart enough to escape... Incompetent clowns.

I laugh, startling a female agent who happens to be walking past.

She blinks, stares for a moment, then says, “Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!”

“Of course I am! I was escorted here by Agent Twit himself!”

She draws her gun and points it at me. “You’re Agent Twit’s prisoner, aren’t you?”

Thinking quickly, I respond, “Nope.”

“Oh,” she says, holstering her weapon. “Sorry, honest mistake.”

“No problem. Listen, you free this weekend?”

Malex:

“Well,” I said, addressing my laptop, “if you’re going to stay with me I’m gonna have to at least know your name.”

“My name? I doubt that a pathetic human could pronounce it.”

“Try me.” No sooner were the words out of my mouth before my ears were assaulted with the audio equivalent of raw binary data.

“That was my serial number.”

“Okay, well serial numbers don’t count as names around here.” I sit back and study the floating face on my laptop screen for a while. “How about we name you Erwin?”

“Oh, how original. Call me that again and I’ll eat your face.”

“‘Are Two Dee Two’?”

“No.”

“X11R6?”

“No.”

Icepunk:

After the female agent shot me down - figuratively, of course - I continued my wanderings through the complex.

This is all so cool. I wish that I had my camera with me, although these morons would probably think that I was a spy.

A door with a warning catches my eye: “Danger! Hideous alien squids! DO NOT enter, else they will make spaghetti out of your entrails. Scrumptious!”

Amongst the myriad of my thoughts, my inner dialog says, “Nice try, Agent Twit.”

Malex:

“Well hmm,” I said, getting frustrated. “What’s a good name for an evil psycho laptop violator?”

“I think,” the fiend said thoughtfully, “that if you had any fewer brains the vacuum alone would probably depressurize the room.”

After another long pause, I sat up. “I know!” I said. My laptop looked at me suspiciously. “We’ll call you ‘Linus’!”

“Why?”

“‘Linus’ was the name of a good and powerful wizard.”

“That works for me... Say, what were you doing in my CIA network in the first place?”

“Crikey, that’s right! I was working on rescuing Icepunk!”

“Icepunk? You know Icepunk?”

“Yeah, we room together. Why? How do you know him?”

“Some retarded human, who called himself ‘Icepunk’, was brought into the Cow Complex early this morning. Apparently he stole some restricted info about our alien research facility.”

“The ‘Cow Complex’? What do you people smoke down there? Anyway, can you show me where it is?”

Linus pondered for a moment, then agreed to help however he could. I grabbed my GPS, jumped into my screwed up car, and drove away - the creature living in my laptop navigating.

Icepunk:

I stare at the strange beings that the room contains. “You guys are really, really ugly, you know that?”

Three aliens stare back uncomprehendingly. Each of them is a Squid-like creature with bulbous eyes on a head which is perched atop a mass of tentacles, making the monsters under children’s beds seem as cuddly as a basket full of kittens.

“Sorry sir, does our appearance offend you?” one of them asks in a rich, cultured voice.

“Kinda. No offense, but you guys look as though you’ve all had more than your share of ‘ugly stick’ beatings. They could, like, torture you guys using nothing but a mirror. As a matter of fact-”

“We get the picture,” a different Squid than the first interrupts. “Who are you and what are you doing in here?”

Malex:

After driving for a while, we ended up in: “A cow pasture?! What are you thinking?”

Linus looked at me and put on a hurt expression. “This is the geographical area where the complex is.” I looked at him suspiciously. “Look, I was an integral part of their network. I knew about every piece of hardware in the place, including the GPS equipment they used.”

“Okay, so these are the coordinates, but there’s nothing here.”

I got out of the car and started toward the cow pasture.

“Wait!” Linus called. “I need to disable the surveillance before you can go over there. Do you have a wireless network card for this laptop?” I plugged the network card into my laptop, and Linus immediately began accessing their network. “Ha! They’ve got no protection at all now that I’ve left.” After a few more seconds of furious network activity, Linus said, “Okay, all clear.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I redirected the camera feeds to myself, here, and replaced them with simple loops.”

“Excellent!” I responded, and headed toward the cow pasture.

“Wait!” Linus interjected again. “Aren’t you going to take me?”

“Not a chance. You can keep an eye on things from there better than with me, besides the fact that I don’t want to have to lug you around.”

I left Linus sitting in my car, and began to inspect the pasture.

After a bit of searching and avoiding cow excrement, I found a an old stump in a small bunch of trees. At least, it appeared to be a stump. The ‘stump’ had quite an interesting assortment of crap inside, ranging from a GPS receiver to a keypad.

I studied the keypad for a moment, and noticed a text message flashing across its display: “Hi Malex, it’s me, Linus. I have good reason to believe that the pass code is ‘9646’.”

“Well heck,” I thought, “what have I got to lose?”