Bloodflow

by Flying Wingnut

Introductions

I suppose a lot of you are wondering who I am. To be honest, that’s a fairly good question. If you had asked me that a few years ago, I could have answered that easily. I would have said ‘Hey. I’m Jake Gray. I’m a twenty eight year old resident of Brooklyn. I am an officer with the NYPD. I enjoy reading, video games, and bike riding.’

At least, that’s what I would have said.

Before my life changed for the worse.

Let me explain. About eight years ago, a company called Dynamicorp was involved in making physical augmentations for police officers. I was one of the first twenty who were picked for the trial run of these augments. The augments were in the form of a pair of metal gloves that would go up to your elbow and a pair of metal boots that would go up to your knee. They were meant to enhance the user’s senses, strength, and reaction times. They were built so that they could be taken on and off at will. Something went wrong with the procedure, however. After the procedure and calibration tests, I was told to take off the augments. It couldn’t have been simpler. I just had to hit the release button and take them off like a normal pair of boots and gloves. But when I went to take them off, they wouldn’t move. It turns out that the doctors accidentally fried the circuits, and the release mechanism was jammed. For hours, the doctors tried to fix the problem, but to no avail. They were permanently attached to me.

Over the course of a few months, I learned to adjust to using the augments for day-to-day life. It was hard, to say the least, but with the support of my family I was able to begin being normal again.

The others, not so much. Over time, the other officers who were augmented were caught abusing their power, and dealing serious damage to people for things like shoplifting and traffic violations. Each time they were arrested and tried, the augments were found to be the source of the problems. After three cases, the augments were discontinued. Each officer was required to turn in their augments for disposal. I say ‘required’ because every one of the augmented officers that weren’t arrested went missing shortly after the order was given. I was the only one who didn’t go crazy with power, but they couldn’t take any chances, and I was kicked off the force.

I had no luck finding a solid career. The only thing I had wanted to do in life was become a police officer, but thanks to the augments no police force would take me. For a year afterwards, I did different odd jobs around town in order to make money. My family struggled, but we stayed strong throughout.

We stayed strong, until that one fateful day.

It was a clear night. The stars were sparkling in the sky, like tiny diamonds embedded in a black fabric. I was heading home from another odd job. I was tired, frustrated, and eager to get home to my loving family. As I walked through the streets, the world carried on. People walked, talked, shopped, and generally lived their lives. As I walked up to my door, I noticed that it was ajar, and the lock was broken. I immediately realized that this was a break-in, and sprung into action. I ran into the house, and found that everything in the house was either thrown or broken. Holes were punched in walls, and shattered glass littered the floor. When I reached the living room, I found a man dressed in full black, rifling through the drawers. I sprinted at him, hoping to catch him by surprise, but he blocked my right hook, spinning around and following through with a right hook of his own. I barely had time to raise my arm to block. As I blocked, I tried to get a good look at his face, but it was covered by a metal mask. His sleeve slipped down his arm slightly, and I got a look at what was under it.

It was a metal glove.

Just like mine.

I was so stunned I didn’t notice his knee eagerly making its way to my stomach. As the knee impacted, I lost my breath, and hunched over. He reeled his leg back in, intending to take full advantage of this prime opportunity. Before I could block, the knee sprung back forward and hit me right in the face. The force was enough to knock me back several feet and lay me down flat on my ass. As I laid there, the masked man walked towards me and knelt down, so he could speak to me face to face.

“Good to finally see you again...brother.” He sounded like he was talking through a radio, not unlike the stormtroopers from Star Wars. Seems kind of reasonable, given the mask. I was confused by him referring to me as brother, since I grew up as an only child. Whether it was from the concussion or the confusion, I said the first thing that came to mind.

“Joke’s on you, stranger...” After I said that, I punched him in the face, making him stagger back. I took this opportunity to get back on my feet. When I stood back up, I felt like I left my line from before slightly incomplete, so I decided to add onto it.

“I’m an only child.” There, that’s suitably witty enough. On with the action.

As i finished talking, He charged at me, winding his right arm back for a wild haymaker. I easily dodged and countered with a punch to the sternum, followed by grabbing his collar, pulling him close, and elbowing him in the face. I tried reeling back for another strike, but he managed to escape from my grasp. He jumped out of a window, yelling out “You will come to us one day, brother!” as he ran. I was about to follow him, but I remembered what was more important, and went to look for my family.

I searched through every room, and found nothing but broken objects and general chaos. But, as I neared the bedroom, I noticed a blood stain on the wall. It was in the vague shape of a hand dragging along the wall, as if the person the print belonged to was trying to grab onto something. I knew this wouldn’t be good. As I busted through the door, I found the worst nightmare any father or husband could conjure from the darkest depths of their mind; I found the motionless bodies of my wife and child, neatly laid on the bed, arms crossed over their chests, as if the killer had already held a funeral. All I could do was weep as I cradled my wife in my arms, cursing the absentee god that would allow such a thing to occur. At that moment, I vowed to find the killer, and make him pay.

Six years. Six...long...years. That’s how long it took to find this man, to get to this point. I had been looking for so long, following lead after lead to dead end, putting down various underworld bosses, but it was about 3 months ago that I finally caught up with the man who murdered my family. It was a long, drawn out fight, but at the end, when I had one hand around his chin and the other around the back of his head, he spilt everything. I learned more on that night than at any point in the past 6 years.

Apparently, the augments contained small needles, which would inject a chemical mixture that did two things. First off, it caused increased aggression and shortened temper. The plan was for the officers to go crazy because of the serum, causing them to be booted out of the police force. From there, the second part of the serum kicked in; mind control. Dynamicorp would control the minds of these former officers, making it oh so easy to transport them to their headquarters. When they arrived, the mind control was solidified, turning each of the officers into the company’s private army. The fuck-up during my surgery must have fried the circuits controlling the needles as well as ones controlling the release mechanism. Why this poor bastard told me all of this, I may never know, but i’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. As I snapped his neck, I thanked him for being so open.

Now that I knew the true culprit, I knew my plan of attack. For three months, I gathered what I would need, which could be summarized in three words; guns, ammo, explosives. Now, here I stand, In front of the Dynamicorp building, ready to give them hell. Time to go over my checklist, just to make sure...

Guns: Two M9 pistols

Ammo: Enough to overthrow a small country

Explosives: Just enough C4 to bring the building down. Also, a few Semtex grenades, just in case...

Outfit: Red hoodie, black balaclava, black track pants, gloves, combat boots, bulletproof vest. All good.

So, now to answer your question from before. Who am I? I am Bloodflow, and I am going to make these bastards pay...

Comments

[NeoNagasaki]

1. The biggest rule with storytelling is "show, don't tell". However, you want to get into the action so badly that you just narrate the backstory of your main character to us. Because of this we have exactly no connection to your main character, we know nothing about him as a person, and we don't care. His family dies, and that should be a big moment, but instead we kind of shrug. We've never seen his family, we've never seen them interact, they don't even have names for god's sake.

2. I imagine that if government scientists screwed up something that messed up a person's life as badly as having metal gloves and boots on all the time they would be sued for quite a bit, unless he signed a waiver of course. Also, having metal boots and gloves on all the time would cause serious issues with sweat, lack of sunlight, nail growth, and untreatable fungi.

3. Why would the officers be given powerful experimental technology to keep at their houses? Police officers' squad cars and shotguns are kept at police stations until they are needed, then they are checked out while the officer is on duty. Now that's for a car and a longarm, imagine what they would do if it was experimental lasers and rocket packs.

4. Waiver or not if the U.S. government fired a man for no other reason than a faulty experiment they held, there would be a massive wrongful termination lawsuit, like headline news big.

5. Why go through all that trouble to get police super-soldiers for their corporate army? I mean, they have an injection that causes mind control. They could pick up bums off the street, or import people from Singapore. The absolute WORST people they could have picked for this are government representatives from first world nations.

6. Did the U.S. government have no oversight at all on this project? The U.S. makes people do months of testing before they let people put out shampoo. They do months of animal testing, then run human trials in controlled environments. That's shampoo, this is gloves and boots filled with needles that inject mind control drugs, but they didn't question it at all?

7. If these guys are under mind control then 7a) How did Bloodflow force him to talk and 7b) This introduces the idea than the actions of this man aren't his fault. This man is a police officer that has tragically had six years of his life stolen from him and been forced to do horrible, horrible things. The psychological trauma from that kind of event makes this man a noble victim, and your psychotic protagonist ignores the entire dilemma and outright murders him. Your protagonist is an evil human being and I hope he dies.

8. Why did Dynamicorp go to the man's house and rip his place apart and kill his family? They would have known the gloves weren't there, the officers that worked with him knew they were fused and the company was the one who did the testing in the first place. He has nothing of any value to them and they killed his family just for fun. I know they weren't there to kill him, otherwise they probably would have just shot him or had a team of people with machineguns pick him up instead of a single unarmed man who takes the time to punch holes in the walls.

If you want to fix this thing up the first thing to do is take it out of America, and make your character a bad person. If these were illegal experiments being done by Somalian pirates to make raiding boats easier it would help. Your character can be a heartless jackass who kills people, corporations know no one is going to miss Somalian pirates, and legality isn't really an issue. Next take time for that boring "character development" thing, I know it's not exciting, but it needs to be done if you want anyone to care. Good luck wingnut.