Olympian Complex

“You’re up, kid.”

Cold. Empty. Lifeless. Irrelevant. Ares never found much use for the toys they gave him, nor took much enjoyment from the food they gave him to nourish his body. He merely did what was expected of him, and no more – why waste the energy trying to excel when all he needed to do was remain adequate and his needs would be fulfilled? Play, they told him, would build the proper neurons, and so he dutifully played with the toys they pointed him at for a few hours a day, until they told him he no longer needed to. When they hooked him up to the testing machines, he likewise completed his tasks, but they soon bored him as well. There didn’t seem to be much in this life for him. Not that he minded much. Why bother speculating on some grand purpose when there clearly was no point to it?

All that changed the day he met Prometheus.

Prometheus was towering, gleaming, and utterly unlike anything Ares had ever known. The bright red and gold paint caught his eye in a way nothing in his short life had – and so did the feeling of power and awe inspired in him by merely standing in the machine’s shadow. When he slipped inside of the machine, it felt like coming home – the chamber was warm and comfortable, and he felt something click in his mind as he reached out for the machine. As he closed his eyes, he felt a warmth surrounding him, almost like an embrace; instinctively, he reached out, and the machine moved, as responsive to his thoughts as his own body. A surge of joy went through him as he left the garage, and it wasn’t long before he was running across the landscape, his cockpit providing the life support to allow him outside the biodome and into the more hostile atmosphere, the large ringed planet filling the sky as though smiling upon his newfound joy. When they encouraged him via radio to test out the missiles, he happily complied, laughing in delight as boulders exploded into so much dust.

Since then, Ares lived only for the moments he spent inside Prometheus. He gladly did anything asked of him, and when they hinted that it would lead to more time with his best and only friend, began to excel, slowly surpassing every benchmark with more and more confidence. He began to spend his extra hours training his body, so as not to let down his new friend when the time came, and to ask questions in the hopes of further developing his skills. Life was still cold, empty, and meaningless, but now some small part of it held relevance, meaning, and warmth. It wasn’t such a bad life after all.

Subject 002 notes: Subject seems to be developing emotional attachment to his unit. Despite this peculiarity, subject has easily surpassed 001 in testing. It is my personal assesment that the subject will be ready for missions within six months.