Apostasy#0: The Misbegotten Vassal

The comic opens with a view of strings of code running. Cut to two eye lenses in the darkness of a Combine transhuman soldier. The code running describes the resurrection of the soldier.

A plug comes in and connects to the mask of the Combine soldier, updating their firmware. The soldier is part human, part machine.

The soldier looks around. They are in the Combine Citadel, the spire in the middle of City 17, overlooking a production line for Combine synth units.

We switch to a flashback. A war scene with soldiers facing the invading Combine army, built of synthetic alien units - synths - such as a three-legged tripod creature, a Combine strider, that is shooting at the soldiers. One of the soldiers tells his superior officer, Lieutenant Roitto, that they are going to be overrun and need to retreat. Then, a speech about a small faction of rebels fighting the Combine cuts in.

The war scene fades out as Mikael Roitto wakes up from his nightmare. He considers how he has overslept as Doctor Wallace Breen, administrator of City 17 and pawn of the Combine, talks on the TV. Doctor Breen addresses the rebels directly and Mikael kicks the TV screen in response, breaking it. He picks up two suitcases.

Mikael thinks about how he is responsible for carrying these two bags into the City 17 and not allowing the Combine to get ahold of them under any circumstances. He reflects on how security has been tight and decides to stash them in a place where Doctor Kleiner may get them later. He spots a sign for the train station and figures it's as good a place as any.

Meanwhile, a Combine dropship flies over City 17, lands in the plaza and drops off a squad of soldiers, one of which is the soldier from the start of the comic. That soldier is stationed at the train station as security. In his head, the software notes a stack overload error.

Mikael sneaks into the train station and spots a locker. He stashes the contents of the two suitcases in there and locks it up. As he leaves, he spots two Civil Protection police officers and realizes he'll have to improvise an exit.

Mikael tosses the now empty suitcases at a window, breaking it, and exits the building by climbing down the wall. Once he gets to the ground, however, a voice from offscreen tells him to freeze.

Mikael is surrounded by two armed cops and surrenders. As he's dragged away by the cops into the train station, he worries about dropping off the locker key to someone. The cops take him off the platform, as a train is about to arrive from City 19, and hold him against some wooden crates.

The Combine soldier is reactivated to deal with Mikael, who is stressing out because the train to the Combine prison of Nova Prospekt is there, from which he could never escape. A man, Mark Meriwhether, watches from afar.

Mikael gets desperate and grabs his concealed pistol. The soldier notices it, however, and knocks him flat out.

Mikael recovers consciousness as he is dragged away by two Combine soldiers to the train for Nova Prospekt. He panics, then spots a shovel nearby, manages to grab it and hits one of the soldiers in the head, then uses their rifle to kill the other.

Mikael escapes and starts looking for a way out. He notices a ladder and climbs it with some difficulty, realizing the soldiers may have broken a few ribs.

The knocked out soldier, the same we've been following, regains consciousness. However, his thoughts are not just mechanical anymore, as he wonders why he's hearing voices and then screams at them to get out of his head. He managed, however, to retain his senses and circumvent the Combine AI, getting it to map him a way out.

The Combine soldier reaches a wire fence as their AI tells them that the route is blocked. They try to force their way out, attracting the attention of two Civil Protection officers, one of which asks if they require something. The AI maps another exit path and the soldier leaves, but not before one of the metro cops tells his colleague to contact the Overwatch Nexus.

In the meantime, Mikael Roitto, still armed with the rifle he took off the soldier, finds two Civil Protection officers up ahead, not having noticed him yet. As he thinks that he needs a distraction to sneak past, both officers are called away. He then proceeds.

At the same time, the rogue soldier is spotted by a Civil Protection squad, who wonder why they're standing there alone. The metro cops approach and question them, but they give no reply. As one of the cops starts to call for backup, the Combine soldier instinctively reacts and lifts him in the air with their raw strength, then throws him away. The remaining Civil Protection officers panic as Overwatch requests backup.

Mikael overhears Overwatch requesting more troops and wonders what the fuss is about, then figures he needs to hurry. He then has a shocking realization.

Three Civil Protection officers are running straight at him, stun batons at the ready. Mikael quickly drops the gun and gets on his knees in terror, but quickly realizes they have actually run past him. Mikael gets up, overhears distant gunshots and decides he needs to get off the streets.

Mikael sneaks into an apartment building, rifle at the ready. He hears the floor creak and turns the gun in the direction of the sound. It's just a citizen, however, who jumps at the sight of the gun. He notes he almost shot her and she asks what's going on outside, to which he replies he has no idea.

Outside, the runaway soldier is trying to escape the fleeing cops, who are shooting at them. An armored personnel carrier cuts their escape route off, so they quickly barge into a building. The citizen hears the noise from below and asks what it was, to which Mikael replies it sure as hell isn't the welcoming wagon.

Outside, Civil Protection holds their position as the soldier's exit is being cut off on the other side. Inside, the soldier looks for some kind of weapon and grabs a shovel. Their AI warns them that there is possible hostile activity ahead.

Mikael gets a feeling that something is coming and, at the very last moment, realizes it's behind him, just as the rogue soldier reflexively hits him in the head with the shovel, knocking him out. Meanwhile, the citizen is looking at them, terrified.

The citizen starts screaming in horror and the Combine soldier's programming kicks in. While they wonder why she's screaming, their body automatically grabs the citizen as the AI notes the noise may alert more hostiles. The AI tells them to silence the citizen and the soldier starts to jam the shovel into her neck. The AI declares the citizen neutralized as the soldier, in horror, questions why they're doing this. The soldier walks away as the citizen's body, still in the air for a moment, flops to the ground.

The citizen's decapitated head is horrifically being held against the wall by the shovel, which is jammed into the wall. Meanwhile, the soldier picks its own rifle back up from the unconscious Mikael as they wonder who they were before all this. The AI then suggests they investigate upstairs.

Outside, a metro cop notes the cavalry has arrived as a dropship flies down and drops off a squad of elite Combine soldiers, the point man of which holding an odd, distinctive gun.

In one of the upper floors, the soldier is still dazed and confused, having just murdered two innocent civilians to silence them. A couple of Civil Protection cops walk in and the soldier attacks them, while at the same time mentally screaming for help, unable to control themself. One of the cops manages to run away.

The elite soldiers rappel into the opposite building, which is connected to the present one by a walkway. The running Civil Protection officer is thrown through the door and outside by the soldier, who comes face to face with the reclamation task force. The AI tells the soldier to submit and, when they ask what will happen to them, it explains that they will be reformatted and reintegrated.

The elite point man soldier fires their strange gun, immobilizing the rogue unit and activating their neural inhibitor, causing them to start shutting down. The soldier desperately tries to override the command, but the AI notes it is not possible.

Trying to resist, the rogue soldier, desperate to not go back, throws themself out of the walkway and into the ground below, falling hard. A Civil Protection officer calls for back up, noting that they'll be in for one hell of a mess.

Going inside, a metro cop discovers Mikael bloodied and beaten but alive, and reports he found a live one. Unaware that Mikael is a rebel, he calls two citizens to take Mikael to the Sector 14 trauma ward in Precinct 6. They take off carrying Mikael.

At a checkpoint, one of the citizens tells Civil Protection they were told to take the unconscious man, Mikael, to the trauma ward. An officer supposes that perhaps Mikael's identification marker was damaged and lets them through.

Just as the two citizens and Mikael have left, a transmission from Overwatch comes in to the guards that just let them through, warning of a rogue citizen who escaped the train station. The officer reports back that an injured citizen with a damaged ID marker just walked past. Still being carried off, Mikael starts to wake up and realizes he's being taken to the hospital, figuring he may be able to give the key to someone he can trust there.

As Mikael thinks to himself that he has to find someone or they're all doomed to eternal subservience to the Combine, we get one last look at the ominous locker where he left his secret, now marked with a graffiti of a lambda. Fin.

Epilogue. We are in Nova Prospekt, the Combine prison and reconditioning center. Two human engineers are standing over the rogue soldier's body, one commenting to the other that he's never seen a neural interface so cauterized before. They figure the soldier may be unrecoverable and start updating the datafile with the relevant data. As they log the details, the soldier starts to wake up.

One of the engineers feels something moving behind her just as the soldier grabs both of their heads and knocks them together. The soldier approaches the Combine computer interface.

A Nova Prospekt guard approaches the room but the rogue soldier takes their weapon and shoots them with it.

The soldier starts tapping at the Combine computer interface and finds their file. They open it and a live video feed pops up. The soldier looks back at their own face, bleached white, bald and mangled by Combine experiments. In horror, they ask themselves what they are.

The soldier picks the weapon back up, aims it at their own head and, against the complaints of the Combine AI neural interface, fires it.

Two Combine guards comes in, finding a gory scenario with two unconscious, possibly dead humans and the remains of the now headless renegade soldier. End of issue.

Next comic:

#4: Outbreak

4 thoughts on “#0: The Misbegotten Vassal”

Michael Andrei Palon

September 20, 2022

Really didn’t notice that the wayward citizen from the very first chapter was actually Roitto… also, by the stars, that poor malfunctioning Combine soldier’s tale was extremely dark.

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George_Stukas

March 5, 2023

Both depth of meaning and exquisite style. The combine’s story alone could have filled an entire series worth of pages, yet here it’s so cleverly condensed to pack the right kind of emotional punch. It works on its own and at the same time adds to the entirety. Beautiful. This really was the zenith of Gmod comics

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BrashFink

August 23, 2023

Thanks for the comments! In truth, this Roitto story is a bit of Retconing and was just a nobody originally… just a random event. His story was hashed out later as a kind of prequel after I had defined a bit of story where Gordon’s endeavors at Nova Prospekt would have freed Roitto.

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BrashFink

August 23, 2023

This story was influenced by a story in either “Creepy” or “Eerie” comic magazines from the 1970s. In that story a robot is continually forced to fight in bloodsports and eventually commits suicide after winning a championship. In the epilogue, the techs talk about the robot similar to my story… however, the robot does not come back alive and murder everyone. LoL

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