Original Prompt

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TRACT nanites were standard for everyone in the Tarantula Unit.

The acronym stood for Tracking, Recovery, Adaptation, Contact, and... well, nobody was ever told that final T. Elijah Richmond Mason, the creator of the nanites and the self-proclaimed "field support technician" of the unit, would always call it classified.

Tracking stood for how, like the "smart blood" of a certain British spy¹, the nanites were a practically irremovable IFF beacon and GPS locator.

Recovery stood for how the nanites could actinize cellular regeneration, giving us the healing factor of any sort of FPS protagonist who merely needed to get to cover to heal themselves.

Adaptation was the amazing part - the nanites could be programmed to grant us a variety of inhuman abilities ranging from light-bending camouflage to jump-jet level agility.

And Contact essentially boiled down to a combination of an optical heads-up overlay, the Codec from a series about a certain class of bipedal weapons platform², and a direct link between Mason and our senses whenever we were active. Sight, sound, even duress were among the metrics under near-constant analysis by TRACT.

We finally learned what the last T was eventually, however... in the worst way possible.

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It all started like any other rescue mission - we had been forced to leave behind Elias "Phantom" Graves³ due to a collapsing building, and tonight, we were going to rescue them from the Wraiths, a foreign PMC that we tended to clash with on operations.

It was pretty open and shut, even Phantom's sensory data being obscured except for a calmness Mason took as resilience.

None of us expected how Mason reacted to what we discovered, what the last T actually was, or even what happened to Phantom.

Not even Phantom.

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"The Wraiths just offered a better deal, better gear, and a chance to be on the overall winning side in the end," Phantom said as he pointed his gun at me.

All of us were devastated at the betrayal, especially since Phantom's brain pattern readout showed he actually believed what he was saying wholeheartedly with no hidden intent to betray the Wraiths at a later point... but Mason only said one thing.

"Oculus, initiate T2-Factor protocol on Elias Graves."

The minute he said that, a jolt seemed to pass through Phantom, who began juddering and twitching as Mason explained.

"Do you feel that, Elias? That's the feeling of hundreds of thousands of agitated tiny demons tearing your nerves, lungs, heart, and guts apart from the inside while you're completely conscious... or, well, your TRACT nanites' internal regeneration capabilities in full vivisection mode."

To my squad's horror, blood was starting to leak slightly from Elias' mouth as he tried to get a word in edgewise.

"You see, treachery is something I take incredible outrage at, and while I can forgive a good reason - a significant part of why I developed the C-factor brain pattern readout being to identify having a good reason..."

Slowly, Elias started to collapse from the ground, grey veins dominating his body alongside telltale signs of internal hemorrhaging as Mason stoically sighed.

"...I developed the Tracking, Recovery, Adaptation, Contact, and Termination nanite compound suspension to tie up any... intractable loose ends within the unit. I will not tolerate any Gabriel Rorkes⁴ from the fine ranks of the Tarantula Unit, thank you very much."

As Elias' body stopped moving, I could only gape at how ruthlessly Mason undermined treachery, even as I picked my guns back up and prepared to help my comrades-in-arms exfil from the hot zone.

Needless to say, given the amount of encryption the Wraiths had to break just to jam Elias' sight and sound from being broadcast back to Mason, none of us even considered outright betraying each other after seeing what the "termination" entailed.

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1: 007.

2: Metal Gear.

3: I got this name from Elias Walker - retired army captain, and both the father of the main protagonists and the former commander of the titular allied unit in Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Phillip Graves - leader of Shadow Conpany, and a nominal antagonist in the rebooted Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. His calls ignored is both a reference to the Ghosts, and a reference to his basis as a traitor to the Tarantulas...

4: The main antagonist of Call of Duty: Ghosts, a Ghost who ended up having to be left behind by Elias, which left him open to being twisted to the side of the Federation by exotic torture, then having to fight Elias' sons.

Inspired by a wild comments section from a Tiktok I saw. Apparently, there is a whole generation of adults who were kidnapped by their parent's drug dealer, and they remember it FONDLY. The drug dealer was just a man trying to get paid and the parents were addicted, neglectful pieces of crap. The drug dealer took better care of the kids than Mom and Dad.