He challenges Lagana to "pinch-hit" for his "boy" - his strong-arm protector, before suddenly leaving.According to the suspicious Warlock in his command-center basement, the former NSA cyber-criminal Thomas Gabriel demonstrated his expert hacking power to the Joint Chiefs of Staff four years earlier by shutting down NORAD with a laptop computer, but since then, "he just fell off the grid" after being fired and smeared.The screenplay was taken from an unpublished short story Romero had written calledAnubis, so-named after the Egyptian god of the dead (and embalming - or mummification).After personally taking charge, Stryker face-to-face confronted Wolverine, hinting that he had experimented upon him 15 years in the past...a sensor-transceiver combination recording everything we say and do"; according to the robot, the human crew member Ilia no longer functioned (or was killed), and V'Ger was traveling to Earth ("the third planet of the solar system directly ahead") "to find the creator, to join with him.