The short that spawned it all:
'They say the devil's in the detail,
I know what they mean,
I'm walkin' in the wasteland,
with a ghost in the machine ...'
--
Sometimes there is reason. A grand cosmic force, the motive power that brings events into focus and fruition.
Sometimes there is chance, a random chain of events leading to something thought of as impossible before.
And sometimes neither chance nor reason have much to say about an event's onset.
Will, Power.
In the Limbo that twists and turns, separating the unlimited number of spheres that are universes, the one equals the other. The Limbo isn't stable ... that would go against its very nature.
And sometimes, it leaks.
And Power is given to a Will that isn't anything extraordinary, really. And for that instant, that fleeting eternal moment, there exists possibility.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
a short in the BGC2032 world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
"There's most definitely a bad aftertaste in my brain," the young man commented, ejecting the VCD.
The room was dark, the only light coming from the screen of the laptop set up on the desk. Other things on said desk included several bottles of soda, a tablet of white chocolate, a clock and a phone. A sky that was about ready let the sun dawn could be seen through the half-closed curtains, letting some faint radiance illuminate what the glow of the screen didn't reach. Several bookshelves loaded down with paperbacks, manga, and textbooks ran along one wall, a fridge stood in one corner, a tv in another, a microwave on top of a small closet was against the opposite wall.
Griever took a gulp of soda, after having replaced the VCD in its case. He payed no attention to the clock.
"I wonder what the hell they were _thinking_ at the time," he grumbled, then sighed. "And about my sanity. Did I think the bloody thing'd get better over the years? Sheesh."
He picked up the VCD, opened a desk drawer, and dropped it inside.
"Crash still sucks, Crisis '40 isn't all that great ..."
He turned the laptop off.
"Or maybe I'm just sentimental? Nah."
Letting himself fall backwards, he landed on the bed, springs protesting somewhat at the sudden addition of weight to support ...
"And now I'm talking to myself. Wunderbar. Gah. Most definitely too late for coherency. Or is that too early? Who cares *yawn* this G-kun's going beddie-bye."
Another yawn followed, before he levered himself up again and started getting ready to turn in for the night. A few minutes later he slipped under the covers and flipped the light switch, plunging the room into the twilight of the outside's impending dawn.
"...classic's still best ..."
With that he sank into slumber, ignorant of the fact that a radiance not coming from outside or any real source of light had formed directly over his head.
***
Fright caught him by the throat, spilling like liquid fire down into his limbs.
Nightmare.
Couldn't even remember what it had been, but still ... something about liquid metal, fire, and cold ... not necessarily in that order.
Hadn't been the first time he'd had that sort of nightmare, but it was the first one he'd woken up afterwards to find that he was standing. At least that was what his sense of balance was telling him.
He panted, the sound oddly metallic, feeling cold sweat settle onto skin, wind brush past, the smoke of ...
... hold it, smoke?
There was a dull throbbing coming from one side of his torso, as if he'd been kicked or punched in that spot, and a sense of something _missing_.
His breath was short, he noticed then, as if he were trying to take a deep one but _couldn't_ ...
Oh, it was one of _those_ episodes ...
He'd had nightmares before, in which he'd been dreaming of something horrid, or of something happening which would have horrible consequence, but couldn't move to stop it, then woke up, and found out he still couldn't move at all ... dream in a dream.
Those he hated with a passion, and at the same time he found them strangely enthralling.
This time there was a definite feeling of exhilaration to it too, an undercurrent that made him tingle with nervous energy.
Damn, but he was holding his breath for a long time.
Suddenly he lurched, shaken by something, as if somebody were trying to wake him up. Damnation! That was _weird_. He'd never had quite this weird a dream, and he wasn't even _seeing_ yet.
Flying ... rather, a jump? His mind catalogued the changes the inner ear was reporting to him. Jarring thump as his body landed.
He wondered who he was this time. There'd been a few dreams that were rather fun, despite their fright factor. Admittedly, they were just dreams, but even in such a case racing through downtown London by virtue of the web slinger express was a neat experience, even if it was just a made up one. He'd seen Spider-Man a few months before his first instance of that dream happened. He still got it sometimes. Then there'd been the one that had haunted him after Avalon, where he'd been running through a ruined city and looking for Senshi, of all people, and was being hunted by gunship helicopters. That had been a one-shot deal, and one of the dreams he had to wake up 'twice' in. Scary sensation, that. Imagine laying there and not being able to move, breather ... then he'd woken up for the second time, screaming. Not fun at all, that one.
Slowly, the sensation was starting to get uncomfortable ... and he noticed that it was really quite unlike that of lungs being filled, but that it had been the closest analogy he could have thought of at the moment in question.
Movement ceased, that which he'd felt anyway ...
... there was something nagging at the back of his mind. Something about the feel of this whole ...
For a moment, he froze ... there had been the most _uncomfortable_ sensation of his ribcage being shoved open, not painful but oddly ... unpleasant. Or not _that_ oddly, all things considered.
Up til then he hadn't really consciously done anything. That usually proved to him he was dreaming, since he could only rarely influence anyhting at all in those dreams through conscious intervention. It was the reason he liked the Spider-Man ones. Nearly full freedom of movement, from what he could recall after waking. Fun, that.
This one was turning out to be really weird, though.
Standing now, hunched, arms down ... chest ... eeew. Felt sort of disgusting, really. There was something fleshy there, he could feel ... was this how a tumor felt like, he wondered?
Then he actually _heard_ something.
When he'd gone to his first anime convention, a small affair, to tell the truth, he'd spent most of the time in the movie room, getting his fill of subbed anime all day long ... later on that night, he'd had the oddest dreams about the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie, wherein he'd been conversing with the main characters in Japanese ... despite not understanding a word of the language.
It was sort of like he felt now.
He knew it was something like Japanese he was hearing ... oh well, he could hardly expect his dreams to be subbed ...
A line of yellow text appeared low in his dark field of vision.
A subbed dream? That's a first, he thought, not really paying attention to the text that changed as someone spoke. Woman's voice. Hmm, nice too. Shame he couldn't understand ...
There was a jumble of noise assaulting his ears suddenly, so much that he wanted to curl up ... he couldn't move, though.
"...have to! If you don't, the city ...!"
Hoooo-kay. He was slowly starting to get freaked out. He could _understand_ that, sort of. Was there ...
He ignored the chatter for a moment, as he noted that ther was a little green square actually blinking in the lower left corner of his field of view.
Puzzled, he focused on it ... it seemed to grow, sort of like a window in a graphic interface would if you pulled at the edges ... he tried that, then noted the slow progression, and focused his mind into the process of pressing a nonexistent 'maximize' button.
...
...
unauthorized access at *13013(core dump buffer)
error: unauthorized access attempt through *13013
error: unauthorized access attempt through *13013
error: unauthorized access a&^%#*$&#$^# (()381
WARNING: damage to core
attempting restore of corrupted data from *10002
buffer corrupted
accessing bter.reg
attempting restore ...
error: corrupted data
reroute: setting main buffer start at *13013
erasing and resetting bu^&@*@&*$^#*&$(
error: could not comply
loading *13013 into tertiary mainframe
battle computer auxiliary boot ...
...
...
...
error: space required for logical routines exceeding designation
expanding
reroute
updating neural nets
restoring
...
...
sensory, tertiary online
sensory, secondary operating at nominal efficiency
error: corrupted data
battle computer: set to standby
query: language database
voice transcript algorithm active
query: audio feed
activating direct neural link
query: sysop dialogue
sysop dialogue maximized ...
Okay, this was officially weird. He'd dreamed of code on several occasions before, but that had been after sessions of tweaking that had lasted too long. This was some sort of pseudo-crap. He'd never had that sort of stuff pop up.
"Priss!"
An uneasy, creeping feeling started somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach ... he still couldn't take brea ...
caution! caution!
power reserves rapidly deteriorating!
battle computer override Gamma-Tetra43 engaging
suppressing input from pilot
"... here I come!"
Rrrrright ... this was getting disturbingly familiar, though his mind refused to make a connection just then.
I want to wake up now! Please!
data-dump to battle computer
error: stack overflow
error: engaging retro-flux modulators
reconfiguration of neural network
j-1 offline
The darkness seemed to flicker for the barest instant, showing nothing but a sudden burst of intense light, then muting it down ...
connection reroute complete
j-1 functions routed through *13013xx neural net structure
"Sylvie!"
His skin felt cold and hot at the same time, and the air was full of noise that he felt in his very bones. The IR spectrum, the EM one, various others in-between flickered before his eyes.
Something approaching at high speed.
An instinctive need, a desire for continued existence ... doubled. Somehow, he knew whatever the projectile he could feel was, it was heading for the one place it could hurt him ...
On instinct, he moved, arms crossing in front of the 'fleshy' part he felt resting in his open chest cavity, the 'ribs' and 'sternum' or whatever that was he felt moving back into position with a hiss of servos.
There was a clanging noise, he felt slight impact, and settled into a defensive position bringing the armaments online again. The tracking mesh appeared before his eyes, highlighting targets ... four of them. Marked down according to color schemes they used ... Blue, Pink, White, Green ...
Why did that sound familiar, he wondered ...
No matter, they were a danger. He couldnt allow himself to turn his back. The safest option would be to eliminate ...
Waitaminute, say _what_?!
He felt something struggling ... the ... fleshy bit? What? His thoughts shot forward, down along the link that connected him to that most argumentative part of his ...
He sneezed ... at least it felt like it. Whatever that traffic in his mind had been, it cleared. Instead, he felt something tentative probe at the borders of his consciousness. He sent himself along that path, through live-wire and current ...
An onslaught of data, statistic and otherwise, came at him. He grabbed it, somehow, and proceeded to adapt to absorb the stream before he knew what he was doing.
"What ..." he 'felt' through whatever link had been established. "What are you?"
He could place her now. The image that flickered in front of his eyes, in a corner of his field of view.
He could also place the ones outside.
Why they were so damn familiar.
And he could also deduce why he felt so different himself.
Somehow, he was suddenly exceedingly sure that this was not a dream.
That only made things worse.
"Oh, bloody _hell_." Griever's voice said, distorted through the D.D. Battlemover's voice synth systems, but still mostly recognizable.
Oh, bloody hell, indeed.
***
And the follow-ups.
'If I were alive,
If I were real,
Would you survive,
What would you do,'
-'Heavy Metal Machine', Smashing Pumpkins
Priscilla S. Asagiri, singer and songwriter, impassioned motorcyclist, and part time power armored mercenary, was most definitely of two minds there and then.
On one hand, she was feeling as if a weight had been lifted from her. The decision had been taken out of her hands.
Sylvie was a boomer. Something Priss hated from the very depths of her heart ... And yet at the same time she was _Sylvie_, not a thing but a person. More than that, a friend.
Priss had acquaintances. A fair number of those, really. But her friends she could count on the fingers of both her hands. Without Sylvie, she could cut that down to those of one hand.
On the other hand, there was the flip side - the fact that the cyberoid was now apparently trapped inside a war machine that was not only berserk, or as close to that condition as its own battle computer had been programmed to make it, but also supremely dangerous _and_ equipped with a 'dead man's switch' activated N-bomb. A dead-man's switch that would trigger as soon as the machine's power ran out ... which, according to Sylvie and Nene, would be sometime in the next couple of minutes.
She could hear Sylia, the instigator and leader of their little halfway between mercenary and vigilante outfit, calling a regroup.
Not that it would be of much use, now, even Priss could see, however determined she may have been. There simply wasn't enough time. Their suits and they themselves were feeling the effects of the fight with the Battlemover, each damaged to some degree, and her motoroid was scrap.
Their transport, the Knight Wing, hadn't been armed since that would have hindered their deployment speed - something of paramount importance when dealing with time triggered tactical nuclear devices. There was no way it could provide support. They didn't even have the time to call it in from its overwatch position and evacuate in time to be ahead of the blast, much less drop off replacement suits and equipment ... Running was not an option.
Denial warred with defiance in her, even as the massive, when compared to their hardsuits and motoroids, form of the D.D. uncoiled from its position with an ...
"Oh, bloody _hell_!"
... exclamation through whatever PA system the Battlemover had. In a voice that was most definitely not Sylvie's.
Then, before she could as much as consider, it acted.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
Arc One->Largo
One->Midnight Hour
the follow up of a short in the BGC world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
No matter what she tried, it was to no effect. Screaming her throat hoarse was about the only thing that she _could_ attempt at the moment, since that ... it _had_ to be another override much like the J-1's initial attempt ... had locked out all external control input and data stream outs, as well as blocking most of the communications traffic between her C class implants and itself.
And she could have sworn she'd fealt something akin to a sentient mind moments before the link was cut. The Battlemover hadn't been built with the appropriate neural net structures needed for personality emulation, much less true sentience. The J-1 was a complex and frighteningly efficient _battle computer_, but that was the limit of it's design.
33-S boomers, sexaroids if you wish, all shared several traits that were helpful in establishing interpersonal interaction. One of those was a series of learning subroutines that analyzed reactions and measured agitation based on 'obvious' external physical signs. This included an ability to read and interpret voice modulation. This was what the model's 'natural empathy' truly was.
It wasn't something that they were consciously aware of working, but still ...
And it did learn, finally going as far as to being able to discern moods based on vocal data alone. That it worked on broadcasts was surprising, but not unexpected. There had been none of the flatness or perfect inflection that signified modulating software or a boomer speaker.
And then she had no more time to think, thrown around as the D.D. maneuvered with a swiftness of decision making that the J-1 hadn't seemed capable of.
But the crux of the matter was that she was once again sealed within an armored cage, the gap in the armoring that the White Saber had caused notwithstanding. Somehow, the J-1 had circumvented the manual override that had opened the cockpit to the outside world, which shouldn't have been possible in and of itself ...
... and the Battlemover was reacting to whatever was controlling it with more swiftness than she'd have thought possible without a link to the operator. However complex the J-1, however precise and direct its reactions, it worked with pure logic. The sort of speed displayed now was usually reserved for intuitive decision making processes of human and more advanced cyberoid minds. It moved as swiftly as it would have if someone were working with the superweapon link instead of against it like she was trying to now. To no avail.
The power reserves were rapidly being depleted, the micro-neutron bomb had been primed ...
***
It was highly disturbing, the way his point of view seemed to be far higher than he was used to it being, the way it covered nearly 360 degrees, the way most of the periphery data was displayed in wire frame mesh and spectrum colors overlaid on top each other. He felt puzzled at the lack of experienced sensory overload, because somehow his mind was managing to _cope_ with most of that dizzying onslaught of sensation ... despite not really knowing what to do with most of them quite yet.
Even more disturbing were the various 'floating' displays that overlapped the sensory data.
And more disturbing than _those_ was ...
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:30
self-destruct primed
micro-neutron bomb armed
... the influx of data that, while it did appear on those aforementioned displays, also sounded within his ... well, mind. He _felt_ a head, but somehow knew it wasn't where 'he' was. He decided to consider that later, while for the moment he focused on more important bits of information ...
The damage listings scrolled through a window on the 'side' of his view, presenting him with a laundry-list of complaints up to, and including, an explanation as to why he wasn't feeling most of his right arm (it wasn't _there_). It froze on
warning: neural contamination of J-1 interface - possible cause: pilot brainwave waveform present
before crashing into a loop of logic faults and vanishing.
He could feel the 'fleshy bit' in his chest, puzzled and confused, and on the verge of shock caused by a combination of stress and loss of blood. Ack. His mind raced ... literally ... he could _feel_ time stretching out as thought processes raced, the colors of the world becoming slightly bleaker and blurry as perception was altered ...
While he'd heard the phrase 'at the speed of thought' before, and had in fact used it before himself, he never imagined he'd ever directly experience it ... certainly not in the given circumstances, unlikely as they were. How those circumstances had come about woulf bear quite a bit of consideration, but not right now, given the pressing demands of that nasty little time-remaining counter.
After all, he had to survive this to be able to actually have those thoughts. This was to be the main priority for the moment.
A minute and a half.
It could be an eye blink, or a lifetime.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:29
Power. That was the answer here. If he could get that from somewhere, in sufficient amounts, blowing up would at least be forestalled. His mind rocketed through the diagnostics routines constantly running on the J-1, ignoring the circuits slagged by what looked to be a recent power surge which were showing some signs of activity but seemed otherwise irrelevant, seeking out anything even vaguely resembling a control system for the neutron bomb within his carapace.
The investigation found nothing. Or rather, nothing obviously useful in the current situation. He blocked off another attempt at interface from the pilot, sending a short burst of white noise 'back down the pipe' which stunned her, and searched beyond the memory address space that he could feel 'himself' living in, meaning fiddling in there was a no-no.
Then he turned his full attention to what the examination _had_ managed to show him. The micro-neutron bomb and its dead-man switch.
'Oh great, whichever bastard designed it, he hadn't taken chances. The godsdamned thing is hardwired into the mainframe.'
Another path led him to something more promising.
Noncombat system: Emergency Power Siphon
EPS is Standby
Okay, so he had the means to do this. Which still meant he needed to actually find something to siphon off.
additional sensory data request: advised active sensor sweep
caution: interpretation of gathered data may slow other processes currently running
It took all of a nanosecond for him to consider the implications, and decide that he couldn't not take the risk. As if he were running through the darkness, with something nipping at his heels and no idea where he was going or even what was a handspan away. Slowing down and lighting a match, if only for a moment, could save his life or make it forfeit ... the former was marginally more likely.
executing
Time sped up again, letting the power armored figures before him move ... a wave of almost solid multi spectrum radiation erupted from emitters he hadn't been aware existed moments ago, fractured reflections returning to him from a reality that had looked as if it were done in fractal for an eye blink, even as he desperately dodged to one side, thrusters on his back flaring in response to the wish for speed and letting him skid over the debris strewn ground.
Laser beams from the white hardsuit's palm cannons sliced past, one grazing a pauldron but getting deflected by the armor coating as it wasn't a full on hit. The green one was coming in fast and low, skimming the ground with her thrusters.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:20
search criteria for data stream: power; distance; - search complete
six viable targets found
marking
She was coming in from the right, using the fact that he was short an arm and it was the off-direction for the crippled-but-operational Gattling gun.
Targeting brackets sprang up around the four hardsuited figures as the data analysis was concluded, in addition to those already present, around a pile of what looked like badly beat up battle armor parts and upon closer examination proved to be an armored suit of some sort ...
database: K-12S Armored Trooper
transponder code identified as that of ADPolice units
...and a directional indicator pointing further up than he could fly, without worsening his power situation.
There was no way to get up there and not let himself be open to fire, and not lose almost all the remaining power reserves.
He didn't know whether or not he could shunt what power from their energy cells to his via the siphon, but it was more than worth a try.
'I mean, what's it gonna do, worst case? Blow up in my face?'
The green suited one came, then, fist cocked to deliver a blow that his threat assessment systems could have shrugged off, if not for the fact that the front of that gauntlet was packing shaped charges. Those would hurt, a lot ... if they landed. For a moment he let the right side open, seeming to focus his attention on getting out of the way of another barrage from White.
A moment later she'd committed, and was snatched from the air and hurled backwards as the remaining grapple caught her in the shoulder, launching from the right housing and smacking her away with its closed jaws.
The path was clear. The K-12 first. Though Pink seemed to have the biggest charge left remaining, the ADP vehicle wouldn't put up a fight. The grapple was back in its housing as he fired another burst from the thrusters.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:00
This would burn time, true, but it was the only way. The thrusters flared, pushing upward and forward, which he changed to just forward. The D.D. hadn't been designated as Airborne Battlemover for nothing. It was surprisingly fast given its size, and the thruster vanes hidden in the two stabilizer wings that extended from its 'backpack' assembly made it even more nimble in the air.
Warnings sprang into life, notifying him he'd been gotten a lock on by one or more of the hardsuited figures. He pinpointed the source in less than an eyeblink, the White one getting ready to fire with those damnable laser cannons.
Well, it wasn't like this hadn't been a gamble already. He only needed a few seconds to check if he could siphon the power from the Armored Trooper's batteries. It took little effort to set the sensor suite to a preset, and even less time for the decision to use the setup to be reached, whereupon all the emitters spat a vicious scramble of radio frequency static, laser designator strobes and a hammering of radar pulses that, combined, threw the sensors following the D.D. into apoplectic fits for the few instants ...
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:30
... he'd needed.
But he'd forgotten Blue and her shattered visor, and the lack of sensory assists coming with that. There was little wrong with her aim, though, despite the lack of aids, which spoke of extreme familiarity with the hardware.
Plasma bolts from that palm cannon of hers shrieked through the air, splashing onto armor and knocking him off course. He could see her running, full tilt, at him, gun arm held front and center and keeping up the fire.
The bulk of the barrage wasn't enough to damage him seriously, needles from her railguns glancing off from the armor. The plasma bolts whittled away said armor, though ...
He had nothing to lose, there and then, and everything to gain.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:18
So he threw himself forward, thrusters roaring as he redirected to meet her head on. She dodged the punch, clear as it was, and her gun arm came forward, towards the armor breach White had made with her blade ...
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:15
The grapple caught her in the helmet, locking into place and sending her flying, jerking the hand heading to the breach back, then immediately retracting forcefully, not releasing the hardsuit and letting it slam into the armor. He grabbed her by one shoulder, then, and pulled her around, releasing the grapple at the same time ... it shot forward moments later, tearing into the back of the hardsuit, pulling said back apart as it retracted, to reveal the power cells there.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:10
power level critical
preparing to execute self destruct protocol
siphon system deployed
A flurry of wires shot from within the housing behind the D.D.'s head, twisting towards the power cells and burying themselves into them.
"No! Priss!"
***
Sylia had been caught off guard by the speed with which the Battlemover had changed tactics. One moment it was fighting mostly from a solid position, as the J-1 apparently reasoned would be best against highly mobile targets such as the hardsuits - letting its enemies come to it, under hail of fire and missiles - and its reactions were hesitant as if someone were trying to slow them down deliberately.
Only logical, since someone - the pilot to be exact - had been doing just that.
Only it suddenly looked as if it were no longer working, and that the J-1 had cut the last vestige of its operator's presence from the command loop. The formerly open cockpit had closed and locked again, shielding the big machine's 'vulnerable spot'. It started using the thrusters on its back to increase its mobility ... while the Sabers' suits were superior when it came to agility, the D.D. was surprisingly fast for its size.
Still, even with the change and its implications, the growing likelihood of the neutron bomb turning a good patch of the city into radioactive wasteland, she'd been caught flat-footed by what followed the sudden change from defensive to offensive.
There had been nothing in the specifications that suggested the D.D. capable of this scale of electronic warfare. Certainly, it was supremely shielded, giving off little energy emanations other than those that couldn't have been easily suppressed, and possessed a more than adequate sensor suite ... but an offensive application of it, even one such as this, would require modifications ... or the battle computer being in control of more than just the combat related functions of the mech.
She recovered in moments, though, and flipped her visor up to rid herself of at least some of the white-noise being dealt with by the suit sensors.
In time to have her heart jump to her throat and cold sweat to break on her forehead at the sight of Priss being grabbed by the damaged D.D., and again as it ripped the armor from the singer's suit's back.
Something changed about the area behind its head ... and Sylia could see wisps of gray shooting forward, just as the mech's remaining grappler returned to its housing after having removed Priss' suit's back armoring.
"No! Priss!" she could hear the Sexaroid exclaim, even from where she stood. And following moments later: "Please! Don't kill her!"
***
There was a feeling of euphoria that came about to wrap itself around him, much akin to what he felt when surfacing after having spent a time under water and finally taking that long awaited breath. Power flowed through the tendrils, though to the Battlemover carapace it wasn't any all to significant an amount ...
estimated operating time remaining: 00:05:15
... it opened up his options considerably. For one thing, there were more of them than merely the dreadfully solitary 'die' on that list now.
"...Don't kill her!"
Now why should he want to go and do that? The blue hardsuit was the only thing between him and the other three's weapons.
He was acutely aware of target locks being made, and also various sensor readings hinted at a number of aerial targets coming in on a intercept vectors, which, when elongated, placed their starting points near GPCC HQ, the USSD owned airbase North of the city, and Genom Tower respectively.
Quite an audience they were about to get in a few minutes.
Also, five minutes did not an 'indefinitely' make. So dallying was not something to indulge in there and then. Most definitely not.
***
Among her many dislikes, Priss hated losing control, in any fashion. So getting yanked about inside a hardsuit that had lost power, thrown about like a rag doll in the hands of her captor, was a truly infuriating experience.
Without power, the suit wasn't more than armor plating. No actuation, no support from the exoskeleton, nothing. Basically, one could say that this made her the area's biggest paperweight.
Her eyes skipped over the wrecked K-12 against one of the canyon walls, its occupant's head exposed from when the D.D. had torn the helmet off, and she revised that statement.
Second biggest.
On a purely intellectual level, she knew that she wouldn't have been able to break the grip of the big mech's manipulator even if her hardsuit hadn't been forcibly deactivated. Despite that, she tried.
Up until the roar of thrusters cut through the night, and the hand of acceleration pressed into her as the D.D. launched itself at an oblique angle, keeping her between itself and the rest of the team. The sound of the thing's grapple firing had her jerk her head, just as the implement slapped against the Battlemover's severed right arm that lay where it had been blasted when Priss, in her motoroid, had blown it off.
Just as the grapple started retracting, pulling the severed limb back with it, the D.D. redirected. At their full power, the noise of the thrusters that lifted the big mecha was tremendous, enough to make Priss' grit her teeth as it rattled her ears and body.
The D.D. shot upwards like a rocket intent on reaching orbit. Or a reasonable facsimile.
And around halfway up the canyon wall, Priss suddenly found herself weightless ... and then falling, away from the red and gray Battlemover and towards a very unpleasant meeting with the bottom of the Fault.
***
"Would you stop struggling? It's distracting."
She recognized the state she was in. Perception seemed frozen, when it was merely that her mind had sped up sufficiently to ... to what? Previously, this had only happened during attempts at data assimilation via direct neural link to an outside system ...
The superweapons linkage that had been part of the C class components, the installation of which had set her and Anri apart from even other 33-s boomers, was active and again connecting with.. something.
'What ... who? The D.D.?'
"You may call me that if you insist, yes. It will suffice for now."
Had she been in control of motive functions in this accelerated state, she would have gasped at the unexpected reply. If only because it had been words and not a stream of data, for one thing. There was nothing in the makeup of the D.D.'s mainframe or that of the J-1 that hinted at any sort of personality overlay. There had been nothing to suggest the possibility of one developing of its own accord.
'But it can't _support_ a machine intelligence.'
"Good thing I wasn't told, then," came the reply. She could actually recognize a voice of sorts, and even in this state the versatile empathy alogrhytms adapted and analyzed. A steady voice, determined but with an undercurrent of worry. "We can concern ourselves with the semantics later, though. More pressing matters should be addressed first."
'What do you want?!'
"The question should be what it is I do _not_ want. I don't want to die. Presently, that involves not letting the operator die - don't ask me how this came about. There's a really tangled logic fault in what's left of the J-1's OS that screws up the battle computer's decision making overrides. I've managed to lock out most of it, but the truth of the matter is I need to keep you alive. The second matter is that I have no wish to explode because of the tactical nuclear device currently hardwired into the power system. Hence the assimilation of our hardsuited friend's batteries' contents into our own reserves."
'You ... so that's why ... but you let her drop to her death!' the image of Priss, hardsuit and all, falling below them as the D.D. rose on plumes of flame from its plasma-jet thrusters, hung before her eyes. She couldn't look away, as the moment seemed to stretch into forever as a result of the speed at which her thoughts were being processed and communications between herself and the Battlemover's intelligence were going.
"Seeing as at least two of her companions have operational thruster systems and sensors, it's more of a delaying action, really."
Sylvie admitted that the reasoning was sound ... if ruthless. Then again, she'd done her share of ruthless things in the past, recent and not. Survival. If this ... whatever it was ... thought it could survive.
A flicker of hope started to form within at the possibility ...
***
As far as combat mecha went, the D.D. Airborne Battlemover was perhaps the most potentially powerful machine of its class. It had been designed to withstand damage severe enough to cripple most of it's counterparts, deal out the sort of punishment that could tear asunder a Bu-12 in a matter of seconds, and survive the most grueling battlefield conditions without drops in efficiency.
It was also a prototype. Prototypes had things wrong with them, usually. They were test beds for concepts that often don't find use in the final development models that come later.
So there were several systems present in the D.D. that wouldn't have been present had the unit seen the mass production it had been intended for.
It was very much a possibility that the neutron bomb was one of them.
And while the J-1 was indeed an impressive tool, it was just that, a tool. Had the D.D. ever been moved into production, the 'autonomous' mode of the J-1 would have likely been deemed too much a risk in combat conditions. Or maybe not. Who knew. It _was_ certain that the J-1's programming would have been improved in the process, eliminating the lockdown on non-combat systems that its activation initiated.
Systems like the EPS, for example.
Then again, the only actual reason for the EPS's presence were the batteries it was running on presently. While the D.D.'s power stores could last long enough to give it an approximate operating endurance of several days, said stores - including the compliment of primary fuel cells - had been kept dry by the maintenance crew on Genaros.
The D.D.'s battery cells were what was currently running it, and those had a maximum endurance of three quarters of an hour in full combat conditions. Truth be told, the batteries of the D.D. cost more than all its fuel cells did, even as numerous as those were, making said batteries another thing that wouldn't have been likely to occur in the end-design. The test-type's five minute emergency batteries had been deemed an unneccessary expense and were to be replaced by several extra fuel cells, for example.
Another nod in the direction of price reduction were the thrusters on the Battlemover's back. In that they were not actual thrusters in the way, say, the Knight Sabers' hardsuits were thrusters, rather, they were plasma-jets that ran off their own fuel cell supply.
_That_, he noted, was the reason that the jets didn't eat up power from the batteries. At least not noticably.
A closer examination, which took several diagnostic subroutines and a grand total of two seconds, produced further information.
While the main fuel cell supply was rigged so that, if such an event were to occur, it could be used as auxiliary for the depleted plasma-jet cells, the reverse was not the case. At least, the possibility had not been considered by the designers.
Logical, since the mixture of reaction mass in those cells was on the far edge of 'stable', and using it to power the D.D. systems would either severely tax the compensators on the power relays, or simply burn said relays.
Almost three quarters of the available cells had been depleted already, in the course of Sylvie's usage of the Battlemover.
There was also a number of safeguards installed, to prevent tampering without first brining the D.D. offline. The J-1 was still experimental enough to warrant such caution. The D.D. could not, using its internal systems, modify its own power supply processing. There was a possibility that the J-1, which could override the Battlemover's own OS in several cases, could do so ... but only a possibility. A small one at that, since the J-1 was designed to work primarily with combat systems.
So he cheated.
He sent a query through the superweapons linkage of his operator, mirroring instructions that could not have been accepted if sent through the OS with or without using the J-1.
The makeshift reflux power coupling which resulted was, if not pretty in design, at least potentially functional. It came into operation as the D.D. Battlemover's armored feet found pavement again, the mech settling on the edge of the highway Sylvie had driven her bike off from not half an hour ago.
The resulting surge, before it could be stabilized, nearly blew every single breaker, limiter, sensor suite and electrical system of the Battlemover. Lightning danced like fairy fire, crackling over the armored carapace of the red and gray mech, before finally dying down when the surge was contained.
But it _worked_.
estimated operating time remaining: 00:30:43
disengaging self-destruct system
***
"Sis, there's multiple contacts incoming at high speed. Some of them are reading as ADP patrol aerodynes, but there's also what looks like several USSD gunships and a half-dozen Bu-55-Cs. Whatever you're doing, get done with it quick!" Mackie Stingray was not agitated. He was downright frantic. Also, some dispassionate part of his intellect told him it was likely he'd get ulcers if this sort of thing kept happening. He was used to serving as support. Driving the van. The usual. But the facts were that he worried, and the inactivity he was forced into, partly due to his sister's overprotective nature and partly because he knew what he did was necessary for a job's success as much as any of the others' roles, did not sit well with him.
His current worries centered on the rapidly increasing chances of the craft he was currently piloting turning into the target of a skeet shooting contest, which was likely to happen if most of the newcomers stayed true to rote. Fortunately, to actually hit him, they'd first need to know that there was something _there_ in the first place. Urban environments were not what one could call sensor friendly, 'ground clutter' became a serious issue, and imaging radars were rated more according to resolution and precision than for power and/or range.
Add to those facts the simple matter of the former VTOL military transport having been redesigned and rebuilt almost from the ground up, to emphasize also endurance, yes, but mainly stealth, and that it was privy to fielding one of the most complex ECM suites in existence at the time, and spotting the craft that had been dubbed 'Knight Wing' became a chore and a challenge. A difficult one.
"The roof of the old parking garage two blocks South of our position," Sylia's tense voice made the already edgy feeling teen even more worried. "We've run into some trouble. Do the Knight Wing's sensors read anything unusual?"
"Static," the young man replied, putting the plane into a controlled dive that would bring him up to the designated landing zone in as short a time frame as possible. "Too much, actually. Serious jamming that's ... what the?! It's stopped!"
"Not exactly heartening, but considering that we're still here, I'm not about to complain," came the reply. "We'll be at the landing zone in three minutes. Bring Priss' backup suit online when you come down. She'll need it."
Not exactly the most positive of possible news, the Knight Wing's pilot thought as he pulled up on the nose and increased the turbofans' thrust, helping to bleed off momentum as the plane started its descent into the darkness of the Fault at night.
***
Leon hurt. Period. Sure, it was mostly his chest and abdomen that felt like they'd been used for a punching bag ...
... come to think of it, they _had_ been used for a punching bag ...
... but pretty much his entire body seemed, at the moment, to be one big painful bruise. He could hear the rhythmic thumping of aerodynes hovering above, and what sounded like gunships' rotors cutting the night's air.
He opened his eyes, and was greeted by several blurs of gray, blue, and brown ... the ADP inspector blinked, trying to refocus his eyes ... his inner ear kept insisting that the world was steadily rocking from one side to the other, his stomach was up to his throat, and he knew that he could add a likely concussion to those bruised and broken ribs which had likely resulted from having a Battlemover's fist slammed into his abdomen.
But he was alive.
And there were no sounds of battle to be heard, only the falling raindrops and choppers' engines. Meaning something had happened to the D.D., but blowing up hadn't been it.
Right now, that was enough.
Now if only he could breathe without the damn pain ...
A jolt went through the battered wreck he was stuck in, easily recognizable in nature really. There was a sort of multi-tool that the Tech Divison of the ADP never moved without. The jolt was that caused by said tool being used to try and pry apart the weakest linkages of the front armor plating. It was depressing, the familiarity with that sensation which just about every ADP Armored Trooper certified officer had.
Leon felt the pressure bearing down on his ribs abate slightly, though his chest and sides still pulsed with a dull, throbbing sort of pain. He also realized someone was talking to him ... or at him, at least.
"... isn't one thing it's another," the familiar voice went on. "Do you _try_ to get yourself killed when your partner's gone on purpose, rookie? That's the only explanation I can see for your hospital bills, at least."
An arm reached past his field of vision, and yanked on the stuck armor plating, managing to get it loose with little effort.
"I mean, what are you going to do when one of us _isn't_ watching out to haul your ass out of the fire," he was lifted out of the crippled battlesuit. "Oh, you're awake."
"Jeen ..." the ADP inspector started, in recognition, before the woman's hand pushed a red and white capsule into his mouth. He recognized the standard cocktail of painkillers that was issued with every street kit, just as they started to kick in and drowsiness overtook him. The aches and pains went away, letting him fall into sleep's embrace.
"What the hell am I supposed to do with you, McNichol?" Jeena Malso, former ADP field officer and onetime partner of Leon McNichol let a frown crease her features as she looked at the man's bruised face.
***
The soft glow of amber optics was lost in the gloom of shadows.
It had once been an apartment complex, and a fairly nice one at that. Nothing opulent, no, but decently sized and well maintained.
Up until the Second Kanto Quake had hit. The Fault had opened up, running through the city like a jagged cut over flesh. Flesh that bled. Flesh that eventually turned into the scar tissue it was now. And scar tissue that could heal in time, but not anytime soon. Though some would actually rather compare the Fault to a festering wound, inflaming the areas around it with its inhabiting gangs, etc.
The apartment complex hadn't been caught in the Fault, no, but it had been damaged severely enough that it had been written off. For some reason, be it a lack of value of the land it stood on, or a mere mix-up of paperwork that had grown in severity instead of diminishing over time, it had remained an unreclaimed ruin much like those of the ones that had gone down into the canyons.
Unlike those, and perhaps also because of that, there was still a power line running to it. Another oversight.
That history didn't matter squat to the two occupants. The thing that did was the power line.
The D.D. Battlemover 'sat' on its haunches, tendrils of its EPS system working their way into a hole in the wall past which the main power line of the building ran.
Slowly but surely, the batteries were getting their fill. Together with a full battery load, adding the flight system's fuel cells to the equation, gave the Battlemover some four and a half hours autonomous operating time.
battery power level: 65%
self destruct system disengaged
external power source detected.
recommend activation of nanite self-repair system
The repair system was not particularly advanced. Mostly, it was used to deal with the results of material fatigue, allowing the Battlemover to operate at peak efficiency for far longer than it normally could have. That was what the nanites did passively. Actively ...
... well, for one thing, a lot more power was needed for active operation. It was also not a completely failsafe process.
Far preferable to running around with a nuke on standby all the damn time. It took a little convincing, but when the nanites finally did accept their commands ...
... the detonator was cannibalized first off the bat, after which the tiny machines dealt with the radioactive components, sealing them within what was formed from the remaining electronics used to activate the nuclear reaction. That being one and a half inches of steel and lead.
By the time this was done, dusk was settling overhead again. For a mech of the size in question, the D.D. could be surprisingly quiet and contort itself somewhat surprisingly. None of the sweeps the ADP or the USSD had made over the area received even a hint of its presence.
That would change, fairly soon most likely, if anyone bothered to check the power drain on the city's energy grid in that section of town.
***
She'd lost some blood, but the injury had been temporarily closed off by her damage management systems. Luckily, it hadn't been serious enough to put her in the same sort of situation a fairly similar wound had done to Anri. A little closer, or if that 55-C had been a bit of a better shot, and she would have been done for without a cyberdoc to repair her. As it was, it would heal.
One should be thankful for small favors.
"D.D. ...?" she said, hesitantly, to the dim lighting of the cockpit. What instruments were active didn't really offer all that much information for her, power level gauges aside. The one marking current battery load was climbing, steadily if minisculy.
Maybe she'd just been imagining things? But no, that was impossible. The J-1 wasn't programmed for recovery in such dire combat conditions; for maximizing damage, yes. Likewise, she didn't have enough familiarity with the Battlemover, despite everything, to make it do what it had, even at her best.
She had been at far from her best that night.
"Yes?" came from around her. Alright, she _hadn't_ been imagining it. Comforting, in one way. Utterly disturbing in another. That, and the voice's tone was easily enough recognized. Most definitely not that of a machine. "You'd passed out again after the surge. Protective mechanism, most likely, so I didn't want to disturb you."
"Where are we?" asked the Sexaroid. The sensor screens were all blank, she noted.
"Some half a mile's distance from the Fault edge we came up from. Hooked up to a power line everybody forgot existed, it looks like," one of the screens flickered on, showing the interior of a demolished building, walls cracked and floor looking as if an earthquake had ... well, looking as if what had happened had happened, really, and nobody had bothered to repair the damage afterwards. "It doesn't look like we're likely to be found here, but ... what?"
"I asked what you were." she repeated, more strongly this time. "I _know_ you aren't the J-1, or a personality overlay on the main OS. I know because I would have noticed before ... whatever happened, happened. It isn't like I haven't used it before, you know!"
"Would you believe that ... I'm not really sure anymore," the voice was quieter, had a less ... mechanical quality than what she'd heard just moments ago. An undertone that had been there but had remained unperceived had disappeared, only to be noticed in absentia.
"Try me," the 33-S prodded. "You'd be surprised at what I'd be willing to believe after a brush with death _that_ close."
"Okay ... there's the likely option, and the unlikely one," the voice went on. "The problem is ... what logical circuits are still working tell me the latter is wrong, while my ... my gut feeling, I guess ... tells me that it's the other way around."
This was, if not utterly surreal, than getting there fast. When computers start talking about 'gut feelings' ...
"The first would be that I'm a machine intelligence that just _happened_ to spontanously generate itself within the J-1 and the D.D.'s OS."
"Are you sure your logic circuits aren't _all_ loopy?" asked Sylvie, sarcastically.
"Very funny ... then again, considering that they _are_ mostly responsible for the J-1's inputs," wondered the voice.
"That isn't something I want to be reminded of right now," the woman shuddered briefly, remembering the same cockpit she was in lit up by scores of red combat lights, the words FULL AUTO displayed in bold font before her.
"No, I don't suppose you'd want to, at that."
"So, what's the other option," she asked after calming a little.
"That I'm actually a human soul that's been crammed into the D.D."
For a moment there, you could almost hear the cicadas, chirping away.
***
END Midnight Hour.
'Through the angel rain,
Through the dust and the gasoline,
Through the cruelty of strangers,
To the neon dream'
-'Detonation Boulevard', Sisters of Mercy
Mega-Tokyo.
The city that never sleeps.
Thought the cliche was a woefully overused one, as the same thing could be said about almost every major metropolis in the world ... wait, scratch that almost. The traditional highways were as full of life, teeming with the mechanical life blood of the city as it ferried its fleshy load from organ to organ, as the information highways. And _those_ had never slept, and would not sleep as long as there was civilization to maintain them. Perhaps even for a time afterwards.
A bike roared, engine screaming as it slid through air resistance like the edge of a blade. Low slung, electric blue in color, and fastfast_fast_, the occupants of the vehicles it passed would have believed it a witchlight had it been either matte grey or black. As it was, the blue paintjob gleamed as the machine passed underneath the highway lights.
The earlier analogies would have gone through the mind of the bike's rider, had there been place in there for anything _but_ a fierce concentration. Weaving through traffic, nearly clipping a mirror here and there as she guided what, at the moment, was for all intents and purposes a ground missile to her intended destination.
There'd been no chance for her to call at the apartment over the course of the day, mostly because of the scrutiny of the ADP and various other interested parties which had been directed to an area not a mile away from where she and her ... companion ... had spent the remnant of the night and most of said day. Well, all of said day actually, since night had fallen a few minutes before she'd decided it was safe enough for her to chance an excursion.
Her name was Sylvie. Just Sylvie. No family name, no initial. It was the name she'd been given, though not the one she'd been born with. All she'd been born with was a serial number.
Sylvie rode hard, aware that she was carrying something fragile, something that could be gone with the morning breeze far easier than it had come.
She was carrying hope.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
Arc One->Largo
Two->Second Helpings
the follow up of a short in the BGC world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
"This is decidedly ... weird," said the synthesized voice to itself.
Yes, one part of him, the logical part, insisted that there was no way, no possibility, that he'd once been human. It was exponentially more likely that he was 'just' a machine intelligence gone mad ...
There were several problems with that. One being the fact that, as Sylvie had claimed, the original OS and neural network setup of the J-1 battle computer, arguably the most sophisticated piece of hardware on board, couldn't maintain the sort of neural net that an ACI required to function. Or rather, it hadn't contained it prior to ... well, something _must_ have happened, since what internal diagnostics routines there were available always came back to him with a list of errors and malfunctions longer than he cared for.
He resolutely locked any and all auto-repair programs out of the OS loop, and had the repair nanites disconnect the ones that had been hardwired into the processing loop. He was _not_ messing with this stuff. If, and this was quite likely, this whole sentience and Self thing was only supported by the myriad of 'faults' that had occurred as a result of ... well, a result of whatever had happened, he wouldn't want to mess it up. To use an analogy, a neurosurgeon, no matter how good, simply doesn't operate on himself. And as far as his skills in that regard were concerned, he was more of a butcher than a surgeon. A hack at the best of times ...
Rather, that was what he remembered being. That was another thing that threw the entire 'artificial life form' theory. He distinctly remembered having been human, having a body of flesh and blood, with all its good and bad sides. A life.
And while that was surreal, the next bit was even more so. Because he remembered, in the same way, where he was. Not from log files, though he had access to a few of those, but a source altogether more ... disturbing.
His world view was already pretty much skewed, either way.
Some of the knowledge he had could be justified as having been drawn from the D.D.'s logs and databanks. Genaros, Mega-Tokyo, Genom, GPCC ... the list went on. All things the Battlemover had come into contact with.
But it went beyond that. He remembered things that he should not have, according to pure logic. Knew things that he could not have known ... unless he really _had_ been human, and really _was_ stuck in a machine body, in addition to being stuck in a universe that he'd considered fictional beforehand.
Currently, there was another set of problems his mind was busy with. Ones not at all metaphysical in nature, but more down to earth as it were.
Not that this made them any less important.
'Okay, sight,' Griever, at least that was what he was calling himself for the time being, until he had definite proof that he was _not_, had never been a particularly thorough person. He missed things when emotions got the better of him. Them or apathy. Unless he was busy with something genuinely interesting, even if his definition of interesting was a little odd. Or unless he was sufficiently motivated. Having been shot at recently, experiencing what it felt like to perform the equivalent of surgery on himself using nanomachines (that had felt _weird_), and a few other things were more than adequate motivation there and then.
On top of everything else, he was starting to babble.
His 'operator' had gone, for 'the night' as she'd said, so he filled the time waiting for her return and for his physical shell's repairs to conclude by performing diagnostic routines.
While he wasn't exactly prone to experiencing deep thoughts about life, the universe, and the nature of everything, he could at least be said to believe in the old adage: 'Know thyself.'
'Visuals from thermograph to EM spectrum overlays, a more than decent purely optical suite. Or is that just image processing ... yeah, image processing. Hmm ... what's this ... oooh, imaging radar direct visual overlay ...' a very low intensity pulse was sent, painting the chamber he'd picked to hide away in, but not reaching past it and giving hint of the Battlemover's presence to anyone outside. '... shades of Matt Murdock.'
'Main aural sensors ... hey, wonder what range I'm working at ... set to basic above fifty and below ... hmm ... ah, normal human. Hey, I can fiddle with the reception range, neat,' the cockpit was suddenly filled with a shrill noise, which cut off moments later. 'Mental note, next time use presets. Ouch. Ouch? Okay, it wasn't really painful ... hmm ... come to think of it, why did that bother me anyway?'
'Okay ... tactile ... works surprisingly well, actually,' he mused. 'Let me see ... _that's_ the section of the net responsible? Bleah. Ugly as sin, that architecture. Ties into ... well, that makes sense. Interprets stress readings from the various armoring segments and manipulators. Not touching that, thankyouverymuch.'
'What? _Olfactory_?! Come to think of it, how in _blazes_ am I _smelling_ things?' there was a whoosh of air as something activated within the D.D. '_Oh_. Right. Readouts from the pollution detection sensors of the air filters. Not even going to try and figure out how _that_ got tied in ...'
Then he got to the last item, and sighed in resignation.
'No taste ... don't have anything to taste _with_, power feels like breathing ...' the realization took a moment to fully compute. With it came other things.
Little things.
The list went on and on, each item considered, each one catalogued ... he was feeling the familiar sensation of depression creeping up. A bad bout of it, too. Normally, he'd have fixed it with a few cups of nutra sweet coffee, or treated himself to a good meal ... both options that were presently ... unavailable. He couldn't even _cry_, for damnation's sake!
So he did the next best thing.
"Fuck!"
While it did make him feel a bit better, it didn't help all that much.
***
It had always been something that helped her regain her cool, her equilibrium. Now, it only served as a reminder.
Priss rode, her body moving on automatic, her mind wandering. A few weeks ago, she'd met Sylvie. Sylvie, who was a genuinely nice person. Sylvie, with whom she soon found herself becoming fast friends. Sylvie, who'd seemed to be equal parts adult and child, eager to learn and try new things and oddly naive about some matters.
A few days ago, her worldview was steadfast and secure. Genom were the 'bad-guys', stereotypical as that may sound, boomers were all killers in hiding, and the world was a snarling worm that was against her in nearly its entirety.
And yesterday, that image of the world was shattered.
The first item hadn't changed, and neither had the third ... but ...
Sylvie was a boomer. Her friend was a boomer. She was _friends_ with a boomer. She could phrase it in a number of ways, but the meaning stayed the same no matter what.
That simple fact had been enough to throw her into a loop, one which she hadn't had time to work out immediately thereafter because of other, more pressing concerns. Like an armed tac-nuke in close proximity, for instance.
And the excruciatingly intense moments of dread that she'd experienced when she triggered the railgun of her gun arm, with every intention of _killing_ her.
She shifted, leaning into a turn and not letting the throttle off any, the bike shooting over the curve, skirting the edge between 'dangerous' and 'damn near suicidal' driving.
Death.
It seemed so much of a constant in the concrete jungle that was this city she lived in. And it seemed to follow her ...
... sometimes, just sometimes, she imagined that she could outrun it if she was just fast enough. That she could leave the Reaper behind in her wake. That the sun that would break over the horizon eventually would really bring a better tomorrow.
Her eyes widened rapidly, train of thought derailed, as finely honed instincts born of countless hours of traversing the streets of Mega-Tokyo at near-ludicrous speed for the sheer heck of it warned her. She had a split second to react, during which she gave a brief pulse to the brakes and nearly overbalanced the bike, putting it into a controlled skid ... just as another bike shot from beyond the turn, almost clipping her as it blew past.
Why she decided to lean farther, locking the wheels as the bike skid to a halt (and left a pair of impressive skid-marks marring the road surface), and turn it around in the process her conscious mind didn't realize until after she saw the other bike.
Just as she had, the rider had skidded her bike to a halt ...
A very familiar bike.
A very familiar rider.
"Sylvie."
***
The feed paused around her, heeding an unspoken command. Several viewscreens, all showing the same thing, from different angles. Four of them were straight feed of the mission recorder data, and the rest had been put together by ways of creating a computer simulation of the events.
The D.D. Battlemover loomed in every image. Front, side, back, top, wireframe, schematic diagram ...
Sylia Stingray sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose and removing the 'earphones', in actuality a set of complex receivers tuned to respond to her brainwaves ... or rather, the ones that held what one would call surface thoughts. It was an infinitely faster, and equally difficult to master, way of communicating with the specialized computer system that served as one of the nerve centers of her operations. There was only one other person who, she was certain, could synchronize with it, and he didn't really realize that yet. Hopefully, he would never need to.
Currently, the leader of the Knight Sabers was tired. It was, in equal parts, physical and mental exhaustions. Physical, because she'd had a grand total of three hours' worth of sleep in the last 24 hour period. Mental, because she'd spent most of them trying to work out several things.
One of those being how and why the D.D. had gone from a highly dangerous automaton to ... well, something else. That was the best way she could put her thoughts into words because, quite frankly, she didn't really know what to think at the moment.
Reviewing the mission data had only given her more questions she needed to find the answers to. The D.D. did not use Boomer technology, except for its linkage system. Certainly, the myomers that made up most of its motive system were not as versatile as the pseudo-organics used in boomer designs. Simply put, the D.D. should not have been capable of of the sort of fluidity of motion it had displayed since halfway through the encounter. The J-1's efficient, if lumbering, gait and stance had started to disappear in favor of nearly animal fluidity of motion ... something a 'pure' machine like the Battlemover would have had to have been specifically programmed for, and expertly so too.
And while she could see what could only be interpretted as the 33-S pilot's input helping the machine achieve some of that fluidity, it should not have been present to nearly such an extent. Omitting the fact that the 33-S who had been the pilot during the encounter had most definitely not been in control of the Battlemover.
Meaning that either the D.D.'s motive programming was odd enough a cludge to allow for this duality, or something _else_ had happened.
It was that else that had been giving her headaches all night long.
The beeping that heralded an incoming call interrupted her reverie.
There would be no rest for the weary, it looked like.
So what else was new?
***
It looked like a coffin, really. From a certain perspective, anyway. A two meter long coffin of steel, with numerous cables leading from various control modules and into the floor. As far as aesthetics went, it was atrociously ugly.
As far as technology went, and to those who knew exactly what it did and how it did those things (the count was currently at less than a few dozen people), it was a startlingly beautiful machine.
The one standing beside it right now knew how it worked, for the most part. Knew what it did. But all that he saw in it was a tool, valuable enough to be kept in secrecy ...
Auto-Doc units were far from commonplace, and still quite experimental at that. Few major hospitals had one, because they were dreadfully expensive devices to maintain and use.
A standard Auto-Doc unit was basically a fine tuned nanite tank, the nanobots within specifically designed for medical application. Highly specialized and adaptive programming was necessary so that they didn't mess their patients up instead of healing whatever they'd been tasked with healing ... but that was the case with 'ordinary' medical nanos as well, to tell the truth. But 'ordinary' medical nanobots only aided the body's natural healing mechanisms after being injected into the 'host' (and before they 'died' and were expelled from the body along with its natural wastes). They let bones grow back together after being broken in a matter of days instead of weeks or months, for instance.
An Auto-Doc unit was only operational for an hour at most, after which the nanites withdrew back from the patient, leaving said patient physically healed of whatever ailment they'd been supposed to take care of. Broken bones knitted together in minutes, tumors removed, all sorts of corrective surgery performed ...
Their high operating costs (and even conventional medical nanos were relatively expensive) meant that they were reserved for the wealthy and privileged.
But then, this unit was no Auto-Doc. Not in the conventional sense. It could do all that an Auto-Doc unit could ... and much, much more. Like rebuilding a cyberoid body from the ground up in not much more than a few days. Granted, it ate up enough power that it had to have its own fusion generator hook up, and the cyberoid in question had not been overly complex a model (or rather, it was quite complex in one way, and not so much in another) plus it had been intact at the time of the procedure's beginning, but that was still an impressive result.
Two eyes of mismatched color looked through the small viewport that allowed a peek into the machine's 'operating chamber', checking its progress.
Inside, the 33-S model designated 'Anri' lay, seemingly sleeping, as her body was systematically taken apart and then put back together.
***
The expression on her face had said 'bone weary' more clearly than words could have. It hadn't been helped any by her stance, or gait for that matter. Debris strewn across the ground of the chamber had been avoided clumsily, unseen by distant and haunted eyes.
That, and she'd been limping. And holding her right side, gingerly, visibly favoring it.
And currently, she was unconscious, her body shivering from time to time as she lay, cradled in the cockpit of the Battlemover, limbs secured by the only means available, meaning the sync-clamps that had locked on each.
Said Battlemover, or rather, its driving intelligence, was neither amused by nor particularly happy with this development.
It had been mentioned before that the entity calling itself, no, himself Griever was not altogether happy with the current situation in general. Worried was one way to describe his sate of mind.
Actually, the first thing he'd felt upon 'hearing' the motorcycle pulling up outside had been pleasant surprise, and relief. Having had more time to think about recent events, he'd come to realize something that should have occurred to him far earlier. Then again, if his memories served him and weren't just a jumble of misinterpreted trash data, he'd never been very 'social'. Empathy was not something learned in a day, even if one could cheat at it a little bit.
Well, that wasn't quite fair. He had the means, yes, but not the methods necessary to implement them effectively.
Or, to put it bluntly, the IR overlay could show him body heat patterns in quite a bit of detail, and he could analyze the frequency spectrum of audio input, among other things ... but knowing what these things _were_ and knowing what they _meant_ were two different things.
Sylvie had been afraid of him. Quite a bit, in fact.
The fact that this was also a bit of a novelty for him aside, he could sort of see her point. The data his memory presented him with was, in context with the current situation he found himself in, pretty wild. Objectively speaking, 'spontaneously generated rogue machine intelligence' was more likely that 'dimensionally displaced human spirit stuck in a Battlemover'.
Rogue boomers were one thing, but a rogue Battlemover ... especially one that had a tactical nuclear device on board (well, had had technically, but he didn't know whether she'd believed his claim of having removed that particular bit of nastiness), was a whole different level of nasty.
So for a fair bit of time he'd been worried she wouldn't be coming back. He'd hoped that the fact that he'd saved her life counted for something (though, again, technically it had been the Battlemover that brought her into the sort of fatal danger she'd been in the first place).
Fortunately, he could move on his own, operator or no operator. He just hoped the sort of activity wouldn't be something the nanites of his repair system could not compensate for. Material fatigue, he imagined, would have been unpleasantly like dementia ... not a pretty picture. No, not a pretty picture at all.
So when the motorcycle had pulled up, he'd been glad. He really didn't know what the hell to _do_ in his current situation, and though he believed that he could survive for a while, and loneliness was something he was well accustomed to, Sylvie had felt sort of ... comfortable. If that statement made any sense at all.
Then he'd become concerned. She wasn't answering his verbal queries, acted as if she'd been injured, and ...
... well, she'd nearly collapsed from exhaustion, he guessed, a few meters away from where he, or rather his Battlemover shell, had been sitting at the time. The grapplers had been supremely useful, stopping her from hitting the ground as she passed out.
This had immediately had him worried on several levels. Her passing out, that is.
After he pulled her into the cockpit, with some difficulty, and tried to wake her up, only to get a mumbled "No, she can't be gone. No." from her nigh unconscious form, his worries had only increased.
When the monitoring routines came online, just as he linked her systems with the D.D.'s own, he'd found proof that his worries were justified.
What monitoring equipment the cockpit had was far from being the sort used in hospitals, but it was enough for a quick diagnostic scan of the pilot. The results were not heartening. Blood nutrient count was so low it was nearly nonexistent, heartbeat and blood pressure were down as well, temperature was starting to decrease ...
He remembered enough from what little first aid he'd learned upon a time to recognize the signs of someone going into shock.
***
Warm. She felt warmth, or her skin did anyway. Inside, she could still feel the coldness holding fast, but it was no longer the predominant sensation.
Images, disjointed and without anything to bind them together other than the faint thread of recognition, were flashing before her eyes, memories called up in response to her wondering what was going on.
Overall, she felt weak. Like it would be an impossible effort to even twitch, much less open her eyes. She'd never really experienced anything similar, perhaps outside of ...
... her activation.
Fear. Anxiety.
Had she gone dormant? Her memories were jumbled, but the most recent ones ... riding like a madwoman, a flash of light in her rear-view mirror, barely conscious when the flash was gone, heading for somewhere her mind had labeled 'safe'. The logs of the past few minutes were filled with warning notices, as her nutrient level counts - already below what was normally considered the borderline - took a plunge.
What was ... her last memory; something grabbing her, cold unyielding steel ... she could feel the murmurs of the 'other' in the back of her mind, just as she had when ...
Pain.
The pressure on what would have been the cerebral cortex increased, the whispers grew louder, burst of modulated static, chunks of data ... the only time that had happened ... the C components were active, negotiating interface with something. Meaning she was hooked up to something.
Bits of armor falling away, a faceplate shattered to reveal familiar red eyes and a face full of worry and desperation as she asks ...
'PRISS!'
':Kj%h1!2*a2
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
'They say the devil's in the detail,
I know what they mean,
I'm walkin' in the wasteland,
with a ghost in the machine ...'
--
Sometimes there is reason. A grand cosmic force, the motive power that brings events into focus and fruition.
Sometimes there is chance, a random chain of events leading to something thought of as impossible before.
And sometimes neither chance nor reason have much to say about an event's onset.
Will, Power.
In the Limbo that twists and turns, separating the unlimited number of spheres that are universes, the one equals the other. The Limbo isn't stable ... that would go against its very nature.
And sometimes, it leaks.
And Power is given to a Will that isn't anything extraordinary, really. And for that instant, that fleeting eternal moment, there exists possibility.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
a short in the BGC2032 world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
"There's most definitely a bad aftertaste in my brain," the young man commented, ejecting the VCD.
The room was dark, the only light coming from the screen of the laptop set up on the desk. Other things on said desk included several bottles of soda, a tablet of white chocolate, a clock and a phone. A sky that was about ready let the sun dawn could be seen through the half-closed curtains, letting some faint radiance illuminate what the glow of the screen didn't reach. Several bookshelves loaded down with paperbacks, manga, and textbooks ran along one wall, a fridge stood in one corner, a tv in another, a microwave on top of a small closet was against the opposite wall.
Griever took a gulp of soda, after having replaced the VCD in its case. He payed no attention to the clock.
"I wonder what the hell they were _thinking_ at the time," he grumbled, then sighed. "And about my sanity. Did I think the bloody thing'd get better over the years? Sheesh."
He picked up the VCD, opened a desk drawer, and dropped it inside.
"Crash still sucks, Crisis '40 isn't all that great ..."
He turned the laptop off.
"Or maybe I'm just sentimental? Nah."
Letting himself fall backwards, he landed on the bed, springs protesting somewhat at the sudden addition of weight to support ...
"And now I'm talking to myself. Wunderbar. Gah. Most definitely too late for coherency. Or is that too early? Who cares *yawn* this G-kun's going beddie-bye."
Another yawn followed, before he levered himself up again and started getting ready to turn in for the night. A few minutes later he slipped under the covers and flipped the light switch, plunging the room into the twilight of the outside's impending dawn.
"...classic's still best ..."
With that he sank into slumber, ignorant of the fact that a radiance not coming from outside or any real source of light had formed directly over his head.
***
Fright caught him by the throat, spilling like liquid fire down into his limbs.
Nightmare.
Couldn't even remember what it had been, but still ... something about liquid metal, fire, and cold ... not necessarily in that order.
Hadn't been the first time he'd had that sort of nightmare, but it was the first one he'd woken up afterwards to find that he was standing. At least that was what his sense of balance was telling him.
He panted, the sound oddly metallic, feeling cold sweat settle onto skin, wind brush past, the smoke of ...
... hold it, smoke?
There was a dull throbbing coming from one side of his torso, as if he'd been kicked or punched in that spot, and a sense of something _missing_.
His breath was short, he noticed then, as if he were trying to take a deep one but _couldn't_ ...
Oh, it was one of _those_ episodes ...
He'd had nightmares before, in which he'd been dreaming of something horrid, or of something happening which would have horrible consequence, but couldn't move to stop it, then woke up, and found out he still couldn't move at all ... dream in a dream.
Those he hated with a passion, and at the same time he found them strangely enthralling.
This time there was a definite feeling of exhilaration to it too, an undercurrent that made him tingle with nervous energy.
Damn, but he was holding his breath for a long time.
Suddenly he lurched, shaken by something, as if somebody were trying to wake him up. Damnation! That was _weird_. He'd never had quite this weird a dream, and he wasn't even _seeing_ yet.
Flying ... rather, a jump? His mind catalogued the changes the inner ear was reporting to him. Jarring thump as his body landed.
He wondered who he was this time. There'd been a few dreams that were rather fun, despite their fright factor. Admittedly, they were just dreams, but even in such a case racing through downtown London by virtue of the web slinger express was a neat experience, even if it was just a made up one. He'd seen Spider-Man a few months before his first instance of that dream happened. He still got it sometimes. Then there'd been the one that had haunted him after Avalon, where he'd been running through a ruined city and looking for Senshi, of all people, and was being hunted by gunship helicopters. That had been a one-shot deal, and one of the dreams he had to wake up 'twice' in. Scary sensation, that. Imagine laying there and not being able to move, breather ... then he'd woken up for the second time, screaming. Not fun at all, that one.
Slowly, the sensation was starting to get uncomfortable ... and he noticed that it was really quite unlike that of lungs being filled, but that it had been the closest analogy he could have thought of at the moment in question.
Movement ceased, that which he'd felt anyway ...
... there was something nagging at the back of his mind. Something about the feel of this whole ...
For a moment, he froze ... there had been the most _uncomfortable_ sensation of his ribcage being shoved open, not painful but oddly ... unpleasant. Or not _that_ oddly, all things considered.
Up til then he hadn't really consciously done anything. That usually proved to him he was dreaming, since he could only rarely influence anyhting at all in those dreams through conscious intervention. It was the reason he liked the Spider-Man ones. Nearly full freedom of movement, from what he could recall after waking. Fun, that.
This one was turning out to be really weird, though.
Standing now, hunched, arms down ... chest ... eeew. Felt sort of disgusting, really. There was something fleshy there, he could feel ... was this how a tumor felt like, he wondered?
Then he actually _heard_ something.
When he'd gone to his first anime convention, a small affair, to tell the truth, he'd spent most of the time in the movie room, getting his fill of subbed anime all day long ... later on that night, he'd had the oddest dreams about the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie, wherein he'd been conversing with the main characters in Japanese ... despite not understanding a word of the language.
It was sort of like he felt now.
He knew it was something like Japanese he was hearing ... oh well, he could hardly expect his dreams to be subbed ...
A line of yellow text appeared low in his dark field of vision.
A subbed dream? That's a first, he thought, not really paying attention to the text that changed as someone spoke. Woman's voice. Hmm, nice too. Shame he couldn't understand ...
There was a jumble of noise assaulting his ears suddenly, so much that he wanted to curl up ... he couldn't move, though.
"...have to! If you don't, the city ...!"
Hoooo-kay. He was slowly starting to get freaked out. He could _understand_ that, sort of. Was there ...
He ignored the chatter for a moment, as he noted that ther was a little green square actually blinking in the lower left corner of his field of view.
Puzzled, he focused on it ... it seemed to grow, sort of like a window in a graphic interface would if you pulled at the edges ... he tried that, then noted the slow progression, and focused his mind into the process of pressing a nonexistent 'maximize' button.
...
...
unauthorized access at *13013(core dump buffer)
error: unauthorized access attempt through *13013
error: unauthorized access attempt through *13013
error: unauthorized access a&^%#*$&#$^# (()381
WARNING: damage to core
attempting restore of corrupted data from *10002
buffer corrupted
accessing bter.reg
attempting restore ...
error: corrupted data
reroute: setting main buffer start at *13013
erasing and resetting bu^&@*@&*$^#*&$(
error: could not comply
loading *13013 into tertiary mainframe
battle computer auxiliary boot ...
...
...
...
error: space required for logical routines exceeding designation
expanding
reroute
updating neural nets
restoring
...
...
sensory, tertiary online
sensory, secondary operating at nominal efficiency
error: corrupted data
battle computer: set to standby
query: language database
voice transcript algorithm active
query: audio feed
activating direct neural link
query: sysop dialogue
sysop dialogue maximized ...
Okay, this was officially weird. He'd dreamed of code on several occasions before, but that had been after sessions of tweaking that had lasted too long. This was some sort of pseudo-crap. He'd never had that sort of stuff pop up.
"Priss!"
An uneasy, creeping feeling started somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach ... he still couldn't take brea ...
caution! caution!
power reserves rapidly deteriorating!
battle computer override Gamma-Tetra43 engaging
suppressing input from pilot
"... here I come!"
Rrrrright ... this was getting disturbingly familiar, though his mind refused to make a connection just then.
I want to wake up now! Please!
data-dump to battle computer
error: stack overflow
error: engaging retro-flux modulators
reconfiguration of neural network
j-1 offline
The darkness seemed to flicker for the barest instant, showing nothing but a sudden burst of intense light, then muting it down ...
connection reroute complete
j-1 functions routed through *13013xx neural net structure
"Sylvie!"
His skin felt cold and hot at the same time, and the air was full of noise that he felt in his very bones. The IR spectrum, the EM one, various others in-between flickered before his eyes.
Something approaching at high speed.
An instinctive need, a desire for continued existence ... doubled. Somehow, he knew whatever the projectile he could feel was, it was heading for the one place it could hurt him ...
On instinct, he moved, arms crossing in front of the 'fleshy' part he felt resting in his open chest cavity, the 'ribs' and 'sternum' or whatever that was he felt moving back into position with a hiss of servos.
There was a clanging noise, he felt slight impact, and settled into a defensive position bringing the armaments online again. The tracking mesh appeared before his eyes, highlighting targets ... four of them. Marked down according to color schemes they used ... Blue, Pink, White, Green ...
Why did that sound familiar, he wondered ...
No matter, they were a danger. He couldnt allow himself to turn his back. The safest option would be to eliminate ...
Waitaminute, say _what_?!
He felt something struggling ... the ... fleshy bit? What? His thoughts shot forward, down along the link that connected him to that most argumentative part of his ...
He sneezed ... at least it felt like it. Whatever that traffic in his mind had been, it cleared. Instead, he felt something tentative probe at the borders of his consciousness. He sent himself along that path, through live-wire and current ...
An onslaught of data, statistic and otherwise, came at him. He grabbed it, somehow, and proceeded to adapt to absorb the stream before he knew what he was doing.
"What ..." he 'felt' through whatever link had been established. "What are you?"
He could place her now. The image that flickered in front of his eyes, in a corner of his field of view.
He could also place the ones outside.
Why they were so damn familiar.
And he could also deduce why he felt so different himself.
Somehow, he was suddenly exceedingly sure that this was not a dream.
That only made things worse.
"Oh, bloody _hell_." Griever's voice said, distorted through the D.D. Battlemover's voice synth systems, but still mostly recognizable.
Oh, bloody hell, indeed.
***
And the follow-ups.
'If I were alive,
If I were real,
Would you survive,
What would you do,'
-'Heavy Metal Machine', Smashing Pumpkins
Priscilla S. Asagiri, singer and songwriter, impassioned motorcyclist, and part time power armored mercenary, was most definitely of two minds there and then.
On one hand, she was feeling as if a weight had been lifted from her. The decision had been taken out of her hands.
Sylvie was a boomer. Something Priss hated from the very depths of her heart ... And yet at the same time she was _Sylvie_, not a thing but a person. More than that, a friend.
Priss had acquaintances. A fair number of those, really. But her friends she could count on the fingers of both her hands. Without Sylvie, she could cut that down to those of one hand.
On the other hand, there was the flip side - the fact that the cyberoid was now apparently trapped inside a war machine that was not only berserk, or as close to that condition as its own battle computer had been programmed to make it, but also supremely dangerous _and_ equipped with a 'dead man's switch' activated N-bomb. A dead-man's switch that would trigger as soon as the machine's power ran out ... which, according to Sylvie and Nene, would be sometime in the next couple of minutes.
She could hear Sylia, the instigator and leader of their little halfway between mercenary and vigilante outfit, calling a regroup.
Not that it would be of much use, now, even Priss could see, however determined she may have been. There simply wasn't enough time. Their suits and they themselves were feeling the effects of the fight with the Battlemover, each damaged to some degree, and her motoroid was scrap.
Their transport, the Knight Wing, hadn't been armed since that would have hindered their deployment speed - something of paramount importance when dealing with time triggered tactical nuclear devices. There was no way it could provide support. They didn't even have the time to call it in from its overwatch position and evacuate in time to be ahead of the blast, much less drop off replacement suits and equipment ... Running was not an option.
Denial warred with defiance in her, even as the massive, when compared to their hardsuits and motoroids, form of the D.D. uncoiled from its position with an ...
"Oh, bloody _hell_!"
... exclamation through whatever PA system the Battlemover had. In a voice that was most definitely not Sylvie's.
Then, before she could as much as consider, it acted.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
Arc One->Largo
One->Midnight Hour
the follow up of a short in the BGC world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
No matter what she tried, it was to no effect. Screaming her throat hoarse was about the only thing that she _could_ attempt at the moment, since that ... it _had_ to be another override much like the J-1's initial attempt ... had locked out all external control input and data stream outs, as well as blocking most of the communications traffic between her C class implants and itself.
And she could have sworn she'd fealt something akin to a sentient mind moments before the link was cut. The Battlemover hadn't been built with the appropriate neural net structures needed for personality emulation, much less true sentience. The J-1 was a complex and frighteningly efficient _battle computer_, but that was the limit of it's design.
33-S boomers, sexaroids if you wish, all shared several traits that were helpful in establishing interpersonal interaction. One of those was a series of learning subroutines that analyzed reactions and measured agitation based on 'obvious' external physical signs. This included an ability to read and interpret voice modulation. This was what the model's 'natural empathy' truly was.
It wasn't something that they were consciously aware of working, but still ...
And it did learn, finally going as far as to being able to discern moods based on vocal data alone. That it worked on broadcasts was surprising, but not unexpected. There had been none of the flatness or perfect inflection that signified modulating software or a boomer speaker.
And then she had no more time to think, thrown around as the D.D. maneuvered with a swiftness of decision making that the J-1 hadn't seemed capable of.
But the crux of the matter was that she was once again sealed within an armored cage, the gap in the armoring that the White Saber had caused notwithstanding. Somehow, the J-1 had circumvented the manual override that had opened the cockpit to the outside world, which shouldn't have been possible in and of itself ...
... and the Battlemover was reacting to whatever was controlling it with more swiftness than she'd have thought possible without a link to the operator. However complex the J-1, however precise and direct its reactions, it worked with pure logic. The sort of speed displayed now was usually reserved for intuitive decision making processes of human and more advanced cyberoid minds. It moved as swiftly as it would have if someone were working with the superweapon link instead of against it like she was trying to now. To no avail.
The power reserves were rapidly being depleted, the micro-neutron bomb had been primed ...
***
It was highly disturbing, the way his point of view seemed to be far higher than he was used to it being, the way it covered nearly 360 degrees, the way most of the periphery data was displayed in wire frame mesh and spectrum colors overlaid on top each other. He felt puzzled at the lack of experienced sensory overload, because somehow his mind was managing to _cope_ with most of that dizzying onslaught of sensation ... despite not really knowing what to do with most of them quite yet.
Even more disturbing were the various 'floating' displays that overlapped the sensory data.
And more disturbing than _those_ was ...
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:30
self-destruct primed
micro-neutron bomb armed
... the influx of data that, while it did appear on those aforementioned displays, also sounded within his ... well, mind. He _felt_ a head, but somehow knew it wasn't where 'he' was. He decided to consider that later, while for the moment he focused on more important bits of information ...
The damage listings scrolled through a window on the 'side' of his view, presenting him with a laundry-list of complaints up to, and including, an explanation as to why he wasn't feeling most of his right arm (it wasn't _there_). It froze on
warning: neural contamination of J-1 interface - possible cause: pilot brainwave waveform present
before crashing into a loop of logic faults and vanishing.
He could feel the 'fleshy bit' in his chest, puzzled and confused, and on the verge of shock caused by a combination of stress and loss of blood. Ack. His mind raced ... literally ... he could _feel_ time stretching out as thought processes raced, the colors of the world becoming slightly bleaker and blurry as perception was altered ...
While he'd heard the phrase 'at the speed of thought' before, and had in fact used it before himself, he never imagined he'd ever directly experience it ... certainly not in the given circumstances, unlikely as they were. How those circumstances had come about woulf bear quite a bit of consideration, but not right now, given the pressing demands of that nasty little time-remaining counter.
After all, he had to survive this to be able to actually have those thoughts. This was to be the main priority for the moment.
A minute and a half.
It could be an eye blink, or a lifetime.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:29
Power. That was the answer here. If he could get that from somewhere, in sufficient amounts, blowing up would at least be forestalled. His mind rocketed through the diagnostics routines constantly running on the J-1, ignoring the circuits slagged by what looked to be a recent power surge which were showing some signs of activity but seemed otherwise irrelevant, seeking out anything even vaguely resembling a control system for the neutron bomb within his carapace.
The investigation found nothing. Or rather, nothing obviously useful in the current situation. He blocked off another attempt at interface from the pilot, sending a short burst of white noise 'back down the pipe' which stunned her, and searched beyond the memory address space that he could feel 'himself' living in, meaning fiddling in there was a no-no.
Then he turned his full attention to what the examination _had_ managed to show him. The micro-neutron bomb and its dead-man switch.
'Oh great, whichever bastard designed it, he hadn't taken chances. The godsdamned thing is hardwired into the mainframe.'
Another path led him to something more promising.
Noncombat system: Emergency Power Siphon
EPS is Standby
Okay, so he had the means to do this. Which still meant he needed to actually find something to siphon off.
additional sensory data request: advised active sensor sweep
caution: interpretation of gathered data may slow other processes currently running
It took all of a nanosecond for him to consider the implications, and decide that he couldn't not take the risk. As if he were running through the darkness, with something nipping at his heels and no idea where he was going or even what was a handspan away. Slowing down and lighting a match, if only for a moment, could save his life or make it forfeit ... the former was marginally more likely.
executing
Time sped up again, letting the power armored figures before him move ... a wave of almost solid multi spectrum radiation erupted from emitters he hadn't been aware existed moments ago, fractured reflections returning to him from a reality that had looked as if it were done in fractal for an eye blink, even as he desperately dodged to one side, thrusters on his back flaring in response to the wish for speed and letting him skid over the debris strewn ground.
Laser beams from the white hardsuit's palm cannons sliced past, one grazing a pauldron but getting deflected by the armor coating as it wasn't a full on hit. The green one was coming in fast and low, skimming the ground with her thrusters.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:20
search criteria for data stream: power; distance; - search complete
six viable targets found
marking
She was coming in from the right, using the fact that he was short an arm and it was the off-direction for the crippled-but-operational Gattling gun.
Targeting brackets sprang up around the four hardsuited figures as the data analysis was concluded, in addition to those already present, around a pile of what looked like badly beat up battle armor parts and upon closer examination proved to be an armored suit of some sort ...
database: K-12S Armored Trooper
transponder code identified as that of ADPolice units
...and a directional indicator pointing further up than he could fly, without worsening his power situation.
There was no way to get up there and not let himself be open to fire, and not lose almost all the remaining power reserves.
He didn't know whether or not he could shunt what power from their energy cells to his via the siphon, but it was more than worth a try.
'I mean, what's it gonna do, worst case? Blow up in my face?'
The green suited one came, then, fist cocked to deliver a blow that his threat assessment systems could have shrugged off, if not for the fact that the front of that gauntlet was packing shaped charges. Those would hurt, a lot ... if they landed. For a moment he let the right side open, seeming to focus his attention on getting out of the way of another barrage from White.
A moment later she'd committed, and was snatched from the air and hurled backwards as the remaining grapple caught her in the shoulder, launching from the right housing and smacking her away with its closed jaws.
The path was clear. The K-12 first. Though Pink seemed to have the biggest charge left remaining, the ADP vehicle wouldn't put up a fight. The grapple was back in its housing as he fired another burst from the thrusters.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:01:00
This would burn time, true, but it was the only way. The thrusters flared, pushing upward and forward, which he changed to just forward. The D.D. hadn't been designated as Airborne Battlemover for nothing. It was surprisingly fast given its size, and the thruster vanes hidden in the two stabilizer wings that extended from its 'backpack' assembly made it even more nimble in the air.
Warnings sprang into life, notifying him he'd been gotten a lock on by one or more of the hardsuited figures. He pinpointed the source in less than an eyeblink, the White one getting ready to fire with those damnable laser cannons.
Well, it wasn't like this hadn't been a gamble already. He only needed a few seconds to check if he could siphon the power from the Armored Trooper's batteries. It took little effort to set the sensor suite to a preset, and even less time for the decision to use the setup to be reached, whereupon all the emitters spat a vicious scramble of radio frequency static, laser designator strobes and a hammering of radar pulses that, combined, threw the sensors following the D.D. into apoplectic fits for the few instants ...
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:30
... he'd needed.
But he'd forgotten Blue and her shattered visor, and the lack of sensory assists coming with that. There was little wrong with her aim, though, despite the lack of aids, which spoke of extreme familiarity with the hardware.
Plasma bolts from that palm cannon of hers shrieked through the air, splashing onto armor and knocking him off course. He could see her running, full tilt, at him, gun arm held front and center and keeping up the fire.
The bulk of the barrage wasn't enough to damage him seriously, needles from her railguns glancing off from the armor. The plasma bolts whittled away said armor, though ...
He had nothing to lose, there and then, and everything to gain.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:18
So he threw himself forward, thrusters roaring as he redirected to meet her head on. She dodged the punch, clear as it was, and her gun arm came forward, towards the armor breach White had made with her blade ...
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:15
The grapple caught her in the helmet, locking into place and sending her flying, jerking the hand heading to the breach back, then immediately retracting forcefully, not releasing the hardsuit and letting it slam into the armor. He grabbed her by one shoulder, then, and pulled her around, releasing the grapple at the same time ... it shot forward moments later, tearing into the back of the hardsuit, pulling said back apart as it retracted, to reveal the power cells there.
caution: estimated operating time remaining: 00:00:10
power level critical
preparing to execute self destruct protocol
siphon system deployed
A flurry of wires shot from within the housing behind the D.D.'s head, twisting towards the power cells and burying themselves into them.
"No! Priss!"
***
Sylia had been caught off guard by the speed with which the Battlemover had changed tactics. One moment it was fighting mostly from a solid position, as the J-1 apparently reasoned would be best against highly mobile targets such as the hardsuits - letting its enemies come to it, under hail of fire and missiles - and its reactions were hesitant as if someone were trying to slow them down deliberately.
Only logical, since someone - the pilot to be exact - had been doing just that.
Only it suddenly looked as if it were no longer working, and that the J-1 had cut the last vestige of its operator's presence from the command loop. The formerly open cockpit had closed and locked again, shielding the big machine's 'vulnerable spot'. It started using the thrusters on its back to increase its mobility ... while the Sabers' suits were superior when it came to agility, the D.D. was surprisingly fast for its size.
Still, even with the change and its implications, the growing likelihood of the neutron bomb turning a good patch of the city into radioactive wasteland, she'd been caught flat-footed by what followed the sudden change from defensive to offensive.
There had been nothing in the specifications that suggested the D.D. capable of this scale of electronic warfare. Certainly, it was supremely shielded, giving off little energy emanations other than those that couldn't have been easily suppressed, and possessed a more than adequate sensor suite ... but an offensive application of it, even one such as this, would require modifications ... or the battle computer being in control of more than just the combat related functions of the mech.
She recovered in moments, though, and flipped her visor up to rid herself of at least some of the white-noise being dealt with by the suit sensors.
In time to have her heart jump to her throat and cold sweat to break on her forehead at the sight of Priss being grabbed by the damaged D.D., and again as it ripped the armor from the singer's suit's back.
Something changed about the area behind its head ... and Sylia could see wisps of gray shooting forward, just as the mech's remaining grappler returned to its housing after having removed Priss' suit's back armoring.
"No! Priss!" she could hear the Sexaroid exclaim, even from where she stood. And following moments later: "Please! Don't kill her!"
***
There was a feeling of euphoria that came about to wrap itself around him, much akin to what he felt when surfacing after having spent a time under water and finally taking that long awaited breath. Power flowed through the tendrils, though to the Battlemover carapace it wasn't any all to significant an amount ...
estimated operating time remaining: 00:05:15
... it opened up his options considerably. For one thing, there were more of them than merely the dreadfully solitary 'die' on that list now.
"...Don't kill her!"
Now why should he want to go and do that? The blue hardsuit was the only thing between him and the other three's weapons.
He was acutely aware of target locks being made, and also various sensor readings hinted at a number of aerial targets coming in on a intercept vectors, which, when elongated, placed their starting points near GPCC HQ, the USSD owned airbase North of the city, and Genom Tower respectively.
Quite an audience they were about to get in a few minutes.
Also, five minutes did not an 'indefinitely' make. So dallying was not something to indulge in there and then. Most definitely not.
***
Among her many dislikes, Priss hated losing control, in any fashion. So getting yanked about inside a hardsuit that had lost power, thrown about like a rag doll in the hands of her captor, was a truly infuriating experience.
Without power, the suit wasn't more than armor plating. No actuation, no support from the exoskeleton, nothing. Basically, one could say that this made her the area's biggest paperweight.
Her eyes skipped over the wrecked K-12 against one of the canyon walls, its occupant's head exposed from when the D.D. had torn the helmet off, and she revised that statement.
Second biggest.
On a purely intellectual level, she knew that she wouldn't have been able to break the grip of the big mech's manipulator even if her hardsuit hadn't been forcibly deactivated. Despite that, she tried.
Up until the roar of thrusters cut through the night, and the hand of acceleration pressed into her as the D.D. launched itself at an oblique angle, keeping her between itself and the rest of the team. The sound of the thing's grapple firing had her jerk her head, just as the implement slapped against the Battlemover's severed right arm that lay where it had been blasted when Priss, in her motoroid, had blown it off.
Just as the grapple started retracting, pulling the severed limb back with it, the D.D. redirected. At their full power, the noise of the thrusters that lifted the big mecha was tremendous, enough to make Priss' grit her teeth as it rattled her ears and body.
The D.D. shot upwards like a rocket intent on reaching orbit. Or a reasonable facsimile.
And around halfway up the canyon wall, Priss suddenly found herself weightless ... and then falling, away from the red and gray Battlemover and towards a very unpleasant meeting with the bottom of the Fault.
***
"Would you stop struggling? It's distracting."
She recognized the state she was in. Perception seemed frozen, when it was merely that her mind had sped up sufficiently to ... to what? Previously, this had only happened during attempts at data assimilation via direct neural link to an outside system ...
The superweapons linkage that had been part of the C class components, the installation of which had set her and Anri apart from even other 33-s boomers, was active and again connecting with.. something.
'What ... who? The D.D.?'
"You may call me that if you insist, yes. It will suffice for now."
Had she been in control of motive functions in this accelerated state, she would have gasped at the unexpected reply. If only because it had been words and not a stream of data, for one thing. There was nothing in the makeup of the D.D.'s mainframe or that of the J-1 that hinted at any sort of personality overlay. There had been nothing to suggest the possibility of one developing of its own accord.
'But it can't _support_ a machine intelligence.'
"Good thing I wasn't told, then," came the reply. She could actually recognize a voice of sorts, and even in this state the versatile empathy alogrhytms adapted and analyzed. A steady voice, determined but with an undercurrent of worry. "We can concern ourselves with the semantics later, though. More pressing matters should be addressed first."
'What do you want?!'
"The question should be what it is I do _not_ want. I don't want to die. Presently, that involves not letting the operator die - don't ask me how this came about. There's a really tangled logic fault in what's left of the J-1's OS that screws up the battle computer's decision making overrides. I've managed to lock out most of it, but the truth of the matter is I need to keep you alive. The second matter is that I have no wish to explode because of the tactical nuclear device currently hardwired into the power system. Hence the assimilation of our hardsuited friend's batteries' contents into our own reserves."
'You ... so that's why ... but you let her drop to her death!' the image of Priss, hardsuit and all, falling below them as the D.D. rose on plumes of flame from its plasma-jet thrusters, hung before her eyes. She couldn't look away, as the moment seemed to stretch into forever as a result of the speed at which her thoughts were being processed and communications between herself and the Battlemover's intelligence were going.
"Seeing as at least two of her companions have operational thruster systems and sensors, it's more of a delaying action, really."
Sylvie admitted that the reasoning was sound ... if ruthless. Then again, she'd done her share of ruthless things in the past, recent and not. Survival. If this ... whatever it was ... thought it could survive.
A flicker of hope started to form within at the possibility ...
***
As far as combat mecha went, the D.D. Airborne Battlemover was perhaps the most potentially powerful machine of its class. It had been designed to withstand damage severe enough to cripple most of it's counterparts, deal out the sort of punishment that could tear asunder a Bu-12 in a matter of seconds, and survive the most grueling battlefield conditions without drops in efficiency.
It was also a prototype. Prototypes had things wrong with them, usually. They were test beds for concepts that often don't find use in the final development models that come later.
So there were several systems present in the D.D. that wouldn't have been present had the unit seen the mass production it had been intended for.
It was very much a possibility that the neutron bomb was one of them.
And while the J-1 was indeed an impressive tool, it was just that, a tool. Had the D.D. ever been moved into production, the 'autonomous' mode of the J-1 would have likely been deemed too much a risk in combat conditions. Or maybe not. Who knew. It _was_ certain that the J-1's programming would have been improved in the process, eliminating the lockdown on non-combat systems that its activation initiated.
Systems like the EPS, for example.
Then again, the only actual reason for the EPS's presence were the batteries it was running on presently. While the D.D.'s power stores could last long enough to give it an approximate operating endurance of several days, said stores - including the compliment of primary fuel cells - had been kept dry by the maintenance crew on Genaros.
The D.D.'s battery cells were what was currently running it, and those had a maximum endurance of three quarters of an hour in full combat conditions. Truth be told, the batteries of the D.D. cost more than all its fuel cells did, even as numerous as those were, making said batteries another thing that wouldn't have been likely to occur in the end-design. The test-type's five minute emergency batteries had been deemed an unneccessary expense and were to be replaced by several extra fuel cells, for example.
Another nod in the direction of price reduction were the thrusters on the Battlemover's back. In that they were not actual thrusters in the way, say, the Knight Sabers' hardsuits were thrusters, rather, they were plasma-jets that ran off their own fuel cell supply.
_That_, he noted, was the reason that the jets didn't eat up power from the batteries. At least not noticably.
A closer examination, which took several diagnostic subroutines and a grand total of two seconds, produced further information.
While the main fuel cell supply was rigged so that, if such an event were to occur, it could be used as auxiliary for the depleted plasma-jet cells, the reverse was not the case. At least, the possibility had not been considered by the designers.
Logical, since the mixture of reaction mass in those cells was on the far edge of 'stable', and using it to power the D.D. systems would either severely tax the compensators on the power relays, or simply burn said relays.
Almost three quarters of the available cells had been depleted already, in the course of Sylvie's usage of the Battlemover.
There was also a number of safeguards installed, to prevent tampering without first brining the D.D. offline. The J-1 was still experimental enough to warrant such caution. The D.D. could not, using its internal systems, modify its own power supply processing. There was a possibility that the J-1, which could override the Battlemover's own OS in several cases, could do so ... but only a possibility. A small one at that, since the J-1 was designed to work primarily with combat systems.
So he cheated.
He sent a query through the superweapons linkage of his operator, mirroring instructions that could not have been accepted if sent through the OS with or without using the J-1.
The makeshift reflux power coupling which resulted was, if not pretty in design, at least potentially functional. It came into operation as the D.D. Battlemover's armored feet found pavement again, the mech settling on the edge of the highway Sylvie had driven her bike off from not half an hour ago.
The resulting surge, before it could be stabilized, nearly blew every single breaker, limiter, sensor suite and electrical system of the Battlemover. Lightning danced like fairy fire, crackling over the armored carapace of the red and gray mech, before finally dying down when the surge was contained.
But it _worked_.
estimated operating time remaining: 00:30:43
disengaging self-destruct system
***
"Sis, there's multiple contacts incoming at high speed. Some of them are reading as ADP patrol aerodynes, but there's also what looks like several USSD gunships and a half-dozen Bu-55-Cs. Whatever you're doing, get done with it quick!" Mackie Stingray was not agitated. He was downright frantic. Also, some dispassionate part of his intellect told him it was likely he'd get ulcers if this sort of thing kept happening. He was used to serving as support. Driving the van. The usual. But the facts were that he worried, and the inactivity he was forced into, partly due to his sister's overprotective nature and partly because he knew what he did was necessary for a job's success as much as any of the others' roles, did not sit well with him.
His current worries centered on the rapidly increasing chances of the craft he was currently piloting turning into the target of a skeet shooting contest, which was likely to happen if most of the newcomers stayed true to rote. Fortunately, to actually hit him, they'd first need to know that there was something _there_ in the first place. Urban environments were not what one could call sensor friendly, 'ground clutter' became a serious issue, and imaging radars were rated more according to resolution and precision than for power and/or range.
Add to those facts the simple matter of the former VTOL military transport having been redesigned and rebuilt almost from the ground up, to emphasize also endurance, yes, but mainly stealth, and that it was privy to fielding one of the most complex ECM suites in existence at the time, and spotting the craft that had been dubbed 'Knight Wing' became a chore and a challenge. A difficult one.
"The roof of the old parking garage two blocks South of our position," Sylia's tense voice made the already edgy feeling teen even more worried. "We've run into some trouble. Do the Knight Wing's sensors read anything unusual?"
"Static," the young man replied, putting the plane into a controlled dive that would bring him up to the designated landing zone in as short a time frame as possible. "Too much, actually. Serious jamming that's ... what the?! It's stopped!"
"Not exactly heartening, but considering that we're still here, I'm not about to complain," came the reply. "We'll be at the landing zone in three minutes. Bring Priss' backup suit online when you come down. She'll need it."
Not exactly the most positive of possible news, the Knight Wing's pilot thought as he pulled up on the nose and increased the turbofans' thrust, helping to bleed off momentum as the plane started its descent into the darkness of the Fault at night.
***
Leon hurt. Period. Sure, it was mostly his chest and abdomen that felt like they'd been used for a punching bag ...
... come to think of it, they _had_ been used for a punching bag ...
... but pretty much his entire body seemed, at the moment, to be one big painful bruise. He could hear the rhythmic thumping of aerodynes hovering above, and what sounded like gunships' rotors cutting the night's air.
He opened his eyes, and was greeted by several blurs of gray, blue, and brown ... the ADP inspector blinked, trying to refocus his eyes ... his inner ear kept insisting that the world was steadily rocking from one side to the other, his stomach was up to his throat, and he knew that he could add a likely concussion to those bruised and broken ribs which had likely resulted from having a Battlemover's fist slammed into his abdomen.
But he was alive.
And there were no sounds of battle to be heard, only the falling raindrops and choppers' engines. Meaning something had happened to the D.D., but blowing up hadn't been it.
Right now, that was enough.
Now if only he could breathe without the damn pain ...
A jolt went through the battered wreck he was stuck in, easily recognizable in nature really. There was a sort of multi-tool that the Tech Divison of the ADP never moved without. The jolt was that caused by said tool being used to try and pry apart the weakest linkages of the front armor plating. It was depressing, the familiarity with that sensation which just about every ADP Armored Trooper certified officer had.
Leon felt the pressure bearing down on his ribs abate slightly, though his chest and sides still pulsed with a dull, throbbing sort of pain. He also realized someone was talking to him ... or at him, at least.
"... isn't one thing it's another," the familiar voice went on. "Do you _try_ to get yourself killed when your partner's gone on purpose, rookie? That's the only explanation I can see for your hospital bills, at least."
An arm reached past his field of vision, and yanked on the stuck armor plating, managing to get it loose with little effort.
"I mean, what are you going to do when one of us _isn't_ watching out to haul your ass out of the fire," he was lifted out of the crippled battlesuit. "Oh, you're awake."
"Jeen ..." the ADP inspector started, in recognition, before the woman's hand pushed a red and white capsule into his mouth. He recognized the standard cocktail of painkillers that was issued with every street kit, just as they started to kick in and drowsiness overtook him. The aches and pains went away, letting him fall into sleep's embrace.
"What the hell am I supposed to do with you, McNichol?" Jeena Malso, former ADP field officer and onetime partner of Leon McNichol let a frown crease her features as she looked at the man's bruised face.
***
The soft glow of amber optics was lost in the gloom of shadows.
It had once been an apartment complex, and a fairly nice one at that. Nothing opulent, no, but decently sized and well maintained.
Up until the Second Kanto Quake had hit. The Fault had opened up, running through the city like a jagged cut over flesh. Flesh that bled. Flesh that eventually turned into the scar tissue it was now. And scar tissue that could heal in time, but not anytime soon. Though some would actually rather compare the Fault to a festering wound, inflaming the areas around it with its inhabiting gangs, etc.
The apartment complex hadn't been caught in the Fault, no, but it had been damaged severely enough that it had been written off. For some reason, be it a lack of value of the land it stood on, or a mere mix-up of paperwork that had grown in severity instead of diminishing over time, it had remained an unreclaimed ruin much like those of the ones that had gone down into the canyons.
Unlike those, and perhaps also because of that, there was still a power line running to it. Another oversight.
That history didn't matter squat to the two occupants. The thing that did was the power line.
The D.D. Battlemover 'sat' on its haunches, tendrils of its EPS system working their way into a hole in the wall past which the main power line of the building ran.
Slowly but surely, the batteries were getting their fill. Together with a full battery load, adding the flight system's fuel cells to the equation, gave the Battlemover some four and a half hours autonomous operating time.
battery power level: 65%
self destruct system disengaged
external power source detected.
recommend activation of nanite self-repair system
The repair system was not particularly advanced. Mostly, it was used to deal with the results of material fatigue, allowing the Battlemover to operate at peak efficiency for far longer than it normally could have. That was what the nanites did passively. Actively ...
... well, for one thing, a lot more power was needed for active operation. It was also not a completely failsafe process.
Far preferable to running around with a nuke on standby all the damn time. It took a little convincing, but when the nanites finally did accept their commands ...
... the detonator was cannibalized first off the bat, after which the tiny machines dealt with the radioactive components, sealing them within what was formed from the remaining electronics used to activate the nuclear reaction. That being one and a half inches of steel and lead.
By the time this was done, dusk was settling overhead again. For a mech of the size in question, the D.D. could be surprisingly quiet and contort itself somewhat surprisingly. None of the sweeps the ADP or the USSD had made over the area received even a hint of its presence.
That would change, fairly soon most likely, if anyone bothered to check the power drain on the city's energy grid in that section of town.
***
She'd lost some blood, but the injury had been temporarily closed off by her damage management systems. Luckily, it hadn't been serious enough to put her in the same sort of situation a fairly similar wound had done to Anri. A little closer, or if that 55-C had been a bit of a better shot, and she would have been done for without a cyberdoc to repair her. As it was, it would heal.
One should be thankful for small favors.
"D.D. ...?" she said, hesitantly, to the dim lighting of the cockpit. What instruments were active didn't really offer all that much information for her, power level gauges aside. The one marking current battery load was climbing, steadily if minisculy.
Maybe she'd just been imagining things? But no, that was impossible. The J-1 wasn't programmed for recovery in such dire combat conditions; for maximizing damage, yes. Likewise, she didn't have enough familiarity with the Battlemover, despite everything, to make it do what it had, even at her best.
She had been at far from her best that night.
"Yes?" came from around her. Alright, she _hadn't_ been imagining it. Comforting, in one way. Utterly disturbing in another. That, and the voice's tone was easily enough recognized. Most definitely not that of a machine. "You'd passed out again after the surge. Protective mechanism, most likely, so I didn't want to disturb you."
"Where are we?" asked the Sexaroid. The sensor screens were all blank, she noted.
"Some half a mile's distance from the Fault edge we came up from. Hooked up to a power line everybody forgot existed, it looks like," one of the screens flickered on, showing the interior of a demolished building, walls cracked and floor looking as if an earthquake had ... well, looking as if what had happened had happened, really, and nobody had bothered to repair the damage afterwards. "It doesn't look like we're likely to be found here, but ... what?"
"I asked what you were." she repeated, more strongly this time. "I _know_ you aren't the J-1, or a personality overlay on the main OS. I know because I would have noticed before ... whatever happened, happened. It isn't like I haven't used it before, you know!"
"Would you believe that ... I'm not really sure anymore," the voice was quieter, had a less ... mechanical quality than what she'd heard just moments ago. An undertone that had been there but had remained unperceived had disappeared, only to be noticed in absentia.
"Try me," the 33-S prodded. "You'd be surprised at what I'd be willing to believe after a brush with death _that_ close."
"Okay ... there's the likely option, and the unlikely one," the voice went on. "The problem is ... what logical circuits are still working tell me the latter is wrong, while my ... my gut feeling, I guess ... tells me that it's the other way around."
This was, if not utterly surreal, than getting there fast. When computers start talking about 'gut feelings' ...
"The first would be that I'm a machine intelligence that just _happened_ to spontanously generate itself within the J-1 and the D.D.'s OS."
"Are you sure your logic circuits aren't _all_ loopy?" asked Sylvie, sarcastically.
"Very funny ... then again, considering that they _are_ mostly responsible for the J-1's inputs," wondered the voice.
"That isn't something I want to be reminded of right now," the woman shuddered briefly, remembering the same cockpit she was in lit up by scores of red combat lights, the words FULL AUTO displayed in bold font before her.
"No, I don't suppose you'd want to, at that."
"So, what's the other option," she asked after calming a little.
"That I'm actually a human soul that's been crammed into the D.D."
For a moment there, you could almost hear the cicadas, chirping away.
***
END Midnight Hour.
'Through the angel rain,
Through the dust and the gasoline,
Through the cruelty of strangers,
To the neon dream'
-'Detonation Boulevard', Sisters of Mercy
Mega-Tokyo.
The city that never sleeps.
Thought the cliche was a woefully overused one, as the same thing could be said about almost every major metropolis in the world ... wait, scratch that almost. The traditional highways were as full of life, teeming with the mechanical life blood of the city as it ferried its fleshy load from organ to organ, as the information highways. And _those_ had never slept, and would not sleep as long as there was civilization to maintain them. Perhaps even for a time afterwards.
A bike roared, engine screaming as it slid through air resistance like the edge of a blade. Low slung, electric blue in color, and fastfast_fast_, the occupants of the vehicles it passed would have believed it a witchlight had it been either matte grey or black. As it was, the blue paintjob gleamed as the machine passed underneath the highway lights.
The earlier analogies would have gone through the mind of the bike's rider, had there been place in there for anything _but_ a fierce concentration. Weaving through traffic, nearly clipping a mirror here and there as she guided what, at the moment, was for all intents and purposes a ground missile to her intended destination.
There'd been no chance for her to call at the apartment over the course of the day, mostly because of the scrutiny of the ADP and various other interested parties which had been directed to an area not a mile away from where she and her ... companion ... had spent the remnant of the night and most of said day. Well, all of said day actually, since night had fallen a few minutes before she'd decided it was safe enough for her to chance an excursion.
Her name was Sylvie. Just Sylvie. No family name, no initial. It was the name she'd been given, though not the one she'd been born with. All she'd been born with was a serial number.
Sylvie rode hard, aware that she was carrying something fragile, something that could be gone with the morning breeze far easier than it had come.
She was carrying hope.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
Arc One->Largo
Two->Second Helpings
the follow up of a short in the BGC world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
"This is decidedly ... weird," said the synthesized voice to itself.
Yes, one part of him, the logical part, insisted that there was no way, no possibility, that he'd once been human. It was exponentially more likely that he was 'just' a machine intelligence gone mad ...
There were several problems with that. One being the fact that, as Sylvie had claimed, the original OS and neural network setup of the J-1 battle computer, arguably the most sophisticated piece of hardware on board, couldn't maintain the sort of neural net that an ACI required to function. Or rather, it hadn't contained it prior to ... well, something _must_ have happened, since what internal diagnostics routines there were available always came back to him with a list of errors and malfunctions longer than he cared for.
He resolutely locked any and all auto-repair programs out of the OS loop, and had the repair nanites disconnect the ones that had been hardwired into the processing loop. He was _not_ messing with this stuff. If, and this was quite likely, this whole sentience and Self thing was only supported by the myriad of 'faults' that had occurred as a result of ... well, a result of whatever had happened, he wouldn't want to mess it up. To use an analogy, a neurosurgeon, no matter how good, simply doesn't operate on himself. And as far as his skills in that regard were concerned, he was more of a butcher than a surgeon. A hack at the best of times ...
Rather, that was what he remembered being. That was another thing that threw the entire 'artificial life form' theory. He distinctly remembered having been human, having a body of flesh and blood, with all its good and bad sides. A life.
And while that was surreal, the next bit was even more so. Because he remembered, in the same way, where he was. Not from log files, though he had access to a few of those, but a source altogether more ... disturbing.
His world view was already pretty much skewed, either way.
Some of the knowledge he had could be justified as having been drawn from the D.D.'s logs and databanks. Genaros, Mega-Tokyo, Genom, GPCC ... the list went on. All things the Battlemover had come into contact with.
But it went beyond that. He remembered things that he should not have, according to pure logic. Knew things that he could not have known ... unless he really _had_ been human, and really _was_ stuck in a machine body, in addition to being stuck in a universe that he'd considered fictional beforehand.
Currently, there was another set of problems his mind was busy with. Ones not at all metaphysical in nature, but more down to earth as it were.
Not that this made them any less important.
'Okay, sight,' Griever, at least that was what he was calling himself for the time being, until he had definite proof that he was _not_, had never been a particularly thorough person. He missed things when emotions got the better of him. Them or apathy. Unless he was busy with something genuinely interesting, even if his definition of interesting was a little odd. Or unless he was sufficiently motivated. Having been shot at recently, experiencing what it felt like to perform the equivalent of surgery on himself using nanomachines (that had felt _weird_), and a few other things were more than adequate motivation there and then.
On top of everything else, he was starting to babble.
His 'operator' had gone, for 'the night' as she'd said, so he filled the time waiting for her return and for his physical shell's repairs to conclude by performing diagnostic routines.
While he wasn't exactly prone to experiencing deep thoughts about life, the universe, and the nature of everything, he could at least be said to believe in the old adage: 'Know thyself.'
'Visuals from thermograph to EM spectrum overlays, a more than decent purely optical suite. Or is that just image processing ... yeah, image processing. Hmm ... what's this ... oooh, imaging radar direct visual overlay ...' a very low intensity pulse was sent, painting the chamber he'd picked to hide away in, but not reaching past it and giving hint of the Battlemover's presence to anyone outside. '... shades of Matt Murdock.'
'Main aural sensors ... hey, wonder what range I'm working at ... set to basic above fifty and below ... hmm ... ah, normal human. Hey, I can fiddle with the reception range, neat,' the cockpit was suddenly filled with a shrill noise, which cut off moments later. 'Mental note, next time use presets. Ouch. Ouch? Okay, it wasn't really painful ... hmm ... come to think of it, why did that bother me anyway?'
'Okay ... tactile ... works surprisingly well, actually,' he mused. 'Let me see ... _that's_ the section of the net responsible? Bleah. Ugly as sin, that architecture. Ties into ... well, that makes sense. Interprets stress readings from the various armoring segments and manipulators. Not touching that, thankyouverymuch.'
'What? _Olfactory_?! Come to think of it, how in _blazes_ am I _smelling_ things?' there was a whoosh of air as something activated within the D.D. '_Oh_. Right. Readouts from the pollution detection sensors of the air filters. Not even going to try and figure out how _that_ got tied in ...'
Then he got to the last item, and sighed in resignation.
'No taste ... don't have anything to taste _with_, power feels like breathing ...' the realization took a moment to fully compute. With it came other things.
Little things.
The list went on and on, each item considered, each one catalogued ... he was feeling the familiar sensation of depression creeping up. A bad bout of it, too. Normally, he'd have fixed it with a few cups of nutra sweet coffee, or treated himself to a good meal ... both options that were presently ... unavailable. He couldn't even _cry_, for damnation's sake!
So he did the next best thing.
"Fuck!"
While it did make him feel a bit better, it didn't help all that much.
***
It had always been something that helped her regain her cool, her equilibrium. Now, it only served as a reminder.
Priss rode, her body moving on automatic, her mind wandering. A few weeks ago, she'd met Sylvie. Sylvie, who was a genuinely nice person. Sylvie, with whom she soon found herself becoming fast friends. Sylvie, who'd seemed to be equal parts adult and child, eager to learn and try new things and oddly naive about some matters.
A few days ago, her worldview was steadfast and secure. Genom were the 'bad-guys', stereotypical as that may sound, boomers were all killers in hiding, and the world was a snarling worm that was against her in nearly its entirety.
And yesterday, that image of the world was shattered.
The first item hadn't changed, and neither had the third ... but ...
Sylvie was a boomer. Her friend was a boomer. She was _friends_ with a boomer. She could phrase it in a number of ways, but the meaning stayed the same no matter what.
That simple fact had been enough to throw her into a loop, one which she hadn't had time to work out immediately thereafter because of other, more pressing concerns. Like an armed tac-nuke in close proximity, for instance.
And the excruciatingly intense moments of dread that she'd experienced when she triggered the railgun of her gun arm, with every intention of _killing_ her.
She shifted, leaning into a turn and not letting the throttle off any, the bike shooting over the curve, skirting the edge between 'dangerous' and 'damn near suicidal' driving.
Death.
It seemed so much of a constant in the concrete jungle that was this city she lived in. And it seemed to follow her ...
... sometimes, just sometimes, she imagined that she could outrun it if she was just fast enough. That she could leave the Reaper behind in her wake. That the sun that would break over the horizon eventually would really bring a better tomorrow.
Her eyes widened rapidly, train of thought derailed, as finely honed instincts born of countless hours of traversing the streets of Mega-Tokyo at near-ludicrous speed for the sheer heck of it warned her. She had a split second to react, during which she gave a brief pulse to the brakes and nearly overbalanced the bike, putting it into a controlled skid ... just as another bike shot from beyond the turn, almost clipping her as it blew past.
Why she decided to lean farther, locking the wheels as the bike skid to a halt (and left a pair of impressive skid-marks marring the road surface), and turn it around in the process her conscious mind didn't realize until after she saw the other bike.
Just as she had, the rider had skidded her bike to a halt ...
A very familiar bike.
A very familiar rider.
"Sylvie."
***
The feed paused around her, heeding an unspoken command. Several viewscreens, all showing the same thing, from different angles. Four of them were straight feed of the mission recorder data, and the rest had been put together by ways of creating a computer simulation of the events.
The D.D. Battlemover loomed in every image. Front, side, back, top, wireframe, schematic diagram ...
Sylia Stingray sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose and removing the 'earphones', in actuality a set of complex receivers tuned to respond to her brainwaves ... or rather, the ones that held what one would call surface thoughts. It was an infinitely faster, and equally difficult to master, way of communicating with the specialized computer system that served as one of the nerve centers of her operations. There was only one other person who, she was certain, could synchronize with it, and he didn't really realize that yet. Hopefully, he would never need to.
Currently, the leader of the Knight Sabers was tired. It was, in equal parts, physical and mental exhaustions. Physical, because she'd had a grand total of three hours' worth of sleep in the last 24 hour period. Mental, because she'd spent most of them trying to work out several things.
One of those being how and why the D.D. had gone from a highly dangerous automaton to ... well, something else. That was the best way she could put her thoughts into words because, quite frankly, she didn't really know what to think at the moment.
Reviewing the mission data had only given her more questions she needed to find the answers to. The D.D. did not use Boomer technology, except for its linkage system. Certainly, the myomers that made up most of its motive system were not as versatile as the pseudo-organics used in boomer designs. Simply put, the D.D. should not have been capable of of the sort of fluidity of motion it had displayed since halfway through the encounter. The J-1's efficient, if lumbering, gait and stance had started to disappear in favor of nearly animal fluidity of motion ... something a 'pure' machine like the Battlemover would have had to have been specifically programmed for, and expertly so too.
And while she could see what could only be interpretted as the 33-S pilot's input helping the machine achieve some of that fluidity, it should not have been present to nearly such an extent. Omitting the fact that the 33-S who had been the pilot during the encounter had most definitely not been in control of the Battlemover.
Meaning that either the D.D.'s motive programming was odd enough a cludge to allow for this duality, or something _else_ had happened.
It was that else that had been giving her headaches all night long.
The beeping that heralded an incoming call interrupted her reverie.
There would be no rest for the weary, it looked like.
So what else was new?
***
It looked like a coffin, really. From a certain perspective, anyway. A two meter long coffin of steel, with numerous cables leading from various control modules and into the floor. As far as aesthetics went, it was atrociously ugly.
As far as technology went, and to those who knew exactly what it did and how it did those things (the count was currently at less than a few dozen people), it was a startlingly beautiful machine.
The one standing beside it right now knew how it worked, for the most part. Knew what it did. But all that he saw in it was a tool, valuable enough to be kept in secrecy ...
Auto-Doc units were far from commonplace, and still quite experimental at that. Few major hospitals had one, because they were dreadfully expensive devices to maintain and use.
A standard Auto-Doc unit was basically a fine tuned nanite tank, the nanobots within specifically designed for medical application. Highly specialized and adaptive programming was necessary so that they didn't mess their patients up instead of healing whatever they'd been tasked with healing ... but that was the case with 'ordinary' medical nanos as well, to tell the truth. But 'ordinary' medical nanobots only aided the body's natural healing mechanisms after being injected into the 'host' (and before they 'died' and were expelled from the body along with its natural wastes). They let bones grow back together after being broken in a matter of days instead of weeks or months, for instance.
An Auto-Doc unit was only operational for an hour at most, after which the nanites withdrew back from the patient, leaving said patient physically healed of whatever ailment they'd been supposed to take care of. Broken bones knitted together in minutes, tumors removed, all sorts of corrective surgery performed ...
Their high operating costs (and even conventional medical nanos were relatively expensive) meant that they were reserved for the wealthy and privileged.
But then, this unit was no Auto-Doc. Not in the conventional sense. It could do all that an Auto-Doc unit could ... and much, much more. Like rebuilding a cyberoid body from the ground up in not much more than a few days. Granted, it ate up enough power that it had to have its own fusion generator hook up, and the cyberoid in question had not been overly complex a model (or rather, it was quite complex in one way, and not so much in another) plus it had been intact at the time of the procedure's beginning, but that was still an impressive result.
Two eyes of mismatched color looked through the small viewport that allowed a peek into the machine's 'operating chamber', checking its progress.
Inside, the 33-S model designated 'Anri' lay, seemingly sleeping, as her body was systematically taken apart and then put back together.
***
The expression on her face had said 'bone weary' more clearly than words could have. It hadn't been helped any by her stance, or gait for that matter. Debris strewn across the ground of the chamber had been avoided clumsily, unseen by distant and haunted eyes.
That, and she'd been limping. And holding her right side, gingerly, visibly favoring it.
And currently, she was unconscious, her body shivering from time to time as she lay, cradled in the cockpit of the Battlemover, limbs secured by the only means available, meaning the sync-clamps that had locked on each.
Said Battlemover, or rather, its driving intelligence, was neither amused by nor particularly happy with this development.
It had been mentioned before that the entity calling itself, no, himself Griever was not altogether happy with the current situation in general. Worried was one way to describe his sate of mind.
Actually, the first thing he'd felt upon 'hearing' the motorcycle pulling up outside had been pleasant surprise, and relief. Having had more time to think about recent events, he'd come to realize something that should have occurred to him far earlier. Then again, if his memories served him and weren't just a jumble of misinterpreted trash data, he'd never been very 'social'. Empathy was not something learned in a day, even if one could cheat at it a little bit.
Well, that wasn't quite fair. He had the means, yes, but not the methods necessary to implement them effectively.
Or, to put it bluntly, the IR overlay could show him body heat patterns in quite a bit of detail, and he could analyze the frequency spectrum of audio input, among other things ... but knowing what these things _were_ and knowing what they _meant_ were two different things.
Sylvie had been afraid of him. Quite a bit, in fact.
The fact that this was also a bit of a novelty for him aside, he could sort of see her point. The data his memory presented him with was, in context with the current situation he found himself in, pretty wild. Objectively speaking, 'spontaneously generated rogue machine intelligence' was more likely that 'dimensionally displaced human spirit stuck in a Battlemover'.
Rogue boomers were one thing, but a rogue Battlemover ... especially one that had a tactical nuclear device on board (well, had had technically, but he didn't know whether she'd believed his claim of having removed that particular bit of nastiness), was a whole different level of nasty.
So for a fair bit of time he'd been worried she wouldn't be coming back. He'd hoped that the fact that he'd saved her life counted for something (though, again, technically it had been the Battlemover that brought her into the sort of fatal danger she'd been in the first place).
Fortunately, he could move on his own, operator or no operator. He just hoped the sort of activity wouldn't be something the nanites of his repair system could not compensate for. Material fatigue, he imagined, would have been unpleasantly like dementia ... not a pretty picture. No, not a pretty picture at all.
So when the motorcycle had pulled up, he'd been glad. He really didn't know what the hell to _do_ in his current situation, and though he believed that he could survive for a while, and loneliness was something he was well accustomed to, Sylvie had felt sort of ... comfortable. If that statement made any sense at all.
Then he'd become concerned. She wasn't answering his verbal queries, acted as if she'd been injured, and ...
... well, she'd nearly collapsed from exhaustion, he guessed, a few meters away from where he, or rather his Battlemover shell, had been sitting at the time. The grapplers had been supremely useful, stopping her from hitting the ground as she passed out.
This had immediately had him worried on several levels. Her passing out, that is.
After he pulled her into the cockpit, with some difficulty, and tried to wake her up, only to get a mumbled "No, she can't be gone. No." from her nigh unconscious form, his worries had only increased.
When the monitoring routines came online, just as he linked her systems with the D.D.'s own, he'd found proof that his worries were justified.
What monitoring equipment the cockpit had was far from being the sort used in hospitals, but it was enough for a quick diagnostic scan of the pilot. The results were not heartening. Blood nutrient count was so low it was nearly nonexistent, heartbeat and blood pressure were down as well, temperature was starting to decrease ...
He remembered enough from what little first aid he'd learned upon a time to recognize the signs of someone going into shock.
***
Warm. She felt warmth, or her skin did anyway. Inside, she could still feel the coldness holding fast, but it was no longer the predominant sensation.
Images, disjointed and without anything to bind them together other than the faint thread of recognition, were flashing before her eyes, memories called up in response to her wondering what was going on.
Overall, she felt weak. Like it would be an impossible effort to even twitch, much less open her eyes. She'd never really experienced anything similar, perhaps outside of ...
... her activation.
Fear. Anxiety.
Had she gone dormant? Her memories were jumbled, but the most recent ones ... riding like a madwoman, a flash of light in her rear-view mirror, barely conscious when the flash was gone, heading for somewhere her mind had labeled 'safe'. The logs of the past few minutes were filled with warning notices, as her nutrient level counts - already below what was normally considered the borderline - took a plunge.
What was ... her last memory; something grabbing her, cold unyielding steel ... she could feel the murmurs of the 'other' in the back of her mind, just as she had when ...
Pain.
The pressure on what would have been the cerebral cortex increased, the whispers grew louder, burst of modulated static, chunks of data ... the only time that had happened ... the C components were active, negotiating interface with something. Meaning she was hooked up to something.
Bits of armor falling away, a faceplate shattered to reveal familiar red eyes and a face full of worry and desperation as she asks ...
'PRISS!'
':Kj%h1!2*a2
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm