Machine Spirit 1-3

[Rieverre]

Compared to the previous two chapters, this one is rather short.
Sort of embarassing that it took me so long to come up with it.
Oh well.
---
'Throw me to the wolves,
Because theres order in the pack,
Throw me to the sky,
Because I know Im coming back,'
- 'Easily', Red Hot Chilli Peppers
He woke up falling ... or that was the closest he could come to describing how the odd 'not there' sensation that had suffused him until just a moment ago disappeared.
Wind whistled past, pressing against his front, even as the ground came closer and closer, cool against the slightly uncomfortable warmth of his skin, and its allotted aches and pains.
He twisted, shifting his center of mass to control the fall better, getting ready for the impact that would undoubtedly come. Oddly enough, he wasn't afraid, just mildly concerned. In fact, that was, confusion aside, the only emotion he was feeling. In and of itself, this was odd.
With a conviction bordering on certainty he knew that he needed to do something to actually slow his descent, or breaking his fall would be all too literal a description of the events that followed. Along with the breaking of several limbs, if he got lucky. If he didn't ... well, the less said about that, the better.
The realization was immediately followed up by a jolt, as if he'd fallen against some sort of invisible safety net that held firm, but still had a lot of give. It was surprisingly non-disconcerting.
For some reason, he landed on all fours, arms and legs bending to arrest the momentum of the already slowed fall, muscles flexing as they absorbed kinetic energy with a whoosh of assist servos ...
... waitaminute, servos?
Griever had the oddest feeling of ... well, it sort of felt as if his mind had hiccupped, before it settled back into place again.
'Oh, that's right. I'm a machine, aren't I?'
Metal rained down from the sky, twisted scraps and chunks of plating, flaming streams of fuel, even as the aftershocks of the explosions faded.
'What in the Nine Hells ...?'
The Battlemover raised its head, its currently quadruped stance shifting to allow for more elevation, and let its occupant intelligence look, with a kind of numb detachment that came with an inaudible sort of screaming, at where the two combat choppers had been hanging in the sky moments ago.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
Arc One->Largo
Three->Pack Instinct
the follow up of a short in the BGC world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
She took a deep drag, letting the synth-tobacco smoke of the cheap cancer stick fill her lungs, then exhaled - or rather, snorted out of sheer frustration. It had the effect of forcing the smoke out of her nostrils.
"Now _this_," she said, rubbing one temple, "is the sort of clusterfuck I haven't seen in years."
Let it be said that, in the course of her long and colorful career, Jeena Malso had seen many a clusterfuck. Initially when she'd been working for the early days' AD Police, then later as an independent contractor slash security consultant. One of those early ones cost her her arm, another claimed a person close to her ... and now it looked like her former partner was getting involved in something so far beyond dangerous it wasn't even funny.
She could feel it in the twinges of her cybernetic arm - whatever it was that was going on, there was going to be on hell of a fireworks display to top it off. It looked like her job would be to make sure the city was still standing afterwards.
All in all, not too much of a change from her ADP days.
Well, aside from the fact that the pay was better.
The ground around her, at the bottom of the drop into the Canyons, was littered with twisted metal and related debris. Remnants of two USSD attack choppers that had been dispatched last night to deal with ...
... well, it was looking less and less like a 'rogue' Battlemover. Jeena was more than smart enough to put two and two together. Smart enough that she sometimes managed to get more than four from that obvious an equation. Having worked for the ADP as long as she had, and then trying her hand at being a mercenary for a while, she was accustomed to being fed incomplete, or even entirely false information. She was also well aware that bad intelligence was the most common reason for getting killed in the field, so relying blindly on data supplied by her employers was not amongst the things she tended to do.
So she'd researched, and the picture being painted was as far from one to be described as pretty as she'd ever seen. The fact that the only place in the hospital which the Battlemover had 'visited' last night had been a blood bank only backed up her theory.
Though she had no solid information, she could imagine why Genaros had 33-S class boomers on board. Genom and its relations liked their fringe benefits, it looked like. The D.D. was just as easy to explain, scarily enough. Genom dealt in arms pretty much openly, and there was no way that a megacorp as large and power hungry as it was had no dealings in the black markets.
Still, there was definitely more going on here than that. Not that there was any information to implicate this, but she could read between the lines well enough. That, and she had a ... feeling.
With a sigh she broke from her reverie and went off to see what, if anything, the forensics team had found.
***
Cold.
Dispassionate.
Strange how she'd not noticed the undercurrent hadn't been there before. It had been another reason why she hadn't dismissed the ramblings of the intelligence possessing the Battlemover as just that - ramblings. Somehow, her empathic subroutines were analyzing data flowing directly from the superweapon linkage - most definitely not something either had been designed for.
What she felt from it now, though, only made her uneasy.
They'd not gone back to their previous hiding place, since it was more than likely that the Canyons, especially their edges, were likely still being scrutinized. Still, the Battlemover did remarkably well where ubran camouflage was concerned - something which had aided her own blood hunting expeditions in the past - for something of its size and bulk. It could be surprisingly quiet when the need arose.
Griever hadn't said almost anything in the interim, simple yes or no answers to her questions aside, and when they found suitable cover in the vicinity of a power conduit the Battlemover shifted back to bipedal, hunched down, and killed almost all of its systems.
Not that Sylvie was in a particularly talkative mood either. The discovery of Anri's absence at their shared apartment weighed heavily on her mind. The place hadn't been hastily abandoned either, from what she could see when she'd gone back there the night before. It had been cleaned out. In fact, it had been cleaned out so well that there was not even a trace hinting that they'd been living there for the past several weeks.
The silence stretched on, interrupted only by the deluge that fell from the sky as the clouds left over from the rainfall that had broken a few nights prior let loose the last of their load.
"I should be feeling something," Sylvie heard, the voice coming from the cockpit speakers seemingly thoughtful.
"What?" the 33-S startled, her own reverie interrupted by the words. "What do you mean, you should be feeling something?"
"I mean that I'd always thought I'd feel _something_ ..." the intelligence calling it/himself? Griever spoke. "Instead, I just feel vaguely disappointed."
"Disappointed?" the cyberoid tried to puzzle out his meaning.
"Yes," the head of the D.D. nodded, jerkily. "Disappointed my reserves are nearly down to just the batteries, disappointed that nothing productive came from your excursion, disappointed about a lot of things ..."
"It's alright to feel that way, I guess," hazarded Sylvie, her voice hesitant. "I know I'm more than disappointed that Anri was ... missing ... but then, you didn't know her ..."
***
NON-CRITICAL SYSTEM OVERRIDE: DISENGAGING
TERITIARY CLUSTERS 0015-6656 RECONNECTING TO NETWORK CORE
TERITIARY FEEDBACK SUBROUTINES: OFFLINE
RE-ENGAGE: y/n?
Y
***
"Blood and ashes!" the giant mechanoid body reared up, making Sylvie clutch at the controls in an effort not to be dislodged from within the still open cockpit. "I could care less about that! I killed people today! And I feel _nothing_, save for a vague sense of regret about the wasted _resources_! I should be upset! Angry!"
The crash of concrete breaking when it met with the Battlemover's armored fist was loud enough to sound like a thunderclap in the confined space of the chamber.
"Sort of like you are now?" a wild-eyed Sylvie asked after the mech had frozen in mid swing, its other fist raised to put a matching second hole in the wall. The displays within the cockpit flickered, went dark for a moment, then flashed back on.
***
"I thought I was the one supposed to look like hell warmed over, Daley," Leon McNichol quipped from the hospital bed as the redhead knocked once, a sharp rap of the knuckles against the frame of the open door, and entered.
And immediately dropped into the armchair that somebody had put in the room ... well, it must have been sometime during the morning, when Leon was sleeping. It had been hard enough for the wounded ADP detective to actually fall asleep but when he did he slept like a log. Not without the occasional nightmare, but one got used to those after a while ...
'And how sad is that?', Leon thought with a mental wince.
"Yeah, well, you try dealing with the circus out there and see how you feel afterwards, Leon-chan," Daley groaned.
"What the hell is going on out there, anyway?" the bedridden ADP officer asked. It wasn't that he didn't have ideas - and he wasn't about the believe that this had been a normal boomer rampage either, like the news was stating - it was simply that Daley had actual information, which was preferable.
"You dance partner from a few nights ago has everybody and their pet dog riled up," there was a shadow of a wry grin on the tired face of Daley Wong for a moment. "Add to that some hotshot USSD freelance showing up and pulling 'rank' on us ... I haven't seen that sort of hardcase since, well, the last time I came to visit you."
"Great, just what we need. This mystery freelancer have a name?"
"Oh, of course she does," Daley grimaced, which looked really strange on his usually cheerful face. "I just doubt it's the one she gave."
***
"Kusanagi," she leaned back in the ratty recliner that looked like a relic of pre-Kanto Tokyo, judging by the wear on the leather ... what little was left of it. "Talk to me."
"You're on," the voice on the other end of the line was tinny ... much like she knew hers sounded on that end. The voice scramblers both sides used were as much there for security as they were for anonymity. "The higher ups are giving this a go and authorization. Especially with a tactical nuclear weapon loose inside the city. This could be the push we've been wanting for the past few years, Captain."
"Pfft, shyeah," she hissed, exhaling tobacco smoke in the process. It drifted through several beams of light penetrating through the not entirely drawn blinds in the small room's window. "You know as well as I do that they'll yank it as soon as they have an excuse to have people stop sniffing about here. Too many fingers in this pie to be entirely comfortable."
"... unfortunately," her contact officer confirmed. "Unless you move fast enough to steamroll past the bureaucracy."
"Don't know if that's doable," was the reply. "It'd be about as sane as tap-dancing through a minefield, blindfolded and in the rain. This isn't exactly the sort of situation you can rush, you know."
"This is different from your other OPs how, exactly? You didn't get chosen for this one just because you've got home field advantage," the voice huffed, still detached and impersonal. "Since when did you get this cautious."
"Oh, I don't know, maybe since the time I lost my other fucking arm," she growled into the receiver. "Kusanagi, out."
She slipped the scrambler from the mouthpiece and slammed the phone back into its cradle, the cheap plastic cracking with the force of impact. Not that it was that important a fact. Contact was never from the same place twice, unless there really was no other option. Right now, the line was being quietly and unobtrusively disconnected from the network, likely never to be used again.
Jeena Malso was left sitting in the darkness of a slowly passing dusk, brooding.
***
"Better?"
"No, not really. But it's going. It's going."
Normally, his mind would have thrown at least one Blade Runner comparison regarding the nightlife of the Canyons in general and the region known as Timex City in particular, but he was still too wrung out to even contemplate such.
Which, when he'd have time enough to think about it, proved that even if it turned out that he wasn't what he remembered being, the simulation thereof was close enough for government work.
Then and there, though, he and Sylvie were both dealing with the aftermath, and the accrued stress of the past days and nights in the only way that seemed even remotely practical.
Keeping busy in order to not think about it.
It helped, somewhat.
The blowup was the better part of three weeks in the past, and relations were still ... strained. Both remained driven, they could feel that much ... it was a quiet, grim sort of drive, though.
Perched atop a decrepit ... well, it looked like it had once been a high-rise. Post quake, it had lost around half its height, and the lower parts had become a haven for squatters. The currently quadruped Battlemover could have been compared to some sort of giant spider, lying in wait.
Tracking a cyberdoc down in Timex and the outlying area wasn't a problem. You could barely walk ten meters without tripping on one, or so it seemed.
Most of those were hacks. Cheap hacks. Cheap and unskilled hacks. Good enough to handle some basic hardware, sometimes a bit more ...
... and not people either of them were willing to let take a stab at modifying any cyberoid, much less a 33-S, and much less Sylvie.
And you could bet that every single one of those considered themselves to be the best in the business in the district, regardless of fact.
It's amazing what some mild persuasion in the right place can make people admit, though. And Sylive was pretty good at that. The simple fact that she was, as it turned out, also very good at scaring the crap out of people was an advantage here.
Two days into the search, they had an address.
Three days in, they had a lead.
Four days in ... they had a job.
"#Stop daydreaming, you two. Movement.#"
The crackling voice wasn't a result of shoddy transmission hardware. Not exactly. It was pretty much unrecognizable, though, other than to those who'd heard it before and _knew_ the reason ...
"I see them," Sylvie nodded. She was perched atop the top of the D.D., sitting on top of the thruster assembly and observing the area beyond and below the wrecked walls that obscured the mecha from sight of the general populace by means of a pair of high powered spotters' binocs.
A cable trailing from their side and into the Battlemover's cockpit relayed that image ...
It was a question of funds, really. Or rather, it usually would have been. Closer to being an 'exchange of services' now, though.
Kiba, though it was sure as rain that it wasn't a real name, had something they wanted. They had something to offer that made such an exchange feasible.
You could consider the Canyons a city in its own right. A world right beyond the looking glass. Timex and its surroundings were relatively civilized, but there were more gangs out in what you'd call the Badlands than a person could usually be bothered to count. Not to mention ...
... there was nothing distinguishing about the rubble beyond and below. Not at first glance. Not until you got a glimpse of some shipping schedules, put up some surveillance. And know that some banks are paranoid enough to really build to last. Not that there was anything of the original contents still left. The underground vault had survived, though. That was valuable, in and of itself.
Never let it be said that scavengers don't take advantage of every inch they get.
Down below, three vans, all of them looking off-road certified and armored, drove into a cleverly concealed garage.
Sylvie disconnected the binocs and slid from the armored carpace of the Battlemover.
The mech rose up, shifting to bipedal mode and opening the cockpit.
"Is it them?" the machine spoke. Or rather, the speakers inside the cockpit relayed the transmission that went out on tightbeam, bounced from a relay hidden on an old and crooked radio tower in the distance, and continued onwards to ...
"#You doubt me? I'm shocked.#" Kiba's voice came, sounding amused. Or at least both the D.D. and the 33-S thought so. It was always hard to tell.
"Better safe than sorry?" Sylvie replied with a shrug.
"#Funny. Yes, it is them. Right on schedule, too.#"
"I suppose we'd best get to work, then," Griever 'said'. "Sylvie?"
"Hai," she responded after a moment. The cockpit was momentarily filled with a series of mechanical hisses as servo motors and myomer synchronization sleeves were fit into position. "Uplink. Connection."
From the outside, it looked as if the Battlemover had tensed, waiting for something ...
... it didn't wait long.
***
"How'd it work?"
Kiba was her street name. Griever wondered whether the arms dealer ever used whatever she'd been born with.
Certainly, he'd had his doubts about that. There wasn't one thing about the woman that wasn't ambiguous, in one way or another. White hair, features a mix of those found throughout Eastern Asia ... and about as much chrome as an old Harley Davidson. The street name came from the simple fact that she'd had, at some point in time, her lower jaw replaced with cybernetics.
She was also one of the premier arms dealers of the Canyons, though her selections edged more towards tied and true ones than cutting edge tech ... still, that only meant that she had a pretty steady cash flow going, with a nominal guarantee that it wouldn't just cut off one day.
She also subcontracted. Which was how the D.D. and its 'pilot' had found their way to her. The nominally best cyberdoc in the area owed her.
An exchange of services had been arranged. Then another.
And the results of the second one ...
"It worked," the D.D.'s PA relayed the reply. "No real opposition to run it through its paces on, though."
And apparently, the idea of a self-aware Battlemover and its partner wasn't one that had as much as fazed her. She was one of 'those' people.
She'd also managed to get the Battlemover to as close to being ready for combat operation as it had been when first rolling from the assembly line, though with some concessions.
The 25mm Gattling the D.D. had been initially equipped with had been discarded. The damaged barrels hadn't been good for accuracy. Instead, the arms dealer had somehow come up with a decades old Russian 30mm chaingun, adapting and mounting that on the hardpoint without any considerable difficulty. The old Shipunov wasn't on par where rate of fire was concerned, but made up for it with the added mass of the projectiles ...
Fuel cells, some replacement armor plates, RPG ammunition, a cyberdoc ... it added up.
Him and Sylvie both acknowledged that they owed her. Hence the recent excursion ... or should that be sortie.
"Could you spool the rpm down a little, though? It felt like it was about to jam once or twice out there."
"Right," the woman frowned. "Where's your little Okami-chan gone, anyway?"
"She had something to do," Griever 'said', in a tone that served as a shrug. "Shouldn't be getting into too much trouble."
***
The smell of cigarette smoke intermingling with sweat and a tinge of alcohol. The pounding beat that seemed to penetrate deep down to the very bone.
Faster.
Always faster.
Chasing that ever elusive chord, the perfect pitch, drifting around metaphorical corners on the wings of a melody.
It was what made her such a good biker, and what ultimately carried her past mediocre and into the 'pretty damn good' category of singers and songwriters ...
Priscilla S. Asagiri had been born for the chase, no matter what form it took.
She had the singular ability to concentrate and bring more than one hundred percent of performance when she had a set goal.
Tonight, the goal had been forgetting.
It hadn't quite worked, the singer realized as she stuck her head under a faucet in what had become her dressing room in the 'Hot Legs' and started the cold water.
But, she completed the thought as she shut the water off and toweled her brown hair off into a shaggy but dry mess, the chase that night had been damn good nonetheless.
The rest of the night, she could relax to the afterglow.
Or so she'd assumed as she walked back into the front of the club, intending to get a drink and maybe have a little laugh at whoever was up performing. Luckily, the proprietor actually had some standards with regards as to who got to try their mettle on stage ...
"The usual," she slumped onto a bar chair, though the slump was a relaxed one rather than a drop-dead-exhausted one. Hmm, it sounded like an old tune was up, from the way the guitar opener sounded. Could be interesting if done well.
"Oh, hey, Priss. Your friend from a while ago showed up and decided to try out her voice," the bartender mentioned, inclining his head to where the stage was.
The drink was presented to her, she picked it up, brought it up to her lips ...
... and froze.
'Out of winter came a warhorse of steel
I've never killed a woman before
But I know how it feels
I know you'd have gone insane
If you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for
Sanctuary from the law
I met up with a stranger last night
To keep me alive
He spends all his time on gambling
And guns to survive
I know you'd have gone insane if you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for Sanctuary from the law
So give me Sanctuary from the law
And I'll be alright
Just give me Sanctuary from the law
And love me tonight...tonight
I know you'd have gone insane if you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for Sanctuary from the law
I can laugh at the wind
I can howl at the rain
Down in the canyon or out on the plains
I know you'd have gone insane if you saw what I saw
So now I've got to look for Sanctuary from the law
So give me Sanctuary from the law
And I'll be alright
Just me Sanctuary from the law
And love me tonight ... tonight'

Priss spun around on the barstool, drink still frozen at her lips, eyes wide in ... disbelief?
She stood, head bowed, in the center of the stage. Biking leathers, wildish looking grey hair, and amber eyes looking right back at Priss.
"Sylvie?"
***
An eminently bad day was being had by all. All AD Police officers on site, that is.
Two in particular, though.
"Jeez, what went through here, Godzilla?" Daley asked, rubbing the back of his head in exasperation.
The place was a mess, both topside and the unofficial area below ... scrap metal, debris, bodies ... not a pretty sight at all. AD Police officers, their CSI unit included, milled around.
Or very much the contrary, if you changed your perspective around a little.
"I think I know," Leon answered him, frowning at a particular set of indentations. What looked like giant footprints in the more brittle, old concrete.
"Oh? Oh. Oh!" his partner realized. "Oh, damn. That means ..."
"... that we'll be taking over, gentlemen," a voice from behind the two said.
Amazingly, to Daley anyway, Leon just groaned and rubbed his forehead.
"Been a while," the senior ADP officer commented after a moment.
"Not as long as you'd think, rookie."
"In my defense, I thought I was hallucinating. Didn't catch you joining up, Jeena."
"Well, it pays well. The hours are crap, though. The ADP still doesn't fill the first of that pair, it looks like."
Daley blinked.
"Wait, you're _that_ Jeena Malso?"
Leon groaned again, just knowing that ...
"Does that mean you have some embarrassing stories to tell about Leon-chan here?"
***
END Pack Instinct
---

Now if the next part doesn't take the better part of ... was that two years now? ... to write, I'll be bloody exstatic.
Ja ne,
-Griever
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

[drakensis]

Yes, please don't make me wait two years to find out what Priss and Sylvie have to say...
Granted, this is the pot talking to the kettle here, but please convey my interest to your muse
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Norgarth]

nice, so where can I find the previous parts?
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Rieverre]

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

[Guest]

Was looking for this to refresh my memory. It's always nice to see some Griver writing goodness.
You know you won't get to chance to make us wait two years for the next installment, I'd kidnapp you and make you write Although since you are writing other stuf too that might be a little to hasty.
Why not post this on florestica? You are the same Griver are you not?
small typo:

---

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.

---

[Rieverre]

---

Why not post this on florestica? You are the same Griver are you not?

---

... I want to get Act I done before I do that. Or, at least that was the initial plan. Now? I'll get back to you on that.

---

You know you won't get to chance to make us wait two years for the next installment, I'd kidnapp you and make you write Although since you are writing other stuf too that might be a little to hasty.

---

Eheh. Actually, it's marginally harder for me to write MS, if only because I'm not going neck in neck with another author. That actually makes things go a lot faster.

A brief production note: I can now safely say that I won't be using 2040 elements. I've finally managed to get through he whole thing, and ... well, it's missing the thing that drew me to BGC (and the animation isn't very good, but that's beside the point right now). See, the KS in the 2032? They were heroines, yes ... but they were failed heroines. Cynthia. Irene. Sylvie. Anri. Things lightened up towards the end, but the series was always sort of ... 'heavy', you know? In 2040 there really wasn't any sort of drama that could compare with those bits of the OVAs.
-Griever
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

[A117]

Hello Greiver ...
Please update Machine Spirit ... Don't let it end up like Richard Drysdale's Soul Of The Machine. He never finished it.
It's been 6 months already ...
A117

[CattyNebulart]

Hello A117, it's been a while since I saw you post. So what have you been up to besides necromancy? Though this definitly does deserve some necromancy, I should probably make good on my threat to kidnap griever-sama.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Rieverre]

*blinkblink* Yeesh, it has been a while, hasn't it? Damn.
Okay. Here's what I've had lying around for chapter four, though it's only about a quarter of the way done. Would have been more, but my more recent drafts are currently stuck back several hundred kilometers away, where I forgot my flash drive.
Oh, and guys? Thanks for the kick in the ass. I need those on occasion.

---

Everybody's waiting for something to happen,
Everybody's waiting for something to see,
Lunatics waiting for bigger disasters,
Everyone's waiting for news on TV,
- Face in the Sand, Iron Maiden
Take two people, have them just ... fit ... without much of an initial reason, but getting to trust one-another more and more as time went on. Similar in some respects, different in just enough to make things interesting. Stir liberally, and let stew for a month or so.
Add in an appropriate number of secrets on either side. They don't exactly go unmentioned, no, but with both the people in question having severe trust issues said secrets are worked around.
Then have both of them almost kill one-another in a showdown that was such a comedy of errors, or simply badly matched coincidences, that it could have been written by the old Greeks - everything had been going in a suitably tragic manner, in any case.
And then, after all that was said and done and mulled over, have them meet and at least _try_ to deal with things like reasonable beings - a course of events which, had the acquaintances of one of the participants found out about it, they would likely not have believed her capable of cooling down enough to make that last decision.
What you get - other than the queen of run-on explanations - is the mother of all awkward silences.
At least there was beer, thought Priss distractedly, even if it did taste like watered down piss.
She stiffened momentarily, as a slight weight settled on her right shoulder, opting to ignore it for the moment.
Behind her back, a dozen or two meters, two bikes sat on a smallish parking lot, a lonely lantern lighting the space and providing at least some illumination other than moonlight to the area. In front of her, waves rolled and frothed, barely perceptible in the faint lighting.
"Do you ... hate me?"
The problem with long, awkward silences, Priss groused to herself, was that they were often broken by things that made the situation even more-so.
In this case, it was because, though she hated to admit it ...
"I don't know, Sylvie," she finally managed. "I don't even know what to _think_ right now."
If there was anything about herself that she knew, and knew well, it was anger. She'd always been passionate, but somewhere back in the grit, gunpowder and gasoline, and the wake of blood spilled on paved highways, it had been anger and determination which let her drag herself out of a spiral of depression and self-doubt.
GENOM had been the focus of most of that anger, and over time it had easily spilled over into other related avenues.
The first chink in the cast-iron world-view she'd forged for herself hadn't occurred so very long ago, either. That boomers didn't necessarily equal hate.
It only took the death of, for all intents and purposes, a little girl, to drive that point home.
Now?
Priss didn't have many friends. She was just that kind of person. She had acquaintances, and some of them were friendly, but people she considered friends were few and far in-between ... even with the Knight Sabers, the only one she thought of as such was Sylia.
Linna and Nene were Good People, she knew and realized that, but still couldn't help but keep her distance most of the time. She trusted them with her back, yes, but ... it had been a long time since she'd trusted someone with her emotions.
Sylia was one of those rare people who'd managed to get behind that last line of defense, though exactly how that had come about even Priss wasn't entirely sure of.
Sylvie, though she'd only known her for what Priss realized was a very brief, comparatively speaking, period of time, had somehow achieved that as well.
"As far back as I can remember, I've wanted to be free," the amber eyed woman said into the night. "I never thought it would be this ..."
"What?" the singer turned her head slightly, to where Sylvie's was leaning against her shoulder.
"Priss, you were the first person who cared about me that didn't have a serial number. And I ... don't know if any of the others are still alive," the cyberoid confessed. "There were five of us when we ran, three who'd stayed behind, volunteering to be the distraction. Even with that, only Anri and myself made it out of Genaros, and I don't even know if Anri's," she choked back what sounded like a sob.
Well, what did you say to that.
Priss decided not to try and say anything to it, in any case. Her reaction would have had anyone who knew her rub their eyes in disbelief, though, as she - somewhat jerkily, and with not a small amount of hesitation - brought her arm up behind Sylvie and hugged her.
--
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Machine Spirit
Arc One->Largo
Four->Who wants to live forever?
the follow up of a short in the BGC world
by Griever
Disclaimer: I make no claim to own the characters and settings used.
--
"I've got good news," he heard, the partially synthesized voice taking him away from some ruminations.
He'd always been a bit of a recluse, yes, but he'd also had many timesinks to turn to ... which, sadly, didn't really work all that well anymore. For example, he'd managed to discover that the most recently integrated sections of the J-1 battle computer had a tendency to activate whenever something they could relate to was being considered ... it made trying to play any sort of game lose its appeal, even with restricting his mind's 'processing speed' to just around human baseline.
So Kiba's interruption, for whatever reason, was a welcome one.
"Unfortunately, I've also got bad news, and worse news."
Alright, so maybe not that welcome.
He imagined it was a bit of an amusing sight, a battlemover hanging its head despondently, but he really didn't feel much like laughing at the moment.
"Bad news first, then," he sighed.
"You've been drawing attention, and not of the good kind either," Kiba said, plopping down atop an empty ammo crate. She had a lot of those around, sometimes in lieu of furniture. Her coffee table had once held a couple hundred 40mm HE shells, for instance. "My people tell me the JSDF's brought in one of their contractors, since the USSD's political clout took a nosedive ever since the Aqua-City incident, and more-so now that they'd been unable to retrieve a certain rogue superweapon."
"It's so nice to be wanted," the battlemover grumbled. "Not. Okay, what's the worse news?"
"Actually, that ties in with the former. I'm going to have to evict you. The contractor they've brought in is pretty damn good at what she does, _and_ she knows the city well enough to realize exactly where she ought to dig."
No, it wasn't entirely unexpected ... it was still pretty damn bad, though.
"Well, shit," Griever's own synthesizer wasn't very sophisticated, but it managed to convey the sentiment accurately enough. "Right. I'm just about ready for the good news now, thankyouverymuch."
"There's some old safehouses I don't have a use for anymore that you could rotate through," said the arms dealer and occasional middle-woman, "not much, but you two've been an investment with good returns, so there you go."
"For what it's worth, thanks. I don't suppose you could throw in a couple of cases worth of reloads for me?"
"What do you take me for, charity?" she asked with a wry chuckle. "Wasn't all of the good news, though. This last bit isn't big, but you'll want to know it."
"Okay, you've got my ear. And a few independent recording tracks."
"No need," she set a palm sized, flat and flat black object on the crate beside her. "It took a while, but I've got you your commission's worth here. Physical description fits to a tee, and the timeline works out as well. Here's all a few favors got me on Millie Jackson."
***
He grunted, part annoyance, part effort ... Mackie Stingray was, despite what a fair number of people in his acquaintance assumed, in more than decent shape. Unfortunately, he was also both still a teenager, and not exactly in possession of the sort of physical frame that lent itself to feats of great strength.
Dragging his nigh-insensate older sister through the sub-basement, into an elevator, then putting her to bed took a bit more effort than he was used to, to tell the truth.
And wasn't _he_ supposed to be the younger, immature sibling?
Of course, working yourself into the ground with the sort of obsessiveness some people approached drinking a bar dry wasn't the same as trying to get nude photos of people (or 'person' at least) known for their quickness in resorting to violent responses, but he'd firmly resolved to forget about that little tidbit next time Sylia wanted to give him a chewing-out.
The younger Stingray's thoughts quickly, surprisingly so in fact, went back to the matter at hand as he got onto the elevator and headed for the sub-basement again.
After all, he thought with a sigh, he knew his sister well enough to realize that she wouldn't let up until she was done with this. She hadn't been this bad about upgrading their equipment since an inadequacy in the early model of Linna's suit had nearly gotten the dancer killed during a sortie, and the young man could sympathize.
She'd always taken her responsibilities seriously. Sometimes too seriously at that.
Well, at least she'd learned how to delegate over the years ... or rather, Doc Raven had damn near beaten that into her head once upon a fall in '29.
The workshop door hissed open, and Mackie went in, resigning himself to another mostly sleepless night checking Sylia's work over as best he could.
He supposed that it could be genetic. Or maybe it was just enlightened self-interest.
After all, the part of his mind that always kept some levity about it remarked, if someone on the team got injured he'd have one less knock-out to perv on.
"One can't be seen as too responsible, after all. Bad for the image."
The door *swooshed* shut behind him.
***

---

That last bit is there to establish Mackie as something more than just a lecher.
-Griever
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

[CattyNebulart]

makeis last line made me grin. I guess we won't meet in person after all ( ) more comments when I don't have a project due, so tomorrow then.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[A117]

Necromancy? What did I do to gain a reputation like that?
As for what I've been up to ... Besides plotting to take over the world ... I've been working on my Chrysalis fanfic. Hard at work here *huff* and *puff* ... Trying to make a plot out of nothing ... I don't believe it ... How hard could writing a story be? I'm still looking at continuing the Armargeddon Inheritance but am not too sure about it ... It seems difficult ...
Greiver ... no matter what happens ... please continue your fanfic. In the end ... the fic must go on ...
Twister is gone ... but his dream will live on ...

[CattyNebulart]

Necromancy = resurecting (ie posting in) old threads.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[A117]

CANCELLED ...

[Rieverre]

Because I don't know if I'll get more of it done in the next few days.

---

Sometimes, there's really no substitute for some good and honest grunt work.
At least that was what she told herself. It could be that the stress was finally getting to her.
Not that she'd ever had what would be commonly considered a calm sort personality.
Oh, methodical and meticulous when she had to be, yes, but sometimes ...
The last Rent-A-Thug went slamming through a wood-substitute tabletop, and following through all the way down and into the floor with a bone-jarring *thud*.
"You know, Ryo, I never really thought it was possible for you to sink any lower," she commented to the only other still conscious person present. "But you've managed to surprise me. Congratulations."
She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.
In fact, it made the slick haired man, who could pass for a sarariman if encountered on the street, and who was currently sitting behind a cheap desk in a way that suggested he wanted to try and make a break for it, but knew that said course of action wasn't a good idea, cringe. And want to hide. Preferably in a very deep hole.
"But, see - I've got a little something to discuss with you, so I'd be willing to let bygones be bygones and treat this as an unfortunate ... accident. No, don't talk quite yet, I'm not done."
She came around the desk, stepped behind his chair, and put her hands on his shoulders. Then she squeezed. Hard.
The yakuza underboss whimpered.
"See? You haven't forgotten basic hospitality since I paid you a visit last time, have you? It's only been, what, a few years? You talk when I say you talk, got that?"
Silence.
"Good. Now, I've been hearing something about you having a bit to do with an incident that came about lately. Something about a buyout of a meat shredding plant ... oh, sorry. I meant warehouse. Supposedly cheap, too, after all the yellow tape went down. Kinda makes all those nasty suspicious types think that you could have had something to do with what went on there, doesn't it?"
Another squeeze.
Those hands felt like a pair of iron vices. That was new. Last time, only one had been quite that bad.
"But I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here if you maybe just, oh, share your ... educated guesses on the matter with me. After all, you're still so well informed about what goes on down here, right? That much hasn't changed since I was last visiting, has it? Give an old friend a helping hand."
Hashima Ryo hadn't gotten to where he was by being soft ... but he also hadn't gotten there by not knowing when to cut his losses. A very important thing to realize when dealing with this particular person.
Messing about with Jeena Malso was not even remotely in the realm of good ideas.
***
Priss blinked.
Well, she thought to herself, this was new.
She was used to giving one member of the band or another a bawling out every now and then, when their efforts were lackluster ... but it was the first time she could recall having that same thing pulled on her. Worse, she wasn't particularly inclined to turn around, yank the door of the Hot Legs, which was still deserted save for the practicing Replicants, open, and give back what she'd gotten, with accrued interest.
Instead, she settled on her bike, and frowned ...
Hell, she'd spent the morning sitting on the steps of her trailer, nursing a bottle of Jack, and strumming all melancholy and shit out of an old, woefully out of tune acoustic she'd had for as long as she could remember and hadn't bothered with tossing. This wasn't like her, damnit!
... or maybe it was. She couldn't really tell, today.
She didn't tend get emotional, or rather, didn't get emotional in any way except getting well and righteously pissed off, either. Hadn't for a good few years now. Until last night, when she'd gone through what could have passed for a nervous breakdown in any other set of circumstances. But then, misery loved company. Loathe as she was to admit it, it had been a liberating, almost cathartic experience.
The engine rumbled to life, and seconds later she was flashing down the dingy roads and alleys with the deft assurance of someone who'd done it more times than they could count, in weather considerably worse than the present minor rainfall. The blurring road and press of wind helped her get a semblance of her usual attitude back, at least ...
She couldn't help but wonder how Sylvie was dealing.
***
He'd never had much of a problem adjusting to new accommodations back when he'd hadn't been technically immune to any physical discomfort, and it wasn't a problem at present either.
'Yeah, well, it wouldn't be too bad if it weren't for everything being so damn _small_!'
It was just his luck that the seemingly 'best' of the safehouses Kiba had pointed out when they'd said their goodbyes happened to be little more than a sub-basement underneath, ironically enough, the remains of a church.
It wasn't _the_ church, of course, since there wasn't enough of it left topside to constitute even a good try at 'ruins' ...
Things would have been a lot simpler if they could have just found the damn place, but ruined places of worship - while not exactly a dime-a-dozen in the Canyons and the general Fault area - weren't exactly marked on your usual maps, nor were they places that garnered much attention from even the shadier characters.
Unless you counted squatters, and even those tended to pick more comfortable places. Or at least ones that weren't as drafty.
In any case, it was just as well that he'd never really had any sort of phobia related to being in small, enclosed spaces either, because, however surprisingly apt the D.D. was at moving through urban environs, despite having been designed with battlefields in mind, it was still rather big.
It gave him a whole new level of appreciation for Sylvie, who'd managed to not only not get caught while driving the thing-that-was-now-his-body through the city when she'd still been 'out for blood', pun intended, but also hadn't caused a ruckus with any cases of hard to explain damages to the surroundings other than the occasional footprint or two. He'd been having trouble getting used to the new proportions of things for a while after their initial meeting, and he _was_ the machine, for all intents and purposes.
Not that they'd spent a lot of time there, since as soon as he and a slightly out of sorts Sylvie had even gotten set up, she'd insisted on following through on Kiba's parting gift.
Which, he noted, brought him back to the initial subject of this idle flight of fantasy.
The solar panels that all but filled the rooftop were almost, but not quite, a veritable forest of metal and reflective surfaces, but there was plenty of space underneath this umbrella of sorts for maintenance work to be done ... meaning he could just barely squeeze in without damaging anything. The position wasn't exactly the best in terms of offered view, perspective, or pretty much anything other than concealment and proximity to the apartment complex that one Millie Jackson was registered as a resident of.
Not that actually getting up there had been easy to do without drawing all kinds of the wrong sort of attention. Sylvie, though, had come back determined enough that there really wasn't any talking her out of doing at least an initial bit of recon.
The rain that had been falling since sometime a few hours before dawn, but seemed to be slowing down now - likely, the skies should be clear come evening - had been a big help in getting up to the rooftop without getting spotted by bystanders or anyone else for that matter. Though the fact that they'd done so an hour before dawn was a factor, since not many of even the most zealous corporate drones, not to mention the other productive members of society, were up at the time.
Things would have been more difficult, had the place been in the vicinity of a college campus, but luckily no such problem needed to be worked around in this case. There was only so much even a coffee addled mind on too little sleep could dismiss as hallucination, and a Battlemover wasn't quite within that bracket.
"You've had a productive evening, then," he'd asked/stated on the way through the ruins of the Canyons - still one of the most secure routes they could take, even with the increased vigilance of police and military forces.
"Yes. No. Maybe," Sylvie had said, haltingly. "I'm still not sure if it wasn't a cascading error in my empathy program. We finally ended up pretty much where we started from ... undecided."
He'd inquired about details, and she'd informed him.
"It sounds perfectly normal to me," he'd replied, with not a little wryness. "Do you want to talk about it?"
She'd hesitated, had gone to nod, and stopped halfway, instead opening the privacy protocols that either side had place on the superweapon linkage.
The somewhat uncomfortably emotional exchange that followed didn't take as much as a second, but both sides had gotten a few insights out of it.
He could still recall Sylvie's unease when she'd found that this 'quest' of hers was one of the main things keeping his own mind in relative equilibrium. It was, he'd explained, in a way the logical extension of how he'd always approached some things, and if he focused his attention on something to the near exclusion of everything else and it kept him more or less sane, well, who was she to argue.
Although, and he didn't know whether she'd let it slip on purpose when the linkage was being limited again, he'd been mildly perplexed when she'd felt oddly flattered upon learning of the above.
The rest of their transit had been spent in silence, both literal, and metaphorical.
***
It took a while, but at the same time, less than it would have pretty much anybody else.
She still knew the city. The beat of it thrummed in her blood, in the electrical impulses twitching artificial muscle, in the way she walked.
She'd _missed_ it. For all the dreams, some of them her own, ground into the ground and crushed under the feet of indifferent masses, there was no other place quite like it.
And to Jeena, Megatokyo was home.
An occasionally rat infested one, desperately needing renovation, but home nonetheless. And none of the rats were big enough to seriously bother her. They hadn't been then, they sure as hell didn't get any better over the years.
A part of her was faintly disappointed.
The rest wasn't considering that there and then, because it was busy being surprised, then suspicious.
The trails and the peculiar style of mediating the contract were both familiar. Enough that she really hadn't needed to be quite as rough on poor-stupid-Ryo ...
She snorted. As if.
The corridor started in a back alley, leading under the building that proclaimed to all the world the delights of soy and sinking down quite a bit further after some point. She'd caught at least five separate sensor plates at varying intervals, but wasn't really concerned. Unless she'd suddenly become persona-non-grata here, which wasn't likely, she wouldn't be more than warned off. Meaning that she'd simply need to find another way.
Apparently, that wasn't to be a problem. She reached the end of the corridor without incident, climbing into the small freight elevator that sat behind a suspiciously unlocked security hatch. Both it and the hatch looked like they were going to fall apart any minute, which wasn't something one could dispute without a more focused examination. The appearance of either was, naturally, a carefully maintained faint for anyone who'd gotten this far.
The ride down was as smooth and quiet as she remembered it being, obviously at odds with the way things looked.
When the lift finally did stop, in a chamber much like the one several levels above, she dismounted with little fuss. It was, she remarked to herself as she pushed open the door she knew led to one of the main storage areas of the place, time to meet an old friend.
"Huh, I wasn't expecting you ... not this soon, at any rate," the white-haired woman said, not looking up from the obstinate arrangement of power-cells the refused to properly align with the drive train receptable of the antiquated K-6 Personal Trooper. The entire space was filled with boxes, full of more in the way of weaponry than even she knew the details of, and quite a bit of miscellaneous kipple besides. "What's the matter? Can't buy a thrill?"
"If I wanted to, I'd be trolling the strip joints in Tinsel City. Been a long time, Kiba."
***
"But ... no, it can't be ..."
"I'm sorry to have to bring you this sort of news," his hand reached out to squeeze hers. A futile gesture of trying to comfort somebody who'd just had the world ripped out from under here.
Again.
"Couldn't we _try_? At least to talk to her, sir? I know I could get through, I just know it!"
Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Or one close enough to it to not matter very much, at least.
"If there is a chance. But I'm afraid we can't risk it," he sighed ruefully. "There simply is no window of opportunity to do so. Things will be coming to a head soon, you know. What we do, we do for the betterment of the world. Some things ..."
She shivered. Then, hesitantly, nodded. The concept wasn't one she was unfamiliar with, but not exactly something pleasant either.
No. Not pleasant at all.
"I'm sure she'd approve," the woman said, drawing herself up. "If it's against GENOM. It's their fault, after all. Their machine. First they took Nam, Lou, and Meg ... and now they're taking Sylvie away from me."
Arms came around her, pulling her close.
Mismatched eyes looked down on the aquamarine haired girl.
Over the top of Anri's head, Largo smiled.
In the distance, a brief flash illuminated the coastward city skyline, briefly filtering through what was left of the ruined church's stained glass windows.
***
Kenichi Hoshi had never wanted to play hero.
All he wanted was to be left more or less alone, to be able to pay his bills and buy Mari a few of this month's 'absolutely must have' things to keep her from verbally biting his head off, and maybe catch a few beers with his friends at the end of a long day.
There'd been a bit of a tight spot when GENOM bought out the company he'd been working for a month ago, but fortunately he wasn't one of those people who'd been let go at the end of the day.
It may not have been his dream job, but he had a sort of knack for working security that wasn't just there due to his being six foot even and around two hundred pounds of pure muscle. He was thorough, conscientious, and took what he did seriously ...
... but he'd never wanted to play hero. It got people killed.
And, like Iwagami had aptly demonstrated a moment ago, trying to take on three assailants in powered armor with small-arms wasn't just 'playing hero'. It was 'playing stupid hero'.
Kenichi stumbled up the stairs, limping. A spray of fire from one of the attackers hadn't quite caught up with him, but the chips that the impacting projectiles had torn from the concrete wall he'd ducked behind a few dozen paces behind and below had.
The five 55-C models they had on shift were long gone, the assailants having gone through them without even thee most remote bit of difficulty, which had prompted Kenichi's desire to be somewhere else in the first place ...
... thought things seemed to be quieting down now. Which either meant that the threat had been dealt with - not likely, all things and prior performance considered - or that ...
The loading doors below rumbled, high yield hydraulics making a characteristic sound that he could recognize in his sleep.
An inkling of hope flared within him as he shuffled over to one of the windows that overlooked the loading yard below.
A cargo hauler roared from the building, tearing through the yard and out the gates, and Kenichi breathed in relief as the glaring lights outside illuminated the three hardsuits of the assailants.
The impromptu tourniquet he'd tied off just above the injured part of his leg would keep him from bleeding to death for the next while, and the frantic panic of having to run for his life was passing.
It was over. He nearly laughed in relief.
He was still alive!
Which was when the sound of servos working the loading doors closed was overshadowed by a deep, heavy rumble ... and the floor, as well as the bays below, two floors above, and nearly the whole breadth of that storage section of the warehouse complex was engulfed by and explosion.
It was enough to light up the sky for a moment, and the fires that raged until the following morning would cast an eerie radiance throughout it all.

---

That's it for now. Thank my looking for something entirely unrelated for finding that I did, indeed, pack my flash drive and take it with me ... I'd just misplaced it. One or two of these scenes are revamped ones that I wanted to use in the previous version of Ch.4, but they fit in without too much of a modification.
-Griever
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

[CattyNebulart]

whee goodie. I wonder what Largo told Anri. Other than that I can't spot any errors, though the conversation between Sylvie and Priss is shrowded in mystery, and I'm not sure if it's intentional or not. Hoping for more soon.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[A117]

Good though not sure where this is going. I tend to focus on the main character (main themes) and the secondary characters later. Greiver ... I would like the self insertion more if you wrote about the DD more and its interactions with the other characters. I'm biased that way.
Stories with a lot of characters are difficult for me to keep track of. I tend to focus on two or three of the characters and only read over the rest later ...
If you have read BGC self-insertions before, I think this was the approach used by a number of (self-insertion) writers.
Twisted Path 3 by Darren Steffler
A Boomer's Life by Baran3
The Bubblebum Zone by Bert Van Vliet
Soul of the Machine by Richard Drysdale
Bubblegum Advocatus Custodes Hell's Fury by Knight-Hawk Jr.
Bubblegum Avatar by Craig A Reed, Jr.
Was there anyone else that I left out?

[Rieverre]

---

I wonder what Largo told Anri.

---

I thought I'd made that rather obvious. If not, oh well. It'll become clear in the near future.

---

Other than that I can't spot any errors, though the conversation between Sylvie and Priss is shrowded in mystery, and I'm not sure if it's intentional or not.

---

I don't write Emotional Moments well. Consider that a professional cop-out. It's going to come up again in a while though.

---

Bubblegum Advocatus Custodes Hell's Fury by Knight-Hawk Jr.

---

*eyebrowtwitch* That is just ... sad. Shame on you.

---

I think this was the approach used by a number of (self-insertion) writers.

---

*deadpan* Which is why I'm not doing it. */deadpan*
Honestly, the beginning chapters, setup, what you will, would really be terribly boring. If you hadn't noticed, he spends most of his time in a freaking _garage_, or equivalent area. That makes for a boring story, at this point at least, which is where the other characters are called upon to pick up the slack.
Besides, more than one egg's needed to make a royal SNAFU, and from what I've read it's almost always more amusing to have a look at the whole basket before that happens.
-Griever
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

[CattyNebulart]

---

Besides, more than one egg's needed to make a royal SNAFU, and from what I've read it's almost always more amusing to have a look at the whole basket before that happens.

---

It is, but at the moment characters are a little hard to keep track of because the parts are somewhat disjointed. I expect this will become better when it's integrated into whole chapters but it's something to note.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Bob Schroeck]

---

oh ... I see. Err ... Guys ... Actually I need a little help with my fanfics (especially fanfic writers out there).

---

A117, you should really post this kind of message in its own thread, instead of in the middle of someone else's story. Just basic politeness, you know.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[A117]

CANCELLED ...

[A117]

CANCELLED ...

[Rieverre]

---

okay ... what is this suppose to mean???
>: >: >:

---

It means, that particular title has no place among the others mentioned. It's subpar, when compared to the rest of the names on that list. Worse than that when compared to BGAvatar and BGZone. Someone should throw this guy to the prereaders - he needs it. More importantly, his writing needs it. Or he just needs his writing to mature with time and experience. I remember writing like that when I started a couple of years ago, though I'd like to think I had at least a rudimentary grasp of punctuation and tenses back then.

---

Sorry. I was sort of aiming this at Greiver, hoping against hope that he would do it ... being a fanfic writer and all.

---

*scritchscritch* You know, I can see a number of people here reading this bit and going 'so what am I, chopped liver?'
I seriously doubt you'd get a 'no' if you gave the request its own thread. We're pretty much starved for text at any given time of the day, I think.
As for the stories, I've gone through Chrysalis. You should practice what you preach.
Stories with a lot of characters are difficult for me to keep track of. I tend to focus on two or three of the characters and only read over the rest later ...
If you're uncomfortable with reading this, you shouldn't try to force yourself into _writing_ it. Technically speaking, though, the writing is pretty good. Congratulations, you've got a better grasp of the written word than 90% of the fanfic community.
On an unrelated note, a single emote is usually enough. More just make you look like you want to jump out and CAPSLOCK someone. You might want to consider toning down on them.
-Griever
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

[A117]

CANCELLED ...