Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Things have gotten worse. The weather has been getting colder, and I have been hearing noises I recognize less and less.

There isn’t a single soul out here, not even a ranger or an Indian. Half the fruit I find now is rotten, and I’ve turned towards fishing yet even that opened its own can of worms. All that’s left is my wallet, a pen, this notebook, my shirt and the upper half of my sweatpants.

I miss going to have a drink. I don't think I'll find a way home, so I just hope that I can find some help or die.

I don’t even know how much time have passe it’s been since my last entry. I've just begun to reflect on how much my life sucks now, even though I used to say I hate my life back in the day. Now I wish I could have someone to say that to, but everything is either a plant, a fish or it's trying to kill me.

Is this what deployment would’ve been like?

The man heard a bang in the distance, swiftly retracted his pen, and flipped back through the few pages of his sketchbook the moisture hadn’t yet smudged: some were desert sketches, fewer were empty left for him to write down his coming days.

After a few moments of staring, he closed his torn-up notebook, and hid it in a rickety moisture-covered drawer, sliding it right under a small pocket knife he’d brought with him from times more familiar. Paper, he’d learned the hard way, didn’t take too kindly to water; and when raindrops could seep from the seams in a roof of haphazardly gathered pieces of scrap metal and gadgets found lying around, that was a problem. He braced himself, turned to his side, and tucked himself under a bed of leaves.

I don’t even need to cry...not that I can anymore.

"Oh crap.. it's that damn sound again."

A mechanical buzz resonated across the meager space of the shelter, depriving him of any rest he may have been hoping for. He wrestled his heavy eyelids open, stood up, and started shaking in the cold. This wasn't the first time he had heard that sound; and apparently, wouldn't be the last for a long time.

He quietly snuck towards the hole that barely reached his height that he had for an entrance, pushed out the discolored block of wood that served as his door, and searched the rainy forest ahead of him to find the source of that infernal noise. After a quick moment of reflection, the man had made out the culprit through the mist to be what appeared to be a small hunk of metal drawing increasingly closer to him.

It was identical to many he had seen before. Short stubby body, tiny legs, large feet, spherical head, no neck. They oddly resembled clockwork toys. Oddly enough, he could tell, its face was directed away from him. The moment its head turned around, however, its eyes went from green to red as it leapt at the man. A wave of fear and irritation thicker than the rain washed over his grimacing face, and he slowly retreated to the door.

He was already feeling tired enough as it is; he thought to himself, "Ah, great. Killer toys: now with a chance of.. shit, I forgot the phrase." and snuck off to his side with the cold wind blowing in his ear to find the nearest pebble, and threw it in the machine’s general direction.

With a cramp, he tripped and his arm wobbled. The pebble shot past its target, and slammed into a tree branch. Hands on the ground and cold rain on his face, the man kept staring at the mass of steel and copper that drew closer and closer to him, and raved with a scowl. “The fuck did I-ha-ha-kah,” he coughed, “the fuck did I to you this time?!”

The mechanical trespasser leapt within a few yards of him, splashing mud over his ear. The man, drawing one breath after the other, grabbed the next rock he could find, stood himself up, and yelped as he slammed the machine’s face in from the side with a loud thwack. The recoil sent him spinning, and he’d slid off to the side just in time to hear the machine’s metal fist whizzing through the air, close to dislocating his shoulder.

The trees and the ground faded around him, and his head weighed like an anchor pulling the rest of his body down as he powered through a stretch of mud and puddles. His breath drew short, and his joints ached as if his bones had been run through a meat grinder. He turned back to look at his enemy, charging at him once more.

What is this angry Chef Boyardee can fucking doing here? Looking for a group shower?

Lungs tight with fright, the lone man lifted his rock one last time, barely able to hear the rain and the machine’s whir over his delirious panting, and threw it. “Hail fuckin’ Mary.” he quietly whispered, and clenched his teeth, holding his hands up.

The pebble hit the machine’s artificial eye, and broke through its glass with a shatter. Its joints quickly began to spasm, and it started shaking. The machine’s head banged against the wet loam and rolled on its side, sinking into a puddle. Sparks flew in the air, and a loud zap sounded from the now deactivated hunk of metal. Straight to the liquid, wait...

...the phrase I forgot was ‘liquid sunshine’. Goddamn it.

The tightness in the man’s chest finally vanished. He cleaned his ear with rainwater, returned to his shelter for comfort from the storm, and put the makeshift door back to its place. He returned to sleep, lying down on his damp bed, hoping to not be distracted -or threatened- again. Or at least, not in his sleep.

Chapter Text

Was it a new day, or not? It made no difference—the sun never budged, and that was how he knew the world was not quite the same as the one he'd known for the better part of his life.

The bed he made was extremely uncomfortable at first, but he had to get accustomed to it after going to sleep on it so many times, especially when the only alternative was to lie down on the hard ground. A bed frame would've been better than this.

It seemed to be the start of a typical day.. under the circumstances, of course. The storm had ended, and the rain was over as well. The ambience was rather warm. The man got up from his bed, grabbed his knife, pushed his shelter's door, and snuck out for the nearest lake. Despite improving at it since his arrival in a world entirely strange to him, he would still take an impractically long time to arrive there from his shelter, and it would sometimes leave him worrying about it, if only because of paranoia, and he'd often find himself-especially in later days-talking to his own, wide open palms to drown out the critters.

He began to sprint across the forest, hopping over tree trunks and rocks. From tree to tree, he followed those whose trunks he carved shapes into.

Once he made it there, he began to rinse as quickly as possible, and kept looking around him. He was completely alone, which meant that a surprise attack from an animal, or a machine, was never out of the question.. only to get surprised by.. neither.

His eyes widened in a double take, as he stared at something unusual, even after he'd seen his fair share of killer tin cans straight out of a 1950s B-movie.

It looked… almost like a decaying human corpse, and yet it certainly wasn't.

A metallic human-like object lay amidst the monotonic bushes. He couldn't help but try to reason with himself as to what he was looking at.

What is this? Is this some sort of scenario where everybody's turned into a dead robot copy of themselves?

He hesitatingly stepped closer to inspect it, and found a disproportionately large blade attached to its back. The weapon was ornated with various symbols and letters that were alien to him. It looked fine as a work of art, yet its handle was so short one could question whether there would be any sane reason to use it.

"This thing's edges are blunter than a butter knife!" he muttered to himself, quietly enough to avoid gathering unwanted attention, yet barely loud enough to hear his own voice and keep himself sane.

He grabbed the metal body's hand with his own and it felt cold to the touch. Unexpectedly for him, as he lifted it, despite its heavy weight, it seemed as if the entire arm attached to it had joints.

"An artificial human?"

Footsteps made a sound in the distance. He didn't have time to think rationally anymore, and panic took control of him. He gripped his knife tightly and began to run away from where the sounds seemed to come from. Everything became but a fading blur as he ran for his life, hoping nobody would take notice of him.

If some fucker finds out where my sore red ass has been staying, what chances I got left of getting anywhere from here are shapeshifting to shit.

All he could think of for the next couple of hours or so, in between marathons across rock, dirt and puddles in the forest wasteland, was whether he was being tracked down, and what would become of his notebook, and other belongings. Whatever came then, would be decided through the strength of his hand, and the sharpness of his knife.

From time to time, his legs would ache. His breath would draw short. His feet would stumble into gears, and small lumps of rust from machines he'd encountered before.

Each one reminded him of how many days he'd spent in this strange place, each day pushing him a little further from home.

His back rested against a tree while he caught his breath, when indistinct sounds simmered through the air. After a brief moment, he stood himself up, making sure to stick as closely as possible to trees in the shade for cover, and steeled himself as he walked sideways along his path.

Something seemed to move, but his vision blurred. He blinked, and immediately felt a waft of dust fly straight into his face, blinding him. The confusion and panic drew him out into the sun, moaning and flailing around. His left hand pressed on his eyelids, his right hand pointed the knife around in every direction, and his heart skipped a beat as his moaning turned to wheezing.

What was at first white noise became a heavy, mechanical hum as it drew closer, and came down from above. Looking up, he lifted his shaky hand slowly, and ever-so-slightly opened his eyes; the sun greeted him with a flood of unfiltered blaze straight into his pupils as his fingers rushed back on his eyelids. This fine weather... why'd we never have this shit on the days I'd done my homework and wanted to go to the lakes as a kid?

He turned his head down, and held down the knife with both hands, swirling and swinging. "Yeah, that's right! I'm the Blender, and I spin like it!" he gloated to no one in particular, with a false, theatrical tone of confidence masking his fear. The only thing that he'd seemed to get for a response, was the sound of a fabric tear as he felt he'd torn through something-a white scrap of fabric that fell by his foot, from a cloth waving in front of him.

He looked up again, slowly this time.

Two wide propeller engines scuttered above, bringing with them the caustic smell of engine oil that blew at his face. On second thought, if I'm a blender, those are industrial shredders.

...shredders!

A flash of panic overcame him, his eyes growing bug-wide in surprise. His ankle gave out, dragging him into a slippery fall on the dirt, almost faceplanting into a tree root before wedging his left forearm in to cushion the impact. His right, however, had lost its grip on the knife.

Jesus! What happened to 'the rainforest needs saving'?

After one long painstaking breath, the now-unarmed runner took the initiative, and slowly waved his hand shouting from where he sat on the loam, staring with his dry mouth agape. "...Hey?"

The engines moved down, revealing machines riding them and waving white flags at the lonesome fellow. Their eyes locked on his, and they turned to face him.

Those green eyes didn't change color. Must be a trap… or they actually aren't going to try and bludgeon me halfway to death with my own shoes this time?

They spoke in a vaguely Asian-sounding language he'd never heard before; he remained in place, and slowly lowered his hand, trying to maintain an unaggressive tone while shouting loud enough to be heard clearly. "English?," he dryly swallowed before adding, "I'm American."

His face tensed up, and he opened his mouth again, remaining quiet for a moment. "...Español?"

The machines remained steadily in place, waving their flags without a sound.

His shoulder rested against a tree trunk, he searched with his hand for his knife in a dark crevice in front of him; nothing turned up in his sweaty palms but dirt, weeds and worms. He slowly lowered his head to take a closer look. A few strands of facial hair tugged on something he couldn't quite locate and looked for with his other hand while mumbling to himself. "Shit..." It was a groove in some bark.

He pulled the hair out, and heaved his eyelids, pulling his right hand out of the ground and shaking the worms off. Ready, set…

The smell of smoke suddenly rose up into his nose, and the sounds of conveyors, pistons and gears in the distance pushed out the wails of the birds and the grasshoppers into obscurity. A tight feeling swelled in his chest as he reached down, sticking his arm from the shoulder down into the crevice—the knife was barely recovered. A heavy breath ran through his lungs, and he looked again at the two floating machines. Holy shit. Whatever you think makes you safe, they'll find a way to take it. At least these two aren't out for my blood.

With his weapon against his chest, he carried himself into a small village in front of him that seemingly consisted entirely of metal huts, silos, dirt roads, power and laundry lines. The buildings were assembled in a spiral-like pattern around a plaza at the center.

His bare feet trudged on the coal-smeared driftway, passing under a pair of scaffolds surrounded with piles of bricks. Looks like they're building a wall here.

Upon entering, he glanced at his surroundings. A few buildings resembled houses, roofed with shingle-like plates and chimneys. Others resembled stores, with window fronts and assortments of cleaned parts and vacuum tubes thinly hung from the ceiling. Machines walked in and out, often wearing oddly familiar articles of clothing such as underwear on their heads, or mittens on their feet. Some held hands with one another, and carried them on their backs.

A few steps later, he froze in place, his blood curdled, and his face felt colder by the second: whenever they passed him, their green eyes fixated on the trail of ash-black footprints he'd left on the village pavement, and their jumbled chatter would all converge towards the same sounds. His pulse grew louder, his lower lip trembled and his pace slowed to a crawl as he lowered the knife, holding it to his crotch as he averted his eyes from theirs.

I get the message that I shouldn't overstay my welcome.

His pace slowed to a crawl. A door creaked loudly by his side, and he'd caught a split-second flash of a pile of firearms. His faltering plod down the paved stone then made way for an awkward speedwalk that had nearly slammed his paling face into a small machine.

He whipped his head around: it was the size of a child, sported overalls, barely reached his knees. The much bulkier biped behind it swung tar-stained buckets in its claw-shaped hands, and darted a glare right back into his irises before he quietly nodded at it, and spun his head back forwards.

Shit, this one looks like he'd rip my head off my neck and screw it in backwards if I looked at him any longer.

He stopped in front of a round patio surrounded by pavement; several machines dressed in neat tin-pot helmets tossed rocks at vaguely human-shaped wooden cutouts, knocking them over and breaking them into pieces. Some were painted black-and-white with oddly-specific curves and others were overly colorful, yet one stood-out with its taller, rougher silhouette and brownish hues. Is that… me? Am I a celebrity to these fuckers?

A staccato of loud electronic fizzles hissed from behind, and he quickly jerked back and forth, like an awry second hand on a clock madly reeling from 12 to 6, to 12 again. A row of red lights stared him in the back, another in the front. At that moment, two things were raised: a feverish shriek, and his knife.

With one hand, he crazedly patted himself down at the legs and ran his fingers through his pockets, slowing down as his blood froze. What the…? Where's my driver's license? Did it fall out of my pocket? Is it still back at the sh-shit!

The helmets encircled him, drawing closer as he rushed words put together. "You have to hear me out, really whoever the fuck you think I am, you're making a mistake," he panted, and shouted louder after he heard a sawblade, "I'm a run-of-the-mill, ordinary man from the United States who's been badly lost for a long time now. I have no idea on God's green earth what any of this is about! ¡Escúchenme solamente—un momento!"

An ear-shattering buzzing seized and shook his hands and arms down to the bone, sending sparks flying into the air and shutting his eyes in panic. Shit, this is it. I had this one coming for a long time after all the things I've been up to in this life. I'm gonna lose my hands, just like what the terrorists do to thieves in their shitholes-

An eerie moment of silence ensued. The entire colony of machines seemed to have its eyes on him; rows upon rows of circular red lights on him as if he were in a photo shoot. Soon after, the farther ones began chirping amongst themselves, speaking unintelligible gibberish.

The electronic yammering spread like wildfire through the crowd that had come to encircle him. Faces in the crowd turned left and right towards one another, as if their heads were all collectively sensing an earthquake. His hands tensed around the—now useless—knife's handle, as he searched for a way to get the holy hell out of this tumor of a town before these saws rip and shred everything north of my balls, hardly able to hear his own thoughts over the machines' buzzish squawks.

In no longer than a blink of his eye, the crowd behind the soldiers dispersed as if a wind had blown them apart like leaves, and they returned to their buildings. A small clown-nosed stubby-legged machine and its bespectacled companion, no taller than his waist and no wider than his shoulders, stepped towards him. Why do you even need glasses? I probably need them more than you do for all the shit I've been seeing here!

The bespectacled one had the more serious look of the two, with large eyebrows painted above its eyes, and a frame befitting a librarian for its glasses. The two of them grabbed his arms, and dragged him on the pavement, followed by the soldiers as the others watched from their windows, some firing guns into the air. Oh shit, oh shit! I must be getting the death sentence for murder against sentient tin cans! No, wait—it was all self-defense! Self-defense! They scared me first and tried to kill me!

Soon after, he was thrown headfirst into a gallows, and left faced only with his bespectacled hangman. "Argh!," he yelped meekly in a plea for mercy to the soldiers pulling the rope up and high. He'd instinctively grabbed around his neck, shaking and choking and knocking down the wooden cutout that resembled him with his bare toes in a spasm. The past, the present and future all melted together in that moment; each second felt like a year of his life flew by. Reddish flashes and greenish-purple and grains gradually covered his vision, he'd begun to see faces of people he'd known before. Their features were all faded, memories becoming distant yet familiar. He could hear voices, yet he was unable to understand them. With his last breath, he intended to scream…

...and a moment later, he found himself dropped alive on the floor. The cutout had broken his fall; the light and sound took a moment to regain their places in his senses, before he looked beneath. Urgh… agh… thank you for your service, wooden fake me.

A strange series of beeps startled him, jolting his head and reflexively making him look at his palms before clutching his chest: it was the little stubby, and the lights in its eyes flickered between green and yellow. He threw a quick glance at the soldiers, who seemed to share his confusion. With a clenched jaw, he dared to peek at the stubby with a more focused look of dread.

Chapter Text

The beeping continued for a while, until it had already stopped to confuse him and it simply bored him to stay in the same position and watch lights flash and beeps sound, when the small machine finally seemed to break out of it.

"Hello. It seems you are a human speaking an old world language known as English." A strange robotic yet mostly comprehensible voice was finally heard for the first time in, well, what seemed like days, were it not for the unshifting daytime sky.

The man was somewhat relieved to be understood, and stuttered before uttering a sentence in a rather weak voice. "Y-y-yes, that's right.."

"What place do you originate from again?"

The man quickly smiled in relief, and replied "Like I said to these, uhh.. what do you call them? Robots? People?-"

"I do not know exactly, but I believe a rough translation to your tongue would be that of 'machine lifeforms'." The machine unexpectedly interrupted him.

"Wow, that sure is a creative name. You know, many things are also called ma-"

"What. Place. Do. You. Originate. From?!"

The man was, once again, startled by this interruption. Shit, I just remembered, these motherfuckers still mean business!

"I'm from the 21st century United States of America! I just want to go home! I have no idea why I ended up here!" the man rapidly answered in fear.

The machine lept backwards, as if it had just realized something went wrong. It turned towards the rest of the colony, and looked like it was announcing something to them. Immediately afterwards, it returned to the man.

"Follow me. I have something to show you."

"Uhh.. I mean, if I'm leaving this place, then why not?", he said, as he tried to get up while shaking and fidgeting. He walked slowly behind the machine, and as he turned his head to look aside, he quietly observed hundreds of basic structures pass by, occupied by more machines with odd fashion tastes. Underwear as shirts, shoes as hats, and gloves on feet were the tamer things he had seen. He desperately contorted his face, in an attempt to hold in the resulting laughter, and turned straight back to the machine, which was not paying heed to any of it. He found himself then out of the settlement's limits, and watched unusual structures, such as stone pillars covered in moss, along with massive boars wandering about. He crouched and hid behind trees to stay away from their view, if only because their size was intimidating, but the machine did not seem to notice him, or them.

They eventually found themselves far away from everyone else, and the machine simply stopped.

"So.. am I free to go?" the man blurted out without thinking, as he looked back at the town, that seemed to be a mile away from their current location.

His question was met with empty silence, until the machine bounced in place, and an enormous trapdoor opened, revealing a tunnel leading downwards, and a very long ladder. Slowy, the machine climbed down, followed by the man, who was growing worried, but was still intrigued enough to find out where they were heading.

Finally, they reached the bottom. The machine opened a series of large doors, and the man looked around to see a dark, bluish facility.

The heavy air carried with it the smell of smoke and rotting plants. Control panels were all over, with screens, tubes and wires taking up most of the ceiling. Tinted glass tubes were on the walls, with lifeless bodies that did not look like anything a loving God would create inside, hovering motionlessly.

The man's eyebrows rose, his eyes shifted everywhere to make out all the details of what he was seeing. He could almost hear his own pulse growing faster and louder than the machine's whirring. What the everloving fuck is this?!

For the first time in hours, the bespectacled stubby took notice of him again. It turned around, facing him, and it talked to him.

"This, is an alien spacecraft that had crashed on this planet thousands of years ago. All the bodies you see here are of its creators, and all of them are dead."

These words sharply smacked the man back into reality from falling into paranoia; he looked back at the machine, which was standing still.

The man drew a heavy breath, blinked and quietly chuckled. "…They look like dicks." the man remarked on their appearances, in a half-hearted attempt at humor.

"..Yes. I believe they do bear a certain resemblance to the human penis."

He gazed in shock at the machine's face for several moments. You must be very fun, dickhead.

The machine walked down a staircase, up to a control panel in front of the man, and turned around.

"Do you know what this is?"

He went slightly closer, and stepped down the stairs to take a closer look. He tried to guess in his mind what the strange device would be for on this alien ship, but after what seemed like an eternity of fruitless pondering, gave up. "No, not really. I'm not familiar with technology made by aliens from outer space." he grumped with a frown, with a sarcastic tone.

"I have been studying alien technology for years, human-

"It's Derrick. My name's Derrick. I'm an individual. I have a name."

"As aliens and humans alike have always been a source of fascination to me for different reasons, I have taken pride in developing a greater understanding of human culture, thought and language as well as aliens' efficient technology, which, in fact, is also the reason I could understand your English. It so happened, that I had found on this particular ship, which I believe to be a minor interstellar cruiser, a device that may be capable of opening rifts between different timelines and dimensions. I'd experimented tens of times with it and its systems, but I had never managed to retrieve any object from another world. And I believe that you, Derrick… have been mistakenly pulled out of your own world, into ours. This universe.. may have wildly different natural laws from yours. It is nearly a miracle that you have survived, let alone made it this far."

The man was frozen in place, trying to process what the machine had just said. He was deeply shocked; yet it finally all made sense to him. He did not question too often the reason of his appearance in this strange land, because he never thought he would find an answer. His eyes opened widely, his jaw dropped, and he moved back to sit down on the stairs. His palm reached for his head, as he finally came to understand what he had just heard.

"So you're saying.. that the reason I'm here.. is because you were messing with technology you don't understand jack shit about?" he yelled in frustration. At that point, he was ready to strangle the machine with his own two hands for what happened to him. "You piece of shit! For all I know, I have no life left to live because you couldn't read a fucking diagram!" He walked closer to the machine, and pointed his finger at its face in a threatening manner as he scowled.

The machine returned his stare. "Derrick. The factors involved in these matters are highly complex and involve a plurality of variables."

His mouth twitched, almost as if to say something, before he could put his words together. "I've watched my own friends tell me they don't give a flying fuck about me. I have watched them pull off with flying colors everything I've screwed up from high school to college, while I ended up mopping floors and scanning barcodes at Safeway."

He closed in on the stubby and bared his teeth. "People I thought were my friends told me that they wouldn't give a shit if Al-Qaeda flew a plane into my face. I had finally built up the courage to leave it all behind, hang myself. But I turned back, and thought I'd find one thing in this life that isn't fucked to the bone! One last thing! But no, Mr. Boltbucket Biggins tore spacetime a new asshole, brought about a cave-in while I was trying to forget about my clusterfuck of a life, and whisked me to a place where I recognize no one, and everything wants my ass on a plate. So let's get the plurality of your screws on the ground, huh? See which one of us has 'em looser in the head." he started shaking and threw his hand down, as if threatening to beat the machine with it.

The machine, overwound from the man's ranting, ran at him and shoved him with its hands, nearly knocking him down, and dragging him back down to earth. "Ow, what the fuck!" he said as he held on tightly to his ribs. He groaned in pain as he leaned against the floor, screaming and yelping.

"Do not attempt violence against me. I did not try to harm you intentionally, and if it comes down to it, I will defend myself if I have to."

Chapter Text

The groaning continued for a seemingly long tiresome while, as the machine remained still and continued to look at the man, who was repeatedly attemping to get back up. He took then several deep breaths before standing up once again.

"Shit.. I shouldn't have done that." he muttered to himself while dusting himself from his fall.

"Fuck… so what now?" he asked in a weak, worried tone, still feeling pain in his lower chest and lightly moaning.

"As I am to be held responsible by my settlement for your troublesome presence, I must inform you that there may be a solution, and that I will aid you in returning to where you came from." The machine responded in its regular monotone, completely unfazed by what just happened. Wow, this tin can truly is the master of the art of nearly not giving a shit at all!

"Most of us machines are connected to a large, sprawling, worldwide network. I know, because I, and all other machines you have encountered since your visit, were either a part of it or used to be. I, however, have remained disconnected from it for many years."

The man raised an eyebrow and titled his head, baring some of his teeth. "How long? 2 years? 3? 7? 10? 20? 70?-

"My internal system clock shows that I have first disconnected within the range of 6 years ago. However, I have underwent maintenance more than once that had required it to stop counting time since then. Therefore, I can not answer your inquiry with absolute certainty."

"When-

"Back to our previous subject, there is a component central to the network, from what little information I currently know, that possesses superintelligence, controlling all other nodes, directly or otherwise. This entity, a concept if you will, could conceivably possess the required information –and resources- to construct a spacetime bridge capable of safely leading you back to your own reality." the machine went on without skipping a beat, completely ignoring the man's attempt at formulating a question.

"And.. when was '6 years ago'? Because I could've sworn that back then, the height of technology was two thousand dollars for a computer that would crash the moment you inserted a floppy. Not this... nightmare junkyard of a forest we're in." the man quipped sarcastically. Although he was genuinely curious as to what time it was, he did not think it would matter much, being that he was in a different reality altogether.

"Today is May 4th, 1194-"

The machine's eyes quickly flashed between green and white, emitting a high pitched buzz.

"What the fuck?" Y2K much?

"An error has occurred within my system clock. What I can say with certainty is that, six years ago is sometime between January 1st, 11934 and December 31st, 11943."

The man's mind was racing to make sense of what he had just heard.

"So now, you don't even know what damn time it is yourself?" he blurted out, frustrated.

"To a certain degree. However, it is certain that today is between January 1st, 11940 and December 31st, 11949."

"Ho..ly.. shit." The man's eyes widened, and his jaw dropped for a few moments before he cleared his throat and sighed. He had forgotten the pain he had felt earlier after being hit, and his expression changed to one of calm frustration, with a slight scowl, looking the machine squarely in the eye.

He let out a sigh, before trying to regain his composure.

"That's a lot further in the future than I expected.. Alright, so where do we start from here? Do we go to my shelter or something?" the man asked while scratching the back of his head, and looking at the exit of the alien ship.

"We are heading further into the forest, towards my estimate of our target's location. Follow me, and we should be able to proceed without any further complications." the machine said while rapidly hopping back up the stairs, and going through the doors towards the ladder leading out of the alien craft.

The man followed it, and although anxious as to where exactly they were headed, he knew that he would not be able to figure his way out of this hellhole on his own, and internally scolded himself for getting caught up in this mess in the first place. You dumb fucking piece of shit! Why didn't you just kill yourself? This is just like you. Now shut the fuck up, this isn't the time to hate on yourself. Focus on getting the fuck out of here, so that then you can maybe, just maybe, re-evaluate your goddamn life when.. actually, if you get home.

The man was lost in his internal monologue for what seemed like an hour, when in reality, it was merely a minute. By the time he snapped out of it, he found the machine halfway up the ladder, climbing.

"Wait up! I'm still here!" he shouted from the floor, followed by him running through the hallway and getting on the ladder as fast as he could while hungry. He followed the machine, which was already on the surface at that moment, through the trap door. He looked around to see it, but had lost track of it, instantly turning to panicking again before noticing footprints on the dirt leading further into the woods, and laughing at himself.

I'm a fucking idiot.

He took the first step, and heard the sound of glass breaking and electric noises, not too far away. Motherfucker! He's gonna drop dead!

He raced as fast as his wimpy legs allowed him to, following the trail of footprints and avoiding trees. "What the fuck is going on in there? I'm coming!"

Sweat was running down his pale face, whilst the sound of metal pounding got more intense. I'm not lettin' this shit go! I'm either going home, or six feet under the ground this time!

He tripped by hitting his foot against a bush while looking straight ahead of himself, leaving his foot with several minor cuts. Not that he was too concerned by the ensuing pain, he got up quickly and looked to his right.

"What the fuck? Is this cyber-rape?"

The man was horrified. Not ten feet away from him, was the machine who was talking to him just now, getting attacked by a larger one. The large machine stood out to him as uncanny; its feet were extremely long compared to the rest he had known, its hands were eerily large yet had exposed sparking wires. It had shattered what remained of the other one's glasses in its grip, whilst it was on the ground, trying to get back up with dents all over its body.

He inhaled deeply from his mouth, frowning. His instinctive reaction was to flinch, causing him to trip and fall again, which fortunately led him to narrowly avoid a sharp piece of metal zooming past him. Holy shit! That could've cut my head in half!

Chapter Text

The man lied on the floor, confused and panicked.

His only partner seemed to be taking punches better than he could ever hope to, and once more, he felt powerless. Fuck. Well, he’ll be out of service for sure. There ain’t no getting out of this one. I might as well join in and get my face pounded.

He turned over, to find the sharp bit of metal stuck lodged in the trunk of a tree.

Wait. Holy fucking shit.

I know what I can do!

In an adrenaline-fueled rush, he ran to pull it out, and picked it up. He then looked back to see the friendly machine try to roll over to dodge, as the bully raised its elbow, and its hand began to glow electrically..

“Hey,fat boy!”

The man threw the plate at the large machine’s exposed wiring, cleanly cutting it. Living in the shit makes you learn badass stuff, doesn’t it?

The plate was then stuck between its gears, leaving it unable to control its arm. It struggled to gain back control, while uttering strange words of its own language, eventually trying to twist it back into position with its other hand. It seemed to scream, or at least, do as convincing an imitation of a scream as it could, as it ended up breaking its arm in half. The man watched silently with a smug look on his face, believing himself to have defeated it, only to once again panic as it turned its body and began to charge at him, throwing its severed forearm at the tree trunk behind him from four yards away.

“What the hell?!” he screamed, with a frown on his pale face, lightly covered in dirt. He held on to his old striped shirt, and covered his eyes with his other arm as debris and dust fell over his head, making him cough lightly. The machine grabbed onto the dislocated, now even further shattered arm and raised it high. Fuck, I have to make a move now!

The man ran under his enemy’s upper body with what was left of his strength, groaning and clenching his fist to forget about the pain from his foot injuries, back towards the closest thing he had to a friend. He looked down while wiping his face with his shirt’s sleeve, to see it dented, trying to get up.

“I’m… functional….” the short stubby muttered, in its typical robotic voice.

The duo were shaken, quite literally and physically, by a shock wave the larger machine had created after bouncing on the ground while turning around to face them.

“Oh shit!I don’t wanna die!” he cried for a moment, until he noticed the wide tree trunk behind the machine, finally cracked by the machine’s shock waves. It slowly fell on the latter’s head, crushing it and leaving it slumping on the floor, while he was trying to roll his stubby friend down a slope.

“Take cover!”

In a quick reflex, he ducked as he heard the sound of an explosion, with unidentifiable parts flying away.

After simply zoning out while screaming with his eyes closed in a fetal position for a good while, the man, finally relieved of all the panic and stress that ensued in the moment, leaned over to look back at the scene, now covered in a cloud of smoke and small flames. Bits of scrap metal were scatted all over the floor, and the surrounding trees and plants were all shaking intensely.

What in the name of fuck was all that? Did I become a hero or something?

The man was lost in his thoughts, trying once again to fully process all the events that had happened since he woke up. Today is the weirdest day of my life. I saw a dead metal corpse with a giant butter knife, I ran to a village where everyone wanted to hang my ass, and-

“Help me get up.” The machine said, smacking him straight back into reality.

The man lied down with his back on the grass, groaning out of hunger and frustration. “I’m too tired… and hungry… fuck, I’m dying.”

“Your condition may only worsen if you do not take action.” It turned its head towards his, while trying to hold onto the ground with its hands to prevent it from rolling further.

“Fuck.. Ahhh… Ahhh..” The man continued groaning with his hand on his chest, wincing. He passed his other hand over his muddied tracksuit pants. “Shit. Ahh.. I gotta do the laundry if I get home. This is gonna suck. Why do I always..

STOP. GET. THE FUCK. UP.

The man quickly rose from his position, and looked around. “I gotta eat.. gotta find a moose.” He coughed. “Or a fish, fuck. Survivalist Derrick in.. action.” he muttered to himself while clearing his throat.

Chapter Text

He held on to his chest, while slowly walking away. The machine was laying still on the grass and dirt, turning to look at him.

“Do not wander too far away. You may encounter much more dangerous hostiles.”

He kept repeating these words to himself, trying to figure a plan out.

Okay. Some trees are here, there’s a moose or two.. fuck I’m dumb, there’s a wide river up ahead. Why the hell did I think hunting down a moose with my bare hands was a good idea?

He slowly stepped closer to avoid making a sound, although he would’ve liked to get this over with as quickly as possible in his current state.

The ground seemed to shake for a moment when he was within arm’s reach of the river, and he almost lost balance before quickly regaining his stature. I am not OK with an earthquake! This is the worst time!

The machine seemed to say something in the distance, but he couldn’t quite make out what it was and didn’t bother asking, as he was busy enough trying to survive.

He squatted, spreading his legs out as much as he could in case an earthquake was coming, to avoid falling over into the river. Fuck. I never thought I’d fish with my bare hands instead of a knife. Today is the shittiest day of my life.

The man turned around to look for anything he could use, but nothing came to mind, letting out a sigh of frustration before sticking his hands into the running water and hoping for the best. I better not get some parasite out of this.

It didn’t take too long before he felt something moving upstream, and caught a glimpse of a mackerel passing by. He quickly took a firm grasp of it, and dropped it by his side. A shape vaguely resembling a fish appeared as well, and he struggled to pull it out, only to find out that it was an aquatic machine lifeform. Jesus Christ! Is there any place these damn robots aren’t? They better not be making nanomachines, or else I’ll be gone before I know it.

The man threw it behind him, further than the mackerel he had gotten earlier. He was mildly surprised to see it shake on the dirt for a few moments, before coming to a stop. They don’t give up, I gotta give it to ‘em.

He looked back at the water, and snagged another fish, which turned out to be a salmon. By then, he was feeling tired again, and slowly scrambled for some branches to start up a small fire. Time was moving along faster as he cooked the fish, and tried to boil some water by heating rocks up and pushing them into a water bowl of sorts, which he’d dug in the mud by the side of the river.

He was then finally prepared to rest, to regain some energy. He let his head drop on the ground, turned it downwards and closed his eyes. This hard work pays off, for now I guess. Hope there won’t be an earthquake, though.

As soon as he was finally drifting into sleep, he was rudely awakened by the voice of his machine partner, left in an uncomfortable position. “There are other machines, and animals incoming. You must immediately stand guard for the both of us.”

The man painstakingly opened his eyes and frowned, muttering vague curses to himself, and heard an intimidating bellow.

He gasped and leaped backwards away from the river, making way for an oversized moose in front of him charging headfirst with its antlers at a pair of stubby-legged, glowing-red-eyed machines at arm’s length from the river, that would be indistinguishable from his partner were they not larger and wider than the man himself, hopping at it. The moose fiercely hit them with its antlers, scraping them and pushing them back with a loud metallic sound. They were knocked down and slammed each other with an equally loud ringing. The slightly bulkier-looking one stopped moving, flat on the ground, while the moose lost balance and fell on the ground. The other one, however, fell in the river. A loud splash covered the man’s pants, leaving him cold. It yelled alien-sounding words and sounded an electric zap while emitting sparks before the red glow in its eyes faded away, and it sank to the bottom of the water.

The man blankly stared at the machine and the lying moose on the ground with a worried look, slowly stepping away. Ookay.. Take it easy.. Slowly back away.. I don’t want any part of this…

The moose slowly got back up and turned its head towards the smaller machine, the latter looking the man in the eyes. Both of them had realized what was about to happen by then. “Act quickly!” it shouted in a slightly more emotive voice than usual. The man began to hectically turn and look around, his arms and hands shaking madly. “I’m trying to think of something, shit!”

It only took a few moments for him to stop thinking rationally in the heat of the moment. He rushed towards his machine, racing against the moose in an adrenaline frenzy and screamed “I’m gonna try to put you back right side up or something!” only to get shoved aside and knocked out screaming, with his vision faded. Shitshitshitshitshit-Fuck, I’m hurt! Fuckfuckfuckfuck-

The man heard the moose bellow again, only this time it was because the moose was hurt by a.. purple orb full of electricity, coming from a four-legged machine about the size of a horse, stepping down of the remains of the destroyed enemy from the previous encounter.Am I now dreaming up shit, or is this real?

A fevered crunch plowed the air. Thud. His mind confusedly raced to understand the situation he couldn't see. What the hell? Did the short metal nerd I watched get bullied, now just kill a five hundred pound moose all by himself using magic?

He slowly tried to stand back up and recover from the blow, and it was only then that he saw the large four-legged machine hit his partner on the ground with its legs while running in his direction, propping it back up before unexpectedly stopping right in front of him, and turning back to head away.

He remained still, dumbfounded. The events that had just played out were slowly being pieced together in his head, trying to form a coherent explanation.

“What…the hell was that?” he asked.

The short stubby then stepped closer to him. “Local wildlife is having territorial disputes with a group of machines, thus why I always prefer to remain safe in my colony.”it explained, returning to its complete mechanical monotone.

These last words raised an eyebrow. “So.. you wanted to leave your place to help me… why?”

“I have always had a deep interest in humans, and their thought process. I tried to study the behavior of the human body for a long time. I preferred to keep you alive rather than dead so that I could observe how humans act. However, it was evident that the people of my colony would not be pleased with you remaining among us, therefore my only option is to help you return home.”

“Oh.. that actually.. makes sense.” he muttered without giving it much of a thought, before a sound emerged from underground, not unlike the one he heard when the ground began to shake earlier.

A loud splash emerged from the river, and all kinds of colored lights blinded him as they popped out, while he tried to cover his face with his arm and lost balance once again, falling on his forearms.

The fuck’s up now?

Chapter Text

Water, rocks, dirt, and metallic dust slowly settled on the surroundings of the ensuing splash. Grass was covered and branches were broken. A pair of thin, curvy metal spires jutted out of the water's surface. The adrenaline rush had ended, an opportunity the cuts on the man’s foot sharply seized to painfully remind the man of his earlier mishap running to save the machine after he’d fallen twice in a row.

He grudgingly got up to the smell of murky water, and held his foot closer to take a look at the injuries. Damn, these are small, but they’ll take way too much time to heal like this if they don’t get infected first. I-

The machine began leaping away, and the sound of its moving gears tore the man out of his thoughts.

“Take cover from the electric projectiles!” These words zoomed through his head twice; first, as a stream of gibberish while he dropped his foot, and the second time, clicking in his head and driving him to look ahead. No. No. No. Whatever it is, this is a bad time.

A big, colorful red and blue orb of electricity was in front of his face, slowly closing him. Time had slowed down in his eyes, and at that very instant, he dodged to the left. He felt a severe pain in his chest for a moment afterwards, curling up and tightly holding it. Can I ever.. get a break?! Stop!

He tried to regain his posture and looked forward. His vision, was getting blurry, but slowly regained its sharpness when he’d noticed two long machines resembling worms, or snakes, flying in mid-air, in defiance of gravity and all good judgment, above the draining river, one equipped with a steel drill, and the other with some odd apparatus that resembled a gun of sorts. They appeared to be composed of a large chain of circular smaller units, stuck to each other, with a black sphere in the middle surrounded by a yellow glow.. andtens of floating orbs of energy appeared out of the blue, slowly closing in on him, multiplying as the latter continued to fire them. Holy.Jesus. Christ.I can’t take on this. I can’t. It’s just not possible.

The man was unable to focus; he’d felt more overwhelmed than ever before, and the adrenaline rush, while active, no longer felt as empowering as it did even earlier when the man woke up. This must be easy for that smart-ass tin can.. wait, where is he?

..And before he’d drowned in his thoughts, his mind suddenly snapped to the orb a mere six feet from himself. “Aawgh!” he gasped, after this sudden reminder that he was not allowed to stop, and fled to his right, turning to look, and found his machine partner silently looking at him, standing behind a tall pine tree, appearing completely indifferent to his fate.

His fatigue-overrun mind raced to construct a sentence, and he’d uttered “Help me!“ hoping for it to at least tell him something that could’ve helped. Instead, it remained motionless and stared at him, seemingly taking detailed mental notes as he ran in circles attempting to avoid an ever-increasing amount of projectiles directed solely at him.

What an asshole. I went to save him twice, he better find someone else to bail him out the third time.

The worms began to fly closer to him, while the projectiles had all but surrounded him. His face paled, covered in sweat in that one instant as he tried to figure an escape out. He looked back uphill, at the dense forest. If I could just run fast enough.. they would lose me between the dense trees!

His eyes swiftly opened up, and he turned to the machine in that small instant, that was preparing to follow him back up. Fuck off. The man began to run as fast as his tired legs possibly could without sparing a single instant, and rushed back into the forest, looking back to find himself outrunning the projectiles, and.. his hunters going around him to surround him from the other side. He turned forward, only to find his view completely obstructed by wide flowing tubes of machinery hovering in front of him, waiting for a flurry of electric orbs to grill him alive, and he could only assume the stubby dented machine was idly watching, without a care in the world for what was to happen to him.What a pretentious asshat.

He turned around to face the bullets, and felt a sharp pain resonate in his head. I could really use some damned safe sleep.

In a poorly-coordinated attempt to crawl, he landed nose-first into the ground. The pain of an impending nosebleed sparked its way into his mind, causing him to draw a sharp breath through his teeth. He slipped downhill, away from the scene, toward the river. Partway down, he heard the telltale sound of energy striking metal- a sound this world had trained him to hear. He saw a tumult of colors reflected back at him from the shimmering grass. He desperately went on, refusing to stop for a moment if he was to save his hide.

He looked up, to find the drill-equipped machine wobbling in its trajectory as if it were unstable downwards towards his spinal cord to tear him apart, while the other one could no longer fly under its own weight after the shocks presumably absorbed by the black sphere in its center that seemed to be a core of sorts, and he began to roll sideways hoping to dodge.

After what felt like seconds, he’d lost control over his roll and began to slide and roll all over the slope, screaming and in a split second closed his eyes and held his breath before eventually splashing headfirst into the river, as the redirected current slowly carried him into the newly-created hole. He was tired senseless, to the point where he could not swim to save himself as the blurry, faded image of his machine partner looking at his helpless body, and the large driller ominously flying away appeared, while his eyesight slowly started to vanish. He fell through the tunnel and was wildly carried by the rushing current, his arms wildly swinging to keep him from slamming into a rock as he felt death oncoming for the next couple of seconds before he’d regained air, and his left arm hit a large rock the water rushed around out of a narrow hole in the dark. The cold, hard basalt under his back complemented the smell of minerals, and heavy machinery.

He painstakingly crawled, holding on the slippery mud and stone under the running water, and lied down.

He looked up.

A faint orange glow showed the top of a large mineshaft, built within broad caves. Machines in the distance across a wide abyss, some as large as trucks, and others as small as his.. ex-partner, were striking rocks and extracting coal and other minerals from them, transforming them into clean, cubic blocks of white seemingly magically and dropped them onto heavy carts before sending them away on rails; all of this, combined with their chanting of the same, incomprehensible words from a language entirely foreign to the American added up to a restless cacophony that promised to never let him sleep, even in the cold underground.

I wouldn’t mind dying that much, at this point.

Chapter Text

The man’s eyes remained closed, as he lay down for a few minutes, grunting in pain and frustration from the freezing air after he’d been completely submerged in the cold water, his jaws shaking with a will of their own.

I have gone through a lot of shit for one day- wait, fuck me, I don’t even know how long it’s been.

I can barely feel my damn fingertips.

He looked to his side. Although he couldn’t see much in the dark, or smell anything other than the blood seeping from his own nose, the mining machines appeared to be going about their business, continuing to dig and chant at the same pace and ignoring him. I can’t be assed to move now.. I genuinely wish I could’ve just died.

His eyes then shifted to the water still flowing from the hole, and falling down into the abyss, making a barely audible rustling compared to the unending mechanical sounds of the machines.

A smudgy outline of a familiar shape seemed to emerge from within the hole. He tried to move his body slightly closer to take a better look and discern what it was from its highlights, but quickly regained its former position when he felt himself almost slipping out. I almost shat my pants! Holy shit!

It kept moving upwards, until it revealed itself in the pale orange light to be another strange type he’d never seen until then; it could fly as did the long, wormy types whose encounter led him here, but unlike them, it consisted of the body of the most common type of their kind; it resembled those that he had been encountering since his arrival to this world. Those, in hindsight, were the ones that worried him the least. But this one, however, had, instead of legs, a large propeller and a large gun attached to it. He tried to hide himself for a second, before it turned in his direction.

OH GOD OH GOD NO-

He knew he couldn’t have stopped it from spotting him; its eyes went from green to red, and its alarm rang before it shouted in an angry tone, followed by an eerie silence for what felt like an eternity instead of the chant the man’s ears were beginning to tune out.

Before he could make a move, the other mining machines had all jumped and turned to face him with their eyes all glowing red, and the oft-heard sound of machine combat mode alarms going off—a sight that nearly drove him to soil himself this time. Jesus Christ! I had all the time in the world to take a dump when I woke up today!

The man felt his pulse speed up so quickly that he could nearly feel his heart tearing itself apart, and his face grew paler and sweatier. He got up as quickly as safely possible, by tightly grabbing onto several rocks in the rough ground he was on. He looked down on the ground, to find the cuts on his numb feet covered in gunk he couldn’t quite make out, and a very uneven, unsafe terrain ahead of him. This was all interrupted by the sound of stone breaking and crashing behind him. He turned to the machines, and found a few of them throwing blocks of sizes ranging from smaller than a foothold, to large enough to crush him.

In the blink of an eye, he’d seen a huge, smooth,shiny cube weakly reflecting the mineshaft lights, combined with the red from the machines’ eyes, crashed into the hole he’d fallen from. He could hear the basalt slowly cracking and sliding from the impact, as he jumped backwards screaming “Waooh!” by reflex, before landing and making a false step, and felt himself lose his touch with the ground, uncontrollably sliding into the dark pit.

He was about to bust his vocal chords yelping, before his survival instincts kicked in and he held on to a small, but sturdy rock protruding from the edge. I’m- Wait, I got it.Don’t fucking look down. Don’t fucking look down. Pull-

A dark, cubical smudge speeding through the air, crashed right where his head was, mere seconds ago.

Is this a good or bad thing that I fell and didn’t get hit there?

Off the corner of his blurred vision, a slowly-approaching bright orb of energy pulses just like the ones he’d seen earlier fired from the flying machine’s gun. Oh shit!

He felt a small burst of energy that let him grab on, and tried to pull himself up to save himself from his imminent doom, but his arms wouldn’t give in after he’d pulled himself halfway upwards, leaving him to look frantically for a bump in the black multi-layered basalt, and raised his right foot, pressed it against a small, granular rock instants before a loud zap and flash from under his feet flooded his senses. The uncomfortable stone he was standing on seemed to tremble slightly under the force of the impact, as he firmly held on to the wall while gasping for air, like a child being choked.

He couldn’t get himself to look back out; his mind was overwhelmed, but he figured more pulses were being fired by looking at the purple dashes of light that appeared on the otherwise almost pitch-dark wall. He heard the sound of clanking gears and mechanical parts bouncing to his left, and took a few seconds to make the connection that the miner machines were running in his direction as well.

He trudged for a few seconds as he heard more electric zap sounds and more lights flashed, closely watching his every step and not letting go of the cold, hard, rough rock by his side, with an extremely tight grimace on his face, breathing uneasily from his bloody, cold, numb nose with the added discomfort of a fever migraine, when another unexpected loud bang rocked the air, and boulders were heard crashing down from above, along with a few of them hitting the running red-eyed hunks of metal, who’d stopped in place to avoid being knocked out. Blinding sunlight suddenly filled the man’s surroundings, and revealed the same drill-equipped snaking worm who’d nearly tore his spinal cord open earlier, still wobbling and closing in on him. Oh my god. Ten trillion goddamn things are happening all at once. How do I keep up with all this shit?!

Wait. There’s light! That means… Look behind!

He turned his head behind as he loosened his grip on the rocks by his side, and noticed the flyer dodging the shaky long, flexible airborne machine that had just burst in out of the blue, and several disorganized large balls of color and electricity dangerously close to his back, before he’d decided to dive and crawl away as fast as possible on the spot on the rocky path he could now see, albeit his vision was still growing blurrier by the minute, and his bloodshot eyes wearier, stopping right in front of a projectile passing by. The nauseating sounds of crashes, zaps, thunks and clunks all blended together in this wild fiasco of unstopping stressful running, dodging and hiding as he saw a pair of rocks in the wall covering up a hole, wobbling. This better not be another shitty surprise, because I’m just throwing myself off the cliff here and now if that’s what it is!

He took a quick glance at what was around him. The miner machines were preparing to move once again after they’d decided the coast was clear, the flying machine was settling back in position to start firing, and the dreaded driller was turning around to strike him. Fuck. I knew this would happen.F-

The man’s thoughts were interrupted by a voice, frustrating him even further. “Derrick.”it said, but it quickly shifted his focus, for its familiarity made the previous events of the day blaze through his mind; it was his former guide, and he’d recognized it from its short stature, and all the dents and scrapes on its body. Standing high above in the tunnel and watching, no less. It started to speak to him, but its words were drowned out by the maddening noises of the miners’ gears and parts hitting the ground as they moved again –now about twenty feet from him– and he’d only made out one: “acquaintance.”

“Wh-“ the man began to shout for a split second, before the rocks flew out of their position, pushed away by another, completely unexpected creature; a head that rolled incredibly fast in front of him, before stopping in the blink of an eye. Its appearance resembled a globe badly decorated to resemble a moon with a face, with its large circular white eyes, its two small holes for a nose and its wide grin, on an otherwise featureless grey sphere. He frowned and stared blankly in confusion.The fuck? Oh.. it’s someone.

…before it started to speak in a childish, friendly voice, immediately followed by an awkward scream as it realized they were both surrounded by an army of machines ready to pound them both into a fine pulp, and the little creepy-faced ball fell back into hiding, followed by the grumpy, wounded survivor who’d gotten into a thin, and dark tunnel right as they could hear rock being crushed and struck by pulses of energy; he’d started to smell dirt, stone and oil as he slowly made his way down, trying to follow the path of the racing creature but enjoyed the growing silence in his ears for a minute or so, until a large drill began to tear through the opening behind him, flinging pebbles and particles at him from behind.

Why the fuck couldn’t I have taken my pointless break here instead of right in front of them earlier? What a retard I am.

Chapter Text

|<< FAST REWIND (Chapter 8)

He was tired senseless, to the point where he could not swim to save himself as the blurry, faded image of his machine partner looking at his helpless body, and the large driller ominously flying away appeared, while his eyesight slowly started to vanish.

The waist-high, beat-down machine stood still, staring at the man, almost invisible as he let himself get carried away by the water, turning to look at the long, flexible drill-spire drifting away in its trajectory; it seemed to be patrolling the surrounding area alone, despitehaving sustained quite some damage; half of the man-sized linked steel spheres that made up its snake-like structure were covered in cracks and emitting faint, white particles.

It began to think out loud to itself.

*TRANSLATION SOFTWARE ACTIVATED. Setting: ██████ to English.

“He was reckless.” it spoke to itself without a change in its usual electronic voice, and looked down for a moment before turning around.

It internally organized the data it had collected over the course of the past few hours, its mechanical legs slowly hopping away uphill as it passed by the wreck of the two dead machines in the river bed and on its side, and that of the gunner worm that had inadvertently destroyed itself; it was slumping down on the ground beside the rotting corpse of the dead moose that was drawing flies and maggots in—giving off a stench that the stubby machine could not smell.

Then, it stopped in front of a large, tall tree trunk blocking its way, that covered the burnt-up shrapnel of the blown-up machine the man had saved it from; compared to the stubby’s size, it seemed a mighty metal giant crushed under a force of nature. It began replaying the relevant memory file in its mind, as it remained in place looking at the hundreds of scattered and shattered bits of steel, wire and circuits left on the ground.

The whirring sound of its inner workings, the rustling of the leaves along with the flow of the river, and the occasional zooming past of the shaking drill-spire–which cast a long shadow over the man’s former partner, the grass, and the debris—were the only sounds to be heard for miles in the otherwise silent woods, apart from the occasional boar roaming.

It looked down, and something suddenly clicked in its mind; it was looking at a small metal plate covered in ash, the same one the man had thrown to save its life earlier.

The man had helped me.. I suppose I should at least make some sort of attempt to aid him now.

Perhaps I could speak to my old business acquaintance in the vicinity.. It would be preferable that I order a new internal system clock and outer body parts from him now either way.

After a moment, it turned around and began to slowly make its way back, approaching the river as the grass rustled under its rusting brownish feet, before looking around to search for a path across the river. It would take too much time to reach him. It seems that I could use the corpses of the dead units lying within range to construct a shortcut, however.

While taking care to maintain its own balance on the slope by slowly shifting its legs back and forth against it, it pushed the corpse of the large machine that had fallen on the riverside, bit by bit,to roll down next to the short-circuited one that had already been lying down on the drained river bed, asmakeshift stepping stones to makeprecise hops across the wide gaps, and looked up to see the driller wonkily flying away into the distance and making a whirring sound, in the same general direction it was headed, and followed it.It seems to have found a target… possibly the man.

The stubby machine hopped forward, and after some time, began to go down a thin, curved rocky path outlined by various weeds and the decayingfragments of various metallic parts, the sound of its gears clunking reverberating off the tall, thickly spread out, short-branched pines of the forest as it headed closer to its destination.

A few moments later, it reached a wooden, cracked trapdoor on the ground, surrounded by small bits and pieces of junk, to the front of a wide, thirty-feet-high, sprawling red-leafed oak tree reflecting strips of sunlight that stood out amidst the dense pines, with a sign attached to its side displaying some poorly-written, incomprehensible text, as if written by a child with a marker. A hole in the tree’s trunk had a long, brown rope sticking out of it, with an iron bucket attached to its end. A strange, eccentric-looking contraption I have not observed before. I suppose I may inquire as to its purpose later, as I am handling more pressing matters at the moment.

The dented stubby hopped and bounced on the trapdoor, as a knocking of sorts.

“Emil, I am here to make a few requests.” it said in its neutral tone, barely loudly enough to be heard from underground.

The sounds of awkward metal ramming and bumping, followed by the stubby’s feet getting slightly shaken by something colliding with the trapdoor followed. I suppose his base is as poorly-lit and cluttered as always. “H-hey Cog, I’m Emil Of The Woods!” a childish, boyish voice spoke from under. “I need everyone to start calling me that so people stop mixing me up with all my brothers!” it shouted embarrassedly.What motive drives him to place so much importance on trivialities?

“Emil.. Of The Woods, I would like to request a part.. and a favor.” it spoke, with clear hesitation at adding the self-appointed title.

“U-uh, wait!” the voice shouted awkwardly.

My patience, and time, are draining as I continue to bear his antics. The machine looked up at the sky, to find the driller had completely vanished from its sight.

“Can you let me try out my new phone? It’s on the tree!”

It is likely that he is referring to the contraption I have noticed today for the first time.

The machine, hiding its annoyance at the creature’s strange demands hopped over to the iron bucket by the oak, getting its hands caught up in some branches as it shook them away, and grabbed it. “Hello?”

“Hello!” the same voice sounded from the bucket as the machine stuck it against its head. An unnecessarily convoluted communication system of sorts.

“Now, Emil.. Of The Woods, I would like you to request you bring an internal system clock replacement for my model. As per our usual agreement, I will pay you a share of my earnings in G.” it spoke—at an ever-so-slightly faster pace, as it heard the distant sound of dirt, and stone being drilled through.

The creature quickly tried to advance the conversation. “An internal system clock? Great! Now, what do you think of my phone, Cog-“

“As for my second request, it is a more time-sensitive one. There is a human stranger, hunted by machines, who has fallen underground by the river, not too far from your location. I believe you may want to encounter him, and I request that you help him find a way to safety. I.. find him to be quite an odd fellow.”

“So.. a long-lost cousin to me and my brothers?!” it lit up in excitement, promptly leaving the conversation squealing gleefully, with the sound of the bucket underground being shoved aside at a lightning pace, as it smashed into various unknown metallic objects while trying to roll away.

His personality can be quite annoying at times, however, he is always an efficient task handler.

The machine sprinted as fast as it could bounce and keep balance, out of the same stone path surrounded by various obstacles it went down earlier, only to encounter an oversized, brown deer with large, sharp antlers—another territorial wild animal resembling the dead one barely visible behind it through the trees on the other side of the river, that it knew to run away from as fast as possible.

As soon as it turned to run, however, the sound of rocks being crushed and falling resonated in the distance. I suppose it is time to act now.

The stubby rushed away, followed in a lukewarm fashion by the deer tracking it through the pines and puddles, and the broken, burnt-up remains of various machines, into the destroyed remains of a dried-up well, now a short tunnel that shed light upon a cave. The deer stopped in its tracks as the dented metal halfling slowly made its way down the shattered stone and debris, careful to maintain its balance.

It recognized the silhouette of the man, terrified, trying to run with his back arched, and slowly made out his paling, sweaty, scarred face, his muddy facial hair and the worn-out American flag on the shoulder of his black, striped shirt as its artificial eyes’ lenses adjusted. Several towering, red-eyed machines’ gears crunched in unison as they ran around a wide gap, preparing to strike him down, and a small gun-equipped unit maneuvering in mid-air with its helicopter-like blades, around the ominous spire uncannily adjusting its direction to deliver one precise blow to the running man’s weak, underweight body. It is him.

“Derrick.” it announced its presence to the scene, in its unchanging tone.

“As.. unpleasant as the situation you find yourself in may be, an acquaintance of mine may be able to help you.”

The machine saw its old friend meet the weary man, and as they both crawled back into a most narrow hole; the driller chased them both, tearing through it with all of its strength.

They may now be both in danger.

This time, I believe l should intervene, for my— and their long-term benefit.

Chapter Text

The machine prepared to make its way back, before it was startled by the sound of the deer stepping closer. It turned its head around its still-standing, petrified body as the two creatures stared at each other; the machine formulating a plan to move out that wouldn't involve risking what was left of its beat-down body by jumping down into the cave or fighting the deer, and the deer observing the machine, before the latter started to slowly step back up from the depths of the tunnel left in the flexible-type's wake, pushing away remains of the shattered well with its hooves. I cannot waste more time.

In a rush, the stubby jumped, turning itself around to face the deer as it climbed out of the tunnel and avoiding the rubble— and after a few seconds, worked its way out, to the sound of the deer tapping its hooves on the ground and tilting its head, as if it was preparing to charge headfirst to ram the battered small machine back down the tunnel. I suppose there is no other option than self-defense now.

The stubby's eyes turned red as it braced itself, turned and hopped to the right to dodge the fatal blow; the deer, plowing through the air with its antlers as it ran on the rocks and the grass, fell prey to its deadly inertia as it slipped down the tunnel, and pressed its hooves against the sliding remains of the well and stone to avoid falling into the cave hole— then a god-forsaken, dark pit of hell with mad, red-eyed steel behemoths clawing at the edges, it seemed.

The deer caught control of its inertia and put down its hooves firmly on the pebbles under, mere millimeters away from the clawing, grasping hands of the miner machines below clanking against the rocky, dirty edges of the tunnel— and regained its stance, facing the still-standing machine that was looking in from outside beside a lone pine, as the stubby turned its body around to face it.

In a blink, the deer shifted its antlers, and raced at the machine upwards through the tunnel as the latter lunged forward at the furious animal, stretching out its arms to reach for its antlers with its metal hands. I must stop this for my, and their preservation, at whatever cost.

A mere second after the stubby's feet hopped off the ground, the deer was within range; the machine firmly locked its hands and arms, tightening its grip on the buck's long antlers, struggling to keep balance as it dragged in the air. This beast puts up a passive front, but is extremely territorial once it feels threatened.

The machine swung its legs at the deer's face, delivering a quick, sharp blow and disorienting it, yet it still would not give up the fight until it would see its opponent crushed and collapsed. The machine delivered a second blow, this time to the buck's forehead, prompting it to stop and curl down; and a loud, forest-shaking bellow of pain accompanied with the crack of antlers sounded as the machine, not loosening its grip on the animal's antlers, was dragged into the dirt by its inertia, its feet barely colliding with the root of a sturdy, tall pine tree.

Several broken shards of the rack were left scattered in its hands on the ground amidst countless pines, the sight of the destroyed well and the path to its friend's home barely distinguishable and surrounded by grass, treetrunks, rocks and the deer from the low angle of its eyes as it turned its head to search for its destination. I cannot waste a single moment now.

*TRANSLATION SOFTWARE DEACTIVATED.

Data stream interrupted.

The wounded man, trapped underground, could only smell dirt, stone, oil, and saw nothing but black in the dark, claustrophobic tunnel. His body was shaking, as he breathed erratically trying to make heads and tails of where he was headed; he'd been trying to crawl away from the hellish whirring of the drilling spire behind him that grew closer, and louder with every passing moment. I'm done. I'm fucking done. I deserve this. I'm a waste of human life. I-

The man's train of thought was sharply broken voice called from the man's right; it was the strange creature he'd met earlier, prompting him to open up his right elbow and notice an opening by his side.

He painstakingly tried to contort his numb, freezing body around the pitch-black cold rock, dust and dirt in the tunnel, until he'd found himself falling into a long, faintly lit corridor— a dim orange sheen bounced off of solid, worn-down steel rail tracks prompting him to shield his nose with his caked-up, wet, sore right arm as he fell face-first, his body loudly thumping on the hard stone beneath him, by the walling of the mine.

"Aargh! Fuck!" he cried out in pain on impact. He'd almost felt what was left of his bones breaking, before nearly collapsing; but the light of the hallway shone at his eyes from the ceiling as he blinked, and he'd started to make out the sound of heavy machinery whirring, picking—and crushing— bits and chunks of stone to dust brutally from various directions, accompanied by the faint sound of the creature's childlike voice from far away.

He looked around, and then he knew.

An enormous, rusty, eight-legged, multi-layered metal-plated iron sphere in front of the rail tracks by his nose tore through masses of minerals surrounding it with its infernal, mechanical limbs screeching painfully into his ears, slowly transforming them into smooth, impossibly perfect white cubes— he saw, all in a single instant. His face grew paler, his eyes closing and his breathing slowing down, his wounded, battered face frozen in horror as his arms struggled to push his numb, worn-out body out of the gutter.. No! Shit! Shit! He..lp..

..but his shaky arms gave out.

I.. can't fucking do this. I give up. This is it. This is what my whole life has added up to. Maybe the suicide plan was really the best idea.

The maddening echo of the screeching and tearing metal stopped at a moment's notice, and the faint orange streaks of light were eclipsed by the red light of the infernal sphere machine's eye, having turned to face him. A second felt like a minute as he put all of his remaining strength into trying to lift himself back up as the sound of wheels creaking approached from afar, and plates on the sphere shifted sideways, revealing another pair of spider-like glowing eyes. Its legs crawled up into his body, and the loud sound of a guzzling industrial engine roared through the corridor emanating from within.

The voice popped up once more by the man's left, calling to him once again. He looked to his side, and found the little creature speeding towards him— he felt an ever-so-slight relief, followed by a burst of panic as he stretched his arms at the talking face-on-a-globe that raced towards him. What in the unholy hell is this dumbshit-

In an instant, the creature pushed the man to roll away as he grunted and coughed in pain and from the acrid smell of oil, stone and chemicals, before the mad machine rushed forwards and slammed into a mass of rock, producing an ear-shatteringly loud quaking sound. The man and the creature watched the machine in shock, crumpled and cracked as it attempted to regain its posture, before an empty cart crashed, hammering into its carcass and a loud banging rang through his ears.

The man's vision began to blur further, as he winced in pain; the creature had moved into a hole, calling him again, and he obliged, crawling in as fast as he could. His limp body slid down a slope, and his eyes were all but closed as the last thing he'd heard was the sound of a trapdoor opening, and the familiar sound of the old stubby's whirring, with its feet hopping on the ground.

He opened his eyes one more, before the blinding sunlight drove him to avert his gaze and mutter a half-formed swear under his breath as he closed his eyes and started to fall asleep.

The image left in his mind was a smudge, but he thought he'd made out the shape of his old partner, standing in front of an open trapdoor revealing the endless, unchanging daylight.

Wait.. did I just see a damn little red girl staring at me and the smart-talking pile of scrap?

Fuck.. this must be what sleep deprivation hallucinations are like.

Chapter Text

The last thing he felt, as he fell asleep, was the sensation of the stubby's cold metal hand pressing around his feet, and the entire world—the rocks, the piles of random items and paper scraps strewn across the floor of the underground room, the sweeping daylight, all faded away over a matter of minutes as did his senses, and his nauseating migraine slowly eased out.

A familiar ceiling appeared to him.

..Home.

It was painted a dull shade of grey, with tears and small cracks exposing rough patches of cement. He remained on his bed, looking to the left and finding a light switch before turning it on.

The half-broken lamp flickered, quietly buzzing as he painstakingly, slowly pushed himself by his elbows from his mattress.

The room was looking as empty and bleak as it had for the previous few years; sheets of paper strewn carelessly over a desk, next to an open box of cereal. A half-empty bowl sat nearby, the stuttering light of the lamp reflecting off of the unwashed spoon protruding from the half-eaten meal, opposite a calendar dated 2004.

'That' creaky chair remained in the same spot under the ceiling fan as he'd left it the day he'd gone missing. The sound of its tired frame quivering under his soles echoed in his mind, from the day before 'he had' gone 'missing'.

It's all over now.

The silence in the room, only accompanied by the flickering of the light bulb, was sharply broken by the sound of the doorbell ringing.

The hell? Nobody's come to visit this shithole in years..

Wait.. crap…

An old man's voice spoke up in a concerned tone from behind the door, followed by the sound of knocking. "Derrick?"

..I was hoping Dad wouldn't see my shitty life. Ah well, fuck it—I couldn't hide this forever.

He swept his feet off of the bed, and walked on the bare tips of his toes closer to the door across the room.

The floor is damn cold. I can never find my goddamn socks when I need them.

.. before turning the knob, and slowly pulling back the door.

An empty void filled the space where he'd expected a familiar face, and the familiar sight of his neighborhood was gone, his vision covered with skyscrapers— colossal assortments of metal and bits of machines of every kind he'd seen, all facing him red-eyed under a sky of whirring static as he froze in place.

A sudden pang sharply struck his back, neck and head as his burning eyes opened to the blinding brightness of reality once more, and an intense burst of panic coursed through his body, contorting and shaking to the feeling of being dragged on knives. After blinking a few times, his surroundings became clearer, and in a moment he could see sharp, rugged rocks under his feet and the dense, tall woods surrounding him, with littered scraps of machines and remains of crushed trees. He frantically shook his head around, and saw the stubby machine standing with its arms outstretched in front of him, silently watching him— and the globe-shaped creature further down a path, staring at the both of them.

What the-

The man, agitated madly, scowled and grimaced, aggressively shouting"What the fuck?! Wha-what the hell are you f-doing?!" at the both of them as if he was feeling violated, while looking around himself.

"I have been transporting you to a location known by our acquaintance where we may find help." the machine responded in its monotone voice.

The man put his hand over the dirtied-up back of the noticeably drier shirt, feeling a mild pain on his back on contact and turned around, finding barely-visible machine footprints, a wide track belonging to his body and a smaller one left by the creature—which was singing to itself, on the damp mud of the rock-spotted path; the whole area was unfamiliar to him.

"Jesus Christ! Wh-!" he started to ramble random syllables as he tried to assess the situation, with a hint of barely-controlled anxiety and angerin his voice.

"It has been approximately five hours and thirty-seven minutes since you were last found collapsed conditions of our route are unknown, but your condition would only have worsened had you been left where you were found. We have taken several stops of varying length." it replied in the same tone; the man however could've almost heard a growing air of hostility in its electronic-sounding, fuzzy voice.

The creature's singing stopped, and it spoke a short sentence in a somewhat inquisitive, concerned tone from down the path, slowly rolling closer to the two.

The man looked at the painful, reddened dorsal sides of his arms and legs and inspected various scratches while the machine stood still, gleaning at the abrasions and shreds of torn-off skin with blood underneath. "You act wise, but you almost fucking killed me. Look at all this shit. Damn!"

The creature began again to speak to the machine, getting its attention as the latter turned its head around—at that moment,the man looked for a smooth spot to rest his hands on, got up from his cramped sitting, and stood up, slightly easing his murky expression as he attempted to wipe some blood off of his hair with the shirt.

"Argh.. why are you doing th-", he coughed, "this half-assed job?"

The machine continued talking to the creature in front of it; although it did not react, the creature rolled an inch to the right to look at him.

He yelped from the scathing pain in his scorched back and neck, and his bloodshot eyes tore up as he tripped and tried to keep balance."I wouldn't be like this if you weren't watching me die before I if I don't know shit, I think you, and pretty much every living thing here, organic or otherwise, are a world of unholy sadistic degenerates."

This time, it remained silentinstead of speaking, as if it was processing what it'd just heard, while the creature behind started to sing to itself once again as it backed up out of focus— its voice crept high and low uncomfortably as it attempted to divert its own hearing away from the aggressive-sounding remarks of the man.

A few more words left his mouth, solidified with a glare at the back of the stubby's head. "So much for a guide."

The stubby turned its head and looked at the man who was circling it limping, as if it was waiting for something; its dented, whirring body facing down the road, yet itseyes locked on him as it watched the man start to walk down the path.

The man took a look at what was in front of him; what wasn't covered in thick groupings of leaves, rock, machine parts, or treetrunks, of the way seemed to go on for miles, from what he'd inferred by looking at the topsy-turvy tracks left by the creature which now vanished from their view—his face turned paler than usual at the horror of having to walk through this hell with his rear half covered in beatings, scrapes, blood, dirt and slimy gunk.

If Mother Nature was reveling in schadenfreüde, it wouldn't have helped justify half of this shit.

After taking two more steps, he tripped, lost balance and held on to the branches of a tree writhing in pain— from his screeching lacerated skin, from weeks of starvation and dehydration; it nearly made no difference to him anymore, in this moment of silence.. interrupted by the bellows of a moose ringing through his ears, and through the machine's sensors behind him.

He let out a meek shriek, right as he'd heard the stubby's voice beginning to formulate a sentence, prompting him to turn his gaze around to see the dented, scraped unit hopping up to the after leap it sprinted, and he panicked limping down towards the cylindrical carcass of a dead, rusted and corroded, vine-overgrown hulk of a fallen machine that it hoped would grant asylum from the horrors they anticipated.

An indistinct sound came from the same direction as the one he'd heard earlier, prompting him to crawl on his burning legs while holding onto the silent trees and their shaky branches next to the dark spot the machine had holed itself up in, what felt to him like a minute or so before he did—that is, if he had any sense of time left. As he slipped in, he saw the machine by his side, hiding its circular, glowing green artificial eyes from the surroundings and looking at him; he returned the look every few split seconds, fidgeting, and feeling the burn in his eyes while blinking, taking moments to peek out as he shook while clinging on to a stray wire from above—nervously chuckling.Is this gnome going to punch me now? Is he going to say something? What the hell? Am I going to die now? No, no-I've told myself that far too many times now. Yeah. Maybe I'm gonna be lucky! Is he mad? No.. who cares! Yeah! I'm not gonna die! Because I'm safe here! Yes! Hahah! Wooooooooooooooo-

Holy sh- After periodically checking its safety,the stubby began to speak in its usual monotone once more.

"You are quite self-centered."

The man turned to look at the machine's eyes, with a bewildered look on his face as its eyes turned a shade redder, locked dead-on onto his. "What?"

"I have rescued you from a painful death at the town square of my home colony as a result of your violence against several of my kind who were confronted with an anomaly, namely you. I have left them to guide you to the one entity that I knew could help you as I knew I was responsible towards my colony for your damages. Throughout the past hours I have spent studying you, the most notable traits you have displayed afterwards were disrespect, hostility to the point of threatening assault, recklessness and an emotional inability to handle stress, and a lack of empathy towards others' drive for self-preservation."

The man's face remained frozen in shock for what felt like an hour, his restless mind attempting to fully grasp the meaning of what he'd just heard, before the look of tired anger left marks on his face. "I was defending myself. One of your.. fellow citizens tried to crack my head in two by dropping a.. drawer on my head. And every scar, every single cut on my face… you think that's makeup? You remind me of my bitch of a mom." The machine remained silent. I fucking hate this jackass.

"You know who you remind me of? You're responsible for all of this, and you have the fucking nerve to complain that you're not getting treated the way you like- The fuck am I doing?

The man closed his eyes, tightening his grip on the wire and grit his teeth.

This is going nowhere! The guy is now trying to help me, and he looks as screwed as I am.. He's not entirely wrong. I suppose I'm a self-centered piece of shit, and it's all thanks to-Stop blaming others for what a miserable piss-stain you are.

He opened his eyes again as he frowned, and painstakingly opened his mouth once more.

"I'm an asshole.", he inhaled through his clenched teeth as he felt the pain in his back spike, "a lot of the time. And I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't like myself. At all."

He blinked, and his reddened eyes tore up again in pain. "I wish I could've been.. not an asshole."

The sound of hooves striking against the ground and closing in interrupted the machine's immediate response—accompanied by the ever-so-slight red tint in its eyes disappearing over the next minute, as they both peeked out.

Between the pines, the rock, and the hills, was the creature, to the man's shock; yet this time, it was accompanied by an enormous, long-tusked boar looking down at it—it could've crushed a small car, big enough to transport all three of them. The little globe called out in its strange language, in words the man did not understand.What is this ballkid saying? "Hey, buddies! Look! I made a new friend, and he says he isn't going to grind both of you up to bolts dipped in blood and mucus!"?

The machine turned to look at the man, and began to hop away, back out of the carcass."It has been proposed that you join us on the back of this boar."

He looked back, eyes wide open as he struggled to balance himself while letting go of the wire, and started to walk out following it, the tears on the back of his shirt widening to display reddened scars and wounds. "You know you're not a friend to all living things, right? Just in case it's not tamed…" he warned the stubby with a worried look on his face.

A minute or so passed as the two grabbed on. The machine hopped swiftly and cleanly onto the boar's back in a single leap, and held on to its neck; the man, however, limped and contorted himself as he screamed and shed dry tears of pain, contorting himself and pressing his foot for a grip against the animal's back as he held on to its fur, noticing a strong stench. "...I've cleaned bathrooms," he gagged, "that smell better than this hog! Public… bathrooms!" he whined.

Eventually, the globe-creature opened its mouth, spitting out glands to be eaten up by its new pet, and turned around, and rolled down the path; the pig followed it, as the man and the machine were dragged awkwardly away. The forest zoomed past their sides, and the refreshing shade of the sprawling trees was a pleasant change from the scorching sunlight. The man could feel the wind freezing his skin, and drying his wounds as he wiped the gunk on his foot that he'd noticed the previous day off on the animal's fur. After taking a glimpse at his foot, he noticed several pus-filled, swollen cuts.

I should try to walk like a fucking human being next time.

Off the corner of his vision, the man saw a fast-moving, small object, and instinctively turned to peek, finding that the creature had abandoned them to hide between the roots of a tree, and let the boar run wild. His face turned pale as panic overtook his mind, and he turned back at the machine, trying to form a sentence as he shouted garbled words. The machine turned its head around to meet the man's, and in an instant, the man, who was looking ahead, made out the shape of a small, brown house in the distance with neat rows of plants and a well nearby.

The boar raced forwards , dodging rock, water and several treetrunks on its way… interrupted by the sudden sound of a loud squeal as it slowly zig-zagged and lost balance. The man felt a new rush of adrenaline course through his veins and, in a split second, yanked the fur on boar's right, clinging on for dear life as he lost balance, while the stubby remained in place. What the everloving shit? Did he set me up?! Am I going to die on a giant shit-smelling pig?!

Bright, blinding projectiles flashed in and out of the corner of his view, making strange ringing sounds as they struck rocks, mud, dirt and wood while the building grew closer and closer. The man desperately shook and fidgeted, yelping, and the stubby slid and fell off behind the man, rolling away as the animal firmly put its hooves in front of itself and gradually stopped over the next second, striking a tree.

The bright, alien-looking projectiles struck its skull in rapid succession and burned off the fur and the skin, leaving a charred, bloody pulp as its body fell down on its left and the man's vision faded after the adrenaline rush ended, and as he lay on his stomach to catch his breath, hefelt the hot metal of what he'd guessed was an automatic rifle pressed against his skull.

Chapter Text

The everlasting sunlight, in addition to the seared steel barrel of an unknown weapon stabbing through his bloody scalp, scorched his dehydrated skin. His nose drew a short breath, almost snapping in two between the scorching dry earth, and the fiery atmosphere—all combined with a nauseating migraine, leaving of him a rough, slurring wreck collapsed on the harsh terrain. The adrenaline rush he'd felt earlier had taken its toll; his body had become limp, corpse-like on the gravel slope, slumping by the rotting boar.

His sore eyes protested with his every blink, as he desperately attempted to shift his look by hair-widths to his sides alternatively—not the barest hint of his partner was in sight, leaving him to pray that the faint humming in his ears was that of the machine. The sudden, hard-hitting impact of a rough boot ramming into his temple reverberated through his skull rolling on the mud. He let out a deafening scream, and his throat protested with an uncontrollable coughing; the metallic taste of blood rose up his dry, dusty larynx as his head nearly felt crushed, cracked in two. The only sound left, past the ringing in his ears, was garbled static—not complete gibberish, it carried some sort of structure, like human speech.. yet none of it made sense; the only thing he was sure he could feel at that point was a vague, enveloping wave of what could only be described as 'wrongness'.

A wrongness that slowly drowned his consciousness, until he felt another blow to the back of his head and passed out to a slightly warm, comfortable feeling.

The stubby machine left behind in the gutter, stuck on its side, crawled on its arm behind a rock, and for a moment, its own whirring was the only sound it could hear other than the thumping of boots on dirt, followed by creaky wooden floorboards fading into the distance reverberating through the oak and foliage surrounding it.

It looked around, the quiet whirring and the distant whimpers of wildlife being the only stimulation in its surroundings— any trace of the man, and a possible stranger, were gone.

The stubby's dented, bent arms creaked as it dragged over the stray blades of grass over the sand-red dirt and the baking stony rubble, following in the tracks of a bag leading from the man's lying position to the creaky floorboards of the discolored, rundown wooden house to inspect them, only for the same dreadful sound of boots and the holstering of heavy weaponry to arise as its unmistakable whirring made itself heard. The machine shook in place, desperately attempting to reposition itself to crawl away with its arms.

The time is insufficient. I cannot evade.

It looked to the side, finding a loose unpainted trapdoor by the bottom of the doorway's floorboards. It rushed towards, the sound of its dry motors whistling against the growing sound of hurried footsteps approaching as it gripped the loose bottom of a broken plank, lifted it momentarily and fell in.

The trapdoor slammed against the adjacent wall, and came back down with a thunk as the sound of wood creaking under sprinting boots passed by. The machine looked up, its head planted in junk it couldn't make out in the dark, and saw a strange light. Much brighter than the dim light reflected from its own small eyes—flashing green patterns, from strange black boxes that could fit in the palm of one's hand suspended in mid-air in the center of the space, to hundreds of cables and tubes protruding from the ceiling of the dark, seemingly endless chamber. And upon adjusting its eyes' lenses, it observed neat, linear rows of sleek rectangular prisms outfitted with siren lights and mock-up limbs grafted to their bottom, and other machinations all arranged in chrome shelves facing it.

...

I cannot process this.

It is impossible for me to find an explanation to this.

It is unclear whether it is more favorable that I pursue data collection, or simply evade this vicinity.

Its eyes remained frozen in place, out of sheer bewilderment at the sight.

…This certainly does not resemble any of the alien crafts I have studied, yet I find parts of it familiar.

The flat humming of the machinery in the air was interlaced with the faint, yet unmistakable clicking of metal accompanying heavy footsteps from above the ceiling.

It tried to turn itself upright and attempt to escape, only for the iron plating of its arms to repeatedly slam against the ground with each attempt, and it knew what was to come next was only a matter of time—the telltale strained reverberations of its beat-up gears scritching furiously made themselves heard through and through.

After a few seconds, a light flooded the room, drowning out the previously-blinding green flashes in the dark; it came in from a metal door opposite the machine slamming open into the wall with a thunder-like clack, sending what turned out to be oil-drenched, corroded artificial limbs zipping across the room. The tall, heavy metal shelves were shaken, and all fell crashing down with their contents all banging loudly against the ground all at once. The dark, tall human-like silhouette of a stranger appeared from behind the door—it would have towered above the man, and did not look the slightest bit malnourished; its strong posture drew the machine's attention as an immediate threat. The stubby's eyes turned a shade redder preparing for the inevitable, and as the stranger stepped out of the dark staircase into the light, his features made themselves apparent in the split-second the machine's eyes locked on to his: a heavy suit of armor and notably, crisp burned skin. The machine yet attempted to roll itself behind a pile of scrap with its arms, and a rising, screeching electronic crackling followed a blinding yellowish-white beam of energy cleanly aimed between the black boxes narrowly missed it, tearing through the heap of metal that served it as cover and reducing it to red-hot ashes.

Pieces clanged and hit against the machine's head and body, and the wall all at once like firey nails, and the stubby finally stopped moving, and raised its arms in surrender.

A voice spoke out; it was much sharper and clearer than a machine lifeform's electronic, static-infused speech, yet its rushed speech patterns had an off rhythm, as if it was putting a strained effort, yet uncannily failing to come across as natural.

Loading translation software..

[C#$!:$14A]:

A lever loudly snapped in place at last, before its auditive sensors began to filter out the ambient noise: machinations that permeated the room, and the faint shaking of a bag from above banging the ceiling.

[C#$!:$14A]:

[C#$!:$14A]:

[C#$!:$14A]:

[C#$!:$14A]:

[C#$!:$14A]:

[C#$!:$14A]:

No matching library detected. Attempting statistical inference..

.

.

.

Complete.

"$d§?ᯰ§8-||…"

The unceasing attempts to calculate and re-evaluate the stream of sounds into proper words fruitlessly heated its circuits, torturously saturating its mind… until one word became clear.

"Thievery."

This word was all it could comprehend in an ocean of corrupted, disjointed articulations.

Chapter Text

The sound of decrepit ashes and red-hot particles hauling through the air washed through the atmosphere, followed by an electronic crackling from within the room—all against the backdrop of the idle machinery .

The machine's mind raced, overloading its processors; it harshly held itself in place, faced with the long, red-hot barrel of a hunting rifle with patchwork displays, gauges and vacuum tubes grafted onto it. Its head carried small round marks for each and every lug-nut, bolt and screw that had stricken it moments ago. Every single one of its joints creaked as if in agony, as it attempted to hold off the bales of electronic circuits and mechanical limbs surrounding it from getting lodged in its limbs.

… talk…

"I have had no intention of committing or participating in such act, whether previously or in this moment." the machine spoke, not dropping its usual monotonous tone for a moment even as it lay half-buried in banging piles of rust. "I do not possess weaponry, or physical storage, of any kind-"

$4ȪʧËഈ/s*-§ĊandroidÔĝt▓ªÃ§ċ‽‒⑁Ώ౮⻣〽ⰹ Ό꤀Ꝣ⥑⤯᪥㏌җ⸙ё ο⼤RȈ⫼℻ⰪᎠ᪐،-

"I do-n't t-a,ke to:o ki*nd^ly to you.. dirty machines.. androids.."

The ever-unseen lever jerked again. The mixture of sunlight and green light emanating from inside the room was eclipsed for a split second by a bright flash of energy seemingly bursting from the weapon in front of the machine; an electric thunder shook the entire building.

The stranger tripped in wide-eyed shock, falling backwards behind one of the shelves as he screamed. Ash-black remains were left where his hand's skin was, revealing its rusting artificial endoskeleton comprised of wire, fiber and motors. He leaned down, as if trying to hide himself in his current state from the machine, and began to mutter to himself compulsively; yet this time, it was not vaguely reconstructed gibberish for the machine was, to its own disbelief, hearing perfectly coherent speech.

"I am.. not- an android. Not an android. Not an android. Not an android. Not an android."

The machine, peeking thinly between the shelves and the junk obscuring its view, caught him scraping skin off of his burnt hand with his left, the weapon out of its unblocked field of sight.

It seems the situation has de-escalated.

"My.. hand… my hand.. my hand… it's still human. Still human… still…" the whispers grew more deranged and quieter with each word.

A possible opening. My associate may have been aware of this irregular individual's eccentricities, yet why had they not informed me prior?

"I had neglected to mention that I had arrived here accompanying a travelling human, in search of one who would be willing to aid him. It is extremely possible that he has encountered you.." the machine explained itself, immediately following its deduction.

An instant after it had finished speaking, the stranger stood up in an awkward position covering their damaged hand, and stared at the machine, awed, before turning away and hurrying upstairs; it was left by itself in the dark room, attempting to regain its posture as it crawled between the scrap and the sleek fallen-over machinery from the shelves.

Where the fuck am I? The fucking smell, this smells like a sewer sex dungeon shitfest!

The man, hearing a buzz, opened his eyes, finding himself in a suffocating dark, dank claustrophobic space no larger than , rough edges of cloth were sorely rubbing against patches of his exposed skin, grinding his wounds and burning his scars. After the numbness of his body wore off, his senses slowly returned, and he felt a cold, enveloping feeling over his face and chest.. wet. His joints were frozen stiff, and torturously contorted against their will, constantly protesting in pain. A warm feeling rose in his gut, followed by a relief, and a strong smell clouded the asphyxiating air.

Jesus H. Christ have mercy on my shitstained soul, am I fucking dead?! Am I at the gates of Hell, in the great void?!

He began hysterically shaking, smacking headfirst against the floor before painfully slamming his hip into a smooth, hard object, followed by a loud banging, and the sound of a liquid spilling. He opened his mouth to scream, yet only a raspy cough came from his torn throat, his jaw dropped wide open. He jerked his elbow, closing his eyes and wedging his hand between his forehead, and the metal teeth of a zipper grinding against it, before reaching out with his index and thumb to the top end and pulling down, gasping for air as his hand slowly slid down along.

The sound of the man's labored breathing, as he freed himself was interlaced with the pounding of his sore temple against the ground, stretching and moving himself on his side out of a bag and feeling the same wetness spread onto his legs and ragged clothes—a puddle of water; its freshening feeling easing him out of panic, as his neurotic fidgeting slowly faded out.

..Air.

Air. Water.

I feel like a human again… holy shit.

His hands trembled, reaching into the dust-brown fluid splattered on the flooring and on his skin, as he spread it all over his face, wiping his eyes—and mucous feet as well, were his back not protesting in agony every time he'd attempt to bend over and reach them.

His eyes widened, as he rotated his neck in increments finding himself in a well-lit, small rustic closet before shutting his eyes and reflexively averting his eyes from a burst of light blazing his sight, muttering under his breath with his eyes shut tight. "Agh..sun.."

The man lied down on the then-flattened open bag he was carried in, and after multiple attempts, opened his sore eyes looking around the cramped space he'd woken up in without an explanation.

..s..

… A body bag?! I'm…  that son of a bitch! He set-

Wait! What the fuck am I doing?! I'm moving my ass this time!

As his eyes regained focus for a fraction of a second, he began to make out the content of the space around him. As he coughed up the dust in the air, his attention was drawn to the sole door of the chamber, an inch to the side of his feet—old, cracked, and lined with a layer of black steel grilling… yet most importantly, he squinted, lockless. Drawing every ounce of effort from his feverish, trembling wasted calf, he slowly raised his foot closer to the handle lever; only a moment before the sound of boots thumping and unintelligible speech rushed towards, and the door was swiftly forced open—outward, by a familiar figure, and the man's eyes widened instantly, leaving his faltering foot up in position as if it were a defense of sorts.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit— shit, it's him! Please don't be a fucking rapist!

The man immediately raced to fill the silence, screaming maniacally while crawling back from the door, hectically looking behind, and in front of himself. "F-f-finish th-the-", he stopped as his throat gave out and felt dry chunks of blood on his tongue, "Finish the-job, but f-f-for!..For-f-for G-God's sake, d-don't—", he firmly grimaced, clenching his eyelids to distract himself from the lunging screeching of his throat and quietly pushed himself to finish every word as his voice died out, "don't penetrate… ," he inhaled, "my… ass… while I'm alive."

The figure, after hearing his plea, put the man's foot down, and spoke with an uneasy Asian-accented stutter in an off pace, achieving a somewhat friendly yet eerie tone and gesturing with its arms at him as if trying to calm him down. "Sta-stay.. calm. "

The man crawled further back, with a tenser look on his face.

Stay calm in a room with you? The fuck? What else do you want me to do next? Spread my ass cheeks?

"I-am human, like you." The figure produced a small, dark green steel canteen from a pouch on its suit, and extended its arm, as if offering it to the man; he responded with a blank, open-mouthed stare at the container. "This is-

Poison? Arsenic? Lead? Anthrax?

-water."

The man's attention jumped to the oddity of the face in front of him; staring straight into glowing goggles wired to circuits soldered onto a hard hat, as he reluctantly took the canteen until he switched focus to twisting the lid with his fingers, and sipping the fluid inside.

Tastes like—this actually tastes better than the water I did drink before. Guess it's filtered or something.

Wait, is this poisonous? Fuck it, it's water either way. I fucking want water and I'll gamble with whatever shitty life I have left for it.

He looked at the stranger's face, standing in front of him—with his stocky build and a strange gun attached to a muddy-greenish, flexible body armor suit, and immediately lowered his head back down, looking at the canteen shaking mildly in his hand before taking another couple of mouthfuls; the dirty haze in his mind clearing bit by bit, until the canteen was emptied. Not that there's much else I can do anyway.

"Why are you h-here?" the stranger asked—almost as if he was trying to hide his previously-displayed accent by imitating the man's.

Am I the only person this guy has ever talked to in his life?

Shit- what was I even supposed to say?

"Uhhm.."

The man, mustering up his strength, fought against his own weight pushing his arms off of the wall and flooring, and held on to the shelving of the closet; his legs were sorely burning after his weight shifted towards them. His grip on the edges of the shelving hitting his back tightened as he felt his arms nearly snapping in half, breathing heavily as he looked at the stranger , who had been standing back, unmovingly ogling the man's every movement.

Where's the machine? Where the hell is he? Why am I with this guy? Where the fuck is the machine? I'm scared. I want to fucking die.. how did I even get here? Shit… yesterday's all so surreal.. my life -

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.. I'm just, maybe.. too paranoid. Yeah. Actually..

I wanna have a fucking word with this guy, I don't give a shit anymore.

I'm just gonna say it.

An instant later, the man spoke up, trying to vent out his pent-up frustration and anger. "My back i-", he stopped before clearing his throat, and blinked before staring squarely into the stranger's goggles with a face of anger and desesperation, "Why I'm here? Excuse you, Do I look like I'm here for a fucking travel tour? You were going to fucking shoot me, asshole. You fucked my head. You knocked me the fuck out. You dragged my ass here in a body bag."

He went on, the current of anger becoming more and more prevalent in each following word. "Hello, welcome to Social Interaction 101: you don't try to fucking kill people to fuck their corpse, and you're just standing the fuck here like another one of those penis-shaped aliens. Jesus Christ. Everyone here is such a fucking prick.

You know what? I want to be left the fuck alone. I'm going out of here."

The man began to regain his balance, and limped out of the closet, staring at the stranger for some time before gesturing to him to move aside. "…Get the fuck out of my sight."

The sound of a familiar whirring suddenly returned, and the man felt a strong hand holding him by the shoulder.

JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE F-

He turned his neck, looking at the stranger who was facing away, and his shoulder was jerked, whisking him away from the rustic living-room scenery interlaced with strange spinning machinery extending from under the ground to a stairwell across a doorway—it was the machine again, slowly hopping out from the depths.

Chapter Text

The man glared with a bloodshot scowl at the end of the staircase the machine was climbing, arching his back as the pain spiked in his feeble legs after the stranger's hand caught his shoulder.

Time to tell this asshole off for good, one last time. "L-", the man vocalized before stopping his train of thought, blinking his burning eyes and grimacing for a split second. Wait, no—maybe I'll have to hold it in this time. If I'm gonna die, better go out without the wisecracker's foot up my ass.

"You know, I never got your name." the man said, with carefully-hidden spite in his tone.

The machine finally jumped away from the last step in the flight, and stood on the creaky floorboards of the living room, a second before turning its head to face him and answering in its usual electronic monotone. "I happen to be referred to as what you could translate as Cog. The reason for this being that, in my community, I have been known to handle important tasks to the functioning of the social structure as one of its founders."

"I don't give two sh-I don't even—", he looked over his shoulder at the stranger watching them, and back at the machine, "what does that have to do with anything?" he asked, not hiding the smallest bit of perplexion at the bizarre, uncalled-for explanation.

"I ask, what task do you think you can handle in your current state? Do you understand your goal? Do you understand the meaning behind your name, Derrick?" the stubby continued, looking at the man without deviating from its disconnected monotone; it seemed it preferred to let hostility more subtly bleed through its words.

..What the fuck am I trying to do?

The man stood still with a look of shock and confusion on his face, attempting to process and filter all the words in his head, and raised his hand at the machine, almost pointing his finger. "..F-Goddammit."

Holy shit.. wait.. I'm about to fucking piss myself! Damn! I am not in the fucking mood to think! What the hell was I smoking?

The man's tone dropped, and his speech slowed down. "The.. thing.. is… well…", he averted his eyes from the stubby, "I'm going to.. ah..", he looked at the stubby, and turned immediately to face the stranger before facing the stubby again, "I'm going to take a piss and… I'll be back."

The man heard a voice—it was the stranger. "Battroom," he said in a flat tone; the man turned around confronted with pain in his ragged neck, and saw him oddly smiling, pointing at a door twenty feet away down a corridor. He slowly turned his neck back forward, and held on tightly to the wall for balance with one hand and to the stranger helping him out with the other, limping towards the door as he hid the pain and fatigue in his legs, before grabbing the door handle and tripping as he pushed the door open. He took a heavy breath, inhaling the dusty air and coughing as a headache suddenly resurfaced from the blood flow, and after the stranger helped him up, stepped ahead. The machine's voice spoke again a question the man did not make out, and the stranger let go of him, standing still facing the stubby before the door was closed on him.

..Wait, wh- what a jackass .

A strange, high-pitched whizzing sound striking down from the sky warped his face into a pale, frozen expression; in no small part impaired by double vision, his bloodshot eyes scoured a large vegetable field, with what seemed to be a small outhouse by a water pump wired to a power line at the very end of a hundred-yard stretch of farmland and plants surrounded by dark, dank swampy marshlands in the shadows of the domineering stature of the colossal trees, almost entirely veiling what resembled a decayed urban skyline from the man's view in the great distance; he then squinted at the sky narrowly avoiding the flare of the sun, and saw a large group of dots crossing the sky above him, with small colorful flashes of light.

What.

Are there planes blowing shit up in the air-

..Oh shit!

The man looked back in front of him, and set out to run across the field along the power line, holding on to his chest to numb a sharp, continuous pain and bending over to hold his bladder in check as he trampled over dirt, stone, mud and avoided tripping over the plants and corncobs strewn in messy, irregular rows—almost like goddamn mines in a minefield, he thought, an association likely formed through the faintly-audible sounds of explosions that were spreading through the landscape from high above, punctured by the hard crashing tearing through his eardrums, of a fiery rotor swirling down from ahead and slamming against a rock mere steps ahead of his wounded, gunk-infested, worm-carrying bare feet.

Fire..?

The man turned his head around, looking at the gritty, dirt-covered back of the wooden house , and narrowed his eyes looking at the second-story window while lending an ear to the continuous crackling of the fire; no one was visible through the reflection of the clouds.

The man caught on his pace, trying to ignore the rising, boiling pain around the cuts on his foot—now swollen and surrounded with greenish pus where blood was flowing at first as he snuck through rows of corn, shallow water and nondescript plants and trees, staring at the outhouse that drew closer to him with every limping step, until he'd finally reached the door, opened it, and crawled inside, closing the door and pulling his clothes down as he smiled in triumph.

I did it! Ah.. time to leak—oh.

The man's smile of relief died out as soon as he sat down on the rough, stained surface of the seat, and looked down at his underwear.

..I did shit my pants back there, after all.

· Translation software deactivated.

The machine stepped away from the staircase's end, turned to the left and walked to the hallway the stranger and the man were going through, before facing them.

" You have mentioned androids earlier; is it possible that you have established relationships with, or know of any?"

This question from the machine, was met with a distinctly flat stare from the stranger through his goggles, who swiftly let go of the man by his side, and closed the door; his mouth shifted into a slight anxious frown and his face grew tense, a scowl appearing above his goggles and the reddish-black burn marks on his porous skin stretching and folding as if he felt cornered by the stubby's words, and reflexively laid his hand on the holster carrying his rusty, shotgun-like weapon, and the other on the cables and wires holding the rectangular object tied to it.

"No.. I know and..roids. I met them." he coldly stated, with a nervous hesitation on every other consonant. "They do not view me as human, but I have lea..rned to d..eal with th..them. " he added, in a scolding tone.

The stubby looked at the stranger and lowered its hands in submission, seeming to have gotten the subtle threat. "What is their importance to you?" it asked, in an inquisitive tone.

His face relaxed, as he looked at the cables protruding from the basement in the living room and stood quietly for a moment; the stubby turned back and saw the ceiling of the room covered in sprawling wires and lightbulbs, and on the other side, another one that stretched over above the door. The stranger's voice surprised it again, "I..studied the and..r-roid body for a very long time," reached into the inside of his suit with one hand, and pulled out the severed five-fingered frame of a pristine steel mechanical hand that looked nothing of a machine's, save for a few bits of shrapnel lodged between its joints.

The stubby did not respond, and stood still before looking at the door. In the corner of its vision, it saw the stranger letting go of his weapon before noticing a reddish glow coming from behind the door, and faintly hearing a crackling sound. A single instant later, the stranger turned around gazing through the door from the side, breathing loudly, picked up his hard hat and goggles with one hand, and threw them both away violently, revealing his burnt, ash-black scleras and faded, distorted iris and throwing a quick glance at the machine before opening the door in a split second, twisting the doorknob while gripping his rifle and kicking it open with a loud crack, sending half of it flying in pieces.. into a field-consuming, blazing-red, smoking fire, terrifyingly dominating the entire view.

The man sat straight on the rough seat, contemplatively; his migraine, coupled with blurry eyesight, was making it harder for him to focus on anything other than the godawful stains on his clothing. The slightest bending of his back would be met with the feeling of pins and blades tearing at his skin, opening his many abrasions and wounds to bleed wider.

The deed had been finished; his legs however, would scream bloody murder every time he'd shifted his weight onto them to get up.

A question was lingered at the back of his mind.

Damn.. how am I gonna clean up? I don't have more clothes, and I sure as hell am not gonna fucking ask for a new pair for free saying I shat my old one. If this is the future, where's the goddamn toilet paper?

A sound he couldn't quite make out, like a white noise buzzing in his ears, made itself clear: a sparking of sorts, confusing him and a.. strong smell, distinct from that he'd expect from the outhouse.

The door crept open with a mellow creak, and the man sat in horror, unmoving as his face paled. "Close the fu-", he coughed, unable to stop, his face frozen as if he were about to scream. The tension of the moment ramped up, building to a panic attack as he saw a brown cat sticking its paw in the gap between the door and its frame.

The sight of an animal witnessing him in the act was never something he'd expected to happen to him, and the loss of privacy made him jump out of his skin. He frantically propelled himself with his arms, and reached out leaning down, wincing at the pain of his back and holding onto his pants. A blink's time was all it took him to conclude that the smoke and hot red blaze over every yard of the field he was facing, and the smoke clogging his nostrils was, indeed, a fire.

He turned around, making out the cat hiding in the outhouse after a few seconds—the light of the fire made it easier to look inside.

What the hell are you doing, you stupid ca- Where did you even come from?!

He limped inside, fleeing from the fire and prepared to lay his hands on the cat, almost grabbing it by the tail, before a vague memory surfaced.

Wait.. that story my parents used to tell me about when I was three.. oh yeah, they said I was lucky I grabbed it by the back of the neck, or it would've scratched my face.

The man looked at the animal, standing on the edges of the seat and looking at him, and gently stretched his hands, careful not to get scratched while holding in an up-and-coming panic attack, and laid his hand on its scruff before slowly, tensely lifting it up, his bone-thin arm nearly snapping apart under the weight as he walked out of the shed and looked at the fire in front of him—grey smoke filled the air, drawing every ounce of effort out of him to keep breathing for dear life while he tried to hold himself together in front of a lone, painful death.

I fucking deserved this. Or maybe I didn't? I didn't think it was gonna sprea- no, what kind of dumbass justification is this?

A voice called, seemingly from the other side of the burning field.

"Ssstoooopp!"

It was the stranger, shouting manically loud enough for his voice to ring crystal-clear in the man's eardrums, almost as if he was breaking down. Shit! He thinks I did it!

He walked towards the pump; no dice. The power cable had been burned down by the expanding fire—a wild, scorching flame that would sooner or later reach the man's feet if he did not take action.

How do I work with this? This is fucking pointless.

He looked at the cat in his arm.

But the cat is more deserving of life than I probably am.

Chapter Text

The rustling of bare feet over the heating grass was completely silenced by the crackling of the fire; there was no way anyone could hear anyone in this fiery wetland hellhole, unless one were to shout from the top of their lungs.

The stranger's voice hid no distress; even when shouting from a hundred yards away, and with the man falling into stupor, he'd burned a few words on the listener's eardrums. "…The garage…! Keep Zin safe in the garage!"

Tell me where the fuck your garage is, dumbass! I'm the one at the asshole of this field, and I don't see it!

' Zin' though, that's nice name for a cat.

Well, I'm gonna die—his train of thought was cut off by a sharp, tearing feeling, like being stabbed and dismembered, my fucking arm!

The man, reflexively letting go of the cat, leaned down and slowly grabbed his arm by the elbow, closing his eyelids and taking a deep breath.I let go! I… nah, he's safer without me. I'm just dead weight at this point.

But maybe, I guess, just for one moment, I wasn't completely selfish.

Or I hope so.

The smell of the burning smoke, however, choked every part of his throat as it filled his mouth and nostrils, and as he open his eyes again, he looked at the fire. Facing the reality of the situation, he stood silently watching; waiting for death to come collect its due on him. He turned once more to look at the cat, and found it following a path he hadn't noticed, venturing deeper into the tall trees past the cut-down stumps—likely the path it came from.

Holy shit-is the garage he was talking about down here?

The cat, unwittingly, led the man down a dark path downhill he could almost hear his knee joints creaking while following. They skirted the roots of several trees, before a wide wooden barn half-covered under massive branches and leaves revealed itself to him, with its barn doors open, and the man froze up again, startled, and looked the other way upon hearing the stranger's screams over the fire once again—almost unintelligible, but he thought he'd heard the word "battery" in-between what sounded like the stranger too overwhelmed to form anything sounding remotely coherent and banging on wood.

The cat sprinted inside, leaving a good half-minute to spare before he came crawling in, entered leaning on a door larger than him, panting and looking around inside to find it. Instead, he'd found something else, smack-dab in the middle of the barn—a half-wrecked vintage sedan, and by the looks of it, a dead, rusty dirt-scraper that would make my dad's trashy Oldsmobile 88 look like an engineering masterpiece.

A battery.. for a water pump, right? You would get one of those in.. yeah, this..  a fucking car! I'm bringin' the bacon home!

Actually, maybe I could just steal it to get the fuck away from.. uh, where the hell would I go anyway?

"Forget it", he muttered to himself looking at the barebones car skeleton, and the large barn door with a padlock in front of it while slowly stepping in without losing his grip to the door at the entrance, until he'd heard the cat meowing from behind the door and pressing against it; he flinched, realizing he'd been pushing it into a tight corner, and lost his grip before collapsing on the gravel ground with a heavy thump, only his hand separating his head from the rubble—every bone in his fingers almost snapping in half between the ground and the sudden weight of his temple, as if it had been dropped into a crusher, not helped by his back wounds rubbing against the gravel only separated by the thinning fabric of his aged shirt.

The cat emerged from the door unscathed, and looked at the man who smiled, letting out a sigh of relief and began to make himself comfortable lying down, letting go of his legs before opening his eyes widely and gasping as he turned his head halfway. His dulled sight was then set on the underside of the car, picking up the contours of a bottle sitting under the loosely-hanging, dislocated steel bar where a rear fender would have been.

A fuckin' bottle? Maybe it's a water bottle.

He crawled towards the garage, slowly propelling himself with his legs and arms to close the distance. The floor felt smoother inside the shed, like concrete; to him, a grace he was sure to remain thankful for. The cat's footsteps passed him by, and immediately following the slamming of his outward-folded hand against the dusty paved cement within range of the bottle, the sense of accomplishment was ruptured by a growl from the cat standing over it. Upon craning his neck to take a closer look at the hand, a hiss followed, and once he had a view of his hand, he panicked seeing claws extended, ready to slice through what was left of his sweaty palms, and pulled it away breathing heavily at the same moment the cat swung its paw. "Jesus! You could give my mom a run for the money!"

While the man tried to get himself up to move on to searching for the car's battery, bumping and pushing against the floor, the cat leaned to fit under the bumper, taking out the bottle with its paws, picked it between them and rolled it out from the shadow of the car, taking his attention—it was opaque, white plastic. An unintelligibly-written set of letters was inscribed in black print on the bottle.

The cat shook the bottle vigorously between its paws trying to open it, and gave up before long; the man, remembering the pending disaster, jolted sprinting along the car, coughing after every breath he took in as his forehead dripped of sweat.

The car's engine was fully exposed; wires were strung all over, and the pistons on the engine block were rugged, their top surface scraped thin from corrosion—and with other parts in similar condition, would leave no doubt that the vehicle was a hassle to even consider escaping in. He plunged his hands into the workings of the engine, sliding his fingers along a pair of thick cables before reaching their rusty clips, connected to the terminals of a heavy, grime-covered car battery.

After disconnecting the handles and tossing them away, the dust and grease against the hard plastic casing of the battery smeared itself on his hands, making the effort of lifting it out as gross as it was straining his near-lifeless arms; not that the grill he'd been leaning against for leverage was sanitary either, covering the rags he'd once called his sweatpants in a blackish smudge while cracking bits and pieces all over it. Grunts followed, as his already-sore throat shriveled to take away from the pain of holding the twenty-odd pound battery over his left shoulder, just enough for him to slowly step aside and carefully trudge along the right side of the car, watching his every step.

That cat better not renovate my feet, or I'm throwing him out… alright, maybe I shouldn't even if he does.

A light tap on plastic, and a rolling sound preceded a very painful step—his foot twisted on the plastic bottle, making him lose his footing, and fall on his back. The weight of the battery was crushing him from the top down; all he could do was to wait for the inevitable thud, crack and acid leak while his temple was slammed flat on the concrete. Instead, the clack of it smashing against the casing of a small crumpled gas cylinder caught him off-guard, and he looked around, searching for the battery before finding it leaning on a loose driver's seat, held from crashing down on the ground only by a few tight ropes, and a chain on the underside.

The sight of a driver's seat on the right side of the car disoriented him, as blurry as everything was to him then; the acrid smell of the car's parts and the stench of newfound misery on his shirt took on the duty of keeping him awake until the cat hurled the bottle back at his face.

…

Who knew a bottle could make me so fucking miserable? Not a bottle of alcohol,  a plastic mystery bottle in some deranged old crazed gunman's garage.  Guy probably snorts lines of his own coke in his spare time.

He laid his hand on the bottle, and lifted his head off of the ground with the other hand's arm, grabbed it and twisted the lid open. A cough and another after inhaling—his throat was sore, after all—and he sniffed the contents of the bottle before immediately regretting, tearing up; the sting of rubbing alcohol was not pleasant to the nostrils from up-close. The bottle immediately came down with a hard slam against the floor, and quite a few drops smattered themselves over his hand, leaving a chilling feeling as they evaporated in the heat. After a moment, the man took another look at the bottle, and at his feet; the cut was covered in greenish, slimy fluid and had swollen, surrounded by hardened blood fragments and soil.

The sight of the wound, left to rot, finally let a truth he wouldn't want to believe sink in: even if it were treated or his foot were amputated, his days were numbered in this world he was never meant to be a part of, and being killed by a machine would be the least painful way out.

And he grabbed the bottle once more. Sat up, and slowly poured out its contents all out, straight onto his wound and clenching his shaky fist. The wheezing and coughing that followed masked his agonizing screams, reduced to crying in front of the cat that was watching him spill it like a drunkard, all over his foot, his ankle, and slowly moving away from the acrid-smelling puddle of alcohol, blood, dirt and pus that was forming before trailing off behind the car, and lying down.

Droplets were soon the only thing left, and with a clack, and a wobble, the bottle fell flat and rolled on the concrete.

Four fingers on one hand on the wall, and the other hand on a wide cylindrical welded beam by the driver's seat in lieu of a door held him up from the vile-looking puddle under his feet, propping him up. If I wasn't going to cook, I would just lie down here and turn into a real corpse by the time I fall asleep. Fatigue struck like a knife through his arms; the only thing keeping him as he picked up the weight, and carried it from the bottom up, slumping it over his shoulder, was the knowledge that he might be burned alive, if he didn't act—and on time, which was running out. And if I'm going to die, it'll be in no hellfire.

He stepped around the then-asleep cat, headed down the door, his feet pressing against the rough gravel with the weight of the battery, making his way surrounded and choked by the ominous patch of trees that left nary a thing visible but the red blaze, the smoke filling the air to a nauseating choke. The tree stumps surrounding the field had been reduced to ashes, and soon enough, the rest of the forest would be on the line, and the man knew he'd be the first victim it would claim. His grazed soles, trampled over marsh and mud, were relieved once he'd dropped the weight of the battery, as slowly as possible, on top of the water pump, and laid his hands down on the pump's steel surface. The relief was short-lived, when the stranger's voice burrowed through the man's eardrums again, louder and closer than before…

He stood, still, inhaling the smoke and looking between the battery and the pump's cables, his mind gone entirely blank after noticing they didn't fit—almost like he'd taken a break of sorts, just from.. being alive, with vacant eyes, and a vacant soul.

The voice seemed to fade away, and for a moment, everything went quiet and bliss.

A cough quickly overcame him, and the shouting and crisp burning suddenly came in, clear again.. "…the inverter!" This time, from further away, or closer? No.. everywhere.. nowhere.

..Inverter.. holy shit, an electric inverter? That's what I needed? I really don't know shit about electricity.

A large black plastic brick, with loose jumper cables came crashing down, slapping the man once more back to reality. He looked at the window of the second floor, from across the fire: the window was open. A vaguely visible silhouette was inside; the stranger, he'd guessed.

… He almost fucking killed me.

Again.

The smoke covered his eyes, and his nose; everything was fading together, into an abstract.. mess. He loosely set up the alligator cable to connect to the wide box between his hands, hooking it to the terminals, and took off the old power cable's socket, plugging in the other one into the matching socket, and pressed a button arbitrarily. A mildly irritating buzzing rose, for a few seconds before water came spraying out of the pump's hose.

He kicked the hose around lazily, slumping down on the pump while the fire slowly withered away. He watched the smoke disperse, and only the ashen remains of the field left, with all the vegetables he'd seen once, not two hours ago, all reduced to pitch-black remains on the burned soil, and the rotor at the center of it all.

Jesus! The sky's a fucking fire hazard.

…

The scorching of the ever-present sun on his back numbed as he slowly walked back to the door, twice as slow as he'd left and thrice as exhausted. losing his breath before pushing the door open with his skull, holding on to the walls before collapsing and lying down, eyes closed. The smell of the old house's interior, and hearing the familiar whirring of his partner's gears in the distance helped put him at ease, if just for a moment-

-STOP.

Fuck.. water. I forgot to drink…

The clamping of the stubby's metal feet hopping over the floorboards was unmistakable. Eyes barely open, the searing light bled in, and a heap of books out the front door. Two hands crunched his jaws in by the cheeks, and spun him seeing eye-to-eye with the beams on the ceiling before he'd noticed the stranger's goggled, half-burnt tan face again, before the latter stood up and ran. The particular chirpy creaking of the closet door was followed by the sound of a bucket banging against the ground, and frenzied running before everything faded away; a trip to oblivion interrupted with all the comfort of a freight train crushing him in a splash of water to the face.

He opened his mouth, hoping to swallow, only to start manically coughing as the mineral-tasting fluid flooded into his mouth and throat, almost choking as he felt bile rising in his throat before gulping. His eyelids felt heavy, almost as if soldered together as he tried to blink, and his arms were all but powerless as he'd gotten picked up in the stranger's gloves, soaked in the man's sweat, blood and dirt particles.

"Stay awake—Don't-don't stop breathing." the stranger sputtered from behind his head, quietly—stressing the wrong accented syllables in every word did not put him much at ease while he tried to make out the coherent words in his half-conscious lethargy. His body was reduced to a mere aged plastic bag, being carried around cables and wires at every turn.

The room felt emptier, and bleaker than the first time he'd seen it, in a way that oddly brought back images of his home: furniture was moved out, rugs and cupboards, cookers leaving dark spots on the ground and the walls where they were before. The only thing that remained, other than the claustrophobic wiring from who-knows-what sort of contraption was underground, was his partner, standing still, not bothering to make a single peep save for the sound of its gears whirring, firmly scoping every inch of his reddened skin.

Urgh.. nngh..

The man opened his mouth, breathing in and coughing, and the stranger turned to the left, revealing a weary staircase of planks nailed to a couple of beams. The creaking of each step, and the feeling of death oncoming in every aching muscle of his body drove him to scream inside until he knew he'd made it in the attic. A dark room, lit by one window and a strange yellowish light coming from behind a whole slew of wires, buttons and levers.

Jesus.. fucking Christ.

The stranger's hands started to let go of his sides, and slowly dropped the man on his back without the slightest bump; even then, his scalp was torturously being skinned with a knife as it made contact with the ground—all overcame him with a longing to escape from the hell his body trapped him in.

Gear, or whatever your retarded name is.. I wish I could leave this shithole, or kill myself, but I think I'm already dead now.

Chapter Text

(Chapter 2)

-Bunker Server File System v1.1-

-AUTHENTICATION-

CODE: ********************

Privilege Level 7 access granted.

-HARDWARE CHECK-

00 22 03 00 3a 65 02 00 d7 19 05 00 00 00 00 .-..…

5a 01 00 00 a2 00 10 d0 0c 00 07 e0 00 08 00 #...-.[]…

STATUS: COMPLETE.

-cd MK:\logs\

-dir

Volume in drive MK is UNIT_EX_3A.

Volume Serial Number: 42O CF.

11942/03/01 - logFirstBoot_030111942

1194█ /05/04 - log_04051194█

1194█ /05/07 - log_05051194█

1194█ /05/07 - log_07051194█

4 Files, 49 data block(s)

0 Folders, 0 data block(s)

-MK:\logs\log_04051194█

Starting …

I honestly don't know what to do at this point. If it weren't for Operator 42O's orders, I would've had a breakdown in front of the Resistance.

I wandered in, finding trees with strange arrows carved onto them, with a sharp object. So I followed them. Maybe this is some sort of hint? A message? I don't know, and I'm hoping all this training with 10D is going to make a difference now that I'm assigned alone. That one-handed sword we took 801S' odd jobs for, I'm not letting go to waste.

I tear through swamps, with my Treacherous Covenant at the ready as I look to every side, hiding my fear of what I could find, and suddenly…I think I see something. An android. But it's not moving.

I run as fast as I can with my weapon out, listening for the sounds of machine lifeforms—there aren't any, and I feel less and less comfortable in my boots as I approach my target. I clench my cheeks in horror, and hold the tip of my sword closer to my face: not only is he long dead, but his skin was melted off of his frame.

I extend a hand out of my sleeve, turn him around to see his front, and load a hologram of the face they gave me.

It's a perfect match! His body was cut cleanly through the abdomen with a blue liquid dripping through his wires: oil and coolant, mixed together. I've seen it before, and the memories it brings back itch at the back of my mind.

I look at my pod, almost as if I'm pleading to it to let me leave, or help me somehow. "Pod, analyze this unit and its surrounding regions. If there's any data left we can access, let me know!" but despite everything, I know that I can't change this now, so I'll need to be the bearer of bad news.

"Analysis: unit shows no signs of life. The cause of death was to a 99.97% certainty a charged attack, pattern matching the Type-4O Blade, a YoRHa-issue weapon. Hypothesis: this unit was murdered by a YoRHa android. No salvageable data found."

"Wh-why?"

"Analysis: this unit is of an older model line, and has minor defects in memory modules."

"I see." I quietly respond, thinking of a way to figure this situation out.

A YoRHa android..? I start to form an idea of who this might have been, from what we were told by the Council of Humanity.

I walk up to a corner, and find a trail of dark molten metal stretching out as far as I can see.

…

I turn to Pod, and urgently come closer to whisper. "We can't stay here! Call Command, I need them to send my flight unit down. I'll need to come back to investigate later, with reinforcements!"

Pod remains silent, and I lean down, hunching myself over the ground. I wish 10D was here.

A minute later, it answers. "Flight unit location marked on map."

I run as fast as I can towards the marker on my minimap, only to stumble by a strange structure. Tiny machine parts loosely piled on top of each other, metal scraps, and a large plank covering an interior. "Analysis: no enemy found," Pod reassures me.

I throw my sword at the block of wood, piercing through it. Not a sound comes, other than that of the tip of my blade striking down on dirt as it falls down, and it reappears by my side.

I wander in. What I see here, isn't something any machine would've built. Before I lay my sleeve over a dusty drawer by my side, a hologram flashes at my eyes, jolting me in place.

Operator 42O's face surprises me with a look of concern, and I anxiously try to string together a sentence in my mind to explain the rush of information flowing through my mind.

"This is Operator 42O speaking to 5S. I need to know what's the matter with your flight unit request."

-end

End of log_04051194█

Now.

· Translation mode: Internal data only.

"Machine. Stay down here, and don't come up." the stranger said, tensed in his tone and looking off slightly to the side of the back door the man had left from, "We're preparing for the worst." and looked back at the machine, "so carry anything you can out the front door. We will get the laundry later."

The finger was pointed firmly at the machine from above, and he vanished into the yellowish-red sheen surrounding what little it saw of the ceiling and attic, before messily throwing heaps of books, compasses, rulers, wooden tables and desk parts and folded-up sheets of paper all of varying sizes down the stairs, over the ground and the rug. The machine picked up the first book that came by it, and read the title: "Feline Physiology." Certainly an odd subject. I cannot protest however, knowing my similar interest in studying humans, it put the book down a mere instant before being smacked with the sudden drop of a ragged, white sleeping bag with a hood turned brown by years of dust and grime, and a tear in the foot box.

As the machine's look centered firmly on the objective of its order, the stranger's voice spoke out of the blue, almost magnanimous yet unsettling, with its accent and pronounced rhythm. "I dedicate myself.. to learning about my surroundings. And my memory isn't perfect. I know, somewhere, that this mind of mine was looking to accomplish something."

The thumping—and occasional snapping of a table leg, along with the stranger's yelling; likely directed outside, it thought, were barely loud enough to mask the terrifying screams of an impending wildfire. In those moments, it still thought to itself, a researcher such as myself knows the value of knowledge. And that thought made it carry on its head, and hands, despite its joints creaking and almost breaking, every page of notes it couldn't immediately jot down in its memory, every book written in an old world language that it couldn't process, and every drawer, every table, in that order, until the flame's red faded away from the windows.

The attic, it noticed, reverted to a dimmer yellowish glow, and the man pushed through the door, falling in agony, reminding the machine of its own search.

It seems likely now... that is he dead, it looked at the dark, reddened eyelids on his dry, dirt-and-scar-covered face and corpse-like, withered frame.

The armored resident rushed down, and lifted him up, taking on his weight and slumping him upstairs. The cables strewn around the room seemed to start shifting in color, and a dreadful silence washed in from the attic down on the machine, save for the single sound of a switch flipping. The machine however, turned around and noticed the bag that'd remained by its side.

It picked up the sleeping bag, folded it four times in its small hands, carried it on top of its head while climbing each and every step of the staircase at a crawl pace, to make a point to move as silently as possible on the creaky floorboards. It slowly turned its head up, rubbing its metal casing against the fabric of the bag to get a clearer view of the attic's interior; the stranger's hardhat facing away, in front of a cloud of white particles floating around some tubes, electronic circuits and hydraulics stacked on top of each other, in a metal grid. The unaware stranger's voice spoke up loudly. "Machine—if you're still here, move the sleeping bag back up in a short time."

I must know what is ongoing in that room.

The stubby climbed to the top of the stairs, and found itself facing the green of its own eyes reflected off of a saw blade before dropping the sleeping bag on the floor, by the man's side.

"I said, in a short time," the stranger stated, his accent converging with that of the man. "I have things to take care of."

A surgical saw, it noted—in the gloved hand of the stranger, who stood still, shakily wiping the blade with a piece of cloth. The stranger slid the red cloth into an open pouch on his belt, and dropped the saw into a toolbox by his feet with a clang, next to the man's unmoving body laid flat on the ground.

"I have been ordered to transport this bag upstairs by yourself, and I have merely followed suit. However, it seems you were engaging in an activity of some kind, and I inquire as to its nature." the stubby spoke, in its monotone.

He shot a glare at the machine looking around the attic, resting his hand on the closed lid of a metal cylinder built into the rack. "I told you to stay down. We need resources right now," the stranger said, keeping his tone straight before spacing out his words, "food and water," before cutting himself off and turning to look at a dark, dusty tungsten bulb on top of the container. "I do, and your partner does."

The machine looked at the man's body, and back at the resident, bobbing its head slightly to look at his features. "It matters that it is explained to me what may, or may not have been done to my partner."

The stranger opened the lid, revealing the container's dark interior, and slid out the rifle part of his weapon from the side, followed by the rectangular object that was attached to it.

I will attempt to investigate at a later time. I must now find a way to make sure he does not remain in my partner's proximity, however, the machine judged by itself.

"A check of my medical supplies, is what I was doing…" he protested, "I prefer to remain on my own, in such moments." holding his weapon upwards by his side, before sliding it into his belt's holster.

The machine stood still, observing the condition of the resident's muted-greenish frog skin pattern polymer armor—not a single tear or rip, and made a suggestion. "We are in need of resources, as you have said. Therefore, it appears to me that it would be favorable to mobilize for resource-gathering." picking up the edge of the bag's loose-gripping synthetic fiber by its feet and lifting it in its creaking hands.

"In that case," the stranger walked up to the opposite end of the bag and grunted while bending over, "we will put him in the sleeping bag."

…It may turn out difficult to inspect my partner without his supervision, if he is laid out inside this bag.

The two dragged the worn-out bag, swinging it next to the man's body, and the machine grabbed the man's dingy feet, before being met with a look from the resident's face. "Your.. hands seem to be impressed on his skin," he noted looking at a patch of marks resembling its fingers, tightly imprinted on his skin—almost as if it were branded.

"We have found ourselves in conditions where travel options were limited, as you might have known from what you'd observed on our first encounter." the machine replied near-instantly.

The machine lifted the feet, and repeatedly hopped closer to the stranger, both carrying the man. The stubby bounced its feet sideways, and slid the man's heels down into the inside of the bag. The two moved around the body, attempting to fit it in tightly: glove on the man's left, and bent cold metal fingers on his right.

As they lowered his waist to the ground to insert his lower half in, the stubby turned itself to face the bag, and kept its look on the man. Suddenly, its legs leapt forward without letting go, pulling his feet out of a now-crumpled sleeping bag. The stranger, alarmed, shouted "What is it that can't be helped with you?!" and strengthened his hold, leaning down and remaining still; the unconscious man had almost fallen through the staircase, one foot dangling, leaning over to the right towards a painful death, or another concussion.

The machine turned its look toward him, and answered without wavering in its monotone. "I have applied a forward force too early." The resident turned his look to the machine, and took a step back to the right, dropping the man on his side, over the sleeping bag.

The stubby stood idly, staring at him. "I have merely committed a timing error."

The stranger suddenly straightened his posture, and abruptly began a march toward the machine, which leapt back twice before finding itself grabbed by the body, suspended in mid-air. "I demand that you cease transporting me in this manner," it spoke louder before turning its head around, and finding itself being held out through the window, to be dropped at a moment's notice.

The stranger's voice came up from behind. "You... will be dropped from here, if you do not cease your irritated act. I…"

It appears that his confusion between participles hints to a limited proficiency in the English language.

Looking below, was a thirteen-foot drop, that would be followed by a bang, clang and an oversized, rusty clockwork toy broken in pieces.

"…will not tolerate you…"

An instant later, it bobbed its head to its right, and noticed a laundry line within swinging distance behind a thick bush, holding tens of dry clothing items.

I fail to comprehend the decision-making process that has driven him not to merely use his weapon to deliver a threat towards myself.

…disrupting my operations." he spoke, a muted yet pauseless fury in his tone, before pulling the stubby back in. "Now," he dropped the machine softly on the hardwood floor, "you will remain still."

"I will." it answered, taking a long look at him: he took the rifle out, opened the charging rack's metal lid and inserted the weapon to power it up. An inscrutable atmosphere permeated the two's still stances. The resident stared at the warning light until it lit up with the sound of a bell ringing. The light was a muted shade of brown from all the built-up gunk over the warning light's glass that drowned out a pure white fluorescence.

The container's lid opened by his hand, and he pulled out the weapon. "We leave the house now." he ordered, in the same tone unchanged. The machine followed him down around the dropped man, down the staircase and out the back door of the house, and came to a standstill facing the cooked-and-crooked remains of the destroyed power line, drooping into one of many puddles fed by the hose left running.

"It seems that it would be favorable for me to remain indoors," the machine suggested looking at the head of the resident standing in front of it. The latter responded silently, by picking it up in his left arm, and pulling out a utility knife from his belt as he walked out into the field with his right, swinging it swiftly at a cut of the thick cable, and leaning over to grab it with his left. The metal lining on the arm of the stranger's smooth Kevlar armor tightened against the machine's body, as he sprinted through the flooded swath of land, water splashing over its eyes and face with every step of his boots, and the latter took a hold of the hose, pointing it upward until the machine finally found itself face-to-face with the water pump.

"My hands are full. Press the button," the stranger ordered, and the machine's hand shook as it reached toward a small button on the side of the bluish cylinder, before lying its finger on it and pressing it, and the obnoxious screeching of unending hose spillage turned to complete silence. The stranger, now stepping softly on the wetland, thumped his boots on increasingly sticky mud before the stubby had seen itself passing by a small wooden booth, with dark-yellowish stains on its bottom. It appears that this is the facility for bodily waste disposal my partner has entered, it duly noted as it passed by, and hit its foot on a tree stump, falling on its side, and finding its shoulder being tied to it with the cut cable section, looking up to find the stranger standing above and fastening a knot.

"I would greatly appreciate to know the reason as to why I am being currently physically restrained, in this manner." the stubby, lying motionless on its back, said in its monotone. The stranger, looking back down through his goggles, gave one sentence: "I will gather equipment," and walked away, to whereabouts the machine could not make out, disappearing behind the tree stump as it tried to turn its head on the ground and set itself upright, to no avail. The sound of a large wooden door moving barely creaked through its sensors, and the stranger later appeared in front of the machine as briskly as he'd disappeared earlier, carrying several small metal cylinders, each marked with a flammable substance symbol. He pulled out his rifle, this time holding it with one hand, and pulling away on the hanging prism-like object with the other, before lightly pulling the trigger.

It seems that he has been highly angered, and may possibly execute me, if not warn me one final time.

A heated projectile of concentrated energy phased through the cable, destroying the knot and letting the machine loose. It finally propped itself upright with a swift movement from both of its arms, and looked at the stranger, who walked away shortly into the deeper woods before stopping and looking back at it. "You will follow me now."

The machine obliged, and creakily hopped over, following him down into the shade. Tall trees passed by, and its surroundings grew darker as the two made their way, until a small, reddish-brown hare fell rolling down from a knee-high slope in front of them, limping with a third leg protruding from its neck. Its fur was unevenly thick, and completely hid whatever ears, if any, that it may have had; the whirring of the machine's gears, and the stranger's raising of its weapon at its eye met with simple blinking from its only distinguishable eye. The sound of the rifle's trigger pulling, the flash of glowing yellowish pellets of light energy firing out of its barrel preceded the explosion of the hare's insides mixing with its outsides in being shredded to a fuming, rotting paste spread over the dim-lit grass, dirt and shrubs.

"Is there an explanation I may have for the reason behind what had just occurred?" the machine, looking at the hardhat-topped figure from behind it hastily kept up with, asked. A few steps later, he clenched his hands into fists and raised them, "That is not," he showed his face to the machine, scoping it with a stare that shot darts through his goggles, "wild…life!" he insisted, punctuating his every word with weighty movements of his fists in the air.

The thumping of his boots stopped upon the rise of a distant boar's squeal—a voice he'd been more eager to hear than he despised that of the machine. The step of his boots gently teetered closer to the edge on the grass, leaning down and reaching for one of the bright-blue metal cylinders on his belt. Taking a moment to check the flame pictogram, he tossed it out into the air, and eyed it narrowly as it dropped, nearly vanishing into the void below.

The machine, however, veered off to the side, a couple of feet away, over a block of granite, and scourged the view within the depths of the ravine beneath the cliff: the ruins of a freeway built over a gorge canal, covered in countless scraps and bits of corroded metal, and countless carcasses shattered under dead machines of varying sizes, undoubtably of inaccurately-reconstructed vehicles of human make.

A boar, no smaller than the sedan that crunched into a flat panel under its legs, left dents for prints on the roof of a school bus, hunching its face over the glands and loose-hanging berries from the overgrown weeds and plants that surrounded—and overshadowed—bales of rusting vehicle parts and rotting tires, on top of cracked, faltering tarmac. As its snout leaned down to the floor, it tried to bite down on the stranger's thrown canister, only for it to slip out of its mouth time after time. The stranger's hands shook as he stared down his sights, his breath losing its pace as the long rifle settled down in his arms and fired a single shot, aimed at a tiny, rolling dot hidden a league down.

An explosion flared up, to the sound of gas blasting metal to shreds, engulfing the pig and the plants it'd been ruminating in a yellow fireball, and tearing it limb from limb into large splatters of blood, muscle and bone, cooking under the sizzling heat as stacks of vehicles and scraps of machines shook and fell from their places. The banging of metal and glass rang in echo throughout the divide, smashing and breaking around the animal's splattered viscera.

The voice of the stranger was reduced to acute screeching as he let out a wordless cry, a blindsiding lightshow of projectiles ricocheting throughout the divide's depths, striking dirt, rock and plant alike. The machine shifted its look to the stranger lying on his side, looking away from the chaos and holding on to the ground by his head with his rifle up in the air. His goggles had fallen off of his eyes, and it made out his clenched, half-burnt eyelids in the split moment before he'd set them back in place with a gesture of his free hand; the machine stepped down, and came closer before stopping an arm's length from the handle of the rifle laid down by his hand, silent as a pin drop.

An exhale preceded his next order. "Your next action will be to move down to the destroy-" he huffed, "destroyed road below." he finished his sentence, as he stood himself up, holding his rifle tightly as the machine looked at it, before packing it into its holster.

Chapter Text

The stranger heaved himself upright, bits of the metal lining on his armor clanging as he lifted his weapon off the ground. A tiny, razor-thin object fell out of his pouch and made a barely-audible clack upon slamming the rocky floor and bouncing towards the steep edge of the ravine.

"Your belongings!"

"Ah—ah!," he gasps and turns his head to find circuitry cacophonously skidding against stone into oblivion. The machine was brutally shoved down, about to take a drop hundreds of feet to the same fate as the iron gorilla that had once nearly turned it to scrap metal. All that was left to do, was to face the rugged, impossibly steep cliff that overlooks the dark abyss below the decrepit freeway of dead boars and rusting cars.

I suppose a system shutdown is due for now.

The seemingly inevitable descent was halted, and the machine groggily turned its head around to look up. "The ci..rcuit is under you. Pick it up before it falls." The armored gunman's brawn-like build towered above it. He leaned down and gripped it by the leg, tightly pressing down on its creaking knee.

Its head slammed with a bang against the pale-yellow rocky wall of the ditch, and a small pebble split from the stone fell, taking sand with it.

"As I will," the stubby held to its flat tone. After a slow-and-steady turn of its head to look up—or more accurately, down, it caught sight of a palm-sized piece of foliage growing from the moss between the edges of two rocks covered in the debris that had fallen.

This might very likely be the only-

"It is visible?" The stranger's voice made its eyes flash in surprise for a moment, coming off more as if he'd made a statement than a question.

His strange syntax, and choice of tone is ambiguously threatening. Regardless, I am not one to take more risks than is deemed necessary.

"I am in the process of fetching the circuit board."

A moment after trying to turn its left arm, it heard a loud snap coming from within its body. A gust of oil leaked from its side, fading into the dark as the biped lost control of its shoulder; its precious arm had gone wild and free, and so would the rest of its body if another freak event followed. "Machine… have you destroyed my-"

"Negative. The sound you have witnessed is the triggering of my precise mechanical mode, a purpose-built function of my left arm."

"Do not try to fool me, machine. I know you have no such thing." The machine froze in place. "I will drop you if you destroy my circuit."

The machine took a moment to focus its lenses more closely on the objective a few inches below its eyes. Proportionally to the time I spend with this individual, my certainty of his complete and dangerous mental instability exceeding that of the human in his revolting appearance and demeanor alike, grows. In addition, I may have to deactivate my optical backlights in order to better discern the color of the object from that of the plant.

With a soft whir, it slowly adjusted its elbow and wrist and lifted its squarish, claw-like index finger over the pebble, and clenched it under its thumb before taking it off and dropping it into the dark beneath, not to hear so much as a pop from the scree.

Grasping between the leaves with all three of the measly appendages on its hand, the machine silently cursed its constantly unfavorable proportions, for its fingertips kept straddling the exterior of the moss. Admitting its failure, or even risking its life to ask to be lowered by so much as the width of a blade of grass, however, seemed to it a suicidal folly. Not even the man, who was now a long walk, a dozen awakenings, and several panic attacks away from where his partner was in body and mind, would have wanted to take the risk. One swipe after another, and all it could see was green at this close of a range—eventually, it decided that it would give up on light itself.

· Internal backlighting shut down.

The darkened view made its entire surroundings appear as bleak as the fate it wanted to avert so dearly for itself over one god-forsaken specimen of an extinct race as dim-witted as he is naturally violent.

A minuscule corner of a piece of plastic reared itself into its view from within the clump of moss, and the stubby carefully pulled it out by the skin of its fingertips, leveled the palm of its hand, and shut its fingers into a fist with a small chip inside. My fortune is as fickle as it is mysterious.

The machine quickly delivered in its steady monotone without skipping a cycle. "I have secured it in my hand. It would be time for you to return me to my upright ground position now."

Its eyes lit up once more; save for its feet slamming and scraping against rock, it was being raised to relative safety. The glow in its eyes returned as it slid up, before hearing the grunting of the stranger grabbing it with his right hand, and putting it upright. The machine held out its hand with the tiny chip inside and was almost forcefully ripped out of its palm by the resident, leaving its left arm swinging and squeaking.

It seems that dropping the item onto the ground for him to pick up would have been a better idea, it duly noted.

The resident handled the chip tightly at the fingertips of his gloves, sliding it under the stock of his rifle and shoving it within the wires grafted onto it. His other hand yanked on a cable from within the metallic prism hanging upside-down from it, and made it meet with the chip; a zap sounded, sparks flew past the machine's head, and a widening halo inscribed with floating runes spun around the barrel of the gun.

I may not be prepared for this, the machine decided as it backed away from the stranger aiming his mutated rifle firmly at the roof of a car on the freeway, by the sizzling remains of the dead boar and the exploded gas tank.

With the circuit now tucked in the depths of his armor vest, he pulled the trigger. A long, feverish string of glowing energy grew straight out of the gun's barrel with a hurl, sending him flying down towards his target. The machine stood over, watching him break his fall over the roof sheet of a hatchback and snap the radio antenna like a dry twig, without so much as a snap heard from above.

Junk and stray weeds packed themselves neatly under his weight as he hoisted himself up, holstered his weapon and walked over to various tipped-over scraps of metalwork and tires, shaking and arching himself to push them inch by inch with an aching groan while picking mucky, brownish bits of bleeding viscera and fat off in the dark from in-between vines, lugnuts and brake plates. Stuffing them into various bags on his suit of armor, the fleshy chunks of falling bits hid in the same earthy colors that cloaked him in the forest.

A side-view mirror reared itself from his side, falling over from above. Holding it closer to himself, the reflection takes a distinct shape. Himself. He fidgets uncontrollably for a moment, before tossing it away into the open grill above the fender. An indistinct sound in the distance drew a panicked breath from him, sending him into a deliriously agitated crawl toward a spot of light. Wads of grass, scrap and entrails were caked behind his arms, and over the metal and polymer lining of his suit. Each passing moment, his breath grew louder with one hand's grip on an exhaust pipe above, and another grabbing away at the mucky paving.

Once the blaze of daylight struck his neck, his arms pressed themselves like pistons screaming against the tarmac as he rushed his legs out from under the dislocated front-left door of a sedan, climbed over its trunk over to the roof and looked around: all to be seen was sandstone walls made of millions of years worth of cracks and strata, bushes, man-sized trees carrying an occasional berry, and long-dead vehicles, nothing that would seem to be a candidate for moving anytime soon.

He turned to look at the cliff he'd gotten down from; the machine stood on the edge still, idly watching him. Still, however, its position was off; it seemed to be closer to the block of granite to its left than when he'd gotten down.

The gun pulled out of its holster in his hands, he opened his pouch, grabbed the chip and hotwired it to the rifle—seeing the sparks and the runes form around the barrel, he aimed and pulled the trigger. The electronic sound permeating hundreds of feet in the air and the suddenly-closer thump of his boots set the machine jolting back from its place. From the other side of the ravine, a smudgy black shape flew out from the trees, and the machine covered its head with its remaining good arm, before looking up and hearing the flaps of wings: it was a crow.

The stranger heaved himself over the boulder off onto the ground, and stood himself up. A brief exchange of stares between the two ensued, interrupted by the sudden silence of the bird's wings.

A look of anxiety took over his face; he turned his head to look into the woods. "Go there." he pointed to a dark corner, with the faint shape of vines and leaves covering it.

Led by the shaking stubby, he stormed off toward a bush, shoulders square, weapon upfront and his sights at eye level aimed squarely ahead. Tall grass and bush twigs slowed down the pace of his boots as he eased his step to remain quiet, until he happened upon the same hare he'd shot earlier being pecked apart.

The bird turned to look around, craned its neck up at the trees and flew away the moment the stubby hopped in front of it.

"It was not here when I killed it." The gun-toting hard-hatter scolded it, blending confusion and anger. "It was moving… this was done by you."

The mechanical biped looked down at the corpse, and back at the gunman. "In your absence, I have witnessed an oncoming predator. The act of moving this hare served to distract it from my position." it maintained its monotone, with its best effort not to betray any fear.

"What preda..tor?" his voice grew quieter, scolding the stubby with the barrel of his weapon between its eyes. The last syllable almost faded from his mouth, giving rise to a nearby rising mechanical clunk.

To his ears, this was a call to arms, and to the biped, it ment its eyes were no longer staring at a dry, sun-battered steel spitfire mouth of death.

Looking at the hare, his face seemed to grow tense, prompting the machine to turn its head around.

"This was it." it took a couple of steps back, raising its right arm in front of its face.

Two spots of red light drew themselves on the grass in front of the two: a four-legged, slim machine with a long flexible tail hopped down from above, pouncing on the hare. Claws extended themselves from its limbs, tearing the carrion into neat little chunks and gnashing teeth brought themselves to the front of its broken skull, savagely devouring the remains of the dead animal and reducing them to paste in mere seconds. Its reddened eyes turned then towards its next target: the stranger.

A fevered mechanical screech ignited from the metal hound as its eyes shifted from green to a bloody shade of red. In the split second its legs arched back in anticipation, he rapidly pulled the trigger and cried out in panic, firing a row of glowing pellets that struck its frame and steered it sideways in mid-air over the stubby. He turned to face his enemy with a swish, kicked the tiny stubby aside and fired some more, before ducking to dodge the predator's next leap. The stubby, holding balance against a tree trunk with its right hand, turned to look at the stranger, not anymore troubling himself with the lambasted biped.

The opportunity presents itself, at last.

(Chapter 2/3)

-AUTHENTICATION-

CODE: ********************

Privilege Level 7 access granted.

-HARDWARE CHECK-

00 22 03 00 3a 65 02 00 d7 19 05 00 00 00 00 .-..…

5a 01 00 00 a2 00 10 d0 0c 00 07 e0 00 08 00 #...-.[]…

STATUS: COMPLETE.

-cd MK:\logs\

-dir

Volume in drive MK is UNIT_EX_3A.

Volume Serial Number: 42OCF.

11942/03/01 - logFirstBoot_030111942

1194█/05/04 - log_04051194█

1194█/05/07 - log_05051194█

1194█/05/07 - log_07051194█

4 Files, 49 data block(s)

0 Folders, 0 data block(s)

-MK:\logs\log_04051194█

Starting…

Continue at last point? (Y/N)

-Y

Reading…

"Their second-in-command, the one they sent me to find… he's dead." I barely restrained myself from shouting that last word. Operator 42O was prone to starting escalating shouting matches, until she was later threatened with revoking privileges for making too much noise around her fellow O-types. So instead, she adopted an almost angry look whenever she'd grow irritated out of worry. I can't say it was easy for me to look at, at first, but I learned to ignore it over time.

I try to not draw attention to myself, covering my nose mid-sentence as I notice a strange smell. "I analyzed his attack patterns with POD's help, and the results matched up to a fugitive YoRHa unit. And I'm a scanner, so this is too dangerous for me." I hope she isn't going to hold me here for long with questions…

"5S? Did you check your consciousness data properly while you were at the Resistance camp? You know, you're on an important job after tomorrow."

No! I mean yes! I mean… I shouldn't get this lost in my thoughts when I'm expected to be listening.

I caught myself trying to come up with an answer on the spot. "Oh, yes," I paused, "uh-"

"Most scanners work alone on far more dangerous situations than this. Are you sure," she insisted, "that you want me to call for backup? You've made mistakes before, and flight units aren't cheap to fly or maintain."

POD thankfully had chimed in. "Affirmative: we have decided that is the best course of action. Coordinates of our position and other critical waypoints will be sent to you."

"Understood. I'll call for support." The mildly annoyed bun-haired operator's face disappeared from view, and the words "TRANSMISSION ENDED" finally showed up.

Sometimes, I'm glad she's my assigned Operator, and at others, she's a pain. But it's something all us Scanners have to live with, I suppose. You can't be the intel gatherer for a war without getting a bit paranoid from time to time.. sigh.

I lowered my voice and looked at POD, placing my hand on his side. "So, any estimate on how much time it'll take for a response?"

"Estimate: approximately four minutes."

I walked over to the drawer, and leaned down. The amount of dust settled under it indicates it's been here for quite some time, and the moisture marks on its grain showed it wasn't quite taken care of, and if yesterday's weather announcement was any indication, the rain wasn't helping at all. I pulled my long sleeve back, and opened it with my hands. A pen and a notebook were inside.

What could be in there? I'll be the first to admit: it's not polite to look in other people's belongings, but this is as important as anything else while I'm on a mission.

I pick up the notebook, pull it out and flip its cover open with my own two hands. POD softly hums to my ear as he hovers right next to me to take a closer look of his own at the contents.

...What's this writing? I can't make sense of whatever language these inscriptions are in. I flip the rest of the pages, looking for anything I can read...

Wait!

Something just fell down. A card of some sort? And with a picture of a deformed bald man's face on it.

POD spoke, my body shifting to the direction of his voice. "Notification: An allied unit has been dispatched to Unit 5S' position."

Alright then; it's decided: I'll take a deeper look into this later. For now, I'm putting this back where I found it.

A voice startles me from behind. My legs lose their grip on the floor and I nearly trip… it's just 7B and her POD. "5S? They told me you wanted backup. Looks like it's safe here… except for the smell. Good thing I'm here to help with that last part!" she chuckled, at least that I agree with her about. "I know what you're thinking, I'll let you have some when we're back."

...Wait, how in the world did she read my mind?

"Hey. Do you actually believe what they tell us about how some rogues can be extremely dangerous? Come on..."

7B was a brute who towered over me, and with an attitude to match. She grabbed me by the shoulder, and dragged me out of the shelter. I felt her weight leaning sideways against me. Her sharp earrings tugged on my hair almost as strongly as I felt like pushing her away from me. She put her arm around my neck with a cheeky grin on her face. "The guy they killed, he's an old Resistance model. We're called the next generation, and we have an R&D division for a reason. Command even puts us through mandatory upgrades every now and then!" I couldn't even hear myself think over her spiel while she pulled me in her tread.

I did not like being dragged around like this, and it didn't make me any more at ease that she wasn't taking me or the situation seriously.

I can't take any more of this.

I certainly wasn't going to do this again until I could do it with somebody who understands me, and not under the pressure of a mission.

End of log_04051194█

(Chapter 11)

Off the corner of his vision, the man saw a fast-moving, small object, and instinctively turned to peek, finding that the spherical creature had abandoned them to hide between the roots of a tree, and let the moose run wild.

The creature brewed a trail of dust and dirt in its wake as it backtracked its previous path, fumbling through the mud-and-pebbled forest landscape. It followed the boar's prints, then the large, squarish footprints the stubby left behind along with the tracks of the man being dragged. I hope the old man doesn't hurt my friends while I'm gone!

Cog looked terrible last I saw him, so I'm gonna give him the stuff he wanted for free this time! I bet they'll thank me when I get back! note: remove this later by using show don't tell

The sheer speed of its roll ramped up as it approached the slope away from the house; its face was nigh-invisible in the blur of its meteoric race through the woods, and its path began to wobble before it veered off into mid-air.

Mutters came out of its mouth, barely audible enough for it to hear its own voice. "I'm Part Man, the Part Man of the Woods, serving only the best goods.."

It bounced off the branches of one tree to the next, lightly passing as a feather through slews of leaves like hammocks, branches like tightropes and boards, pine trunks like poles to be dodged, sprawling roots like twisted, twined pipes that contorted around the rusted remains of machine units. High and low ground alternated in its movement like counterpoint, rhythmed by the occasional chitter of wild birds flying out of its path and the distant yowls and squeaks of wildlife.

"...Under a mighty tree, always with a smile of glee…"

A left turn off a root, and after some skating through the innards of the cylindrical remains of a machine: it found itself right in front of the old slanted watchtower. Motionless androids and machines impaled on each other's weapons and smothered in each other's oil littered the floor around the entrance, and it narrowly moved between them into the dimly-lit inside; sunlight only flowed in from the entrance, and the top a couple hundred feet away, partly blocked by the greedy leaves of a monstrously large cedar that seemed to scrape the clouds in the sky.

"...There's no hazard..."

Swirling its way up along the walls of a worn-out staircase, the stone blocks that made up the inner wall gave off a coarse rattle as it moved up against them like a marble circling the inside of a bowl.

A few of the walls had steep edges, and in the many times the creature had come here over the years, it had learned to expect them and avoid them knocking it out to crash into the ground with a loud plunk, or the heaps of lifeless, dismembered androids on the steps.

"..that'll... stop... me!" it stopped as its voice cracked.

Dodging a few branches as daylight began to take over its view, it finally slid into the top of the watchtower, slamming dead-on into a flagpole wedged into the cedar's bark with a loud clang, and bringing along another little dent next to all the other ones from its previous excursions, drawing a loud cry of pain out of it. "Owchie!"

"A-alright, let's look for my home from here," the sphere, now stiff in its place, coached itself. All I have to do is find that red oak I live under, or the river right next to it, and jump! I'll get it right… this time!

Circling the cedar, it passed by a faded pair of underwear with a tear in the middle from being stretched thin. The worn-out fabric was covered in splinters and holes, with moss growing through its largest rupture over the years from the wooden guard fence it was stuck on. The unlit eye of some machine dangled from a bunch of loose, pearly-white threads.

The creature moved along, peering between the beams of the fence to find the odd red spot in the green of the forest. They say that my oak comes from the other side of the world. I wonder if they buy the seeds of our trees over there? Maybe I should go there someday, and show those night-dwellers what I have in stock!

Once a small red spot popped up in the corner of its vision, behind the banks of the river, it stopped dead in its tracks, and looked at the outstanding color: the target. This is it, it thought, the chance to do it right this time. "Yeah! This forest's mine!"

The little tracker rolled up against the fence, and launched off toward a stray plank, corkscrewing up the bottom of a branch and soaring off into the wind at full speed.

The air rushing against it was cold on its shell. The imposing pines, viewed from above now blended together and moved like neat fibers on a sliding carpet under its eyes.

Just the right amount of roll, and I can fly even further up…

The sphere rolled back and surged further up in the air, before slamming against the beak of a bird. A painful sting and a loud bang ensued; a screek and a scream sounded off of each other in the air. "So..rry!" the creature faintly whimpered, spinning dizzily out of control.

With a loud thud, the rolling little trader fell smack-dab between a pair of tree branches, hunched down under its weight. Urgh... I feel so sick right now.

…

Do I smell… something unusual, yet familiar? It… it's my cousin! Oh man, what have I found? What was a moment of quiet recovery quickly turned into a sneak peek at what seemed like the discovery of the century, as it turned to look at the trunk of the tree it fell down from. This one has an arrow carved into it! I wonder where it leads?

The trader rolled gently down the path along the arrow, avoiding hard spots in the loam and fallen tree trunks to make as little noise as it could. Arrows and triangles, all pointing in the same direction, were carved on every other tree it came across. Voices crescendoed in the distance, and a repugnant tang germinated from away as the creature followed the directions engraved. W-who do these voices belong to? Does my cousin have siblings?!

A giddy, girlish voice came from behind a small shed made of scraps of junk and metal plates. "Look, our stranger is an artist! Do you know these places, Tenna?" Huh? My cousin's tongue sounds a lot more raspy and hissy…

"Hmm? Some base, perhaps?" There was the other voice. Deeper, more subdued, yet still feminine.

The creature froze in place for a split second, and caught a glimpse of an empty entrance. Are they… looking for someone? I gotta hide!

It rolled at a turtle's pace over the grass and gently snuck up the slope into the grody interior. This smells like that time a boar wet itself while I was under it—Awgh, I think ants are crawling all over me!

Its voice quavered as it remained in place, peeking through a tiny slit in the walls. Two charcoal figures stood out against the daylight, and it listened patiently to their whispers.

"Jeez, Fives, it's a bit dingy in here. Sorry for the wait by the way, had to deal with some hostiles in the air on my flight here..."

"It's alright, I'm just glad you're here—Oh!"

The creature froze in place, and felt its shell freezing over for a brief moment.

"POD, how long ago was this shelter made?"

...Phew! Thought she was onto me! it sighed as it turned towards the drawer, and slowly rolled towards it.

While the creature inside slowly pulled on the drawer's handle with its teeth to open it, a masculine voice, almost entirely flat and electronic surged up. "Analysis: Based on the stability of this assortment of machine and junk parts, and the difference in grime between the strata, the most likely length of completion for this structure is 8 to 12 weeks."

The drawer opened with a light creak. No, my senses aren't smelling anything here...

"So he set up a camp here, and left not a while back."

"What does this have to do with the dead soldier?"

"I don't know, but my intuition tells me something's off… it's as if only I can feel a link."

The creature turned to look at the bed of leaves by its side, and sifted through the pile, only to find nothing but dust, dead skin and scattered hairs. Oh crud, there's a feast for the ants!

Well, there's nothing here. Gotta roll before I catch the heat!

It rolled out of the couple square feet that made up the interior, and over the grass.

"What do you mean?"

"I was scared when I came here a day ago. So I had called for backup, and 7B appeared. I thought she'd have something to say about this, but she just dragged me out and told me I'm worrying too much. 801S just bragged about other things he's seen when I came back to the Bunker and asked around."

"Hold up-7B… ouch, I remember her. That ponytail of hers is so long I could strangle machines with it."

"You've met her before? I felt strangled after a minute with her."

"Well," the deeper voice chuckled, "it's not hard when she's always trying to make a show of everything, or when she's hauling clouds of perfume and won't wear a standard uniform."

"Clou-Everything? What did she do to you, Tenna?"

"It was at the cafeteria, she took away my plate and put down some sort of stew she made herself. I told her I didn't want it, but she stuck a spoonful in my mouth while everyone was looking, and I couldn't spit it out so she just made me eat through all of it. The B-types say she's great to be around, but I'll say her cooking definitely isn't."

Footprints! They look like my cousin's. Maybe I should follow them out of here?

The trader sped out into the boggy soil. Bits and splinters of wood cracked and snapped loudly under its weight, and not a second passed before the voices it had been hearing all spoke at the same time.

"Alert: unknown presence detected."

"Tenna, pull out your Fool's Reaper! I just heard a hostile!"

"POD, activate program R050! I'm right on it, Fives!"

Spears of solid light rose one by one swiftly from the ground in front of the creature. Weeds, leaves, worms, ants. All impaled, smoking and burning to a crisp. The crackling of the little flames, the smell of smoke and the spears went from none to all around, and riveted it in place with a shriek.

"Aaaaaah!"

The deeper voice sneered from behind. "Shredding doors isn't so bad after all!"

I'm so glad I don't blink!

It turned around; the two black figures were now front and center, accompanied by two colored floating rectangles. The taller one's scythe seemed to stretch sky-high from the clouds down onto the ground, covered in lit-up electronics, with the tip scraping down the middle of the creature's face, and commanded it. "Don't move!"

N-nope! Definitely nothing in common with my cousin or Cog! I am not ever doing business with these two!

The creature squealed, almost as if trying to befriend them. "W-well, hi there, ladies, I'm Emil of the Woo-forget I said that! I don't have a name!"

The shorter one stepped back. A small hand slithered out of her long sleeve and rested on the other's wrist. Do they see me through those blindfolds?

"This thing looks weird. Hold it down, I'll try to hack into it." At least this one doesn't sound as scary as her friend… wait, hacking? I'm not a robot! That doesn't sound good at all!

"Nooo!" a shrill scream jumped out of its mouth. The girl raised a fist at the trader and flashed halos and runes at its eyes. A searing light flooded in from her wrists, and one last very faint glimpse of the ants crawling all over its eyes was all it had left before it was blinded.

What's happening to me?!

A loud clang, thud and thump sounded from nearby. The unmistakable smell of rusty metal suddenly flared its senses.

"Huh?"

The sphere's vision suddenly returned; shortly after, it noticed the flashing lights had stopped. The girls were startled, and they were looking away—towards a dead machine that must've been impaled on one of those spears… which means the spears are gone?!

In that one opening it leapt off, rolling between the fading spears and leaving a dust cloud behind, riding on its terrain sailing instincts, the sound of footsteps chasing after it, and the muddled smell of a nearby lake.

Off to wash this away!

Now.

The stubby hopped away, following the path back to the outhouse. Not the drop of a pin, not the rustling of a leaf, it wanted not to hear the quietest sound in the world other than the whir of its canter. It whipped its sights back and forth, grabbing its own broken arm to throw at anything that moved as a last-resort security measure.

I have arrived at my destination. At this moment, it would seem I can safely find my partner in his last known position.

The machine knocked on the door, to check for whichever minor threats may remain in this building. To its surprise, the most dangerous thing that occured was a patch of dirt falling off a gutter and dumping on its head and the door, leaving it to try and wipe it off with its good hand before opening it and stepping inside. The interior was dead silent, and a haunted serenity resonated through the wooden furniture.

I must come closer, to confirm his auditory vital signs.

The bottom of the stairwell was drenched in darkness; the dry-rotted wood on each step looked as if it could snap on the spot from whatever was about to be revealed at the top. As the stubby reached the apex, it saw the man, in his sunburnt skin and torn shirt, face smothering the sleeping bag. Blood stained the white pillow under his nose, and a neat, shallow cut grazed his calf. It grabbed his wrist, and lightly felt his pulse before dropping his hand on the floor.

The source of this cut is almost clear. To conclude my findings, I must examine the contents of the toolbox located by my partner's head.

With a push of its three pincer-shaped fingers, the half-closed lid slightly chirked up. The sawblade from earlier was inside, bottom drenched in hardened sable blood. The teeth traced piece-for-piece the outline of the man's wound.

It seems that the resident of this building has much more severe psychological issues than I first suspected. Purposefully attempting to sever my partner's limb and deflecting away from it strongly suggests that he finds in my partner means to an end, and likely not of a practical nature.

The little biped set aside a moment of silence to look down a mouse-sized cable hole in the floor. A small peek of the mechanical body parts heaped upon each other two floors below in the basement, and its beaten legs recoiled as it pictured the man's body parts and viscera in their place, knocking the toolbox over. A staccato of plastic packages and metal banged against the hardwood floor, jolting the machine aback. On the floor, the saw, a bottle of vinegar, band-aids, a pair of tweezers... and most curiously, a long tube in a sealed plastic bag with a hose socket highly resembling the filter on the water pump.

The open window stood a few steps away, pouring bucketfuls of solar punishment over the pair. Promptly, the machine stepped forward, and grabbed the sill with its good hand to lift itself—barely high enough to gain a view. Pitch-black ashes vied with the enormous shadows of the surrounding trees to drape the few drops of green left on the field in a lifeless monotone. There is not a single moving entity in sight. It would appear that my hastily-constructed stratagem has turned out exactly as I had hoped.

The question poses itself now: my partner is heavily injured at this point. Quite likely, in fact, is that these injuries may turn out to be fatal within hours to days. I must find a way to tend to him under the circumstances.

On to its new mission, it braced itself and stood straight, raising its forearm into a right angle. The static-filled ticks of its defective system clock grew louder in its mind as it hopped down the stairs, scoured the living room, the kitchen and the closet, finding the bucket the man had knocked down and emptying a few muddy drops into the cracks between the floorboards.

There was no time to think about transportation; the machine shouldered the pail on its broken arm. Clink. Clank. Bang. The bucket rang like a bell against its leg as it awkwardly galloped to the door, shaking from side to side as it cut through the field to the pump.

The presence of a waste disposal facility nearby may imply the availability of cleaning tissues. It would be prudent to carry some.

With the hose loosely in the bucket, the smooth reach of its hand for the button was harshly interrupted by a hoarse scream in the distance: it was the resident's gravelly voice.

It would seem that the risk I have taken has not led to a favorable situation, yet in this instance, it shall not preclude me from attending to a matter of necessity.

After a moment, water poured, splashed, and sprayed over the stubby's arm. The bucket's handle weighed down on its shoulder like a heavy horseshoe; yet the atmosphere to its left was heavier, and its eyes locked onto the egress with its every step and splatter towards the outhouse, gently opening the door. The inside was covered in tracked mud, muck and colorful stains. As expected, it is fortunately unoccupied. There is a possibility of locating a… less sterile substitute for unavailable bandages within.

Raising a foot to lean and turning its head, a small spot of green beetled from a dark blind spot behind the seat. The stubby swung its foot back, hopping and tripping sideways. Water splashed off on its broken arm's shoulder joint once it stood down again, blowing up a fuse. With a snap, crackle, and scream of pain, a puff of smoke flooded the outhouse. "Aargh!"

I must take more care to be restrained in my movements!

Its feet treaded gently on the wooden floor of the latrine, dodging dingy corn cobs, and its fingers reached like needles through a house of cards under a pipe, pulling out a roll of toilet paper and inspecting it.

It is quite clean and looks much less worn-out than the rest of this waste disposal chamber.

I have always believed this roll of paper to have been used by humans for cleaning body waste, yet it appears completely unused. It may be pertinent to inquire of my partner later as to how he has used this.

It hopped out of the outhouse, carrying the roll on its broken arm and the bucket in the other.

...It would seem that cleaning the stain off of this door would aid in covering my tracks.

The roll trembled in its hand, being pulled off of the broken arm. The cardboard inside neatly fit on the door's handle. A few squares were soaked in the bucket, and it wiped the dirt stains off to drop the bucket in the living room, take the roll and toss it on the dinner table, shut the door, and reached out for the stove and kitchen cabinets. A bluster ensued of slides, creaks and silverware pieces banging to find a salt shaker, open the stove's gas cylinder, light a fire, open the nearby window, put the bucket to boil and salted the water.

The bucket wheezed and whistled; the machine's circuits simmered quietly yet more vibrantly than the water. Its legs impatiently bounced to look at the window with each passing second, lest the resident return carrying a rifle loaded with white-hot energy, in his arms fueled with white-hot rancor.

The floor creaked under the tumult of its gears, growing louder until a sound from the attic froze it in place. It left the fire on, grabbed the bucket off of the stove by its handle, held it against its chest and inched as quietly as possible towards the stairs, creeping up before finding the man, having twitched and rolled over.

A relief.

A light gurgle escaped his throat, turning to painful moaning as his back rubbed against the ground. The stubby dropped the bucket lightly with its warmed fingers, and softly nudged him back on his stomach.

It poured a few drops of the vinegar into the water, and put down the roll. Downstairs, it shut the gas, put the salt back, slammed the window shut, closed the cabinets, and hopped back up.

One by one, it pinched squares and dunked them in the sterilized saltwater to rinse the man's wounds, making sure to return every item and the toolbox to its former place. The last of the paper was exhausted covering the red pasture of bloodied cuts, pus and abrasions on the man's back in white with toilet paper and pulling his shirt down before it scuttled off to the black field of ashes and burnt crops outside.

The resident crawled out of the woodwork, slumping with tears and scratches all over his armor suit. Fibers of kevlar hung loosely from his charred tatters; his stature had been cut in half, weighed down by his rifle in his hand and reduced to a slumping canvas dripping red, orange, cyan and black splashes. His pouches and holster were torn off—like cotton candy bitten by feral children, yet his hand clamped down on something with its juices leaking between his fingers. "Machine, this wi..ll be for you to pick up." he whimpered, drained of his strength before tossing a slab of boar meat for the stubby to grab.

Hours later.

...There is no fucking James here!

The man woke up, feeling his legs warmly tucked inside the fabric of the sleeping bag.

My face, it's so cold… it's wet?

Gear! Help me get the fuck out of here… Cog?

The man opened his eyes, slowly adjusting to the soft brownish hues of the ceiling and the glowy floating particles in the heavy air, his sluggish breath barely keeping up with his lungs. He scratched his beard. Several glasses with a few spilled drops of water by his side laid an inch from his head, reflecting his face. His scars were many, and had the bushes outside been a recruiting gang, his uneven hair would have been well past the initiation phase and on its way to veteranhood.

He almost could not believe his ears; there was no machine alarm sound. There were no chants, no shocks, no explosions, and no fire outside the four walls of this dead-quiet, lifeless cell of an attic. The fanfare within him, however, was far from over: save for his back which had been gagged into silence with toilet paper, his limbs all vied for attention, hectically turns shrieking in agony in the theater of his brain each louder than the other. His wandering mind turned into a cloud of white noise, as he pressed his arms on the ground to stand himself up as slowly as he could, letting out a wet cough. His next inhale brought in an unexpected, yet welcome guest: the rich smell of grilled meat leading the aroma of sweetcorn. His hand on the stair railing moved in bursts along with his shaky trudge down the stairs.

A thought makes past the barrage of fog in his head for the first time. ...Should I take the meat if it's Friday? No… that question doesn't even make any fucking sense.

With his free hand, he crossed himself before hearing the sound of plates and silverware knocking on a table, and finished his way down. The stranger, out of his usual suit and the stubby were putting plates down and setting chairs for breakfast, as he greeted the man in a somewhat reassuring tone. "Good morning." He was in a brown flannel shirt, with a conspicuous white breast pocket.

The man twisted his tongue a couple times while debating whether to respond in kind or stay silent. "Good morning to you?"

The man sat awkwardly at the end of the table furthest from the stranger, resting his hands beside the plate in front of him, and sighed in relief as the seat felt more comfortable than he'd expected. More like Palm Sunday.

While the resident cleaned a pan at the sink, the man cast a quick glance at his partner, standing halfway across the table from him, who had just put a glass of water down on the table. You son of a bitch, you're gonna be my buffer state for now. He waved towards the stubby, and it quietly turned its head to face him. With his thumb, he gestured to the meal as if eating with a fork, and then raised it to his mouth before shifting his head down to the side with his tongue out, then sitting straight again and raising his shoulders and palms. I hope this smartass gets the question.

"No." it answered, loud enough to ring the man's ears in its monotone.

The stranger immediately shut the water and turned, with a nearly-palpable sense of alarm in his voice. "What?"

The stubby immediately turned around without skipping a second. "My apologies. I intended to instruct my partner not to eat before you would sit with us at the table."

Holy shit. Might as well just have eaten until I started foaming and turning green when this dumb fucking screwshaft is who's ment to be looking out for me.

Once the resident sat, the machine hopped on its seat. The man stuck his eyes to his plate, and the machine stayed still. A paper-thin tranquility pervaded through the dinner table. He brought the glass of water slightly closer to himself and toyed with the knife, carving out bone fragments and casting them to the side of the plate after every other bite. Sure wish I had some fry sauce right here. No flavor to this stuff. Things are fairly calm in here for once-

...What if, instead of poisoning me, he was gonna drag my ass behind the outhouse right after we were done and shoot my brains out? What if he wanted to rape me for real this time? What if he was gonna use my organs as fertilizer for his next harvest? What the fuck is this moron right next to me thinking?

After forking a bite of corn and meat, and dipping it in the last puddle of fat on his dish, his hand freezes, and his fearful shunt makes way for a decisive stare. Moving his jaw around, he finally puts the words together. "Listen, I'm sorry for the fire. I swear, I was gonna come back and te-"

The resident, who had been quietly whorfing down his share, suddenly snapped and slammed his knife down leaving the man to flinch in his chair. The knife bounced and did a backflip, crossing over and sliding into the man's half of the table. "I know! I know! No one has to tell me what I know! It was that thieving bitch son!" his goggles flickered, searing floating spots into the man's retina.

Jesus fucking Christ, I can't see shit for the next quarter hour with these spots!

...Alright, alright, so he doesn't think it was me. But there's enough crazy to go around in the Proenneke house that it won't make a difference. Good to know.

The machine interjected, to fill in the man's silence. "What do you suppose is the identity of your suspect?"

"That bastard sphere! My items, my schematics, my belongings are always disappeared because his wide smile on that disgusting face swallows it all up in front me!" he stood up, and kicked his chair into the wall so hard it snapped into pieces. "That no-good bastard!"

The man turned to the machine twice: once out of concern, and once out of anger after he'd realized whose description he was hearing. His glower said all that his mouth could not at that moment. You son of a bitch. This is who you trusted? The same piece of shit ballkid that left me here to die because your dumbass can't even save your own life properly?

The target of his shafts of rage quickly seemed to fire back; its eyes shifted red for a moment without even turning its head to look at either of the two others in the living room. Wait, ah shit! He's on to me again! I can't leave now and get my ass cheeks torn apart by Drill Sergeant over there!

The resident shouted at the top of his lungs, his fists clenched and shaking. "I have been robbed for years since I came to hide in this house! I can never see him coming until I hear his embarrassments that are called songs by him!"

Wha..what the hell did that sentence even mean?

The man felt a slight shot of bile soar up his throat, and forced himself to finish the last munch and few grains of corn on his plate, gluing his eyes to the furious pontificating in front of him. "I… urgh."

"All the time! He is doing it all the time and now tried to kill us! I will find him! Next time, I will find him! I will never forgive this!" The resident panted and ran upstairs. The duo downstairs exchanged stares for a moment to the sound of metal clanking and sliding upstairs.

What the…? Fuck this, I'm out! I'm all solo now!

The creak of a lever suddenly electrified the atmosphere. The man stood up and made a beeline for the window by the stove, tripped and latched on to the sink. He looked over his shoulder; the resident had come downstairs and completely ignored him before kicking the front door open and storming out.

The man turned on the sink, and turned around. The running water drowned out his whispered message to the stubby, even in his own ears. "Water is a limited resource in this residence," the machine interrupted his train of thought. Fuck.

He shut the tap off, and came closer to his partner. "Upstairs. Go."

A moment later, he sat down on the sleeping bag, clasped his hands on his lap, and folded his knees, biting his nails in front of the stubby.

"My hearing detects that the owner of this dwelling is far enough for us to speak safely."

He clutched his chest before his tense posture relaxed slightly to throw a glance at the window. Once his eyes were again with the stubby, his frown tightened and he let out every thought on his mind at that moment. "What is up with this weirdo? Actually, what is up with your friends? If you wanted to kill me, why are you doing it like this? Why not fucking let me choke till my eyes pop out on that fucking gallows in Robopodunk? Because I've seen enough shit now."

"De-"

"I'm serious. If you want to kill me, do it now, bitch."

"Derrick. Please."

That is the first fucking time I have heard you say that word. Ever.

"Alright, alright," he drew a deep breath, "listen, my joints are like water balloons and I had a fucked up dream today."

"So be it, then. Tell me if you judge that doing so will help you calm down."

"I was running through that same fucking fire again, and on the other side, there was my school. My friends from the sports team were there, they were in some kinda cloud. And I saw some withered body crawl towards me. Don't know how, but I knew she was my ex-girlfriend."

"Is there any information about human sexual encounters you would like to share, Derrick?"

"Fuck you, I never had one," his tone erupted briefly, followed by a second of silence.

"...anyway, my father was there too. And the closer she got, the more my body just started cracking and falling into pieces from the bottom up. Then my genitals, I guess, fell off. My friends' faces all disappeared. My dad's face showed up on my girlfriend's black skinny corpse, and he made rain sink everything into the ground until my head was level with his. And then he said: James, you're standing on the family's remains."

"James? Is that an acquaintance of yours?"

He lightly shook his head, and his tone went quieter. "No, nah, that doesn't mean anything. I'm just upset about this." He blinked twice and licked the roof of his mouth. "I don't even feel right thinking about jerking off anymore with these," he closed his eyes in silence for a moment, "images in my head." before tilting down to look at his moving thumbs.

"I see," the machine commented. "There are pressing matters of which I must inform you."

Frown faded, then a sigh softened his voice. "Shoot."

"This home is much less safe than you may be aware. The owner has attempted to mutilate you during your loss of consciousness, by amputating your leg."

The man raised an eyebrow, and his tone showed a growing worry. "Why in the world… was he going to chain me here like a dog?"

"It seems that he had been intent on using it to make up for his supply shortage, and use it as a source of nutrients. It is also important that you not be misled by his claims: he is absolutely not human, but he is an android."

"Christ!," his hands tensed and pulled back his shirt sleeves, "I am so fucked up!"

"I do not intend to kill you, Derrick. Far from it, I have attempted to remove you from harm to the best of my abilities under the circumstances."

After a moment of brief reflection, the man looked agape at his partner. "So that's… where the toilet paper came from. Wait, where did you fi-"

A whirlwind of air burst into the attic from the window, and a familiar voice chimed. The duo quickly twisted their heads; it was the little spherical creature with its usual eerie smiley face.

Red-faced, the American clenched his fists, put them on the ground, and scowled. "You moose-humping little shit! I'll kill you!" His shouting might as well have been a whistle in the wind; for a conversation had already started between the two before he could react, one in this world's language.

TRANSLATION SOFTWARE ACTIVATED. Setting: ██████ to English.

"Heya Cog! Emil of the Woods here, I brought ya some…news...er, that clock part you wanted!" The creature was rock-still, but its voice had quite the wobble.

"Thank you, Emil. You have failed to live up to the standards of decency I had expected from you."

"Hey! You left me here to die! I almost got my leg cut off!" the man interjected, shouting.

"Wha," the creature stammered, "h-what? Cog, I'm sorry, I-"

"You have repeatedly engaged me, and my entire colony in counter-civilizational behavior without even our consent. This is a violation of our community's principles."

The man shouted at the stubby. "Speak up for me! I want this kid to learn I'm not the local toy here!"

"I didn't do anything to hurt people! And, and.. look! I thought you and my cousin would be safe here!"

"Regardless of how you feel about your intentions, that is not an acceptable excuse. You have been selling stolen goods. It is this fact that voids your legitimacy as a trader. Your reckless actions have endangered me and the human."

"O-oh.. oh! This guy! I stole from him a lot but he deserved it, you know-"

"I do not preoccupy myself with these fickle judgments when applying my standards, Emil. As I do not expect you to return this system clock or tell me truthfully whence you have acquired it,-"

"Uh.."

"-I ask that you simply drop it here. Yet, as it remains, I will honor my contract with you as soon as I am able to access my earnings once more."

"No, no," the creature's voice quieted down to a much frailer tone, and its pace slowed. "This one's… on the house. I'm so sorry for," it let out a sob, "for what I did." Before long, it opened his mouth, and spat out a chip at the machine. "Goodbye," it flew off, speeding away in a cloud of dust into the distance.

TRANSLATION SOFTWARE DEACTIVATED.

The man huffed and puffed, and leaned against the wall. "So what's this little chip? And did you speak up for me? Actually, what'd you even talk about?"

"I have done that and more. You need not worry, Derrick. This is the system clock I will need. As there are no qualified maintenance units nearby, I will have to instruct you to properly install it in my system."

A light patter was heard in the distance. "This operation will demand your utmost focus. We may have to wait, however, until it is reasonably safe to perform maintenance without any disruptive agents," the stubby murmured.

The man looked at the staircase, and whispered back. "Speaking of which, I've got a plan. Because I am so fucking done running from every shadow I see or waiting around to die. No, we're gonna take a fucking stand here."

Chapter Text

I read in some old human archives that May 1st was the International Labor Day. Not for us, Mankind’s Finest though, we’re hard at work even today! Command just gave us a set of assignments to choose from, and I jumped at the one where I could go with a partner!

<Several days before the introduction chapter.>

In my mind, I had been picturing barracks, a couple of armored vehicles, soldiers playing card games over rounds of alcohol or playing pranks on each other, stores of medical supplies… and most importantly, sunlight.

And yet when I’d arrived at this camp, I’d not seen but the shadow of the urban graveyard outside. There was nary a sound, save for our footsteps and the seagulls.

“Notification: target location has been reached,” my POD’s electronic voice punctuated our long walk from the landing spot Command had deemed ‘safe’ for my and 10D’s flight units in the fog. It’s so far away, they had us land on a leaning skyscraper and then walk along the city docks instead of making a beeline! But I shouldn’t doubt their judgment when it comes to managing the Ho229 flyers. After all, they’re the ones who manufacture them… that, and 42O says my unit is her life’s work, and doesn’t want it anywhere a machine can lay a finger on it.

Tenna sat herself by my side on an overgrown tree and sheepishly muttered. “So we’re here, huh,” she looked at a scrap dome a few hundred meters away, beneath the highway.

“Affirmative. Analysis: target building is a makeshift Resistance outpost set up in this urban district’s train station. Short and medium-range communications are not available to and from camp.”

I raised a thought. “It looks so dead from the outside. I wonder how the trains come and leave if the railroads are sealed off…”

She seemed tired. “Alright, you go down there and I’ll keep watch. If you’re worried, you know what to do.”

“Sure!,” I taunted her, “Don’t let the weather get to you up there!”

Her POD crackled in protest. “Suggestion: Unit 10D should accompany unit 5S to target location.”

“Mmh…”

I looked at her hunched posture. Classic!

Most of the time, Tenna just felt tired, and I learned to bring out the best in her. Each time, I tried something different. Sometimes I sang to her, sometimes I gave her random things I’d found that she really, really liked and she would spin around in excitement. It made me smile sometimes, seeing her get out of her slump just over a music box. The other Scanners’ sense of humor though, I didn’t enjoy as much.

I jump down the bridge, and get into stance, as if to let the ground know I’m more than a match for it; the air feels a bit cold and drafty. I really hope the next few days will be sunnier! Maybe I’ll ask around if 9S has any weather data later.

Right before landing, I clench my fists, shift my weight onto them and pound down on the pavement, leaving a few cracks on it. I crawl through some foliage, hide behind a laundry line with some ragged mats and flank a small four-legged machine that’s digging a hole in the tarmac and wagging a tail large enough to grab me. As I come closer, I hear a metallic sound and it turns, red-eyed hostile, toward me—I accidentally kicked a bucket, and that made a sound. 

"Hu-eeyah!" I roll up my sleeve, raise my fist toward it and launch nanobots at it.

No sooner than a moment after, I’m connected and I hack into its CPU. A generic model for a machine, made in a tenth of the time in an assembly line, with a hundredth of the transistor density and the clock speed of mine; it’s inefficient and subpar. I can do it, I can do it, I can do it… I’m heating up...

Its security almost corners me for a brief moment, but I’m in soon enough after a bit of a smackdown in cyberspace.

With full system access unlocked, I head to the control section. The legs are a bit heavy, but I’m a quick learner, so I’ll get a grip on the joints in no time!

After a few moments wagging my appendages, I walk up to my android body that’s lying on the floor by the bucket and pick it up—my face fell inside the bucket, and it’s covered in data storage chips that could’ve had who-knows-what installed. Yuck!

POD’s voice is chiding me, but his voice sounds so distant I can barely tell what he’s saying… he’s probably just worried about me is all. Some Scanners have gone berserk in a few cases, hacking into a machine and then remotely self-harming. The few cases we’d hear about involved some rumors about corrupted consciousness data. Well, i-it did make me perform self-checks every time I was about to enter sleep mode!

I tear the mats off of the laundry line with my claws, roll them up around my android body under my legs, and grab it with my tail. Phase one complete!

I turn back around, looking for the tree, and climb it slowly, circling the many branches along the way up, and see Tenna lounging on a holographic chair, looking worriedly around herself. I climb to the top, and hang on to an enormous chestnut. Phase two!

I throw the roll off of my tail, soaring up in the air and jump down right behind Tenna, raising my claws and roar with this machine body’s speakers at the loudest volume.

In a moment, the poor girl springs up from her seat shrieking and clutching her robe. “Aaah! Fives, I’m in trouble!”

Her Fool’s Reaper wobbles as it materializes in her hands, and she charges at me. A commendable effort! I then jump right over her, chasing after my airborne android body, and leap downwards. My leg joints crack under impact, and my feet leave a crater large enough to swallow a truck with a devastating crunch. Tenna should be right above me, going for the kill.  Yikes!

She’s usually tired, but she’s not lazy. We know each other. The part of my visor’s fabric that hangs from the back of my head and her braids end at the same height off the ground, because we made them this way.

I’ve always counted on her. And I know a little warm-up is what she always needs to get in shape!

I look up at her, and tear my own machine body to pieces before enacting its self-destruct protocol.

…

After a split-second flash of light and sounds floods through my bandwidth, I’m now enjoying the sensation of floating weightlessly, feeling soft fabric all around me. I’m in my android body again, that’s for sure.

My fall is broken quickly by a pair of hands, lightly carrying me in midair and gently dropping my rolled-up self on the floor, and before long, I see Tenna’s soft features under the sky, smiling at me and embracing me. “Ah-haha,” she gives out a heartwarming chuckle, “you always catch me off-guard!” Her slim figure folds from cracking up. “I have to give it to you, I’d love to hear your mission plans after this!”

I can’t help but pinch her warm cheeks. “Well, sleepy doesn’t do it for us! And that brings the score to a four-love in my favor! Now, let’s go together!”

My POD interrupts us. “Report: fog density increasing. Suggestion: Units 5S and 10D should approach target location within 60 seconds for optimal results.”

Hers chimes in, with a slightly younger-sounding voice. “Report: machine activity projected to rise exponentially within moments. Warning: Immediately proceed to rendezvous point.”

I looked up to him, and petted him before turning to face Tenna. “Not a problem.”

We smirked at each other. “Are you ready?!”

The two of us race to the train station, propelling ourselves to the limit. The skyscrapers, the cracks in the pavement, the wildgrass, the animals all blended together and yet at the same time looked clearer than ever. Tenna calls out enemies lightning-fast. “Bipeds! Flyers! To your left!”

“I got your right!”

She cut and I hacked through hordes of them like tin foil.

These were the moments I truly enjoyed sharing with her. We were bonding, performing our duties, and creating moments worth sharing, all at once. A minute of bliss.

After all is said and done, the heat is radiating through our circuits, and I can hear the coolant rushing throughout my joints. Since the fog’s thicker, our PODs escort us up a staircase, and I take a much closer look at this strange building.

The entire perimeter was covered in rows of rusting metal plates loosely bolted together, unmatching colors and patterns looking like broadcast static, and not so much as a single ray of light trickled in. I couldn’t help but lean and clasp my hands against my mouth. I had noticed the gate by its wide steel door, and the cracked diagonal ridges on it.

“Proposition: Units 10D and 5S should notify the camp members of their presence.”

“Tenna, should we knock?”

Tenna pats me softly on the head and ruffles her fingers in my hair. Her reassuring smile reminds me to steel myself and let my hands down as her knock heavily resonates through the gate, rattling a chain on the inside.

...Are they this scared of visitors? Is this the right entrance?

I hear a latch slide, and the left half of the gate slowly opens before us. I peer into the dark—a tall, strongly-built man wearing the head of a machine lifeform greets us with a tone of relief. “On mankind haven’t I been this glad to see new faces in forever. Fine weapons you have there, ” he pointed to my Treacherous Covenant and her Fool’s Reaper.

I hide my pride with a quiet nod, draw my hands in a fold and nearly bow to him before I feel POD pulling on my shoulder, and whisper in his barely-audible monotone. “Proposition: Unit 5S should adhere to standard YoRHa protocol when introducing itself as part of a team.”

I clenched my jaw, pursed my lips and stood myself up, hands down. “I am No. 5 Type S of the YoRHa forces. I was called upon for recon and to provide assistance to this branch of the Resistance. I am assisted by No. 10 Type D.” My eyes were closed behind my visor, but I knew it would be too opaque for him to see it from outside.

Wh-what?! He’s pulling me in?! “Alright, alright. Enough with the fancy introductions, get in quick!” The latch squeaked as it closed.

“Everybody, make sure the ceiling has no room for leakage!,” a woman’s anxious voice echoed off the walls, clueing me in on the vast emptiness of this place. My pace grew uneasy until the man let go of me and sat me on what I presume to be some kind of bench. I could faintly pick up a hint of sobbing between her words.

“With Miller and Wrench gone, we can’t afford to waste a second!” I opened my eyes, looked up, and saw a couple of androids in ragged uniforms running in circles on the pathways under the ceiling, shining flashlights at the seams of the patchworks of scrap they’d installed in one hand, and wielding solder guns in the other. The plates thumped heavily, and some of them almost seemed to shake under something that kept pouncing down on it.

The pale moving beams of light stood against the dim-yet-warm yellowish lights hung between the walls and support beams of the corridor.

While I was still trying to process what was happening, Tenna spoke up from behind. “Mmh… What’s happening? Is it going to rain?”

The woman from earlier chimed in again. “You two YoRHa. I need you to follow me to my quarters.”

I looked down. I was sitting on an opened supply crate laid on its side, with a few names engraved right where I sat and some notes scribbled down in machine oil...

“WRENCH’S POKER SEAT 

| | | | | | | | | 

1 MORE ROUND AND YOU WOULD’VE GOTTEN MY BEER

-DESSY ROSIE”

“| | |

DAYS SINCE MILLER’S LAST CALL

PRAY IT WONT REACH 4”

I stood up, and followed Tenna behind the woman’s straddle up a staircase to the side, past a warehouse that seemed a lot larger than the hall we’d just been in, and extended further into the ground. There were shipping containers of various colors, with different names written on them—Shizuoka, Tokyo… probably where they came from, yet they all carried YoRHa insignia. 

“A-ah!” Tenna grabbed my nose, and pulled me into a room with her and the lady. She stood at a desk, with a wide keyboard terminal by her side, and a sewing machine.

Her pale skin and long auburn hair stood out in the drab-looking decor, with a loose coat covered in more seams than the rest of the androids we’d seen here. “Careful not to trip on the string. I should clean that up sometime, my bad,” she chuckled. Her voice was surprisingly higher than earlier.

She took off her ushanka, putting it down on the desk and pulled out a photograph from her hair, and her face turned much more somber as she laid her hands down. “This is my husband, Miller. He has been missing for five days now with no contact, after going out all by himself. I warned him,” her voice cracked, “I told him we shouldn’t risk his life for fuel filters or transporter resine...”

I felt something well up inside of me.

Something sad. But what was I to do? A part of me didn’t even bother to think about that, and blurted out immediately words I almost choked on in panic. “We’ll help you find him, no matter what it takes!” I didn’t even know where to start. What was I saying?!

Tears welled up, and ran down her face. “You don’t know,” she sobbed, “how much this means to me. I’m glad your Commander sends you to keep us company… it’s been hard for us, with the constant EMP-equipped hordes trapping us indoors for days on end. When they deploy a full team, I hope that’ll be crossed off our bucket-list. And don’t tell anyone he was my spouse, just my second-in-command.”

She looked out the window to the warehouse. “We’re running out of everything, and that b-,” she sighed, “the last month, your Commander told us to send our best medic out to the next camp,” she drifted off into a pensive tone, “we owe her so much...”

“There’s no need to worry.” Tenna stepped closer to her to console her, but I have a feeling I might need it more.

I don’t know what to do. I hold my arms, I’m feeling cold… this isn’t the coolant wearing off, I’m about to burst into tears! Why do I do this to myself?!

Is it so hard to do the right thing?

A detail suddenly came back to me. Confusion took a hold of my head, and tilted it all of a sudden. “Wait, ma’am… no contact in five days? Was it not three?”

“You can call me Acacia,” the camp leader broke the deafening silence with a sigh, “and it’s five as in 5S. For little Scanner, I’d like you to let your Operator know that I’ve sent her all the coordinates I could gather, so there’s no more point for her to keep calling me about sending you with unclear instructions. As for Type D, I’d like you in the meantime to help us out with some heavy lifting and to familiarize yourself with our camp. Why do you ask—ah… I don’t even pay enough attention to stop their vandalism anymore, damn it!” She stormed off angrily from the room, walking right besides the two of us and tripping up some fabric rolls. Tenna was waving at somebody in the warehouse.

I’ll be a-alone…

Now.

“If I wanted a slow and painful death, I would’ve signed up to fail boot camp again. This whole fucking thing reminds me of White Phase, ‘cept the date of return on this tour of duty is the Day of Judgment.” The man groaned before picking up the system clock chip, and hearing footsteps closing in on the two of them.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself, sliding it into his pocket and walking around the attic, flailing his hand around to swat off the glowing particles in the air. What am I gonna tell him I was doing here? Throwing him a surprise birthday party?

He took a look at the bookshelves, and hesitated for a moment. As if I ever used the library for something other than the Guinness Book of Records to win bar arguments and the computers... Christ.

What the hell, I’ll take a look.

He put his fingers on the books facing him, one by one. “Eel piasseer, Heart of Darkness, what’s this—Ri-wiru-an shellay?”

The stubby, looking at the man, spoke with clarity, as if to rescue the innocent language from the audible torture of his slurring. “Coming to Life.”

“What?”

“A collection of poems from the 8th Androids’ War by machines that recovered from a large-scale EMP attack. Latin script renditions are rare and troublesome to locate.”

“Yeah, sounds fun.” He skipped over to a binder wedged between two tomes, and took it off, tumbling one over on its side. An orchestra of cupboards and doors opening and slamming downstairs punctuated the hardcover’s thud, like a succession of cannons. Holy shit! I can see Psycho Cokehead’s arms strangling me to death already for defacing his book collection before my English teacher could lecture us on all its themes!

Gasp and gawk, his face contorted itself in panic at the demonic sounds and his feet flew three steps back with the binder tucked over his chest like a plate of armor. The leap made the demons disappear, as it were; the back door opened and shut, leaving a much-welcome ataraxia behind.

The man crossed himself, and turned around: the machine was standing by the closed window, looking out, before turning its eyes back at the man. “The owner of this home has parted with us once more. His pace suggests that he will attend to a matter of some importance to him, which may provide us the time we require for the maintenance operation.”

“I have a nasty fucking headache, but let’s get it done with.” He sat down by his partner, opening the binder as he pulled out the chip in his pocket. Schematic after schematic, arrows and sequences of assembly and disassembly, grotesque sketches of human body parts and their android equivalents in side-by-side comparisons and unreadable notes all over. “Uhh, do you think there’s anything useful in here?” He handed the binder over to the machine.

Flipping through pages one by one with its good hand, it notices something. “This page is a detailed visual aid for installing arms on a chassis compatible with my body. It will be important when you replace my nonfunctional left arm. The location of the system clock chip is also accessible from my left shoulder socket.”

"Nonfunk-what? Your left arm?,” he took a second glance at the stubby’s left arm, “Wait, I just noticed.”

“Search in the drawers downstairs for a screwdriver matching the screws holding my broken arm in place. Afterwards, go into the basement where spare parts may be easily found. For your safety, my systems will temporarily shut down during the disassembly process,” it pointed to the screws on its shoulder and hand.

The man frowned and sounded somewhat alarmed, raising his palms in front of his hips. “How do I know when you’ll power off? Hell, how’m I gonna know when it’s showtime again?”

“The lights in my eye-”

He quickly and loudly broke off the machine’s words. “You know what, nevermind, you’re sounding gay,” he stormed off, almost slipping on the sleeping bag. “Woargh!”

He tripped, and regained his balance on his way to break into every drawer under the gable-ended roof. “Must be why you like that book so much!”

“The human ego often projects what it sees as flaws onto others.” were the last words he heard from upstairs, before its whirring took hold of the air as the only sound in the residence.

Fucking faggot, should choke on an AV cable. What am I saying, I need the poor fucker!

He grabbed the knife off of the table, wedging it in locked drawer after drawer, opening cabinet after cabinet in the kitchen. “Fuck me, at this rate John Wayne’ll be back before I’m done!”

A small dark object fell out of the cabinet above him, and landed at his foot: a handgun. 

Thank the Holy fucking Spirit. After the prosthetic penis on that dead droid’s back, the Lego bricks in the cave and the Franken Rifle with a square ballsack, I finally found a normal weapon meant for civilized people like me! I’ll put it in my pants… right after I change my underwear.

He tried to bend down, weathering the pain in his joints as he reached down with his back straight, and moaning in pain. “Argh!” He fell on his side, putting his hand over the firearm to avoid disturbing the trigger with his body, and moved it off to the side as he rolled on the floorboards in crippling pain. A green light emanating from underneath the planks shone into his eye and into a floor cabinet, almost as if to warn him not to give up. I’m… gonna make it no matter what.

He picked up the gun and rolled around to get on his stomach, catching a glimpse of a screwdriver duct-taped to the ceiling of a floor cabinet. That clever son of a glitch hid a fucking screwdriver upside down!

With the gun in one hand, the screwdriver in the other and deafening white noise in his mind, it was time to go downstairs.

Trekking through the steps, his meager posture shrunk and his breaths tightened, as if some vague threat loomed within behind the heavy door of metal.

The basement was full of scrapped parts from various clashing shapes and sizes of machines and vehicles, wires and tubes accented with green reflections of the glowing geometric lines on a pair of black metallic cubes hung low. The smell of soot permeated, and the air had a bitter taste:  he knew something was, or had been very hot in this room. “Agh-ach!,” he sneezed out the dust in the air.

“Chernobyl called, they want their reactor back!” he quipped to himself, watching his every step to land carefully on the ground. Hey look, the metal boxes with… limbs and lights on them are here. They got more legs than the one attached to that nutcase’s rifle, though.

The silence of the room, save for cicadas outside, grated on him. He circled the lights, whispering to himself for comfort until he found what he’d come for, then turned around with a shout. “I got your thing!”

A vague shape bearing resemblance to a red girl’s figure outlined in pale yellow was reflected on the door, distinct from himself and the green light—he turned around for a moment, finding nothing unusual, and raced past the open door upstairs. I’m not going insane, it’s probably just the fucking paint. Or the sunlight coming through those trapdoors. 

＜The little raccoon is a delightful addition to our garden, but he upsets nature!＞

＜Will he live to watch our flower blossom?＞

＜No idea!＞

＜He plays with us and avoids us, he runs from us to meet us!＞

＜Will the fox and the raccoon scare off the coyote from its den?＞

＜I want to see that!＞

“Alright,” he put his hand down on the binder’s open page, “let’s do this. Ok, so I’ll start with this screw, right? Like the drawing says.”

The machine reached for its shoulder until its index finger touched the screwdriver. “Correct.”

Continuing by the drawings on the page, the man removed the arm from its joint. “Holy fucking Hannah,” he peered inside its shoulder, “That’s a shitton of cables!”

“It is by no means a high amount. My current body has a smaller volume and mass than all my previous ones, which greatly simplifies balance and maintenance concerns, although it is unfit for combat.”

Yeah, glad this is the one you used to punch me in the gut then.

“But goddamn, you’ve got wire spaghetti here! It’s a hell of a lot many more connections than I’ve had with my friends, that’s for sure.”

“How common were meaningful social relationships for you compared to humans you’ve known, Derrick?”

“I’ve had friends,” he squinted into the shoulder socket, “for a given value of friend. They can go to hell,” he groaned. “Now, turn your left to the window so I can look for the bad clock.”

The stubby extended its right arm forwards. “Hold my arm and turn me in place. My balance programs are too rudimentary to quickly adapt to moving with one arm.”

The man heaved himself, turning the machine by its arm, and turned around to spit through the window. “They mooched on my weed while I busted my ass to sneak it past my dad who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how he,” his voice momentarily took on an elderly scruff, “served in Vietnam to be our school coach!,” he raised his hands. “All of ‘em but Avery.”

He rested for a bit in front of the machine, breathing heavily before picking up the screwdriver again and arousing its concern. “You seem to be experiencing shortness of breath, Derrick.”

“That ain’t nothing compared,” he exhaled, “to what me and Avery would do at the YMCA.”

“What is the YMCA?”

“Young Men’s Christian Association. It’s like a youth organization with a gym. My father wouldn’t let me sign up until I was a teen, saying it’s full of heretics.”

“Heretics?”

“I’m Catholic, he’s a Mormon; I told him their gold plates are probably fake, he fired back that the P in pope stands for phony and we were both too baked to care. Great guy. Taught me everything I know about hiking. These sweatpants?,” he grabbed to indicate, “Wore ‘em with him to Thompson Peak and took ‘em again to the High Desert years after I last heard of him, which brings me to your UFO fuckery, and us... here.” He looked the machine in the face: its eyes had already gone dark. Fuck, did he even hear anything I said?

I need to get this toasted clock out of here before I can put the new arm back. How the fuck do I do it? He turned his eyes to his left, and saw the toolbox by the sleeping bag. Now that’s a suggestion.

Tick, tick, tick. The man’s nail-biting sounds, running his fingers one-by-one through his teeth like an assembly line, and the distant sounds of cicadas were the only indication that time passed in the attic.

“...and this should do it.” He pulled out the burnt clock with tweezers, and used them to plug the replacement in with a neat clink. Wiping sweat off his scarred forehead with the star-spangled banner woven into his sleeve, he picked up the screwdriver and stiffened himself for the last touch of installing the new arm. Job well done.

With a loud slam, the tweezers were tossed into the toolbox, barely falling inside. The man sat up against the wall, slapping the machine’s dented head again and again, whispering and coughing. “Cog, kah-kagh, wake up.” It’s fucking hopeless until those lights turn back on.

His eyes rolled up at the attic and glowing particles in the air, and widened as a familiar voice resurged. “You have satisfied my expectations, Derrick.”

A question bubbled out of the man’s throat. “Is your arm fixed now?”

With a whir back and forth, the stubby moved its new arm. “Affirmative.”

He opened his mouth once more, pleading. “Get me water, man. Get me a whole jug! And take your old arm to the basement before Elmer Fudd comes and sees something out of place.”

The stubby turned its head, and stood in place for a second. What the fuck is he doing?

“Where did you find the screwdriver, and in what position?” it asked.

Ah, shit. “Was in the floor cupboard right next to the basement door, duct-taped to the ceiling. I think the head was towards the right, yeah.”

“I will come back with a supply of boiled water after rearranging these objects,” it picked up the spilled glasses on the floor, “We may be able to discuss your plan afterwards.”

He dryly scratched a few words out of his throat up into his chapped lips. “This time, don’t shut down when I talk.”

I have no idea what my fucking plan is… I thought all this time dicking around would’ve given me a hint. 

He closed his eyes. What do I know about the guy, other than that he wears armor, he could be a National Rifle Association member with how much he likes his guns and probably has no eyes underneath those goggles of his?

The events of the last few hours replayed in his eyes, and his mind raced to put together as many details as possible, drowning out the sound of running water in the kitchen.

...He has a car. A barn with a cat. Collects gas tanks. Keeps going out to get stuff. He’s paranoid, and knowing he’s probably the one who did that android at the lake in, Lord knows he’s probably killed the last human that came here, raped their corpse and stuffed it in a bag down the river.

Ballkid keeps stealing his shit, and it’s likely that all this machinery next to me, that keeps clouding the fucking place with pixie dust, was built years after the rest of this house with all the holes and the wires I could bump into. What if a family used to live here? ...Good Guada-fucking-lupe, I need to focus!

All the parts in the basement were scrapped from dead robots given the binder and how none of the designs match, which means that cobbled-up rifle must have a hell of a kill count.

If I could find some of my fellow Americans out here, it would make things much easier.

Wait, what about the plane?!

The plane that flew over the field and left me with a flaming rotor, it was headed somewhere! What if they’re searching for people… or what if they were fucking terrorists trying to kill me?! Maybe I can turn this place into a base after I’m done with this—Fuck! Why am I distracting myself?!

A base. That’s it. Just like in baseball, I need to get Mr. NRA Chairman off his home plate, pitch Cog the ball , get him tagged, and he’s out of the game! I’m not the flood, I’m “The Dam”! And I got everything I need.

He lifted himself up, grabbed the binder and put it back in its place before lying down on the sleeping bag with his handgun inside. The back door downstairs walloped shut. Ah, shit.

＜I went out for a walk in my garden yesterday and saw something really breathtaking!＞

＜Yes, yes we did!＞

＜A wounded bear tore a beehive apart!＞

＜The bees fought for their home, all but one stung, all but one died!＞

＜And a sly weasel waited out the bear, crawled to the remains, until two hawks scared it away.＞

＜Where did the weasel go? I wanted to play with it!＞

＜It passed by the coyote’s den this morning, let’s go!＞

＜Let’s go, let’s go!＞

Chapter Text

And all that's left now… is to catch my lightning in a bottle and let the genie out of it. I'm sending this wacko to the Recycle Bin right down there with the System30-whatever folder. I can make this a no-hitter, minus the 'losing my library card for bricking a workstation' part and pretending I didn't want to download porn.

The man lay on his back, watching seconds pass like hours staring at the roof. His breath seemed to want to leave him for the heavens; he panted and panicked as if his stolen handgun glowed in the dark; his plans were written all over his face, and the resident could read them off of him the moment their eyes met.

His insides felt as if they were freezing stiff and his blood running cold, and the skin on his legs and arms stuck to the lining of the bed with sweat like slime.

With every moment, the bag seemed more and more comfortable, like a shell to retreat into from the terror quietly surrounding; yet his inner voice swore to crawl out of this before I rot in it.

Let's see if there's ammo here. Uh, fuck, forgot how that works… dammit! Should I just pray it's loaded and chambered?!

He pondered his next move, before holding the weapon to his ear and shaking it to check if it was empty by feel and sound; he immediately panicked. W-wait! I just remembered, it's the press check maneuver!

With the gun in his hand, he gently pulled back the slide. Okay, I can't see shit inside the slit… you know what, I'll just rack the slide. After hearing the satisfying clicking sounds of its parts moving and slipping back and forth into place then, if there wasn't brass in the chamber before, that definitely ain't the case anymore.

H-hold on, what about the safety?

He flicked the safety catch and then tried again: the slide was now stuck in place, which had to mean he'd only just turned the safety on.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph. The safety was off this whole time? I almost shot myself?! Maybe I should be dead—no, no, this isn't the time for my bullshit!

Okay, let's turn it off… try to sneak it somewhere other than my underwear. I'd rather not put it with the biohazards in my boxers and turn it from a weapon to Jackson Pollock art.

Barrel-down, the gun fit neatly between his narrow belly and the polyester of his shirt, and with a bit of shoving, its contours were less noticeable.

Should I even have taken it? What if it's not enough?

Good Lord, what have I done?

He pulled himself up, working through the motions of standing himself up and the tussle of keeping his eyelids open.

...It's about time the showdown started.

Fettered by his fevered mind and withering legs, his feet crawled down the stairs and his chest frosted with pressure in each step down the stairs. First things first.

"Hey, uh…" he stuttered, turning his head around to look for the enemy. "Where can I find some newer clothes...?."

The door was in front of his eyes. Where the hell is he?

A plate was dropped on the kitchen sink counter; his partner was on a stool, washing cups from their last meal. "A laundry line is behind the ba..."

A stern shout flash-flooded the building from the basement below, as reprehensive as it was commanding. "De-rrick!"

An electric shiver crawled up the man's spine, freezing him in a statue-like stupor. Holy fucking shit! Who-it's the fucking resident! He got me! He saw something!

An order rang loudly in his ear. "You know the outhouse must become clean! Go!"

...I didn't know if I had legs anymore.

Well, let's go find a mop. Probably in-

"Go clean the outhouse ou–t a' my sight! I'm countin–g my child-ren!", he shabbily aped the man's accent.

He clenched his fists. "M-fuckin' eardrums!," he covered his ears. He put his hands in a cone around his mouth at the floorboards below to scream "Shut the fu-", cutting himself off to be more quiet, "uhh, the basement door, I'll get it done!"

Christ! One wrong word, and my tongue would've been this guy's next meal.

Cleaning this shit… a mop? Probably under the sink, that's where I remembered seeing one.

He turned towards his partner, softly hushing his tone. "Cog, buddy," he pointed, "the cupboard under your feet. Hand me the m-mop."

The machine obliged. With a leap off its stool, the floorboards creaked, the stubby opened the counter and picked up a stained gray mop.

The man took one step closer, wiping his hands on his sweatpants before his mouth curled in disgust at his mental image of what he was about to do, and tacked on "maybe wash it first."

Wordlessly, the machine gave its partner a cold glance before jumping back on the stool, rinsing the mop in the kitchen sink and nimbly throwing it backwards at the man's feet.

...Same old job: cleaning toilets. I'm always bearing the same burden, and I don't even get a damn pair of gloves this time!

The man meekly opened his mouth, letting out a weak sigh of frustration—he couldn't tune out the resident loudly counting items downstairs with the tireless rhythm of a typewriter, nor the scritch-scratch of the machine scraping a cooking pot like nails on a chalkboard.

He waded once more out the back door and through the burnt field, covering his face with his hand from the sun and carrying the mop in the other. A metal object loudly banged the floor by his side, startling him. This shit again?!

Oh, it's the… bucket?

He turned around: the resident had thrown it at him from the attic window. "You are slow!"

Motherfuck-okay. I can't be assed to speak loud enough to talk back. And I don't think I can pull out this gun fast enough for an easy headshot.

The two exchanged black looks before the man picked up the bucket, and he wended on, wordlessly wheezing. After a moment, he looked again: the window was empty, and the grating sounds coming from the house were boiling his blood, grinding his sanity down.

Fuck you and fuck whatever children you're raping in the basement. I don't give a shit what our deal was, I'm taking my gloves and my underwear first. And I will make you sing like a choir boy with a hole in your throat!

He turned back to the laundry line; the wend through ashes, dirt and dust blackened the man's feet, posture hunched over as if wilting, his hairs falling and graying one by one.

Jesus! That... fucking roadkill smell coming from that path over there!, he turned to his right, I'm not even going to look!

A pair of smooth rubber gloves and tighty-whities were hidden in the rows of unmatching clothing, kevlar, burlap bags and sacks. He jumped to reach them, and couldn't pull them.

Goddamn it, I need Robo Baggins' dunce chair!

A few more footsteps later, the man crouched outside the kitchen window, opened it and stood up: the prized stool, on the other side of the no man's land known as the sink. I'm having this!

He bent over the windowsill, reaching for the chair. His withered fingers hooked around its legs, smearing it with soot and he grabbed it in one fell swoop. Suddenly, his partner surged up in midair from below, leaping right where the stool was before crashing into the cabinets and falling over. "Sh-sh-shit!" He looked over at the machine, eyes red and now rolling on the floor. "I-it's okay, it's okay! He probably didn't hear you fall!"

Before either of the two could react, footsteps arose from the basement door and the man hurried off with his loot, crawling off on his knees and elbows into the bushes.

The resident's tone exploded; the man wasn't sure if it was concern or paranoia. "What did-you've happened?!"

The stubby's voice faded away with distance. "I have lost balance."

I can't be assed to listen to this soap opera scene. I need to hurry, the expert janitor slapped himself for having stopped in his tracks, whipping his lips up into a tight frown.

The stool's feet were planted firmly into the ground beneath the laundry line with an audible crunch. Soon enough the prized gloves were loosely fit on his hands, and the spare boxers packed messily into the corner of his pocket.

Yeah, I took it and it's mine now! Throw a knife at me from the dinner table this time, psycho!

The outhouse door creaked open. He dropped his tools and dragged out the heavy masonry seat over the dirt, shoving aside dirty corncobs on the floor. Time was slower than the snail he'd plucked off the seat; he'd fill the bucket to clean the seat, and then keep his coughing fits in check while shoveling waste out, with only cicadas to keep him company.

Handfuls of clear water were splashed on his head and neck between the repetitive motions, twitching to avoid scratching himself compulsively. His mouth almost automatically repeated the words, "I want to stick that asshole's head in a microwave until it explodes. I swear, as soon as I get the chance..."

Hours seemed to have passed before he was done, and he folded an imaginary blunt in his hand, making the gesture of lighting it and pretending to smoke in celebration of a hard day's work well accomplished.

He took one last look at the last bucketful of waste in the hole before finishing the job—something shone in the dark, catching his eye and prompting him to look around.. The sheer force of will packed in his arm shut the door tight with him inside, as if nailed, and he stood with his back against it to cross himself.

Mother. Of. God. This could be worth more than a piss-gold Rolex back in the real world!

Within a minute, the last of the waste was bucketed and shipped off with the rest behind a mossy sewage pipe between the trees, and he rushed to pick up the unusual object: it was a necklace, with a few letters engraved on it. He reached for it with his ungloved hand before yanking it away—wait, did I just forget it was under a geological column of robot dung?, he pushed the seat back in place with his heels.

The air was more cheerful, and the greens more vibrant. The field suddenly seemed to have shrunken to half its length, and the way back with his belongings in hand felt like the lightest stroll he'd taken in months. Not driven back not by shame or by defeat, but by triumph, he walked up to the house door, proclaiming the completion of his deed to the closed attic window. "I did it, bitch! I cleaned the outhouse!"

Wait.. how do I bring this pendant in? What if the mad hatter downstairs stabs me for carrying it?! His head shook and whipped back and forth searching for solutions, before remembering the one in his waist. Calvin Klein could make a commercial out of this. America's one-stop storage for your trunk, your brown streak and your prom supplies!

Pulling his pants down with one hand ungloved to change boxers, the necklace fit neatly inside his old underwear. The sunlight grated on his skin, and the radish-red extremities of his skin contrasted with his uncovered thighs while he did everything he could to ignore the smell.

He tightened his grip, to make sure no part of the jewel stuck out until a loud pounding was heard at the door, hurrying him to pull his sweatpants up. "There's a rat trying to come in!"

"Take ca…re of it first!", the armored hulk behind the door commanded.

He looked down—his gun fell on the door's threshold, and his eyes opened wide in shock as the stranger shouted. "Is it done?!"

His spine would snap like a twig if he'd reached down again. Crap! I knew I shouldn't have taken this punked gun! At least the safety's on. I need Cog to pick up—wait, no, he can't come in. I can't tell him this is just the cat's litter. Unless—he whined "Alright, alright!"

"Sufficiency is in one alright!" [sic]

With all your books, it wouldn't kill you to read some grade school grammar…but I'll do that job soon.

He scraped dirt with his toes as fast as he could, burying the chrome firearm under his soles that reflected the glazing sun back at his eyes.

The exit was kicked wide open, and before he knew it, a surreal force yanked him indoors, sweeping his feet off the grass: the android's arms. My gold! It's gonna fall!

His arm barely rested against the kitchen counter, was all that held him back from collapsing. The underwear swiftly changed hands, and he stopped for a moment to catch his breath from the lightning-fast stunt. "Ah, hu-ugh, hurgh," the air seemed to escape him. "I need to clean," he coughed and looked at his tightly-gripped fingers, "...myself. So, ¿dónde está?"

"What?" the resident flatly answered, looking at the man's hand.

"Where do I clean myself—," he pulled the spoils of his victory away from the dress-shirted hunter's hand.

He's gonna grab it!

…Goddammit! Reverse psychology it is.

"Listen, I just wanna shower so I'll be heading out. And it's not gonna take long for you to clean this. I just have some diarrhea over here, and I think that stain was from-"

"No! It will be done by the Machine! Go clean yourself!" the heavy-framed figure scolded, goggles flashing into the American's eyes with fatherly indignation and chucking a soap bar at his solar plexus.

Without skipping a beat, the poor man flinched. "Aagh! Yes, 'the machine' will do it! You'll even know when we're finished!"

Reverse psychology, more like reversing my skin!

An oddly comforting sound surged from above; it was the familiar whir of the stubby, stepping downstairs from the attic; its flat voice calming the blaring fanfare in his head after the resident's bellowing earlier. "This task will be my undertaking, Derrick."

You son of a piston, you've earned yourself a baptism just for this.

The android looked at the stubby before exchanging looks with the man for a second. With a nod of the head as his heavy jaw remained clenched in a slight frown, he allowed the sickly man to straighten his meek posture to walk up to the biped and hand it the laundry. "Well, you'd better watch what's inside."

With the resident taking the cleaning wares indoors, the machine hopped back upstairs followed by the man. His partner looked back at him, and a wooden step creaked as if to bark at the man: the stubby's feet stopped in the middle of the staircase. "Don't follow," its pointed eyes and arm raised sideways spoke silently to the crawling wreck behind it, who considered arguing with it before he'd just given up and resigned himself to a sip of water at the sink. Once he'd turned away from the stubby, the infernal march of the android's war boots faded back into the basement, and he'd started counting parts, nuts and bolts again.

He sat himself down at the dinner table, and rested his head on a basket.

His body, all of a sudden, felt lighter than a feather and time stopped. The resident's harsh voice, rising like magma from below, cooled down and the smell of oil and scrap vanished from the air.

He yawned, recalling the sensation of water warmly flowing over his hair and skin. The soft smell of vapor wrapping around him, the white noise of an open showerhead and soap smoothing the cracks in his skin. Weeks of hard labor setting up traps for his mechanical predators, and building his old shelter piece-by-piece finally paying off as the caked dirt in his folds washed away in a brown scum on the white floor, slowly turning blood-red. His toes were falling apart and circling the drain, bones turning to dust. The water was sawing him apart, digging trench after trench deep into his skin. With a scream of agony, he shielded himself with his arms, unable to close the faucet as the droplets severed his nerve endings. A silhouette reared its head from behind the curtain.

Opening his eyes, he jolted wide awake, breathing heavily: he was still covered in grime, both on his body and his soul, at the dinner table. Holy shit… I can't just sit on my ass here! It's now or never! Not waitin' at the table till I'm sushi on the menu!

The man up and bolted out the door, crouched and dug up his gun; the entire weapon was covered in soil. Fuck! One step forward, two steps back!

Alright, alright. Where to from here? Talk to Cog? Take the car and go on a road trip to nowhere? Christ! What's with all these decisions all of a sudden? Why can't I just throw rocks at machines or stab fish like I've been doing just fine for weeks?! And this asshole, this huge prick won't just jump off a cliff or eat a live wire!

He turned the gun back and forth in his hand, his hand quivering and quaking as he struggled to keep a steady grip, shoved it loosely down his pants and stood idly hunched-over by the door, until the sound of footsteps shot sparks up his spine, leaving him to shut it promptly with a clank. He stuck his ear to the wooden panels, hearing running water and scratching the side of his nose. Cog! O-okay, he's just washing my shit.

He looked up to the attic window, looked back at the handle and shut his eyes, reaching down at his gut for his weapon. Break in like a SWAT or… shoot him through the cracks in the floorboards?

I don't know.

I don't motherfucking know!

He fell to his knees, winding his face like a tight spring under the pressure facing him. He felt the gun pressed against his chin, about to go off—by his own hand no less. What the fuck am I doing to myse—he felt like shouting, before he'd heard a heavy baritone barge through the door and knock him out on the floor, as it were.

"This choker! How were you to take it!"

…Shit, that's him!

He held the gun tightly in his hands, and loudly slammed the door with his knuckles, only for it to send a shockwave of pain through his joints. The sound of the machine's joints surged, as if it were trying to run. A metal object loudly struck the floor. Cog!

Th-the damn knob!

He covered his eyes from the sun with one hand, reached for the doorknob with the other, slowly getting up and kicked the door open with his knee.

The android was running, sidestepped the necklace on the floor. The machine's eyes were nailed in place facing its pursuer.

The whole scene passed in front of the man like a blur. "You two toasters! On the ground! Don't move!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, feeling his throat ripping apart. He pointed the gun at the stranger and squeezed the trigger. A shiver in his wrist made him panic, unloading two shots into a dish, sending shards flying, and a tusk-equipped machine head on a wall, sending the round ricocheting through the window, breaking it. H-How did I miss?! Dear God, are you shittin' me?!

Instead of complying with his request, the hard-hatter turned around, adjusting the buttons on his shirt while the machine ducked. "You! You try to betray me now?!"

The man's mind froze, and he was soon smacked to the forehead by the resident's hard hat tossed at his nose, culminating in a loud snap. In his rush, he ignored the spiking pain in his cartilages as he slammed the door shut and turned around to run around the building before stopping himself. W-wait, no! I gotta distract him!

With a tight grip, he ran back to the door, raised his hand above eye level and fired one more shot through its panels, and another through the window before running the other way—up the mountain, before finding the coarse-faced man barreling at him far behind with a bullish pit-a-pat and a missile's precision. Why does every mess I get into end like this?

This shit makes me feel like I don't deserve to li…that's it! Get the gato!

With the last of his strength, he scurried up to the garage drenched in sweat and yellow to the face, in front of the closed doors. Bang. Ram. He threw himself once, and again, and again as the footsteps behind him grew louder, before his skull proved able to defeat wood and the garage barn door broke open in splinters, and he leaned against the back of the clunker parked within.

"T-the cat!," he shouted at no one in particular, turning left and right before a hissing drew his gaze. Climbing over the trunk to the car's roof with both arms, he turned around: the resident was on his trail, hunting him down with his fists clenched and hurling out loud in gibberish. My fucking God! Am I destined for this?

His spine made a cracking sound as he crouched under the light fixtures, grabbed the cat's neck, and held the gun to its head, holing himself up as if he held the higher ground. "I'm right here, big copper man! Crawl back to your crib, or I'm popping Sonny's tots right here an' now!"

"He is Zin!"

Ah, yeah. Zin. Forgot about that.

"I don't give a shit! Don't come an inch closer!"

"Zin! Did you open the door for this criminal?!"

He thinks the cat… opened the garage by itself? Good Lord, man, get screened for dementia!

The man looked at the pet, silently warning it that this ain't working out, pal, before throwing a glance above its owner's head and shouting at the top of his lungs. "Cog!" His hoarse scream nearly ripped his throat in half, making his foe turn around.

That's it.

Only one shot at this. He's distracted.

Swiftly pointing the gun away from the cat and drawing it towards the back of the stranger's head, he pulled the trigger—only for a little click to escape the barrel, and nothing more.

Here goes-shit!

His finger struck the trigger again, over and over, like a hammer striking an anvil. Click, click, click, each consecutive sound etching a line of pitch-black horror under his eyes, at the corners of his chapped lips, and on his jaundiced forehead; the crows' caws grew loud enough to split his eardrums. A peek at the gun quickly reveals the slide stuck behind an empty and open chamber: the magazine was empty.

A crushingly tight pressure overwhelmed his leg.

The sirens in his head blared near-instantly. Kitty's gonna scratch!, his mind echoed through his hollow-feeling head, prompting him to drop the pistol, and toss the animal as far as he could out of the barn with both hands. Before he knew it, the resident was by his side, yanking him off of his hiding space as he wordlessly cried for mercy. "Mother of God!," he squawked, bracing himself with his forearms from the shelves closing in on the bridge of his nose. It's over!

With his face to the ground, and thoughts to what maggot-filled horrors lay six feet beneath, the man contemplated his last words before the curtains on the stage of his life would be dropped, and the audience vanished into dust. Maybe I'll be eaten by tiny robots instead of worms. That'll make less of a stink.

A moment later, something heavy thumped the stranger' back, and his knees slammed into the car. A loud thud shook the floor, and the android's goggled face dropped right before the man's. Its skin had a rough, foamy—almost porous—yet artificial texture, with a few bumps, as if to signal old age. The lines of horror on the man's face slowly dissipated as he lay flat on the floor, before he'd heard the voice of his machine partner.

"Derrick. Remove yourself-"

THE FUCK?! KILL MYSELF?!

"-from the premises immediately. The brown feline has been secured."

Y-yeah, that's a relief.

Pins and needles struck the man's arm; his foe had gotten a good hold of him. "Aah!"

"My weapon will not be used by anyone to kill me!," he threw a trickle of scalding spit up on the man's nose, leaving him blinded and screaming. "Aargh!," the android got up, grabbed his hip and lifted him into the air and tossed him out the door at his partner, "I'm falling!" His face grated against the loam, his arms flailing around as he rolled on the ground down to the stubby's feet.

The heat of energy projectiles loomed over him between his ragged clothes and the sun, and their light flashed across his closed eyelids. Facing sideways to avert himself from the sun, he opened his eyes: as the sunlight fried him, he witnessed the cat scurry off alone into the outhouse, running away from the hellish clamor of energy weaponry, trees cracking and heavy branches falling like logs and snapping on the rocks. The machine's humming faded into the distance as it bounced away, following heavy footsteps; likely Ty Cobb heading to second base, he figured.

Ah shit, no way I could catch up to those two.

…what if I use the car? Hold on, where would I even find the damn keys?!  Maybe they're on the shelves?

With a droopy expression on his face, he heaved himself up; coughing on the soil as he crawled into the garage. Grabbing the edge of the car's trunk, he lifted himself up and opened it: a butterfly leapt out and hit him in the face, throwing him off for a moment before he'd noticed a clean, full magazine resembling the one in his handgun between a pair of cobwebs. What the hell? I was this close?! Fuck me, fuck this!

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

…Alright, he sighed, where's my gun?

He looked on the ground around his feet, circling the car twice and finding nothing but cracks in the marble. "Shit!," he shouted as he'd nearly walked out before remembering his initial quest for the car keys.

He ran his hand through the shelves, ransacking through piles of hardware, voltmeters, alternators, jumper cables and other metallic junk he couldn't recognize. His hand finally rubbed something with a sharp, toothed edge—a key?, he thought. Damn it, it's a wrench!

This isn't working! I need to look inside the house and take the cat with me… where is it?! I don't want a fucking bear or something making one bite out of it!

The man passed by the trunk to grab his magazine, putting it in his pocket before breaking out of the barn in a rush, up the beaten path to the outhouse. So… this is where Zane-no, Zin goes when he's scared? Is that why he wouldn't let me take a shit yesterday?

The machine held the strange rifle over its head. The externally attached component of this weapon is highly detrimental to my field of vision, it duly noted as the dangling metal box slammed repeatedly into its face. All it could do for the time being was to track the resident by his footsteps, looking up and down every few seconds and the taunts he couldn't stop uttering.

"I will get you! I will get your hairy friend! You are all a hundred years too early to defy me!"

The stubby leapt towards the source of the insufferable gloating, aimed the rifle and fired in the direction of his footsteps, hoping to lay down suppressive fire. A moment later, it was surrounded by a couple more sets of footsteps, much more orderly and hurried in their staccato. It seems I have been led into a trap, if my target has more support than previously thought. Backing up in fear, it saw a pair of black blurs whiz past in midair opposite the stranger's footprints, leaving leaves, dust and pollen flying in their trail. Was this an event of chance?

After a moment, the stubby's insides heated up as it trekked under the sun, not having heard a word from the stranger as it reached a drainage canal, finding his boots laid down within a swamp of dirty water and waste. Nary a footstep was to be seen, on the rocky ground of the other side.

The man opened the outhouse door, and sure enough, found what he'd expected. "You're coming with me, it's alright," he whispered softly as he picked up the cat and took it across the field with one hand over his head, "and hail fucking Mary!," he furrowed his brows, "Going back and forth givin' the sun its dues is taking a toll," he started leaning from side to side as his vision blurred, slurring words, "enough on my hands payin' my debts to Christ..," before he'd shut the house's back door and dropped it on the table, lying down with his chest over two chairs.

"Don't eat bread from the fucking psycho, they said in Sunday school," he whined at the cat. "Don't lay a fork into his messy slab of meat, they said. His heart ain't with you, they said. But I had to, didn't I?"

The cat answered with a growl.

"And then, my right calf was almost with him!," his panting grew louder as a chill crept up his spine, in one spasm falling off the chairs with a voice crack. "Ow!"

After a bit of heavy breathing, he got up, holding on to the attic-attached cables and petted the cat on the table. "This civilization's advanced enough to have, uh, particle guns but not fridges… come on, let's find you something in the cupboards. Christ, I've never been this good with animals," he muttered to himself.

Pushing a cupboard's door open with his dust-coated fingers, he searched for anything with a lid. "We've got uh, what looks like a cup of noodles. I guess that's something." Tearing the transparent plastic lid off, he shook the cup, emptying it into a pot and leaving some water to boil, and rest his head in his palms. "Oh, Guadalupe. I need a gun. A gun. A gun…" his lips seemed to escape him as they drifted off into mindlessly flapping the syllables, quieter and quieter. His fingers offered up his nails to his teeth. His feet wandered downstairs to the basement, pushing the metal door open—thankfully, with no strange reflections or lights on it this time, save for the strange green lights hung up.

To his surprise, the shelves were upright and similar-looking items stacked together, giving the room a much less ghastly and jerry-rigged air. Turning to his right, he grabbed what seemed to be a severed android's arm, its naked skin made up of rubber panels cleft over the shoulders and a barcode laser-inscribed on its side. Note to self: if you ever scan this, there won't be enough credit cards in the world to pay off the price. 

He waved it around with a chuckle, swinging it at an imaginary target. "Hey, Edward! You ever see this shit in Tampa Bay?!", he thrusted it, "and this one's for telling everybody Linda put out on the first date!" he spewed with spite before he'd put it back in place, and closed his eyes, hanging his head in shame.

"Nah, this ain't working. I-uh, I told you that shit so I'd look cool. Linda wasn't a slut. And I never got sucked off… who am I screwing with, this is why I got dumped."

While his eyes welled up with tears, a pair of darkly-clad arms hovered over his shoulders, grabbing both ends of the one he'd just dropped and tightening it over his neck before he'd even realized what was happening, reflexively kicking and whipping his arms about.

"Aargh! Gock-gah-"

The stranger's voice rose up from behind, piercing right into his eardrum before he could understand what he was hearing. "...you will be taken with me. No questions. You will not be killed if you don't resisting."

"O-o-okay, I'm on board," he whispered. "Wait, what about Zin?"

"You know his name now," the stranger's tone shifted between mockery and muted enthusiasm.

"I gave him noodles. The pot's still boiling."

"Put it out in front of me. I'll take him."

Pushed forth like a wheelbarrow, the man hit his toes on the steps several times, contorting his face in agony as the resident paced his steps without interruption, close enough to hear and feel the android's warm breath down his neck and the wounds on his back. "Raise your hands," the stranger commanded the man to reach for the stove dial, without letting go of the detached arm around the latter's neck.

"O-okay, i put it ou-"

"Now, open the counter. Take out the gas pipe from the butane tank," he added as the man obliged. "I-it's done," he held the cold rusty pipe in his shaky hands, looking at a slew of butane tanks that must have been put right under it a minute ago.

"Open all the butane tanks. And get the light…"

What the fuck?! He wants to burn the entire place down?!

The cat's meow drowned out the screams in the man's mind, as he turned the tanks open, one by one.

In an instant, he'd felt an overwhelming force propel him forwards towards the sink from behind, tipping the butane tanks over and slamming his ribs against the counter. An electronic crackling sound thundered from outside. The arm around his neck fell at his feet. The hardhat made a loud clunking noise as it fell smack-dab inside the sink; the stranger had lost his balance, rolling on the floorboards. One quick look around him, and he'd noticed a familiar sight at the window: his partner, holding a rifle that seemed larger than its own chassis—the same rifle, he recalled, that had been pointed at his head by the gunman not more than a day ago, except with a long rope-like string of energy attached to the hardhat, like a grappling hook. "Move left."

Whose? Yours? Mine-dammit, I'm not thinking! he dived to his right. A flurry of energy projectiles flew through the window, striking his assailant over his chest and legs as he regained balance, wordlessly crying out in pain. Oh shit, oh no you don't!

The man raced to grab the fallen pipe under the stove, and chased the stranger running towards the basement, placing it right over his bare foot and tripping him over the stairs. His aching joints punished him harshly for daring the work of athletes as he dashed down the steps, noticing the handgun on his belt. Quickly enough, he swiped it off of the resident, loaded the fresh magazine from his pocket and unloaded shot after shot after shot into the android's thorax and neck until a fresh crimson pool of blood had formed under the both of them, leaving him breathless.

"Holy shit," shouted the bug-eyed man, "I did it!"

The stubby appeared right behind him.

"Regarding the repair of my system clock, and your termination of this hostile unit, I am pleased to say your performance has been satisfying, Derrick."

"God," he coughed, "damn! Wait, argh!" his voice cracked and he wetted his underwear at the sight of the android's finger twitching, "he-he…" he quivered as he unloaded the rest of his ammunition over his shoulders and neck, firing in a trance that could only be broken by the clicking sound of an empty magazine bestowing its furlough upon him.

The machine laid its newly-replaced left hand upon his back, as he let out a heavy strenuous breath. "He's dead… he's dead…" he sighed, "alright, Cog, I've got something for you," he gestured at the machine to follow him into the kitchen.

"I am not equipped to consume foodstuffs intended for the consumption of androids, or organic beings," the stubby explained on their way up.

"No, no, it's something else." Emptying the pot onto a bowl to offer to the cat, the man took a handful of water, and sprinkled it in three steps over the machine's head. "What is this?"

"I baptize thee, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit," he turned over to the stove, "now let's turn this shit off before that becomes a baptism by fire."

Chapter Text

(Chapter 13&1)

Time: 1194■-05-05 16:38:49

> Message sent: This is Tactical Support Unit POD ■■■, codename "Goose". Due to the potentially sensitive nature of the information exchanged, this unit prefers to remain anonymous and requests a passkey handshake.

> Data exchange requested by Goose.

> Message received: This is Tactical Support Unit POD ■■■, codename "Blue Jay".

> Passkey handshake complete. Data exchange request accepted by Blue Jay.

> Proposal: exchanging datamined files from deactivated entities found in a hostile environment would theoretically enable the construction of higher-precision situation models for combat.

> Proposal accepted.

> Data exchange in progress. Awaiting confirmation from Goose.

> Confirmed reception of data from Blue Jay.

> Suggestion: Goose and Blue Jay should regularly exchange data in the future.

> Analysis: This idea carries security risks. Further re-evaluation of the necessity of this type of communication is to be conducted.

>$ ls /share/

eWVwIGl0J3MgYTI=.log

>$ eWVwIGl0J3MgYTI=.log

Open file? (Y/N)

>$ Y

I

I am Fabricio. Every machine of the City on a Hill knows me and my name, and I am proud to say all of them have worn my accessories at least once. Every week, while others preferred maintenance or trinkets, I had put it upon myself to invest first and foremost into honing my craft; and need no more cover than a plastic sheet over my rather unremarkable frame to get through my work without any hazards.

Every Sunday, Emil would come to my shop and supply me with fabrics, fur, ceramic, cotton, buttons and strings I weaved together, all in one day - thanks to the work ethic my master taught me before he'd died in an act of biological warfare. The enemy was merciless, and electrocuted him with urine. And the first, the one before him, was found torn apart by a moose rubbing its antlers against him. A most undignified demise!

Dignity is something I wish to restore to his legacy, yet I am known to care little for revenge and fighting despite my adventurous mind. So be it: the Senate of the City (or rather, the half who hadn't been undergoing maintenance for the month at the Baruch's Bazaar, something far too costly for commoners) has elected me for the honor of a monumental task: weaving the largest ever map of the surrounding land out of fabrics, to be displayed along with my master's handcrafted gallows in the town square for the colony's anniversary!

With this in mind, I shall venture away surveying the land, starting off with the Sagami River. Next, shall come the other side of the City, where I shall explore the root of many a rumor that has pervaded from the rumor mills among my customers. Where there is darkness, where there is doubt, I will bring certainty as I trust none more than myself for this task!

II

I have struggled through hordes of bears harassing me, yet my genius shows again in my coming out unscathed.

I have seen the bodies of soldiers lying down and falling apart in a myriad of ways - this shall absolutely be noted. They shall not grow forgotten, their bodies will be inscribed along with every tree and shrub on my map! The Senate shall know of my perseverance and dedication. My apologies to Mayor Cog, who had reprimanded me for trespassing upon his "physics experiments" as he puts it - I hope he may be satisfied to know that I have taken care to erase all traces of his discoveries.

I had been planning to watch the more dangerous areas from a watchtower, or to enlist a flying unit to carry me around but the storm has laid the drapes of a thick fog over the forest. No bother! I shall travel now off the beaten paths, and follow whichever one Providence has revealed for me as I run, wearing my sheet in the rain. A lake is nearby.

III

I circle it three times, enough to observe the mechanical carp leaping in and out the water, and pass by what I presume to be a fire pit. Yet I suddenly hear the sound of electricity zapping through the fog. Such horror! An android shouts, yet there is none to be seen! "You... I know you're a menace! Stay back!" A gun cocks.

A lady takes him in jest. "Hm... well, old man. That's no way to greet someone you just met."

"Get awaay!" Bang. Bang. Bang. It's definitely an android's small gun, by the sound of it. A sword slash, dash and crackle and a howl of unspeakable throes all impress themselves on my consciousness in a flash, I must say I am stunned! I turn around, and finally see it: the chap's charred skin had completely melted off of his frame, with vapor and smoke rising from his remains, and a gigantic sword is dumped from thin air upon his body. A ghost-no, a girl suddenly fades into existence in a whirlwind of speed and red light right above him, standing in the highest heels I have ever seen and pressing down on his neck. Her skin is half-torn away all over her limbs and chest, her black frame exposed: she had the presence of a dead android who haunted the living. The raindrops vaporize into steam around her, and the exposed bare metal on her waist seems to turn nearly red-hot.

She brandishes a sword which I would wager a good chunk of my G to be large enough to carry the both of us over the Pacific, and points it at me. I have never known this emotion before, but I felt desperate to live, even as I hear her words drop as a sort of prelude to her attack and tighten the plastic cover around my bolts. "Show's over. If you wanna see more, I'm afraid the second act’ll cost ya. Which is it, now or later?"

I jump away. "Android. Scary." I cannot see her anymore. Throw plastic cover away and escape. Girl groans.

Run.

IV

FEAR. FEAR. ANDROID, ENEMY, SCARY. RUN.

ANDROIDS. ARE. SCARY.

1. SEE. HEAPS. OF. HEADS.
2. SEE. BODIES. STACKED.
3. SEE. MAN. HAIRY. SCARY.

MAN. THROW. ROCK.

MAN. FIGHT.

"WHY DO I FEAR?"

            End of eWVwIGl0J3MgYTI=.log (page 4/4)

> Message sent: Analysis: Data contains pertinent unit and cartography information relevant to current missions. Possible benefits critical.

> Message sent: Conclusion: Further investigation of area is to be conducted. Unknown hostile unit entries added to database.

> Message sent: This unit, Goose, would like to show its appreciation to Blue Jay for its contribution.

> Message received: Acknowledged. Signing off.

> $logout

(Present)

The back door of the little wooden home bore a pair of bullet holes. Each one was stained with gunpowder, and each one dutifully traded sunlight from the outside, for the light glowy dust from the inside and a couple of ants treading in and out all the way to the dead boar out the front porch.

The few hours after the debacle with the former resident were the most peaceful he’d ever had. The soot and smoke in the air smelled better than the sweetest perfume he could recall, and his aching body was zapped with a newfound vitality—although not for long.

After shutting off the gas tanks, the man looked at the cat by his side munching on noodles, and back at his partner with a sigh. “I need to change myself up,” a warm streak of urine ran down his pants and over his leg, spilling a few drops on the floor in plain sight. “Y-yeah… sorry you had to see this. I haven’t peed this well in a while,” he started laughing uncontrollably, “though it got some nasty kidney stones out when your compadres beat me with my MIA shoes last week.”

“I am in possession of a few memories of… certain units reporting that the enemy was developing ‘area denial fluids.’”

“Oh man,” he chuckled, “poor guys were probably as scared of my piss as I was every time I took a drug test. Health worker’s probably seen more of my junk than any woman ever has…” the man sheepishly nodded with his hand behind his neck, “gotta thank Mr. Fipp’s history class for tellin’ me about what the Brits did at Fort Pitt. Figures, if smallpox can stop natives, I-wait, uh, do you have real countries in this world’s history… nevermind.”

“It is my recollection that the disease known as ‘smallpox’ has been eradicated by humanity circa 1980 AD. Has this been the case in your reality?”

“Well, uh, I was like one year old back then, how the fuck would I know?” the man raised an eyebrow, clutching his chest with his left hand and letting go of the steel pipe in the other. “Uurgh…”

“It would have seemed to me that such an event would be documented for years to come until you developmentally matured,” the machine dryly answered his question.

“Cog,” he bent over, feeling a sharp pain in his back and legs, “fuck, take care of the pipe,” he threw a glance at the cat who’d finished its meal, “and deal with Kitty-cat’s litter while you’re at it,” before he’d collapsed on the floor. “I don’t want any more,” his voice trailed off before he’d caught his breath, “deaths in here,” the smoking handgun fell off his grip.

His pupils vied for territory with his eyelids, lying down while trying to grab wakefulness by both arms. His mouth dried up; he’d felt like his tongue no longer obeyed his mind’s command, unable to utter so much as a coherent syllable. Aargh…

Sweet taters, do something, he stared at the machine.

“Derrick?” its monotone almost seemed like a question, while it lifted the metal pipe off of his hand.

You’re not gonna… beat me with this… are you…

A feeling of numbness washed over him, while everything passed by in a blur—it could have been a minute, an hour or a decade for all he’d known. The only thing he was sure he could sense was the machine’s whirring, allaying the deep-seated fear that he’d finally gone to meet the Father.

A splash of water from above ran coldly through the cracks and folds on the skin of his face and arms, as if to strike him alight with consciousness again.

Water.

The fog had vanished from his eyes for a moment; after he’d blinked enough times, the shiny dust in the air no longer blinded him, and he realized he’d been watching the stubby splash him. “You are in urgent need of first aid.”

He whipped his head around in electric jolts to shake off the dripping droplets over his eyes; the cat was by the door, watching and catching the ants as they passed by.

“However, you must clean yourself first. In addition, change of attire must be immediate in order to minimize the severity of infection.”

“Why… ugh… the fuck… did you and the ballkid… drag me here…,” he grunted, slurring his words.

“My regrettably short-sighted acquaintance had led me to understand that this residence was the safest destination to minimize detours.”

The only response he could muster to this statement, was to emanate a pair of vacant stares from his dull eyes. The machine’s words, coherent as they were, bounced up and down through the inside of his skull as if it were hollow.

With a thud, the stubby hopped down from a stool. A bucket of steaming water was in its hand, which the machine dropped by the man’s side. “This is a container that was located in the closet . It will be necessary for me to pour this over you from a certain altitude, in order to avoid short-circuiting. I believe this is called a ‘shower.’”

The man looked his partner firmly in its green headlights, and fought the ground beneath him to sit up slumped over. “I’m not,” his eyes went back and forth between his pants, the machine and the bucket, “undressing in front of you, dick,” he threw himself up and stumbled haphazardly to keep his upright balance. “I’ll do it myself!,” he proclaimed with saliva flying off his tongue. He lowered his knees, grabbed his bucket, and wobbled his way to the door around the cat, opening it. “Toss me the soap and then close the curtains, Boltbucket, will ya?!,” he’d taken off his indoor voice and checked it at the exit, as soon as a fit of sneezing took its place. “A-archew!”

Whoosh-bang. A half-whittled bar of soap whizzed past his leg and struck the bucket, lightly tipping the container before it settled back on the ashen soil—the windows were shut and the door closed. Taking off his clothes, he dropped his old shirt, his torn sweatpants and piss-reeking tighty-whities on the loam. So much for a quick change of garb, he kept the new piece away from the rest—it’s not ridden with enough blood and pus, he thought.

The man’s skin baked in the heat of the sun, with nothing more than the sound of the cicadas, the running water behind the pines and the light howl of the wind that carried the smell of soot and dirt to reassure him.

A moment passed, and another, and he’d soon enough had warm tears running amok down the puffy, reddish bags under his eyes, the cracks and folds in his face, his mustache, his beard and the smooth patches of scars in between. There were no words, no grunts, only a terrible feeling of being exposed and alone.

The only faces he’d seen until he’d crossed paths with the resident were his reflection: in the water, in the bits of glass strewn about, in a cup of water, and the vacant-eyed photo ID his wallet—a visage that became less and less familiar to him over time, before he’d lost it.

He reached down as slowly as his arm would left him, and with a quivering hand, poured the warm water over himself, letting it flow and rubbing himself with soap—aw, oh, it burns! Gearhead must’ve dumped in a whole pound of salt!

The burning sensation shut his eyes. In his newfound blindness, the man’s blood curdled as he’d heard a voice closing in from behind, and he let out a scream: it was the ballbusting ballkid, uttering a shout of childlike excitement.

“No, you fucking didn’t!” he let go of the bucket that slammed the wet ground, “Don’t bring a moose here to stomp me!” he turned around, flinging the soap vaguely in the creature’s direction while his eyes remained shut.

The only thing he heard after that was a “hop!”, and a rigid wet object of some unusual shape—he felt—soared straight towards his arm.

“Woah,” he wheezed, “shit!” Shaking in his cold skin, did his best to grab the object that had lightly bounced off his shoulder, and picked it up: My God, these are… bite marks! He bit off half the fucking soap bar!

The creature hollered, and hollered again from side to side before its voice and rolling had uncannily gone quiet with a whoosh. “Huh?”

After cleaning himself, he trekked, with his wet underwear held by his fingertips, over the ash and pebbles to the laundry line, dried himself with some white rags that traded color with his wounds and feet before putting on whatever he could pick up; convenience came first.

A cracked motorcycle helmet atop a milk crate—better than letting his forehead fight a constant skirmish against the sun, he figured.

A loose-fitted shirt stitched together from several unmatching faded seventh-hand tatters, camo cargo pants, a pair of long black shoes and a polka-dotted necktie wrapped tightly around his waist should do for now, he whistled to himself, let’s save the bitching about style for America’s Got Talent. And while I’m at it, what’s with the bullet holes and the weird faces with wings drawn on this pair of underwear?

Once he’d donned his makeshift gentleman’s getup, he made his way back in, standing behind the back door. “I’m done,” he announced out loud, turning around one last time to inspect his surroundings and faintly pushed the door forward with his fingertips. The cat stepped out, startling him to bounce back against the door frame: the pet went out up past the outhouse into the woods, towards the garage. “Aah-ay!,” he rubbed the pain away from the back of his head after bumping into a column.

Two voices racked his eardrum, coming from the doorway. One was the irritating chirp he’d been hearing earlier, and the other was the machine’s monotone; they seemed to be engaged in bitter verbal sparring. What the hell?

Walking into the kitchen, he’d found the machine pursuing the sentient globe around the floor, fumbling its capture of the latter that darted up and down through the walls, the picture frames and machine parts, stopping in an elusively perfect balance on the tip of a machine head’s tusks. “Hey-ugh,” the man groaned at his partner with a wave of the hand, “didn’t… we tell Ballkid to fuck right off…”

He went back to shut the door behind himself, and cupped his hands around his coarse lips: “Cog, get this little shit out of here before he kills us or I’ll kick him out with a swing!” his lungs trembled as if he’d smoked a crate of cigarettes, yet the two seemed to pay him no heed. Fuck it, he picked up his wet underwear and got to the sink, I’ll clean this, he’d decided to drown out the bickering with the sound of running water and scrubbing stains; a mere minute had passed before he’d felt burning reflux build up in his oesophagus, coughing a bit away and pounding at his chest before he’d dropped the undergarment over the counter.

There was one word, one set of syllables he’d kept hearing over, and over, and over before his nerves had heated up to a fever pitch, and his veins seemed to strangle him. He raised his hands without moving an inch, and shouted at the wall: “Emiru this, emiru that, Halua-er, Hallelujah! Is that your friend’s name, is that it?!” his calloused hands slammed the marble, he opened the window and took heavy breaths one after the other.

“Derrick, now would be a good time to rest. Further stressing yourself is detrimental to your health.”

He turned around, keeping his back stiff to lessen its aching. As if a bolt of lightning had struck his arm upright, he raised his pointer finger shakily at the machine as if to say something; the hand had apparently taken on a life of its own. His hand lurched then at the creature, pouncing on it. “You-you-¡eres…!-no, ¡son…!,” he shivered at his hand suddenly drained of its energy surrendering to gravity, “you two keep at it and hash out which one of you takes the kids and which one gets to keep the house,” he grunted, “I need to look at my own damn wounds,” he passed by the kitchen table and trudged up the stairs, stumbling on the creaky steps.

• TRANSLATION SOFTWARE ACTIVATED. Setting: ██████ to English.

“What’s wrong with my cousin? H-he seems really bristled up. He sounds angrier every time I see him, you know. And now, his clothes look more like an android, or something.”

“His previous articles of clothing have been extensively damaged, and harbor hazardous mixtures of pathogens and blood from repeated abrasions due to my transporting him despite my best attempts to hold him. It is for this reason that I have a request, Emil of the Woods.”

“Wh-what is it, Cog? I mean, that sounds… pretty bad.”

“The human is in a dangerous condition. I cannot take care of him entirely by myself, and so, I will be in need of a few items.”

“Anything, you name it! If it’ll help him, it’s on the house.”

“As long as it is your property.”

“R-right,” the ball sighed. 

“Medical supplies will be indispensable, notably relating to first aid. Nutritional provisions will also prove critical on short notice, although I believe their availability in the surrounding forest renders it less of an urgent concern.”

“F-first aid! That’s not a problem! I have logic vaccines lying around, a large pack of staunching gel that’s still viscous, an Auto-Heal plug-in chip-”

“The human body is a carbon-based organic system, one similar to that of animals. Supplies manufactured for androids are ineffective and toxic to human biochemistry.”

“Wait, wait, I know! He needs herbs… and potions! I can kinda remember this guy, his daughter—no, I think it was his sister-”

“Bring the supplies you’d use to take care of an injured animal. Nothing more, nothing less. Will that be possible?”

“Bandages, disinfectant, antibiotics, tourniquets, dressings, gauze. You got it!”

“That seems adequate. However, there is one more issue that remains unaddressed.”

“Oh, oh no!” the ball wobbled off balance and bounced off the floorboard with a thud, “Cog, I’m really sorry! I just didn’t want to scare you!”

The machine’s eyes reddened. “Are you aware of sightings of some figures in black scouring the surrounding area?”

“U-uh,” the creature’s tone had mellowed out, “y-yeah, that.”

“Were they associated with you in any way?”

“Ho-hold up, um…” the ball turned left and right, “wheeere’s the big guy who lives here? He was like an uncle to me… who hunts me around with rifles. Or shotguns. Or landmines.”

“Due to his erratic and malignant tendencies, the human and I have resorted to killing him in self-defense.”

“A-ah, what the… You’re scaring me!”

 “Two black units which I presume to be androids of some sort. Their dimensions were similar to the targets my colony’s militia train against. The units in question were seen leaping over vegetation towards the owner of this residence during my final encounter with him, near a water current. Due to my visual sensors’ low shutter speed and the units’ excessively brisk movement, I was unable to obtain any further information,” the machine pointed to its eyes.

The ball chuffed and panted, stammering, and shut its eyes briefly before talking. “I think I’ve seen them before! Th-they were at some place that smelled like my cousin, talking about paintings of some places! Then when they heard me, they tried to kill me!”

“Smelled like him?”

“It had his footprints and all! A bed of leaves, hair and bits of skin everywhere, some drawer… it’s like a tiny house made of machine parts! But the smell was so bad, I washed myself in a lake when I got away.”

“I believe that was his shelter. What were they conducting there?”

“I don’t wanna rile you up, but now that I think about it, they might’ve looted it if they’re searching for him. And, erm, they might want to send him into the night… and I don’t mean going moon-watching in the Kingdom.”

“Is it likely that they had been after the resident before his death?”

A voice rang out from above; it was the man’s call for help.

“What’s he saying, Cog? Is he dying?!” the ball began rolling, before the stubby’s arm had stopped it in its place.

“This fruitful conversation must regrettably end now, and I urge you to tend to your duties as soon as possible. The human is in no condition to be agitated any further. As such, he will not be made aware of these events,” it explained until the ball no longer chafed its hand.

The ball’s tone dropped to one of resignation as it turned its back to the machine with its upside-down face to the door, “I’ll head out.”

“Thank you, Emil… of the Woods. Do not attract the attention of any third parties,” the stubby let go, and took care to close the door after its supplier left, heading then up the staircase.

• TRANSLATION SOFTWARE DEACTIVATED.

“Took you long enough,” the man in the sleeping bag stretched and chuckled after letting an audible fart. “Heh-heh, oh man, my colon hasn’t died on me yet. Some Meister Brau wouldn’t hurt either, just for makin’ sure the liver is at work too,” he sat up, “ah, man, sometimes, I’d let some apples ferment in a cylinder for a few days and down it all at once just to stop shivering in my sleep.”

“Do you suffer from an ongoing alcohol addiction, Derrick? This is an enormous health hazard,” the machine stepped over to his side, staring him dead in the eyes.

“The fuck are you-no, no, it’s just that I prepare in advance for the night of the 4th of July. Fireworks, beer discounts, hammered guys kicking each other in the shin and I join in… it’s better than any family dinner I’ve had,” he tightened the sleeping bag’s fabric around him and turned over to the stubby, “until they kick mine.”

His face contorted itself in silence for a few seconds before he went on. “But no, I’m not a fuckin’ alcoholic just because I turned a piston from some S.O.B. that wanted to bury me into a drinking glass,” his face immediately was overtaken by terror after hearing his own words to the machine, “n-no offense, man.”

…Did I see a pink elephant, or a flash of red in his eyes for a split second there?

“Very well. My current priority will be to fetch nutrients and watch over you until you find yourself to be well enough to continue our travels.”

“Guess so,” he looked at the roof and bit his nails as the machine put the resident’s rifle in its charger in the rack before leaving him be. “Hey, I like bananas!” he shouted before realizing his partner had already been long gone.

Aw, fuck. Well, not much left to do but stare at the ceiling all day. Worst comes to worst, I can count tiles or watch the floating grains of shiny dust.

His hands under his head, he looked to the wall across the room: bookshelves. That’s it! I can look for a book in there… fuck, do I even want to read if I’m gonna leave the blanket ? He reversed his position to lie on his stomach, put his hands to the ground then started pushing himself. Grumbling to strenuously turn himself in the sleeping bag around and crawling on one hand, he tenaciously held the blanket from slipping off his neck with the other.

Passing the window, he panted for a bit, questioning just how much of my damn mind I’ve lost for doing this, before taking one more deep breath and closing his eyes: the sunlight would burn him to a crisp if he gave up at this point. Peace was no longer an option; this battle had to be waged all the way down to the last inch of the attic, just as the bit of meat stuck between his teeth had to be expelled from his cracked incisive. Pushing his arm to its limit, he scurried over to the wall and a stark realization had seemingly crushed all the hopes and dreams on his face to dust: I’ll have to get up to reach the books?! My back will fucking kill me!

A long yellow plastic ruler leaned against the plywood studs by his side, prompting him to meekly grab it. Prodding at the bookshelf above him, his eyes widened as the books shook. Bam, blam, blang - he could see the edges of the covers nudging off the bookshelf, and crossed himself over the blanket. “Lord, Father, Son, Spirit,” he clasped his hands upwards before picking the ruler up one last time, “don’t make it rain hardcovers on my nose. I’ve already had enough nosebleeds for a lifetime. And make this book a worthwhile one.”

With one last thrust of the measuring instrument at the wooden bookshelf above, a sizable object flew off and thudded imposingly. After a quick glance at its cover, his eyes sank.

Shit! It’s the gay-ass poetry book I saw earlier! If Cog thinks I wanted this, he’ll lecture me on how I’m repressing my emotions or some shit.

Grabbing the hardcover in his hand, he’d blinked thrice before his pupils adjusted to reading the text on the cover. “Riwaniru shellay,” he muttered, “that’s a fuckin’ weird way to say ‘coming alive,’” he flipped through the pages and caught glimpses of a few drawings in between inscrutable lines upon lines of letters, accents and diacritics. This one looks like a crocodile or Godzilla screaming at the sun, and that one looks like a dinosaur crying inside a cave. Wonder what the hell this all means.

A sudden sound shook him, sent a chill up his spine and made him toss the tome on the floor. “Agh!” he twisted himself in place for a moment to look around, before realizing it was the voice of the machine, who’d dropped a bucket on the attic floor—and looked at the open pages right beside its feet. “Jesus, man, what were you even saying? I positively freaked out!,” he breathed heavily.

“I have brought peaches. You may use this bucket later for waste disposal,” it brought the items towards him and held the book in its hands, “you appear to have moved across the attic with a view of discovering this piece of literature. Have the illustrated pages satisfied your curiosity?”

“Y-yeah, about that: the kiddy drawings make even less sense than the squiggles on the letters. Is this about some sort of monster that eats the sun and wants a friend?”

“This is a representation of a transforming machine that appeared in 11,627 AD, near the remains of a sunken city built by machines.”

“Transforming?” He chuckled at the machine’s absurd-seeming statement, “like, what? Turns into cars and piranhas,” he burst into laughter at his own response, “maybe it turned into that time I thought I got a sardine and I ended up having to give the tooth fairy a share of my front teeth?”

“Its configuration changed to avoid common attack patterns. While it resembled most closely the forms of reptilians, it measured 2 or more kilometers in length.”

“Wh-whoa, shit, that’s like… 2 miles!” his voice and irises shrank, “So it’s still out there a-and it’s been three hundred years? This is a leviathan,” his voice cracked, “a leviathan dammit! And they’re making this look all cute?!”

“It is designated as Behemoth-class. It had attacked machines and androids alike throughout the Pacific Ocean, from which it rose, and was unharmed by a nuclear strike before retreating in the geologically turbulent borders of the Philippine Sea.”

“Y-yeah, that’s a relief, that’s a relief… hold up, aren’t androids also robots?”

“What I refer to by ‘machine lifeform’ is an individual of a mechanical ecosystem of evolving units developed by aliens, such as the ones you have likened to your genitalia . Androids-”

“Yeah, alright, that’s enough, that’s enough of this crap,” he raised his hand at the machine, and pointed it down at the bucket. “Gimme some of those sweet-ass peaches, attaboy!”

The machine knocked the bucket over with its foot, tipping the peaches over to the man’s side as his cheerful face grew somber watching them roll on the attic floor. Ah, fuck. I forgot all the cons of being babysat by a clockwork toy, he grabbed the nearest one to his creased fingers and wiped it on his shirt.

“They are washed for your consumption. Regarding your condition however, Derrick, I have an offer for you.”

“My kidneys aren’t up for sale or lending.” He took a bite and spoke while chewing loudly, “ “Amyffing elfe, shoot.”

“You are in need of social contact, and I wish to collect further behavioral data about you. I propose that you and I, for the duration of your recovery days, establish regular contact in the form of book readings. This activity would be similar to what humans call ‘book clubs’.”

“Thaff’s a spiffy pitch you haff ‘fere, I gotta say I’m on,” he swallowed, ”like, if you don’t need your lost specs to read, I’m on board with that if I don’t have to rot here by myself,”

he took another bite and swallowed. “so, did Bill the Moonfaced Baseball disappear?”

“It is preferable that you refrain from using such unflattering nicknames for every individual you encounter, Derrick.”

“¡Mírame!, son,” his voice died out from fatigue, “naming things is a skill I practice, even in my own company,” he’d grown caustic, “and if i hadn’t been on it since you put me here, you’d find me grunting like Cro-Magnon.”

“You have already begun to slur your speech. As for my acquaintance, he has vacated the premises and will return promptly to bring medical supplies likely to prove useful to you.” the machine stepped away, adding “In the meantime, I will keep watch for any matters of concern.” before it grabbed its rifle off the rack and veered away into the staircase.

Alone, the man looked again at the ceiling and drifted off into muttering gibberish. “I wanna chew some sap and swig a cerveza,” he sighed.

The machine sat at the door by the porch, holding its weapon out for a moment before going back inside and shutting the door. Peeping around briefly, it stood in place: nothing out of the ordinary. It circled the living room, then the kitchen—until, wham! An object flew into its back and sent it spinning in the air halfway from the back door to the front, and the machine crashed on the floor. The half-wooden, half-scrap rifle and the shiny metal cube wired to it both rammed the dinner chairs, torn apart and ending up behind opposing legs of the dinner table.

Zzz-hurr. A heavy buzz, followed by a siren-like wail: the machine hollered its war cry. Its eyes glowed blood-red as it propped itself back up on its feet and leapt away, reversing its direction as the man upstairs shouted. “Cog? Cog?! This is freaking me out! You’re gonna fucking kill me…w-with a heart attack, man!”

A man-sized greenish holdall presented itself in front of the lunging red-eyed stubby. Before its feet could hit the ground, the zipper opened with a buzz, the button popped off the fabric.

A familiar face stood over it: the rolling face, whizzing right beneath the pair of metal pads with the sound of its rocky shell rubbing the floorboards and spilling tin cans and plastic packages in its wake.

The man’s voice cracked shouting. “Cog? Talk to me! It sounds like a bad rock band down there!”

• TRANSLATION SOFTWARE ACTIVATED.

The machine hopped at the creature backing away. “Emil. Your outrageous negligence has been needlessly damaging our health and resources. This cannot continue.”

“No, I gave the cat a bath and a litterbox! I’m bringing the resour-oh, you mean the gun!,” the ball rolled back, bit down on the wires from one part of the scattered weapon, dragged it to the other, swallowed some more cabling and loudly chewed the two, spitting out colorful sparks and dropping a spliced cable from its teeth. “See? I-it’s good as new! Try it!”

The machine picked up its weapon as its eyes turned back to yellow, and then green. Its hands tightened their grip, aiming the rifle steadily ahead. “Move to your left,” it ordered the creature.

“Sure…?” the latter complied and completed a turn on its side, not one moment before the machine had fired an energy bullet right at its face, sending it veering towards the door with a wham. “Yoow!” it cried out, “It burns! What the heck was that for? I can’t tell up from down!”

“Your impact earlier was this much disorienting. I had asked you to move so that you would not follow a trajectory that contained furniture. I surmise this has been a learning experience for you, Emil of the Woods.”

A clamor sounded from the attic, of walls and shelves being rammed. “G-g-son of a bitch! I’m,” something fell to the ground loudly pounding the ceiling, “I’m comin’ down!” the man upstairs shouted before falling back to the ground with a thump.

The machine grabbed the bag, tidying up the supplies and headed to the staircase, speaking to the man. “There is no cause for panic, Derrick. All is well.”

The creature dizzily trundled about. “Owowowowowow-guh… I remember my old body puking when I spun like this, oh man…” before it stopped and turned to the machine, “hey, why do you two always talk funny, Cog?”

“If you are implicitly referring to the human, it is a necessity that I communicate with him in the language he is most familiar with.”

“It sounds so random,” the creature rolled against the stairs step by step to rise, “I mean, ouch,” it hit its face on every consecutive board of the flight as it creaked, “how’d you learn it all? You sound almost like him!”

“You had once provided us in January with a large number of ‘black frisbees’, of which I had the misfortune to get one thrown in my knee joints by a colonist that would incessantly ask me to ‘play catch’.”

“So you broke it in a game-wait, so they can give you powers!”

“Negative. I had no desire for such activities, and had promptly ordered him to pay for my next maintenance in case he did not wish to be publicly humiliated by having militia members ‘play catch’ as he puts it, using him as a toy. Your ‘frisbees’ were, in fact, vinyl records containing analog sound data, many of which were material for teaching Old World languages to androids.”

“They were? Man, you’re so smart! I thought androids just played catch with them or ate them. That explains why they don’t taste as good as soap!” the creature’s comment was ignored by the machine once they’d reached the attic and turned around; the man lied down on his stomach, wiping his bloody nose and moaning in pain.

He craned his neck to look sordidly at the stubby. “So you’re fine?” he blinked twice at his partner, raising an eyebrow and breathing a sigh of relief. “Fine news, but I’m not. Either I’m made of glass, or this floor’s so solid I could’ve rented it out to the Weight Watchers.”

“Derrick. Remain in place for treatment.”

“No,” he screamed in pain, “I may be tired, fucked and wounded, but I’m so full of energy I could run a marathon,” he blended sarcasm, pain and pity in equal measure, “I’m a vegetable now, Cog, so help a brother out, save a soul and do your thing.”

With its sack unloaded by its patient’s side, the stubby closely inspected his back. “This will require much patience on your end, Derrick. We will have to take your shirt off in order to clean and cover your wounds.”

The man grunted. “Not like I got anything else. As long as none of you rape me,” he took his helmet off, followed by his shirt.

Rinsing wounds. Alcohol. The burns ran deep and lasted long enough to sear not only his skin, but an impression in his memory of a fire and brimstone hell. Lazarus, help a brother out here.

Between the litany of instructions the machine barked, or the face on the stony ball rolling around him over and over grabbing items in its teeth and dropping them, the man’s mind and ears had gone numb as he kept his sight to the floor, holding in a scream or two to retain the meager vestiges of his larynx. “Guhh…”

Gauze. Bandages. He’d drifted in and out of consciousness. More alcohol, more bandages. With every glint around the attic, the little yellow flickering dots in the air disagreed on what color and what shape to take, or whether they wished to show themselves to him at all, a debate that entertained him for the time being; he kept himself guessing what’d come next.

Orange, stars. No, yellow… and spherical. Ah, man. After what felt like hours lying down, the stubby had grabbed him and stuffed him with its cold hands back in his shirt, and then in his sleeping bag.

The incessant vibrations of the sphere rolling on the floorboards had quieted down, the heat from the machine standing next to him made way for cold air; the moment had seemingly come, at last, when he was no longer the minority in the vote for whether he could be left alone for the moment… until an unbearable noise had paid him yet another visit.

“Emil of the Woods. Now that our dealings for the moment are over, I believe the time is right for you to make your leave. Your presence may attract undue attention.”

“Really? B-but I don’t think we’re done here. I mean, my cousin-uh, he needs help, right?!”

“You have informed me earlier that you were under pursuit by a pair of android units, more than capable of assassinating all three of us in the right circumstances. If you share my concern for my self-preservation and the human’s well-being, understanding this should be of no difficulty.”

“W-well, I built a slingshot and flung myself in the bag all the way here! How would they know where I am?”

“Your improvised engineering skills are not relevant. Whether they are aware of your location or not, if any indication of your presence here is detected by whichever means are at their disposal, we will be at risk sooner or later.”

“But they won’t be standing still if they don’t find me, right? They’re always patrolling, and you said it yourself! W-what if they like, searched this whole building? They could find you! They could take my cousin out in his sleep! I can’t give up on you two.”

“Loyalty must be shown in good faith. I have repeatedly asked that you demonstrate your loyalty in manners more judicious than your past behavior indicates.”

“I really really know, Cog! You guys are like family to me. It’s like… I have millions of brothers, but only one cousin and only one Cog.”

“You view us as family,” the machine repeated with an air of incredulity in its tone. “It was my understanding that our relationship is one of an economic nature, and possibly a communal one in certain cases. Labeling your social ties as ‘family’ is more appropriate for the untold millions of Emil entities circulating throughout the world with your exact physical makeup.”

“But I don’t feel close to any of my brothers, even though we’re all supposedly copies of the same old Emil from…however many centuries ago the aliens invaded. We all have the same face, the same voice, and apparently, the same memories. I’m supposed to be an Emil and yet I can barely remember even who Emil’s friends were, or the story of his life aside from having a butler, a few blurry faces and something about a sick girl. When I had hands, I used to grab a pen, you know? And I’d try to write their names over and over on any slip of paper I found to try and recall them until I could get it right someday, but I got nothing. I can’t even describe what I am in this body.”

“I see. You lack electronic memory storage as an engineered bioweapon.”

“But this, with you and my cousin? When he said something like ‘Halua’, it sparked a memory for me I didn’t know I had, somebody I must’ve been very close with and that was when I realized it: I have to do something that’s mine in this world, not just call myself Emil of the Woods. Something very real to me… and having another set of eyes looking out for you doesn’t hurt.”

“In this case, Emil of the Woods, it would behoove you-”

“Be-behoove? You know so many words, Cog, it’s hard to understand you. I mean, it’s like you gallop with words!”

The machine’s eyes flashed red for a split-second, freezing the laughter stiff. “It would be of interest that you learn the name of this human. If you do conceive of him as family, I suggest you learn to ask him.”

“Ask him?!” the creature replied, shaking. “But I don’t think I know how,” it inched closer to the man and turned around to face him.

• TRANSLATION SOFTWARE DEACTIVATED.

“Huh?” the man stared at the ball in front of him. “Is this a NAFTA meeting?”

“Ma po’e do cmene nandesuka?” [What’s your name?]

“What do you want, ass-cheek?” He grunted at the creature, and turned to the machine, “shut him up,” before he pulled up his blanket. “Christ, say something!” he begged as it stood in place, before it packed its rifle and left downstairs.

“E-emiru zis! Emiru zato?” the sphere meekly rolled up to his face, and repeated his tone barely well enough for him to recall his own bout of earlier anger.

“Wow-you can remember stuff. So you do at least realize how bad your fuck-ups are,” he breathed laboriously with his eyes half-closed, “thanks,” he muttered, “for helping me out of the mines... and fuck you for everything else, Emyroo.”

“Eeya, eeya! Emiru,” it rolled back and bounced in place, and then closed in on his face almost as if to lay sovereign claim to his personal space, “oooh?” Motherfucker! I can smell the soap mixed with oil and stale catnip in this gremlin’s mouth! What does he want?!

He whispered to himself, with his eyes now finally shut. “George Bush. This attic is the terror he warned us about.”

“Geooorgebooooosh.”

You can’t win, he fell asleep.

Wakey, sleepy. Waking and sleeping hours ticked away, and the man had slowly gotten used to the chaos of his new company. There was an air of tranquility to it all: almost feeling like he’d gained back something he’d been missing; almost, yet not enough to feel like he enjoyed the fanfare, or the new name he’d been given—one he could not lose, no matter how badly he tried to plead and reason with the creature that went by his side, behind him, in front of him, on his chest and underneath his sleeping bag, and even pounded his head until he’d put the helmet back on, and kept it on for good this time.

Sometimes, the machine comforted him. It brought him fruit, and later twigs and straws for him to chew. It brought him water. It dumped his waste for him, and helped clean him. It watched over him with its rifle when he slept, and the two of them spent an hour out of each day reading a book off the shelves, exchanging stories about what he’d seen through the window or what it’d encountered on its latest foraging—The Cog Morning Show, or Morning Gear, he called the only part of his day at which he snickered with anticipation, hoping he’d find some detail of human society on which to smugly correct his partner’s spotty knowledge.

The first time, was a novel whose contents his mind was too foggy to process; something about a Renaissance trust-fund kid who gets into scuffles to win some married biznatch over, after which he’d sworn to never let the machine pick anything without summarizing it for him first to let him choose something an English teacher wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

The next session, he’d made another request. “Hey, hey, I wanna see the one with the poems and the dinosaur. The two-mile freak. Tell me more about that uh, eighth robot war.”

The machine obliged and took it off the shelf, sat by his side and opened the pages.

“The 8th Androids’ War was fought more than two hundre-”

The man, lying down, raised his hands and turned them sideways. “Dumb it down, before the ballkid comes back from playing with Zin.”

“A series of large-scale conflicts between a faction of androids known as the Army of Humanity and machine lifeforms.”

“Army of Humanity,” he squinted, “Army of Humanity? Like, the UN or something?!” he grinned from ear to ear, “you’re tellin’ me they still party like it’s 1999 in New York while I’m out here?” before his features stiffened into a pout, “nah, it couldn’t be that easy to find people. It never fucking is.”

“The Army of Humanity is a misnomer. It only comprises androids of human make, who generally profess a goal of servitude towards mankind. As machine lifeforms’ alien creators arrived on earth, the androids were, and remain hostile. There are no known reliable records of machine lifeforms encountering humans.”

“Alright, alright, so the androids… they’re made by people. As in, flesh and blood. Like me. To help people, people like me, out. And you’re supposed to be the swarm they’re battling.”

“That is the commonly accepted account.”

“Well, ain’t much accounting for reality in this little ‘account’,” he raised his fingers in quote marks, “if my leg’s got something to say about it.”

Sometimes, he’d fallen restless despite his efforts, not merely due to the spherical creature’s incessant rambling or the cicadas—it often was the case that he’d find himself rolling endlessly in his blankets with his eyes shut even with all the silence in the world but that of the cicadas. “Ah,” he crawled up against the wall, “ah shit, I think I saw something in the window flying, like a crow or something,” he’d warned the machine the next time they met.

“There is no cause for concern. Avian animals regularly migrate throughout the world, moving to one region for a portion of the year to return to another, although the Earth’s magnetic field being weakened since tidal locking has caused major navigational dysfunction for multiple species of birds.”

“Well,” he coughed, “if you say so,” he’d watched the machine with its rifle in hand.

“Which leads me to our next topic: I have decided to present to you, for today’s session, a book on nature and its cycles.”

“Pick a random page, will ya? And not somethin’ boring like the water cycle.”

“This one,” it picked off the shelf with its free hand and held open in its three fingers, “is on forest ecosystems, and the importance of forest fires.”

“Forest fires? They’re good for something? What about all the talk back in my world, my time, about ‘saving the Amazon’ I couldn’t hear enough from hippies about?”

“I am unable to inform you on this subject. It is, however, written that forest fires serve a natural function of helping ecosystems clear out decaying specimens, and optimize the flow of nutrients throughout food chains as a result.”

“Clears out old junk. Makes sense.”

…My god, an ice-cold sensation washed over his face, jolting him upright from his sleeping bag. “Holy shit. Cog, where are my clothes? The ones I wore when we first met?”

“They remain where you had dropped them. I intend to dispose of them in time, once I ensure that the risks incurred in doing so are acceptable.”

His baggy eyes and chapped mouth stiffened as he dusted himself, staring vacantly at the floor. “No, don’t get rid of ‘em. I know what we’ll do.”

And I’ll wish I had a Kodak and some film on me to save this next moment.

“What is it?” the machine lowered its arm, and turned to look out the window.

“You just follow me and watch,” the man groaned as he’d sat up, and pulled his legs out from his sleeping bag. “Holy shit, I haven’t stepped out of this in a while,” he rubbed his frigid thighs and leaned against the wall to stand up. “Gimme a hand,” he reached out with his arm and lifted himself by the machine’s cold thumb wrapped around his palm.

“Can you move?”

“I’ve had worse days; I survived Idaho Falls High School,” he shooed his partner out of the way with his hand. “I’m getting deadwood.”

The stubby, half-slowed by its following the man’s paces, went down the staircase and held his hips up once from tripping and falling into the cables that ran up the floor to the ceiling. “Woah, woah,” the man regained his posture and patted the machine’s head, “good job,” he opened the door and submerged himself in the oncoming sunlight.

The two trekked through the field, wandering into the forest. “There’s one hell of a smell out here,” the man leaned up against a tree, covering his forehead. “Just as bad as when I was out cleaning out eons of ‘droid shit, except a bit fruitier.”

“I do not have olfactory sensors. However, your long experience in forests should signify that this is no more than a minor inconvenience,” the machine grabbed a tree branch off the ground.

He took it and slung it over his shoulder with the rest. “Ol-fac-what?” the man stared dumbfounded at the stubby. “They could use this smell in wars, man. I’m telling you,” he pinched his nose.

The occasional fly hounded him through the slog, and he’d swat it away for a reprieve from the incessant buzzing and itching it left on him, until he’d realized he’d stepped inside what a swarm of them attacking him from every which way. He looked down—the sole of his shoe had landed on the decaying corpse of a three-legged hare, festering in worms and maggots feeding on the fur and skin that clad its bones.

Grimacing in disgust and terror, he ran away as quickly as he could, going back the way he came until his breath drew short a minute later; the stubby later found him panting, slouching under the weight of the branches. “Derrick.”

The man let out a scream and, propelled forward by his feet, leapt forward only to hit his head against a tree trunk. The branches on his shoulder fell off all at once as he spun erratically in place, turning out and about before he’d realized whose voice he’d heard, breaking him out of his stupor.

He wiped off the nosebleed, and hunched sideways on the sloped ground before resting his hand on the machine’s head. “You know what, you carry it. I don’t even know what the fuck that was.” He caught his breath, voice cracking, biting the skin off his phalanges, “in fact, I wouldn’t know my own name if I weren’t wearing this,” he pointed to his helmet, “before I smacked that tree. What the fuck kind of wildlife is that?”

“That is the carcass of a mutant brown hare. The resident shot it to death, claiming it was not a form of life.”

“Mighty bold of a nuts-and-bolts nutcase to decide what’s too freaky to live. What a joke, robots pretending they’re alive!” he watched the machine pack the branches one by one. “I-I’m sorry about that, by the way.”

The machine stared him in the eye for a moment. “To what is your apology in reference?”

“The branches,” he delivered in curt deadpan. “It’s about the fact you’re picking them up and carrying that Franken-Winchester rifle at the same time. I’m apologizing for that.”

The two wended back to the field as the sound of cicadas and the stench of rot chafed the man. He stuck the longest branches down into the soil amid the field one by one, shoving them down vigorously with his knuckles akin to a hammer striking a nail… until he’d heard a snapping sound, after which he’d lightened his touch. I’m not going back to the Mutant Forest. No no no, Boltbucket can deal with it well enough on his own—and he can call the Department of Fish and Wildlife if he needs help.

“What is the goal of this endeavor?”

“I’m disposing of it the way we dispose of all good things: with respect. Nine damn years I’ve had this with me in three states, and I’m not feeding it to some moose.”

With a few more held up horizontally by the rest, he dusted his hands off and went off to search for the old shirt: it was right where he’d left it, in a dry and dirty puddle. He bent down, grabbed his underwear and sweatpants in one arm, and the shirt in the other.

Holding it up by the corners of the shoulders, he stared at it, recalling the countless stories each tear, each hole and each stain told. While his arms flipped the shirt back and forth, a wave of chilling memories froze his eyes and feet in place.

The machine, standing by the stake, called out to its partner. “Are you inspecting the article of clothing in your hands?”

“H-hey, hargh” the man gasped for air, “I-I can’t burn this just yet, you know,” he chuckled nervously and turned around, “this isn’t any old shirt for me.”

Stiff as a statue, the stubby glanced at the jaundiced man’s dour face. “Do what is necessary,” it briskly advised him, and added after he’d hesitated: “and waste no time on needless thoughts. It is unhygienic to preserve your old clothes, and I consider it a health risk to do so.”

Nodding his head, he overlaid the clothes over the many sticks and branches, as if to dress up a snowman. It’s Christmas in July 2004… no, this isn’t funny anymore.

“Know what the text that’s ripped in half says on the back of this shirt, Cog?”

“Is it of relevance?”

His posture tensed up, and a sudden stutter overwhelmed him. “Yes, it’s very rel-relevant, very absolutely fucking much. Before you tore it,” his lips kept moving as his voice cut off.

“I am not trained in lip-reading.”

Slapping and crossing himself, he tries to speak again. “Before you tore it,” he pointed his finger at the machine then the shirt, “it read Idaho Falls Tigers 1995. That was a baseball team,” his entire body shook uncontrollably, “they called me ‘The Dam’. We had a flood in the Seventies. My mom used to curse me, saying I’m like that flood, made her move out her parents’ home when she had me.”

“I do not yet understand the significance of this. It is highly likely that you are in need of psychiatric treatment.”

“Shut the fuck up, you’re a nudist with no sense of fashion. That year,” he shouted, “the one on the shirt, I was a freshman, and I was the dam. I saved the Tigers in the state championship,” his teeth chattered as he sped through his words, “I pitched away at the rich little shits whose daddies could afford private Catholic high school. I wish I could do it a hundred times again to see the look on their faces knowing there was no Viagra for their limp arms. If I earned one fucking thing in life, it’s that nickname and this shirt… make that two,” chills rose up his spine, shaking him from behind. Within him, a silent panic awaited the stubby’s retaliation.

“I see. This shirt symbolizes a source of self-esteem for you.”

One sob on the man’s part was all the confirmation it would need.

With a sigh, he frowned, and turned his back to the wood. “Let’s light this. How do we do that?” his voice softened to a murmur.

Steadying its rifle, the stubby fired a few shots at the tinder under the stake, setting the stake ablaze.

My sweat more than makes up for all the tears I’m holding in.

After all that remained was smoke, ashes and charred sticks, the man sat down at the empty dinner table, staring at the machine head hung on the wall. The back door behind him shut loudly; a familiar whirring returned.

“It smells like shit here too. Just a bit different,” he dryly complained. “I had to flick ants off of my ankles.”

“It is my understanding that you are frustrated at the moment.”

“I want to forget it,” he rubbed his eyes without turning his eyes away from the wall. “Listen—we gotta fix the soil. Don’t know how, maybe we gotta water the shit out of it.”

“The amount of water required for this endeavor would be tremendous. It would conflict with your hydration needs.”

“Well, I’m not feelin’ up for reading, writing, or even talking to be honest. I don’t know what to make of myself,” he hunched over and quieted down to whisper to himself. “I never noticed the killer cologne our furry friend outside was brewing until now,” he swallowed the reflux in his throat and grimaced. “Gotta be one of those things I’m told only women can appreciate.”

Another voice rose up from behind: the creature. “Georgebooooooosh!”

Oh no. Oh no no no.

A ping-pong ball struck his helmet, doused in the scent of soap. Grabbing it, he’d finally broken eye contact with the lifeless tusks and eyes facing him, stood up and threw the ball back at the creature. “I’ll be in the attic, folks,” he murmured and trudged up the stairs.

A cat hissed, turning the man’s attention behind him: the pet was back. “The fancy lightbulbs in the basement make the floor look like a disco,” he sniffed in the staircase, “you and the ballkid can have a dance party or something,” he pointed at the animal. “I’m out.”

Lying down in the sleeping bag, he listlessly watched the ceiling without a single fully-formed thought passing through his head, only echoes of places he’d been—and it took another ping-pong ball rattling his helmet to make them whole again. “Christ!”

“Watashi ca to-asobou do!” the boyish voice called out.

“Fetch, bitch!” he sat up and tossed the ball out the window.

The grinning face spat out something else: the necklace. “Holy shit, I forgot about that,” he grabbed it before shooting a glare at the creature.

“If that’s how you want it,” he grumbled, “well, nice to…”, he readied a salvo, “meet you!” he shouted, firing the toy at its teeth. “I’m the dam!”

Back and forth, the two took turns throwing and spitting. With his arms growing tired from one turn to the next, he’d realized his opponent had no shortage of stamina and could go on for fucking years, when he’d finally rested his back on the wall and pulled down the glass cover on his helmet. He shut his eyes for a moment; a hard object crashed into his head with the weight of a brick. “Sweet Mary’s tits!” he yelped, opening his eyes: it was the handgun he’d forgotten on the kitchen floor. “What the fuck?! That could’ve-”, he ripped his throat shouting, “nevermind, you’re retarded.” he whined before falling asleep.

Chapter Text

A dark void. Claustrophobic, warm, tight: a tunnel. The man found himself compelled to move up, up and further and yet the tunnel’s walls closed in on him. The rocky texture gradually made way for the fleshy feeling of an animal’s innards, with bits of bone, slime and grease coating his fingers with every move. The ear-splitting whirl of a drill rose up from behind, chasing him relentlessly into the depths of the tunnel.

There was no space to maneuver, not an inch to crane his neck and look around, and no light. The bone fragments, the rock, the slime all cut through his hands until he was rendered still, awaiting the approaching drill. He didn’t know how, but he could feel it growing closer until it reached him—and he woke up, not screaming, but petrified.

Opening his eyes, he was not so sure that he wouldn’t prefer to fall back asleep: he was unable to move, faced by the glowing silhouette of a woman. Her features flashed into being, one by one: a soft face wrapped in jet-black hair, and a red dress draped over a small figure. Seemingly weightless in midair, she licked her lips, leaned down, caressed his cheek and kissed him—all without a sound.

His body imprisoned him in his sleeping bag, as he pondered whether it’d also double as a body bag and a grave.

You’re the freak that’s been stalking me?!

With one more blink, the woman faded and his joints were no longer numb. His eyes opened wide and searched the attic as he grabbed the handgun by his side. He leapt out of the sleeping bag, backed up into a corner and held out his weapon; he was alone, with man’s best friend and its magazine on that shelf. His hands quivered as he loaded the firearm, his breath heavy, with no other sound to hear but the cicadas outdoors as he crossed himself.

The woman surged from behind, her silhouette popping out of his chest and doing a backflip in mid-air; the man wordlessly screamed.

“Derrick?” the machine climbed into the attic. “What is happening?” it looked around, and ran at him.

“Lo-look over there, dumbass!” he screamed and pointed at the floating figure, emptying a staccato of gunshots into the walls and the floor until she dissolved into shiny dust. “Out, out, out! The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels,” he sniffed, “you…”

“The attic was empty. You were alone.”

Listen, God, I just drove a fucking demon or some shit out of my house. Can you just stick with me for a bit longer? I’m not asking you to heal a blind and mute man-but fixing up my throat wouldn’t hurt.

“Are you shitting me?! There was a ghost, sorry, a hologram that just kissed me in my sleep,” he wiped his mouth over and over, “and popped out of my ribs? You bumped right into her ass while she did th-th-that flip, man, how the fuck was I alone?” his raspy voice fizzled out as his throat grew sore, “she’s been stalking’ us since we left that cave with your friend! Back then, I thought I was starting to dream as I fell asleep a-and-” 

“You are experiencing delirium. Probable causes may include: low blood pressure, depression, shock, pain, emotional stress-”

“Whoa, no shit! I thought it was sleep paralysis, but she jumped out of my ribs when I got up,” he put his back to the wall. “And I wasted a perfectly good mag!” His hands rubbed over his scalp, dropping a few gray hairs on the ground as the gun scrubbed his skull.

“In addition, the machinery in the back of the attic could have been shot. Do you understand the potential consequences of misusing your weapon, Derrick?”

“I know, I know, goddammit!” He pounded the wall with his elbow, discharging a bullet through the floor.

The little sphere surged out from beneath, stopping by the machine’s side to check in on the man. And now the whole gang’s here. I can’t have a proper fucking moment to myself?! Either it’s a big rapist, Clockwork Poindexter, Motor Mouth Moonface or the stalker in the red dress. And apparently, I’m also a schizo now…

Let’s change that.

The man, swallowing his frustration for a moment, raised his open palms as if to explain something, sighed, relaxed his arms and stepped forward. “Listen, I don’t wanna do this all by myself. The whole ‘human’ thing, I mean.”

“We have continuously assisted you, and I intend to continue to do so until I have reasonably fulfilled your request to return to your world,” the machine maintained its monotone. “Your wording is ambiguous.”

“I’m the only man in here, we have two whole-ass stories to ourselves and a scrapyard for a basement. There’s room for more, and if I recall, I need someone to watch my back, because it’s turning out inside ain’t safer than outside.”

“Our agreement starts and ends with my ensuring your safe arrival to our destination.”

“And if somebody else happens to be stuck around here because of little Coggy’s messing around? You thinking of hanging ‘em, getting it over with real quick?” He glared at the machine. “Drag their ass over some rocks for six hours again? Even better, if it’s a seven-year-old, why not have them kill a fucking,” he shook his head, “sea leviathan on a fishing trip while you’re at it? It’s only two miles long, isn’t it?!”

“Five quarters of a mile would be more accurate.”

“Don’t bullshit me, I told you two kilometers was two miles!”

“Regardless of your stance on the mathematics of distance measurement, this endeavor would lie far beyond any acceptable risk to reward ratio for whatever findings it might beget.”

“What’s so risky out there, friendo, that I haven’t seen before? Aside from three-legged rabbits?” He stepped to the staircase with one foot planted firmly on the first step, restrained by the stubby’s hand wrapped around his ankle. “Hey, wrench-hand! My ankle’s no lugnut!”

“La Georgeboosh-kun tavla do nani-ka?” the ball asked.

“Hey, stupid thing won’t stop calling me George Bush! He’s talking about me, what’s he saying?!” the man waved at the machine as it replied in the same foreign language, frustrating him even more. “Hey, what the fuck?! Stop talking about me when I can’t understand shit!”

The two voices went back and forth. The words became indistinguishable from one another, prompting him to clap his hands and tap his free foot repeatedly in frustration vying for the machine’s attention, until it turned to him.

“I will agree to let you leave the premises, on one condition: Emil of the Woods must accompany you for your own safety and ours. You will carry him,” the machine turned its eyes and pointed with its free hand before letting go of his leg, “in this duffel bag.”

“So that was his name. Emiru whatever. Booyah, can’t hide shit from me: I’m learning them words!” he raised his fist in triumph.

“Correct. Now to the matter of most pertinence: he is highly mobile and will be able to outmaneuver whoever it is whose path you might cross.”

“Outmaneuver? I just wanna know, how did he live in a cave with all those flying drill-headed snakes messing with his home, dodging their attacks and yet he couldn’t steer a wild pig?”

 “If you do not have confidence in Emil’s abilities, it remains a choice for you to stay indoors.” 

“One I’m not making! If you got a problem with me leaving, you sleep in here,” he pointed to the sleeping bag, “and see for yourself: within a week, you’ll wish you could move to Elm Street and dream of electric sheep.”

“While Emil’s track record has been satisfactory for the longest time during my acquaintance with him, I share your opinion of his current behavior. Where is Elm Street located?”

The man stared at the machine, his expressions rapidly shifting from resignation, to joy and then being flushed red with embarrassment. You’re playing the reverse psychology card? I’m on to you. Not this time. Nobody’s making me stay.

“Nevermind. I trust him very much,” a painful grin overcame his features by force before he stepped up to grab the holdall by its strap, “I trust him with my life and yours both!”

“Wooooooo!” the creature rolled straight into the holdall, sealing the zipper from inside. What the hell? How’d he do this?! Forget it: I’m not asking questions now, I’m on the move!

The man raced past the cat down the stairs with the holdall slung over his shoulder through the living room, grabbed the stray round that was embedded in the dinner table and put it in his pocket. “I’ll be venturin’ out, time to meet people. Who knows, maybe I’ll find Jimmy Hoffa, D.B. Cooper and Amelia Earhart right around the corner!” he guffawed, checking his laughter at the door. 

...Right after I find the damn keys. Uh, shit. Maybe the dead cokehead is carrying them.

Turning around, he came inside to the entry of the basement’s staircase, unzipped his duffel bag and slapped the spherical creature within. “Alright, buddy, let’s see how useful you are,” he quipped as he pointed to the stairs.

“Fetch,” he commanded and gestured in the motion of a key turning a keyhole, snorting to imitate the sputter of a car’s engine starting before, and pulled out his pocket, “in these. Go!”

The creature flew out the sack, tripping him with its brisk leap and making his head spin as it soared down the stairway. The man had barely regained his balance when it came out holding a keyring with a pair of car keys in its teeth, mere seconds later, tossing them into his hand and crawling back into the holdall. “You’re not that bad at all, ballkid, you fuckin’ know that?”

Taking a drink of water directly from the kitchen sink, he raced out, shut the back door, and passed the outhouse, heading to the garage barn. Barging through the rear doors he’d once broken with his skull and opening his holdall’s strap, he hung his supplies over the car’s metal wire frame, lifted the barricade off the front doors.

With his helmet fastened and fists pumped, his eyes widened to take in the view of the vast highway. A tangled tarmac maze was laid bare in front of him, fenced by pines and covered in black cracks overlaying faded white paint and skid marks.

He sat on the driver’s seat to the right, twisted the key and gripped the gearstick. A vociferous cheer filled the barn; the engine roared to life and made a strong, guttural rev when he pressed the accelerator. “Yahooweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

He strained his left knee, clenching his jaw in pain as he’d rediscovered the old ritual of pressing a clutch pedal and shifted the gear stick… which was too stiff compared to what he’d expected: the gearbox grunted in injury upon his hand slipping off.

His blood ran icecold, and panic washed throughout his extremities. As abruptly as he fastened his fingers around it, memories of his father’s car flashed through his eyes until he’d regained mastery of the machine and shifted into first gear, panting. “Ho.. ho…” he sneezed over the windshield, “holy shit!,” he shouted while the rope-bound seat shook him, “I was this close! This close, to shit crick without a paddle!” he wiped the windshield with his arm, driving onwards.

With the holdall swinging over the car’s frame, a loud song emanated from within in, prompting the man to take a hand off the wheel and bang on it. “Ballkid, shut up!” he slapped the side of the sack. His mind idly shifted and accelerated through the gears, before he’d noticed he was driving the car head-on into a tree. He felt his flesh dry up and his hands stiffen in terror at the impending doom, and violently swayed the steering wheel sideways. 

The brake was relentlessly pumped over and over, dizzying him as the sack knocked against his helmet; the song played in pitch-perfect key with the screech of the tires’ smoking rubber until he’d fallen face-first into the horn in a daze, the world around him blended into an unrecognizable blur of confusion.

He grasped the dashboard’s frame for balance, and let his feet slide off the spring-powered pedals: a chill rose up his spine realizing that the car had no floor, and his shoes were on the boiling tarmac—and that would be a long stretch of road to get my flesh ground to dust at 60 mph on.

“My God, man,” he moaned, “My fucking God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Hannah,” he stepped out the car. Let’s just.. stick to doing this on foot for today, he detached the holdall and hauled it over his shoulder, venturing out into the woods and hollering into the wind. “Somebody out here? Hey! I’m running a camp!” “Camp Master coming through! Looking for survivors!” “¡Somos buscadores de sobrevivientes! ¡Manejamos un campamento!”

The only replies seemed to be those of the cicadas and birds, almost as if to mock him.

With each step, he grew uneasier seeing similar unmarked trees over, over and over.

His feet traced a straight line, yet his head followed a round-robin around the unmarked trees. His hands, playing to the same rhythm, would adjust the necktie around his waist and crawl back up into their natural habitats: clenched over his solar plexus, smothering his handgun.

After enough time, his shoulder, aching and stiff, gave out under the sack’s weight, and he rested against an unmarked tombstone covered in vines, kicking it with his knee in rage until he fell.

After all was said and done, he’d returned to the attic, sitting on his sleeping bag. The machine had brought a steaming washcloth and a bucket of hot water, rubbing the sore spots on his joints.

“You have put undue pressure on yourself. I fear that you may be undoing the effects of your healing process if you maintain a pattern of reckless behavior.”

“And if there’s somebody else,” he sneezed and coughed, “you know,” he stuttered and stammered, “s-some-somebody you dragged in here who’d watch over me if I dropped the soap in a room with a ghost, what would you say if some machine fires one of those electric orbs at ‘em? O-or what if this asshole we spent three days to put in his place ra-raped someone and put them in the fucking walls of this house, man?”

“You may not damage this residence to search the walls. It is shortsighted and unsafe to do so,” the machine jumped in front of him, removing the gun in his hand and dropping it by his side.

The man stared at his partner, raising an eyebrow and blinking profusely to ensure he was awake. “O-of-of course I’m not tearing down my own fucking home! Christ!”

He unzipped the bag, taking a look at his items without realizing the machine had joined the inspection. In its hands, it picked up the golden collar, and read out the letters inscribed on it. “White.”

“Hey, gimme that!” the amateur explorer yanked it off of the machine’s hands. “What are you, blind? It ain’t white, platinum’s white, this is gold! I swear,” he took a closer look at the choker, “you’re tryin’ to drive me cuckoo-what the fuck, you were reading this? Homestead-A-Tron 3000 engraved this on it before we shot him or what? That his favorite color or som’in?”

“The dot above the ‘i’ is rendered in the shape of a heart.”

“A heart,” he scratched his beard, “like… his breast? His breast pocket? Which was the only white part of his dress shirt? So, does he like the color white enough to wear it, or does he hate it so much he’ll shit all over something where it’s written? Fucking nutcase,”

he turned over to his partner, “what do you think? Ex-wife or something? She took the children, told a judge in that city over the horizon that she doesn’t like the taste of roasted refugee legs?” He chortled, picturing the resident in family court. By the authority vested in me by the Army of Humanity, I’m sending your kids off with Mrs. White!

He picked his teeth with a pine branch off the attic floor, and turned back at the machine to listen to its answer. “I know very little about the significance of this inscription. It is harmful to speculate and form unfounded assumptions on matters we ignore. I however doubt that in the state he was last seen, that he was capable of affection towards another individual.”

“And I hope you don’t change the state I’m seeing you in now, because I don’t want you to eat me alive in my sleep,” he gave one last wisecrack and fell asleep.

The moment he’d awoken, he found himself drenched in sweat, unable to even recall what he’d seen except that it was nauseating, and an endless loop of gunshots rang in his ears. The steaming bucket was put out on the windowsill, and he was alone. How long… has it been…

His head boiled, his body froze and his mind had gone blank; only one thought remained. Not enough. I didn’t do enough. I need to find people.

“Ballkid, get in here!” he shouted as he stood up, realizing that he was by himself; the only other occupant in the attic was the cat, meowing at him; he threw a peach at it. “Good kitty, Zin,” he calmed down for a moment before shouting again at the window. “Heey!”

Grabbing the car keys out of the bag, biting his nails, running through the glowing dust and the chirps of the cicadas, he ignored everything in his path and ran for the back door. He turned back briefly, fearing he’d heard something come from the basement before he’d resumed his paces for his sanity. No more demon chestbursters for today, no sir!

Running up towards the slope and turning past the water pump to the garage, he scurried up to the car; the machine and the smiling creature were both by the car.

“Out of my way!” the man gestured to the machine to leave.

“Derrick. Please be careful. We have found this tool,” the machine held out a digital readout corded to a microphone, and inserted a pair of batteries. “This is a sound spectrometer. It is designed to detect various frequencies of sound waves, including at frequencies too high for human hearing.”

“You’re helping me now?” His eyes widened at the machine as he grabbed the device.

“By focusing on certain areas, you may eventually find certain signs of life such as heartbeat and voices, within the band of 80 to 260 hertz. Do make use of it.”

“Holy shit. Th-this is like in, in the movies, man!” He beamed in excitement, his legs jiggling. “It’s like, I’m, I’m a fucking FBI agent hunting down a serial killer!”

The machine remained still, looking at the man for one last moment before leaving the garage. “If you find yourself overwhelmed, return as soon as possible. Do not get sidetracked, as while I accept your statement of intentions, you and I have an agreement to fulfill,” the machine retorted, “one on which I will default if you no longer wish to reach our goal.” 

“Y-yeah, to meet the super smart network or something that can build portals,” he stuttered, “that.”

The little trader surged up from behind, and threw itself inside the man’s holdall with a scream. “Georgeboosh!”

“This kid, huh,” he zipped the sack up, “it’s gonna be a long one.”

He sat down and placed the spectrum analyzer in the li’l jockey box, turned the key and heard the engine sputter. A whistling sound came from somewhere in the rear, making him turn around: one of the butane tanks, like the ones he’d seen in the kitchen. So, we got butane for fuel. Wonder what this whole place’s electric grid runs on. Is there a utility bill I’m running up?

Driving out, he’d gotten better used to the gearstick and the incessant singing coming from his rucksack. Following a narrow stretch of tarmac was easier this time—although he hard-braked at the slightest sign of going off-track, stalling the engine, and twisted the key with growing frustrations each time. The sun, in all its heat, did not sweat him as profusely as the fear of his own home. 

After a few attempts, the wheels took him coasting along a seaside highway, passing by several road signs written out in some East Asian script. The cries of the cicadas made way for the chitter of birds, making him stop for a moment to look at the ocean: there was an urban skyline on the horizon. A heavy cargo ship in the distance, almost hidden in the fog, crossed the sea to dock. The fuck… something this big? Could be people, could be machines.

Driving further, he tried to reach the city, and rehearsed his lines. “Hey, you, uh, gentleman, boy, ma’am, miss, my name’s-no, I’m a traveler-no, no, I’m a relief worker-no, I’m a humanitarian, yes, a humanitarian, me and a machine that I programmed with my robotics skills are gonna help you find your way back to a normal, God-unforsaken world, and-Damn!”

At the end of the road, he found himself face to face with a two-story wooden building with an awkwardly-affixed air conditioner, covered in overgrown weeds. While the first story seemed mostly unaffected, the second was wholly enveloped in leaves. A dilapidated sign barely hung off of the front, with a washed-out red cross. A few kanji, and the word “Clinic”, were sprayed over with “Labo”. 

He pulled up the parking brake, grabbed his duffel bag, raised his gun and stepped to the door; the door was shut with a chain and padlock, and the windows all boarded up.

The first order of business, as he’d decided, was to announce his presence as loudly as his throat would allow. “Heeeeey! I’m here to heeeeeelp!”

After knocking and banging, he’d decided to stick his microphone into a window opening, and listen for sounds, sticking his ear in. Wait, hold up… I’m an idiot! He stuck the spectrograph’s microphone to the hole: a few peaks, one at 60 and the other at 120 hertz. “Hey, that must be it! Somebody must be hiding or…” he tensed up, “ah shit, maybe somebody’s screaming inside.”

He picked up a bonesaw from the holdall, smirking. “The tools of evil… are now the tools of salvation. Heh.” With the weapon once used to cut his flesh, he hacked and whittled down the boards. Slinging the holdall on, he ventured inside; the reception hall was ghost-quiet, covered in years of dust. A few dated posters were hung on the walls, barely visible from the daylight seeping in. A couple of them were covered in happy figures and katakana, the rest covered in photo montages. 2003-something-six-something-twelve. People turning into piles of white powder or something and a needle? This country’s weird, man. I bet the text says ‘yuura burainu ona duraguzu.’ Didn’t know Japs had a cocaine epidemic last year.

A line of English text was covered by a thick power cable, one he’d decided to follow.

Looking further around the room, he’d noticed that the phone was uncorded. The television, the speakers, the displays were all unplugged, yet the outlets were full. Going in further down the hallways, he’d ventured out into the rooms, sneaking underneath patient beds and behind desks, calling out and peeking through the slits in the window boards, until he’d grown exhausted. An idea then surged: I’ll take the fucking beds! My house is now Camp Humanity!

With enough of the boards sawn off, he built a ramp to the windowsill. Lining up all the beds one by one, he pushed them out the hallway and out the reception room through the windowsill, and turned his car around. By mounting them back-to-back and over the chassis’ rear, he’d managed to bring them into the ramshackle home… barely.

Frenziedly loading the beds on their wheels through the back door, he parked them in the living room. “Hell yeah! Cog, come get this shit! I’m emptying the basement next, because we need all the space we can get for new arrivals!”

“That is out of the question.”

Almost immediately, while panting, wheezing and coughing, he went back and forth again.

“Kid, fetch!”

With the creature’s help, the two nabbed a television, a filing cabinet, a stack of newspapers and tens of bottles of substances he could neither name nor describe. “Hah-hah-hah-aaahh! We’re gonna make it!” He clamored, “the people need us!”, he’d grabbed a spray can with pictograms of insects on it. “And… ants, begone at once!” He rushed in circles through the entire ground floor, spraying the floorboards, the furniture, the tusked machine head on the wall, the paintings and the door until the can was empty and he lay on the floor, sweating bullets and panting. “Hope I, uh, hope I left whoever’s in there enough stuff to get by.”

Wiping the sweat off his brow, he pinched his temple, and leaned against the car parked in the garage before one more ride.

“Fuck… we’ve been searching through every fucking room in that clinic and I still keep seeing the same shit on that frequency sensor thing.”

“Le mi tamne-kun… pe’i,” it moaned, “ugh… fa watashi cu dijca le nu watashi ba klama fe zo’e poi na’e du vu le spita ku onegaishimasu.”

[Cousin, buddy, ugh… I feel like I wanna go somewhere other than the hospital, please.]

I’m surprised, he seems to have caught on to my tone. Maybe he gets me.

“I’m as pissed as you are, kid. I can’t believe I’m letting people fucking die in there,” he had opened the duffel bag, hung it on the car and gestured to the creature within, “but ballkid, Cog’s already told me to stop this shit several times. And I certainly haven’t heard whatever the fuck that… that tool, that readout with a mic is showing on the screen,” he frowned. He played with the corded microphone like a yo-yo. “Somebody’s in there,” he pointed to the road, “they need me, and I need them. I need to save them, man. The Lord didn’t leave me to die out here all alone.”

Driving out once more, he’d reached the sawn-off boards on the clinic window, and hopped in. Following the cables, he’d gone all the way into the dark and descended three flights of stairs, each darker than the last, each with a stuffier air and a more nauseating stench of burnt plastic. His vision began to flash white every time he blinked, prompting him to tap on the holdall. “Ballkid. Work your voodoo!” he heard the zipper open as his duffel bag suddenly lightened. 

The noise was finally becoming clear: it was an electric hum. “Hey! Anybody stuck in there, we got you covered!” he called out in his descent, “I’m the Red Cross of this place! I’m what God sent to relieve you of this living hell, and your possible drug addiction! I apologize for takin’ your toilet paper!”

With one further step down, something pushed back against his right foot, prompting him to kick it in anger. “What the hell?! Stop shoving my foot!”

He tried to step forward again, and again as his foot was repeatedly pushed back. “Ballkid, is this you?! I didn’t haul your golf-ball looking ass in here to piss me off!”

About to give up exploring with his toes sore, a door three times his size had opened in front of him and bathed him in green light. With the whole area gone from pitch-dark to dimly-lit, he’d realized: the floor was covered in heaps of white powder, and he’d been an inch away from stepping on something round, with a button and a fuse: a landmine. The door had been opened by the friendly creature, calling him in. “Ko jbibi’o mi!” [Come closer to me!]

His eyes widened, his face tightly contorted as he’d entered the chamber. “Holy shit! It’s a coke den! Who the fuck would want to live here?!”

The walls were made of cracked concrete, and an electric hum permeated the dusty air. Hundreds of cables, coming from every outlet and room in the clinic and draping the walls, all bundled together in loops and curves. A metal locker in the middle, with something trapped inside and vacuum tubes sticking out. A hoop around it, affixed to a television set. A glowing green black box hung above it all, inside the shell of a demolished generator—exactly like the ones in his home’s basement. Its hum was idle, smooth and constant; he’d bumped into an iron bar, knocking the hoop down.

His chest tightened, his teeth gritted and he let out a piercing scream as the television screen scrolled through the innards of a bastardized android merged with an alien-looking machine, sporting uncountably many tiny limbs alongside its humanoid arms. T-twigs?

Of its arms, only one had a hand; the other had countless artificial nerves, sensors, and wires all sparking and sticking out of its chest, cleanly cut.

Doesn’t matter what this poor guy cuts off at this point, his entire body’s a fucking sin against nature. I can’t see the Lord sending this to heaven.

Like a fossil, the screen displayed its jaws wide open as if to condemn whoever had left it here, and whoever might see it. 

Wh-wh…

Its broad masculine frame and arms were as if to aim a firearm at the man crossing himself. The would-be rescuer, in a daze, rushed to raise the hoop back to its place; it fell back in place. This time, however, his eyes glued to the terrifying display picked up a semblance of text inscribed on the android’s features: the text “CHILD 22”, and “M002” carved into its forehead.

The floor’s bathroom tiles were covered in bubbles upon bubbles of melted rubber, spilled all over the room. The bubbles and foam, hardened and now cold, formed a trail that led to a long strip of rubber hung over a wall covered in thousands of needles, accompanied by the words “Good Skin” carved into the concrete above tens of tally marks.

I don’t like this place, he scurried over to the doors. “Ballkid, get in the bag!” he shouted at his companion. With his bag now full, he sprinted up the stairs as fast as his wasted legs could carry him.

Click. Ding. Wh…?

Within a moment, a chill rose up his spine curling his blood: he’d dropped the spectrograph on the landmine. 

Hurrying up the flights of stairs, banging his head on walls, a slew of explosions reverberated through the halls, punching at his eardrums.

The ground beneath him shook, the ceilings above him cracked, split and fell as he fled the doomed building, and he’d soon enough found himself latching on to a board on the window as the reception room sank into depths unknown.

With everything around him sinking, rubble, leaves, grass and branches raining, he swung himself out the window. Sitting in the car, and resting his holdall, he’d taken one last look: anything that was in there had turned to dust and ashes, his mind left in pieces. Wh-what the fuck? The android with a gun really… he really… he was a cocaine addict who tortured other androids for their skin?!

He was mute. His tongue, stiff and dry. He was deaf, except for the ringing in his ears. Racing over to the shore, he’d dipped his shoes in the river to clean the powder off of their soles and his fingers. 

In three gestures, he’d started the vehicle and raced up the coast; a trail in the sky seemed to follow him, making him take a longer route between the trees for cover. A minute later, the engine had gone quiet, stalled and would no longer crank; he’d spent the next hour crying, punching tree trunks, cursing his god, and then settled on dragging his car downhill to the garage.

The next time he’d entered the home, he’d passed the stubby, the cat, the furniture, the beds, the bottles and the television without uttering a word, as if it were a stranger. Crawling up to the attic, he pointed the barrel of his gun at his chin, and fell face-first into his sleeping bag.

A few moments later, the creature had leapt out of the holdall upon hearing the stubby’s greeting, yet his face remained blank. The companions spoke, and the machine approached him.

“Derrick?”

“Hu-huh, hm, ca-can we just watch TV?”

“There are no electric outlets compatible with the television set you’ve acquired.”

“Okay,” he dryly swallowed.

Confronted with nothing but silence on his part, the stubby picked up a book and began to read it out to him until he’d suddenly snapped, and began laughing hysterically, banging his fists on the wood stud.

“Ah,” he wheezed, “ah-hahaha! I really thought I could do it! I thought I was gonna be the health worker who wouldn’t have gotten me fired for smokin’ it up with Rico from the Safeway photo lab! And now, I’m high! I must’ve inhaled a million bucks’ worth of coke!”

His laughter turned to tears, his body growing weak and his mind being bombarded with emotions he could not describe.

“High?”

“The clinic… get this. The clinic was full of fucking cocaine! I-I think I got some on my shoes, it must’ve stuck and-”

“Emil has spoken to me. It was sodium chloride.”

“Dude,” he raised his neck, “I felt paranoid as shit. I saw a dead, uh, a deactivated android’s body man. My heart started skipping beats like an asthmatic playing a trumpet.”

“Derrick. If anything was inhaled during your stint in the clinic, it would have been table salt.”

The man’s eyes widened for a moment, before he’d dropped to the floor and sighed. “Salt. What the fuck, why would there be a poster in the damn place about people turning into salt?! Forget it, you know what? I’ve been an interior decorator, an urban explorer and a humanitarian worker all day. That’s damn good.”

“There is quite a lot of furniture that clutters up the living room.”

“Well,” he frowned, “you putting it in the basement?”

“It is unnecessary. Our stay in this building is transient.”

“Then I guess you’re alright, with all this.”

“This has been quite a costly endeavor, Derrick, and while your intentions were reasonable, it remains the case that your methods were unnecessarily perilous.”

“Every fucking thing I do is perilous, Cog. Won’t be long till we’re out of here,” he’d finally shut his eyes before he could fall asleep. “Well… good night, uh, if there was night.”

A few hours had passed, until he’d woken up—alone again, with a surge of energy spurting within him. “I’m alive. I’m alive! I’m fucking glad to be alive!” he cackled as he paced manically around the room, even going so far as to grab the rifle out of the stacks of circuits and wires by the wall and dance with it. “I’m alive!” He cheered to the world. “Ah-hahahahaha! I lived, you sons of bitches! Tell my dad he can go fuck himself and his hookers in Boise!” and looked at the field, freezing his face stiff.

A tall charcoal figure sprinted over the ashes, kicking up clouds in its wake. Long hair in braids fluttered in the air and a floating scythe twice its size floated behind its long robe.

It turned to him, revealing a feminine face. It returned his stare from behind a blindfold, making him slam the window shut. Immediately, he’d felt a force tackle him from the side and screamed, before turning: it was the machine who’d tackled him, eyes red, warning him. “Derrick. This is no time for pleasantries.”

“Ow! Who the hell was that?! You called hookers in here or something?”

“It appears that your cognitive faculties have declined, yet your tongue moves as swiftly as ever.”

Dazed and panicked, the man broke into a furious sweat, rolled on the floor bumped heads with the machine, knocking it off and backing into a corner. “Derrick. Focus,” the stubby instructed him as he shook his head.

“Guh, huh…”

“Fleeing is our best option. Follow me through the closet,” it picked up the rifle off the attic floor and led him downstairs.

Coming down and holding the staircase’s railing, the human attic-dweller rabidly galloped behind the stubby, with a helter-skelter posture and balance and nearly tripping; his partner showed no sign of slowing down for him.

Once it shut the closet door, he’d found himself racing to catch up. At the bottom of the staircase, he looked around, and froze at a sight he thought he’d never worry about.

The android gunman—rolling in his own blood—simmered beneath the furniture. Gears, circuits whirring and bursting with a viscous fluid through the bullet holes in the half-dead former resident’s uniform held the man’s attention captive, unable to process what he was viewing. Goggles inscrutable as ever, the automaton crawled under the hospital beds lined up in the living room, seizing the shrieking human’s ankle and wrapping the television’s power cable around it, dragging him so fast he leaned on a bed not to fall down. “Hoooly shiiiiit!”

A moment later, the machine had burst out the closet door, firing its rifle at the android and pulling the man in by its arms until he’d slammed the door shut. The two of them were cramped together, standing arm-to-arm facing the closet window.

“He’s alive?!” the man scowled, “how did you not know-”

“I have been busy tending to your health, the feline, my acquaintance’s rowdiness and the general state of this residence until you were deemed fit to leave. You too were able to verify his death, which is something you have not properly done.”

“Don’t blame me! I sent the ballkid-fuck, forget it. We gotta leave.” He looked around. “Go through the window?”

“There is a space outside this window through which we can bypass the crop field behind this residence, evading detection,” the stubby hopped over to the window, leapt and it outwards, “After me, go quietly, and go swiftly,” it ordered right as it jumped out and the window opened and swung back shut promptly, splintering the wooden frame.

Rushing over to reopen it, the man pounded at it, and wedged his fingernails between the glass case and frame, to no avail. In a hurry, he opened the door behind him and rushed back into the living room, smashing a glass bottle of some colored fluid over the android as the latter writhed in pain before running up the stairs.

A quiet and polite sound shook the human attic-dweller to his core: there was a gentle knock on the door. Front door, back door, he could not know; his mind was too fractured to recall the map of the building, only that he needed to get out the fucking window by yesterday.

Snap. Crack. Swoosh. Downstairs, one door was no more.

Chapter Text

(A few minutes before the previous chapter’s ending.)

The sky was peppered with concrete, deadwood and steel raining upon the shore. Each piece of debris plunged into the water louder than the one before it.

The tire tracks in the sand ended where footprints started. Most of them were similar: the awkward, wobbly steps of a man in long shoes. One exception stood out: a sharp and methodical stride, dug with military precision by a pair of stilettos.

A deep monotone chatter emanated through the speaker of a floating object. “Inquiry: Unit 7B should clearly state its objective. Aimless wandering from assigned area during active mission time is considered a form of insubordination and wasteful-”

“Honey,” a feminine voice retorted, “do not ever mistake me for a slacker. I only ever have three things in mind: my objectives, me, and my subordinates in that order,” almost as if to flirt, “something exploded here, and I know a call to action when I see one. Got it, POD?”

“Affirmative. Warning: This support unit will remain unable to assist Unit 7B to its fullest ability without a clear statement of Unit 7B’s intentions.”

“Hush now,” it took on a mocking motherly tone, “you can listen to the widow[acacia, ch18]’s groveling[ch16] later while she needs me. You just keep watching and I’ll reward you with handsome data.”

A lone figure, a slender silhouette of black, white, and gold, hopped from shattered bed to bed on the remains of a clinic in the delicate spin of a ballet dance. Steeling herself for a charge attack that might infringe upon her delicate features from any direction as her long silver ponytail whirled in the wind, she frolicked with the demeanor of a butterfly and the power of a meteor.

Thump. Crack. Splash. Snip. Thump.

The seemingly bottomless tapestry of branches, leaves and weeds proved to be no match for her. From her long satin gloves, glowing strings of energy sunk their tips into the slag and flung it off into the shore, one cinder block and one steel beam at a time. The threads cut searingly through the weeds, and the webs she weaved chopped through leaf and concrete alike, leaving every slash straight, and either red-hot or ashen black.

Sliding her finger gently over the cracked remains of a wall, she made out a smudge in the shape of a hand. “Recent. There’s precious little dust, and lookee~ my, someone’s been grabby,” she leaned over to a cupboard with the clear markings of hands and several containers’ bottoms that were removed from place. With a quick reach into her sleeveless jacket’s zipper pockets, she pulled a pair of wet wipes out, furrowed a brow and pursed her lips. “POD, do you think the R&D division deserves its funding?”

“Affirmative. The Research and Development facilities of the Bunker are instrumental to maintaining equipment and progressively iterating on-”

Unfazed, she turned her nose up at her floating assistant. “Well,” cracking a wry smile, “we’re about to find out whether they can help with basic hygiene,” the tissue up in smoke and vapors as she rubbed it lightning-fast, “...I guess you’re right,” she playfully petted the roof of its casing.

A mere moment later, she’d leapt back and blinked: a foreign hair was stuck between her eyelashes. Focusing her only exposed eye on it, she’d inspected its fibers. “Animal hair! In my wet wipes? How did this get in here-” she plucked it, and grunted in annoyance. “Ugh. Maybe I should cover my left eye with the visor too, with all this dust flying around. Or maybe not,” she put a thumb to her chin and covered her lips, “after all, the humans once said, ‘an eye for an eye’, did they not?”

“Refusal: This unit will not answer Unit 7B’s question due to its low confidence in Unit 7B’s comedic abilities.”

“Suit yourself,” she lightly slapped the back of the floating cube, “now, lift me up,” she gripped its mechanical talons, leapt into the air, and reached with her palm at the rubble beneath her, “Laser! Now!”

“Error: command interrupted by system function.”

A moment later, she’d let go. Adjusting her posture, she fell back to the ground, landing flatly on her soles in a dust cloud: nothing transpired, as she waited for the assistant to fly back down to her eye level. “POD,” she groaned, “look at what a mess my boots are!” she pouted, “if you re~ally want an excuse to make me do all this by myself, keep this up and I’ll-”

The pod turned away from the android, turning its light on and chiming. “Alert: The following communication will be encrypted, and classified Privilege Level 5. Unit 7B is required to digitally sign an authorization for Order 67.”

A dark holographic screen was projected into the thick dusty air, showing black characters on a khaki background. Turning towards it, a scowl formed over her visible eye, one she’d quickly restrained lest it overly crease her skin. “To authorize the use of force on the following targets possessing no entries in the YoRHa combat database… ensuring security by any measures necessary,” she scrolled down the virtual sheet with her fingers.

“Good use of decorum, I can tell they didn’t just copy a template for this letter.” She skipped over a set of photographs and idly read through a few paragraphs, “uh-huh, ‘Squad Commander 7B, signs off on the following operations to be undertaken by YoRHa units 5S and 10D in accordance with POD number whatever’s recommendations.’ And this is the time for it?”

The floating assistant manifested a glowing yellow stylus between its talons. “Information: As designated squad leader by Command, Unit 7B must immediately provide its digital signature on the authorization form, or refuse the operation otherwise. Units 5S and 10D will be informed immediately. Delays will negatively impact mission outcomes.”

“Hm. This pen’s a bit… asymmetrical,” she swiped the stylus off into the ground and stepped on it, dissolving it into a brief flash of light. “I’ll see the others. Conjure them.”

“Affirmative.” The pod produced another holo-pen of a different shape.

“Wrong color. I need the same color as the text,” she flicked the item off of her assistant’s grip. Before long, it materialized a third one; her fingers gracefully swooped in on the writing implement and turned it upright in her hand, leveling it with the line on which she intended to write.

A couple swift gestures were all it took for her to calligraphically sign her name on the virtual form, above the English words “Glory to Mankind”, sighing at the holographic display’s disappearance.

She ran through a slit in the slag down the crumbled staircase and snapped her fingers at the pod to turn its light on, pecking it with her lips and whispering to it. “Don’t move. I wanna surprise them.”

Trampling in sharp high heels over hardened pools of molten rubber between the steel beams of a shattered basement, she snickered at a green light in her peripheral view. “Ooh. Messy. A black box…” she turned over to an object embedded within a crack in the floor, “now, we can’t have that just lying here,” she whispered into a microphone on her finger.

She looked at the intricate criss-crossing fiberglass lines surrounding the device’s rugged obsidian exterior. “The reactor… it’s a prototype. Ju~ust as I’d expect for a boy that’s out of his element,” she shook it, “wonder if this one turns into a mushroom. It’d make for a good stew if it did, ah. But if it doesn’t, that explains why this place isn’t a crater.” she dissolved the reactor in a flash of light, “Off to digital storage you go.”

“Hm. This’ll be a,” she slowly savored her next word, “lovely encounter,” she opened a crumpled metal locker and marveled at its contents. She caressed the cheeks of the dead android within, and softened her voice. “Oh, hun, you must have been so angry. If only you’d met me earlier, you could’ve had such a peaceful end,” she hugged its chest, you could even have called it an act of love!”[ch21]

Her fingers ran through the tiny limb stubs all over the side of the unit’s body, the wires and nerves sticking out, before a visceral revulsion stayed her hand. After remaining still for a moment, she’d raised her index fingers, wedged them in the body’s armpits, lifted it up onto her shoulders, and hauled it back into the daylight to be greeted by the slick slate-gray assistant raising it into midair. “Analysis: These are the remains of No. 22, a prototype YoRHa unit of the deprecated Gunner type. Components have been substituted extensively and combined with machine lifeforms. Fuel filter is missing.”

She smiled softly, and winked. “I delivered,” she put her hand on her hip, “didn’t I?”

“Affirmative. Unit data has been submitted to database and is pending verification.”

“Now… to deal with the decoy objective of Operation Anthropoid, then it's back to real soldiering - I can't wait to see the Kingdom of Night. But, seriously,” she twirled a corkscrewed lock of hair, “mark an access point on my visor. I can get all this dust off my uniform, but I will not take it well if my mascara starts running.”

“Access point marked on map. Warning: said access point is operating in restricted mode. Bandwidth has been limited for security.”

“Wait, so it’ll take that long for it to reconstruct me in Yokohama? I better write the girls a message then,” she clapped her hands at the assistant for it to project a communication interface and materialize her holo-pen. Swiping it immediately from the air, she scribbled a note on an input pad. “If-you-can’t-handle-the-target-call-me-to-intervene-I-would-be-disappointed-to-lose-you-Captain-7B. That’ll do it. I-am-always-available. Have 10D’s POD immediately notify her when it catches this.”

She took another pair of wet wipes out her zipper pocket and cleared her shoulders of debris. “Eugh. I almost wasted a logic vaccine just making sure all these I/O ports don’t write bad bits to my OS chip. Good thing I took his black box out.”

As soon as the floating cube took to moving along her planned path, she’d grabbed it again and held it in place. “Hold on.”

“Inquiry: Unit 7B should state its reason for delaying its movements.”

Her tone grew sterner. “I might go there and see them. My girls are not allowed to get hurt if I can help it. And besides,” she winked, “in restricted mode, who’s to say these glorified candy dispensers would reconstruct my earrings faithfully? I will not face that machine in the Forest Kingdom again and ask him to make me another pair.” She wipes the two belts on her skirt, wiping dust off of them with a grimace of disgust.

POV: the man.

(Immediately after the previous chapter’s ending.)

The helmet on his head strained his neck, his joints screaming in the language of pins and needles for relief.

Feels like my head’s in an iron maiden, or like I’m taking the shots from when I was a kid… except all over my neck instead of one spot on my arm.

With the visor down, sweat dripped over the glass to blur his vision and constricted him in his own shirt as he ran through the hundreds of glowing particles in the attic. A pitter-patter downstairs propelled him toward the windowsill like steam out of a boiler.

He took a quick detour to rush over to the gold necklace on the floor he’d spotted from the staircase.

I want my Rolex! I want my three months rent! I want my compensation for having endured living in this place, and by God, I am getting it! This necklace is mine, no matter which bitch it is whose name is engraved on it!

With the dexterity of a drunken sailor on a rocking ship, he pried it upwards with the sole of his shoe, scooped it up with his foot and raised his knee briefly to pick it up; the first time, his foot fell back. Ding. The necklace struck the floorboards with a loud clang, pulling a scream of frustration out the man’s lungs. “Gaaaah!”

One more attempt: bouncing on the other leg to keep balance, he caught his foot at the apex of its trajectory, and yanked the necklace expediently into his pocket. Without skipping a beat, he scurried up to the window.

Something assaulted his senses. He knew he wasn’t exactly by himself, but there was something watching him. It felt like a stiff breeze and a blur, but he couldn’t call it an entry: for one, how would anyone come in without making a clear sound on the stairs, and second, was this presence fact or delirium? His mind froze in its tracks, as if stretched thin in a hundred directions.

…If I didn’t know the exit, I’d call this place purgatory.

The gentle pit-pat downstairs abruptly halts. The man turns around by the window, looking every which way, and briefly hears a thud come from right at the bottom of the staircase. Whiplashed, he turns around. Before he’d even registered what he’d seen, he’d already had a chill rise up his spine. Without a second thought, and without even taking time to look, he raced to the stairs, panting too loud to hear his own thoughts: whatever was down there, he thought, he could process later; but what was up here with him, he thought, would rip his balls, face and soul out, not necessarily in that order.

Not a moment after he set his first step on the top of the staircase did a whirlwind blow over him carrying nails and wood shavings. The only warnings were a flash of light and the faintest whimper of a woman before he’d blinked and found the stairs all chopped into splinters along with the flooring next to them, exposing the closet right beneath the attic.

The figure, staggering under its own momentum, loudly dug its heels in: a nefarious presence, bewailed by grating and screeching floorboards to curdle the listener’s blood.

He froze in place and slid a finger over his visor to wipe the muck and sweat off: unmistakably the figure he’d seen on the burnt field, only now crystal-clear.

When it was on the field, the surrounding ashes muddled his view of the silhouette. Yet in the light of the attic and standing nearly eye-to-eye with him, its sleek and clean features contrasted sharply with the muted browns and beiges of the attic, its shelves, the toolbox, the bandages strewn on the floor. Its skin was paler than the white fabric of the sleeping bag.

The silence enveloped the attic; something slowly fell out of a spot on her chin, pushed out by a glowing substance. From the brisk and solid landing sound, he could tell it was a splinter of wood. As quickly as the little splinter bounced and spun on the floor, the glow on her chin shrank and vanished, leaving a smooth patch of skin.

If sanity could not make heads nor tails of it, his hindbrain was almost certain of its nature: a tall and slender woman, sporting a dress that fluttered in the wind within an inch of the ground.

Dark-brown insignia on her back: a symbol resembling either the shape of eyelashes if the MS-13 found a way to sharpen their eyelashes for stabbing, brass knuckles, or a fist with knives tucked between its fingers. Long jet-black hair, done in braids so meticulous only an assembly line could make them that seemingly sucked the light out of its surroundings. The Wiccan Taliban? The drawings of goth middle schoolers?!

A scythe, taller and wider than its owner herself, floated behind her back with a halo around its handle, bestowing an air of holiness upon her. To the right of her temple, a dark red cube with black metal talons levitated.

…If Isaac Newton saw this, he and I would’ve been put together in a padded room.

The man, picking up his pace, scurried over around his pursuer’s back, unthinkingly kicked his sleeping bag up over his knees, grabbed it with his arms and ran to the window before the next idea popped into his head. I-I-Bag! I can jump and use the bag to cushion my fall! W-wait, what the fuck am I thinking?! My hands are shaking, I need to roll it up, and I don’t even have ten seconds for that!

“Guuh!” he shrieked, turning around to see a shape closing in on him, announcing its approach with the roar of a hurricane: she’d launched her weapon at him.

Swoosh.

The scythe and its wide carbon-black serrated blade cleaved the air, tore through the vertical cables in the middle of the room and the support beams leaving nothing but sawdust.

Crack! The glass snapped loudly, blasting off into the field outside as the weapon bounced off of the window’s metal frame, leaving a dent that arched it into the shape of a bow for a parting gift. The walls cracked, the ceiling creaked, the rulers and compasses on the shelves took flight, followed by a blizzard of papers and hardcovers.

The man, watching death oncoming, leapt backwards and slammed his head on the wall as the blade’s tip stopped short of his neck. As swiftly as it flew at him, the weapon spun in a boomerang motion and floated back into its halo behind the woman’s dress, slicing through the leatherbound covers of three tomes, and coating the floor in hundreds of evenly-cut page fragments.

“Le pamoi saske cu puco’u ckisku le selbradi klani poi dekte fpi’i vopiso n’iu ci. .i le selbradi nejni cu pimo’a no’o lo’e re’amnu. Fa’o.”

[“Preliminary target analysis: estimated combat level index is seven-point-nine times ten to the power of negative three. Target’s energy emissions are multiple orders of magnitude below expectations. Over.”]

With his head spinning and his eyes seeing double, he hurried over to the other end of the room. He stubbed his toe, cursing out loud the “damn toolbox” on the floor and tripping into the racks of circuits, cables and tubes in the attic’s rear. A volley of energy projectiles whizzed right over his head. When an electric shock from the circuitry struck his arm, he’d jolted back into place, briefly thinking he’d been retired from service to meet the good Lord — a false prediction. I’m still here… Weapon! I need a weapon! The… the fucking rifle! Maybe it’s charging energy up inside this contraption!

Opening the lid of a metal container on the racks and stuck all ten inches of his forearm inside, clawing and scratching the deepest reaches within for anything of use until he could feel the blood in his veins curdle and freeze as he’d made a quick realization.

…That Cog son of a gun took the rifle earlier.

“.A’ecai doi le selbradi cu ca troci nu ri xaksu vanbi nejni mu’i ra cu ba pregunta mi’o .i .eicai mi’o cu ca darxi. Fa’o.”

[“Warning: Target is attempting to absorb energy from contraption or deploy energy-based attacks. Suggestion: sabotage the energy pipeline. Over.”]

“Ko dai ri’e dai’a do sisti go’i.”

[“Go nuts and stop him.”]

“Je’e .io fa’o.”

[“Affirmative. Over.”]

Did… the cereal box… just say pregunta… if this is just a ‘pregunta’, I don’t know how the fuck a ‘frase’ will turn out.

With his forearm stuck in the container, the man pushed back and held the lid up. The dirty warning light turned on and the container heated up almost instantly, searing his arm intensely enough that he’d yanked it out at once, clutching his wrist. Holy shit! It burns! I can still feel the pain! I still have nerve endings!

Face to face with the woman, he’d noticed an oddly terrifying look in her face: there was nothing that stood out. In fact, there was nothing: there were no creases, no pores, no body hairs, no scars, a sight his mind refused to accept. The figure before him had all the markings of a face, yet its skin’s devilishly smooth softness did not betray the smallest sign of life.

After she briefly stood statue-still under the sunken ceiling, the woman crossed half the attic in one step and lunged at the hyperventilating man and his sleeping bag like a tiger at its prey. His helpless eyes betrayed a blank stare as he’d felt a blazing heat radiate from behind and ahead.

…Is this a glimpse into hell?

Quivering and sweating, he raised his sleeping bag as a last-ditch shield. Holy shit! Even without that scythe she’d borrowed from the Grim Reaper, she could body-slam me into the 10th circle of Hell! Virgil and Dante better lend me a rope out of there!

The ubiquitous particles that were his greatest annoyance in the attic, he’d noticed, had suddenly disappeared: they were all flying towards the racks of circuits and wiring behind him, pouring like moths to a flame. Wh…

“Le darxi cu co’aze’i fasnu. Fa’o.” A beam of light unloaded out of the floating prism by the woman’s side, going over the man’s head. [“The strike is on the verge of happening in a very short time period in the future. Over.” or “Impact imminent. Over.”]

They ain’t aiming at me?!

“Nngh!” The woman grimaced, slammed her heels into the floor and bounced off into the ceiling. Her somersault in high heels rumbled the floor, and ended with her latching on to the ceiling’s bars, crushing two of them under her unrelenting momentum.

Not a second later, she landed perfectly still within arm’s reach of the man. The scythe dissolved into thin air behind her back and appeared in her hands, spinning virulently in a fan-like motion as if to repel something. Dazed, he clutched his portable bed, dived sideways, and ducked under its cover.

Eyes shut, jaws clenched, he’d heard a rain of projectiles, ricochets and crackles.

The whistling and hissing of the air shook him to his core, quaking the precious few floorboards on which he rested. A few objects he couldn’t see struck the helmet on his head, laying chink after chink in its cracks. Glass broke, metal was bent, wood was vaporized, and shrapnel spun and took off all around the attic, and a burning hole was etched into his sleeping bag right above his stomach–one through which all life would have spilled out of him, had it been any thinner.

The once-charming gable roof snapped into pieces, breaking and collapsing above the two occupants. The building was chock-full of smoke and glowing dust anywhere the man could look, blocking everything from his sight—had his legs been the slightest bit number, he’d also concluded that he was half a casualty himself.

Shit, shit, shit… I’m under like, a million pounds of wood. I’m sending Giles Corey and Mr. Fipp[ch20] my regards.

Letting out a few pained breaths muffled under his covers, the man coughed the dust out of his tongue and throat, choking. Oh God… I’m going to die here.

He let go of the sheet, and tried to crawl over the few square inches of flooring left intact around him, noticing a crack in the floor. He dragged himself off to the side, firmly gripped the jagged edge and turned to look: it was a hole in the broken floorboards leading into the closet, he’d realized from seeing a window. Straight back to the closet.

…Well, my journey in this house has gone full circle. Yeah, speaking of closets, this’d be the time to come out if I were gay.

Crawling on the floor and treading as quietly as possible, the man did his best to hold the sleeping bag up with his shoulder and arm, lest it fall and the debris on top make a sound, until his arm gradually moved away, followed by his hand and then his fingertips. Once he was in the clear, he’d held his cough in long enough to stick his head through the opening, cough into his free hand and breathe in. He looked down; there was the bag[ch12] in which he’d been first brought into the house. The closet window was broken and its frame in shambles.

“Le remoi seske cu puco’u ckisku le du’u le selbradi goi ko’a cu pu je canai bacyxundi’e lo gusni .i cakiku ko’a canci fe’eroroi ve’a .i ja’o ko’a cu morsi. Fa’o.”

[“The second analysis explains the predicate that: the target’s infrared signature is no longer detectable. No more vital signs were found. Conclusion: threat neutralized. Over.”]

"A'enai doi… mi cu ca pu'o mensku le du'u mi cu tolmencre…"
["Mmh, I feel like such an idiot…"]

Hacking, wheezing, choking on the dust and chafing under the rubble as it mixed with his sweat and lodged itself in his facial hair, the crevices in his lips and his tongue; his throat slowly but surely gave up the ghost. With all of his strength, he dragged his neck into the gap in the floor.

A second look revealed yet another issue: the window’s edges and surroundings were coated in broken glass. So, this window’s making me an offer: destroy your legs and feet, and you might just get to live long enough to walk past a few trees and tattered blankets on laundry lines before a moose munches on you.

…

Fuck you, I’ll pass.

All skin and bones, yet he had never felt heavier than that moment, slithering under the coarse debris and wood into the hole and twitching at the occasional glass shard. He clenched his jaw and braced himself for impact as he slid over the rubble, letting his chest, hips and knees free from the crushing pile of glass, metal and dust above.

Wait. Wh-

In the brief moment he was at the mercy of gravity, his chest tightened. Even with his eyes closed, he could see his own skull split open and release torrents of blood, before blinking again and finally feeling the dreaded moment of truth: a mild nosebleed. When his mind had cleared up, the pile of rubble he landed on broke his fall. Letting go of the sleeping bag relieved him of the blaze burrowing through his skin.

I need… an ice pack…

A faint beep rang through his ears, like a fish surging up through a sea of tinnitus and quickly dipping back in. It was not in his head; this sound had a position, an origin and a distance, the three properties of a vector if my D+ in high school algebra was any fuckin’ good for a subject on which I didn’t cheat.

The masculine voice from above spoke slowly, as if to recite a well-memorized passage.

“Ju’a vlapoi cu pu’o notci da poi cu vajni mi’o zi’e poi tepritka klani ci fi le selci ly Seven-B .ly fo mi’o .i xu do dircu nu mi tcidu ra? fa’o.”

[“Notification: new text message received from Unit 7B. Priority: high. Privilege level 3. Display contents? Over.”]

POV: the scanner.

(A few hours earlier.)

I’m finally at the vantage point marked on my mini-map. I take one last look at the corner of my visor’s interface, and make sure of it: no doubt!

Tenna and I have combed the area for a few hours, looking for that… darned thing! At first, we just followed its tracks hoping that was enough: but that led us right back to the lake where I found the Resistance camp’s second-in-command[ch16]. We’ve been over trees, underneath them, we went through some ruins, crossed a river and an abandoned watchtower: nothing.

So we gave up. But more than a week later, we find this rundown home in the middle of nowhere, so Tenna and I take turns watching it for two hours each.

Did humans raise their children in structures like these? It looks a bit… sad. Like a place that needs so much renovation, but from the peek I could take at this distance, it was just full of junk. There was a television set[ch21] left on the counter by the windowsill, and it wasn’t even plugged in. I tell Tenna on her shift to look out if they turn it on, and show us some sort of message so I can decipher it… but whatever they show, it won’t demoralize me now. Not after we’ve come this far.

It’s the third shift now: mine. I saw a machine come and go, but that’s it. A little machine, even. It was smaller than any I’d seen before. There were also the cicadas chirping for hours on end, and a few vultures feeding on a boar’s carcass by a tree, something Tenna absentmindedly wandered off and found on the other side of the building.

I lie down over a tree’s branch with her by my side watching my back, a job for which I thankfully don’t have to keep my nostrils turned on. Still, it wouldn’t hurt if I could try[ch17] some of that perfume I’ve borrowed from 7B…

While I’m watching, I spend a good amount of time drafting my authorization to attack and record data to the intelligence server. The holographic keyboard takes some getting used to, because it has to calibrate input for the ‘force’ I apply to the keys with my fingers inside my sleeves. The display is transparent, so I can see through what I type and look at the building at the same time, without even moving my eyes.

At any rate, no corners will be cut! Not the standard margin size, not the letter spacing. the Commander isn’t strict about it, but 42O’s calls often go into detail nitpicking everything I send her way. And if 7B’s anything like Tenna describes… what horror! I can hear my internal fans spinning up when I imagine what it’d be like if I sent her a simple message without all the bells and whistles the higher units like.

“You look like you’re so sharply focused. Mmh, I should learn to look like I’m working… and this thing can teach me to type reports.” Tenna pets my POD, and the holographic display flickers. “Warning: Unit 10D is not authorized to physically interact with this support unit. Failure to withdraw is a violation o-”

I shake my arms to lower my sleeves, stand up and grab it off of her hands. “Tenna, stick to yours,” I raise my pointer finger at her, barely high enough that it pokes out of the warm synthetic wool to wag.

It’s really a performance, of sorts. It’s like how human sisters interact, we both know it’s not as serious as it looks. Before long, my POD is back in its place and ready for me to lie down again and start typing on the holographic keyboard in midair.

“We’ll find the ball[ch17] and ask it all the questions we want.”

She leans back on the tree. Her weight shakes it vigorously: it’s like she woke it up from a deep sleep. The branches shake, and a few leaves fall over her hair. They rustle her hair every time she plucks them off. “Hum, we have-” she picks up a bird’s nest off of her head and waves a bird off from pecking at her head, “I have to shower, and we have to let the captain know before we make a move…” She’s clearly irritated by all the broken twigs that fell into her hair, even if she doesn’t want to show it.

I wouldn’t handle it that well, for sure.

Time to blow her mind. “I already sent it. The tall man, the slouchy fellow with the beard, the machine, the creature, what’s that weird thing’s name-Emil of the Woo?[ch17].”

I can’t see her eyes behind the visor, but I can tell from the slight shift of her visor that her eyes are popping out underneath.

“You’re fast.”

Always deadpan, Tenna. Never change.

“While we’re here, I’m sure the Captain will take her time to get back to us, but I’m keeping watch. The first target got away and, the other one, hm…”

“Mmh, who are you talking about?”

“He looks a bit like the bald face I found in a photograph once, but a lot more… deflated? I’m not sure.”

“An inflatable android,hm… if it’s for swimming, why not just carry a buoy instead of inflating his skin?”

My POD shoots up into the air and interjects. “Conjecture: the abnormal properties of hostile units being discussed may be due to unauthorized use of salvaged Resistance and/or YoRHa equipment. Proposal: collect more data until Unit 7B replies to letter, in order to-”

Tenna’s POD makes a loud ping, and speaks in a slightly higher voice than mine. “Priority message received from Unit 7B: Attack authorized. All threats must be prosecuted with extreme prejudice.”

I get up, and adjust my visor.

I can’t believe I’m doing this. This was meant to be just a sideshow of a mission, but it feels like so much more than that. We look at each other, and nod.

“Hmm.”

“Mhm.”

We’re closing in from the side, and I put my hand on her shoulder before we split up.

“You stand watch in the field, do what you do best as a D-type. I’ll go in first, and collect data. I’ll hack into anything I find-”

Chapter 21: "Ah-hahahahaha! I lived, you sons of bitches! Tell my dad he can go fuck himself and his hookers in Boise!"

Is that… a man’s laughter? No, no, that’s the sound of a maniacal breakdown!

An infernal sound assaults me from the window. “10D! Y-you go on and check it. Next time I enter sleep mode, that shout will panic me down to my kernel![ch21]”

POV: the scanner.

(During the end of the previous chapter.)

I stand at the rear entrance. Tenna signs off that she’s watching out for me.

Little holes! I peek through: nothing’s moving in there. I open it and…

The floor is… wet?! No, no, no! I’m not about to slip and fall in these boots. This looks like a trap! Better turn back and walk through the laundry line. I’m short enough to sneak right under it.

But there’s a better way: if I jump on the stool and latch on to POD, I can just walk on the wall around the building and avoid whatever’s on the ground. I’m sure it would’ve been easy for whoever set up shop here to lay traps all around the building or landmines to kill whoever gets too close to exposing the truth about their deeds.

With this in mind, I manage to avoid a window on the ground floor and make quiet steps. Hands on the support unit, feet on the wall… all these centrifugal force exams we take during physical check-ups are finally making sense.

Standing sideways with my head slightly lower than my feet needs some heavy calculation of friction coefficients to keep generating the upwards force to resist gravity. And the coefficients have to be calculated again with every step I take.

Before long, I briefly go even higher to avoid the carcass, and then I make a clean somersault off to the front door. It’s up to me to make the first move. A couple trapdoors are available for me to break in, but it might be too dark in the basement before I get struck by whatever’s hiding there.

To shed light on this matter, the sun is a girl’s natural ally.

Whatever that… laughing abomination is on the other side, I’m sure Tenna will make short work of it. If I can’t make a quiet entrance, I’ll have to make a powerful one. So, let’s learn from the best…

Shredding doors isn’t so bad after all![ch17]

Once Treacherous Covenant flashes into my hand, the door is history. Well, I wouldn’t mind if I had any melee combat skills, but I’m sure that just piercing it in random spots until it breaks should make… an impression?

As soon as I’m inside, I look all around. I almost lose it at the face of a Medium Pseudopotamus hung on the wall[ch19] before realizing that it was just the shell of a dead machine. No problem.

…H-hey! Someone just ran up the stairs! Where did they go?! I need to catch up to them-oh. Oh no.

The light coming from below… it’s from black boxes. The renegade, was she in on this? Tearing the black boxes out of other units like it’s a game to her?! And whoever is here, are they going to call for her to come back? No, no, no, this is really bad. I need to search for anything I can find, capture as much data as possible and hand this over to a battle division!

It feels like a jungle of furniture here. There are hospital beds, shelves of strange bottles and containers, some… surgical tools? The television is over there, facing outwards. I strafe around a rug and a pair of beds to look in the closet.

“Alert-” POD warns me, but by the time I hear him, I can already feel my ankle in the clutches of something from underneath. Is it in the basement?! I don’t even get to process the signal from my sensors before I start kicking and thrashing about.

My mouth is open.

If I fall, I’ll scream.

But my heel pushes something off, and it lets me go.

I jump back and take a defensive stance, aping what I saw of that woman who was with 9S once. She looked intimidating back then, in the Bunker. Maybe if I do it too, it’ll intimidate whatever lurks here.

…it’s an android, on the floor. Something’s monstrously off about his skin - like he was burnt, or punctured, wait… it looks like he has ‘pores’ all over his skin. Why would you… impersonate our creators?

I’m forming a working theory about how all this came to be. The renegade unit, and the two modified older android models. Did they brainwash her? If she’s a prototype, maybe she couldn’t tell they’re not humans? Did the other one flee up the stairs just now? H-hold on.

This one crawling on the floor is mouthing something at me that I can’t understand. Some Old World language, I suppose.

I raise my fist. The software runes are cast into the air, and the maso flows into his head.

Remote control: let me hack in!

One by one, my senses are cut off from the real world as I enter virtual space. If this goes all well, I should get in, copy some files over to a sandboxed filesystem, disconnect and it’ll be over in a few hundred milliseconds. My motor functions won’t be turned off long enough for me to even lose balance in the real world.

POV: the man.

Lying down for a moment, the man’s pulse seemed to slow to a crawl over the rubble. His body grew numb; his eyes and body told two different stories. The former, told through a spiderweb in the cracked glass of his helmet, was that he’d fallen on his stomach, his head struck something hard and that his hands and legs were twitching.

The latter was of him falling into a pit of needles, and that everything below his neck disappeared to make way for the smell of blood and rancid puddles of sweat consuming his being. With a hectic force, he yanked the helmet off of his head, finishing it off as its frame broke into pieces.

Am I… dead?

It’s like… holy shit… before you know it, it’s like when I nearly hung myself all over again.

The ceiling drummed and thumped powerfully, drawing a shiver out of the man.

The last few shards of glass left on the window trembled with each noise, falling one by one. Not long after, a gust of wind blew from above the closet, brisk as thunder, cranking the window ever-so-slightly open with a creak.

A chill rose up his spine, invading every fiber of his being as his breath grew heavier. I-I need to find… Cog, man…

Where’s… Cog…

A loud ringing permeated his ears, like a violin in the pitch of nails on a chalkboard playing inside his skull. For a moment, he whipped his head around searching for the source—before realizing it was within.

After a couple seconds of breathing, he’d felt his body strangle his mind with a million sensations: the tight, sweat-drenched fabric of his pants around his legs, the pain and the broken toenail in his shoe, the nauseating stench underneath his shirt, the coarse rubble all over his skin mixing with his sweat, his tendons stretched thinner than his sanity and his shirt stained red with blood where he’d fallen on a stray nail, clenching his jaw as he pulled it out.

Heaving himself up, he staggered, limped, tripped and trotted up to the open closet door, pushing it wider open. The floor had become warmer, and a suffocating heat was rising from beneath.

Is Hell spilling over? That seems about right.

With both arms, he reached at a hospital bed, leaned over its ticking fabric, shut his sore eyes and rested his hand before recoiling in panic at a loud creak and crack, and his feet giving out. With a yelp, his eyes were peeled wide open at the noise. Holy shit! Did I break the bed-

…No, he turned to the shattered remains of the front door: the tree by the house had been felled in a matter of seconds. The charred and rotten carcass of the[ch13] boar underneath it had been crushed into a fine paste, with its skeleton holding the trunk up from blocking the entry.

Why did the tree fall… it’s because the-the monochrome motherfucker never left! Why is she looking for timber? or… or… is she still looking for more victims? Cog!

On the tips of his toes, every fiber of his being wobbled as he’d stepped over the unexpected mechanical horror at his feet: another killer goth, one with short white hair, sporting the proportions and rounder face of a middle-schooler who had just hit puberty and is dressed like she’s sneaking out of her parents’ to go to Treefort. I ain’t a priest, so I ain’t interested in touching it.

After a quick look at her blindfolded eyes, the hailstorm of fear that’d welled up within his arteries mellowed out once he’d realized that somehow or other, the unit was either deactivated, dead or something in-between and that he was by no way in hell going to stay here and find out.

Turning to the back door, the man made a beeline for his exit, wiping the blood on his hands and passing by the dinner table to pick up a knife for stabbing, a fork for lunging, and a stray bullet[ch21] fired into the table’s woodwork to bite if need be. Sliding on a puddle of water, he rocked back and forth to keep his balance as he stepped on shards of broken glass, and craned his neck over to the kitchen: the window was smashed and there was a leaking pipe on the wall.

Panting, he crossed himself and grimaced. “God,” he grunted while leaning on the shut door, “I ain’t ready to meet you yet.”

Powering through, he attempted to open the door: no dice, only a loud bang.

After three attempts, kicking it was of no use, and the faintest sound of a finger tapping the ground from somewhere behind him fired a chill up his spine: in a living room with two war machines, he was the third wheel in a contest for life and death.

His hair stood on end, his fingers froze stiff, his eyes darted around the dinner table, chairs, hospital beds and the large box-set television to tell which of the two figures sprawled on the floor had started twitching with all his strength he flung himself at the door, prying the door ajar and plowing the piles of fallen glass, wood, circuits and wire.

His feet stood on edge at the exit, manically powering through glass and fallen shingles on the floor and briefly untangling a power cable from his legs, ramming his head into a water pipe before turning around as he pressed the sore spot on his forehead. The laundry line!

Sneaking along the wall towards it, he crawled through the weeds up to the shade of the pine trees, and spotted small, orderly, square footprints neatly circling a bush yonder. First a crawl, then a walk, then a run ensued as he eagerly ran, his heart pounding at the distant sound of a car’s engine sputtering, whining and fizzling out; the words “Wait for me, you sons of bitches!” silently flowed out of his throat and tongue; with his free hand, he choked himself lest a mere cough betray him to his apex predators.

A glowing pellet of energy whizzed right over his head, striking a tree’s branch above him and dropping something long and round into his hair. “Guuh-guh-grenade?!” he wheezed and yelped, grabbing the foreign object and tossing it as far as he could to his side, and hearing it strike a hollow piece of metal: it was a pinecone that struck his mechanical companion.

His frozen and shrunken stance of cornered prey thawed into the usual slouch as his hands fell down to his pockets. The tight, contorted lips holding screams of panic hostage loosened into a sigh, letting out heavy breaths. “Oh Christ,” his vocal chords wheezed. His fingers jumpily scrubbed the pinecone’s pollen off his hair. “Cog! Y-you-”

The stubby’s monotone, now familiar, felt more reassuring than robotic. “You were mistakenly identified as an enemy, Derrick,” it turned around and hopped along its footprints, “After the commotion, Emil and I had presumed you were deceased. I appropriately tilted my aim away from your cranium as soon as I recognized your likeness.”

“You thought I was one of them?! Good Lord, man, do I look like a living Barbie doll?!” he hushed his tone, running hunched over to the stubby’s eye level, “Your rifle’s got the same… shiny metal case as the floating weapons the Ballbusters in Black are using up there!”

“It is my understanding that the resident of this household has been butchering androids[ch14] to hoard their parts for reverse-engineering purposes. Similarly, he had intended to harvest your organs for study.” It hopped inside the garage’s broken doors, turning its head around to look at the man, who lagged behind and rested his palms on his knees. “Our actions have averted for us the fate of all previous visitors to this residence.”

“Hurgh… hurgh…” he sneezed, “let’s get in the damn car. I can drive us out of here. I know just the right place… The keys. Where are the keys?” he patted his pockets down, skin paling as the sound of empty fabric dilated the whites of his eyes, and boosted his murmur to a wail. “We’re never getting out of here aliiive!”

The machine grabbed his wrist, dragging him inside by force. “Derrick. Your carelessness will expose us to lethal force. I will not endanger myself needlessly to support you.”

The two stood inside as the man took to the shelves, rummaging through scrap, wrenches, bolts, butane tanks and locked toolboxes, ripping his throat out as it were. “Where are the fucking keys?!” he shouted once more as his hands scrambled over a shelf, grabbing a bottle of rubbing alcohol and splashing it over the wound in his abdomen.

His mind was turned to mush by panic. The alcohol burn was hardly noticeable as adrenaline coursed through his brain. He turned over to the machine by his side, spilling more rubbing alcohol on its frame from the bottle shaking vigorously in his hand. “Where are the keys?!” his shout was punctuated by a coughing fit.

The spherical creature rolled off the car’s dashboard, bounced up to the garage shelf by the man’s head and rammed the wall. It shouted at him in enthusiasm

“.ui coi doi tamne djordjbush! .ije ri cu pu co’u ze’i ve’u klama nau! .i mi cu te cusku djica nu mi’e fi la Cog. canai fe nu mi’a posystizu’e do!”

[“Cousin George Bush, you’re here! I knew I shouldn’t have listened to Cog when he said we should abandon you!”]

Before the machine had gotten a word in, he’d shouted right back. “Ballkid, stop fucking calling George Bush and help me find the keys!”

Jerked to his right, the man fell back over the car’s wireframe chassis with a shriek. His legs, tightly-wound like a coil, lunged at the creature to yank the keys off from between its teeth. “Gimme that, ballkid!” With both arms, he pulled the rusted door open, seated himself in the rope-bound seat in the cabin’s center and twisted the key as hard as he contorted himself: the engine clicked and croaked, screaming, yet all he’d seen was a dash of sparks in the air.

“Jesus,” he swallowed. Narrowing his eyes, he cracked his knuckles and cranked the ignition again; his voice trembled with each click and thump that fizzled out. “...Cog?” he barely held back the fear in his voice.

“It seems the vehicle is not functional. There is likely an issue with the battery, the carburetor and the fuel tank.”

“Oh, shit, I didn’t know!” he turned to the machine, crossing his eyes and curling his lips as he quipped sarcastically, before straightening his face out. “But suppose the car did work: were you planning to ditch me here? Throw the meatbag to the wolves?”

“Indeed. It was most prudent to assume that following the ceiling’s collapse, and the spotted enemy unit remaining idle on the roof, that you were deceased.”

“So the bitch is on the roof. Where were you, motherfucker?” His fist struck the speedometer as the spherical creature watched the two of them from over the shelf. “Why didn’t you come back and open the window?”

“The most immediate assumption that came to mind was that you merely took the necessary time to open the window after my exit. After this was deemed improbable, I was far enough that the time to return would make for an unsafe delay.”

"Fuck you, talking like an air traffic controller and all that.” He stepped out of the seat, putting his feet down between the ropes that held it in place, and bent over the engine block, its pistons, and air intake, sweeping dust off the parts with the palm of his hand. “Your TSA agent buddies are back inside,” he scowled at the machine, “and they wanted to get acquainted with my blood type!" He sighed. “Butane. We got it? We need fuel.”

The machine stood in front of the headlights, hauling a litter box. “The tanks are on the shelf to your left, Derrick. You have ignored them.”

Frustration clouded the fog in his mind. With every step he took, his posture swung left and right. The space around him seemed to both shrink and grow. To protect the few cubic inches inside his skull, he wrapped his hands around his temples and let out a cry of despair that bewildered his companions. “Why is no damned thing ever in the right place,” he caught his breath, “where I need it when I need it?!”

He sighed. “Cog. Get a tank in,” he sat himself back on the seat, rested his feet on the pedals and stared down the spherical creature, lips parted, skin jaundiced and face pale. “Ballkid. You’re gonna have to get in the trunk,” he gestured over to the vehicle’s rear and rested his chin over the steering wheel.

The clink, the drop and the fitting of another cylinder behind him grated on his ears. His fingers darkened by ash and grime, he briefly dusted them, reached inside the ol’ jockey box with his left hand, swept the sweat off his brow with his right forearm, and peered inside: a flimsy sheet of paper, folded in four and turned yellow, with a couple tears in the middle. Unfolding it in his hands, he found a map of the surrounding area and roads, drawn in shoddy pencil strokes with unintelligible labels. “Even the maps are written in these… these damn letters,” he sighed, “but since Texaco probably isn’t selling maps of this backwater, I can make do with what we’ve got.”

“An individual in my colony once attempted to cartographically reconstruct this area on paper. It would be wise for us to check in on his progress, as my data is incomplete.”

“Really? You got somebody like that-well, of course!” he shouted in excitement, “you know, like, all the machines, man! Cog the Yellow Pages!”

“Is this referring to the yellowing of the material in your hands?”

“No, no-nevermind,” he rubbed his eyes and nose, “get to putting the damn tank in.”

“The individual in question has been of hitherto questionable reliability. Until recently, however, I had placed greatly more trust in Emil than was due. Adjustments are therefore necessary such that more data sources are preferable.”

He narrowed his eyes and whispered. “Of course you did, rust-bucket. Listen to somebody who doesn’t send their friends to Rape Central for a change.”

“So we’re… here,” he slid his pointer finger, smearing a spot of grease over the sheet and moving it up a narrow line… “this was the clinic… and, this must be that city I saw over there… which we can reach by this bridge.” He looked at the legend, and spotted an arrow in the corner.

So that’s north.

A trapezoid dominated the better part of the paper map, outlined in hard pencil strokes with a few attached letters labeled over it. He called out to the machine. “Cog, which way were we meant to go again?”

“Our path would require us to return to my home colony. With my accompaniment, greater security may be attained. The troops may be able to confront the enemy units.” The machine explained its plan, barely audible as the creature on the shelf started shouting halfway through its speech. The machine swiftly turned to it, spoke a few words, and turned back to the man.

“Doi la .emirus. .ionai .i gacu’i ko nonsku.”

[“Emil, my friend, quiet down.”]

“S-sumimasen!”

[“Sorry!”]

Returning to face the man, the machine subdued its sudden inflection and spoke in monotone. “My colony is to the west. Our final destination, however, is approximately fifteen degrees north of East.”

“The… the spot with the super network[ch4], you mean? It goes through a huge-ass city, the one with all those skyscrapers we see behind the trees?[ch15]”

“It would seem so.”

“So that puts…” he muttered, “our destination… through this road and this bridge… right over this road labeled ‘20’ and through the city,” he tapped his finger lightly over the sheet, “assuming there’s no Machine-zilla in there to eat our car in one bite.”

The smiling sphere bounced off the garage shelf into the engine block, bit down on something and began to unscrew, bristling the man up. “Hey!” he reached out, trying to grab it and toss it off. “Whatever the goth kids outside do to my balls, I’ll do to you!” he threw his hands at it, coating them in dust and soot and missing every blow.

Four objects flew off the grip of the creature’s teeth in a blur off the engine block, flying off the metal: spark plugs. A split second later, it rolled off the frame up the shelf, grabbed four cleaner spark plugs, and screwed them back in as quickly as it took the old ones out. “What the…? You’re an auto mechanic?” he chuckled, and turned back to the machine still attaching a gas tank, while the latter stared blankly at him. “Check it out! Ballkid’s a gift that keeps on giving!” His snicker turned into an all-out guffaw. “He should’ve built us an android-proof house!”

Once he cranked the key, the car rocked forward; the seat shoved the man onto the dashboard, slamming his nose on the steering wheel. A loud hiss scraped his eardrums from underneath the headlights: litter box pebbles were scattered over the tires; the brown cat screeched and jumped off onto the wall.

The man shook in his shoes, and briefly felt a chill run up his spine as he’d pictured what would’ve remained of the pet had the tires struck it first. “G-gurgh! Get that thing,” he coughed, “get that thing on the damn car with us now! This car is our sanctuary!” His throat nearly ruptured from shouting one last order at the machine, before it grabbed the feline and enclosed it in the trunk with the creature.

“I have ascertained the absence of electromagnetic interference behind this barricaded exit,” the machine announced as it lifted the planks. “The presence of enemy units within attack range is unlikely.”

Shortly afterwards, his eyes were baking: the meager sunbeams that slipped through the gaps in the walls and the cracks in the door now flooded in the open barn from every direction. He narrowed his eyes and adjusted the collar of his ragged shirt. The coat of sweat over his skin, mixing with the alcohol over the wound in his abdomen felt like a fire eating away at his flesh from the outside in.

With his foot firmly on the clutch pedal, and the key cranking in his blackened hands, the engine wheezed and sputtered its way into a roar of triumph as the man shifted gears and rolled forward off into the blinding sunlight above the cracked asphalt, holding a corner of the paper map under his thumb over the steering wheel and clutching his wound in the other, spotting a few reddish patches of skin on his arm through the tears in his sleeve.

The sounds of the stubby’s motions were well-known by now. It leapt up to the roof, it latched on to the roof’s bars by his side, that much he could tell without a look: he’d learned it by ear.

The next solo of this jazz session was his: to press the gas pedal and make his first turn. “We’re goin’ to the colony. You’ll have to give me directions,” he sighed, “and you’ll have to spot anything that crawls, runs or flies our way-ow, shit!”

The stubby interrupted his train of thought. “Make two right turns,” it commanded.

Slam. The beat dropped and the rhythm broke: something conked his head. The car ground to a halt. He checked his temple for blood with the unblackened back of his hand, shouting at the machine on the car’s roof. “Shut the fuck up! Why did you hit my skull with-with that huge iron Lego on your rifle?!” he looked in a dizzied trance at the dangling object by his side.

“Turn right.”

He sighed, cranked the key once more and set himself to follow the machine’s instructions.

First gear, second gear, third gear… and bam. A shock from the rear of the car, and another from ahead. The ground shook. The pines by the side of the road fell, one by one. A blinding flash of light, followed by clouds of smoke and dust eclipsing the road. The shockwaves, loud as they were, cracked rocks to gravel, trees to splinters and shattered the tarmac. The man’s blood ran cold in the rocking seat. His throat squealed in unison with the tires as he wrestled the steering wheel to maintain his direction.

Chapter Text

> Entered logic circuit. Found one data stream open.

Huh? The I/O stream on the system update port was still open and never closed. Using a legacy protocol. If I try to spoof our update server's signal… this is the first time I've done anything like this!

The memory stack was… stilted. Like a function open somewhere was never closed and just went on endlessly from higher to lower addresses.

Unlike that time I hacked into the machine near the camp, time feels neither fast nor slow. I can extend and retract my virtual fingers as quickly as in the real world.

I hear an open file stream. Large amounts of data flowing freely through a few memory channels, but I can't put my finger on what isn't right. The blocks aren't all the same color: usually, this meant that there were files mixed in from different inputs, but this river flowed straight from the Abyss of the Heap: entirely within the system. Is there some kind of partitioning going on? The river's memory banks repel me, with some kind of lock that appears in front of me. It floats, it shines with a purple light as if it's taunting me. I don't know how to open it. Did I miss this during training?! Was I distracted again by looking at pictures?

I cup my mouth and call out. "Is anyone here?"

A humanoid smudge surges out the river in a cloud of dust.

I can't see much detail in its black silhouette, but it's carrying some kind of striped orange key in its arm. It looks briefly at me, and then runs through a dark door. I run after it. I call out and raise my hand. "Come back!"

My words fall on deaf ears. So I give chase with all I've got. I pour all the signal strength I've got into this session, so much I probably couldn't tell if my real body is being maimed by creeps.

I cross the door.

It's so dark I can barely see myself anymore. All I notice is a grid of flickering, disjointed tiles.

In cyberspace, everything speaks if you listen: us androids have our senses mapped to different aspects of the signal when we're in cyberspace, as it makes the best use of our artificial brains. So, I can make out the details of a messy and cut-up memory space with tiles shaking and flickering in and out of existence.

The sharpness of our eyesight, for example, maps to the signal strength and bandwidth, so we can know what's being transmitted. The less we're allowed to see or the less data we can access, the darker the environment looks. And when something is not only unreadable, but harmful, it's often black. Hearing maps to some of the messages that we exchange with other units, and usually this means transmitting raw vocal synthesizer data. I find it so much richer than if we'd only used text. It makes hacking feel like a human experience!

Data corruption can be felt as a bad taste in your mouth, or an odor like something burning. It signals that you have to either get away from it, or clean it up and take care of it before it spreads throughout one of the memory sectors.

And here: it was dark, and my mouth tasted bitter. Eventually, walking down a hall, I stopped. The floor in front of me was flickering in and out of existence! I could fall into the void… but if I decide to take over read/write permissions and… I reroute the file system through my logic circuit so that I can parse this android's full memory space for him, I may stand a chance.

Going over what I said earlier about senses mapping to cyberspace: if I pool in with my logic circuit's processing power, I'll radiate light in this grid and I can manifest tiles under my feet whenever this guy's faulty. It seems like he's… not all there, actually. Like there are cracks running through his mind.

I, uh, I'm not sure I can do it. And yet, I'm not sure I can turn away either.

I'd have full access to their data, but him, he'd access mine! Is this a price worth paying… to let him in? Just thinking about it, I can feel my nanites burning trying to fix what'd be left of me if I swallowed a logic virus or a-an infection could make my hardware give up the ghost in  the shell.

…So be it. 

My offensive programs are at hand, to cut down any malicious instruction down to bytes.

The dark smudge from earlier is at the furthest corner from me. I run up to it without skipping a beat. It slouches. It turns left and right, looking for an escape and clutching its key. The dark tiles beneath my feet crumble, and I immediately manifest brighter ones. I don't fall. My memories rise from the tiles I lay, to be seen, heard and entered. I am not afraid. I have nothing to hide. The bitterness in my mouth grows more intense.

"Unlock the data stream for me!"

The figure stands up straight, turns around and leaps off the grid over into the void.

…

Is this it? Is it gone? I peer over: it's freefalling into a glowing sphere in the abyss. And if that sphere glows, then that means it must be part of my being. A memory - mine.

-HARDWARE CHECK-

00 22 03 00 3a 65 02 00 d7 19 05 00 00 00 00 .-..…

5a 01 00 00 a2 00 10 d0 0c 00 07 e0 00 08 00 #...-.[]…

STATUS: COMPLETE.

> Warning: selected file is read-only. Enable write permissions?

-********

     …insecurity…

> Permission denied. Try again?

-insecurity

> Write permissions granted to user "b#@!n".

> Warning: two user space processes are open on the current file. If multithreading is not carefully implemented, race conditions may occur.

I followed it into the sphere. I'm enveloped by a white light, slowly turning into the contours and shades of a familiar place as the file loads. I'm… there. Watching many shades of gray and very few hues sliding through my sight.

Literally. I see my past self. I.. She's walking a lot more awkwardly than I remember-wait, hm, she's wearing a black bodysuit. I was wondering how she didn't have my outfit's back keyhole…

What is this place? It's the Bunker's sterile white steel corridors-wait, I shouldn't let that… software entity see the Bunker's layout from my memories! That's Privilege Level 2, only for YoRHa members! I'm following it all the way!

Oh… no, no, no, I think I know what this memory is. It was that time I was asked to try on the heavy armor suit for the first time in the flight unit hangar.

42O told me I'll absolutely need it if I'm in a large-scale operation, yet nobody's allowed to use them without orders… and we never got the order.

So, in my experience, that heavy suit has only ever been a farce. I hated it. I hated how tight it felt around my crotch. I hated how it felt on my hands, on my fingers: I never like to wear anything without long and loose sleeves.

I run up the hallway, and try to catch up to my past self. She's ignoring me, assuming she can see me at all. I have to reach that smudge before it lays a finger on anything in here!

But before I can come closer, and while I'm calling out to her: "Fives! Fives! It's me! You're-", she enters the Bunker's elevator and goes up to the hangar ring, leaving me at the outer part of the station. I turn around while waiting for the elevator to drop her off, and look at the window: the Earth and the Moon are… a bit blurry. I'm guessing I didn't pay attention to them back then, and I didn't travel either.

Should I call the elevator down? Can I even use it in this memory? Is there some other way up?

Wait! I can see the marking for 4S' room! I know he was the next person to come up to the hangar on the elevator, so he should be out right about now.

…somebody just left it. Black straight hair, gold buttons, shorts… it's him, definitely. I wave my hand at him right away, but he's… low resolution, like a vague recollection of what he should look like. Oh.

This part of the memory must be my imagination. I wasn't there to see him leave, but I heard his room's doors slide open at the time, so my memory file just reconstructed him in low detail.

Almost instantly, he dissolves into a pixelated grid that slides into the elevator. Not on the floor, but slides through mid-air with his feet floating an inch or two.

The Bunker's floors are actually rings, and the artificial gravity is really centrifugal force.

So knowing which way the floor curves helped me run off from many uncomfortable situations.

Like when 801S sometimes crept up on me and blocked my sight to play "who's there", when I still did odd jobs for him to get my weapon[ch17], because I'd just turn and charge away too fast for him to keep up… it's what he gets for never practicing his physicals when he spends all his time trading supplies up here.

The pixelated record of 4S floated in a beeline to the elevator. Even his feet were going up in midair over the concave floor straight to his destination. Sheesh, was my memory bandwidth that low that day?

I follow him up to the hangar, keeping a distance from him. I walk in there, strafing around him as his details start to reappear one by one, and I remember why I shelved this memory.…

All the S-Types were there. We were all wearing the body suits, and listening to Operator 21O drone on about how we should use the flight units responsibly. It was a drag, but being so used to 42O's theatrical antics made 21O very bearable by comparison.

From the tone of her voice, she was tired too. She could tell most of us weren't paying much attention to her words, but she wanted to get it over with. The rest of us were talking about all kinds of topics to pass the time, but nearly all I could think about was when I could take the heavy suit off of my wrists and my legs. One of them, whose model number I couldn't bother to recall, is a bit cheeky and trying to whisper to the boy next to him, but he's so loud I can hear him.

"...hey, 3S… 11B… whaddya think of her, would you go out with her?"

3S is a bit quieter, and is a bit more bearable. "...the one who's always with 16D? Hell no. I saw her the other day using the virtual reality terminal to simulate flight unit crashes, over and over. She kept asking me to reset it all for her. Made it sound like it was a mistake, but from the sim logs, she seemed to be doing it intentionally to see how her body reacts, like she enjoyed it. Weird."

"...The B-types are masochistic or something, I swear. But I get why she sticks around with 16D… ha-haha, Ds got D-cups! 5S is lucky."

4S was the last one to show up, right around the time 21O was done. He wasn't wearing the heavy suit either, now that his image is sharper in this memory.

I think the last thing 21O said was something about how to properly affirm or deny something to your operator, something about "clear communication".

My past self was grimacing, but I was looking away to hide it; I was watching 21O drag 9S off by the ear up to another woman–2B. I… have to admit, it hurt me on the inside to see that.

4S looks at the two others, and admonishes the louder one guffawing. "You two are talking about this topic instead of paying attention? It's a bit rude to talk about someone the way you just did about 5S, you know. It reflects insecurity."

"Beats being the guy who buries his face in books instead of attending training!"

"I never got a complaint from my Operator, and my flight unit never needed an inspection. If you bothered to read the manuals, you wouldn't need to be here."

"That's the first time I've seen you talk to something that wasn't a book. Maybe if you weren't such a weirdo, we'd listen to your bullshit more often."

Ah.

That was when my past self couldn't bear it. My past self turned around, took her suit's gloves off and slapped him bare-handed. I didn't even say anything. It just came naturally to me. It didn't hurt him, but it was enough to make him stagger even with the armor on.

We later talked it down and kept it under wraps… and with 3S' help, we 'misreported' the bent pins in my hand to the Development and Maintenance Division 'misreported' as an accident so that they'd touch up my joints.

…I see it! The entity I was chasing appeared again! It got in the way of my past self striking that idiot down and fell to the floor! I have to catch it! I phase through 2B, 9S, 21O, 4S and myself and hunt it down, but it runs away from me again through a wall… No! I can't let it go out of bounds!

Come back!

Ah… it's a shame.

> File read complete.

I'm back in another data bus in cyberspace… I need to find this thing and get its key to unlock the data stream! I haven't gotten one bit closer to uncovering why the Resistance camp's second-in-command was killed, or what this android I found crawling, the little machine and the… the transforming man who went from fat and bald to skinny and hairy have to do with the renegade unit!

And I'm not giving up until I'm either dead or I get my data. I run down the narrow tunnel as fast I can. It never gets any darker or brighter, or even turns. If I couldn't see the tiling on the floor as I went down the memory address lane, I'd think I was running in place.

The tunnel suddenly lights up. It's so bright I can't even see myself. I must be taking in a lot of data right now…

I hear my voice, with a slight crackle in the recording. There's a bit of static, but the bitrate is high. The static has some kind of pattern

"Hey, 3S…"

"Yes, Fivette?"

"I, uh, I uploaded a-" ZAP "-couple files to the Bunker's central server from Earth, and 42O approved them… but they were mislabeled, and-"

"And she didn't check their formats."

"No, no, they were just… mis-" ZAP "-labeled photographs."

"And you sent them without a format tag, correct?"

"No.. I badly tagged them as hacking data."

"The sort of format an Operator would look at but couldn't under-" ZAP "-...eh?"

"It was a mistake."

"You've made this mistake over and over, and it just so happens that it makes your Operator overlook photographs every single time, hm."

"Ha…ha… I guess I'm silly…"

"Well, I'll 'correct' the file format tags for you. To tell you the truth, I've seen some of your photos. That's an identity document of some kind, written in Old World language, that you photographed there. Are you sure you don't want an Operator to review it?"

"No… I… don't want to hear 42O yelling at me if she looks too much into this again."

"Suit yourself. I'll upload it to the serve-"

It suddenly cuts off. I hear a sound that rings a bell, but it's a bit strange for it to be here. It's one of those voices that I can tell aren't from an android, but just preinstalled on software terminals. They're a lot more hollow than a real voice, just so that nobody confuses them with androids. Static recorded sentences, long pauses between every word and every number.

"System update error: I/O failure-" ZAP "-Failed to download package 1243. Failed to download package 1244. Failed to download-" ZAP "- 2501. Total number of failed operations: 2502. Please contact the Labo system administrator."

 The tiles from here on out aren't perfectly lined up, and there are gaps between some of them. It looks like I'm in his file system now, not mine. The tides have turned! Let me bring forth the light!

Right after I see the smudge on the horizon, the light becomes blinding. I shut my eyes. Even though it's virtual space, I can feel it flooding into my being. I can feel some kind of wind blowing over me as I run towards the last place I saw it. I can't let it go this time!

And eventually, I can feel the lights go dark on my eyelids. I finally open my eyes.

…Oh. It's a memory? But it's not mine. Is it his?

I'm in a station of some kind, but it's not the Bunker. The finish on the walls has a grainy look to it, and it's a dirty gray instead of the Bunker's clear smooth blacks and whites. The floor isn't concave either.

The androids surrounding me tower over me. They phase in and out of me as they walk through a busy hallway, all wearing magnetic undershoes to stay in place. I can't make heads or tails of their blurry faces, but they all have goggles up on their heads, hard hats and thick white coats. Their skin tones are too dark and saturated to be of YoRHa make, that's for sure.

I walk through them. I can almost imagine being there, tugging on somebody's coat and asking them for directions.

But I can't do that! I run, I run and I run up to a room in a corner of the hall, roughly to the last place where I saw the smudge on the horizon before this space materialized around us. I see a man, bent over. He's wearing a hard hat and goggles… but this pair's a bit familiar. The dents on the side are the same I just saw on the android before hacking into him! It's him!

He's hunched over a table, soldering something. I take a closer look: it's the only part of this workshop in the memory that isn't a low-resolution blur. He's welding two sheets of metal together, and he puts them down beside another one. A much shorter man comes in, wearing a dark military uniform and cap. Is he human? I think he has a high rank, which means he should be.

"Brown? You haven't punched in."

The taller one, the one in the lab coat snickers and mutters something. "If I asked for pay for these extra hours, they wouldn't let me in, and I wouldn't get to work my magic. Literally," he looks into the officer's eyes, "I've been workin' on using maso to enhance the alloys for the next generation project's frames. It's everywhere in the air, why aren't we making better use of it?"

The officer comes up to him, and takes the soldering kit out of his hands. "Brown. You know this won't do. You can't come in willy-nilly, and-"

"I noticed the software division is sleeping on the job, Yamasuke. The machines aren't getting any dumber. How does the Army of Humanity expect to win this war if we can't put our best AI forward?"

So… is he talking to a human, or an android?

The officer steeled himself, and took a much sterner stance, enough to make the engineer back up.

Instinctively, I run up between them, even though I can't interact with them. I shout at the officer. "Hey! Who are the 'next generation units'? Are they YoRHa?!"

Of course, they can't react to me.

"Drop this charade at once. If you have any concerns, bring them up in the next budget meeting. The assembly lines are all at full capacity. SS support units, new flight models, biological research… the next generation combat units are just a small part of all our business. Training them is hard enough, and you want not only to change their chassis but rewrite their firmware from scratch? You're no Zinnia."

"Shimokita-style boar and air conditioning are great, but the benefits aren't what's keeping us cooped up in here. Full capacity or not, the YoRHa-type androids should stand for what's best in all of us. It's not about me."

…Isn't that… what the Council of Humanity tells us? What the Commander told me? That we represent mankind's latest and… best effort?

"No, they don't. You signed off on the blueprints for the second prototype of the black box designs, did you not? Do you remember what these units are made of?"

What? What?! What am I made of? What are all my friends made of?!

He lowers his head. "I'm sorry, sir."

What is this about?!

"I will take note of your developments. Leave these quarters for now."

"Yes, sir." The engineer walks away as I follow.

He turns around, as if he just saw me?! He seems to be… looking me in the eyes behind my visor! I wave at him. He's even about to say something. Is this him? Is he going to talk to me?

"Lieutenant. Will Secretary White be present at the next budget conference?"

"If she gets around to cleaning her damn laundry and you can shut it about you-know-what, you might catch her by fall 11939. At least, she'll definitely be there to review proposals for the Bunker's plans."

Oh.

He turned away and walked off.

He wasn't looking at me, just looking down to defer to the officer. I keep thinking that the record will interact with me. How silly…

But if this is before 'fall 11939', this must be years into the past.

The room's resolution is dropping as the engineer moves out. I need to follow him. I don't want to wait until the floor blurs and fades away under my feet, but I can't just leave this place without finding the smudge! I run around, under the desk, above it, I look over the walls: nothing. Nothing. I give up and follow him.

But instead of entering the 'Research Wing' hall, where I was earlier, I'm back in a white void again.

The light around me dims, and reveals another room. I can't see much of the detail, but I know this isn't the rundown building where I am in real space.

My limbs feel so… stiff with latency. I'm in a sort of glass dome. It's geodesic. The triangles it's made of are all lined with cool fluorescent lights. My body loosens up, for a moment: I can finally look around me, and see a few details: the engineer from before, and a female android, about a head taller than I am with black hair. She's in a white robe made of synthetic fiber. "Your baseline is at 288 K."

She stands still. She doesn't even make eye contact.  "I see. What sort of contact will you demand?"

"Just do your thing. Same as last time, but keep moving."

Is he off-duty here? He's sporting a brown dress shirt[ch15] and a white breast pocket. He's watching her lug a heavy sword at the dome's frame, lunging and slashing at it until white fumes come out her mouth and nostrils–it looks like she's heating up… is she okay? The robe turns red in the shoulder area. I stand behind her, looking at some inscription on her back.

Calling it an inscription isn't exact, but it's an area very sharply delineated where the heat doesn't redden her shirt as it spreads over the fabric. It's in the shape of… the number '2'.

The heat fills the air as it radiates off of her, and it's encoded in this memory too. I can feel it surrounding me. She's hunched over, exhaling as much vapor as she can.

Is she trapped here?

The voice of the android behind me speaks out. "That's good enough. You did very well today." He walks up to her, and holds her wrist. What is he doing to this girl? If I came all the way here, I have to know. I tense up just thinking about it… he's lifting the robe off of her: it turns out she has no skin. Wires, metal, circuits… it's all exposed.

It's a bit sickening to look at this, but it just goes to remind me that this is how we were all built once. Or twice. Or seventeen times, in my case… I, uh, am a little bit embarrassed to admit that, but I forgot to back my consciousness data up once, and it's why 42O never lets go of asking me if I performed a check.

He leans in, gets on his knees and unscrews a panel on her back. "If I trigger your pain receptors, just tell me. Your cooling isn't right. You're only using air exchange to expel heat… that's worrying."

"What does it mean? Will I be able to traverse the atmosphere with my current specifications?"

"No, no, you can't go to Earth in this condition. I keep telling the researchers: materials, materials, materials. I had this alloy, all workable, but I only have a small bit of it. It could go here… as a heat sink… if I skirt regulations."

"Is that advisable, sir?"

"Without a doubt. And between you and me…"

He's leaning in. I stick my ear between the two. He better not be a creep…

"Even though you and the other kid don't have names, you're like family to me."

The girl remains silent. I just realized I'm feeling some serious secondhand embarrassment… it's like I'm intruding on a family now. Ouch…

"But Zinnia is our designer."

"I'm Uncle then! Or 'teach', short for 'teacher'. I can teach you all kinds of things about how to take good care of yourself."

He pulls back, and presses a button on a remote. The dome is coming down. It's just… dismounting itself automatically. The beams are all folding into one another, transforming into a wall.

I guess nobody was trapped here… huh.

"For example, your head's an important part of your body. Your sensors are all there. But your logic circuit and processor core, it's actually way further inside of you. So if you have cooling issues, it can mess up the way you process things because it's not far from the most active muscles in your system. We've been working on that."

She turns around. She has no visor, only gray eyes. "Why is that?"

He gestures for her to lie down on her stomach on a sort of bed. Hundreds of little wires and sockets protrude from it, connected to a console with a large keyboard. He grabs an office chair from a pixelated corner, and rolls its wheels up to the monitor. "Lie down for a moment. I'll look into your hardware." He was wearing goggles, and they were backlit, so I can't tell what look he has on his eyes. He seems to be watching her chassis bind to the console's sensors with a staccato of click-click-click.

But his jaw was clenched, and he took some time to answer so I infer that the topic strains him.

It doesn't faze her, as she repeats herself. "Why am I built this way? Is it classified?"

"Sometimes, we experiment with your designs a bit. You are a bit special. You're different from the rest of us, down to your basic parts."

…Am I different too?

"Doesn't that make things more chaotic?"

"We want you to be less vulnerable. If something targets you, having a few more seconds for you to realize it took your head off will help you to send critical data to the orbital base so we can train you for it next time."

"I see. In other words… it's that we are designed to end, one way or another."

It's eerie. It's like this is the moment she and I had the same idea.

But what kind of place is this?! Are humans on this base? Is this place top-secret? This Zinnia, is he a human researcher? If so, this is as close as I'll ever get to meeting humanity.

…What I uncover here… might have to stay here. I might not even be able to tell the Commander about this.

A compartment on the wall slides open, with the engineer pulling a piece of the same alloy I'd seen on his desk out of a seemingly black void. He takes a transparent tube out of the bed underneath the girl, and plugs it into some kind of container. It's pumping a clear liquid in, and the tube slowly becomes engulfed in vapor. "You'll be in sleep mode for now. I don't usually bathe brains in liquid nitrogen, but it's extremely safe."

She asks one more question. "I suppose it can't be helped. Do we upload anything in our dreams?"

"Well, no. Why do you ask?"

"I dreamed that I cared about someone, but I hurt them. I don't understand more than that, but I felt some sort of… emotion. I wonder if anybody else… saw it."

"It's nothing, it's nothing. Dreams are harmless, my child!"

He pulls out a necklace. There's something very intricately engraved on it, and it stands out to me. It's in one of the Old World's alphabets.

"Why, I saw myself handing this to a woman I liked very much in a dream once. And now that I've made it, that dream will soon be a reality!"

He digs inside the girl as the temperature within her drops, and seems to be drilling something without a care in the universe about the thickening fog in the chamber. Her speech is slurring: she must be falling asleep quickly.

"I… see. Will… this… procedure… help me… in the atmospheric exit exam?"

"As long as you're not planning on going to Venus! Your male friend would get lonely if he went to Mars, so don't let him do anything rash! Ah-hahahaha!"

He guffaws.

The fog is so thick I can't see much. Even if I try, all I can do is listen to more drilling noises.

But I notice something. It looks like the key I've been after this entire time. I reach out and grab it.

…It's finally time to get the full picture.

But as soon as I do, I find it the humanoid smudge, completely opaque and visible, right in front of me. Its head moves… no, its 'jaw' does. It's trying to tell me something. But I won't be fazed by that. I clutch it, and it's time for me to exit this file.

H-huh. Something tastes really bitter here… oh… oh no.

The end of the file points to a faulty data sector. This space is fragmented. That explains the tiles having gaps between them in the hall earlier…

And for a blissful moment, I don't-no, there's no separation between us.

& For we are one, father and daughter. &

& It is what humans call 'family', or close. We see through each other's eyes. And though we may not fully understand each other, there is a part of me in Father, and a part of me in my child. &

& Our shared consciousness moves our bodies together, but only for the briefest instant.&

& We long for the touch of family. &

&My hand reaches ever-so-slightly towards Father, before I am cleft asunder once more. &

& Farewell. &

I don't even realize where I am, before I feel like screaming from all the sensory overload I'm about to experience.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

What is this place?!

It's… it's so… bright! I'm drowning! I'm drowning in data! Is this a denial-of-service attack?! There was a wave of heat… no, more like a tsunami that washed over me. I felt like I was melting. But a moment later, it was all gone. I heard some talking again. How familiar… it's the…  access point sounds.

I see the android, standing inside one. The recording must be playing from there. There's a data socket plugged into the side of his neck, right where one usually installs plug-in chips.

He's installing something. A system update, perhaps?

"Failed to download package 1244. Failed to download package 1245. Failed to download package 1246…"

The recordings went on. The numbers ticked upwards and upwards, seemingly endless.

All I could think of, was that for a brief moment, I felt something in common with him.

He helped fix that girl's hardware. He worked for the humans who created YoRHa.

Humans are something… sacred. Something very dear to all androids, well, the ones who hadn't isolated themselves from the rest of the world anyway. But I felt some sort of kinship with him, when I took the key from the software entity. I couldn't grasp why he might have done the things he did, to associate him with the renegade, or to end up in a building like this powered by severed black boxes. But I wanted to help him.

The torrid air around me feels like it'll weld my joints shut… but waiting until this ends is all I can do.

I can't exit. Something about this corrupted file is keeping me in. If I force an exit, I'll disconnect, and I'm not sure what kind of data loss would come of it if I took the time to hack into him again.

I watch him contort his face and scream in pain as it plays. And I just think about it over, and over, until I finally hear it.

"Total number of failed operations: 2502. Please contact the Labo system administrator."

He steps out, dazed. When I finally see him, half his skin has melted off over his chassis,  and the other half is burnt to a crisp. There's something out of place in his internals… he's wearing a-a machine's leg! He assimilated parts from machines into himself?!

How did-Why would an android do that? Wouldn't you just repair yourself or order new parts? If this station is called "Labo", surely it's a place where parts can be found?

He screams, and he shouts a cry for help… but it's in an Old World language.  He's walking alone through the same hallway of this station I first saw, but it's all on fire. It's all burning. All I hear is a mess of crackling, alarms, the screams of terrified androids on this station, and some laughter with unintelligible words coming from behind a door marked "Hangar".

All of a sudden, he starts floating in midair and grasping at debris and furniture crashing upwards through the floor, pushing himself through to the door. He runs through the hangar, and seals himself without a word inside a round hatch.

The file unceremoniously exits now that the playback is over. I see. It was marked as a 'core file', a tag reserved for critical files. You can't exit them once you start reading until they're done.

That was the last of him I saw in this condition. All he could do was call for help. It sounded a bit like that unbearable shout I heard before Tenna and I stormed the building in real space. Same language, maybe? It means that other unit had something to do with all this.

And I am not letting it go.

I find myself back where I started. There is the river. The Abyss of the Heap is where it flows from, and its blocks are in unmatching colors.

The memory banks welcome my touch this time. I am still glowing in this virtual space.

I reach out for the file with the oldest timestamp I can find.

This building. I saw him enter it.

The one where he and I are lying down right now as I hack into him.

It was a library in the middle of a forest… with a pair of redheads sitting at a round table

They had black streaks, and barcodes engraved on their arms in black ink.

Where the outhouse is today, his escape hatch was half-buried in the soil back then.

A pair of androids are taking him in from the back. One with straight hair welcomes him at first, but the frizzy-haired one seemed to be mouthing off at him until she drank something. They both wore.. red bell-bottom jeans, for some reason and a pair of matching flower shirts, like a few photographs I saw of humans from the late 20th century AD? Or was it the 30th century…

He speaks in that language again to them. They understand it, I suppose.

The only time they went back to Regional Standard, and I could grasp anything, was when I stuck my ear between them in the attic. It was a bit pixelated, but the straight-haired one sat down while the frizzy-haired one rolled on the floor. The latter seemed to be angry. "Why are we going to help this freakshow?"

"Because we take it upon ourselves to do that, Sis. He crashed down here in a space can, and we just dug it out."

"His skin is half-melted, half-burnt, and he's gone upside-spaghetti-down, Poppy. We should be transcribing the texts on the Replicants again before the paper we have decays. Why would you waste your time with some nutso who calls himself a human?"

"He's damaged. If he leaves and something happened to him that we could've dealt with, it would be our fault."

"Like it matters! He's half dead! We've cared for humans, we've cared for Replicants, and now this? We're family, you and me!"

Family? That confirms it. They must be twin models of some kind, given that they look so similar apart from their hairdos.

"That'll always be the case, sis. But we won't keep him here if we don't have to. We can escort him to the next camp in the city nearby."

"The Resistance? To let them brand our arms, sure. One more autograph of 'never come here' in barcode format! Gee, maybe that kid who cloned himself[ch20] can scan them and give us a liquor discount next time he comes to sell us his crap?!"

"They're just coordinates of the camps we're exiled from. It could be worse! I mean…"

What? Exiled?! Were they thieves? I can't believe this…

She sighs.

"And it's only one arm each. We should check his fuel filter."

The entire time, he's moaning in pain and shouting in this Old World language.

Then it happens.

Something clicks downstairs. I look down.

He… rushes upstairs with something in his pocket. It must be a weapon-oh, it's just the… choker? Everything looks a lot clearer as he steps in the attic.

He runs upstairs into a corner and clutches it, like he needs it to survive. The straight-haired one walks up to him and gently yanks it, and immediately, the unthinkable happens.

I realize that this man isn't what he once was.

It's why the data is corrupted, and my tongue still tastes bitter to this moment.

It's why his memories are marked as coming from different sources on the heap, even when they're all stored in the heap. It's why some of them are inaccessible without the 'key' that entity held.

He's… something between an android, and a killing machine now.

He tears the woman's hand off as she screams, chewing the skin off of her.

I see the crimson silhouette of another long-haired person in the opposite corner, behind a pile of leather bound books. The smell of leather and ink emanated strongly from there.

Not much of it was visible, though. It was pixelated, and quickly faded away. I could faintly make out a sort of grin where its face would be.

The frizzy-haired one throws the choker out the window into the pit with the space hatch, and she lunges at him. She tears his goggles off. His eyes are the last part of his face that wasn't damaged by the fire… but she's about to change that. She grabs a staff, and casts a clod of energy particles right into his right eye, searing it before they disperse into the air.

And bit by bit, he tore them limb from limb as they struck more and more at him, only to be taken apart, skinned and have their limbs tossed into the basement.

I hear cries of pain. Screams.

What I saw was unforgivable.

But I want to redeem him.

Now that I know almost all the answers, it's time to do something I should've done a while ago.

I'll disconnect, and check my own file system for corruption after this.

With a glowing ring passing over my virtual self, I'm out of the system.

>Total session time: 56.07 seconds.

I run a quick file check on my own data: no errors. Sweet! Aside from that little patch-up I did from that time I tried to hack into myself to install gardening skills into my combat data partition, so I would have the fine motor skills for trimming. It… didn't work, but it's no harm done now.

But there's an odd file I didn't notice before. I should prepare some defensive algorithms and read it.

"Jesus Christ!" He briefly peeked to the side: the house was swallowed by a growing fireball, with nothing but a small and narrow silhouette somersaulting out of the scene high in midair, glistening in the sun and revealing a contrast of black and white. He could not recall what it could be, or where he'd last seen it, yet it was too damn familiar.

His hand reached for the high gear; his feet pressed down the gas pedal and the clutch as if switching time signatures to change the pitch and scale of the piece, punctuated by the machine's monotone. "Do not brake, Derrick. Do not brake."

"I fucking won't!"

In the rear view mirror, the trunk burst open the creature leapt out, bounced up and rolled under the roof, bit down on the steering wheel's axle and steered it in its own direction. The vehicle leaned left and right, nearly tipping over as it sped over the loam. The windshield struck branch after branch of the trees above it, and the tires skidded and sledded to kick up dust clouds all around the man as he'd felt his eyesight flounder and grabbed the seat's ropes to hold him still. Am I… Am I dying?

…No, I'm not! his eyes cracked open as he'd pressed down on the brakes. "Stop steering us away," he muttered at the creature whose teeth were pressing down on the steering wheel's axle, without making eye contact.

"Stop steering us into shit!" he shouted, his vocal chords dryly shredding the words, letting go of the ropes and punching the spherical creature with his fists. In frustration, he jerked his knees, unwittingly pressing the brake pedal and finding himself headed down a ditch before the car ground to a halt.

Am I the only son of a bitch trying to keep sane in this clunker?!

In the rear view mirror, his face was contorted and pale. His eyebrows were furrowed, his teeth bared, as he mustered up a soup of bitter words in his mind to match the bile in his reflux.

The key smoothly fell into his pocket, making a light clink with the necklace inside. With only the three of them and the pet as far as his besieged mind could count within hearing distance, he tapped his foot restlessly over the clutch pedal with the handbrake up.

Well, let's hear it, poindextron. Tell ballkid how badly he fucked up.

He scratched his head at the ensuing silence, resting his elbow on the dashboard and eyeing the machine askance: the backlights of its eyes had gone yellow.

What, you're going to take it out on me now? Am I always your little bitch?

I'm done. I'm going to speak up. If Campbell's Soup cans, wild deer and Hot Topic mannequins don't pound me into marionberry jam, this asshole will drive me cra-

Immediately afterwards, he'd gotten an answer: a gentle pitter-patter over the ditch called the group's voices on a labor strike, his vocal cords met the picket line and every pamphlet about 'talking your problems out' HR ever had us read transubstantiated into toilet paper.

Lowering his head and leaning over to the side mirror, his voice quivered and his eyes twitched, yet the forest remained completely still save for the few bits of foliage in the wind.

The trees, the bushes, the loam and the rock all blurred together. Within his head, a deafening silence rang. Without, the chirping of the cicadas filled the air. The stubby held its rifle.

Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

The vitality of his muscles fizzled out of his pores, like foam from a sponge.

Click. Clack. The crunching of grass and leaves was weaned away by the sounds of running water and wind. A wave of heat washed over him.

Wh-what the fuck was that, BDSM for the soul?!

He bent over in his seat, clutching the deep and narrow wound in his abdomen. "C-Cog!" he shouted. "Aaagh!" he let out a scream of frustration, trying to recall the first word that came to mind. "Tampax! I mean, gauze! Now!"

"I will search the trunk."

His sense of grammar slowly returned, as did his sight and senses. "Don't wait! You find anything, hand it over and tell your friend to get off the steering wheel's axle!"

"There is none. I must inform you, the feline has fled as well."

"Oh, god damn it!"

After what feels like several days, I finally see light from the real world.

But I know it hasn't been a full minute since I hacked into him.

What happened here?

The ceiling… it's half-caved in. There's smoke everywhere. I get up, and I find an exposed pipe leaking water on the ground by the back door. I can't find anybody. I, uh, I might be starting to tremble. I don't know what happened here, or whether something might kill me and I just don't know it yet!

Where is he? Oh, he's underneath that hospital bed.

"Analysis: Unit 5S has been in hacking mode for an abnormally long period of time. Suggestion: Unit 5S should reinstate contact with unit 10D by sending a distress signal."

"There you are!" I grab my POD from the air, and hold it closely. I feel safer just touching it, like I'm stronger now that it's by my side.

I don't want to broadcast a signal yet. Last time I did that, 7B answered it. I don't want her in here again.

Father doesn't seem to be moving. I'll take a glance through the window, and call out for help. I put the television in the windowsill down on the floor, as it blocks my view.

"Hello? Anybody?"

I don't want to be too loud, just in case I end up calling more attention to myself than I should.

I hear the sound of something sliding on water, and immediately, I feel a splash wash over my thighs.

"Right here… ah." 10D surprises me again, and I don't know whether I should be relieved or mad at her. She glid right behind me across the spilling puddle and around the kitchen counter, smooth as ever. But my legs shiver now for it.  "I can explain everything, just a moment," she sighs.

It doesn't take a keen ear to know that she's lost control and about to slam the wall when the floorboards whine keenly and the television's glass breaks: it's the sound wood makes when she drives her Fool's Reaper down into the ground to brake. Aw, what a mess… I could've fiddled with the cathode ray tube.

"Mmh…"

She's leaning against the wall, dusting herself. "7B sent us her heads-up. She'll be here soon."

I have to turn away and pretend I'm paying attention to the exposed water pipe on the wall.

But really, I'm grimacing at the thought of seeing 7B here. If I didn't wear the standard issue visor, she'd think I'm possessed by a logic virus. "While you were out, POD overloaded something up in the attic and it blew up."

It takes me a moment to process what she just said.

"You destroyed the attic?"

"One target is down, not yet confirmed. Don't ask me how it worked exactly, mmh… but what I knew for sure is that if somebody laid a finger on you, I would've crumpled them."

The leak's stopped. I guess this place ran out of water, huh… come to think of it, the basement flooded now to a few centimeters high, probably 10√2. There's also something else that bugs me. I walk closer to the wall.

"Fives? Why is the heat turning uh-" She follows me. I turn around. I'm about to yell something obscene, but I hold back.

I shouldn't lash out at her. This has nothing to do with her. "Tenna. Watch the android under the hospital beds, if you may."

There's that look on her face. She knows something's off with me if I sound more formal than usual. In the end, it can't be helped, can it?

But she doesn't skip a beat before she gets to it, picks Father up and pins him down with her Fool's Reaper. I always liked that about Tenna. She was a D-type by excellence, even if she didn't seem that way.

She never took much of a lead, and didn't make many plans.

Nor was she much for stealth. For instance, I couldn't make a louder noise than her walking all over the television's cracked glass and circuits if I tried.

But in a team, she always knows when and where she's needed most… even if we sometimes disagree on what that means. I guess that just goes to show that our differences complement each other.

Whenever I stood behind her, I always felt safe.

I gesture to my POD assistant behind me, only to realize it's missing. "Where are the PODs?"

"I, mmh… I don't know. They're searching the wreckage to confirm that kill I made earlier, I think."

That'll make this a bit harder for now, although it's nothing to worry about. At any rate, my optical backlights should help me pin down if what's in that pipe is what I think it is.

Zoom, zoom…

It's… a YoRHa fuel filter. A recent variety too.

I get that he could kill older androids, but YoRHa…? No, no, maybe he just purchased them or looted them from a dead unit. Father can't possibly fight a YoRHa-type android.

"I think… that he has the renegade unit scrap our soldiers for parts on his behalf," I think out loud. I don't know why I did that, but I feel like Tenna should hear it. It makes me feel saner.

"What… mmh… is this for real?"

>Data transmission request. Accept? (Y/N)

…what…

-Y

There's a new file on my system. It's tagged as an image. I made sure to receive it in my sandbox so it won't corrupt my consciousness data. Let's take a look…

It's a block.

Purple orange. Orple. Purange. I'm not quite able to make sense of what this color is, but I can feel it somehow.

This must be from Father.

I open it.

This image is a three-dimensional view: a stone watchtower[ch17] and its surroundings. Looks like the one Tenna and I went over while searching for our earlier target: the "happy sphere" that's been on my mind for much longer than it should have. And I have yet to find it!

There are many bodies, bodies, bodies, dead machines… but something stands out. I can tell it was taken from outside, because the interior is recorded as a solid black mass of… nothing.

There's a female YoRHa-type unit right outside the watchtower, in an unusually frilly black and white uniform. It's not immediately obvious, but I saw this uniform somewhere in the Bunker's public archives.

Her skirt is torn apart at the seams, and she's partly nude. It already unnerves me. But she's not showing skin, she's showing layers upon layers of "scar tissue". It looks like multiple incompatible healer nanites tried to heal the same wounds over and over, or like multiple botched healing attempts layered. And yet, I can't look away.

Even now as I stand on a stone pillar within the still image, I prepare a few defensive programs in case Father wishes to test my prowess.

The bubble enclosure algorithm is the weaker version of the self-closing algorithm. It's the one us, S-types, are allowed to use, not that the self-closing algorithm would run on our hardware even if we wanted it to.

It seals oncoming attacks in a porous bubble that contains them. This would buy me some more time to cut them down.

No doubt about it: I will redeem Father, even if I have to seal his malicious code in a bubble and strike it with my own hands!

A large broadsword is in her hands. Electrical sparks. Are those glowing bits fireflies? No, they're maso, magical energy. I see.

She's holding it close to her chest, and facing somebody outside the frame. A defensive stance.

And then it hits me: the final piece. A streak of molten black metal, or carbon…

The molten metal is on top of the corpses, and still has a crimson glow to it. That means she just came by moments before this image was taken. There's a faint red afterimage of her, slightly closer to the corner of the frame.

This might be who I think it is: the renegade unit.

And she's not on good terms with Father. It looks like he engaged her, and this was a very long time ago. I'm sure the renegade has grown much more powerful now.

There's no timestamp. Well, there is one, but it tastes bitter and the listed time of day is a negative number. Ah, I'll have to leave this image here in the sandboxed partition for later reference.

>Exited image view.

I turn around. She's holding her Fool's Reaper in the same position, still as a statue.

"Tenna! Keep him pinned down!" I run up to her, and look at Father sprawled on the bed as it creaks under his weight.

Not a moment later, our respective PODs fly out the door by my side, with hers hitting me in the temple as I run. Ow.

"Observation: The ambient temperature has been rising."

"That's so… mmmh… obvious…" Tenna thankfully answers my POD for me, not budging an inch away from Father.

"Warning: Units 5S and 10D must investigate the source of the rising heat in the surrounding area."

I have an idea what that is, but I'm afraid to find out. And fear is the only thing that's been holding me back this whole time, so I have no choice but to put it behind me.

I raise my fist, and pull my sleeve back.

Tenna tilts her head quizzically. "You're hacking into him again?"

She'll have her answer soon enough. If I'm right, I don't even have the time to speak to her.

My fist is aimed at the floor.

Specifically: the black box reactors glowing green.

They looked so pretty, the way they were hung from a pair of electric cables braided reminded me of vines.

 "POD." I announce my conclusion sternly. "It shouldn't be possible to draw power from black box reactors without broadcasting some kind of signal that would identify the units they belong to, right?"

"Affirmative. Black box signal encoding follows a proprietary asymmetric algorithm. Said algorithm makes use of several cryptographic features that render falsification difficult."

"So that's why there are two of them. The signals might cancel out. POD, I need you to tell me something more: can you confirm that the heat rose by a couple degrees centigrade since I came in here?"

"Affirmative." It projects a rolling graph of the ambient temperature over the past five minutes: a straight line pointed upwards. Just as I expected.

But this means that they're not operating normally: they're producing excess power, and there are only a few scenarios that would lead to this. One of them is the self-destruct capability present in all of us YoRHa-type androids, and it should heat them much faster than this. If the self-destruct routines of the black boxes underground had been activated, we'd all be in pieces by now.

The other is an old feature, no longer in use. I believe the renegade was using it in that image I was sent: Berserk Mode, where one's black box power multiplier is increased gradually until, in theory, the external heat sensors reported a critical temperature. The rapid heating and cooling of a prototype android's internal components under Berserk Mode was deemed too unsustainable for maintenance, and thus the feature should be deleted from newer black box reactor models.

"POD, what happens if black box reactors over..heat?"

I'm starting to tense up.

"The concentration of fuel within a black box reactor is rated to operate above 150 million degrees within a microscopic chamber at ordinary consumption rates. The reactor is rated for up to 350 million degrees."

"And above that?"

"Unknown."

10D interjects. "So, you dunno if these reactors are cooking all the items here into plasma jam?"

"This assistant is not assigned to answer inquiries from Unit 10D. Suggestion: defer to the assistant assigned to Unit 10D."

I try to hold a chuckle in, but I can't help it. I hate it. It makes me look like I'm not taking this seriously. But it's clear: nobody knows where this is headed if the reactors aren't stopped, and there's no telling if it's a good idea to just grab them and store them away with a runaway fusion reaction unfolding inside them.

Up until now, I had never looked too much into the technical workings of the reactors. All I knew was that I had one inside of me, and that I wasn't meant to know more than I should about them. We had to carry orders out, not reverse engineer ourselves.

But I believed there would be some kind of safety feature, like a switch or a way to stop them if they became unsafe.

Unless these black box models still had the Berserk Mode feature. It wouldn't even have to be something the original androids could use if the functionality was just 'cut off' from the main consciousness and sealed off in an isolated program.

As evolutionary technology, machines sometimes carry bits and bolts of programs they never execute within their memory when I hack into them.

Half-formed ideas for attacks and obsolete tactics, most of the time. But some of them could be executed by force, sometimes with fatal effects.

For example: I could make a bipedal machine execute a flight program, and I'd watch it spin its arms so fast they'd fall off because it took them for flight rotors.

I wonder if this is similar? Come to think of it, did Father force the renegade to enter Berserk Mode against her will so he could exhaust her and kill her?

No, no, no. I can't get distracted. I need to understand how to turn Berserk Mode off on these reactors underneath me. Ah… I can't turn my breathing off anymore. I need air for heat flow. This is really bad!

I drag POD down to my eye level, and stare into its top-mounted flashlight. "Find a way into the basement, turn the light on and help me infiltrate the black box reactor that's under my feet!" I clap my hands, close my right into a fist, aim it through the floorboards and propel a ring of maso runes into the first of two reactors.

>Entered system.

It's a narrow corridor, with transparent walls.

Opaque streams of data surrounded the structure, giving the appearance of an ocean. I can see bubbles forming and moving in the direction of the data stream - little bytes that settle on the sides of the corridor, forming a membrane between some code and my access.

Three white locks are in front of me.

POD isn't here. I have to break through by myself until that changes.

I insert the striped orange key I'd gotten from Father into one of the locks. It turns, it creaks… and then it dissolves back into my consciousness. I raise my offensive program at it, and strike at the barrier. It knocks me back and I stagger. I fall on the floor with a twinge of pain all over my body. I get up.

I can't let myself quit. I insert the key again. It turns, it creaks. But this time, I notice something: when the key turns, the wall's membrane seems to grow brittle but for a very short moment, barely enough to let a bubble through.

I try to throw myself into the other side, but just as soon as I do, the lining hardens and repels me, knocking me out on the ground again. I feel something striking my consciousness, but I am quickly back on my feet.

I hear something. "Time-sensitive vulnerability detected." It's POD! I needed him!

"Yes! That's what I stopped. It-"

"Suggestion: This assistant will saturate the data stream of the black box reactor, lengthening the flow of time sufficiently to enable Unit 5S to penetrate any barriers necessary."

He knows what I want to do. Even better.

"Get on it!"

I turn the key. It creaks. The membrane slowly thins out, revealing the individual particles, the blobs and spheres passing by. I throw myself at them. I'm in!

We'll get this done in no time. I can even see the setting for Berserk Mode: it's a slider I can leap across the stream and reach! My fingers cross the membrane, then my hands, then my arms, and-

"Warning: Interruption received. Assistant must exit immediately."

I-uh. I'm immediately kicked out of the black box as well, and I scream in pain. "Aaaah!" I don't even know what's running through me, but a surge of agony runs up and down every square micron of my body's pain sensors.

10D watches me clutch my head and pound it on the floor as I yell and cry, and does her best to stay quiet to keep a firm grip on her Fool's Reaper. She hasn't moved an inch, but I can tell she's eyeing me through her visor.

The pain overwhelms me. I can barely move. I call out to her, but I can't even take the time to make sure she's listening. "Tenn-na. Find the others. The machine, the creature, the bearded man. Find them."

"Hm? What?!" She's shouting. "Fives?!"

I try to talk, and I can barely put words together in this torture until the pain dissipates. "They have to have a key or a secret to hacking the black boxes."

"Fives!"

I whisper. "Get 7B. Find them with her help."

All I can do is look at her. The PODs aren't even with us, so I'm hoping she understood me. Maybe I can't talk for some reason, or the words are coming out wrong. But after a moment, she seems to get it and storms out.

After a while, I feel the heat constricting me. It's not even useful to breathe anymore, because the ambient air is becoming hotter than my insides. I do my best to stand up and face Father, because I absolutely need him to hear me out.

But first, I have to pin him down while I perform one more hack – this time, all I can do is to lower the fusion yield. It'll buy more time, before this building either explodes or catches on fire and takes all the evidence out with it.

I tackle Father, sprawling him on the floor. He moans in pain. I have to do it. He's stuck under my weight, unable to move. I close my fist and point it at one of the two black box reactors under the floor.

I am back in the hallway, surrounded by streams with locks facing me. There isn't much time. I insert the striped orange key. It turns, it creaks, and as fast as I can, I look into the wall.

Before it repels me, I see the slider again. I memorize its location.

Even if I manage to move it in the right direction, it might be too little, too late. This reactor is likely on its way out, and undefined behavior is never a pretty sight. A self-destruct reaction is a controlled attack, its parameters well-known; an unknown outcome is great for data collection, but only if I'm around to collect it.

Be that as it may, conjecture won't do anybody any favors now: it's time to fire my offensive program. I insert the key.  It turns, it creaks. I fire my program through the membrane into the ocean-like background. There's no sound, but I should hear something, or should I?

No, no, no, no… but what if I set up a rudimentary loop? I'll have the program running, it'll keep turning the key and firing my virtual sword at slight angle variations even when I'm out. Then I'll set this up on the other black box.

I rig something up with a few strings of code. It doesn't take much time, but it wouldn't be secure to leave my programs out here on a live unit's system. I disconnect, and immediately find Father shaking his head and trying to shove me in real space, so I deliver an uppercut with my fist before pointing it at the next black box, praying with all my heart that its layout is the same as the other one – it feels like the weight of the world is on my shoulders as I work through the steps in haste.

I rig another loop, with a similar offensive program. The key is inserted. It turns, it creaks, the virtual sword is fired at a specific angle as a projectile. Great. I finally disconnect.

There's one more thing I need to do.

I stand up. I take Father's goggles off to view his eyes. They're burnt and blackened, like his innocence. His pupils twitch aimlessly. I ask him a question.

"Will you face Command, Father?"

He doesn't answer.

I scream.

"Father! Will you face Command and answer for your crimes?"

He shakes his head. He's been shaking it for a while now.

It's getting too late for him to answer: the PODs came back, and they're setting up some kind of defensive perimeter around me to seal me from whatever's coming next. It's a sphere made of solid energy, and it takes me a while of talking to understand that it's also soundproof.

He says something, finally talking in Regional Standard for once. "No, I'll have a clean slate."

…I can't help myself. Before I realize it, I'm sobbing! Why is he like this?!

"Father!"

The eye twitching continues, but he finally mutters something. "Tell White…" was all I heard.

Who?!

Tell what? To whom?!

No!

The PODs are indifferent to me as the shield is complete. It doesn't take long before the 'undefined behavior' is finally revealed: the entire edifice is consumed in a fireball that envelops everything in sight. And for the briefest moment, I feel no panic, but peace.

The cicadas chirped, loudly as ever. Off the corner of his vision, the man spotted rows upon rows of birds flocking away from the blast. A few splinters of wood and dust debris fell around the ditch, some of it settling over the car's tubes and workings, the rest over its wireframe body. His eyes, through the rear view mirror, traced the scan lines of a television over his face from forehead to chin. All these explosions, that Rambo-style missile rain earlier… it's got me looking like a roasted tomato. 

He'd wondered if the damn forest had some kind of protective coating it could share with us, seeing the unaffected trees before a passing weasel covered in soot and chewing on a power cable clued him in: it doesn't. A thought process slowed to a crawl by the mellow band act of his throat's three most prolific jazz players: wheezing, breathing and coughing.

The machine, by contrast, had dropped down from the vehicle and stepped away to inspect the surroundings.

On the engine block, the sphere-with-a-face put its round eyes to watch the debris and blow it off the parts as loudly as it could.

The driver, after a while, had grown frustrated with the creature and its little dust clouds blocking his view, and contemplated shouting again a colorful variation of "save that mouth  for Las Vegas when this long-ass morning shift ends, Round Roomba," but the lethargy of his vocal chords made him reconsider.

He raised his head for a moment, after resting it on the steering wheel for several minutes. With the lion's share of his effort pressing down on the deep and minuscule wound in his abdomen, little was left for maintaining a sluggish posture and uttering slurred words. "This… this isn't the time for a hike, dumbass."

"I am searching for the feline. You appeared to be concerned over its situation."

"F-fuck it, man! I got-I got-oh, argh," he gets up from his seat and leans on the ditch wall in front of him. A bitter reddish-brown slurry of stomach acid and sweet half-digested fruit, stirred and shaken, spills out of his mouth over the dirt and rock. My dad… he'd… he'd beat my ass with a belt for this if this was Halloween candy… Jesus, why the fuck am I thinking of my childhood now?!

The stubby turned back to him, and latched on to the side of the car's frame once more.

"Derrick. If your condition worsens, you may be unable to operate this vehicle before long. It is imperative that we travel to a safer and more permanent location to ensure our safety and do so immediately."

"This," he lamented, "is so messed up! I had a house! I could've, uh," he stuttered, "built greenhouses, found saltpeter for fertilizing without Monsanto crap in our field. We needed more land? We could've cut trees and composted that rotting fucking pig," his rant turned into hushed whispers as he sat in the seat, mumbling to himself. "We had a river, a river of water, and it's all going into some nasty-ass hole[ch8] where it's falling into limbo with tap-dancing machines."

"Your memory is failing. You have not encountered machines involved in any sort of dancing  rituals recently, Derrick."

"Th-the machines singing nursery rhymes, digging or polishing rocks like Snow White's ass for a Kubrick movie set! Where we found Ballkid!"

"In all the time which I have spent with you, Derrick, you have not been as forward-thinking as it satisfies you to believe. Your plans vary constantly and are often based on whatever bothers you at the moment."

He banged his head on the steering wheel, checked his pocket for the necklace, and cranked the key. The engine stammered, groaned and revved with a vivid vroom upon his first press of the gas pedal, pounding his knee in frustration. …Damn it. He's right.

The machine's words unraveled the look of rage on the man's face, straightening his sunburnt features into a dour expression. He sat up, and leaned over the engine block. "Ballkid? Where'd you end up?" he asked about the creature's location, narrowing his eyes and whipping his head back and forth.

"Emil has entered the trunk."

Well, here's to hoping he won't jump out again and kill us this time.

With a few twitches of the gearstick, he pumped the clutch pedal. His new mission objective: accelerate at any cost. Uneven terrain, rock, loam, burnt bits and bolts rocked the jalopy up and down as it scurried through the narrow corridors of cracked tarmac, tying the man's stomach in knots. The mother of all DUIs: driving while half-dead. Let the killer Barbies try to pull the best drunk driver in America over.

The first few turns were tedious: he watched every mirror, visualizing the black figures encroaching on his peripheral vision every moment, and frantically turned to his rear-view mirrors on every side. Th-the little… the Girl Scout looking one just flew so high up out of an explosion she could crash into a Cessna, and just disappeared. She could fall here, o-or she could jump out of a bush—she could pop out of my trunk, for fuck's sake!

Slapping the stubby briefly to move it off of the sunroof and looking for raining goths, he'd learned a lesson: the sky machine-gunned sunbeams into his eyes any time he looked above the horizon. The ensuing threat of pain was one he took to heart, slamming the brakes as red spots cropped up over his eyesight.

"Derrick. Signals on my sensors are increasing in frequency and amplitude."

"I know you have PMS, Cog, you're angrier-"

"It signifies the approach of enemy units at an alarming speed." the man's slouch over the dashboard immediately straightened up, "Your ironic remarks would be better-suited if you possessed a working understanding of physics."

…Fuck you, man. Physics this!

The machine's words immediately riled him back into action. "Either we get out of here," he wiped his eyes and bit his fingernail, "or I'll be too dead to know if we don't," he clamped down on the gas pedal. Fuck. Engine stalled.

"Cog," he idly called out as he turned the key in the ignition once more.

"Derrick. Transport us. This is no time to speak."

The machine's speech was drowned out by the loud roar and sputter of the engine, as he tested the gas pedal. "Whaaat?!" he shouted, before he'd felt a wave of fatigue overcome his head. "Cog, I'm about to collapse! You'll have to keep me talking while I drive! Keep me going!"

The next turn he followed led the vehicle downhill. All the greenery, the weeds, the loam turned into a blur. Winds blew to his left and his right, blowing strands of hair over his eyes and surrounding him to take his breath away. In third gear, an ear-splitting rev resounded before he shifted up, just shy of the RPM meter's redline. "What idea was it that made you believe a halt was required?"

"The sun, the sun…" his mind shut down as he watched the hairpin curve ahead, "the sun fucked my eyes! I felt a weight in my head, like that time I was in the fu-field fire![ch15] Keep talking!"

"There are two enemy units. One of the signals in question matches those I sensed from your recently-demolished settlement."

"The other?"

"Unknown."

Either Tin Can needs to be taken to RadioShack for repairs, or there's a third one of these monochrome motherfuckers.

The engine roars as he reaches a fork on the dirt road. With two signs facing them, he pressed the gas pedal further, and shifted up to fourth gear.

"I can't read the signage! I need to find that smart-aleck map man of yours," he shouted, "without cornering me or," his grip on the steering wheel loosened as a chill rose up his spine, "engraving it on my molten skin," his voice cracked. The engine chugged along, rushing on the straightest of the two paths.

"In order to reach Fabricio[ch20] of my home colony, the other path would have been necessary. "

"Crack a potato on my nuts-" He'd nearly taken his hand off the gearstick and steering wheel to deliver an uppercut to the stubby above him and briefly twitched, "is your kind the special needs class of Robot High, only good for getting pounded by the jocks?"

He stared at the rear view mirror and looked to the side. For a moment, he considered braking and steering straight into the foliage to correct course, before his bowels clenched at the sight of a black blur passing between the trees, pushing a yelp out of his lungs.

"Control your emotional state, Derrick."

"You suck so much at giving directions, I'll end up swerving around penguins in the South Pole!" surprised he took a breath and interrupted the machine right as its voice spoke again, "Shut up. Forget it."

With a deep breath, he put himself to slowly braking and maneuvering the turns ahead of him. The birds finished their exodus. The cicadas cried. The smell of soil caked over sweat made way for the brined odor of the nearby seashore. Between squealing tires and galloping pistons, his every thought was drowned out, save for the jouncing of the trunk lid. What do I say… Jesus… what was I supposed to-

"Cog! Make sure wheels don't steer into Ballkid—fuck," he braked at a hairpin curve, "i meant, make sure those goths don't grab him and find out if he's full of coconut milk for brains!"

Chapter Text

> Loading: COG_LOG_1194X/01/XX

The warehouse was sealed from every angle, stacked with shelves upon shelves of electronics and mechanical parts galore from parts unknown. For many of them, neither their age nor their origin could be determined, yet they were attended to, wiped down, lubricated or cleaned regularly in case the storekeeper could find a use for them.

On this Sunday, the only indication of a world beyond the walls were the high windows plastered with decals forbidding entry, lining the hexagonal walls under the ceiling and its stray wiring, powering the halogen lights. Baruch, the storekeeper, stood alone on a stepladder, hanging massive tapestries by their corners and painting the walls and sealing every crack in the concrete floor and corners. More than anything, the pressing need of the moment was to maintain appearances: apples no one would ever eat were placed over a narrow table in the middle, an analog clock no machine needed – their electronics tracked time more accurately and efficiently than any minute hand – was affixed over the counter, and chairs nobody would sit on were laid out in a row, with the names of their designated occupants written on them in advance.

In time, the five occupants arrived, and the storekeeper shut an enormous padlock with a key it could barely contain in its hands.. Varying in size, shape, and number of limbs, they stood over their respective seats, last of whom was the mayor: the bespectacled stubby Cog, shortest of them all stood between its similar-looking comrade with the clown nose, the heavyweight whose built-in typewriter quickly jumped out of an oversized compartment in its torso and began to crank the keyboard’s power source.

The moment came to open the meeting, as soon as the Senator’s typewriter held a sheet of paper and rang for the beginning of a new page. Its owner locked eyes with the storekeeper, quietly signaling the beginning of a stenography duel, determined to record every syllable of the coming exchange of voices. If the machines’ synthesizers were to falter and glitch mid-speech, nobody was quite sure whether those incidents might end up on the transcript as well.

The keys ticked away furiously on both counts as Cog spoke. “In beginning this meeting, my fellow Machines, I am pleased to see that you have all taken the time to attend. The sound-proofing of this facility is more than suitable for the topic we are to discuss today. I must commend your effort and commitment to maintaining our council’s privacy, Baruch.”

The storekeeper, locking eyes with his co-duelist at the table, took a pause from furiously striking the keys on his typewriter. “It was the product of Fabricio and his master. We appreciate your gratitude,” before resuming its typing twice as quickly.

“Sinclair, if you will, display the exhibit.” Cog calmly adjusted its glasses and asked the machine in its front, a stack of loosely-attached torsos with a head standing on six arms, to produce a glowing orb from underneath its seat. Once on the table, a blackish-green orb caught the Senators’ attention, with what seemed to be a gem wrapped in a membrane swimming in a pool of cytoplasm. “This encrypted machine core was recovered by a well-known merchant,” Cog declared. “Emil of the Woods has been subpoeaned to testify at this hearing, however, he has not arrived.”

The heavier one broke its focus from typing furiously away at its built-in typewriter, replacing the sheet, adjusting the ribbon and cranked before pounding the table. “Emil must be penalized! He has charged me a hefty sum for a faulty ribbon that blotted my pages!” and took out its anger on the keys to type up its own rant, punctuated with the sharp ‘ding’ of its typewriter. The other machines were captivated by its energy as it continued. “No contact information! No permanent location! How can we accept such-”

Immediately, a ribbon flew out of its inner compartment, and the spherical creature Emil produced another from its mouth, pushing it on the table with its tongue. “Right here on time, and it’s free of charge this time, sir! I’ll have string phones available next time you find me!”ⁱ

The five other machines, Baruch included, stared in awe at the sudden appearance in front of them. Emil rolled over the table, taking a bite of each apple laid out before the several Senators and the mayor. “Don’t mind if I do,” it chewed off a part of the fruit, “if I do... if I do... if I do aand if I do! Here to answer all your questions!” it rolled to the center, facing the mayor.

The storekeeper interrupted the senators’ jumps out of their chairs and flinches as the creature rolled in and out of their personal space, chipping away at fruits. “That was meant to be decorative!”

“What’s the harm in a few apples, Bar-bar? You know I’m your number-one delivery service!”

The storekeeper resumed typing down its transcript. “Can’t argue, Emil. Can’t argue.”

Cog jumped on the table, demanding everyone’s attention. “Emil. You have obtained an encrypted machine core from the corpse of Private Asimov of the Municipal Guard. Tell us of the circumstances surrounding Asimov’s demise.”

“It wasn’t natural, I know that for real! Somebody had to have done all that stuff to him! They cut him in half!”

“Perhaps we should decrypt the core and mine it for useful data,” the senator at the far end of the table suggested, “to obtain more reliable information than a feeble testimony.”

Cog left no time for any other response before interjecting. “Gentlemen, machine cores are the most intimate and treasured element of a machine lifeform’s consciousness. The precedent to be set by such an action for our colony’s citizens would upend the social trust upon which the individuality, that each of us has developed through trial and error, relies.”

“The androids’ war effort are succeeding with new tactics in far-off regions!” the many-armed machine Sinclair sifted through piles upon piles of remote papers. “We’ve been living by ourselves, for ourselves for only a handful of years I can count on two of these hands since severing ourselves from the global machine network. Maybe it’s time we all reconnect!”

“There is no need to surrender our individual minds to it once more, if we use our position to our advantage.” Cog replied.

The sounds of the typewriters clickity-clacking reverberated oppressively through the warehouse.

Ding. Ding. The spherical creature found itself confronted with an evergrowing flood of questions, from most of he machines at the table. “Were you privy to the attacker’s identity?” “What tactics did you use to recover the machine core?” “Can you tell us the exact date and time?”

“No… I don’t know… stop asking me so many things at once!” the creature cried out.

“Was a sword used in the attack? Were any of your funds or supplies found at the scene?”

“N-no! I mean, yes, a sword, but why would I put my hard-earned G where-”

“You are contradicting yourself!” “He is contradicting himself!”

Increasingly absurd questions were being thrown out by the senators, culminating in “Would you have stopped it if you were able?” “Did you enable this attack to happen as part of a greater agenda? Are you conspiring against us, Emil?”

“Guys, I can’t handle thiiiiiis! You’re hurting me!”

Cog stepped up to the table, pounding it and demanding silence. “This will suffice. We have questioned Emil of the Woods enough for this hearing. What matters is that we develop an appropriate response to new threats of unknown capabilities. Clauswitz?”

The clown-nosed machine turned to look at Cog the mayor. “Yes, Mr. Mayor?”

“Do you have any feedback you wish to share? Your silence throughout this hearing leaves us curious.”

“Mr. Mayor, I wish to suggest a compromise between your desire to retain our autonomy, and Sinclair’s insight. We cannot remain isolated any longer from the wider machine network, yet we cannot connect ourselves to it.”

“That is correct.”

“We are in a most difficult situation,” Clauswitz honked its nose, “that demands new measures . It would be prudent therefore, for you to establish joint training exercises for our security forces with the Machine Supply Union. Whoever is in charge of administrating them should receive an individual of your status more favorably than us. This Emil fellow must be investigated at once, however.”

“Nooo! I’m good!”

“We will not entertain any accusations against Emil without sufficient evidence. I do not approve of this conduct, neither from Sinclair, nor from Latham or Clauswitz. You are dismissed, Emil...”

“Th-thanks, so much, Cog!” Emil beamed. “A-and in the meantime, I can even make up a little st-story for the kiddy machines and for everyone else, so that nobody has to worry ‘till-”

“...until you meet me personally immediately after this hearing.”

“Huh?! Cog, no...”

“I wish to thank you all for attending. Your input has been most valuable,” it turned to the shopkeeper, “and your payment for a well-handled hearing is due after our regularly-scheduled maintenance session, Baruch.”

The shopkeeper jumped in place in excitement. “All in a day’s wo-”

Its typewriting competitor pressed a button, and announced its victory with a loud ding. “The transcript is complete, Mr. Mayor.”

“Good work, Latham.”

After the maintenance, the greasing of parts, the replacement of treaded foot pads and scratched camera lenses, the machines had begun to vacate the warehouse, leaving only its storekeeper, who awaited the exit of the mayor and the creature at last.

“Asimov will be recovered to the best of my ability,” the storekeeper promised. “If the core is intact, fragments of his memory may be intact.”

The master craftsman outside begged to shake hands with each Senator as they exited, even offering to shake each of Sinclair’s hands, dirty as they might be compared to the rest. Following it was Cog the mayor, carrying Emil in its arms. With a polite head nod, Cog declined to drop its acquaintance on the ground and scurried over across the smokestacks and chimneys of the colony to its private residence. The two trudged along a narrow, winding road out to a gated building, outwardly not much different from the others.

Upon swiping its hand across a lock, a quick exchange of cryptographic keys took place, and the door was unlocked.

“Wow, Cog! Is this your study? You’ve got soo many books!”

“Do not be overly impressed, Emil. I have hardly had the time to integrate all this data, especially from such an inefficient format as visually represented text. I have merely completed one point five percent of this compilation of literature.”

“Where are all of them from? They all have such different covers. This one’s got a face on it and-”

“For your safety, Emil, do not under any circumstances touch that one. It is a reproduction of a tome containing certain powerful sealed verses.”

“Sealed… verses, huh. Can’t remember where I heard that one,” the sapient sphere twitched and spun, briefly overwhelming the stubby machine with speed before surging out of its mechanical arms’ tight grip. “The frisbees I brought last week! How’d all of them end up on that needle? I didn’t know you liked collecting them that much! Which-”ⁱⁱ

“Your undivided attention is greatly needed, Emil, as I wish to seclude myself in private with you to ensure that you answer my inquiries in a safe environment.”

“Right, right. Lots of questions. I-I’m glad you stood up for me earlier, Cog, you know?”

“It was necessary, Emil. Needless infighting is the bane of leadership.”

“That’s deep… you’re always smart, Cog.”

The machine stood on a chair, before its desk and moved a globe, and a stack of leatherbound volumes aside along with a hardcover made of scrap metal, a pair of diskettes and plug-in chips to the side. It picked up a piece of chalk from a drawer, and inscribed a circle on the desk. “Emil. Please rest on this designated area.”

“You’re testing my movement precision? Woooo!” the creatured rolled over the curved wall, rode upwards over the ceiling, rolling and stopping flatly over the chalk shape, and falling into the center with a plop. “Slam dunk!”

“Well done, Emil. If you would be so kind as to describe to me in detail the events leading up to Asimov’s death, so that we may better prepare for similar occurences in the feature, it would much appreciated.”

“I didn’t really see much, to be honest. All I know is that I heard some footsteps, I heard a loud bang, a crackling sound and came out of my hideout. At first, I thought it might be a moose, or a wild deer that rammed into some machine on its way to find me and thought I’d pacify it with some animal bait. The first thing I did was recover the core before looking at anything else, so I had to bite it off.”

“You have done well, Emil. Were you able to identify the party responsible?”

“I heard somebody, like a human running, but that’s it. Or how I remember people sounding when they ran.”

“An android’s involvement must be supposed then, knowing as I am informed that humans reside on the lunar surface.”

“That’s a bit hard to believe, that they all went to the moon. I’ve never seen this sort of thing happen to the colony, Cog…”

“You have done enough for us today, Emil of the Woods. It is time for you to return to your business,” the machine opened a drawer as its associate rolled out of the circle symbol. Before it could reach for the chalk eraser and typewriter inside, “I must take notes on this matter now.” Emil noticed a photograph within. “H-hey! I know that! That’s one of the alien spacecrafts I remember… I’ve been inside one, a very very long time ago…”

Cog’s eyes flashed a shade of white, before turning back to green. “You have piqued my interest, Emil.” it reached with all three fingers of its hand inside and pulled out the photograph in question, holding it up in front of Emil. “Are you familiar with the materials and components in this craft?”

“Y-yeah, I kind of am! I don’t remember much, but… it was a very long time ago, when I was with all my brothers-my clones, I mean. We were trying to fight them together, but they kept retreating back into their saucers. It’s like… they moved like vines or like plants, shooting roots into the ground in one place, severing them in another, and they all moved together at the same time. It’s not like legs… they used to join their roots together to m-make baby aliens, or to sorta ‘walk’ together like it made them stronger-”

“Please focus,” Cog held the photograph. “The extraterrestrial lifeforms that had begotten us Machine lifeforms are long gone. Focus, Emil, on the details of this craft. It would be of a great utility for you to tell me more of its logistics. If more time is available, I would like you to visit a recently-discovered one with me.”

“I-it doesn’t bring any good memories for me, Cog. I don’t want to relive those moments, I’m sorry!” the creature’s voice cracked. “We used to wipe them all out, and then they’d come back somehow. Me and my clones, we all wondered how or why and we even thought they might really be a new breed of trees. But they kidnapped me on one of their crafts and started trying to build new copies of my head, I think... then I escaped, but… there was something in there, maybe a few buttons they used…”

“Could you infer the nature and goal of these activities? What is the equipment in this photograph able to achieve? Is there a life support system, as I understand it?”

“P-probably, but they look like they’re dead in your picture. Those weird buttons on the side, they could open a portal or something…” Emil watched Cog pull out a sheet of paper and scribbling rapidly with a fountain pen, before the former continued. “I could see another world, all rocky. Like a giganic ant farm, and more aliens kept coming out of that portal and coming down to earth.”

“Please stay with me for a moment,” Cog politely requested before taking the time to scribble down further notes, and filling a second sheet with more.

“Huh?”

“Bear with me.”

After finishing its note-taking, Cog concluded. “Emil of the Woods. What you have described is quite possibly one of the greatest breakthroughs I may ever discover. My debt of gratitude to you is immeasurable.”

“Will this save Asimov? O-or help get the ‘united supply machine’ guys on your side to protect you?”

“Far more than that, Emil. We may discover the most efficient transportation method Machine lifeforms have ever used. We may become soon able to overcome any and all obstacles to trade, diplomacy and logistics that the 14^th Android War poses, without yielding neither to the Human forces, nor to the global machine network.”

“W-wow, Cog! This rocks! Am I gonna be rich, too?!

“...”

“H-hey, promise me one thing at least: you’ll play with those frisbees, right? You’re not just gonna let them gather dust in here now that I helped you, alright? You’re gonna let others play with them?”

“As you wish, Emil. I will ‘play’ with the ‘frisbee’ discs.”