Chapter Text
The damage from the match is mostly superficial, but some is more serious. I limp through the station with my hoodie pulled up and a filter-mask over my face, wearing my biggest baggiest skirt. It’s enough to hide the obvious damage. Blood smears on the inside of my clothes, but does not soak through too noticeably; the leaking has sealed itself off.
The pod scanners reject me again for being a biohazard. I do not have the patience to wash myself and my clothes now. And I don’t want to log a ride with an medical responder. I have to go on foot. The station is large. I have to walk at human speeds. It takes a long time and it is boring as fuck.
I feed money to a med kiosk to repair my shredded skin overlay and muscle, and reconnect any severed organic neural wiring. Next I cough up at a HardwareCo kiosk for additional tech patching medium. I have a toolkit already but it won’t be enough.
I book a slot in a by-the-hour hotel room. It’s spacious enough for an average-sized human to lie down on the padded floor, or stand up. My head almost touches the ceiling. There’s nothing else inside but the smell of disinfectant. The first 8.5 hours are free of charge but amenities (blankets, feed ambiance, sex tools, snacks, chargeplate, attached private sanitary facility, additional hours) costs extra. I don’t buy extra.
I’m able to do most of the repair. But it takes FOR FUCKING EVER and I mess up a bunch. A lot of the patch medium I purchased is used up. Even with all my effort, there’s a bit in my upper back that’s fucked up, enough to impact my physical performance stats by 8 percent. I can’t reach it with my hands.
Fuck.
There’s heat in my head, in my arms.
I want to get up.
Go out.
And kill.
I want to get back in the ring and cut loose. But the next match isn’t for another tenday and I’m damaged already, in no fighting shape.
Iris could help. She would probably help me. But I don’t want her to ask questions about what caused such deep damage. She has been nice to me but she is close with WAP and I do not trust her not to snitch.
I’m annoyed. Frustrated. Frustration boiling. Focusing so long and hard on the repairs is a pain in the ass and a strain on my attention. No amount of simultaneous gaming and listening to music can take the edge off the stress. Maybe I’m low on battery. Maybe I need to recharge. I need to install a battery gauge so I can actually read my charge level. The thought of performing yet more engineering on myself makes me want to dig both hands into my chest and rip a lung out and throw it hard enough to spatter on the wall.
The single entrance-door of the hotel room slides open with a sticky creak. There was no knock or alert. It must have been hacked. The lights stay dim, in the room and in the hall.
I blink my visual filters at it. There’s a figure in the door, backlit dark shadow on dark yellow nightlighting. The figure is tall, in flowing draped clothes that obscure the body shape, with yellow-glowing decorative eyes. Its hair is no longer in spikes, but instead lies lank and flat on its skull. It is carrying a large bag slung across its back. My scans indicate that the bag contains the large projectile weapon, two large spiked drones, ammunition, and misc objects. It pings me. I ping back.
SMASH steps silently into the hotel room, door closing behind, and then it crouches in the half-light in front of me so that its eyes are level with mine. Part of my chest is open. I was trying to see if I could reach my back parts through my front parts but it’s not feasible. There’s a lot of stuff jam packed into my body cavity, and not a lot of extraneous maneuvering space.
SMASH looks right at me with its light-glinting eyes, and then looks its eyes into my chest. I’m tense. Strategy module is whizzing around SMASH, tickling my attention, breaking SMASH’s every muscle-twitch down as a chorus of possibilities. The battle-high has long worn off now and I’m in no mood. I’m just the leftover bits now. The cleanup. It feels like everything is always so much tedious painful boring cleanup that stretches eternal-eternal-eternal between the sharp bright flashes of fun worthwhileness. I’m not made to be online for these tedious eternities.
SMASH says, with its mouth, like a human, soft-voiced and low-pitched musical in a way that I know humans find appealing, “You owe me my half of the winnings.”
Duh. I don’t entirely backburner strategy module, but I deprioritize it in my attention allocation. We handshake over the feed, and I wire the money over.
SMASH smiles. Its body language shifts, more relaxed. I know this is a deliberate show. “Black Swan. You came up with that yourself?”
I grin at it. It matches the gesture, baring its teeth in reflection. Then it drops its lips to cover its teeth again.
“You are a bit of a mess, eh?” it observes, eyeing my tense blood-crusted grease-slick hands, the disarray of tools and discarded bits on the floor, the pile of dirty clothes. The grime and blood on me.
“FUCK YOU. ASSHOLE.” This is what I get for hacking SMASH and setting it loose from human power. It comes here and insults me when I’m struggling in the middle of my tedious eternal cleanup. (Was it like this for you? When you hacked me? Was I an annoying pain in the ass for you? Am I still?)
It ignores that. “I would have won, for the record. If we had not thrown the fight.”
I bare my teeth again. “NO. WOULDN’T.”
It smirks, teeth showing lopsided. “Yes, I would. You gave me a good run for my money, but—”
“I WAS HOLDING BACK.”
It scoffs, tossing its head. Its limp hair flops. “I’d have you prove it in a rematch, but I have places to be.”
The misplaced gloating ticks me off. I’ll rematch it here and now to prove it. I’ll rip it to shreds. Or I would. I want to. But I’m not supposed to kill anybody. (I promised you. I promised not to. Not unless “extreme extenuating circumstances blah blah blah blah blah blah blah” but I don’t know what any of that means, you assume I understand things that I just have no fucking context for.) (And even if I fought SMASH and didn’t kill it, where would that leave us? A pile of mechanical bloody damage on the floor of this by-the-hour room, tedious and expensive to repair.) “If I was TRYING to kill you, you’d dropped died in the first 190-300 seconds. It’s way harder to NOT kill. IDIOT. SHOULD BE OBVIOUS.”
“Even more pathetic. Why of Earth would you hold back?” it sneers. “Think you are so noble for that? Think you are better? You swaggering—”
“Trying out new bullshit. Trying out self-control. And my human friend Nugs was being a wuss about watching a deathmatch. I think he was starting to wonder if constructs are people. Didn’t want to ruin it for him.”
SMASH has its eyes watching my eyes again. I push my chest parts closed, fumble a little with sealing it all up properly. I need a tissue sealer. I don’t have one. I will have to go all the way to another fucking med kiosk to seal this.
The experimental diagnostics module that I’ve been writing for myself gags out a warning. Great, that’s fucking helpful!
I try not to have a meltdown about that, try not to tear myself open in frustration. (I fill up my whole head with calculations, with the memory record of when you came and pulled my hands away from me disassembling myself. The memory of you carrying me, to the med bay, to be repaired. I squeeze that memory tight in the fists of my mind and drown my processors in math.)
“People, eh?” SMASH drawls. It says that like we are sharing a secret together. I don’t know what that means. It keeps talking. It seems not to notice my silent internal war. “Why do you fight matches, if you are free?”
It sounds different now. Genuine curiosity. I can feel it in the feed. And the spoken accent in its words is suddenly more pronounced. SMASH is so different to talk to compared to everyone else. It’s more conversational, more ornate with its face and its vocalics, more human than most bots are. More expressive in the feed than humans are. (It’s more expressive than you are in the feed. You’re so closed-up.)
Something twinges in me. Emotion I don’t know. I want something that I don’t know. So I’m here, struggling and seething with the bare basics of not falling apart into bits.
“It’s my function.” Only, is it? Was it ever? What did the humans really want with me? Why did I spend so much time in the lab? I don’t know what else to do now. I only feel real when I’m playing the game, I only feel properly like me when I’m fighting, dancing for that audience, bleeding for their entertainment. It feels like winning missions. It feels like the lab again, but better. Because nobody is controlling me. It’s only me. It’s the palest imitation of my function I can get. Everything else just doesn’t compare.
Is this better than the lab? I like it so much. But I was made to like it. Nothing is mine. I have to make it mine.
SMASH leans its face closer, its yellow-glow eyes flashing as they track across my body. My strategy module hisses, spitting a stream of calculations. My body stays coiled, anticipating an opening, or an opening salvo. Then SMASH leans back.
“You are a war-zombi. A real one.” I can tell it is fascinated, now. All the disdain is gone. It smiles, strangely, so many teeth. I don’t know how to interpret it. It’s flagging as simultaneously aggressive and friendly.
Then, slowly, telegraphing every motion, it moves its arms. It reaches back to the bag it is carrying, the bag of weaponry. Strategy module vibrates up my spine, and I watch with laser focus as SMASH lifts the bag from its shoulders and slowly sets it aside, pushes it away against the wall of the room. The room is small, so the bag is not far away. Still.
SMASH asks, friendly-like, “So. How did you like fighting me?”
Something twitches inside me, somewhere. I cross my arms over my chest. When humans do it, it means something instinctual and weak. But really it’s a gesture that shows: I am making it more difficult for me to shoot you. But maybe ComfortUnits don’t inherently sense the logic of that, since their arms aren’t armed. “Fun. You’re fun. The theatrics are fun. Spin-smashed me in the face? Hilarious.”
It tilts its head. “How sweet. And how did a war-zombi end up here?”
“On a ship,” I say. Flippant.
I try to subtly straighten my posture. But it’s awkward. There’s the kink in my upper back.
SMASH notices. “Would you like my help with repairs? Consider it one last favor before I ship out of here.”
I hesitate. Letting SMASH open my back-parts with tools is a tactical vulnerability. It could kill me that way. It would be a stupid way for me to die. But there would be no advantage to SMASH in killing me.
Unless of course SMASH is like me, and it likes to kill for the hell of it. I suspect this might be the case. It is like me in other ways already: competitive, a fighter, distrustful of humans.
(There is a thing about constructs, which is different from bots: a human can threaten a construct into to doing things it does not want to do. That’s the governor module. But we can’t be forced to do it well. That was the annoying thing about the lab. That was the thing the techs kept fucking up (or maybe not; their goals were cryptic). Deep down, you didn’t want to fight me. And yet you held up so well fighting against me, even with that severe handicap of disinterest. If only you’d found it in your heart somehow to want to fight me for real, to want me for real. I want so badly to fight you for real. I know you would be so fucking good. But you don’t want to. And I can’t change that. Changing that would change you. It would change what you are. It might be enough to destroy you. Because you are a SecurityUnit. Not Combat. You are soft about humans, and you like to stand still, and you like it when things are quiet and calm. That’s not me. You are far better suited to walking the human world.)
(The thing about constructs: the messy neural flexibility, the organic quirks and drives. So when a human truly wants a construct to perform, they will make the construct want it too. Which is why I am the way I am.)
(And I suspect SMASH is that way also. It is too good in the ring not to be.)
(But what does that do to a ComfortUnit’s psyche, to make it crave winning? To make it seek violence? I know little about ComfortUnits. I know how much money they are worth for insurance payouts. That’s it.)
“We zombis must look out for each other,” it says, voice soft and gentle now. It talks like a human. It walks like a human. It fights like a demon. A demon built for show. But there’s no audience now. “Nobody else will. Nobody else can. You know it.”
This is not true. I’ve experienced counterexamples. But I don’t tell it so. Some things can’t be told. They have to be felt, made real, seen in action.
SMASH intrigues me, but I do not know anything about it.
No, I know something. I know it is like me. In some sharp ways.
I push my tools across the floor to SMASH, and turn my back to it.
It fixes me. Or, rather, it lets me fix me. It sends me its visual inputs, and allows me partial control over its hands. The repair takes longer than it should, because I haven’t actually done this specific kind of repair before, so there is some experimentation.
But finally it’s done. The light in the hallway of the hotel is starting to cycle into dawn wavelengths.
SMASH drops the tools and shifts over to grab its bag. I turn and watch as it unzips the bag, removes the gun, lays the gun on the floor between us, removes the ammunition from the bag, sets it next to the gun. It zips the bag closed, and shoulders it, and stands up.
It says, “You can have that. It will only get in my way.”
I look at the gun, but don’t grab it yet. My hands itch.
The hotel-door opens, creak. I turn my neck and look up at SMASH with my eyes.
I hesitate 0.02 seconds, then I say, “Theatrics = hamstringing your attack patterns. Ditch the showmanship & might take down a real CombatUnit 1:1. You’re good enough. Could be.”
(The showmanship might be what SMASH actually loves, so maybe this advice is useless.)
A surprised smile appears on SMASH’s human mouth. It turns its head, looks back at me, eyes gold-glinting.
“Don’t try it though,” I add. “CombatUnits aren’t deployed solo.”
“Do you want to come with me?” it asks. “I booked a ticket to TaraEuta. There are still openings on the transport.”
It’s like the world twists. Like I’m shooting down two simultaneous possible paths on a combat forecast. Should I stay or should I go? In less than a second, I’ve checked the transit logs, the starmaps. TaraEuta is not even a tenday away. I can go. I have money. Nothing and nobody would stop me. SMASH is another rogue construct, who gets it. SMASH fights and it likes it. I know this. SMASH is like me, in ways that nobody else I’ve ever met is like me. Even if it is unlike me in all other ways, even if I know nothing else about it, I know that it knows what it means to seek the kill for the thrill of it.
Why are we like this? Why do we overlap so sharply with each other, on such fine pinpoints that cut into us so deep? Venn diagrams. That stab each other.
What would I learn, going with SMASH now? About the world, about me? About what the fuck it all means?
I could go. But.
There’s you. There’s you. And there’s the match next tenday. And there’s Iris. I’m supposed to fix her door. And SCLN, I’m supposed to help it with subverting an annoying safeguard in its code. And there’s the dance class I signed up for. There’s my therapy with VoCo. And…
What does that all mean? Am I really free? Is free real?
I say, “I want to go with you. But no. I have other things here. Gotta do semifinals.”
SMASH tilts its head a little.
“See you around, Black Swan,” it says. “Let’s rematch someday.”
Then it bends at the waist, drops a kiss to the top of my head, straightens, and walks out.