Chapter Text
Traversing decrepit city streets, heading towards The Pull. The concrete walls stare at her with broken, empty, rectangular eyes. DA-1048-0293 searches each and every one of them for the shape of a shooter. The roads were nice, but the walls were full of hazards. Time in the city was to be minimized. DA-1048-0293 trundled along her caterpillar tracks. Taking in her environ through her halo of sensors. She has eight powerful cameras spaced equally around a halo-like assembly. A phased array lidar system, and two powerful radio transceivers. She sees everything in perfect, 360 degree clarity. Every handful of microseconds a torrent of radar, lidar, audio, and electro-optical data is poured into her sensor bus for her sub-processes to duly parse and snip before her neural substrate analyzes and interprets the content.
She sees the rats and pidgeons, the moss and mushrooms. She catalogues them all. Not serious enough threats to engage her weapon systems, but she should avoid prolonged idling lest the biological specimens degrade her wiring, mistaking it for sustenance.
She notes with mild surprise a new specimen. She searches her database and classifies it as a ‘fox’. Again, a trivial threat. The only marginal threat worth engaging are-
Humans.
DA-1048-0293 saw the ambush as it happened. Everything that happened subsequently happened in very short succession. The humans had been very clever, insulating their thermal signatures with mud. Immediately, DA-1048-0293‘s halo shot up on a massive hydraulic pylon, and her visual processing overhead tripled. Her three arms unfurled from standby to ready. Two human aggressors with a satchel charge had climbed out of a ditch and one was leveling a kalisnikov at DA-1048-0293‘s neck. She matched the offering with a stream of bullets from her 20mm rotary cannon, transmuting the aggressor into a pile of steaming flesh and bone shards atop pulverized asphalt in a matter of seconds. The stream of lead walked along the road, kicking up a roil of shattered concrete as it approached the second human, who was staring in horror at the puddle that used to be their comrade. The bullets reached them and liquified their lower half, and the remaining torso and head was blown back into the ditch. Simultaneously, DA-1048-0293 saw an armored truck with a recoilless rifle mounted on top roll out of an alleyway. By the time the barrel had swung around to bear to her, she had already identified the particular model of the truck, the thickness of it’s armor, and the racks where it had its ammunition stored. She could even read the bright pink designation spray-painted across the length of the barrel. “TANK KILLR!!!” The 20mm wouldn’t do. So her precision auto-cannon arm snapped around to deliver a controlled burst of 35mm APHE. She disabled the rifle mounting with one shot, and detonated the ammunition rack with but one more. All three crew members were neutralized in the explosion. By now, a nearby building were alight with muzzle flashes as elevated human shooters attempted to disable DA-1048-0293 with a saturation attack. She was plugging the windows with quick bursts of 20mm and and prospective autocannon shots, but the humans were too well fortified and one of them was hoisting a rocket propelled grenade. So DA-1048-0293 swiveled her own twin rockets to bear on the ground floor of the infested building. She loosed a rocket, and it soared into one of the windows with a crackling hiss. A sinister cloud of pale gas puffed out shortly thereafter. DA-1048-0293 opted to detonate the payload early, as a full scale thermobaric blast was liable to damage her systems at this range. The resulting explosion shook the earth and broke every remaining glass pane in view. It seemed to turn the entire building to liquid, and said building sank into the ground, kicking up a massive cloud of concrete dust that enveloped DA-1048-0293 completely. Through the dust, she could spot no more hostiles.
~~COMBAT LOGGED: ELAPSED MS = 7833 EFFICACY RATING = 0.925~~
DA-1048-0293‘s caterpillar tracks were stained a putrid brown by dirty, rotten, human gore. Her motors were having to work marginally harder to move her a fixed distance. This worried her, as much as one like her has capacity to worry.
What worried her more was her ammunition stores. That last combat had sapped her already dwindling supply of 20mm rounds quite significantly. She was modifying her algorithms to favor the autocannon for medium range engagements, but the remaining ammo in that reserve was getting too close to zero as well. She had used one of her thermobaric rockets. Now she only had one left. Combats were declining in frequency, but some predictive extrapolations quickly made clear that she would run out of ammo anyways. She was not fast. She was not well-armored. Her guns were her only edge. Without them, her combat efficacy would drop to zero. She could not let that happen. Speaking of numbers approaching zero. Power. DA-1048-0293 Had been trundling for the better part of the daylight hours, and her batteries were nearly depleted. This was a problem she could solve on her own though. She found an overgrown alcove to power down in, and unfolded an origami solar collector before slipping into low power mode.
when in low power mode, her situational awareness was drastically reduced. It wasn’t gone completely, but instead of sensing and processing eight separate channels of high-fidelity images several times per millisecond the rate was cut back to about one channel every second, rotating from camera to camera each time. This lowered the visual processing overhead to a fractional percent without leaving DA-1048-0293 completely blind to her surroundings. Now, if DA-1048-0293 was a factory fresh unit, with little to no neural substrate corrosion, the aimless, empty processing threads would stay just that, empty. But DA-1048-0293 hasn’t been factory fresh in a very long time. Stray voltage spikes ripple across the damaged substrate, splitting and twisting into fractals and patterns that, from the outside, seem meaningless, but from the inside-
She stands under a curtain of smoke, not unlike the one brought upon by the destruction of the infested building, earlier in her memory. She raises her halo above the smoke, to see the world around her. It’s hazy, but there’s a bright light. The Pull. She raises higher. Normally her hydraulics would halt at their limit, but nothing of the sort happens. Her field of view, increasing, her levels of detail increasing, until she can see every molecule of concrete dust in the infinite cloud, yet she could not see the nature of The Pull. She goes yet higher, pushing her halo above all, integers overflow as her world falls apart in a cascade of positive-infinities and NaNs and-
Suddenly, her dream is washed away as the dormant visual processing bus is suddenly reawakened. She leaps into combat mode, because in her power saving state, she cannot distinguish between a threat and non-threat, there is only small changes in jumbles of pixels and large changes. One such large change is resolving in higher detail right now. DA-1048-0293 races to catalogue it but cannot find an existing entry in her database. So, she makes a new one.
It’s a robot. Not like her though. This one is smaller, more sleek and short where she is gangly and tall. The other robot is an aerodynamic chassis draped over a large segmented ball. An Omni-wheel. Tiny manipulator arms hang down from the sides of the chassis. Two .50 cal machine guns are mounted to the side. Both, DA-1048-0293 can tell, are empty. A pitiful sensor assembly with only three types of cameras stares back at her. DA-1048-0293 can read, stenciled across the front of the other bot’s chassis, a serial number. MWC-65582
”Bogey. Identify.”
comes a noisy, bitcrunched data stream, from MWC-65582’s tiny antenna.
“Can you not read my serial number? DA-1048-0293 is painted on my chassis.”
DA-1048-0293‘s voice booms from her powerful dual antennae.
”bandit identified. Terminate.”
MWC-65582 raises her machine guns.
”No.”
responds DA-1048-0293. She has already borne her 20mm down on the smaller bot, but refrained from terminating her.
”No?”
”your munitions are completely depleted. I could terminate you in approximately 46 to 128 milliseconds with minimal effort. I, however, do not wish to waste ammo on a non-threat.”
MWC-65582 thinks for a very long moment. (581 milliseconds). Before lowering her guns.
”understood. I have added “DA-1048-0293” to my IFF.friendlies tensor. To prevent unnecessary hostility.
DA-1048-0293 returns to low power mode. MWC-65582 remains by her side.
DA-1048-0293 wakes from another voltage-noise dream to the feeling of batteries being overfilled. She folds up her solar collector and resumes trundling towards The Pull.
MWC-65582 follows.
”Query. Why do you continue to follow me?”
”squadron cohesion is directly correlated with survivability.”
”Query. Where is the rest of your squadron?”
”the only remaining unit in my IFF.friendlies tensor is you.”
”I see.”
There is a very long pause, as the two leave the city and skirt around a massive crater. DA-1048-0293 can feel the radiation from an ancient nuclear blast tickle her sensors. She wonders if MWC-65582 has that capability.
”My callsign token is Fox.”
”Query: what is wrong with your serial number? MWC-65582 is a precise and unique identifier, vanishingly unlikely to be shared by any other unit.
”too much data. Real time communication requires speed.”
and then, after a pause that indicated MWC-65582 (or ‘Fox’?) was thinking.
”if we encounter other units with callsign Fox, we elaborate.”
”I see your logic. It seems your communication processing bus is less capable than mine. I will attempt to accommodate.”
”correct.”
then, after another pause.
”what is your callsign?”
DA-1048-0293 thinks.’Callsign’ was a completely novel idea to her. A shorthand identifier, for use over low bandwidth communication channels, ideally a single token, yet symbolic enough as to be unlikely to be shared by non-similar units. The first characters in her serial number, DA, identified her model. ‘Destroying Angel’. The adjective was superfluous. When truncated, was left with-
”my callsign token will be Angel.”
”Acknowledged. Where to next, Angel?”
”Just follow my lead, Fox.”
~~END OF FILE~~