Observation, Confession, Overtaken

Glaucus watched the monitors. The constant stream of data that described the operations of the entire outpost spooled in an unending litany of ones and zeroes down the black screens like a waterfall. Long ago his biological optics had been swapped to the single-strip visor all data techs used. It allowed him to see code as far more than what it represented.

To a lay, that strip of ones and zeroes meant nothing, but for Glaucus, it had the shape of the hydroponics generator failsafe program. That strip was the door lock code for apartment five-five-kilo, that was the medical chief’s equipment software update file. All the data within the octagonal settlement, from menial to major, rendered down to ones and zeroes. All perceived and understood as concepts, rendered from numerical abstractions.

This was his job from sunrise to sundown. Locked underground in a small room near the power generators that fed the entire outpost, he watched, detected anomalies, then fixed them should any arise. His most important task, by far, was the upkeep and guarding of the outpost’s kinetic shields.

He worked with a partner, Titus, but he was off in the sub-basement level with a female civilian, registrant code seven-nine-golf-phi-dash-one-one. They were copulating. Titus had recently purchased and replaced his reproductive biologics with an upgrade after he’d received a sterility diagnosis. A commonplace response.

Soon he’d be back in his chair, complaining about some thing or another.

Glaucus watched the code. He was keenly interested in the strands indicating the infirmary. A few hours ago, a burst of code had rippled across the ever flowing data, and Glaucus had feared something bad had happened. When he had checked, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Titus had checked too, then he’d waved it off and gone to the sub-basement.

Since then, Glaucus had watched, more keenly than ever before. Alone in the cloistered black room with its dark machinery and cabling, with its myriad screens flickering green with code, he’d watched. The guards had been alerted, but no combat routines had been started. They were just on high alert. Again, very commonplace.

The electro-thornwire had steady input, the gates were cut off from power altogether to keep them closed, and all the necessary generators were up and running. Everything was fine.

Then why couldn’t he shake the feeling that something was wrong?

He heard the hatch to the monitor room hiss and open. Titus lowered himself on the rungs and hopped in his seat.

“Same old?”

Glaucus grunted in confirmation.

Titus sighed. “Thanks for keeping things under wraps, you know. I owe you.”

“You owe me from three times now, don’t forget.”

Titus made a noise, then both fell silent as they immersed themselves in the code.

The hours ticked by, the data spooled, and occasionally one of them would comment on something or another. Their attentions were always directed to some line of code that needed to be ironed out or troubleshooted.

Then, as their long shift was in its final hours, Glaucus blinked. Or rather, he refreshed his optics, which was the equivalent to a biological blink. He’d been doing his routine check on the code describing the kinetic shield generators and he could’ve sworn he’d seen the code flash into the likeness of a sneering face.

---

Buddy stared at the concrete ceiling above him. The domicile granted by the governor for their unexpected overnight stay was one of the few second story habitation buildings in the outpost. It looked out over the waters of the Mediterranean Gulf, and like every place on dead Earth during the night, it was cold. Not as cold as the desert, mind, but cold, nonetheless.

The cots, like all bedding he was used to hibernating in, were a measly six feet in length, and woefully too short for him. His long legs dangled off each side of the bed, and his seven fingered hands were crossed over his chest.

Jean was snoring in the corner bunk bed, Jaques puffed quietly above him in the top bunk. Hound lay flat on his side, tongue glued to the floor. Lucia lay in bed in the opposite corner to the bunk bed.

Even though he didn’t really know how to show it, or if he should, Buddy felt sorry for her. Having cheap gutter tech was a curse too many struggled from, and to know that an implant was slowly killing you was a curse he’d not wish for his worst enemy. And she was still so young.

Buddy noticed movement from the corner of his eye. He didn’t need to switch to dark-mode to see Lucia get up and slowly sneak to the balcony. The silver light of the Broken Moon cast a pale glow throughout the spartan room, and it painted the already pale girl with a ghostly white.

She had only the bed sheet wrapped around her, and Buddy could see that her legs and feet were still biological. She was just a kid…

Moved by a sense of compassion he’d last felt decades ago, he got up, and followed her, his hemispherical feet softly clacking on the wooden floor.

She didn’t turn to look at him when he entered the balcony and closed the door behind him. She sat in the corner, curled within the blanket, looking up at the glowing Mother Mass and her shards through the grated railing. In the moonlight her graft and implant scars looked purple and blue, and her tonsured black hair gleamed like crude oil.

“You alright, kiddo?” Buddy asked. Without his poncho and hat, his lanky disproportioned cyborg body was on full display. It was a stark contrast to the fay, naked human form tucked within the sheets.

“I’m alright, Mr. Limbo,” she whispered.

Buddy leaned on the railing, metal against metal, and looked out into the darkness of night, and the black sea. The rhythmic sigh of the waves against the rocks, and the moaning wind through the tight-knit buildings of Decimum Iuxta Mari, were the soft inhales and exhales of the collective populace hibernating in their nooks.

“Now, I don’t think you are,” Buddy said, “I can’t know what its like. I’ve a good quality enhancer, top of the line, and if I just update my drivers every twenty years and get enough amino-slime, I’m set for life, however long that will be. I’m well regulated, so to speak.”

“I’ve heard this all before,” Lucia said, still not looking at Buddy, “you’re going to tell me that I should get it replaced, or have work done on my brain. You’re going to ask me when it was installed, then say that you feel bad for me when you find out I was six.”

Buddy nodded. “Good guess sister. But tell me, why won’t you? Get work done, I mean.”

Lucia tucked herself deeper into the sheet. “It’s not as if they haven’t tried. It’s the first thing the See did when I joined. I spent days in the surgery halls, lying flat on my stomach with the back of my head open. They tried to remove it, or to replace it piece by piece, but the problem isn’t the tech; it’s me.”

Buddy sensed that any word from him might derail her train of thought, so he said nothing. After a long pause, he was proven correct.

“The scholars have lost count of how many generations it has been since humanity was altered, but the doctors concluded that I am up there, one of the newest. My biology is so secular, so independent, that it rejects even the simplest implant.”

At this Buddy spoke up, “now, hold on, you’ve got implants. That arm of yours, and the ports. You’re even able to interface with my software.”

Lucia grabbed her left arm, detached it from the elbow, then tossed it at the bounty hunter.

Buddy caught it and raised an eyebrow as the dainty pale hand waved at him.

“That’s an autonomous prosthetic. Simple AI interface that reads my brainwaves sent by these,” she tapped a finger to copper dots at the back of her neck and on her scalp, “it translates all data and tells me through these,” she indicated her earrings, “believe it or not.”

“So, you ain’t a cyborg at all then?” Buddy asked.

“I only have the enhancer and these diodes. Not even this stump is a replacement,” she gently peeled back a layer of synth-skin and removed the bulbous stump. “It’s just a magnet basically. The arm just does what I tell it subconsciously.”

“I still don’t get how they couldn’t remove the implant. If your biology rejects machines, then shouldn’t it, you know, push that thing out if given the time?”

A tear fell down Lucia’s cheek. She giggled, then covered her mouth. “If they’d just taken it out when I first started showing symptoms, then yes. But my parents thought it was just faulty software, so they had it updated. When I got fits of laughter followed by mania, they thought the installation was what caused it, so they had it refitted. When that didn’t work, the slum doctors said that I required more advanced tech, so they grafted spares from more sophisticated models on to mine. Web dendrites, Mr. Limbo. Self-replicating.”

Buddy felt a cold ball drop into his mineral processor.

“After that, when I was thirteen, they took me to the See. They would only work on me if I joined, so I did. They only managed to stabilize it, to slow it down, but in a few years I’ll be dead. So, you see, it’s not just that I have gutter tech dissolving in my brain, its far worse.”

Buddy let out a soft whistle. He couldn’t find anything to say.

“Please don’t tell the rest. I already feel like a freak,” Lucia said.

“Is that how you blackmailed the See? They’re renowned for their healing arts. I’d think not being able to repair a young girl such as yourself might be bad on their public perception.”

Lucia laughed. “That’s the short version of it. But also, I learned about the Verdancy Pathogen and, well, if it can do what Jean says it can, then it could be used to kill the enhancer. I’d be left without emotions, but that’s better than dying I guess.”

Buddy, like many, had been given an emotive enhancer when he’d been young. He’d been lucky. His had been good and his body had accepted it. For nearly eighty years he’d taken it for granted, never really thinking about how life would be without one, or furthermore, how life would be if he had a faulty one that was slowly killing him.

“We’ll have you right as rain once we find it,” he said, “hell, if we get to it and Mr. Grower over there uses it to bring back organics, I think the world will be a pretty nice place with or without emotions.”

Lucia giggled and covered her mouth. Now Buddy knew that it was a misfire, a kink not ironed out. It was what she did when nervous, angry, or in this case, sad.

“I hope so,” she said.

After another long period of silence, she asked, “did you really meet a Chronologist?”

Buddy grinned; his metal teeth glinted in the wan moonlight. “Yep. Honest to God.”

“What did it tell you?”

“What else, that I’d die, and a lot of other weird shit. Also, it did something to my chronometer.”

At this, Lucia finally turned to look at him. Her prosthetic arm, that Buddy was still holding, snapped its fingers. “Hook me up,” she said, “I want to see.”

Buddy traced the cable from the wrist to his neck socket, then gave the arm back to the girl. She left it on the cold concrete, slipped back into the room, then returned with her wrist unit. She flipped open a small screen and looked at it in wonder.

“What are these?”

“I’ve no idea, but their counting down to something.”

“Your death?” she offered and giggled.

“If only I’d know. It said I’d die by the assassin’s blades, but I took care of that back in Jean’s laboratory. She also said I will guide a ‘keeper of the past’ to a ‘dagger.’ That, and a lot of other weird stuff.”

“That is weird. Why would a keeper of the past need a dagger?”

“You’re asking the wrong cyborg, sister.”

They remained on the balcony, Lucia distracted with the strange symbols, Buddy watching over the sleeping outpost and the glimmering black waves of the Mediterranean. They spoke softly for a little more, about things less severe, until a cloud hove before the Broken Moon and her shards, casting the night into a shadowless darkness, signaling them to return from their vigil to the blissful silence of rest.

---

Unit Five-One watched from atop a bank of sand, crouched low and growling, the flickering lights of Decimum Iuxta Mari. The flight here had been swift, but the wait for the signal was too long. Too agonizingly long.

The Wraith, Meridia Five, should’ve done its job by now. Making it wait this long was unacceptable. Five-One would make her squirm once it retrieved her.

It counted itself lucky that there were no mechs in the outpost, only common soldiery and some bots with military grade upgrades. The kinetic shields were the only real obstacle, but wouldn’t be for much longer.

“Haste/Speed…” Five-One hissed, closing its knife-fingered hand around the skull of its dead plaything.

The mangled gob had been a part of the flyer’s crew; the one most afraid of Five-One. He had reeked of feces and fear pheromones the entire flight as the kill-bot had sat by the boarding ramp. It had relished his screams, but now he was dead, serving as a pincushion, a chew toy, a heap of flesh and bionics to be sliced, crushed, eaten.

It brought a gobbet of circuitry and rotting organics to its mouth and bit down with gleaming serrated teeth. Gore flowed down its chin and pattered down to the irradiated sands.

 Then the lights of the outpost flickered. Faintly, almost unnoticeably, but flickered, nonetheless.

Any second now.

---

Glaucus twitched as he stood over the console between the two chairs. His bare feet were wet, so too were his fingers, his hands, and even portions of his forearms. Titus lay dead by the ladder to the hatch. Grimald and Gedney, the twins he’d known since they were babes, sat in the chairs in the quiet repose of death, their jaws ripped clean off by Glaucus’ own hands.

He’d been conscious during the entire horrific ordeal; the thing that presently controlled his body had made him watch.

Now it made him stand in the gore of his dead colleagues, made him stew in the horrifying reality of what he was going to do next. It derived pleasure from his suffering.

Glaucus’ body grabbed hold of Grimald’s long hair and tore her corpse from the chair, flinging it to bang off the rung ladder and fall limp atop Titus’ broken form. Then it sat down, interfaced with the machines, and began its work.

First the emergency overrides for the fuse box were severed, then the operating systems for the alarm claxons were taken offline. Next were the generators themselves. Glaucus watched through his visor, impotent to stop his overtaken body from inputting the commands that would doom everyone.  He watched as his fingers typed in the commands to overclock the generators. Commands only to be used if one of the generators failed, and only meant to be used in bursts, a single machine at a time. Now they were all cycling up, roaring with energy, their cap limits severed.

Then the sentience overriding him cut the connection to the generator controls, making it impossible to stop the coming catastrophe.

Glaucus heard a whisper in his mind, “thank you for the ride, slave,” it said, and with those words, he felt the presence ebb from him back into the flowing code.

He gasped. Bloody tears streamed from the seams around his visor, and as the generators blew and the fire from the explosion burned him alive, he screamed.

Outside, moments before the explosion rocked everyone in the outpost from their hibernation, the kinetic shields vibrated, hummed, and built up with such an excess of energy that they became visible, like a glass dome over the octagonal town. Then, milliseconds before the operations center, and the generators beneath, detonated, the compression of force became so strong that latticed white cracks spread across the black sky.

With a demonic boom, Decimum Iuxta Mari shook. In the distance, a murderer howled in glee.

 

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