Imp for the Perverse

Uzbek stood and stretched, cracked his knuckles and snaked his fingers under his Fold to rub his eyes. Unbidden, he saw in his mind the force of his fingers acting on semi-compressible spheres, and how they may deform under such pressure, rolling against the thin bone plate of the eye socket as he probed them with his fingertips, modeled in his mind as spheres applied by displacement, and how the peak points of tension within the eyeball membrane-

With a thought, it was gone, leaving behind the odd, empty cold-air feeling of a mind asking the server for information.

"Geez. Geez." He hissed aloud, finally feeling like he was back in his body. He had been working, totally zoned in, for hours. It felt like he'd been dreaming and had finally awoken to find himself more tired than when his dream began. A tough workday, made worse after taking time off for Down Day, but a fulfilling day. Uzbek enjoyed his work and had no reason to complain about a bit of sore eyes after staring into the Fold. So his fingers slipped out, he sat back down and he was back in.

The inside of his blindfold, a nano-thin virtual reality display, put him inside the homeroom of his virtual work environment. The environment was based on a mind-palace of rooms, all displayed as mostly empty, but supplemented by direct feeds from his Cranial Implant, his Imp. His eyeballs, looking at the display, saw little except for low fidelity visual cues; doorways of standard size and color that represented access to different components of his working life, work surfaces that were all slightly different shades and shapes that represented different software packages. The Imp supplied the rest, pumping symbolic perceptions directly into his cortex and extracting information the same way. He looked at a door with his real eyes, the Fold tracked his pupils, told his server, the server talked back through his Imp, and he knew that the door lead to the "kitchen" where he could socialize, request food and temporarily disconnect from work, all without leaving his real desk cubicle. When he looked at his main desk, the one in this virtual world, his eyes saw a green blocky silhouette, but he perceived what the Imp told him; his work. Not a 'hologram' of his work superimposed over the virtual desk, or some visual trickery of his work in the room around his desk, but just his work, as real as if it was sitting before him, as a symbol of being his work, proposed to his mind as presently as the topic in a conversation, or the knowledge that he was in his apartment when he was in his apartment. This virtual world was made as real as any other by the signals sent directly into his brain on the silver-yttrium alloy monofilaments that connected his Imp to the circuitry of his brain. It was a grand magic trick, first pioneered by the Executive himself, and refined in the thousand years since.

Today, his work was the 3D frequency response of an artificial knee, projected out to fifty years of life for a 95 percentile weight male, accounting for design variation in biological geometry in a variety of ambulation styles. When he looked at the desk, with the help of his Imp, he was thinking about the hundreds of ways someone could walk on the knee, jump on it, material degradation curves, muscle binding, fastener options- he hooked a thumb under the Fold and pulled it off. It had been several hours since he first rubbed his eyes, but he hardly knew it, until his Imp gently impressed the time onto him.

It was Uzbek-17:00, time to head home. His own day cycle was engineered along with everyone else's day cycle, to ensure that there were no inefficient surges in activity or inactivity. Throughout the 'day', as much as there was a day with personal day cycles, there was always someone leaving work, someone starting work, someone in the middle of their day. Some cycles were different lengths, so that the schedule of open businesses always shifted relative to their customers and ensured there was somewhere to shop and someone with the time to shop, and that anyone who needed to buy something had somewhere to go to buy it. He briefly considered dinner, and his Imp presented him with restaurants that were open now, with preference for places where he could pick up food to bring home to his wife. When they'd married, he and Kasha had been adjusted to have the same day cycle. The Executive coordinated all of this.

In that shared day cycle, it was clear to the Imp what it meant to remove the Fold, so the Imp shut off his work-server interface, at least in part. Now, when he rubbed his eyes again, he just felt the response from the nerves in his face. The computationally expensive and neurologically taxing work functions ceased unless called up, but the normal operations, some so subtle that he did not realize his life almost relied on them, persisted subconsciously. There was no biomechanical simulation for him to visualize this time, and those monofilaments to the device in his skull remained quiet.

When he looked at the other engineer that worked in this cubicle, Peters, his Imp quietly let him know it was Peters-10:45. His partner had arrived for work an hour and forty five minutes ago. And, based on alpha and beta wave patterns, Peters' Imp knew he was deep in thought, and communicated to Uzbek's Imp that any messages sent to Peters would be de-prioritized until they could be presented unobtrusively. No bother, he didn't have anything to say to Peters.

But, suddenly he had a message from Peters. He knew what it said as instantly as he could interpret a picture held in front of his face. It was not read as words, it was a nearly pure symbolic communication from one Imp to another.

Was he done work?

Yes he was.

Peters immediately took off his Fold.

"Have you been having trouble with your Imp too?" He asked audibly.

Uzbek caught himself before he replied through the Imp. Peters preferred that old channel of speech. It made Uzbek nervous to make so much noise when there wasn’t an emergency or emotional stakes, such as expressing love to his wife, but he consciously rejected his instinct to use the electronics.

"Uh. No."

"Man, mine's been killing me. I wish we didn't have to use these stupid things."

"Uh. They're good." Uzbek said.

"Don't kid yourself." Peters said. In the pause for breath between sentences, Uzbek asked his Imp what 'kid yourself' meant and was given the corresponding neurological symbol to understand it perfectly. This on-the-fly translation between the coarse wordplay of spoken thoughts into actual ideas was common when speaking to Peters, as he was one of very few people in Uzbek's life who often used the audible communication channel. He also liked to consume audible media, and had picked up odd symbols from it.

"These things are the worst parts of a leash and a crutch."

Crutch? He learned several megabytes of medical theory accidentally as he tried to remember that word. Ah, that's what that meant. He'd just never seen one in person.

"They use 'em to control us, you know? They even control our time! And I bet they have a lot more control than they let us know."

"No." It was all Uzbek could say, and it was something he often said to Peters.

"See? You can hardly put two words together in your mouth, no offense. They've turned your Imp into a gag too."

"No. I can... I can talk better with Imp than speaking." Uzbek said, turning red with embarrassment. He hadn't realized how much he leaned on- how much he used the Imp communication as a crutch.

"Yeah, I bet." Peters said with a waving away gesture, another part of low-fidelity spoken communication. Peter continued, "They use these things to implant ideas into our minds, you know."

"Yes." Uzbek said, nodding.

Peters paused. He hadn't expected agreement.

Uzbek continued, "I cannot work if the Imp does not put it into my mind." He tapped the spots on his scalp where the Imp implants rested under his hair, "I ask for eigenvalues for my ideas, and the Imp gives them to me. I look at you. And I know what time it is for you."

Peters waved this away too, "That's all easy crap; you ask it for all of that. I mean, what if it puts ideas in your mind without asking? What if it told you to be happy, even when you're not happy? What if it told you to do something you didn't want to do? What if it told you that it hadn’t told you anything? Would you even know if you were a puppet on silver-yttrium strings?"

"If it told me to be happy, I would be happy."

Peters balked at this, "What? That's insane! You can't be happy just because the machine told you to! What if your wife died, and the box just said 'Too bad, Uzbek, be happy and get back to work'? How can you say that you'd be happy?"

Uzbek and the Imp were thinking at the same time now. Uzbek thought it was odd that Peter’s said ‘your wife’ when his Imp should have told him to say ‘Kasha’. And the Imp, through a series of transform functions and neural net analysis, had determined the symbolic subject of conversation and prompted Uzbek with philosophy packets that would inform him of both sides of this topic. He and Peters were far from the first to discuss the costs and benefits of Imps. But Uzbek felt there was something else at play, that Peters was priming up for some other topic, so he ignored the packets and and instead asked the Imp what this could be. It performed a descending abstraction analysis of Peters' Imp activity and determined it was a violation of privacy to disclose its findings to Uzbek. That's what he expected, but it did confirm that this was no casual conversation. If this was just office chatter, the Imp would have told him 'Peters is seeking the cultural norm regarding Imp usage' or 'Peters is unsure how to access specific Imp functions'. This took just long enough to Peters to lean forward after his question.

"I don’t know what I would do if that happened." Uzbek said, then forwarded a prompt from his Imp to his lips, "But why are you concerned?"

Peters looked around, using his eyes to scan the office around them instead of tapping into the environmental cameras, and scratched absently where his Imps were implanted.

"I think mine is glitched out." He said at last, "Yours ever... put stuff in your head? I mean, of course. But stuff you didn't ask for? Dark thoughts?"

"No...” Uzbek said instinctively. But that was not true.

Peters was better at perceiving than Uzbek was at hiding, “Come on. What is it?” And Uzbek caught an unexpected begging tone in his voice.

Without really understanding why, but probably because he was compelled by empathy and naïve to the risks of vulnerability, Uzbek shared a story that had haunted him, that Peters’ concerns had dredged up from the lake of thought he had drowned it in.

“Well... one time Kasha and I had an argument, and one of us threatened to leave. I don't remember-" he rejected the Imp's prompt to fill in that memory gap, "-I don't remember which one of us. One of us was going to walk out. And, I don't think I asked, but then it told me what would happen. It was a budget. I saw that the new budget had a high confidence prediction that it would include counseling. Suicide counseling." Uzbek trailed off. It was strange to have his own memory be so clear, almost as clear as the Imp's memory. Again, he rejected the Imp's prompt to help him remember anything else more clearly.

"Damn..." Peters said, "did it-"

Uzbek continued, "And that was odd. It disturbed me. But it did something else, that I definitely did not ask for. It suggested that we have sex."

Peters stared at him, like Uzbek had put a finger on his brain.

"It was a good suggestion." Uzbek said, "but it did not feel like a suggestion. It did not feel like a person had suggested a course of action, it felt like I now knew something. Except I did not ask it for this information, so in this way it felt like an unprompted suggestion.” Uzbek felt the weight on his face shift as his expression soured, “It is hard to say this feeling with words. Imps do not make many suggestions; that's what our human brains are supposed to do. It was not a suggestion, it actually gave me a report. A model, on the hormonal and emotional outcomes from having sex in that kind of situation." He shrugged, "and the outcomes looked good. It also told me it had shared this report with Kasha, except for one part."

He felt it best to pause, so Peters could understand what this meant.

"The part it did not share with her was much longer than the rest, so my Imp delivered it last." He paused again, but because he realized that when he was speaking these things, it was much harder to ignore the emotional response the words caused in him. "It was a report on the hormonal and emotional consequences of spousal rape. Statistical outcomes, key performance characteristics, key noise parameters... modes of implementation. You have read reports; it was in the standard template. It was a straightforward report that described a small set of possible outcomes."

Silence.

"Did you..." Peters started.

"I was upset, and in an agitated state. So, even though I knew the reports, I was not able to take their information. And the last part... did not help. So I turned off my Imp and left the situation."

"And Kasha?"

Uzbek asked his Imp for a gesture for his feelings and shrugged in the way it described. It was easy to shrug now, with all of those heavy words out of his head.

"We worked it out another way and spoke to each other a lot. I am done talking about this. Sorry."

"No need for an apology. You see, that's exactly what I'm talking about! Not exactly, I guess, but I am having, well, it's doing the same thing to me."

Now Uzbek was the confused by his coworker’s unexpected alignment, "How?"

Peters looked around again, and dropped his voice, "it's putting stuff in my head. About women."

Uzbek was not sure how to respond. On instinct, his Imp found out that Peters was not married.

He continued, "I mean, it's not even reports, like what you got. You always ask yours for reports, so that's what it gives you. That's why you get the big bucks." He laughed mirthlessly, "I just ask it for pictures, you know? Graphs, diagrams, transforms, renders, that kind of stuff for work. And... I must have glitched it up. It's doing that still. But for women. All the time. It used to be just be when I saw someone, you know? I see Jessecia when I come in to work, I think, in my human brain, I think 'that's a nice dress' and immediately, the Imp shows me what she looks like, but without the dress. And I think 'woah, that's not what I asked for!' And it goes away. It used to. I don't want to be looking at that stuff at work, you know? So I kept it at home and yeah, I went back to it later, I admit, real scummy or whatever.” Uzbek had a strong feeling that the pretense of dialog was evaporating. Peters was on rails to say what he had been keeping to himself for a long time.

"But it kept happening. I go to the store and see a girl, and think 'man, she's got a nice-' and before I can even finish the thought, the thing is showing me whatever I'm thinking of. Just, boom, right there in my mind. Don't get me wrong, I like what I see, but it makes it hard to talk to her, you know? How do you ask her out when you just see that? And it kept going. Eventually it even happened with memories!" At this point, Peters was talking in a fast low whisper, almost hard to hear, "memories, you know? I'd be here, trying to work, and I'd remember that video I watched last night, just remembering it, not even really thinking about it until suddenly it's all I can think about! Now I'm here at work, just seeing that... well, it was porn, you know? I try to turn off the Imp, but I can still see it. And it's not in the Fold, so I can't just close my eyes, it's still there. Oh man. And, a part of me, down here, has no problem with this, you know? But up here," he points at his temple, "I'm freaked out; I don't need this stuff coming up at work!

"So I tried to turn all that stuff off. You know, I set limits on the Imp, I scrubbed my history, I tried some meditation or whatever. It worked for about a week, then it started coming back. Think about a cute girl at the bar? Boom, all I see is her rack. Think about seeing the doctor about it? Too bad my doctor's a woman; instead of scheduling an appointment, I just get to see her ass. Bored at work? Here's some porn." Now Peters' voice was rising with frustration again, "damn! Even just now, just even talking about it! I just- I'm sorry, but when you mentioned Kasha… Dammit!" He slapped a hand against his scalp, "It's all the time! It just never stops! I keep turning it off, and it just keeps turning me on!"

Uzbek instinctively reached to his Imp for support. How was he supposed to handle this? Pat him on the shoulder? Scold him for looking at porn at work? Assure him this was normal? It wasn't normal, was it? The Imp tried to answer, but his confusion made any search he submitted into noise for the Imp. Without strong symbolic thoughts, the Imp did not have a high-confidence reading on his intentions, and could not respond.

Peters stood up and tossed his Fold on the desk, "Sorry, You know, I just had to tell someone. I'm going to see a doc, I gotta get this thing taken out. I'm done, it's ruining my life."

"You can't work without it." Uzbek said, rising from his seat as well.

"Well I can't work with it! Not when it keeps showing me half the office like that!"

At this point Peters realized he was catching attention. He tried to dismiss it with a wave, and posting on his Imp that he was just worked up over 'something', using the generic symbol for 'indistinct conflict too personal and/or complex to describe to a multitude and unfamiliar audience.' Most of the onlookers got the post, and put their Folds back on, or left the environmental cams.

Now Uzbek was following Peters out of the cubical farm, "I don't think you should have it removed; it must be fixable."

"I checked, no way. The darn thing won't help me with this at all; it's working against me you know? I need it out, right now. I'm done. Best case, I get a new one that works, worst case I just... I don't know, I guess I just use a keyboard or tablet or something."

"But you won't even know what time it is."

"I can use a clock."

"Or summon elevators." Uzbek said, as he subconsciously summoned the elevator.

Peters summoned it as well, except he was pressing the emergency button, "They have these as safety back-ups; I'll just use the buttons."

"How will you calculate things for work?" Uzbek asked.

Peters turned to him as they got in the elevator, "Look, I know. How can I take a dump without the chip in my head? I don't know! But I certainly know I can't live with it, so I gotta- dammit! There it goes again!" He clutched at his scalp, "Fuck off!"

For a second, Uzbek thought Peters was lashing out at him, but his coworker was reaching out and waving away like there was someone else in the elevator with them.

"There wasn't even anything there that time!" Peters said, talking to Uzbek again, "See? I can't keep dealing with this!"

"Would you like me to find a doctor?"

"Thanks. I just- every time I tried to think of- whatever." Peters said, still holding his head, as if feeling for a power button on the Imp implants.

Uzbek took this as confirmation and found an doctor that was at 3:30, just a few minutes from their office. He was about to send the directions to Peters, but realized it would be best to just guide the man there himself. He started his Imp on scheduling an appointment. It started including Peters’ symptoms, but Uzbek pulled those out. This was too intimate a matter for him to handle on Peters’ behalf.

As they walked, Peters calmed down, "Sorry about that. It's just been happening for a while. I tried dealing with it, fixing it, you have no idea how long I spent just searching for known glitches, hacks, software fixes, whatever to make it stop. Sometimes it’s not so bad. But even when I'm trying to concentrate, one second it's work, and the next second it's porn or whatever. It's enough to give me a headache."

"I'm sure a factory reset will fix it."

Peters sighed, "Maybe. But I'm not taking any chances, I'm done with this. I want it out right now, I want to get back to normal, you know? To be able to talk to women like I use to. Geez, even saying that it gives me more crap to look at! Stop it!"

As they arrived, an automatic check saw the acute signs of stress picked up by Peters’ Imp and connected him with his appointment. But he rejected its prompt to log in through his mind, instead going to straight to the nurse’s desk. Uzbek knew instantly there was going to be trouble as he saw the nurse. An attractive young woman, frustrated that she should have to handle a patient check-in the slow, old fashion way.

"Sir, please use the kiosk, it will scan your-"

Peters cringed away as she spoke, "I'm sorry, but can I talk to the doctor? Or another nurse? I'm sorry, but-" he stopped himself.

"The doctor is at an appointment, please use the kiosk to sign in and we will be with you-"

Peters was alternating between squeezing his eyes shut to block out the image of her, and opening them so the image of real life could override the image in his brain, "Please, I need to see someone else, right now, I'm having a serious problem with my Imp, it's freaking me out. I think I need a male doctor, please, right now."

She scowled at him, "what did you say?"

Uzbek cut in, "He's having a serious issue with his Imp, it's-" messing with his ability to communicate with certain people, he finished in Imp. By looking at her, his system used facial recognition and the context of his location to determine who he was speaking to and directed his message to the nurse automatically.

She shot back, he is looking at me like a pervert, he is being a creep.

Uzbek sent a report describing the situation. In symbolic thought, it was easy to be dispassionate, to clinically present the issue that Peters could not express without obscenity on vocal channels.

She scowled again and tried several times to Imp Peters, who was now staring fixedly at the surface of the desk, but he wasn't accepting any Imp messages.

"Your Imp is showing no abnormal readings; there is nothing wrong with it." She said. This also offended Uzbek; could she not see his distress?

"Yes there is!" He insisted, "didn't you read Uzbek's report? He sent one, right? It is- it's forcing stuff into my head!"

Her scowl seemed permanent, but she pulled a small tablet from under the desk, activated a program and held it up to Peters. The screen showed a glyph in the corner that older Imps could use to directly interface with the tablet, and the edges of the device carried even more archaic interfaces, including a card reader. One of them was a featureless glass square, and Peters pressed his thumb against this as soon as he accepted the device to authorize medical diagnostic access to his Imp. Instantly, the tablet's screen was scrolling with packet data as his Imp engaged in 5 Ghz conversation with his server and surrounding devices.

The nurse pursed her lips as her own Imp sent the report directly to her, and she realized that there was too much traffic going through the distressed man's mind for her to quickly determine if he was healthy.

Peters didn't wait for a diagnosis, "I need this thing taken out right now! It's ruining my life."

"We can't do that without a board review." She said, trying to send him the process over Imp, which he again dismissed, "Extracting an Imp requires-"

"I know! I know! And I am in acute distress over what it's doing to me! Here, can you deal with this?!"

Uzbek realized what Peters was going to do, he was going to send the poor woman a sample of his distracting visions. In a panicked gesture, slapped Peters on the shoulder to interupt him, “Do not do that! Ma’am, he is very distressed.”

At the speed of thought, Uzbek could not stop Peters’ transmission, but perhaps it was for the better. He could not imagine what the nurse had ‘seen’, but it turned her face white, and she nearly jumped to her feet.

“Sir! You can’t-!” She started, then mutely pointed into the office, “Go to room 12. Now.”

Peters did not seem to see the hatred on her face, just happy to get what he needed. And he had no perception of the quick flurry of Imp messages she exchanged with Uzbek.

This man is sick! She shot over.

Yes, his Imp is severely compromised. He replied.

No! He is sick. She used an emphatic notation to describe Peters, as a person exclusive of any other feature. There isn’t a single fault with his Imp, she added.

Uzbek could only respond with confusion. Hadn’t she seen what it was putting into Peters’ mind? Surely she could not see that and imagine that Peters had conceived it himself.

"Thank you!" Peters said, as he sat in the patient's chair, "I will be so glad to get rid of this thing! I can barely think with it constantly buzzing with this- this- shit all the time." They say for a few seconds in silence before Peters asked, “When is the damn doctor going to get here? I need this thing out!”

"Doctor Pastruma will be here in a minute,” Uzbek said, reading off the notes that were being attached to the appointment he had set up for Peters, “but he won't have time to review your Imp packet history and diagnostics. It will take about an hour to review it to see what exactly is going on, after he has spoken with you."

"Thanks" He said, "Uzbek, I'm sorry to rope you into this, You can head out if you need to. Kasha's probably worried that you're not home yet."

"Don't worry about it; I'll be here to make sure you can take care of this. I already let her know I will be home late."

Peters was calming down now that he was finally going to get the help he needed, and that the nurse was no longer around to trigger his condition, "You know, this is so embarrassing. Thanks for sticking with me."

"Of course." Uzbek said.

There was a moment of quiet as Peters’ agitation slowly ebbed away, and Uzbek had a moment to think about what was happening. Being a biomechanical engineer, he was more familiar with the Imp than most laymen, and being specifically a prosthetics engineer, he had access to much more tools and information about the device than even most people in his field. What would it take to actually get Peters' device removed? As soon as he asked, he knew. He saw the robotic device, a system of arms and micro-actuators that would delicately remove every one of the tens of thousands of silver-yttrium monofilaments planted throughout the man's brain. Some reached as deep as the Medulla Oblongata to tap into sensory signals, and dozens more tapped into the amygdala to facilitate memory implantation and recovery. Uzbek himself had an especially high density of these connections, which enabled him to download whole reports, rather than the more average amount of connections that Peters used to get single images at a time. Extracting these connections was a delicate and crucial procedure that could take days to plan. Depending on how old Peters was when he had them implanted, it could also take several rounds of surgery to remove all of them. Then recovery, learning to live in this world without the Imp interface. But there was no such recovery. It was considered a severe disability, to be unable to interact with systems for the rest of ones’ life after Imp removal. Most systems did not have elevator buttons. Perhaps Peters would be forced to leave the Fifth Star, start a new life in a less developed world that did not expect Imp interfacing…

Doctor Pastruma arrived.

"Hello there, Peters." He said, offering a handshake. The man had impeccable bedside manners to start with vocal channels, and he already knew that Peters was averse to Imp messaging, "I’m Doctor Pastruma. I understand that you are having an issue with your cranial implant?"

"Yes! It terrible! Did you read the report on it? I could barely talk to your nurse! Even now, I can't- I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself, you know. How long will it take? Can we get the extraction done today? Tomorrow?"

Pastruma gave an uneasy smile, "Well. Before we talk about that, I've got good news and bad news. Normally, I would send you the report, and you would have all the many pieces of information you need to fully understand it right there at your mental fingertips, and we could avoid any kind of misunderstanding. But, in light of your condition, I can tell you audibly, even though it can lead to... miscommunication. Are you sure you don't want the Imp report? That is to say, not to your imp?"

"Absolutely not. Tell it to me straight."

"Well… I checked your packet traffic. Very preliminary, I'm sure you know there's a lot of data going up and down from your brain. But I took a quick look. And, frankly, I did not see anything unusual. Just normal traffic. Biometrics, metadata, little bits and pieces, like the packet that told you what the tablet was for that you authorized to record said packets. I must ask, did you realize it was your Imp that suggested you use your thumbprint to authorize the scan?"

At this moment, Uzbek realized something was not going well. Peters' eyes nearly popped out of his head.

"What?! It can do that?!"

"No need to be distressed, Peters. Your device understood that you were unlikely to use it for the authorization. So it identified the thumbprint as a fallback and sent you a standard Imp suggestive symbol to prompt you unobtrusively to interact with standard-"

"This thing can 'unobtrusively' control my mind!? What the hell? No wonder its dumping all this porn on my brain!"

"Not at all! It just told you which of the authorization methods was compatible with your preferences and abilities. And, since you are seeking aid, you reflexively complied-"

"That's what's happening! I got that suggestive symbol! Somehow, my Imp sent me a suggestive symbol by mistake, unconsciously causing me to constantly download this crap into my brain!"

"No, Peters, that is not how the suggestive symbol works."

"Yes! You just said it yourself! It suggesting this shit to me and forcing me to reflexively comply! That's what happened to you, Uzbek, when you had that fight with Kasha! It gave you a suggestive symbol to rape her!"

Uzbek threw up his hands, "No! That's not what I said, it was just a report." He glanced at the doctor that heard the accusation, but Pastruma was trying to calm down Peters with no success. All of his Imp messages were rejected, and he was untrained to override Peters in the audible channel. Uzbek was dizzy with confusion as Peters began shouting.

"That's what it wanted you to think! You said it! The rape fantasies, you said it, didn't you? You have them too? The porn, the rape, the murder this fucking thing dumps into my mind all day! These things-" he scrapped his fingers along his scalp over the implant, "they can tell us whatever they want! They can give us memories, they can give us suggestions! But what if it causes a loop?! Huh? What about that? What if this dammed thing 'suggested' I look at porn? It knows what I'm thinking! It knows what this thing wants! It knows it can make me ‘reflexively comply’! It gave me this subconscious suggestion and how could I stop it? I didn't even know I was being suggested! I want porn, it suggests porn. I want rape? It suggests that too! Anything I want it tells me to take. How perfect!"

"Peters, please call down, I'm sending you a report so you can truly understand what is happening, but you won't know the report until you accept it." Pastruma said.

"Like hell! I'm not taking any more shit from this thing! It's already ruined enough of my life, it's already fucked me up!" Peters was bleeding now as his fingers dug into his scalp. For a second, lucidity shown in Peters' eyes, "You called the nurse, didn't you? She's on her way right now with a shot to shut me down!"

Uzbek started, looking at the shock on Pastruma's face. Before either could react, Peters threw himself at the door, slamming it just as the nurse tried to come inside. With one hand he held the door shut, his other hand scrapping and clawing at his head, now streaming with blood.

"What's wrong doctor?!" He screamed, "your little mind control chip can't tell me to calm down? Why don't you suggest it?! Why don't you send me a 'normal' 'standard' packet to 'suggest' I calm down?! Why don't you stop sending me all of this fucked up shit?! Why doesn't it stop showing up in my brain!? It's ruining my life! I need to take it out! Right now!"

Uzbek saw it on his Imp as it happened. He already had the surgical simulation program loaded, it was just a small change to the procedure, and he saw it happen in his mind as Peters finally got what he wanted. A fingernail pierced deep enough into his own flesh, and caught the edge of the implant, peeling the biosafe glue off of his skull like a refrigerator magnet. Uzbek saw in his mind how the monofilaments were torn out of their places, still firing, now slicing through millions of neurons as they were yanked out all at once with no surgical consideration. Synapses were broken, axons severed, whole circuits displaced and flooded with hemorrhage blood. As residual signals flew down Peters' arm, it kept moving even after his brain stopped telling it to, almost finishing the extraction automatically, until the Imp was left flapping against his head as Peters' body spasmed madly on the floor, blood gushing over the invisibly thin silver-yttrium monofilaments.

The nurse screamed and dropped a sedative skin-patch as blood ran under the door and Peters' head knocked erratically against it, the doctor grabbed Uzbek and held him back as he instinctively tried to help Peters. But both men knew it was too late. Peters had removed from himself something to intimate to be removed.

----

It took minutes of exhausting Imp messaging with police officers to explain the scene; they did not understand anything until Uzbek shared the simulation of the pseudo-surgery the man had done on himself. There was even mention of composing reports for the Executive. As always, the Executive’s mention was somber, clinical, and probably not actually going to happen. But it was the closest Uzbek, or anyone he knew, can come to a real Executive contact. Peters' body jerked and twisted until one of the medical staff was able to apply a sedative to his flailing arm. The chemical reduced his spasms to dull shakes as a dozen doctors were called, regardless of their times, to determine if there was any way to fix him. The only solution, it seemed, would have been half a dozen Imps to replace the neurons he had destroyed, but long before he could be set up in a surgical machine, the hemorrhaging had destroyed his brain.

One hour later, what would have been days if they couldn’t have given immutable and accurate reports from their own Imp records, Uzbek and Pastruma were the only ones left at the scene, with just Peters' bloodstains and the tablet containing his final packet history to indicate what had happened.

Uzbek was rerunning the surgical simulation over and over, compulsively fleshing it out with details, trying to meditate through work instead of thinking about his coworker's fate. A cursory check of the knowledge ocean showed a gap here; his simulation, supplemented by a live enactment, was one of very few documented cases of non-surgical Imp removal. Perversely, he found some satisfaction that this gory detail would add to the ocean. In fact, it may be the most valuable data he would ever add. Meanwhile, Pastruma was scrolling through the tablet, glancing at glyphs on the screen so his own Imp could tell him the full contents of the packet directly. He went through several hundred in a few minutes, until he had finally seen enough. He used his doctor's credentials to gain deeper access to more intimate information from Peters' implant, and analyzed that too.

Finally, when it was Uzbek-19:30, Pastruma spoke aloud, forgoing the Imp, perhaps in unconscious respect for the dead.

“Such a confusing case, to be sure.” He said, “I cannot find any way to explain why he was so distraught.”

Uzbek glanced at Pastruma. He had been working without a Fold. Without the display to supplement the Imp’s messages, it was slower work and demanded more imagination, so he was slow to re-focus on reality. When he did, he realized how exhausted he was. How much he wanted to abandoned this bad day and go home.

Pastruma had plenty of energy, this being his morning. So he continued, “Neither Peters nor his Imp were malfunctioning. He had no signs of scizophrenia, nor hallucinations, nor delusions. And his Imp had no observable glitches nor malfunctions.”

“But he was clearly distressed.” Uzbek said, trying to be dismissive so he could leave.

“That is what confuses me. There is one part of a possible explanation, but it does not make any sense. My theory is that Peters was so unused to intrusive thoughts that he both could not accept their reality, but could also not believe that they were fleeting fantasies.” He continued, “It seems that his own mind was split in two. One side that had to accept the intrusive thought on its face, and was able to do so because, of course, how could it tell a dream apart from the Imp? And the other side could not accept the thoughts at all because, of course, how could the Imp present something so obscene? Did you see any of the visions that he had?”

Uzbek shook his head.

“In truth, they were none too terrible. Most no worse than old smut stories, from when most were written by hand. But he just couldn’t accept that they came from his mind. I believe that idea, that they were his own, never even crossed his mind. So, he was stuck thinking that they must come from his Imp and also that he could not accept them from his Imp.”

Uzbek spoke, almost unwillingly curious, “I do not understand. How could he be so aggravated if… if it all came from his mind?”

“Perhaps, at a time, you wonder, 'what if I jumped off this high place?’ This is perfectly natural. In a deterministic computer, this is called ‘speculative execution’, and it allows the mind a short sprint to see if the finish line is worth crossing. Then the mind realizes that jumping off the ledge will kill it and none of its goals will be fulfilled, and it returns to present and walks you away from the edge. Have you ever had such a thought? Is that what Peters referred to, with your wife?” He received an instinctive acknowledgement from Uzbek’s Imp and continued, “Our partners bring out strange and powerful thoughts some times. Just wait until you have children. All the mothers of history have been horrified to catch themselves wondering what would happen if they drowned their babies, and fathers wonder what would happen if they left their families behind. And in many of them this causes great distress. But in those old times, the thoughts could only come from the mind, so these victims had to confront the true source of their evil daydream. Either they thought themselves evil for having it, and sometimes used this to justify their evil, to bolster an evil and guiltless identity. Or they saw it as a weakness, a personal failing that they needed to overcome. After all, a good mother would never imagine drowning her baby.”

Doctor Pastruma continued before Uzbek could repeat his question or leave, “But Peters, perhaps as uniquely as one can be among a trillion people, did not know this had happened to him. Perhaps he truly did have a porn addition before, and I know that problem has exploded to pandemic proportions among young men with Imps, and perhaps that fueled his condition. But regardless, at some point, he began to suffer from such intrusive thoughts. Crucially, however, he assigned them to the Imp. Because he had this other agent with access to his mind, he was never forced to realize that he was the source, and therefore never had a way to plug that source.

“That is why he deteriorated so violently. He lost himself, fighting a demon that was not his enemy.”

They both looked at the crimson residue that fight had left behind. With a thought to his Imp, the doctor summoned a cleaner to remove that residue.

Much Ajar for Nothing

Morning spread though the Vert, designation Clairetown (294-A-800820), starting at 7:00 ± minutes(rand(0,15)). In Clairetown, this occurred on a 24 hour cycle, a quaint holdover that was excused by the Executive (Justification Code: Old Blood).

Gradually, the superstructure migrated from night behavior to day behavior, one module state at a time. Starting in the east and creeping west, lighting brightened up to average 30k lumen, then transitioned to 7000K light temperature. Life support systems raised air temperature and acceptable noise levels. Street scrubbers scurried back to their charging pads as deliverers took the air, carefully avoiding drop-lines that hung from the ceiling, two thousand feet above. And humans went through their own boot-up sequences, with varying degrees of success.

Trojeus was not one of them. Increasing levels of light and sound stimulation did not rouse him until, falling back to extreme measures, he was startled awake by small pulse from his neural implant, his Imp.

“What the hell?!” He spat as he sat bolt-upright. And along the same micro-filaments that sent the wake-up call, he got the next packet, “7:41?!”

Trojeus rolled out of bed and dressed in a flurry, fed information about his day through his Imp, even if his attention was dominated by the fear of being late to work again. It did not matter if he consciously encoded this information, but it was his preference to almost hear it. As easily as he could remember his multiplication tables, he could also know the traffic on the way to work, the exact same traffic the Vert saw on every other working day, and the same traffic that always took 22 minutes to traverse, with a standard deviation of 3 minutes. Damn, he would never make that. His Imp was already informing him of more expedient options, until he finally interfaced with it directly, as he grabbed a breakfast roll.

“Equite, can I get to work before 8?” Trojeus thought to it.

“There is a slim chance you will be able to. But do not be so stressed, you are unlikely to-“ Equite the Imp started.

“I’m trying to make good with the boss! I can’t be late again!” he shot back.

“Then your best chance is to leave immediately. Would you like me to summon a private deliverer? [This] is the cost estimate. Also, do not forget-“

“Yeah, call it, bring it now. And also add more breakfast rolls to my next delivery day.”

“Of course. I have ordered the flavor you like. Now, do not forget-“ it started.

“Has Katsuta checked my desk yet? Is he going to?” He asked as he almost put his jacket on backwards.

“I cannot disclose that. Do not-“

“Has any motion been detected at or near my workstation? Has the motion sensor in the haptic screwdriver connected to my account been tripped? No, wait, tell me the maximum accel reading it’s experienced since midnight, and tell me if this corresponds to nearby footsteps.” He asked. Because he was not a Young Person, it was odd to ‘talk’ to the implant with a roll hanging out of his mouth. He wasn’t vocalizing anything, but interfacing with the implant still required just enough vocal stimulation to make his lips twitch.

“Are you trying to indirectly spy on your supervisor through unconventional means?” it asked.

“No.” He lied through his skull. It was hard to lie to a machine plugged directly into his brain, but the implants had supposed imposed limits. Total Heavy Industries was probably lying about how much they nerfed their devices. In addition to the Imp, the super-corp that made his apartment building, the Vert itself and the planet it was installed in, everything in sight except the roll, but at least the god-company had the decency to pretend it did not listen to his ‘real’ thoughts.

After all, who in their right mind would put something in their head that they couldn’t lie to?

Equite seemed to think about this, and finally replied, “No signals have risen above ambient noise levels since midnight, except for one instance. [This] instance corresponds to the activation of the HVAC system upstairs from your workstation, and is normal. Do not forget to grab-“

“Good, he hasn’t been through yet. How far away is my ride? Also, start playing some kind of relaxing music I’ll like.”

Before the implant could respond, he saw the slick vehicle outside, and practically leapt into it. Finally, for a few minutes, he had a chance to relax. Equite played its generated music directly into his audio-cortex, and was smart enough to realize that he was trying to calm down from a stressful state.

So, in addition to modulating its music to suit the situation, it stopped trying to remind him about what he had forgotten.

11 minutes later, he stepped out of the ride, strode up to the Electronic Rework warehouse’s side entrance and did not grab his badge. Trojeus froze. He tried again, and again failed to grab his badge. He checked his coat pocket, his pants pocket, his lanyard and his coat again, all while the side entrance looked upon him.

“Equite!” he thought, “Where’s my damn badge?”

“You forgot it beside your bed.”

“Get a deliverer to bring it here!”

“Your employee badge is secure material. Deliverers cannot transport it.”

As Trojeus cursed himself, he gave the entrance an awkward wave, and stepped away to debate with his implant, “Then get a secure one to grab it. And why didn’t you remind me?!”

“Secure-transport-rated deliverers are not available for… about an hour. I tried when to remind you upon waking. I did not want to interrupt your music.”

“That is some BS and you know it!” He said with enough emotion that he almost actually said it. Finally, he tried to think rationally again, “What’s the fastest way to get it?”

“To return home and retrieve it by hand.”

Now he did actually speak aloud, “What kind of stone-age cave-man crap is that?! Do you expect me to drive the car myself too?”

“Please calm down. This is not a serious situation.” Equite shot back, really pouring on the contempt.

“You can be a real ass sometimes.” He said.

“I am not in your ass.” It replied.

He threw his hands up in frustration, and span back to the door. There, at the top of the jam, was the camera, centimeter-wave radar and microphone, hidden behind the tamper-proofing enclosure. The Electronic Rework warehouse was not secure enough to justify the cost, expressed as network bandwidth, to include millimeter-wave radar, X-ray or Jeegtronic detection.

“Hey, it’s me, let me in.” He said aloud. A microphone, either one embedded in the door or incidental to the environment caught his words, correlated them to his voice signature, then consulted a secure database that connected this signature with his Imp’s address. The door traced these addresses and established a private channel with him, so that they did not have to talk on public audio channels.

“No.” it said.

“You know me! I’m here every workday!” he sent back, “Equite can vouch for me.”

The door thought. Then responded, “Equite is an assistant of [this] security patch update. [Vouching behavior] is only valid for assistants of [this different] security patch update, published three days ago.”

“Dammit, Equite, get updated!” he said. The difference between interfacing with the door and with Equite was so stark, it felt like he was suddenly talking to himself.

“Updating will take… about half an hour and will disable-“

“Do it anyway.” He thought, “Door, you gotta be able to-… Door? You there?” He had the uncanny feeling that nothing was listening. And he was right. Too late, he thought about Equite again, and got back a ghostly memory, something about all non-essential neural channels being closed while the security patch was applied.

“Dammit.” He thought again.

“Well,” He said aloud, “Door, I was saying, you see me all the time, you have to let me in.”

The door paused before responding. It had received an offline packet from Equite, but still tried to contact Trojeus on more secure channels before falling back to audio. It paused further as symbolic packets had to be translated through its 6B language model to be rendered as speech.

“I cannot confirm identity with only one factor. Present second factor.”

“Uh, I kind of forgot my badge.” Any other day, he would have blamed Equite, but it felt wrong pinning something on the Imp while it was offline.

“Present second factor.” The door repeated.

“Biometrics, here’s my thumb.” He held his thumb up. The door was not equipped to read it, and ignored this gesture.

“I have confirmed biometrics through face recognition as the first factor. Present second factor.”

“Well, what do you want to know? That’s the other one, right?”

The door seemed to think about this. While it was thinking, Fleits arrived and walked right through the door. His badge was scanned through NFC and did not need to be presented. He passed through so fast that Trojeus didn’t notice him until he was gone inside.

“Hey! Fleits didn’t even show you his face! Where was his second factor?” Trojeus whined.

“Gait signature, behavioral patterning and partial facial recognition yielded high confident biometric verification of that employee’s identity. Present second factor.”

“Then ask me a damn question!” He said, throwing his hands up in exasperation.

“Loading.” The door said.

Pathetic, he thought, it’s such a dumb old box that it has to load. And dumber still that it would say so aloud!

Finally, the door continued, “Insufficient data for meaningful question. Unable to construct identity-authentication query.”

“I’m Trojeus!” He yelled, “I come here every single day! You gotta recognize me! I’m always late, I’m the guy that always makes jokes about ‘Haptics being Tactics’, and I always go out to the sandwich place for lunch.”

“I recognize you; first factor confirmed. Response analyzed; all information is publicly accessible, insufficient for second factor. Present second factor.”

Trojeus was so angry, he had to wrestle his coat off to stop from sweating through it.

“Dammit, what other factor do you want?!”

“Present either: Authenticating information or authenticating non-fungible object.”

As Trojeus threw his hands up again. He was going in circles at this point. But now, he saw Smiths approaching, even later than he usually was.

“Smiths! Hey, you get held up to?” He said.

“Yep, almost forgot my badge!” Smiths said, running a nervous hand over his bald scalp, “What a pain that is, you know?”

“Boy, you have no idea.” Torjeus said, sliding in right behind Smiths.

By the time the bald guy turned to ask what in the world he was doing, they were nearly though-

Smack!

The door closed itself between them so abruptly, Smiths was bounced inside and Trojeus caught a painful knock on the kneecap as the door cut him off.

“What the hell was that for?!” He barked as he clutched his leg.

“You have not presented second factor. Entry is not permitted.” The door said.

“Damn box!” He cursed. But, finally, he hobbled away. There was another door, a dumber one, he'd just barge in through there and deal with a human security feature instead.

It was locked.

“This- dammit, this door is never locked!” He growled, yanking on it in vain. He stormed away, heard a click, and turned in time to see Fleits close it behind him.

“Fleits!” He called, “Can you open that for me?”

“Oh yeah, let- Oh, it’s locked already.” Fleits replied, yanking on the handle.

“Just badge in, and I’ll trail you. Forgot my badge today.”

“Ooh, that sucks. Huh.” He pulled his badge out and tapped it against the scanner, even though it should have picked up from his pocket. He paused as he got a message through his own Imp, “Uh… it’s saying you have to step back.”

“What?!”

“I don’t know man, it doesn’t want you this close… It says you’re trying to gain unauthorized access.”

“Damn box!” Trojeus swore, “Well, just leave it open. I’ll stand over here, and just-“, He stopped as he saw Fleits shaking his head, “It’s telling you not to do that, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“Well screw it! It’s just a door, just ignore it!”

Fleits crossed his arms nervously, glancing between Trojeus and the door, “I don’t know man, it doesn’t like that idea.”

“It’s a damn door.”

“It’s part of security.”

“Yeah, I know. Tell you what, just take me straight to the security office, and I’ll sort this out with them. But first, let’s get me inside.”

That calmed Fleits nerves, and he finally returned to the door. Trojeus took a few steps away. Fleits yanked on the handle again, and again it failed to open.

“Don’t tell me…” Trojeus started.

“It heard the plan.” Fleits confirmed.

“Screw this, just take care of your stuff, I’m taking this up with the big door again. I’m going to give that box a piece of my mind!”

As soon as he said it, the lock clicked again. Fleits cracked the door open, Trojeus span on his heel, Fleits slipped inside, Trojeus leapt for the opening, and Fleits slammed it shut just before he could get his hand on the door.

“Traitor!” he shouted through the door.

“Sorry man, the door told me it was a security violation!” Fleits called back.

“You plotted with it! You planned this!”

“I can’t hear you!” He replied, and Trojeus could hear his voice fading into the depths of the building.

“Bastard! You damn glitchy box!” He slammed a fist into the door for emphasis, then went back to the original door, the smart one, the one he could reason with. Or at least talk to.

“What the hell was that?” He demanded.

The door did not respond.

“What would it take to let me inside?”

“Present second factor.”

“I know that! I mean, what if I cut your network access? Killed your power? Pried you open?”

“If destructive methods of intrusion are detected, this system will summon more security agents with greater agency to defend this system.”

“Human security agents?”

“No.”

“Then call a human security agent!”

The door thought about this. Or maybe it was summoning a human, or perhaps even a robot to deal with him.

Finally it responded, “No. You have demonstrated a pattern of manipulating human agents. Would you like me to summon… a secure, non-human agent?”

“No! That will be just as metal-headed as you!”

He regretted saying it as soon as he said it, but either this door was less sensitive than Equite, or better at de-issuing human abuses.

Trojeus paced in front of the door now. All the obvious avenues were exhausted, and somehow he was losing. But he’d be damned if a simple door forced him to go back home for this! In fact, even if Equite came back online now, he wouldn’t think of using it. This was a battle of man and machine now.

He saw Plethaux approaching. The other man spotted him too late, and Trojeus called out before Plethaux could turn away.

“Pleth! Hey, Pleth! You gotta help me, this thing isn’t letting me inside.”

“Troj, Fleits told me about this, just go home and get your badge.”

Trojeus was half leading, half hauling him out of the door’s sight, “Listen, as long as this works, it won’t be an issue. I need you to smuggle me inside.”

“… I don’t know man, that seems pretty-“

“Don’t worry about it. The door already thinks I’m manipulative or something, if it catches on, and that’s a big ‘if’, then it will just assume I tricked you and that you did nothing wrong.”

Plethaux looked around, concerned, or maybe looking for someone to get him out of here, but he was alone with Trojeus. The only thing that could have seen them was the door, but Torjeus had made sure they were behind a storage crate waiting for the freight door to open.

“Don’t talk to it!” Trojeus snapped, as he saw Plethaux’s lips start moving, “Come on, who do you trust, me or some dumb box?”

“Well, you’ve been kind of-“

“I’m a human, dammit! You gotta trust a human, right?”

“Well…”

“Here,” Trojeus held up his coat, “I’ll grab you, and drape this over myself, so the box will think we’re just one big dude. Trust me, these things are smart, but they can be even dumber than smart.”

Before Plethaux could protest, Trojeus did just that, hunching and hugging, with his jacket over him. Plethaux tried vainly to push him off, but Trojeus just hissed, “Move it, it won’t suspect a thing!”

Defeated, and a bit terminally curious, Plethaux lead them back to the door. Just in time, Trojeus remembered to adjust his gate, hopefully enough to keep the machine from recognizing him. As they approached, the door spoke, oddly choosing the audio channel to begin with, “Present second factor.”

Torjeus was about to give up the gambit right there, until he realized it was talking to Plethaux.

“Uh, what? I- here’s my face.” Plethaux said.

“Facial recognition confirmed. Gait recognition delta-Tau exceeds normalcy margins, biometrics rejected.”

“No, I’m walking normally. Same as I always walk.” Plethaux said.

“You are walking normally.” It said, because a 6B language model was very poor at disagreeing. But that was only the language model; the adversary engine was not fooled, “Gate recognition delta-Tau exceeds normalcy margins, biometrics rejected.” The door repeated.

“What’s that supposed to mean? This is how I always walk!” Now it sounded like Plethaux was getting as frustrated as Trojeus.

“Gait recognition rejected because you have… four legs. Standard leg number is… two. Standard deviation of… one.”

Trying to keep the coat from sliding off, Trojeus carefully executed his next maneuver. He locked his grip around Plethaux’s shoulders, shifted his weight, and slowly lifted his legs. It was a painful, awkward position, and he felt the man’s muscles straining to carry them both, but at this point they were too far gone to back out for fear or weakness.

“What about now? You must have just been seeing things. I only have two legs.” Plethaux said, his voice straining to stay normal.

The door thought, its thoughts seeming far slower than before as both men tried to stay their ground.

“Explain this anomalous behavior. Suspicion index is non-zero.”

“It was a trick of the light. Come on, I need to get back to the office.” Plethaux groaned and braced himself against the wall.

“You appear stressed. An unknown agent acting as Trojeus was trying to gain access to the building. Further verification is required to ensure you are not under duress. Stand by.” It finally said.

“I’m not under duress!” Plethaux shot back, “I just need- I just need to get into the office, or I’ll be late for a meeting.”

There was no wait this time, “You do not have an immediate meeting. Suspicion-“

“It’s with my mistress!”

This gave the door pause. Trojeus too. Was this why Plethaux kept leaving the office before lunch?

“Disclose the mistress’ identity to confirm.”

“That’s private information.”

“The mistress’ identity is private information.” The door paused, long enough for the men to realized the jig really was up this time, “Mrs. Information is not expected to meet with Supervisor Katsuta today.”

He was so shocked, he had nothing to say before the door spoke again, “Semantic and Abstract Ascension analysis has determined you are trying to carry an unknown person onto the premises. Entry denied.”

Finally, Plethaux hit his limit. He pulled Trojeus’ arms off his shoulders, “Nope! I’m out!” he cried, and scurried off to get in through another door.

“Dammit!” Trojeus hissed as he landed on his tailbone, rolling on the cement in front of the door, “Dude! We almost-“ But Plethaux was already gone.

“What is your problem!?” He shouted at the door, lacking anyone else.

“You.” It said.

He got to his feet, “At least you know who I am now. Box bastard.”

The door stared down at him, image-solving his skeleton as he slowly pushed himself up and stood, shoulders slouched, arms hanging, to stare up at it. Emotion recognition modules and behavior prediction gave aligned outputs; the unknown human was continuing to behave as expected. It was defeated. The box’s adversary engine was well optimized to recognize this state, as it was the desired state for every subject that interacted with the security system. All permitted persons were best kept in a ‘passive’ and ‘incurious’ state, so that they trusted the system and had no interest in tricking it. And unpermitted persons were best kept ‘defeated’, unwilling to even challenge the system’s control. If the machine had modules for mirror-neuron emulation, for empathy, it may understand how distraught Trojeus was as his last great trick was defeated. And defeated by both the machine’s unyielding demands and a man’s weak will. His efforts alone had failed, his efforts to find weakness had failed, and even bringing in another person, one he tried to trust, had ended with humiliation. But the box didn’t need to understand the emotional state of its adversaries, only know if such a state would lead to attempted subversion, or if they were put in their place. In the next cycle, it checked that predicted and observed emotional states were still aligned.

They were not. They had diverged. The machine was looking at an unexpected response from the unknown person. The response was an expression of surprise and realization. The door corrected its projected behaviors from the human, then adjusted its responding behaviors, and began running epochs of adjustment so that the human behavior and its own behavior would converge on an outcome that would preserve the security of the premises. But this took time, and the human was still acting, and changing its emotive state, so the door had to respond to each development.

Finally, the unknown person left the door. Object recognition tracked his bounding box projected onto its understanding of the environment. If it had a more expensive abstraction ascent module, it would have adjusted its models to account for the fact that the human did not leave in the direction it had arrived from. But, with the hardware and software it had access to, the door determined he was not approaching a known vulnerability, such as the other door, so it did not make note of this, nor pass this message up to the server that coordinated the Electronics Rework warehouse security detail.

After he was gone, the door finally arrived at a branching graph of behaviors that was very likely to converge on preserved security. It was a simple network of actions and reactions: if the human claiming to be Trojeus did not present a second factor, it would summon secure resources to extract him from the facility. It had already sent a message to Trojeus’ employee account, notifying him of attempted identity theft, and it would update him again when the threat was removed.

Some time later, motion was detected. An unknown object came into the field of view. Strictly speaking, it was not unknown; there was a 21.9% chance it was a ground deliverer, a 19.4% chance it was a cardboard box, a 14.2% chance it was a small animal, and the rest of the keyed list of object classification probabilities. But, with these probabilities being so low, and with no clear peak probability, the door was as close to confused as it could be. Then the object, with the halting, rocking motion of a broken robot, rotated itself and faced the door. The door sent a series of communications to the box over near-field radios, as it did not see any universal fiducials or QR codes to communicate its network address, yet the box did not respond. The door attempted to contact the box on near-field audio channels, but this action was blocked by its own security overseer module, as it would risk broadcasting secure information over a public channel.

“Identify yourself.” It finally said, falling back to speech channels.

For some time, the two regarded each other, apparently in a stalemate, with the door considering the box, and the box sitting in front of the door. With its limited abstraction ascent module, the door tried to solve out this odd circumstance. This box was likely a deliverer, based on its shape and motion. And it was likely damaged, which may be why it moved and looked so odd. So, the door down-selected two descriptions of what was happening; this deliverer was here to be repaired, or had arrived in error, after the damage it sustained caused malfunction. In either case, there was no security-

The door opened as someone left the building, and Trojeus leapt out from under the box so fast that they nearly toppled over to get out of his way. For the milliseconds between recognizing Trojeus and his entry beyond the portal, the door was blocked by this other person, and the door could not safely slam him out again.

“Gotcha! Take that you damn machine! Can’t even tell what a box is? This is one small step for-“

“Torjeus? What the hell are you doing?! You were supposed to be at your desk half an hour ago!”

Torjeus looked up into the red, sweaty face of Supervisor Katsuta.

“I-“

“Intruder detected!” The box blared, repeating the signal across audio and radio channels, “There is an unidentified human inside the facility!”

With a glance and a thought, Supervisor Katsuta shut the box up, though Torjeus suspected that, at this point, even his boss’ override wouldn’t convince the box he was supposed to be here. And maybe he shouldn’t be, given how the big man was glaring at him.

“And what the hell did you do to Plethaux? The man was ranting about you turning him into some kind of- some kind of- some kind of sock puppet! And this!” He kicked the box out of the doorway, “Are you some kid crawling into work? You got some dolls? You going to show up with a unicycle tomorrow?! What do you have to say for yourself?!”

Trojeus felt like his stomach was still in the box. Now would be a great time for the door to slam in his face.

“I- uh, I- I forgot… I forgot my badge at home…” He managed.

“And you figured it waws better to pen-test our security system than go back home and get it?”

“Yeah! I just figured-“

“That’s not your job! Your job is to be at that desk at 8:00, fixing whatever I tell you to fix! Not to break our expensive security systems like some kind of cybersecurity cowboy! Now you better run home, get your damn badge, and just hope it’s still attached to a current employee when you get back here!” Katsuta practically shoved Torjeus back out of the door, leaving the employee glancing between him and the sensor cluster, now staring passively, smugly down at him.

“But if I leave now…” He glanced up at that damn box one more time, “I’ll miss my appointment with Private Information.”

Slowly, Katsuta’s deadly glare shifted from him to the sensor cluster over the door jam, “What the hell do you not understand about ‘Private Information’?!” He shot daggers at Trojeus, “Get the hell out of here. And no one hears a word about this, you understand?”

“So, I’m not fired?”

“Get back here in 20 minutes or you might be!” Katsuta spat, and slammed the door.

Through the barrier, Trojeus still heard the man berating the machine, “If this happens one more time I’m gonna sell you for scrap!”

Technical Failure in Debt Collection

The Armored Articulated Recon and Anti-Vehicle Force Projection Platform, known among the troops as an A-RAV, weighed nearly one hundred tons, and was festooned with hydraulic systems, radar systems, armor systems and comms systems, yet its air conditioning system was nearly absent. So, when it spent two hours in the exhaust stream of a dropship, the interior, where Kune Latras was cracking his knuckles and drumming his fingers, got far too warm. But, despite the heat, the cockpit was a familiar and comfortable place for Kune. It was where he could do what he lived for. His leg bounced frantically on the vehicle's color-coded command pedals, his fingers played nervously along the switches and lights before him. In this compact cell, big enough only for his body, the jumpsuit he wore, and enough open space to crane his head and wrists over the controls, Kune awaited his release with vibratory anticipation. The jungle-like atmosphere glowed with light spilling from the A-RAV's display. It was getting hot in here.

He could feel it, they were getting close. Two fingers coiled around a ring on the wall and pulled it down a vertical slot, bringing the AR-helmet down to his scalp. He smiled as its familiar, almost flirty, ECG probs massaged themselves into place under his coarse black hair. They buzzed with mechanical vibration and electromagnetic waves that stimulated instinctive reaction centers in his brain. Simultaneously, the visor closed against his high cheekbones, and lit up with a video feed constructed from a constellation of cameras scattered around the hull of the A-RAV. He could see through two inches of steel plate as well as God could see the children of Adam.

Above him was the gun-metal hull of his dropshop, piloted by a guy he knew as Sammy. Sammy was a shitty pilot. He was barely passable in training, but when he flew into real battle, he'd drop A-RAV as far out of the AO as possible so he could avoid flak on his way back to maternal safety of the capitol ship hanger. He also spoke to his passengers with a snivling, pouty tone that sounded more like a child that was scared of mommy than a pilot of Mitochondria's proud Asset Acquisition Committee. But shit pilots didn't matter once the carry hooks disengaged.

Those damn hooks better disengage soon.

Beside Kune's A-RAV was Killian's, then Pat-sui's, then Arbadah's. Three decent pilots, but he owed Pat-sui twenty Acals, so she'd hopefully bite the dust before the mission was over. Also, she was a bitch that hated him, so the feeling was doubled and mutual. Kune snarled at her A-RAV. It was indistinguishable from the others, not even marked with war paint or a unit number. In this unit, 'Interchangeable parts' was the holy gospel. No decorations or personalizations. And, the most cardinal sin, no modifications. But he still knew which one was hers because the way it rattled against its carry hook pissed him off.

They'd all bet that Arvin would die in the last mission they ran, which he did, since he was a moron. But Pat-sui had bet double or nothing that he'd die to system failure. Arvin was an idiot, but he was the only one besides Kune that did his own maintenance, and he protested loudly when she made her bet, complaining that she was picking on him for being tall. Kune joined in and called her an asshole for calling Arvin out like that, because she was calling him out by proxy. Then he ate his words when that retard had managed to over-heat his ankle drivers, melting the CAN bus on his right foreleg, which pitched him right into a ravine. System failure, just as Pat-sui had prophesied.

Kune subconsciously swiped the micro-pixel monitor next to his thigh, a gesture which temporarily let him see through his helmet to observe the instruments in his cockpit. He wanted to check joint driver status in all legs. All cool. He wouldn't go down like Arvin.

He scratched a finger on his visor; one of the ECG probes in his helmet mirrored the movement to scratch his nose. He was getting impatient! When was Sammy going to turn them loose? The sound of turbulence began to thump through the A-RAV's armored hull as they dipped close enough to the ground to avoid the cheaper kinds of radar surveillance. That only made the anticipation worse, the ground so close. Kune licked his lips and wrapped his hands around the primary drive sticks.

Any second now.

"-roaching drop zone Ecog. Pilots prepare for departure. Ack." Sammy's voice said in his ear.

"Ack-A." Kune said.

There was a long pause as the team's replacement for Arvin realized it was his turn. "Ack-B." Killian squeaked.

"Act-C." Pat-sui said. Her accent grated on Kune's nerves; she even managed to mispronounce common radio commands.

"Ack-D." Arbadah said, with the emphasis of a man asking for a drink.

"Acknowledge." Sammy said, "Drop in 10."

"Killian, don't skrew 'tis up." Pat-Sui said.

"Channel quiet." Kune said.

"Someone's eager to get their payout, aren't they?" Arbadah taunted.

"Don't worry Pat, I got great scores on the pre-amp test." Killian's boyish voice said, just a little too shrill.

"Channel quiet!" Kune barked. Damn, was it really still three seconds to the drop?! His leg was bouncing so bad his A-RAV started running in place as it hung from the belly of Sammy's dropship.

ClunkBANG!

Freefall.

Kune howled as his quadruped disengaged thirty feet above the ground. His stomach jumped into his throat, then slammed down as he landed in a wide stance. In a flash he snapped up the auto-impact switch, snapped down the manual ambulation switch and slammed both control sticks forward. The A-RAV galloped forward, reaching seventy miles an hour in a matter of seconds. Acquirable targets blinked into existence on his primary display. He looked out through the camera constellation to see enemy light armored vehicles bouncing along the crater-splattered battlefield.

Prey.

A half trigger pull adapted his right stick to cannon control. The 4 inch diameter twin barrels were unlocked from the underbelly, shifted forward on their damping piston, and swiveled around the thorax of the A-RAV to rest at the dorsal firing position.

Left stick directed him after the fleeing vehicle at breakneck speed, the A-RAV's terrain navigation engine automatically placing his feet to maintain footing even as it careened over trenches and between trees. The truck had no such systems and its suspension was slammed in every direction as it tried to get away from Kune's quadruped mecha.

He cranked the trigger home. He felt the auto-cannon's blast thump through his ribcage as both barrels fired into the fleeing truck. A hundred yards away, it detonated with a concussion that made rain spontaneously form out of the humid air.

Kune halted his gallop, carving deep divots as four claw feet dug into the muddy ground, pivoted his abdomen and cranked off three more shots before he'd come to rest. Three more light transports erupted into flames as his high-velocity HE rounds tore through their plates like tissue.

"Kune! Kune! Act!" Pat-Sui was shouting into the radio.

"Ack-A" he barked, still blasting away with his twin cannons.

"Get with te' prokram! What te' hell are you doink out 'tere?"

He didn't reply immediately as he let go of the sticks and started switching controls and feeding coordinates into the nav computer. Auto-nav. Ambulation on light. Throttle to 50. Towards mission waypoint 1. Defense radar target acquisition was fed straight to cannon target-fire routine.

The A-RAV set out at a light trot back towards his team, running much quieter than his frenzied sprint upon landing. Now that motion was handled by the computer, Kune scanned his telemetry readings.

"I was exerting the system to generate field diagnostic data, Unit C." He said, sure not to say her name, "Unit B, carry contiguous squad to rally point 1." In hindsight, it sounded nice to acknowledge that she existed, but to give command to Killiam. And what a perfect microcosm to illustrate why. Arvin would have never questioned him less than a minute into a mission over something as simple as blasting light transports.

There was a low chime as the radar picked up a target. Then a whirr as the cannons swiveled towards it, then a thump as the target was erased. He hardly noticed; he was scanning the data he'd collected from his spree.

All temps within the expected window, lubricant pressure high, battery voltage hardly dipped as the cannon activated. Perfect. But he did reach behind his seat and tweak the coolant flow into the forelegs, just in case. He'd also opened up the trimmer valve to let more coolant flow through them. Interchangeable parts may be the axiom they were supposed to live by, but Kune would never trust his life to the default calibration and settings imposed by the maintenance crews.

While the system was configured for auto-pilot, he took a moment to look at the mission map. Four letters for him and his team. Blips with numerical tags for known enemy equipment. And a nice big star to call out their objective.

The star was hardly necessary; the planet's U-net node was tall enough to be visible from space, and was the single most obvious feature on the horizon for a hundred miles around. As long as that space needle was online, the locals could call for reinforcements, buy food, surf the web, and learn how to oppose whatever Asset Acquisition Systems Mitochondria sent their way. Even now, the eggheads upstairs were spending millions of Acals an hour to scramble the connection space-side so these people couldn't find out how to hack his precious A-RAV. Best estimates said his team had four hours before the locals dug up some obscure bug or virus that could disable his team. Well, that was the lingo. Really, he had four hours before the top brass stopped spending money to keep the internet offline. For a colony like this, Total took bribes by the hour. He had until then to upload Mitochondria's seizure program, or else the locals could, potentially, turn his own vehicle against him.

Not that he cared. These animals could throw all the intel in the Galaxy at him and it wouldn't matter, since he had an Ace card. He snaked a hand under his seat and through a hole he had cut through a key-locked access panel. He gently wrapped a finger around the power line to his decryption amp. Every signal his A-RAV received would be pumped through this black box; everything from software updates and real-time position data to radio feeds and mission updates. Interchangeable parts be damned; this mod meant that, with one tug, he could shut out the whole world. Of course, that meant he couldn't rely on the cloud-computers that handled all his autonomous functions, but those were luxuries he could cast aside for a few hours. He was the best A-RAV pilot in Mito, the Bastard of the Core. He could drive it 'by the stick' until the mission was over.

He consciously hoped it would never be necessary, of course. But at night, or when Pat-sui pissed him off, it was always tempting. He brought his hand back up to the control cluster and flicked off auto-nav and re-tuned his drivers for the high-speed, unstable balance that better suited agile combat. Instantly, as each toggle clacked home, his A-RAV's gait changed. Its bounding gallop was less graceful, its stance widened. Its center of gravity swang through each bound, jostling the pilot inside its belly.

"Unit B, return command." Kune said.

Units B, C and D appeared on his monitor. He assigned the follow relationship and grabbed the control sticks, leading the four vehicles as one. Each was barely visible to the others as they fanned out hundreds of yards away across the battlefield, but they are more closely coordinated than a pack of wolves. Kune's radar pinged another light transport, probably the last one within ten miles of the front line. He locked the stick forward and prodded the icon on his screen. With the target designated, Arbadah's A-RAV determined it was closest. His cannon armed, locked, and obliterated the fleeing vehicle seconds later, without pilot input. But the cannon did not return to it's dormant position; the transport may have been evacuating wounded, or it may have been deploying field infrastructure for a defense drone. The system stayed alert, ready for rapid follow-up. Kune dialed his radar frequency to expand the area of effective scan.

No new pings.

It seemed they were alone on the battleground. Twenty hours ago, a pitched battle had turned this farmland into a bullseye-shaped swamp that wrapped around the U-net node for thirty miles in every direction. They moved through abandoned mortar nests and past burning auto-turrets. Drone chassis and corpses were sinking through the mud, occasionally squishing under his metal claws. Of course, none of them were Mitochondria assets. Just as none of the drones overhead were theirs. Kune's employer hadn't been part of this war twenty hours ago. They were just here to abduct the survivors, an operation that would be less profitable if those survivors had a working U-Node they could use to gather intel.

Despite winning the assault from their neighbors, the city that lived in the shadow of the node was too cash-poor to defend themselves from Mito. And too hated by the rest of this planet to request defenses.

Or maybe not?

"Tis is C, long skan showts hostiles." Pat-sui said.

"Ack." He said, bringing up the output from her scan. Apparently, he'd been correct to assume that the last transport wasn't running a suicide mission just to recover bodies. It had dropped off a micro seismograph so that some new enemy could locate them based on their vibration signatures. The graph was passive, too small for their sensors to pick out, but it sure knew about them. 2 blips were entering their radar range; T-Epsilon ATTOs, more affectionately known as 'Scrubbers', named for the cleansing effect of their twin 40mm, 13 barrel gatling guns. They could also hit Mach 5 in this planet's atmosphere, so the A-RAV's had four seconds before the scrubbers opened fire. Any other day, these four seconds would be a scramble to disperse even more, but Mito’s recon division had dug up some useful intel for once; the key flaw of the Scrubber design was that one pass could only rip dirt for five hundred yards before the plane passed out of range. Since they were already spread more than five hundred yards apart, he was able to prepare instead by loading a return-fire routine. How lucky they were that Mito's Intel department had let them in on this secret, Kune thought sarcastically. Two V's zipped silently overhead, wings swept forward and nose-cones as sharp as surgical needles. Two seconds later the ground exploded like det-chord as the rounds struck followed in lock-step by the hornet-swarm 90 decibel white noise of their miniguns and sonic booms.

"Unit D Hit." Arbadah said, as calmly as ever over his cannons' thump-thump, one-two, one-two, like a heartbeat, "Fire returned, no joy."

Of course 'no joy'; hitting a scrubber with an auto-cannon was like hitting fruit-fly with a spitball; they could dodge a direct hit at point-blank. Kune ground his teeth as he swiped up a list of squad-configuration presets on his monitor. They only had fifteen seconds before the scrubbers could cycle back for another pass, another 'secret' performance characteristic to exploit.

________________________________________

Airman Halberd chewed his rubber mouth guard as he nudged the textured control stick with his bare fingertips. The muted howl of supersonic wind attenuated as his scrubber swang through the turn. Only fifteen seconds to cool barrels and reorient for the next pass; with any luck those quads wouldn't expect him to be back soon soon, and get caught with their guns cold. Even though his turning radius was over a mile across, the centripetal force was squeezing blood out of his head like orange juice. His nose was freezing and his legs were leaden.

"Omega-2 calling, we have joy." His partner, Airman Flamberg, said over the radio. Through encryption, compression, noise filtration and a pack of cigarettes every day, the older man sounded like an ocean wave with a voice.

Halberd tried to reply, but just ended up swallowing his words and a mouthful of vomit. And then they were out of the turn, thank the gods.

He looked down to where the control cluster had been for all two weeks of his Scrubber training, but instead he just saw the helmet-interior display. Dammit. Where were his controls? What was the point of the training rig if they didn't put the fucking helmet in it? Where were his fucking controls?! He needed controls! He swallowed the spit pooling in his mouth-guard as he found the switches he needed to re-arm the gatlings. Thank the gods!

Instead of his cockpit, all Halberd saw were mission objectives and instrument read-outs, more like a videogame than a war-machine. Still drunk on G-force, his mind latched onto that nostalgia, reeling with the old comfort of virtual worlds, where the war was over when he dropped the controller, and where he wasn't fighting for his life against the other cities, or Mitochondria, or whoever it was today.

"Omega-3 receive, snap out of it." Flamberg said.

He saw the orange enemy diamonds zipping up the display. Three of them were spread out and moving laterally to minimize the effect of his mini-gun fire. His trainer had mentioned that he was supposed to increase the lateral spread trimmer to counter this, but he didn't have time to remember how to do that, even if it was as simple as flipping one switch on his control cluster. He just chose a diamond at random, felt the buzz as his computer confirmed lock, and squeezed the trigger.

The recoil was like opening an airbrake and he would have slammed into the controls if his harness didn't preemptively harden to hold him in place. But he wasn't the only one firing; he saw a flash, then a fourth diamond appeared as the disabled A-RAV returned fire. Shit! Why wasn't the sonar-?!

BEEP.

The harness felt like steel bands as it ratcheted down on all his limbs at the same time as an explosive evasion charge detonated under his right wing, throwing the jet out of the way of a auto-cannon round from below. He felt pinpricks on his neck as the jet pumped Non-Naesu into his system to keep him from puking in his helmet. Maybe it would keep him conscious through the G's, but he was conditioned for that? Was he? The G-force meter spiked to 9.4.

BEEP.

Instantaneously, another evasion charge was dispelled, to his rear, intentionally knocking the scrubber into a vicious eccentric tailspin just before another auto-cannon round screamed through his flight-path. Halberd tried to grab the security straps scattered around the cockpit, but the sleeves of his flight-suit were rigid to prevent his limbs from snapping during this superhuman maneuver. G-force 16.5. The world collapsed into a mote, then blackness as Halberd went unconscious.

BEEP.

He never felt the third charge as it flipped the jet into a completely chaotic tumble, missing the third auto-cannon round by such a narrow margin that its pressure waves rattled the scrubber's landing gear cover. He also didn't see the G-force meter spin wildly across a dozen values in a second as red alarms winked across the control cluster.

"Omega-3! Respond!" Flamberg said, but Halberd didn't respond, "Dammit kid! Respond! Shit! Omega-2 to Omega-1, pulling emergency extract on Omega-3!"

________________________________________

Kune smiled as his squad's fire converged on the tumbling scrubber. The other one was long-gone, but they only needed to snag one of them at a time. This pilot was either a toddler or an idiot; they hadn't even tried to manually evade his salvo.

It was true that scrubbers, with their vectored thrust, evasive detonators and forward swept wings, were so maneuverable that they could dodge a cannon round fired within a quarter mile. They could dodge accelerated rockets, and a good pilot could even dodge guided munitions with a bit of prowess. But, while the first one had a pilot that knew the most basic principles of fire evasion, that being to regain control as soon as possible, the second one had let himself get flipped and flopped by the automated evasion system as the A-RAVs launched rounds carefully aimed to trip the auto-evade. And he was probably out cold right about now, given that his jet was throwing him around like a salad spinner. That's the danger of having a pilot more fragile than the jet.

Sure enough, something triggered the ejection seat. Probably the pilot of the other jet, overriding safety policy. It was a good move; the jet would be lost, but at least his partner would be saved from centrifugal death. And, now that he was floating down under a white parachute, he was a legally protected POW.

Detecting the surrender signal, Kune's A-RAV started turning its cannons away, but they halted as he flipped a switch. Now under manual control, the twin barrels punched out and blasted the descending airman into fine mist. A clean, well earned kill.

Kune licked his lips as he released control again and let his automatic systems take care of the returning, lonely jet. With all their fire focused on him, and now adjusted with auto-evade characteristic frequencies from the first jet, the A-RAVs plucked him out of the sky like an athlete catching a ball. Before the jet's fireball hit the ground, Pat-sui located and destroyed the seismograph.

"Phew! That was, uh, kind of scary!" Killian said.

"Tey ditn't even soot at you." Pat-sui said as her vehicle climbed out of the crater where the seismograph was hidden.

"Speaking of which," Arbadah said, "I've lost most of my Dog's in two legs, and I think my cannon is shot to pieces. Sending diag report. Kune?"

Kune swallowed the automatically generated report in one glance, "Ack. Switch with Killian. New guy, you're the rearguard now. Catch up."

"But-"

Pat-sui had been waiting for this call, "Kune! You ckannot leaf te new kguy behint! Andt it's your fault Unit C ist tamagedt because you kept takingk te controls!" She was so aggravated that her accent descended into a near unintellible crackle and hiss, "Tis shikt ish what kilt Avrin! Switking vekless its-"

Kune muted her channel, abridging a retort about how ignoring 'interchangeable parts' had killed Arvin, "Arbadah, switch units with Killian. We need to keep moving."

The other two were smart enough to follow his orders over their first commandment, but Pat-sui was still spouting off to herself, betrayed by a bouncing waveform next to her designation letter. Arbadah cranked on his field ejection lever, popping off the electrical and hydraulic connections from the back of his jumpsuit and helmet as Killian did the same. Even with their pilots disconnected, their A-RAVs automatically came alongside each other for the transfer. Settled in to their new seats, the sub-computers in each suit loaded the vehicles with the new pilot's preferences and settings. But mechanical adjustments couldn't be made so easily. Kune gave them just enough time to adjust their seats, then slaved the two fully functional units to his own and set them trotting across the battlefield again. Killian limped after, under manual control, but he was soon lost among the blasted trees and bodies.

Finally, Kune let Pat-sui back on the radio.

"Now we are a man shot." She spat. At least she managed to pronounce that properly, Kune thought. Mostly.

"We don't have time to wait around for a broken machine." He said.

"At least havt a pilot wit a machine tey know." She said.

"A-RAV's are exchangeable. We need Arbadah's experience when we get near the node. Interchangeable parts." Kune said.

"Thanks." Arbadah said, "But this kid's machine is practically stock. Not sure how much help I'll be with a fuel ratio still set to 0.02." Kune could practically hear Arbadah shake his head.

"You say tey are extsageable, but you motify yours." Pat-sui said to Kune.

He didn't reply. Over the radio, and in the recordings that Command would be reviewing later, even Killian wouldn’t have confirmed an accusation like that. She was digging for something to throw in his face when they debriefed in front of the brass, something like openly admitting to cutting a hole into his decrypt box. She wanted some gap in his judgement she could blow up, but only after checking that he didn't have a retort for it. Normally, she would just report him for blasting an ejected pilot, but she had slipped up too, and now he could peg her for questioning orders. So she needed to dismantle the order she questioned so that he didn't take her down with him. He hated her politics almost as much as her accent.

When she realized he wouldn't give her any ammo, she went quiet. Around them, as if sprouting from the ground, the ruins of buildings began to thicken into a parody of cityscape. They were nearing the parts of the city that were still livable and therefore better defended. Kune slowed their approach as they started passing buildings that were two and three stories high. It would be unwise to crash into landmines, auto-launchers, or any nasty electromagnetic surprises these dolts thought would stay the squad of A-RAVs. The change in pace also gave him a chance to re-focus on their objective.

It loomed overhead. So tall and straight that it tricked the eye into perceiving a curve that didn't exist. Warning lights blinked up its length, almost like a visualization of the terabytes traveling up and down the nano-tube tower. fourty eight hours ago, it was probably yotabytes, and forty eight before that, it was probably near saturation. Occasionally, a blink was skipped as it was eclipsed by an ever-present maintenance drone. Even in total war, the drone swarm that patrolled the tower was given all the resources it needed to keep the U-node in perfect condition. Because anything less than perfect condition could lead to a collapse. A U-Node collapse, a space-elevator falling to ground, would impart enough kinetic energy to level the city and everything in sight around it. Even a Funny-class Mitochondria battleship didn't carry nukes that powerful.

Made of Total's most perfect developments in material science, the space needle pushed the limits of structural possibility and economic feasibility. A tower like this was the most valuable asset on the planet, after the human population, but destroying it was as easy as missing a single shot with their auto-cannons. A single stray shot would end the career of everyone involved in the mission, including theirs, because they would be atomized by the collapsing tower. Kune had already enforced a no-shot protocol to keep the A-RAV's from shooting towards the tower, but now he adjusted the rules, just to have something to do.

"Long skan showts hostiles." Pat-sui said.

The blips showed up on Kune's display as well, snapping his attention away from the U-Node. As he expected, the approaching hostiles stayed between the squad and the Node; the no-shot zone. Safe from return fire.

"Ack. Fan out south. D stay centered. Cover C." Kune said, "Pincer maneuver-"

"Grounded threat!" Arbadah interrupted.

Their radars hadn't detected the ambush laying in wait, and Arbadah had just stepped into a nest of 98-363's. The six-legged autonomous defense drones sprang out of their dormant mode in an instant, latching onto Arbadah's forelegs with hydraulic pincers. They had no guns and barely any comms, they only existed to disable legged vehicles like theirs. In the quarter second it took for Kune to approve his A-RAV's automatic close fire support, two of the 363's had sliced through Arbadah's left foreleg, completely disabling it. Kune's twin shots were so tight that they ablated the squad logo right of Arbadah's haunch, the shockwave whipping his severed fluid lines into tatters. But they hit true, turning the nearest 363 into swarf, and scoring a collateral on another that absorbed so much energy from the metallic mist that its batteries caught fire inside its torso. But the flaming hexapod simply logged the damage in a status-report, dropped batteries into an incandescent puddle and used energy stored in backup supercapacitors to finish severing Arbadah's right forward tendon. With a crash that would have rattled a pilot even in locked straps, Arbadah's unit slumped forward, crushing the remaining, undamaged 363 into sheet metal.

"Unit B disabled." Arbadah said, "I have a broken leg. My leg, I mean, not the A-RAV's. My hand is pinned. Evac required." As always, he was an icy professional, but the onset of shock put a quaver into his voice

Pat-sui was cursing in her native language as she launched salvo after salvo into the surrounding buildings to root out any more ambushes.

"Unit C! Stop wasting ammo!" Kune shouted. She fired another round, and he mashed a fist into her symbol on his controls. Detecting the ECG spike in tandem with the command, his computer intuited that he was responding to a high-energy action in her A-RAV, and disabled all weapons and ambulation.

Her firing system locked instantly, ejecting an unspent round onto the shattered street with a thud. He had the radio muted before she could react.

In the back of his mind, Kune filed the outburst away for later recollection during debrief. The forefront of his mind was running the numbers. Arbadah disabled. Killian bringing up the rear. Pat-sui ready to question anything he said. He remotely set Pat-sui's unit into a sweeping maneuver to draw and return fire with the incoming aerial attackers while he did the same in the opposite direction. The drones were savvy enough to stay in the no-shot zone, but lateral motion made it impossible for them to keep out of both A-RAVs' firing lines. His fingers programmed and executed the maneuvers, accounting for terrain and syntax with hardly any conscious thought. He double-checked that the A-RAVs still had an active no-shot vector on the tower. Killian was still ten minutes from catching up, but his mission was now to remove the injured pilot from combat. That meant they were down to just him and Pat-sui.

Kune raised an eyebrow as he scanned a radar read-out from Pat-sui's machine and noticed that he had more intel than he thought. The brass had loaded it into his machine during their fight with the Scrubbers. Not accounting for ambushes, it looked like they were would have a difficult path into the heart of the city, but brass had delivered that report when they still had 4 A-RAVs. Well shit, they had just become a 2 unit squad. Or, more precisely, they would be a 2 unit squad once Killian left with Arbadah. Kune licked his lips and grinned as he sucked up the intel. With 2 units, the report estimated a 40% chance of survival. This would be fun, but no amount of fun would make dying worth it. After all, if he died, he wouldn't be able to ride the A-RAV anymore. Could he scrub this mission? Would he still be able to pilot the A-RAV if he abandoned the objective? That also wasn't an acceptable risk. If they had three units, even one injured, the likelihood of success was probably over 50%.

Killian was approaching, and would then have to carry Arbadah out of the fight. Once that happened, the decision would be made for him; it would be down to him and Pat-sui. Shit. Run a suicide mission with that bitch, or risk losing his pilot status?

Outside, the drones had arrived, but they were never meant to take on equipment like his. His and Pat-sui's auto-cannons thinned the skies easily, and crawled over the ground to avoid the worst of the drone-fire.

Kune licked his lips and cracked a knuckle against his helmet. He estimated that he had spent approximately 4 weeks of his life hanging from the bottom of drop ships, waiting for missions to start, and another 54 hours in actual combat. And he'd spent as much of the rest of the time as possible tinkering with his A-RAV with an active disregard for the 'exchangeable parts' doctrine. Most of that tinkering was wiped out when someone else used it, but the lessons he'd learned had stuck around. During that time, he'd found out that he could manipulate almost any data that moved between the vehicles, including the pilot biometrics that A-RAVs broadcasted continuously to other members of their squad. He'd had a sense of humor back then, and had 'killed' a squad-mate to scare the crap out of his CO.

If Arbadah was dead, then Killian wouldn’t have to escort him away, and Kune would have a third, albeit dysfunctional, unit in his squad. They could just come back for Arbadah later.

He logged into his personal files, stored in his jumpsuit, and found the old macro. It took a couple tries to remember what he'd written back then, then another to recall Arbadah's raw network address, then he just had to hit enter.

"Fuckt! Tey kilt Killian!" Patsuit shouted.

"Shit." He forgotten that they'd switched. He corrected the mistake and was gratified by two flat heart monitors on his crew-status display.

Oddly enough, Pat-sui didn't react to that, but he didn't notice as he called over the radio.

"Unit B, Ack." He said, a little shakily as his A-RAV jumped through cover while engaging the flying drones.

"Ack. Something is screwy with the network, I'm fine." The rookie said.

"They killed Arbadah, a bug made it look like you, the transfer did something. Maximize speed, we need support." Kune said, not missing a beat.

Killian responded, "Ack."

But Pat-sui still said nothing.

Finally, her silence peaked his notice. He double checked that he hadn't reflexively muted her. That's when he saw that she wasn't even online.

There was no trace of her.

A deafening BEEP and a hardened harness was the only warning before an auto-cannon round with more kinetic energy than a locomotive engine punched through a dirt berm and most of the way through his flank. A head-sized inverted dent slammed into him from the side of his cockpit, cracking ribs and melting his jumpsuit as it knocked his breath away. If that had been a direct hit, he would be in the same grave as that scrubber pilot.

Still dizzy from the hit, he instinctively launched the sticks forward, narrowly avoiding a follow-up shot, and galloping into deeper cover between two buildings. Auto-cannon rounds pulverized the architecture behind him, but his reaction was faster than she'd expected. Then a stream of smaller caliber rounds rattled on him like hail on a drum as the defense drones laid into him. Their puny guns were meant for lighter armor than his, but nothing was stopping them from getting a lucky hit.

What the hell? Concussion drained away as adrenaline and Go-Juice drugs flooded in, with comprehension washing in close behind. He had over-ridden her controls just a minute earlier, hadn't he? Pat-sui had fucking shot him! Where was she? Hadn't he put her on auto-pilot? That fucker must have had a hardware disconnect for her decrypt box too!

"What's going on?" Killian said, "Pat-Sui just went completely offline!"

"Kill that bitch!" Kune growled, pushing his sticks forward.

"What's going on?!"

Kune gritted his teeth as he ran his vehicle through tight alleys and over rubble. In the pass-through cams he could see her unit crawling after him. But without any kind of auto-nav or external intel she had to maneuver manually. Except that didn't seem to slow her down as much as it should have. There was no way this mutinous bitch was a better pilot than him. He took cannon control into his right hand as he deployed the drive pedals so he could use his left hand and feet to control ambulation. Rubble was crushed underfoot as the vehicles stomped through the destroyed city, soaking up dust and gunfire as they went. Auto-cannon rounds cracked through the air in both directions, all blind shots that missed by feet and inches.

Kune was imagining her process, visualizing the cannon's lock and fire routine, and timing his dodges to narrowly avoid her aimed fire. Around this corner, it would take a moment for her to re-acquire her target, a moment he used to skid across the ground and leap laterally into a municipal pool. Algaed water slapped aside and splattered his thorax, but he was already climbing back out like a buffalo fording a river. Ahead was a mall, to his left the U-Node overlooked the fight.

She hadn't expected his sharp turn, compounding his lead and giving him enough time to clamber inside the mall, blasting the wide doors into detritus. A cannon round ricocheted off a rear pauldron, but none of his systems went offline and he was out of the way of the follow-up. If she was still online, her auto-targeting system would have turned him into a sponge; only her human hand had saved his ass just now. But he still couldn't face her head-on; if he miscalculated by even a tenth of a second, she could land the first shot, and it would be all over. Damnit, he also couldn't lure her into the open so Killian's A-RAV could take her out; her system wouldn't respect the no-shot zone now that it was offline. And if that bitch missed him and hit the U-Node, they would all get fragged.

So he galloped through the mall, away from the U-Node visible through the plaza's skylights.

Killian was sobbing some bullshit on the radio, Kune risked the two seconds it took to direct auto-nav towards a random nav point so he could take control of the rookie's robot, send it to the same nav-point, then grabbed his controls again.

Shit; warning lights were clicking on. The scalp interface was directly broadcasting his damaged status into his brain; he knew he was losing power in his cannons as surely as he would know if his leg was broken. That first shot had hit his cannons' cap-bank! And, worse, despite his custom cooling profile, leg drivers were beginning to warm up. Dammit, he would not die like Arvin!

Another thud as Pat-sui shot... The roof of the mall? No, that was her landing on the roof, not shooting it. She was directly above him.

Kune realized, if she was on the roof, it would be easy for her to follow his acoustic signal, his crashing and slamming through walls. And, across a flat roof, she would have no trouble out-running him and getting the drop on him once he left the building. She would be wherever he tried to go. He had been check-mated as soon as he went indoors.

But that bitch wasn't the squad leader.

Kune jabbed his control screen four times, and grabbed his sticks, throwing them forward.

His A-RAV did not move.

Now he was looking out through Killian's, previously Arbadah's, mecha, which lunged forward, raising mechanical degradation alarms, but those were irrelevant for the thirty seconds he needed with this machine. He saw the mall, and the fresh claw marks where Pat-Suit had climbed up. Damn this A-RAV was too slow! In real life, overhead, he could hear pounding as Pat-sui started digging into the building. The bitch knew he was up to something, probably abandoned his vehicle to escape on foot, and she intended to come down on his head.

Killian was trying to take the controls, confused into hysterics, but Kune ignored the kid's spamming control requests. He crested the roof. Pat-sui was dug down; he had no line of sight. Shit!

With one hand, Kune manipulated the squad-command console in his own machine, with the other he over-rode operating limits in Killian's A-RAV, giving him a few seconds of performance over operating spec. Pat-sui's digging was so close he heard light clicks as debris feel from the ceiling over his thorax.

A skylight; He skidded to a stop, looking down at himself from Killian camera constellation. His left hand updated the mission marker, resetting it to origin, himself. He dragged Killian's auto-cannon to aim at that star, tapped up and mashed the trigger. A chunk of ceiling crashed on top of him, he heard the hydraulic whine as Pat-sui's auto-cannon swiveled toward him, then PANG! The shot from Killian's cannon tore the forward sensor array off her A-RAV, throwing it aside like trash, her shot flew wide. Kune flicked controls inside his cockpit, reaching awkwardly around the inverted dent to reset his command allocation, and grabbed his sticks to lunge at her. Killian froze, he was back in action. Pat-sui tried to jam her cannon into his torso, but he was too close now, too dexterous with his A-RAV's claws. He could practically hear her screaming in her god-awful language as he grappled with her A-RAV, keeping her damn cannon from lining up on him, and throwing her into the cement floor, trying to crush the cannon out of commission. But she was damn slippery, caught herself on forelegs, and stood in a surreal handstand, rear legs on the wall, cannon swiveling, he dodged a shot and closed the gap again.

Even upside down Pat-Suit fought like a mad dog, punching with her claw and legs, ripping at his hydraulics like the 363s that took out Arbadah's A-RAV.

A chime sounded as Killian requested control again. The drones were raining small-arms fire on him, but Kune was neck deep fighting Pat-sui, and barely dodged as she tried to snag a claw into his ankle hydraulic line. He stepped away, shifted balance, trying to body-check her off her feet, but she rolled with the blow, cannon still locked on, Kune saw, fell with his momentum and felt his teeth rattle as the round glanced off his armor, fired from so close that the explosive charge hadn't been primed, but the muzzle blast knocked out an exterior camera. Blindspot.

He closed the gap before she could line up another shot, staying aggressive, grappling and trying to snag his claws on any control lines he could see through chinks in her plate armor. He had the advantage that his auto-cannon was already offline, so he didn't have to worry about exposing it. She had the advantage that her cannon was online, so if she could create any gap between them, she could blow him away. So they fought and clawed at each other, both mechas too well armored to expose a vital component. Kune tried to tear into the exposed electronics where he'd shot her in the face, but that was the most maneuverable part of her A-RAV, and put him in front of her forelegs. He couldn't take the time to get back into Killian's controls to fire on himself remotely, and she was beginning to use shots from her auto-cannon to keep him from grabbing it.

Now lights were flashing continuously, glaring red temperature readings all blinking and beeping as his ankle-joints climbed steadily with the excessive torque loads of close combat. He really was going to die like Arvin, and he couldn't even take this bitch down with him.

Then, as he climbed on top of her in impossibly dexterous maneuver that demanded he over-rode the ambulation engine to make sure his claw landed on the cannon to keep her from blasting him off her back, he felt her lurch. As he fell off her back on the other side, he saw a glowing red puddle under her right foreleg; she had overheated.

He lost no time. Kune side-stepped her cannon's next shot to get at her flank, ignored a bone-rattling rear-leg kick, then saw that joint lock just like the others, fully extended, glowing dull red and shimmering like a stove, and he got a claw under the armor panel over her micro-reactor.

Victory. Checkmate.

Hauling back on his sticks and punching forward his aux-command pedal, he wrenched on the compound alloy plate off her power supply. But it didn't come off at all. In fact, the compound alloy, a cutting edge blend of ceramics, metal and nano-tube fiber, caught on his claw. Stuck.

The auto-cannon locked on.

Fuck.

He actually heard the click as Pat-sui pulled the trigger.

And nothing happened.

She was empty.

She was more shocked than him.

Kune ripped his claw free and punched forward in one motion, crushing something delicate in the power core. Machinery inside Pat-sui's A-RAV screamed as power was cut, then softened as auxiliary supply came online. But aux power was never meant for claw to claw combat, and her cooling system, already overtaxed after her digging and fighting and with none of the careful tuning of his own system, began to fail outright. Sparks spewed from the cannon actuators as a blinding electric arc developed in her right foreleg. Pat-sui sluggishly, finally turned to take her core away from Kune, but it was too late. Her legs were locking up as joints failed in succession, armor plates were jettisoned to maximize cooling capacity. He dug a claw into the ravaged front-end that had taken Killian's cannon-shot, and twisted. Metal screamed as it tore, and Pat-sui screamed as the control console was ripped away from right under her hands. The swampy atmosphere inside her A-RAV was sucked away as Kune pulled her machine apart. Then, he put it back together, just a little bit wrong. Pat-sui was crushed so easily, he didn't feel it in the ECG motor feedback.

The A-RAV stood stock still, then, like a headless chicken too stupid to realize it was dead, sat down. It looked, for all the world, like a cat sitting on a shelf. A cat with kilowatts of heat baking off of shimmering heat-sinks. Dead heat.

But Kune didn't see; he re-focused on Killian, still stuck under his command, now covered in as many small-arms dimples as a golf-ball. He gave the kid control again, and the youngster instantly let his auto-cannon do its work. In three shots so fast they sounded like someone knocking on the front door, the drones were vaporized.

They both limped back to Arbadah's A-RAV for the pick-up. Kune ended his macro. Two of his teammates were suddenly online. The fourth would never be online again.

"What happened there, Kune?" Arbadah asked.

"Pat-sui tried to collect her debt early." Kune said.

The three mechs, two disabled, stood in a triangle. Though they were still and their pilots silent, they were wary. They were waiting for Kune.

He took diag reports from Killian and Arbadah, then considered his own state and what he had done to unit C.

"We will retrofit." He said at last, "The weapon system from Unit C for my unit, and Killian will take Arbadah's functioning legs. Acknowledge."

There was a pause as the other pilots considered, then Arbadah said, "Ack."

Killian took a bit longer, then said it as well.

Arbadah was able to use his good hand to run radar. Kune and Killian cracked open their units, retreived tools, and began the retrofit. With interchangable parts, it would take two hours.

They would only have two mobile units after the retrofit, and one of them with a pilot as green as Soylent. But, as he pressed the bolt driver into the hex-heads that secured the cannon's track, Kune looked up at the U-Node. It was the first time he had seen one with his bare eyes, with no constellation cameras or heads-up-display. It looked the same. The impossible black line from hell to heaven was nothing but a cartoon star on his screen. Actually, the sight made his head hurt. It looked better in the cameras.

Interchangeable parts. That's what it was all about, wasn't it? Cameras, electronics, machines, U-nodes, cities, drones, bullets, betting dollars, data. Pat-sui and Killian.

Interchangeable parts. He pulled more interchangeable parts out of his auto-cannon assembly until it fell crashing to the ground, then he looked up the sky. The scrubber pilots.

There must be more to war than trading parts? Yes, there was removing the bad parts.

Finally, Kune smiled. Well, he'd done that, sure as hell.

Technical Performance in Field

Destructive Potential (DP) equals the rate of energy introduced per unit volume into a volume of flesh, squared, times the corrective coefficient to account for the form of energy, further refined by a cast of secondary factors that are added or omitted at the engineer’s discretion. DP calculations assume an insignificant time of energy application, of less than one half second. Consult other text if this assumption is not met.

This is often called the Barbaric Equation.

Kinetic energy, the most ancient form of energy used in war, has a coefficient of 1. Thermal energy, the second most ancient form generally has a coefficient of 2, depending on the convention used to define ‘destructive potential’ and historical data. Laser energy, though technically thermal energy at the end of the day, has a coefficient of approximately 0.5 because charring and low volume of effect tend to dominate the heat transfer operation in weapon applications, though this varies widely based on pulsing, wavelength and tracking precision. Chemical energy, radiation energy (alpha, beta and gamma), and even obscure effects, such as yantological energy transfer to grey matter, all have coefficient expressions, though they are often non-linear and must be deduced or guessed based on even more factors. The rule of thumb is that a Total Heavy Industries Hollow-point MK112 9mm bullet delivered to the torso has a DP of 1.2, a FT-06 or GR-H1 flamethrower applied to the torso for one second has a DP of 3.4, and a fist-sized rock to the back of the head has a DP of 1.0. The engineers that wrote the training material where the Barbaric Equation was first recorded insisted that the rock’s DP was purely a coincidence, and that 1.0 was an arbitrary relative scaling number, that the biblical method used to kill Able was not the “base unit” of lethality, and so on.

But Kune suspected someone had massaged the data to make that one have a nice, clean number. After all, it was easy to tell the grunts, “Rock number is one. Gun number bigger than rock number, flamethrower number bigger than gun number,” followed by scientific sounding monkey noises.

But DP was only ever a gross metric, too coarse and opaque to apply blindly when Mitochondria decided to develop new weapons platforms, which meant that real-world testing was required.

And, every damn year, someone tried to prove that the DP on a laser gun made it just as good as the equivalent DP of a firearm, or any other sane man’s weapon. So, every year, the Acquisition Instrument Testing Committee put their neck on the line to find out just how bad this year’s crop of laser weapons was. Everyone knew laser weapons were hot shit. If the enemy has reflective armor, they don’t die. If they are too far or too close, they don’t die. If the laser moved across the target too fast to deposit energy, they don’t die. If the laser moves across the target too slowly and develops a layer of insulating char, they don’t die. If the laser bounces the wrong way, they don’t die but the person holding the laser does, or goes blind. And if the laser blah blah blah… All the other ways to fail ran into each other. But, paradoxically, he thought, all the ways to fail meant nothing to the engineers. In fact, they were a bonus; every mode of failure was an opportunity for a solution, and every solution was a chance to out-nerd the other engineers and get a payday for a new invention and, in his cynical opinion, solving problems with lasers was such low hanging fruit that some engineers spent their whole careers on laser weapons because they couldn’t hack it on a real weapon platform. After all, the 9mm bullet had persisted for centuries; it was just too good. It made the nerds uncomfortable, like trying to approach a woman who was out of their league. It was paradoxically too attractive to get any attention. But lasers; that easy, ugly technology riddled with issues, was an easy lay.

This time, the new hotness was “Adaptive-Band Ranged-Point-Focus Pulsed Multitube Concussive Burst Laser Stimulator”. Kune liked to treat all tech as black boxes, but he had been around this block enough to know monkey-speak. The grunt-speak translation was approximate; “the problem with reflective armor has been solved by making a laser that changes color. The problem with range has been solved with moving lenses that can break. The problem with char-shielding has been solved with light that explodes, sort of. And the problem with the beam reflecting off smoke or mirrors to blind people could not be solved with a buzzword and has been ignored.”

At least they were lightweight. Technically speaking, this shouldn’t matter since Kune had an exosuit to lug the laser across the battlefield but when he was sitting in a troop transport like this one, exo off to save power, he was glad he didn’t have to balance a hundred kilo power pack and flash tube across his knees.

For Jobbu, though, the weight mattered a lot more because he did not wear an exosuit.

“You still wearing that lobster skin?” Jobbu called across the aisle, raising his voice above the whine of the ion thrusters, “You know that stuff will break your arms and legs if it ever glitches up? I don’t trust it!”

Kune ignored this.

“I just use Gopamine! That stuff is great, look at this!” Jobbu flexed, showing off a ham-sized bicep laced with green veins, “All natural stuff!”

“That stuff is as natural as your left foot.” Kune responded, kicking the metal prosthetic that jutted across the aisle.

“Nah! They get it from those Jellaallal trees Freshson grows back home on Lasshic. I grew up on those Jellaallal’s, I trust them. You ever climb a tree? It makes you a man!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Trees!” Jobbu made some kind of gesture that was supposed to look like a tree, “Trees, Jellaallals! they’re the real nature.”

Kune just shook his head and looked at the red clock at the end of the troop compartment. Two minutes to ingress. Jobbu traced his sight, and made a barking laugh.

“Hah! That’s what I’m talking about! You gotta read clocks? Can’t even track time without some computer doing it for you?”

Kune ignored this too.

“Sorry, just giving you a hard time. You really shouldn’t trust them. That one’s probably fine, but I know the alarm clock they issue us will change time so you wake up earlier and go to sleep later; the brass can make them change to whatever time they want so that we end up working more than we think we are.”

How the hell do you argue with that? Kune thought. The man thought time itself was a conspiracy.

“And these lasers,” Jobbu continued, lifting his own prototype with one hand, “What do you think they actually do?”

“What?” He asked before he could stop himself.

“You know they aren’t weapons, right? Everyone knows lasers are terrible weapons. I bet they’re actually mind controlling beams. You know that lasers are electromagnetic waves? Well, guess what, so are our brains! It’s all electro-signals. I bet we’re actually testing mind control beams. That’s why I added some ferrite to my Gopamine. It makes it so much easier to think, since the iron particles block the electro-signals from all this technology crap we have to wear. You should try it! And it’s natural too, just grind up some natural rust and combine it with-“

“What are you talking about?” Sarah-Ann asked from her seat beside Jobbu. Kune tried to shake his head to warn her off interacting with the meat-head, but it was too late.

“Natural rust! You ever eat rust?”

“You’re a fucking idiot, Jobbu.” She said.

“And I bet you suck Illuminati cock!” He shot back with a smile. They knocked knuckles, both proud of their witty banter.

“That rust will screw you up.” She said, “Lojack got screwed up from it.”

Jobbu shrugged, “It helps me; maybe it just messed with his inflammation.”

“No! He got tetanus!” She had to shout over a swell in the engine buzz.

“Then he’s an idiot! You have to give it a sanitation rinse before you eat the stuff! Jeez, what moron doesn’t sanitize their rust?! If you don’t know that then tetanus is the least of your problems.” Jobbu shot back.

Kune was mildly impressed at this point; he didn’t think Jobbu even knew what ‘sanitation’ was, and if he had known, he was more likely to reject it as a conspiracy to destroy his immune system than anything worth thinking about.

Before the intriguing conversation on the health benefits of eating rust could continue, Sergeant Davis appeared at the end of the compartment, “Listen up, Brain Buckets!” the Sarge saw Sarah-Ann had some recreational reading on her lap, “Sarah-Ann, put that shit away! Don’t you Buckets forget, we’re here to test these platforms! We’re not hear to sit on our asses and pick our noses! Get out there and shoot shit! Secondary objective, put the hurt on Kalter Returnerists! Those cult fuck nuts are spreading salacious rumors about our outfit, and what do we think of that?!”

The troops seated down both sides of the transport cheered, entirely unaware if an affirmative cheer supported the opinion of Davis or the Returners. Kune just gave a half-hearted fist pump. As usual, they didn’t get their real objective until they were seconds away from ingress, and even then, in their usual ‘just do it, don’t think about it’ way.

The transport’s lighting switched from white to yellow, and all those wearing an exo suit flicked them on. If they hadn’t expected Davis’ final words, they would have been lost in the whine of power packs priming up.

“What are we?” Davis chanted.

“Scientists!” The committee cheered. Now the wine of power packs was keening under the subhertz rumble of ions straining to maneuver.

“What do we get?!”

“Blood and data!” Was blasted away as the deployment doors cracked open.

“That’s right! Now get out there and get some!” Davis roared and charged down the aisle towards the growing crack of true light. The chamber lighting switched from yellow to flashing green as Davis leapt out, and the twin rows of ‘scientists’ stood as one. As they trooped out, Kune caught a glimpse of Jobbu clutching the tags around his neck, then saw that his tags were still hanging down the front of his plate carrier, then he was out of the doors and into the screaming wind. Even over the roaring wind of freefall, he could hear Jobbu howl with the thrill of it.

Then the floor was gone and he was falling too. After hundreds of drops, the tedium of process numbed the thrill. First, finish priming the Exo, which gave its electromechanical whine as its powerbank span up to full wattage. His limbs trembled and flexed as they started dynamic self-diagnostic, an action that would have been awkward to go through in the cramped carrier. Then it was fixing the payload for landing, planting the heavy laser module in its lug at the base of his spine. Then, eye on the display mounted on his chest plate, he watched the ToF sensor read his altitude as it closed in on retro-range. The Exo’s power supply whined and chirped, then he felt the haptic heartbeat against this chest, signifying Exo self-diagnostic was all good. Well shit, it had better be all good, he was falling into a cement combat zone at terminal velocity. As he entered the green retro-range, he felt the machine gun pops and jolts as his retro turbines span up, then the dull roar as they ignited and kicked into sustainment and control thrust. As he fell into yellow retro range the engines were howling and his weight doubled as they fired in earnest, trying to squish him between his own falling momentum and their hundreds of pounds of upwards thrust. Then retro red hit, with urgent thumping from the haptics as the Gs fell away and he had enough control to retrieve his payload and bring the laser to bear. Just in time too, as small arms fire erupted from the squat prefab buildings all around, some of it thumping into his plate armor. He fired back.

It sounded apathetic. Just a snappy click and a pop as relays switched, then his first target crumpled, screaming. To his right, he saw Jobbu land, still howling, jutting his weapon out in all directions, as if he needed action-hero movements to catch the null recoil of a laser shot.

“Put on your damn goggles!” Kune shouted over the comms. He saw Jobbu pause and pull a pair of goggles from his carrier, then give him a goofball thumbs-up.

“Hey Jobbu, if you go blind, can I have your pornos?” Sarah-Ann added, over the radio.

“No chance in hell, a lady like you couldn’t survive my stash.” He said, turning slowly, pumping his arms against imagine recoil with each laser pulse.

“I’m already in your stash!”

“Focus, you idiots.” Kune barked, pivoting his instrument towards a new target climbing up the side of Jobbu’s landing site. His shot didn’t land with enough DP to kill, but the stunned falling body probably caught enough on landing to finish the job.

Jobbu’s voice lost some of its machismo, “No, are you serious?”

He could almost hear Sarah-Ann’s shit-eating grin, “What do you think I did for Mito before I signed up for the Committee? You know I started as an Asset myself?”

“Shit! You-“ There was a chirp of feedback and radio noise as Jobbu’s weapon shut down, taking his power system offline in the process. Kune gave him covering fire while he rebooted, giving three more tangos the snap-crackle-pop of his spread spectrum laser fire. He felt a low buzzing from his haptic feedback; his weapon was getting too hot. Two shots later and his own system shut down, just as Kol’s came back online.

Lucky asshole, he thought as he paused to open up the cooling throttle on his prototype. If I hadn’t landed up here, or if this shit had over-heated ten seconds ago, or if I hadn’t reminded you to use your goggles, you’d be packed in a casket. Then he was back in the fight with a long shot; the weapon’s onboard target tracker picked off a sniper four hundred yards away, and he didn’t even have to hold it carefully. That was one advantage of laser weapons, whatever DP they delivered, galvanometers made sure they could deliver it almost anywhere in line-of-sight.

Jobbu finally had a moment to get back to important business, “Please tell me you’re not the girl with the horse mask in-“

“You fucking perve!” Sarah-Ann shot back, “I can’t believe anyone bought those horse mask videos!”

“All units report landing status!” Davis barked as the last of the platoon made land-fall.

Kune punched the Auto-Acknowledge button on his carrier interface and went back to shooting, now focusing suppressive fire on a stack of Returners huddled inside some kind of cement watchtower. He commanded his goggles to zoom in, saw that there was a metallic instrumentation panel in line-of-sight, and focused a series of measured laser pulses on it. The first, tuned for wide divergence, ablated the paint off the console with a series of bright flashes that probably blinded the bastards who thought they had cover. The rest of the pulses, with a wavelength tuned to reflect off the metal instead of melting it, bounced around inside the tower and… lucky hit. He saw a gout of flame, then panicked motion as one of his reflections hit a target with enough power to light their clothes on fire. What was the DP of that shot? Didn’t matter, the DP of the impact after that unfortunate bastard jumped out the window was more than enough to finish him off. He pumped a few more megajoules into the tower to discourage the targets from getting back in the fight and returned his attention to his immediate area.

Scorch marks and dazzling lights were dotting the cityscape under his tower as the rest of the platoon descended to the streets for close-quarters ‘science’. Morons. Within those few meters of range to target, the reflected laser light was still strong enough to blind, maim and kill. And no sooner had he thought it, than he saw it. Coming down the lane in front of his perch, a grunt was chasing someone, man or woman, wearing the Returnist robes, carrying what looked like an honest-to-god kitchen sink. It was just unfortunate timing; the Committee Member brought their weapon to bear, to gun down the fleeing Returnist, just as the Returnist turned to see if their pursuer had caught up. Their torso pivoted, bringing the sink-thing around in time to catch the shot. It was all right-angles, a coarse retro-reflector. The person in the cloak dropped the boxy object as it flashed white hot at the same time a sunspot appeared on the shooter’s face. Kune cringed as the screaming and smoking started. Their goggles weren’t rated for a direct hit, or even a secondary hit, at such close range. Just seeing the reflection from where he stood, his own goggles reported that they had lost 5% of the sensor area in his right-side optic. The computer vision system filled in the lost data with the feed from his left side, but he got the feeling he’d have to swap sensor plates before he was done here. As for the man on the ground, clutching his face and staggering blindly towards a wall, there wasn’t much to do besides call in an injury and start moving.

Finally, almost a full ten minutes after ingress, Davis had set a rally point on a Returnist Hall of Convergence. Ironic, because there was a whole lot of Committee members converging on it now. Kune kicked on his retro thrusters, keeping them revved up so he could start traversing the rooftops. He only had enough kilojoules of fuel for a few minutes of thruster use, but he intended to use every second of it. The longer he could stay out of the cramped streets, the better. When his thrusters were up to speed, he made a half leap, half stride off the roof to coast down to a lower building, then jumped to turn his momentum into a bounce to the next one, then to the next. On the bounce, he saw Jobbu running through the streets between his rooftops. He had his goggles pushed onto his forehead, heedless of any chance he could accidentally catch sight of a laser shot. Well, screw him, Kune thought; he’d already got his one warning for the day.

Over the comms he heard a report that Sarah-Ann had caught a reflection; sounded like someone forgot what they were doing, missed a target and bounced enough laser light off a flat wall to score some friendly fire. Damn idiot; lucky she only got a DP of 0.01, or the shooter would have to report to the Committee head. Other reports were coming through of power system failures, charge chambers bursting into flames, dust on the optics cracking lenses and Committee members forgetting to wear their goggles.

And as fast as their equipment was failing, the Returnists were rallying. Faster, in fact.

With the uncanny synchronicity that could emerge from chaotic pitched battle, the Returnists lit up the rooftops with kinetic weapons. Plumes of dust impact peppered Kune’s next roof, forcing him to turn the landing into a slide, then a thruster-cushioned fall into the street below. Shot-tracing in his heads-up-display pointed at the steeple of the church, but he was too deep in the streets to get a line of sight. He pushed a couple keys on his equipment to call in the threat so that the rest of the committee would know, then began his deliberate walk to the congregation point. No running for him; it just burned energy and convinced his brain to act fast. With a weapon that could kill its user at lightspeed, he needed to be slow and deliberate.

But Jobbu had no such need. He charged around a corner hollering “Get ‘em! Behind me! Get those fuckers!”

Kune had his gun up as a horde of Returnists followed, and squeezed the button. A gout of flesh-fire burst off the first in line, then danced across the rest, saccading from one to the next as the weapon’s tracking system automatically delivered 5 DP and moved to the next target under its own discretion. Unfortunately its discretion sucked. By the time the last grey robe was lighting up, the second one, who was not as dead as he was supposed to be, was shooting at Kune, raising sparks and ceramic fragmentation across his exo’s chest. And the damn gun was too locked onto its current target to shoot him, even when Kune yanked the gun towards the guy trying to fucking kill him. Jobbu span, got a sight picture, and lit him up, turning the man’s head into a candle. Then another one, who’s nerves had cooked so fast he didn’t realize he was an amputee, opened fire. He shot Kune’s weapon at the same time Jobbu shot his.

It was too fast to track; Kune felt like a supernova had gone off in his arms and had one frame of pure white before his goggles went totally dead, and all he could hear was a tinnitus ring and Jobbu screaming. For a dizzy moment, between the heat, blindness and pained howls, he thought he’d finally gone to hell. Then he pushed his goggles up and saw that his gun had, in his stead. He shook it as if it just needed a little bump, but that only caused scorched plastic and expensive glass to fall out of every burst seam. Then, in a bolt of panic, he dropped it hard and held up… two perfectly healthy hands. At least the designer had done one thing right. The husk that stank of burning plastic rolled on the ground, revealing a steel plate that had ballooned, but not cracked, when the weapon failed. A few millimeters of steel was all that had saved his flesh.

“Shit.” He hissed and stowed the junk on the lug on his back. The nerds would want this one back to see how its life had ended. Fortunately, it had stopped his life from ending. That bullet was meant for him. He swapped in his back-up goggle sensor plate and scanned the Returnist bodies for anyone playing dead. All were cooling rapidly. Had it been his last burst, or that exploding gun? What would he write in his report?

A heavy hand fell against his shoulder, he span to this new threat, but saw it was Jobbu. All life and joviality was gone. He was looking through Kune like a ghost.

“They- they got my eyes.” Jobbu said.

Kune stared, with numbed horror.

There were goggles on Jobbu’s forehead.

“They got my eyes!” Jobbu gasped, he tried to reach out for Kune, but he stepped back on instinct. Jobbu heard the servos whine, and stepped towards the sound, “I can’t see! Kune, you there?! I can’t see! It’s dark!”

“You’ll be fine.” Kune said, but he found himself stepping away again, “They can fix you up.”

“No! They got me. Just like Jespa.”

They had to move. This place was crawling with Returnists and they had a rendezvous to make.

“Get it together! Set your suit-“ he started, but Jobbu wasn’t wearing an exo like his, “I’ll guide you. Follow me.”

“I can’t bro, I’m- I don’t think I’m going to make it. They finally won.”

Now rage was filling him like ice water, “Jobbu, cut that shit. We have to get moving!”

By now, Jobbu had felt his way to a wall and slid down to the ground, “Nah, they won. The tech. The system. I’m done man.”

“What are you talking about?!” Kune held a button on his controls, “I’m reporting a-“

“Stop!” Jobbu shouted at the world, “Leave me!”

“What the hell are you talking about?!”

“I’m done man! What’s gonna happen now? They stuff robot eyes in my skull? What kind of sight is that? Only see what they want me to see? I’d rather see Jespa.” He said. His hand had found those second dogtags around his neck.

Kune was about to ask again, but Jobbu had more on his mind “She was all I had man. After I got picked up, you know? They got us both. She was an asset of course.” He sighed, “I was- fuck, I was so mad. I fought them all the time. Then you know what they told me? ‘Jobbu, your sister moved up! She’s having a great time. If you stop fighting, you get to see her again!’. I knew it was shit, I tell you. I could see it in their faces.”

Kune scanned up and down the street. Davis would kick his ass if he made it to the egress late, if he made it to the egress at all.

“Then let’s move so you can see- so you can meet her again! Come on!” He reached out. Jobbu protested and tried to push him away with the animal strength of a desperate man. Servo joints whined as Kune batted his hands aside, and without the sight to fight back, Jobbu was no more effective than a toddler against Kune’s machine.

“Let me go! Let me die!” Jobbu protested, trying to strike Kune, but his fist landed on a mounting lug jutting out of Kune’s shoulder, “Fuck!”

“We’re getting out of here!” he shouted back, “If you want to die so fucking bad, then why didn’t you eat a laser?”

Instead of answering, Jobbu started pawing at the suit controls, but he didn’t find anything before Kune rolled him back to the ground, “If you don’t tell me what the hell is going on, I am going to knock you out and drag you back to the ship to face whatever the hell you’re freaking out about.” He hissed.

The impact with the ground, and Kune’s threat, finally cut through Jobbu’s hysterics.

“My sister.” He said, “They put me on a call with her. I hadn’t seen her for over a year. Said if I kept cooperating, I could keep talking to her. I thought she was dead, but when I heard her voice I knew I could make it. You know how it is for assets; they behave, do- do their thing, they get out, same as us.”

Kune had picked up Jobbu’s gun and fired a test pattern at the opposite wall as Jobbu talked. Self-diagnostics were shit, since Jobbu probably never set this thing up properly, but it was might just be good enough to get them to egress.

He continued, “But I knew she would never make it easy. We’re from Lasshic, we don’t fit in the system, we can’t ‘behave’ for these assholes. They probably shot her before she even got to a Home. But then I heard her voice! Dude, you have no idea, it was like… like the best Gopamine in the Galaxy! As soon as I heard that, I knew I could do it. Just serve my time and I’d be good. Even if Jespa gave them hell, I’d go to her and break her out, or die trying.”

“Get to the point!” Kune said. Now he was finishing a rough calibration routine to keep the gun from overheating again.

“Well… You know me. I was kind of suspicious. I just had to pry.”

Kune had a cargo hook on his belt, which he snapped onto the drag handle on the back of Jobbu’s vest and started hauling him towards the church. He didn’t even know why he was dragging the man back to the extraction site. Cynically, he thought that Jobbu’s huge body would act as cover for his legs, or so that he couldn’t be blamed for leaving the man behind. But this was Mito. No one cared if someone was too weak to keep up, and no one would blame him for thinking the same. At this point, he might even be dressed down for not shooting the man as punishment for losing his nerve, or to close a potential leak, or to treat him as a run-away. And even with his exo suit, the body was heavy, it slowed him down and made it harder to evade detection. But this… empathy was as strong as it was mysterious. Damn. He wished he was like this stupid laser gun, coming into the field with a suite of self-diagnostics, and a back-up team of brainiacs to figure out the solution to every idiosyncrasy.

But he had gray matter instead of silicon, and he had to do what it said. With sick irony, he realized Jespa was not so lucky. Jobbu was still talking.

“She wasn’t even one of the good models! They had just prompted some shitty sexting AI to act like her! It didn’t even know what a Jellaallal tree was anymore! They just-”

Jobbu was still babbling and pawing at his eyes, but Kune cut him off.

“So they used a machine to copy your sister to keep you in line!” He growled over his shoulder, “Don’t be a pussy about it. Yeah, sucks she’s probably dead, sucks you didn’t get to make a suicide pact with her, sucks you both got pulled into the Mito ‘family.’ Either give up or don’t, stop making it my problem!”

“It’s the system!” Jobbu wailed, “The system is all artificial! It’s mechanical! It ain’t humans keeping us in line, it’s-“

“It’s not real!” Kune shouted back.

“It’s killing us!” Jobbu retorted.

Kune saw a large courtyard ahead, with one broad avenue leading to the extraction sight, a tall spire of the church poking above the small, square buildings. They could try to sneak around the alleys, hope they connected, didn’t get ambushed, and still made it on time, or they could make a dash across the open ground. If he didn’t have three hundred pounds of useless junk strapped to him, it wouldn’t even be a question.

Jobbu had moved past pathetic wailing into pathetic rambling, “Once I realized it wasn’t Jespa anymore, I knew. The system isn’t here to help us, it’s here to control us. It’s here to make us into machines, so we can turn calories into profit, so we can put DP where they want it and stop it being where they don’t want it. We’re just fucking machines, man. When they turned Jespa into a computer voice, they didn’t even change anything except stopping her heart.”

Kune still had his laser up and ready, but he spared a moment to glare down at the man, “You are a moron. You don’t even know what ‘the system’ is. You actually think it’s real.”

Jobbu started to reply, summoning indignation as he was sat on his ass, but Kune was just getting started.

“There is no system. There are only cowards, morons, try-hards and egomaniacs trying to get what they want. They don’t care about you, they literally made your sister into a number, which to them and you, was barely a difference. The only difference between you and ‘Them’ is that you dealt with your problems by acting smart cause you eat rust and hate clocks, while they dealt with their problems by applying 1.2 DP to your sister and turning her into a vocaloid. There is no system, there is only taking whatever shit you have in front of you and making the most of it, and hoping it doesn’t tick off anyone so much that they leave you for dead in the middle of the battlefield.”

Jobbu finally shut up, but Kune had one more thing to say, “You know my gun just blew the hell up? That’s what blinded you. Boo-hoo, the system gave me a crappy gun. But there are two differences between us, besides the fact that I’m not a total retard. First is I’m not so blinded by fear that I don’t take basic fucking safety advice, which means I’m not literally blind like you. And second, is just because one thing went wrong one time, just because this shitty gun went nuclear in my hands, I didn’t give up, sit down, and wish someone besides me had the balls to finish the job. I picked up another shitty gun, because it’s the only way I can get myself, and three hundred pounds of idiot and rust, out of this godforsaken place. You got that?”

Jobbu turned his head away, but Kune saw the obstinate set in his jaw.

Kune had said his piece and Jobbu had heard it. Now it was time to get back to work. He did one more check to make sure there weren’t any Returnist snipers on the roofs around their lane, then unsnapped Jobbu.

“Can you see anything at all?” He said

“I- I can see a bit. Bright lights.”

“Can you see my silhouette?”

“No way. It’s all dark.”

Dammit, that’s what he was worried about.

“I’m going to strike a flare. Follow that. It’s a hundred yards straight ahead to the exit point. Just follow me, and we’ll be out of here and you can keep telling me your sob story, and I can tell you how stupid it is.”

Jobbu got to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall with one hand, grabbing dogtags with the other. He nodded in Kune’s direction, “Let’s get out of here.”

Kune looked down at the flare in his hand. Make himself as obvious as possible, crossing an open field, surrounded by blinds, in enemy territory. Just to get one rust-eating asshole back to a company that would send a hundred men to die just to prove that lasers are stupid weapons. But this was what he had in front of him. And if he left Jobbu to die, if he struck this flare and threw it the other direction, or didn’t even strike it at all, then he would just be another cowardly, moronic egomaniac, taking what was in front of him to screw the other guy.

Jobbu stared blindly, waiting for the mote of light that he might follow to another day. He could hear the drop-ship approaching, the last sound he’d often heard before extract, signaling the last half-minute of heads up before their last chance left them behind. One of the many choices the system gave them; get on, or stay behind. And it was time to get on.

Kune twisted the top of the cigar-sized tube, pressed it in, and ripped it off, opening a near-blinding fountain of pink light. As he darted out into the courtyard, he clipped it to his belt, brought his gun up, and started firing deadly flashes at any window that seemed to have a body, at any thing that poked above a roof. His heart and servos were pounding as he ran like a bat out of hell across the exposed space. Now shots started ringing out, shooting geysers of dirt around his feet, some even thumping against his armor. His laser flashed again and again, sometimes causing gouts of fire to spew out of Returnists that were caught by the auto-target, sometimes just leaving sunspots behind where he only imagined a threat. As they finished crossing the courtyard, he risked a glance behind, and saw Jobbu, arms pumping, chest heaving, veins stood out so far they looked green, racing to keep up with him. And he charged forward those last hundred yards as the drop-ship swooped in at the end of the street. Their last chance to exit, but they were too far away. Between violent breaths, Kune cursed Jobbu, cursed himself for talking too long, cursed the damn company for sending them here.

Then Davis peeked around the edge of the ship, “Kune! Get your ass in here! Double-time!”

For the first time in his career, the ship waited. It was only ten seconds, but that was as good as the rest of his life. He didn’t even slow down, one mechanically assisted hand latched onto a hydraulic struct, swinging and pulling him into the crew bay, while his other reached out for Jobbu, ready to help the blind man into the ship.

There was no blind man there.

The ramp was closing already, and through the thinning gap he saw the ground fall away with a lurch of vertigo. Kune couldn’t even get a glance outside to see what happened. He felt a burn start on his back and ripped the flair off his suit before it could do any damage. It filled the crew bay with white-pink light as he threw it aside.

“Where’s Jobbu?” He asked Davis.

“How the hell should I know?” Davis said.

“He was right behind me.”

“Guess he didn’t like what he saw. Good, you got his gun. Check in your gear and take some Slondrium, we’ve got a long flight back to the ship.” Then Davis moved on to berate someone for leaving their busted prototype behind.

Kune glanced behind him, confused that Jobbu wasn’t there. But by the time he got to the armorer at the end of the crew bay, he was livid. He had practically stuck a flair up his ass just to give that guy a fighting chance. He had hauled him a hundred yards, and had carried his gear, just because Jobbu didn’t the nerve to own his mistakes.

The armorer recognized Jobbu’s weapon and absence.

“He bit it?” the armorer asked.

Kune could only give a tight nod.

“Bad luck.”

“Idiot.” Kune spat, “Coward”. The armorer glanced up, and saw that Kune wasn’t talking to him.

The armorer scanned the code on Jobbu’s gun, and squinted at the charred mess where the code would be on Kune’s gun.

“The idiot got himself killed, after I dragged his ass right up to the drop ship.” Kune said.

The armorer decided to look for a component serial number so he could figure out the ID for the hunk of slag Kune had given him. As he unscrewed a blanking panel, he said absently, “Why’s that got you ticked off?”

“Cause I stuck my neck out for him. I gave him a chance and he threw it away. Couldn’t face it. Thought being blind was worse than being dead, after I nearly got shot in the ass pulling him back here.”

The armorer shrugged and used an optic probe to scan the internals for a serial number so he could log the gear into the system.

“Wouldn’t that piss you off?” Kune demanded.

“You get mad, he gets sad-“

“So, I should just be a rock?!” Kune glared at the lump he brought back, as much rock as tech.

 The armorer broke into a smile as his scanner finally found something to identify Kune’s gun, “Ah, there it is. You’re Kune? One of the brass asked to get you back.”

Kune’s chest was still raging against his breastplate, but his mouth had stopped in confusion.

“They wanted to make sure you got back.” The armorer said again, then called back to Davis in the crew bay, “Kune made it back!”

“Damn straight he did,” Davis shot back, “I had to hold up this whole shit-rig for him!”

“Who wanted me to make it back? What do they want?” Kune asked.

“No idea, I guess the system likes you. Maybe you’re useful. Haha, like this thing!” the armorer slapped the blackened mass.

The DP calculator fell out of a mote of ash.