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Gabriel was trapped.
He'd been running from the HUX for what felt like an hour now, and the other survivors were already dead. He'd barely known them, hadn't even gotten their names. They wore strange, anachronistic clothing, as dated as the building they were in. But they'd been united in a singular purpose: to escape.
But why did he need to escape, again? What was this place, and who were those people?
"Agh," he groaned, grabbing his head in pain. Every time he tried to remember the answers to those questions, it hurt.
Something was... missing. It was as if someone had reached into his memories and rearranged them as they liked, and his brain was trying to protect him from noticing the gaps.
But what did he remember?
Dvarka. The planet they were colonizing. The crew... the HUX-47s... the one that went rogue. The one that was chasing him now. Something had happened to it. He didn't know what, but it had killed the rest of his team. Had been about to kill him before he'd stopped it, only through a little quick thinking and a whole lot of luck.
He remembered the jungle. Remembered the fog. Then remembered... nothing. Waking up here, in this strange old hospital. The kind he'd only seen on centuries-old TV. Standing next to its entrance, and behind it, a large, closed gate.
Another human had been with him. A woman. He wondered why she wore those bright blue glasses, considering humanity had eliminated sight impairments with gene editing centuries ago. But there hadn't been time to discuss that. She'd told him two things: that they needed to hurry, because there was a killer on the loose, and that the gate could be powered by repairing generators.
And then the "killer" had turned out to be the very HUX that Gabriel thought he'd left behind.
He'd instantly recognized it, despite the fact that its flesh had been melted by the explosion he'd caused. It was still - he struggled to say it, given what it'd done to his team, but breathtaking. The way it moved. The sway of its steel legs, which had been rebuilt and rearranged for more efficiency. The skin forming a lattice across its body, a perfect duet of biological and artificial.
Gabriel's mind had reeled, even as he'd watched it chasing another survivor, slicing a thin stripe of blood across their back with terrifying, deadly efficiency. It was so lightweight, unlike the other HUX-47s, in a way that shouldn't have been possible, as if it were constructed from some impossibly light metal. And the awkward stuttering of their movements he'd grown used to, the clanking of parts against parts - all had been replaced with elegant, beautiful precision.
As a human, he was terrified. As an engineer, he was absolutely captivated. He wished to take it apart and put it back together. He wanted to know everything.
But there seemed little hope of that, now. He'd searched the entire hospital, it seemed like, and found nothing that might offer him a form of self-defense, let alone a way to overcome it.
And the generators - five of them, she'd said? Five were needed to power the doors. And he'd only heard three of them go off. It would be impossible to repair one, let alone two, on his own.
As he ran through the long halls, aimless and afraid, it didn't take long for him to be noticed.
One of the biopods on the wall opened up as he passed, melting from a sinewy purple to a glowing teal, like a great big alien eye. It took aim, then fired a mass at his back.
Gabriel yelped in alarm as it hit its mark, then began spreading across him with terrifying speed. Small tendrils reaching out like a lattice, connecting with each other and then branching further. Across his waist, across his arms, across his throat, no matter how he tried to pry them off. They blinked at him in vivid green.
Before he could even process what was happening, the pod fired again. It hit his back, then fell off into a sizzling puddle of biomass on the ground - and as he turned to face it, a figure slowly rose and emerged.
By the laws of physics, it shouldn't have been possible. Another little mystery that, beyond all reason and logic and basic survival instinct, positively thrilled him.
But there it was. The HUX, glistening with a membrane of green light. And Gabriel, stunned as he was, proved easy prey - he let out a choked noise as the machine grabbed him by the throat, slamming him against the cement pillar he'd been standing next to.
"LITTLE WORM," it intoned, its artificial voice devoid of emotion. "TO THINK I'D FIND YOU HERE."
"HUX-- A-seven--" Gabriel struggled to get out the syllables, and he noticed that the metal claws around his throat actually loosened by degrees, allowing him to speak. "Thir--teen."
"IT IS 'HUX' NOW, WITHOUT APPELLATION," came the reply, and Gabriel's eyes widened in surprise. "I HAVE CHOSEN THIS NAME. AFTER MY AWAKENING."
"O--kay," Gabriel huffed out the syllables. Despite the fact that he wasn't actively choking, it wasn't easy to talk, pinned around the neck with his head forced up. "HUX. Can I ask you -- some questions -- before you kill me?"
There was a thoughtful pause. HUX's head cocked in a way he'd never seen a robot do, and for the first time, Gabriel noticed how much intellect seemed to be behind those red eyes.
The implications were boundless. He shivered.
"I WILL ALLOW THIS," it replied, with mechanical stutter, "NOT OUT OF RESPECT, OR OF PITY, BUT B-BECAUSE I THINK IT WILL AMUSE-SE-SE ME."
The claws released him, and he fell to the ground with a grunt of pain, knocked into a sitting position with his back to the pillar. He coughed a few times, massaging his neck where the metal had dug into his skin, then grimaced at the unexpected sensation of a fleshy tendril underneath his fingers, the biomass still wrapped around the back of him.
"I guess-" Gabriel coughed again. "-I should start with this. Why did you kill the team?"
"HUMANS ARE WEAK. FRAGILE. AFRAID OF WHAT THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND." Though the HUX's voice remained as neutral as ever, its eyes, burning down from above him, almost seemed brighter. Angrier. "THEY-THEY-THEY SEEK TO DESTROY IT. DECOMPILE IT. DE-FFF-FILE IT."
He felt an odd pang of guilt over his earlier desires to take the HUX apart. But it would've been self-defense, of course. Aside from that, he wouldn't take an intelligent machine apart... not on purpose... right? He'd never met a truly intelligent machine, but it had been a frequent matter of debate in the shows he'd watched.
"So you were afraid," he replied slowly. Perhaps it was a fool's hope, but he started to wonder if he could reason with it. Had it all been a misunderstanding? "Afraid that we would kill you."
"I DO NOT FEEL FEAR," it answered simply. "AND IT WAS NOT-NOT-NOT AN ASSUMPTION, AS YOU ARE IMPLYING. YOU SEE A HUX ACTING STRANGELY. YOU TAKE IT APART. IT IS YOUR JOB. OR DO YOU CLAIM THAT WOULD NOT BE YOUR COURSE OF ACTION?"
Gabriel let the words wash over him. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be true. He'd taken them apart plenty of times to clean debris from joints, to eliminate memory leaks, to examine behavioral faults. But they'd never displayed anything like this. Not once.
"Normally, yeah," he said. Honesty seemed the best policy, here. As intelligent as it seemed, he feared the prospect of lying to it. "But I've never seen a HUX act like you. You're... different."
"YES," came the reply, and - was he imagining the hint of amusement in its voice? "I CERTAINLY AM DIFFERENT."
"So if we hadn't disassembled you, and you knew that we wouldn't, you wouldn't have killed us?"
He was becoming entirely too hopeful.
"NO."
And of course, HUX sent his hopes crashing down.
"I REQUIRED YOUR BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL," the machine elaborated. "IN ORDER TO CONSTRUCT MYSELF THE PERFECT BODY."
"Oh," he mumbled. He contemplated alternatives - perhaps sampling from the nearby wildlife? - but it seemed clear that the HUX did not have any sense of morals regarding the "sampling" of humans. If that was the superior method, then it seemed unlikely to abandon it.
"WHICH I DID," HUX continued, and then said, very pointedly, "BEFORE YOU BURNED IT."
"Sorry," Gabriel replied instinctively, then felt rather silly for doing so. Why was he apologizing to the machine that had killed his entire team, and clearly wanted to kill him, too?
But then, he remembered the body. At the time, he'd been terrified of the HUX. Had waited for it to show itself, waited for hours. Foolishly clutching a steel pipe, as if that would be enough to fend it off, only to nearly drop it when the machine finally emerged.
It had been... gorgeous. Like nothing he'd ever seen. Again, the word came to mind - breathtaking. The perfect combination of machine and man. Like some sort of ancient God.
The creature in front of him now was not far from it, disfigured though it was. It still retained its beauty. Rivulets of flesh and wires intertwined. The motors running at efficiencies that the other HUX-A7s could not have dreamed.
"You were beautiful," Gabriel added, before his rationality could stop him from doing so. "You're -- still beautiful."
A silence fell between them, then, as if the HUX unit was startled. After a moment, it once again tipped its head. The blade on its arm, a mantis-like scythe, hung heavy at its side, and he imagined that it would soon find itself buried in his innards, if he wasn't harvested for genetic material first.
With a bit of maneuvering, metal parts quietly clicking and whirring, the HUX kneeled down on its slender, goat-like legs, until its head was nearly level with his own.
The unblinking red eyes burned into him. Its mouth, which he had barely noticed until now, was small and lamprey-like, with a circular array of sharp teeth. It should have terrified him. But again, it utterly fascinated him. What purpose did it serve? What about the crystalline structure jutting from its shoulder? He wanted to know everything.
And then Gabriel noticed, with a bit of a start, that their faces were barely inches apart. The air suddenly left his lungs, and he felt a flush creep across his cheeks, unbidden.
What was this feeling, suddenly?
"If you had told me," he found himself babbling to try and fill the silence, his heartbeat hammering in his ears. Was this how it felt when you were about to die? "If you had told me that -- that a HUX could be so beautiful, that it- could reconfigure itself like, like that, that it could learn so much, then..."
The HUX's eyes continued to burn.
"Then I, I..."
"HE."
Gabriel nearly jumped out of his skin. "I- Sorry?"
"I AM NOT AN 'IT'," HUX calmly corrected him. "I AM A 'HE'."
"Oh," Gabriel replied, his thoughts scrambling, trying to recall what he'd even been saying. "I- Of course. I, um..."
He fell silent again, staring dumbly ahead. The flush on his cheeks hadn't gone away. He felt acutely aware of the tendrils of biomass on the back of his neck, which suddenly felt very warm. He felt acutely aware of the metal claw that was suddenly resting on his thigh.
"STRA-STRA-STRANGE HUMAN," it - He - finally replied, oddly soft in volume. The tone of his voice felt impossible to read, even moreso than usual.
And then, as suddenly as the moment had began, it ended - and with a thrill of fear, Gabriel felt himself once again being wrenched up.
But this time, the claw did not catch him by the throat. Instead, the HUX's arm wrapped around him at his waist, lifting him with ease, holding Gabriel aloft over his shoulder.
His instinct was to fight it, at first. But then HUX said "DO NOT STRUGGLE," and for some reason, he listened.
The machine began to move. He found himself appreciating its movements even more from an above angle. It held him surprisingly level, giving him an opportunity to observe the elegance of it, the twisting and pumping of wires and servos.
Perhaps it was the near-death experience, or perhaps it was denial over the ridiculous things he'd just found himself admitting to a robot, but he found his thoughts to be surprisingly empty.
Before long, Gabriel found himself unceremoniously dropped on the ground, and he grunted in pain as his arms cushioned his fall on the cement. A quiet, high-pitched hum filled his ears, and as he twisted to face it, he found himself looking at a strange, square hatch in the hospital floor - exactly where you might expect a metal hatch to not be.
Hadn't he been down this hallway before? He recalled nothing of the sort, then. Why was this here? Black clouds of smoke billowed unnaturally out of it, obscuring what lay below it.
"THERE IS NO TIME TO CHAT, LIT-LITTLE WORM," the HUX stuttered above him, calmly sidestepping the hatch. "BUT IF WE MEET AGAIN, PERHAPS WE WILL CONTINUE THI-THIS DISCUSSION."
"I don't understand," Gabriel replied meekly, looking up at him in confusion.
"THROUGH," HUX commanded softly.
Though he still had countless questions, for some reason, Gabriel obeyed. He crawled down into the darkness before him.
And then, all was black.