Chapter Text
The sky’s a lurid purple and the pines are black and weird against it the night you get your baby. You’re squatting behind your four-by-four, parked up on an offroad embankment and ankle-deep in mud: you’ve got your rifle propped in one hand and your pants hooked back in the other. The Batterwitch’s wrath comes down strongest when your business tricks come up wiliest, and you haven’t stopped to pee since you started running, and you started running as soon as your latest lie-packed press release went public – profits rocketing! FTSE value through the roof! talk of collaboration with Apple for expansions in the entertainment sector! most successful business year to date! Yesterday you shot out the tires of a truck in the middle of rush hour in Chicago, one hand on the wheel and the other on your blowpipe, head out the window and jeep swerving wildly through the traffic as the assassin in the truck unequipped his gunkind and looked guileless just in time for the press photographers to swoop.
You rest your forehead on your propped-up rifle. Mosquitoes drone dizzily past in the twilight. fuck off!!! you whisper, but they don’t. You shimmy your pants back up without wiping and bullfrogs shriek from the shadows – you’ve got cans, you’ve got a cookalizer, another day non-stop will be no trouble.
The roof of your jeep is washed in sudden, fiery light.
You hitch your rifle straight to your shoulder and squint up, into the concentric afterimages left glowing on your vision: there’s something coming.
You shove your way forwards, through the scratchy webs of low thin branches. There’s something coming, out of the sky, and you’re gonna get there first. You stumble on a log and furiously cuss it, grit your teeth and bludgeon your way straight through a low-lying thornbush with the butt of your rifle. The dark forest begins to shimmer a pale white and the hallucinatory way the shadows fall and flicker through the underbrush sets you off your balance; a dull tremor in the ground below your sneakers builds up and up till it’s a sound as much as a feeling but by the time you realize it’s hard to separate the two, a low roar thrumming through you that’s loud enough to deafen.
You skid into a clearing that glows and crackles orange from one toweringly claustrophobic pine wall to the other. You’re spattered in leaf mulch to your knees and you’re scratched up everywhere you’re bare, but you’ve only got eyes for the sky.
The trees are shaking. Your bones itch from the vibrations.
You press your hands to your ears and you watch the meteor come in.
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[SUBMIT. CONSUME. EMBRACE YOUR CULLING.]
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You pick your way across splintered tree trunks to the edge of the crater, jagged in the low light from the last of the fires. The path back to your jeep is entirely clear, pulverized down to ragged-edged stumps and settling ash, silvery under the fat bright moon.
hello?? you call. The fire crackles on. aliens can come out with their hands all the fucking way up please, this is NOT an alien friendly zone
In the deep shadow at the lip of the crater, something moves.
You drop to your knee and line your sights against it.
It keeps moving.
im armed and dangerous!!!!!!
It’s moving towards you, low to the ground and utterly unflappable.
You hold your breath.
Hrrummm, it says, and gurgles, cheerfully.
uhhhh...............
Hrrumkh, says the baby. You sling your rifle across your back and scoop it up. The baby has mildly singed hair and is wearing glasses and a diaper, and you hold it dubiously out, at safe arms’ length, just in case those teeth are meant for fighting.
did you just come down with that meteor??
Firelight glimmers on the ridiculous baby spectacles. Ahahahehehe, says the baby, and burps on you.
thats not an answer kiddo! im not in a position any more where i can just trust every baby that falls out the sky at me – im gonna need some explanations
You check inside the diaper. The baby winks.
omg you did not just wink at me
He winks at you again.
you little squirt :O
Your SkaiaNet Monopoly Modus (Business Upgrade) tends to render living beings dead within thirty seconds of captchaloguing, so you file your rifle back into your strife deck and hitch the baby onto your hip: he squirms obnoxiously the whole way back to your jeep, coating you in soot and forest dirt in all the places you weren’t already coated as you trudge through the wreckage of the forest. You’ve got a scanner in the trunk: CrockerCorp’s never built an android yet that could fool you.
You tie him into the front seat with the spare rope you keep in the footwell for emergency abseiling, jam down the accelerator, and swerve into reverse with your arm flung over the headrest behind you as you check the road is clear: which it is, and deserted in the moonlight.