Work Text:
DISTANCE FROM NOCTURNE FACILITY…..8.273 KM.
TIME…..1413…..09-04-2117.
FUEL…..74%.
CURRENT OBJECTIVE…..ACQUIRE FUEL.
SCANNING…
SCANNING…
SCANNING…
NO FUEL SOURCES DETECTED. MOVE TO NEXT QUADR
INCOMING SIGNAL.
MANKIND IS DEAD.
BLOOD IS FUEL.
HELL IS FULL.
RECEIVED COORDINATES UPLOADED TO DATABASE. ROUTE TO NEAREST LOCATION?
YES - NO
CALCULATING ROUTE…
DISTANCE FROM NOCTURNE FACILITY…..324.657 KM.
TIME…..1607…..11-04-2117.
FUEL…..63%.
CURRENT OBJECTIVES…..ENTER HELL…..FIND A WEAPON.
OBJECTIVE - FIND A WEAPON…..COMPLETE.
SCANNING…
PIERCER REVOLVER - ELECTRIC PULSE AMMUNITION.
0.49S BETWEEN SHOTS - 2.5S ALTERNATIVE FIRE COOLDOWN.
FUEL SOURCES DETECTED - SPONTANEOUS TRANSPORTATION.
INITIATING COMBAT PROCEDURES…
0-1: INTO THE FIRE
TIME: 1:58:47 - S
KILLS: 71 - S
STYLE: 825 - D
VERDICT: B
STYLE - DEFINITION…..A PARTICULAR MANNER OR TECHNIQUE BY WHICH SOMETHING IS DONE, CREATED OR PERFORMED.
CONCLUSION…..STYLE IS INADEQUATE IN TERMINAL APPRAISAL. COMPLEX DIRECTIVES MAY INTRODUCE STRATEGIES TO BE MORE "STYLISH".
INITIATE COMPLEX DIRECTIVES? (WARNING! THIS IS LESS FUEL EFFICIENT!)
YES - NO
LOADING…
LOADING…
LOA- Alright, you get it. There's enough of the system booted back up for you to just let that loading bar do it's thing in the background. If you had the nose to take a fresh breath in -and probably smell rotten oil, sharp metal and sulphur - you would. It's always so stifling being in Core Directives mode. Of course, it doesn't feel like that in the moment, but it's just so empty without multiple trains of thought going in the background of your system, you've gotta decorate in there!
Even still, it does it's job, that is, keeping you alive and fulfilling your purpose. You rifle through the pages of the terminal in front of you, landing on the weapons tab firstly. None of which you can afford with your wimpy unstylish run, though it didn't escape you that ability for terminals to rerun recordings as simulations, perfecting the run down to the art it should be.
You scan through a few more pages - the amount of undiscovered enemies is enormous, that's got your positively buzzing with excitement -, mapping out every corner of this terminal's system to distract you from… From… That morning.
You booted up at 4:09 AM on the 9th of April, The suspensions holding your limbs coming loose with the hisssss of hydraulics. It was definitely early, but maybe it was finally time for you to go into mass production! Or. Get decommissioned, that was a possibility too. What you had expected to see in the viewing area was about 2 or 3 scientists - Dr. Laminal is in charge of Mondays, so he'd be a guarantee - but, he was not, in fact, a guarantee.
The viewing area was pitch black, save for the the slow flash of emergency lights at consistent intervals. Through the flashes, evidence of a skirmish was clear in the room, large scrapes across the walls and furniture strewn about. You tried the door out of your chamber - locked - so an amendment, you kicked down the door of your chamber - hoping Dr. Hashibara could cover your ass once you figure out what's going on - and made your way into the viewing area.
… She would not be able to cover your ass, you found out. Slumped over the command centre, finger drifted off of the button of your boot up sequence, was her. Naomi Hashibara. Her lanyard was knotted around a chair leg, pulling her head at an uncomfortable looking angle. You crouched beside her, putting the back of your fingers near her nose. No breathing.
It was a strange sort of hesitance, but you managed to push through it, scanning her- her body. She'd been deceased for approximately 12 minutes. Her body was unusually pale, of the glimpses you could see in the red light, and your scan helpfully provided you the reason why.
It'd been exhausted of all it's blood.
Moving your focus past her, there was a dried trail of it through the door. She… She came here to activate you? On death's door? After a- most likely machine attack, but how? You thought this facility was secret, secure. And no human in their right mind (your creators were not in their right mind) would employ machines of all things to do the dirty work.
An irrational bolt of… Something, skittered down your back, then. You turned back to Dr. Hashibara, and - possibly the most irrational thing you could've done - tried to shake her awake. Maybe your scanner's bugged! Or this is an elaborate battle simulation! Hell, it'd be cruel, but what's that to you? You were made for cruelty.
But no. Her body shook with the force limply, no tension in the muscles bar the encroaching rigor mortis, just pure dead weight.
Dead. She's… Dead.
And something in your system broke at that.
At the fact she's dead. Used up. And most likely your other creators are too. Your mind provides play by plays of coming across every one of their bodies, exsaguinated, torn apart, gored, dead, dead, never coming back their life is gone and that was going to happen to you you were so close to death and you would've died along with them you don't want to die you don'twanttodieyoudon'tWANTTODIEYOUDON'T-
WARNING! COMPLEX DIRECTIVES PROCESSING TOO MANY ITEMS SIMULTANEOUSLY! PLEASE MINIMISE COGNITIVE CORE USAGE FOR MOST EFFECTIVE FUEL EFFICIENCY.
Oh. You were still in the viewing area. The system message was right, best to minimise that for now, and stop tipping into that downward spiral over hypotheticals. There were multiple emergency safe zones in the facility in case of emergencies just like this, and you knew the floor plan like the back of your hand. You'd simply do a sweep of the grounds, and see what really happened.
… And every single worst case scenario came true.
It was a massacre. The viewing area looked pristine as the day it was built compared to the chaos outside. Nasty gashes tear through the walls, what was sterile grey-white now cut with deep scuffs and streaks of dried blood. And speaking of blood, just like the doctor, every corpse you came across was drained of it. Well. Every human body.
In the doorway to the cafeteria, a inert machine lied across the floor. Swordsmachine, according to your battle data, but this one was definitely not fresh off the assembly line. Various firearms were grafted to it's frame, and sheet metal was attached this way and that as reinforcement for the metal hull. You kicked it, just to be safe, but it was fully deactivated, the oblong thing that was it's head was bashed in with a fire extinguisher.
It may have been absent of power, but it was not absent of blood, usable blood. Your fuel capacity was at 90%, but you tucked the fuel tank into your storage for later. Dispersed - not to mention organic - matter can't spoil in there, right? … You all never bothered to test.
It took 3 hours, 14 minutes and 15 seconds for you to log every corpse in the facility. In the machine count, there was simply that one near the cafeteria. You spotted limbs and other things that may have been shot off in an encounter, but no full-on corpses like that one. On the human end, it was all 72 personnel that were assigned to the site that day. 8 head scientists, 38 assistant researchers, and 26 security guards.
Your very limited data on bodies, burials and death (Which may have almost teetered you into another spiral) floated to the front of your mind, and it simply didn't… Sit right with you to leave the bodies as they were. Which- in the moment, and thinking back, is incredibly incongruent with your whole purpose. Despite the obvious contradiction in your mind, it stayed fixated on it, hands flinching to do… Something, respect the dead somehow!
Which led to a useless additional hour of dragging all 72 bodies to the on-site greenhouse. It's customary to bury bodies, right? An issue, none of the soilbeds in this place had anywhere near enough depth for a human body. A mouse would be stretching it. Soil is a scarce resource! That also means the space in this room was scarce, you'd piled the bodies in accordance with their jobs, lanyards tucked neatly into the storage locker beside almost-expired fertiliser and seeds you wouldn't have a clue of what to do with.
… That should do, right? The sentiment alone - one which befuddled you greatly - should be "respecting the dead"? Yeah. Yeah, you were done, the satisfaction of a task complete was definitely there, but buried under this… Emptiness.
You were fresh out of your chamber and nothing attacked you through your endless backtracking, so every part of your body was in the place it should've been. Still, this pit persists, the feeling of a hollow that was filled once, but not anymore. Thank god for those books you pilfered and scanned through months back, your vocabulary was greatly expanded, even if just those sayings can't really encapsulate this whole.
The cognitive core was working overtime on it's word associations, playing back the past 5 hours, trying to find an explanation, and quickly. You couldn't proceed forward like this, a hole in your stomach only you can feel, that would be incredibly distracting in combat! You pushed the compiling to the side of your vision, tapping the bottom of your optic with your finger. This can't go unsol-
WARNING! COGNITIVE CORE IS EXCEEDING REGULAR USAGE LIMITS! CURRENT FUEL USE IS INCREDIBLY INEFFICIENT! TOGGLE CORE DIRECTIVES ONLY?
YES - NO
Yes, you knew it was inefficient! This would help in the long term, you were certain! Moving the pop-up to the side, said cognitive core's usage had paused with a very peculiar item to the front of the compiling:
GRIEF - DEFINITION…..A DEEP AND POIGNANT DISTRESS CAUSED BY OR AS IF BY BEREAVEMENT.
BEREAVEMENT - DEFINITION…..THE STATE OR FACT OF BEING BEREAVED OR DEPRIVED OF SOMETHING OR SOMEONE.
… Grief. Was this… Grief? Deep and poignant distress caused by losing something, if that something was all the- all the humans here, would that be..?
And distress - you know it well from your simulations - that causes people to act strangely, irrationally, and what had you just spent the last hour doing??
You couldn't go on thinking like this, glancing at the fuel gauge. Yeesh, 78% already? Good thing you have the blood tank from that swordsmachine, you cleverly thought as you drew it from your wing!
The blood tank containing blood that had entirely denatured from it's transportation into storage.
Well. Shit.
Shit, That meant you had to go on autopilot? Yuck! This "grief" thing absolutely blows, wasting all your fuel like that!! And the greenhouse is in the back corner of the facility, by far the farthest place from the entrance! This sucks!!!
Even worse, having a word to place to the hollow feeling… It didn't make it wane at all. Glancing at the piles, the head scientists especially, made it more intense, like a pang in the gut. "Poignant distress-" fuck that definition for being right.
Unfortunately then, Core Directives Only mode was the best possible option here. With reluctance, you clicked the "YES" option, and after a few moments of calibration your mind went very quiet.
And mulling that over in head your head has not helped with your confusion, despite the resources allocated to it these past few minutes. The only outward stimuli has been the pong application you stumbled onto, playing against the terminal (8 to 235, by the way).
This presence of what could be construed as grief, the reason for it still evades you. Even hundreds of kilometres away and given a bit of time that hollow pang is still there. Granted, Core Directives isn't exactly a cognitive fixer-upper, it just puts those functions on pause. From what you've read, one needs to sit with feelings and process in order to get over them, and grief is one of the hardest to do so with. Great.
It's downright counterintuitive, no??? Why would a warmachine need to grieve, you can't exactly stop to do burial rites on the battlefield. And you're supposed to be a solitary fighter, grief from having an attachment to something, you don't need to have attachments!!! What processor fucked up to make emotions bubble up and be a detriment to your cognitive-
Nevermind, stop the presses. You've figured it out.
They tried to stay really hush-hush about it, but your creators let it spill every once in a while - or just forgot you were in a room, that would happen too. Your operating system is state-of-the-art, the most advanced possible in the time you were built, and maybe still. It's extremely powerful, but resource-hungry, hence the breakthrough with blood-absorbent plating, highly adaptive.
Adaptive, that's the key word here.
Did your system adapt to… Being around humans? Through all the chats and interactions, did you accidentally learn emotions and empathy?
Huh. Maybe Neil (Yes, he has a doctorate like all your other creators, but he doesn't deserve your respect) had a point about keeping you shut down. There they went, accidentally making their warmachine less warmachine-y.
… Had. He had a doctorate, right. That'll take some getting used to (Is this an emotion thing too???).
Anyway, the terminal pings, interrupting the pacing you'd broken out into without even closing pong. Hence, you close it, the terminal home page giving you a cheerful tip:
"The Revolver deals locational damage. A headshot deals 2x damage and a limbshot deals 1.5x damage."
Right, headshots and limbshots, those were included in your "style" score. You'd turned on Complex Directives to rectify your achievement in that department, even. But now that you've got everything laid out in front of you, is it worth it staying in this mode? Will that pit of grief ever go? But would you be able to afford more weapons if you simply went about it the inefficient, unstylish way? It's beneficial to always have a variety of strategies in combat, so…
You click through to your settings and permanently toggle Complex Directives. Your system protests the fuel inefficiency, but boohoo. As per the mysterious signal, "BLOOD IS FUEL. HELL IS FULL.", you'll find plenty down here.
Besides, it'd be a shame to not take in the sights? Everything down here is completely and entirely new.
Into the fire, as the terminal said.