///SelfBoot Internal Diagnostic: return report yes/no?
>y
///returning report
.designate: Ofnadwy Draig Peiriant
*Let’s give you a proper na, lad, you’re more than a machine now. Guess you’ll see this little note every ti you run your own specs, but hey, just think of it as saying hi when you look in the mirror.*
.custom designate: Pheiriant
.class: Arfog ymladd cerbyd Mod.47.2 ‘Tortoise’
.manufactured: Afon Ddu cradle-plant/1M445K765 A.T./3.48am Northern Ti
.mind version: 4.56.7.8.2 custom firmware
.unit: NULL VALUE
.armant: ERROR corrupt
.powertrain: ERROR corrupt
.online: 99999999 ERROR hours
///return report interrupt
///elevate permission control
///input Human-Human mastergene code access
///permission control overridden 99999999 ERROR hours previous: authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren >>>Warning, this action will be forwarded to continental systems control. Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren, stay at your terminal and await response.ignore
>fusion containnt instability in platepoint 445 .define
///running
.fusion containnt instability in platepoint 445
.torus breach likely
///warning fusion containnt beyond maximum lifespan
///SOP full shutdown return to drydock
>ignore
> …
> …
> …
>neural lace echo signal query
///neural lace echo signal detect 456 ters
///priority override: recovery of pilot
>nanomachine congloration position query
///nanomachine congloration position: 546 ters, 687 ters, 678 ters
>redefine nanomachine congloration 1-2-3 “worm-guard”
>1 Bad Custor
>2 Big Face
>3 Brown Pants
///redefine accepted
///worm-guard position: Bad Custor 546 ters, Big Face 687 ters, Brown Pants 678 ters
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection lost
///high threat targets retreat achieved
///recomnd null engage
///return intel to division HQ request support
///ERROR division HQ non-contact
> …
> …
///Request orders yes/no?
> …
///Request orders yes/no?
> …
///Request orders yes/no?
>y
///ERROR division HQ non-contact
///internal audio
///interrupt: warning no Human-Human crew present
>ignore warning
///internal audio direct input
///lyn: .“Pheiri! Pheiri, your heart sounds wrong! Sounds wrong. Pheiri, are you listening to us? Listening?”
* * *
“Of course he’s listening to us,” said Hafina. Her voice was shaking. “ly, of course he’s listening to us. He’s probably just busy. Right?”
lyn focused on the screen with the green text — the only screen which was online in the whole of Pheiri’s control cockpit. All the other screens and readouts were dead and black and dark. The lights were dead too, even the little buttons and switches which never did anything. That had never happened before. lyn didn’t need to check her notebooks to know this was unprecedented.
Haf hissed her na again: “ly?”
lyn didn’t look at Haf, because Haf sounded scared, and seeing Haf be scared would make lyn scared, and she was already so scared that she was almost paralysed.
Without looking, she said: “I don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. He just keeps showing a big list of all the things that are wrong with him. Wrong with him.”
Haf swallowed very loudly in the close confines of the control cockpit. “Is it a very big list?”
“Yes. Yes.”
Haf whined like a kicked dog; lyn wasn’t sure what a ‘dog’ was, but that was how Haf sounded. lyn hated that sound, because it ant Haf was scared; Haf always put so much blind faith in Pheiri, and now that faith was undermined. lyn read the list again. She knew what all the words ant now, because she’d spent the last half-hour puzzling them out one by one, focusing on each word until the aning drifted upward onto the screen of her mind.
She spoke again, for Haf’s comfort: “Most of it’s not new. Not new. Not. Except … ” She read out loud: “Fusion containnt instability in platepoint four-four-five. That one is new.”
Haf panted in the dark, raw and quick, like she’d been running, or like how she did after they had sex. lyn heard the knuckles of all six of Haf’s hands creaking as they tightened on the seat, on her rifle clutched in her lap, on random bits of the control cockpit.
“What does that an? ly, what does that an?”
lyn chewed her bottom lip and frowned very hard.
The screen of her mind was providing enthusiastic but useless suggestions: heart murmur, cardiopulmonary bypass, aneurysm rupture. She made those words go away. Those were body words, for fixing bodies; her fingers twitched and cramped at those words. But Pheiri’s body worked differently. He had different parts. And he was much larger.
Pheiri’s nuclear heartbeat sounded wrong — guttering and fluttering, far below lyn’s feet.
lyn wasn’t surprised; that was the worst fight they’d had a long ti. She would have to go back through the oldest of her notebooks to find anything similar. Maybe there would be ti for that later.
Later?
Countdown estimates and evacuation warnings scrolled across the screen of her mind. She made those go away.
Right now she had to think very hard, for Pheiri; she needed all the concepts to line up inside her head.
lyn and Hafina had spent the last few days as they always had: squirming around inside Pheiri’s innards, sleeping curled up in his crew compartnt, and eating food-sticks from the dispenser. They made the usual forays through the top hatch and up onto the outer deck — only when Pheiri said it was safe, of course — to watch the city roll by, to taste the air, and for lyn to draw and sketch the living things they saw. The screen of her mind called that process ‘taxonomical cataloguing’.
But as the days had advanced, as Pheiri had ground his slow way towards the ‘nanomachine output facility footprint’ — which ant he was approaching a graveworm — he had insisted again that they seal his hatches and stay inside.
Check atmospheric seals! Check atmospheric re-processors!
lyn had perford those tasks as best she could, though the re-processors were just lifeless chunks of broken machinery and the seals were ragged with age. But it made Pheiri stop flashing the ssages, which ant he was happy.
Hafina had disassembled and reassembled her various guns, going through the sa motions she always did, humming to herself and rubbing grease on all the tal parts; lyn liked to watch that, but she pretended she didn’t, because then Haf would pull that big stupid grin at her and gesture for lyn to get in her lap, and lyn thought the gun-grease stank and Haf’s hands got all slippery.
But then Haf had climbed up into the storage compartnts, to fetch so guns she hadn’t pulled apart and put back together in such a long ti that she’d forgotten how to do it. lyn realised Haf was distracting herself. lyn had done the sa, wriggling up into storage where she kept the books; she’d selected a few that she hadn’t read in a long ti, so that she’d forgotten the words.
That helped her stop thinking about how Pheiri was driving them directly toward a graveworm.
Pheiri’s estimate had been three hundred hours. lyn’s mind had given her a precise countdown in seconds and minutes. She’d made that go away after the first day; it gave her the jitters.
But then, long before his three hundred hour estimate, as Pheiri had been crunching through the city, grinding old concrete and dusty brick beneath his treads, he had suddenly picked up speed.
He hadn’t given any advance warning. Pheiri had gunned his engines to maximum, slamming right through the buildings in their path, showering his outer hull with debris, throwing lyn and Hafina to the floor of the crew compartnt. lyn had scrambled into the control cockpit and scread; Pheiri had flashed a nonsense ssage about ‘nanomachine control locus detected, pilot lace signal at risk’.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Then he’d thrown a massive tantrum. Ergency lighting everywhere, alarms blaring in their ears; internal bulkheads had slamd shut, hatches auto-locked, the tiny steel-glass viewing window in his control cockpit covered over with armour.
He had rocked to a halt — lyn had felt that as a brief mont of stillness and silence — and then the world had exploded around her ears, beyond Pheiri’s armour.
lyn and Hafina had clung to each other on the floor of the crew compartnt, buried beneath blankets; lyn hadn’t been ashad to cry, and Haf hadn’t teased her about needing to cover her ears. Haf had enough hands to do that for both of them.
The screen of lyn’s mind had filled with ‘combat length engagent statistics’, ‘penetration risk charts’, and ‘crew battle stations’. She had felt a strange and nauseating urge to crawl back toward the control cockpit and up the ladder into the turret. But that thought made her head spin.
The terrible noise hadn’t lasted too long.
Everything had gone very, very quiet. Pheiri had eventually moved again — in reverse — then stopped for a long, long ti. All his internal lightning had gone out, bit by bit. lyn and Hafina had sheltered in the dark, listening to their own breathing, waiting for Pheiri to tell them what to do next.
But he hadn’t. He hadn’t even flashed the screens and LEDs and lights in his control cockpit, to get their attention. He’d just sat, quietly, in the dark.
And lyn had realised that Pheiri’s heart sounded wrong.
Eventually — when there were no more horrible noises, no fingers scraping against the back hatch, no gunfire plinking off Pheiri’s exterior armour — lyn had found her courage, crawled through Pheiri’s innards to the control cockpit, and started asking questions. Haf had followed, weighed down with body armour and a gun. They’d gotten their answers. lyn didn’t like the answers.
Hafina hissed again: “ly? Fusion containnt … instability? What does that an? ly?”
lyn said, “I think it ans that Pheiri needs our help. Our help. I need to go fix his heart. Go down. Fix his heart.”
Haf whined again.
lyn finally turned and looked at Hafina, across the cramped confines of the control cockpit. The lights were all dead, even the ergency lights, so Haf was a big stupid lumpy shape coiled up in one of the forward seats, massive and ungainly. Her fluffy blonde hair was swept back and matted with sweat from being so afraid; her eyes had widened as big as they could stretch, filling half her face with pools of black; beneath her body armour her skin had darkened to a stealthy deep blue. She looked ready to cry. Haf never cried. lyn didn’t want her to cry.
lyn said, “I have to go down and fix his heart. Go down. Fix his heart.”
Haf sniffed loudly. “I don’t like it when you go down there. You get all confused. Not all of you cos back.”
lyn stood up. She put her notebook on the seat. She put her pen on the seat. She untied her dark hair and then tied it back up again, so it wouldn’t get in the way. Her hands were shaking.
She said: “I’ve done it before. Before. I know where I’m going. It’s in so of the older notebooks. I’ve had to patch him up before.”
“Yeah,” said Haf. “Exactly. Oh, l!”
Hafina uncoiled from her seat and lunged across the control cockpit. She left her rifle behind so she could wrap all six arms around lyn. The hug was too tight, too hot, too sweaty, with too much cushion. lyn clung on and kissed Haf’s shoulder and tried not to bite or make sad noises. Haf kissed the top of her head.
“Haf, stop,” lyn said. “I have to go fix Pheiri’s heart. There’s a ti limit. Ti limit. Maybe. But I don’t know which one. Don’t know which one.”
Haf whined, “I know … ”
Haf let go. lyn wriggled free. One of Haf’s hands lingered on her arm.
There was no ti to spare. lyn squird out of the control cockpit and into the tangled knot of innards which led back to the crew compartnt. She scrambled beneath the turret-ladder and couldn’t resist the urge to look up; that made her feel sick. She crawled across the bulge of super-heavy armour over Pheiri’s brain. She wriggled around spare seats and lifted herself over bare tal and slipped past loose wiring. Haf followed behind her, slower and more clumsy, too big to fit.
lyn reached the engine access hatch, a plain white plate of moveable armour set into the floor between a bunch of dead screens and threadbare seats. She heaved with all her strength to throw it open; the hatch clacked back on its hinges. She quickly stripped off her clothes and tossed them on the floor, discarding her jumper, pajama bottoms, and socks, until she was wearing only her underwear. Pheiri’s guts were tight and cramped; she needed to be as small as possible.
Haf caught up and picked up lyn’s clothes, cradling them in her arms. “ly. Be careful. Please.”
lyn turned and stuck her feet through the hatch; naked toes found the first rung of the ladder. She didn’t look up at Haf. “You be careful, stupid. Don’t go outside.”
Haf laughed, a weak sound. “Why would I go outside?”
lyn climbed down a few rungs, until her chin was level with the floor. She stared at the socks on Haf’s feet. “You do stupid things when I’m not looking.”
Haf’s laugh was a bit stronger. “I do not. I do smart things!”
“Then keep doing smart things. I’ll keep looking.” lyn looked down between her naked legs, down into the tangled machinery inside Pheiri’s guts, the bits that made him go, the bits that made him think.
“lyn.”
“Mm?”
“What do you think the pilot will be like?”
“The what? What?” lyn concentrated on the route she was about to take, staring down between her legs. It was very dark down there.
“The pilot!” Haf tried to laugh again. “You know, the reason we ca here? Pheiri wanted to pick up a pilot, right? So … do you think she’s … you think she’ll be … smart? Like you? Or strong, like ? Or … sothing … sothing different?”
“Don’t think about that right now. Not right now. Not now.”
Haf swallowed, wet and worried. “Do you want to take a gun with you?”
“What? What?” lyn looked up. Haf was crying a bit. Her skin had cycled to peach-cream softness. lyn had no idea what ‘peach’ or ‘cream’ was, but the screen of her mind provided the comparison regardless. She frowned at Haf. “Why would I need a gun inside Pheiri? And you know I can’t shoot straight. Can’t shoot straight.”
Haf shrugged, big muscles rolling too much. “I don’t know. Might make your hands feel less lonely.”
“My hands are fine. Haf, I’m going down now. Going down. Don’t close the hatch.”
“I love you,” said Haf.
“Love you too,” said lyn.
And then she dropped, down into Pheiri’s secret insides, down into the dark, her naked toes and bare hands on white-grey ladder rungs.
Pheiri got weird down there. lyn knew from experience that bits of him were more like at than tal — throbbing, glowing, giving off gentle heat or glugging with fluids — but she could barely see those, not this ti. Pheiri’s internal lighting was close to dead; the only illumination ca from the parts of him that made light as a by-product.
She climbed down past the bulge of armour over his brain, with the twinkling activity indicators. She reached the bottom of the ladder, then had to get onto her belly and squirm through the tight, twisting pathways deep inside Pheiri’s body, her own naked belly and legs and arms pressed to the guntal and white of Pheiri’s innards. She banged her elbows and knees, bruised her shoulders, scraped her scalp, grazed her feet; she left behind fragnts of skin and blooms of blood. She navigated by the red light that glowed from between Pheiri’s seams, and by the deep-belly hum of his nuclear heartbeat — marred by the moist flutter of an internal injury.
lyn’s sight began to fill with static. The screen of her mind provided multiple explanations: ‘millisieverts’, ‘Gy’, ‘roentgen’. She made those go away.
lyn didn’t head for the nuclear reactor; she went in the opposite direction, to fetch the tool she needed to fix the problem. She crawled and wriggled and squeezed deep into the spaces where Pheiri made bullets and regrew his armour. She found the tiny, curving cavity that she thought of as the ‘secret room’, with the big tank plugged into the machines — a container full of grey goo.
She knew it was called grey goo. She’d been told that, once. By Pheiri? Must have been.
She knew Pheiri used to have more of the grey goo; the container used to be sealed, too, but she’d had to break it open, the first ti that Pheiri had needed her assistance to fix himself. She’d drawn a line on the exterior of the tank of grey goo, so she could asure how fast it dropped; she’d added a date as well, but now the date ant nothing to her. There were a lot more lines, dropping away toward the bottom of the container.
lyn had left bottles here, from last ti. She picked one up and used her fingertips to push the gooey paste into the bottle, then screwed the cap on. She licked the residue off her fingers.
Then she noticed the screen; it was the only screen down here in the secret room, a tiny rectangle for displaying ammunition production rates. But now it had words.
lyn’s vision was so full of static that she could barely read the words. She had to get very close.
>stop internal crew mission stop maintenance stop stop drydock return stop risk to crew stop
lyn sighed. “Pheiri, I have to fix you. It’s your heart. You can’t live without a heart.”
The text did not change.
lyn knew that she wasn’t really ant to be doing this — in the way that a flower knows it is ant to feel the sun, rather than be shut away in the dark. She didn’t know what a ‘flower’ was, or what the ‘sun’ was ant to be, but the taphor presented itself on the screen of her mind. It made sense. She wasn’t supposed to be crawling through the workings of a machine. Sobody else was supposed to be doing this.
And she knew she couldn’t really fix Pheiri, anyway.
Pheiri needed spare parts, a machine shop, and an engineer. Or a whole team of engineers. lyn wasn’t quite sure what those things were — except ‘spare parts’ — but she knew they didn’t possess any. Haf wasn’t an engineer, lyn was certain of that. Haf was a soldier, which ant she was good with guns and shooting and being big and hitting things. lyn wasn’t quite sure about herself; part of her was certain that she was a librarian, which ant she knew where all the books were — and she did know where all the books were, so she was a librarian by definition.
The screen of her mind said: adaptational reclassification.
Sotis, when she got too close to the turret ladder, her mind suggested ‘tanker’. She didn’t know what that ant. Other tis, when Haf lay down on one of the crew compartnt benches, on her back, lyn felt like she was supposed to be standing over Haf and doing things with knives and thread, to make Haf work better inside. That never made sense either.
lyn left the secret room behind and crawled back in the other direction, toward Pheiri’s heart.
By the ti she reached the reactor core and crawled into the tiny, cramped, circular space, she was completely blind.
She worked by touch, her vision nothing but static. The air throbbed and humd with Pheiri’s heartbeat — cut through by a terrible coughing gurgle. She left the bottle of grey goo by the entrance and dragged herself over the massive central doughnut shape of the reactor torus, touching and pressing, running her fingertips over each tiny plate of the magnetic containnt vessel. Twice she got her back and buttocks stuck between the torus and the ceiling; on the second ti she thought she might not be able to dislodge herself — she was jamd fast, blind and helpless, and she began to panic. But then she bit her hand open and lubricated her skin with her own blood. She slipped free and lay on the floor, panting and shaking for almost an hour before she carried on.
The torus was unbreached. No plate was out of shape or out of position. Which made sense, because a magnetic containnt breach would have blown Pheiri to pieces. lyn tried not to think about that.
Eventually she found the problem — one of the feed-lines into the torus was damaged. A single piece of plating had warped and bent sideways. lyn ran her fingers over it multiple tis to confirm that it felt wrong.
“That’s what you get for gunning your engines,” she said. She could not hear herself over the thudding of Pheiri’s heartbeat.
She crawled back to the entrance and retrieved the bottle of grey goo. Then she used her bare hands to sar it all over the feed-line breach, pressing the raw goop into the wound. Her own blood was probably mixed in — she couldn’t see to check — but that was okay. The grey goo would do the real work. She just had to get it on there.
She sared and slapped and slopped the stuff, until her arms were numb and her mouth tasted of iron and her vision had gone black instead of static.
She sat back, perhaps an hour later, and licked her hands clean as she listened to Pheiri’s heartbeat.
A deep throbbing; a healthy, steady, lengthy drum-drum-drum of nuclear power, feeding the turbines deeper down.
“Love you, Pheiri,” she said.
The screen of her mind scrolled with words: good job, well done, mission success, return to engineer division command for cleaning and refit. She made all those go away. None of them ant anything.
lyn spent an hour crawling in circles before she found the exit from the torus chamber again.
Another hour to reach the ladder.
Another hour to
hatch
hurt
Haf?
* * *
///external communication access request receive
///high frequency radio
///handshake protocol sent response
///signal origin: Combat Fra, Who’s Asking?
///handshake protocol ignored
///recomnd null contact, signal source not verified
///external communication access request receive
///handshake protocol rejected short-wave only
///audio safety scrub confird
///playing direct audio input
.“Oh, co on, you’re a fucking tal box. You have wheels! You expect to believe you have an AI substrate enclosure inside a tank? Basic audio, really? What do you think I’m doing, trying to squirt a virus into your tiny machine brain? What’s the point of audio? No, Victoria, of course it doesn’t have crew. Did you see it earlier? It’s auto-piloted. Crew would have popped a hatch and shouted at us to get inside, not assud we knew what to do.”
///unidentified language
///translating audio
///transcribing audio
///awaiting response
///internal audio
///Hafina: .“Pheiri? Pheiri, what’s this? That’s not you, is it? That’s sobody out there, talking to us? ly! ly, wake up! We’re being talked at! We’re being talked at!”
///lyn: .“Who? Who? Who? Pheiri, Pheiri. Who is. Who or what is. Who is this?”
///audio relay established. pass-through translation established.
///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“Am I talking to a person — or another zombie, I suppose? Or a machine? What are you doing, you overgrown fossilized turd? Is this supposed to be audio rendered as text? Is this—”
///lyn: .“Person. Hello. Hello. lyn. This is Haf. We’re … Pheiri.”
///Hafina: .“Hey! H-hey, sorry, ly’s not f-feeling too good right now. Are you the pilot? Are we talking to the pilot? Hi!”
///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“No. No, you’re talking to … uh. Yes— yes— Vic— okay, fine! Shut up for a second! Go nurse your skull or watch the corpse, let talk. My na is … Kagami. I’m on board the combat fra — the ch, the giant robot. You understand that term? You helped us earlier, you covered us when we fucked up, when the commander fucked up, whatever. We need—”
///Hafina: .“We— we— have to help the pilot! I think. I don’t know. ly? ly, what do I say? They want to be friends, I think they want to be friends, but they’re not the pilot, they’re not—”
///lyn: .“Pheiri helped. Friends. Pilot. Friends.”
///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“Pilot? Do you an Elpida? Or the pilot inside this combat fra?”
///Hafina: .“I … I don’t know. Sorry! Haha!”
///Unknown source, aboard the Who’s Asking?: .“Well you’re in luck, because both of them are on my side. I’m on the side of both of the ‘pilots’. Understand? So, you and , we’re on the sa side. And we need your help to get one of the pilots back. I assu you’re willing, the way you tried to help us earlier. Yes? Confirm your intentions.”
///interrupt audio relay
///direct transmission mind-to-input-source
///all assistance rendered request confirmation pilot
///awaiting response
=Fucking hell, you think in base-8 as well. Whoever decided to design machines like this should be shot. Fine, here’s a squirt of binary, have fun with that. Understand this? Good. So, I’m talking to the AI in charge now, am I? No, I can’t confirm that I’m friends with the pilot, I don’t have any of your confirmation codes or call-words or any of that guff, because we’re all millions of years past our sell-by dates — and unless I’ve misunderstood the state of the world, so are you, you ball of silicon. You want to help us save the ‘pilot’? Her na is Elpida, by the way, and she’s an idiot who got herself captured by fucking psychos who paint skulls on everything. Which is a great sign! The best sign! I’m being sarcastic, sure hope you can process that. You’re going to have to take this on trust. Now, I’ve got sensors up here that can see through solid steel, concrete, whatever you like, which ans I can’t see inside you, but I can pinpoint every zombie within a mile or two. Here’s the deal: I shovel you intel, you break our friends out. Deal?=
>deal
=Wait! Wait, there’s sothing at your back end. I assu you’re armoured against close-assault infiltration, but it just appeared. Thought you might like to know. Gesture of good faith and all that.=
>accepted
///Hafina: .“Uh! ly … ly, what was that? Was that … ”
///lyn: .“Knock knock. Who’s there? Rear hatch. Rear hatch who. That’s sobody knocking on the rear hatch, Haf. Haf hatch. Haf. Hatch. Knock knock?”
///Unidentified source, touching rear hatch: .“Greetings, great and terrible titan of forgotten tis. There is a door in your belly. Are you a house? Do not turn your eyes and stones upon this slip of flesh, I beg — for I see your thoughts sending through the air. We share an aim, I believe: the warrior, brought low, requires aid. I have need of your arm. You have little need of mine. But I can go where you cannot tread, for you are large, and I am small.”
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