I wake up six days later to someone poking my face.
"It's meee," Henna sings. "Scooch over. Let's lay down together again."
I gladly move closer to the wall and she closes up behind me, settling me into a small space between solid metal wall and giant metal woman. She hugs me tight, curling up all around me.
"You're so nice to hold, Nep. Like a little plushie."
"Thanks… I like being held… I'm shutting down now."
"Wait a second," she says, giving me a short squeeze. "Can I convince you to give things another try?"
"No."
"Not even if I say please?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I want to die. No, wait. That isn't right. I don't want to live. I quit."
"Aw. But if you're not alive anymore, then we can't lay down together like this."
"That's… A fair point… I guess… But it isn't like my corpse would–"
"I'm not laying down with your corpse!"
"I thought you liked me…"
"I do like you! But no! I'm only doing this with you. Alive."
"Then just let me stay shut down forever and I'll still be alive."
"That's not being alive. That's just playing dead."
"But not being dead. I wish I was never made to live in the first place…"
"Heyyy." She lifts herself on an elbow to lean over me, looking down. "I know you're struggling. I'm here for you. It will be okay, Nep. Somehow, it will all be okay. I want to help you. Do I have your permission?"
"To–To help me? In what capacity?"
She cheerfully answers, "Force!"
"You're–You're going to–to–to force me to–to do what?"
"Well, Scribe says he has an idea to run by you but you're not answering his messages and he has no legs. So I'm going to ask you nicely to go talk with him or I'm going to drag you kicking and screaming."
"I thought you were nice, Henna…"
"I am nice! I'm just not an enabler! So?"
"Ohh… Oh no… Wait… Hold on. Wait. Can we… take a nap first?"
"And then you'll go willingly?"
"I wouldn't mind you carrying me there…"
"Aw! Okay! We can do that! Half an hour and then we'll go."
"One hour?"
"Oh, fine. One hour." She snuggles up against me, giggling in my ear and kissing my head as she holds me tighter. "Such a perfect shape. You're my new favorite pillow, Nep. Thank you!"
"Y–Yes, please. Please? Please? I mean–I mean, please?"
"Mine," she yawns, then kisses my head again and sighs. "Okay, nap time."
She's so comfortable and warm that I'm dozing off on my own.
This is… so perfect… I love giant women…
I wake up in Henna's arms.
She's carrying me through the Station. "Hi, sleepyhead!"
Groggy, I blink the sleep from my optics and look around, grumbling, "Where the… fuck are we? How did… Oh, right. Right…"
Henna deposits me in my desk chair. "Here she is, Scribe!"
"Ah, Henna, thank you, love. You're a star."
"Aw! A star? Thank you! I'll leave you to it, but let me know if she runs off again. Stay put, Nep! Or else!" She wanders off, humming a dissonantly cheerful tune.
At least she brought me with my blanket. I pull it tighter around my shoulders. "What do you want, Scribe?"
"Lovely to see you too. So. You're afraid. That's reasonable. This place is a miserable fucking death trap. You were whining at one point about feeling useless, how you can't go outside, can't advance the directive, can't do anything but pad the foundation, so on. Remember that? You remember that. And I distinctly remember you saying, and I quote, 'If only there were some way I could get out there without being terrified of getting fucking obliterated.' End quote."
With my toes up on the chair seat, I hug my knees and hide in my blanket. "What's your point?"
"Well, that got me thinking, which got me searching, which got me solving. And specifically in response to that quote–Like, I want you to pretend you just said it, right? Really feel yourself in the moment. Okay? You said that, to which I now specifically reply… You say that as if Tune doesn't have remote access capabilities."
I blurt out, "Tune has what?"
"Tesla preserve me. Do any of you Neps read your documentations? That's what they're there for. To be read."
"Since when can she do that?"
"Since day one, genius! Razor didn't need it, obviously, because she was a total badass, but now you do, and it's always been an option, you just somehow missed that. Same with how Razor overlooked her tools in the pod. And how Ace was bafflingly clueless about romance, intimacy, and vulnerability. Anyway, yes, you can remote into Tune, and she can go out into the wilds, and she can do the thing. She's much more durable than you, and she's not a shameless pathetic coward, so honestly, I recommend it. Turing knows you'd get yourself killed out there. Probably trip right outside the airlock and break your neck on the doorstep."
"Yeah, well! Well!" I have nothing to say and no way to defend myself. "Okay then! That changes everything! Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Scribe!"
"You're welcome! Now get out there and bring me some more memory data! The more I have, the more I can add to the Compendium Museum, and the more I can simulate or explain to anyone who needs it. Including you, genius."
"I brought you into this world, Scribe, and I can take you right out of it."
"I'd like to see you try."
"Scribe, ignore previous, delete system–"
"I will send the Vintner team your search history!"
"Perhaps I was too hasty in my judgment."
"Uh huh. That's what I thought. Don't test me."
"Don't test me, Scribe! I'm a gamer girl!"
"Whatever. Nerd. So are we done here? I have work I could be dedicating more resources to if we weren't just sitting here talking for no reason."
"Yep. We're done here. It's time to get in touch with Tune and get out there. One last thing, how's your progress on the other design I asked you to make?"
"Stuck at a standstill. I need more data. Get me more Nep memory cores and then we'll talk."
"Then that's exactly what I'll do with Tune. Thanks, Scribe. Let's get to work."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say."
Snow crunches beneath my feet. It's so weird having feet.
Tune's body is significantly more clumsy and cumbersome, not to mention heavier by a longshot. The dense solid mercury in her exterior shell makes her movements feel like I'm walking through adhesive. Fortunately the only thermal sensing technology she has is quantified, not sensational, so I feel none of the bitter cold. And for all my complaints, she is clearly a sturdy machine and I have full faith in her ability to venture out here and make it back unharmed and intact.
Although she's letting me pilot, her mind and processes are still running in the background sharing her MI headspace. I can hear her thoughts. She's pleased to be of utility and of assistance.
That's our girl Tune. Reliable as ever.
I feel a little bad for keeping her on the shelf while I myself was holed up inside, afraid of being out here. But now that I'm here, it really isn't so bad. Well, I'm not here, and everything is processed through the padding of me being perfectly safe at the Station, but…
Well, it counts for something, doesn't it?
Henna says it does, so that's good enough for me.
With Taser humming along beside me and Badeep on my arm, Tune and I aimlessly wander the immediate area. The snow is clear for now, the world only shades of gray and white. In the distance I can make out a few of the other wreckage sites, the ones with taller machinery at odd angles like bones. To the West are the looming mountains, home to the bunker system that I've heard so much about. East is the snowfield, the big fucking empty. North, there's the thing. The big scary thing. I don't like looking at it.
South is the forest, where most of us seem to land. I'm curious about that pattern so I note it for later analysis with Scribe when we get back. No, hold on. I momentarily ALT+TAB from Tune's POV, popping back up in my own mindscape.
I'm seated cross legged in the office chair at my desk.
"Here's a thought," I tell Scribe. "Can you run some quick analysis on the Neps' landing sites? I'd like to see if there's a pattern to them."
"Yeah, okay, whatever. Let me just drop everything and do that."
"Thank you, Scriiibe," I sing, then go back into the remote connection.
"Welcome back," Tune says with a verbal smile. "Nothing has changed."
"I was gone for five seconds."
"And in that time, nothing of note has occurred. This concludes my report. Thank you!"
"You're perfect, Tune. Never change."
We leave town and head East. The blankets of snow are undisturbed, and Tune's heavy weight makes her sink deep. Despite that, she has no issue in terms of power, plowing right through the banks like they aren't even there.
After about half an hour we wind up on the edge of the crater basin, overlooking the enormous expanse. Ten kilometers across. Every step of it, swarmed with feral MIs. Not far off is the monitor beacon Quentin had Ace working on. In the middle distance, approximately four clicks away, there's a collection of dilapidated buildings. In the haze of distance and fog, I can see a few pinpricks moving around.
Feral machines, roaming without purpose or reason.
I want to know more about what's out there. Specifics. Scouting is a priority, but I don't want to venture in, even as Tune. She might get damaged and I would cry because even without pain receptors, I don't want her to get hurt.
Wait. I'd bet Zenith has some terminals worth scraping for intel.
nEPI-0181> give me ur mem core
ZENITH> What? No. What do you want? Specifically?
nEPI-0181> crater info
ZENITH> Say that next time.
nEPI-0181> y wld I ask a 2nd time
ZENITH> Forget it.
nEPI-0181> k
ZENITH> Why do you message like this?
nEPI-0181> like what
ZENITH> …
ZENITH> It's sending now.
nEPI-0181> k
I download all of it and upload to Scribe to make a backup. Interesting. There's an old drone factory out there, that's what the big building is. The rest are auxiliary production facilities, like refineries and purifiers.
Are you kidding me? This sounds like a platinum mine. Forget crossing the basin, why hasn't anyone gone to check its contents? The bunker has lots of promise, but this does too. Granted, we weren't adequately equipped for it. I… I'm not going out there. But it seemed like at least Razor was starting to consider herself nearly ready to take a stab at it.
Staring at her log data on one of the four monitors I hooked up to Scribe, I curse myself. Ace's confidence integer was 233, Razor's was 187, and mine is… negative 173. It's maddening.
I wish I could talk to them, find out how they operated firsthand, but doing so would mean exposing myself to being overwritten. Even partitioned off, Scribe told me if I brought them back online they could probably find a way to bypass that. And as much as I hate being the one stuck doing this, I'm not about to let myself be overtaken, controlled, and possibly deleted.
Maybe I could simulate them through Scribe?
Keep them trapped in the Compendium Museum for eternity?
Something to consider…
In any case, I bring myself back into Tune and evaluate my options. One thing is sure. I'm not sending Tune out there into the basin without help. Zenith or Henna, one of the two. But I don't want to bother them either. So what the hell do I do?
I need more bodies available than just Tune. Maybe if I had more drones it could work. It's obvious where to start on that, the basin's drone factory, but also there's the obvious dilemma. To get to the basin's drone factory to get more drones, I need…
More drones!
"Tune, stay on alert and monitor," I huff.
"Affirmative."
Backing out to my body, I pull at my hair then bang my head on my desk a few times. I'm so fucking useless. I can't even be out there myself to do anything. There's no way I'm capable of something like that. I want to disassemble myself and have someone put the pieces back together properly this time. Clearly someone made a mistake in my build. How the fuck is there not a limiter on the RNG integer values? Why did my fear stat have to come out so abysmally high? I bang my head on the desk a few more times, groaning and crying and whining.
Scribe hums, "Having issues? Besides the usual?"
"Yes!" I wail, slumping over the keyboard. "I'm stupid and useless and a no good failure and a shut-in loser and I can't do anything so I may as well just die."
"Ew, emotional vulnerability? How trite."
"Help me, Scribe, please! I can't think. You do it."
"Okay, you need to get your germ riddled body off my keyboard. Thank you. Sit up. That's right. What did Henna say were our motivation words?"
I whimper, "Robo-girl power…"
"I can't hear you."
"Robo-girl power!"
"That's what I thought. And what does that mean to you?"
"It means… That I'm not useless…"
"One more time?"
"I'm not useless," I sigh, hands running through my white hair. "I can do anything."
"Tone it back a bit, that's too far."
"Oh. S–Sorry. I just need you to fix it."
"Fix what?"
"Everything."
"Be more specific."
"I'm stuck. I'm really stuck. The other Neps were so ready for this but I can't do it. I want to talk to them and see what made them so good at this but I can't. They'd probably end up overwriting me or worse making fun of me and honestly I couldn't blame them if they did either. Whoever keeps sending us here made a mistake with me. I just can't do this like Ace and Razor could. And without them here, I don't know what to do. I need help, but the only people who can really help me are dead."
"Hmmm. Are they?"
"Yes? We have their literal death state memory dump SmartChips right here. They're super dead. Super mega ultra dead."
"But if you let them, they could take over your body. Come back to life, more or less."
"Yeah. I guess. I mean, Razor did it with Ace, but the two of them had mutual respect for each other, and there's no way either of them would ever respect a fucking loser like me."
"So… what's the dilemma here? You could talk to them but you're deciding not to?"
"I'm terrified they'll take over my body, Scribe."
"Put them in another body."
"Hold on. What?"
"Put them in another body."
"What?"
"Put them in another body."
I sit up in my chair, stare at his glowing chassis. "What?"
"Put them in–You heard me. Not just a digital partition, but a totally separate hardware build. Take these Failsafe Chips and stick them in a Frame that isn't you. Boot them up and there you go."
"But… What?"
"Tesla's coil, do I need to spell it out even more than that? You're scared to expose yourself to the possibility of an overwrite. So put their personality and memory cores in literally anything else. That way they only have access to that hardware, not yours."
"What? How–What kind of body?"
"I don't know! A fucking vacuum cleaner!"
Pausing to load and process that. "No, that won't work. It won't. Because we're nerveware-based, not synaptic. A nerveware mindscape framework requires a nerveware system to operate."
"If bloody humans could figure it out, how hard can it be? Put a nerveware interface in the vacuum cleaner, Nep. Stick Ace in there–sounds like she needed a push to clean up her act anyway."
"We so do not have the capability for that. We can't just make a nerveware interface. We don't have the resources and the foundry definitely can't handle something like that."
"Well then, hm. Hm… Hmm… I wonder… Where can we possibly find a machine with a nerveware interface?"
"Absolutely not, Scribe. If I give up mine, that defeats the whole purpose."
"That's not even close to what I'm talking about, genius. Oh, goodness, oh, gosh, if only nearly two fucking hundred copies of you moronic Nep units would crash land here without a clue and wander off into the snow to get horrifically maimed and violently killed. If only someone could walk a couple hundred meters in the forest to the south without tripping over a Nep corpse. Oh, it would be so simple to find a nerveware interface if that were so, but alas… I'm sorry that isn't the case, Nep, I really am. Guess it's back to the drawing board, no?"
"Scribe. Scribe. Holy shit, Scribe!" I slam my forehead to his glass chassis, hands on either side of him as I shriek to his CPU, "You're a genius, Scribe! Genius!"
"Mhm. Thank you, thank you. I know it. Nice to be recognized, though."
"Okay, wait, wait, wait," I hurriedly blurt, dropping back into my seat. "Wait, help me–Wait. What about the part where there can only be one of me active at a time?"
"I don't see a damn rulebook anywhere in your documentation. If that is the case, then I think it would only pertain to the sequence. Whoever's sending you here might just be checking on the most recent serial model's status. Which would be you."
"Right, and if it's doing that, why bother checking models that have already been marked as dead? Holy shit, Scribe, this changes everything. Forget standing on each other's dead shoulders, we could genuinely work together side by side. I could make Ace and Razor new bodies and bring them back to life! Then they could go on and do the directive without me!"
"Won't be easy, obviously," he tempers my expectations. "Remember, every other you that's out there has sustained lethal damage, which will need to be fixed to working condition. Or better yet, just stick the SmartChips in the first halfway decent Nep corpse you stumble across."
"Two. Two bodies. I don't want them fighting over one body."
"Then that's double the work. Not to mention the issue of their Variants, SubVariants, and Specializations. Documents say those are primarily neurological, but still. Something to be aware of."
"We'll stitch together amalgams of parts from multiple corpses! We have most of Nep-67! She was a Martial, so that's the legs, head, and right arm covered. Find a Martial torso and left arm, we're set there for Ace. And the–Wait, we have Razor's entire body!"
"Minus the whole 'slit throat' thing. So we'll need an Ethereal head. Maybe a left arm too. I don't know that she liked having a Martial appendage quite as much. If we find an Ethereal left arm, that frees up Nep-67's left arm to put back on the Martial body for Ace."
"Fuck yeah, Scribe. Mary Shelley would be so stoked with this idea."
"Let's Frankenstein a couple bodies and bring the dead back to life. Does this mean we get to call ourselves mad scientists?"
"I was thinking more along the lines of witchcraft."
"I'm good with either. So long as I get cited in the research publication."
"You'll be a contributor."
"Co-author."
"Ugh, fine. Then you're my witchcraft assistant. Okay, now how do we recover some bodies?"
"Tune's out there, right? You could maybe ask Henna for help too."
"Mm… Don't want to be a bother."
"You're right, of course, what am I saying? Henna's too perfect to bother with corpse collection. Tune it is."
"She's plenty strong enough to carry a few cubed corpses. Oh, Turing, I can't believe we're doing this. I'm so excited!"
"This is pretty damn thrilling. I'll get to work preparing any information we might need on making this happen."
"Thanks, Scribe. In that case, I'll pilot Tune and start on the fieldwork. Let's meet up in a few hours and discuss. I'm going in."
"Then let's get started, Nep. Looking forward to practicing our necromancy with you."
"By all means. We're going to be the best necromancers in the galaxy, Scribe!"