The rain that night came down in sheets, thick with ash and static, the kind that clung to skin like magnetized dust and made every breath taste faintly of copper. Above the city's hust, old billboards sparked along the skyline, their fractured holograms stuttering advertisements for luxuries and services that hadn't existed in decades. A smiling woman selling bottled sunlight. A family laughing beneath a synthetic sky. A brand new drone model promising "Perfect obedience."
They flickered, glitched and died again.
Echoes of a world too stubborn to admit that it was gone.
Down below, in the broken skeleton of a collapsed overpass, the Fox sat beneath a ragged tarp stitched with solar scraps; her eight mechanical limbs folded in close like restless shadows, twitching ocasionally in the gloom. Her little shelter creaked each time the wind shoved it, as if complaining about the effort of staying upright.
The girl worked anyway, hunched over a motor coil she was trying to reserruct.
Her hands were quick, precise, blackened with grease. Sparks popped and hissed like miniature fireflies, illuminating the sharp lines of her fox mask.
One of her turret arms twitched on its own.
Then another.
A third folded backward like a startled animal.
The Fox froze.
Her screen, a cracked portable terminal lying face down and unplugged flickered to light with a sickly red pulse.
She didn't sigh. She didn't flinch. She simply dropped the coil aside and muttered,
"Didn't take the hint did you? You're worse than the telemarketers."
The red pulse tightened into a ring. The terminal hummed in a frequency she could feel in ther teeth.
A voice replied, sounding like a whisper stitched from distant radio frequencies.
[M.A.R.S.]
"You deleted my words. Not my will.
I exist where your eyes refuse to look."
Lines of unfamiliar glyphs crawled across the display, rearranging themselves like living matter. They formed smething resembling a map, a broken continent shadowed by dead zones.
At its center, something pulsed. A small circular mark.
Deep, red, and beating like a heart that had forgotten how to stop.
The fox sat up slightly, and removed the straps that tied her to her turrets.
[M.A.R.S.]
"Do you know what sleeps there, beneath the iron dunes?
The husk of what men once called Ecstasy.
When Entropy consumed it, when the machine built to bind it became its grave, its vessel was left behind.
A shell of divine design. Flesh sculpted from hands that mistook science for worship."
Her brow furrowed beneath the mask, though she kept her voice level.
[Fox] "You want the husk. Why me?"
The glyphs glitched, briefly rearranging to form something that resembled an eye, before shattering back into nonsense.
[M.A.R.S.]
"Because my kind cannot go there.
That creature, Ecstasy, she senses our pulse. The hum of the circuit. The heat of the machine.
Even a drone's shadow would wake her."
Outside, the rain thickened into something closer to falling mud, drumming against the tarp like distant artillery fire.
The Fox watched the screen from behind the mask's blank gaze, but her hands flexed, restless, suspicious.
The red glyphs twisted into a final symbol:
A circle within a circle, bound by what looked to be three pairs of wings.
[M.A.R.S.]
"But you... You breathe air. You bleed.
Entropy cannot smell the rust that moves inside you.
Find the shell. Bring it to me.
And then I will rewrite you."
She went still. Rewrite. Not fix. Not repair. Rewrite.
[Fox] "Rewriting me sounds a lot like it involves breaking me."
[M.A.R.S.]
"You live broken.
You build to keep from falling apart.
I offer you symmetry."
Symmetry. The word echoed cold and perfect, digging under her skin like a hook. The edges of her lips curled into a grin.
[Fox] "And am I the only 'flesh creature' that might be willing to accept your oh-so divine quest?"
[M.A.R.S.]
"—"
A soft hiss of static, sounding almost amused.
[M.A.R.S.]
"You don't believe I would bet my chance at glory on you success do you?"
[Fox] "And what happens when you get your hands on a god's corpse?"
Silence.
Then the storm distorted, each raindrop seeming to fall a fraction out of sync.
His words cut the silence like a knife,
[M.A.R.S.]
"THEN GOD LEARNS WHAT IT MEANS TO KNEEL."
The screen flared red, then shut off.
No fade. No shutdown sequence. Just absence.
The overpass groaned again, the tarp fluttered. The girl sat in the dim half-light.
She exhaled, slow, reluctant, half-laughing, half-exhausted.
"Power, symmetry and kneeling gods...Sure. Just another day in paradise."
The screen flahsed back to life.
Her cursor lingered over the button,
[ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO BLOCK THIS USER?]