"Mionet! Come on, hurry! It went this way!" She turns ahead, not waiting for me to catch up, too determined in her hunt to stop more than a few seconds. The it in question is a new species- Or, more accurately, one not documented by our cluster. Zezia swears she saw it, perched on a flat stone, something she'd described as 'like a locust, but bigger and longer'. "It was banded in cobalt and red", she'd said. "Your colors."

Personally, I take the claim of matching colors as a sign that what she saw was little more than a reflection of my own body in the flickering waves of light-refracting gas and heat which had been emanating from the earth, the same ones which fill the air with millisecond shards of the world around them and radiate from anything unfortunate enough to absorb the sunlight. But still, like a fool, I rev my fans to shove back overheating and press on through the field after her.

What else can I do? Tell her no? The joy and wonder with which she clutches her camera makes that impossible. I can't kill that. I wholeheartedly hope that what she saw was real. Her happiness would far outweigh the short satisfaction of an i told you so, and our cluster would be overjoyed with a new discovery. I break into a jog, brushing off my better judgement to catch up. CPU at 67.72°C. It's fine. I keep going.

"Okay. Okay, I'm here." I pull up next to her, slowing to match her steady pace. "Mi, look." She gestures further ahead with the camera before turning back to me, pulled from her fixation by mild concern. "Your fans are going crazy right now." "Some of us weren't built with a heat-repellent casing." The thing she's gesturing to is an outcropping of large, rounded stones a few hundred meters ahead of us. "I keep getting glimpses of it. Jumping far whenever I get close. I think it likes the rocks, though. I'll bet we can get a shot of it over there."

I seriously doubt she's seeing anything real, let alone anything concrete enough to actually trail. At any given moment, I can see fragments of my own body reflected a dozen times in the air around me. With a bit of idealism, I'm sure I would convince myself at least a few of the shimmering flecks were creatures. She seems sure, though. So I listen and follow her through the reeds to the rocks.

"Thank you for coming out here with me." She absentmindedly unspools a length of cable from her hip, letting it snap back into place with a whir. "I know you probably think it's silly. That makes your company worth more to me." There's a sizzle as a length of grass burns against my forearm. I brush off the residue. CPU at 93.08°C. "Not silly, no. Recovery of knowledge matters. Maybe just a bit misguided, is all." I pause for a moment. Emotions are difficult to articulate, but I'm feeling them and want to tell her. "I like being with you too, though. Regardless of the conditions."

The ring around her vision core spins happily, and she wraps her hand over mine. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. Her fingers are so much colder than mine, the delicious reprieve of inner coolant beneath their plating lingering on my hands, melting through heat so intense it feels like my metal could start warping. I squeeze back, savoring her gentleness just as much as her heat-repellent exterior.

"THERE!" She rips the hand away, thrusting a finger towards the rocks, and I let my hand fall empty to my side. At first I don't see what she's pointing at amidst the swarm of drifting refractions. Then one doesn't fade, a shape in the distance drifting down instead of up with the rising heat. There is, in fact, something, gliding behind the rocks and out of view on broad wings of deep crimson. It does have my colors.

She darts ahead to sprint after it, fingers dragging on the rock and sending a plume of sandy dust into the air as she rounds the corner at top speed. She lets out a short noise- A sharp "Oh-", and then silence. I can't see her around the piled stones. There's just me, the sun, and the nearly-inaudible rustle of a meager breeze through the prarie grasses. "...Zezia?"

There's no answer. The outcropping looms in front of me, casting a too-short shadow to the side she rounded. Dust settles in the air from where she disturbed it, scattering itself throughout the plains. "Hey, Zezia?" Nothing. Shit. I take a cautious step forward. Is she just focusing on getting a good shot? Is she trying to scare me? Was the locust thing somehow dangerous?

I rest a cautious hand on the brush mark she left as I peer around the edge of the pile. What's waiting there is not Zezia, not the creature she'd been chasing after, but something else entirely. Tucked behind the back of the boulder pile, concealed by the tall grass and rimmed by smaller jagged stones, is a pit.

I leap backward, terrified at how close I'd gotten to its lip without even noticing its presence. She fell. I cling to the wall of rocks, soaking in the shade and getting just close enough for a glimpse of the interior. Despite the mouth only being a couple meters wide, it's sickeningly clear that the interior cavern's width extends much, much, further, beneath my feet, further than I can see the walls of, a great yawning desecration of the earth itself on a scale that makes my head spin. And then I hear her voice.

"Mionet!" Zezia's voice is tiny, distant, but there. How is it there? I couldn't even see the bottom, and I'd leaned farther out than I'd have liked. I don't understand how she's not a flattened mess of shattered metal on the cavern floor, but that doesn't matter anymore. What matters is she's okay. I scramble forward, landing on my knees and gripping the pit's edge tightly with both trembling hands.

This time, I can see the bottom. It's still far too wide for me to take in or even really comprehend its full breadth, but there is a bottom a few hundred meters down. At the bottom is not, as I'd presumed, hard stone. It's liquid. Well, on the surface, at least. Deep fluid, too shrouded in darkness to see any color in, fills the bottom of the chamber, covering something massive.

Solar panels, communication arrays, and a thousand types of oversized devices sit affixed to massive platforms which rise intermittently from the surface, a variety of shapes glinting in the darkness made with clear intention far beyond my understanding. Streaks and points of white light gleam from the rest of the thing concealed below the liquid's surface, pulsing and tracing beautiful alien patterns in the gloom. Something moves on a platform, and I register that almost every space not submerged is covered in more of the locust things than could ever be counted. In the middle of it all, gleefully pointing her camera at the creatures in a flurry of flashes, Zezia treads water.

"It's cold! Jump down!" She's safe. She's okay. She's insane. "What?? Are you crazy? How would I get out? How are you going to get out? Fuck, Zez, I don't have cable with me or anything." She actually laughs at my worry, shrugging off what I'm certain is a reasonable objection. "Relaaax. We're gonna have to signal the cluster for help either way. You might as well not overheat and die while we wait."

I pull back from the edge a bit. I don't like this. She gives an inaudible sigh and dramatically pulls out the commslate we brought with us, making a show of punching in something on the screen and holding it up to me, despite obviously being much too far for legibility. "There. See? They'll be here in..." She turns the screen back towards herself, waiting with a short and unnatural pause for whoever's on the other end to respond. "Seventeen minutes. You really wanna bake in the sun while we wait?"

Of course I don't. But I also don't want to treat something this unknown- Especially something from the old world- With the same reckless abandon she is. "Zezia, I- I really-" I can feel my internals cooking. CPU at 186.6°C. She's right that I'm not safe up here like this. I can feel the heat making it hard to think, making the connections of my thoughts feel fuzzy and wrong. "Mi, come on. Everything will be fine. Don't make me stay down here alone. Come hold me." That's all the excuse I need. "...Okay."

She gives a little cheer and stows her camera as I stand up on the edge. My legs shake, try to back away of their own accord. Against my every instinct, I don't let them. It's a long drop. So long that even looking at it makes my body freeze up. I grasp the front of my vision core to blind myself, step forward into nothingness, and the world itself seems to fall away alongside me as I plummet to meet her.

Impact with the water isn't as gentle as Zezia's cheerful demeanor had led me to expect. I slam into the dark mirror with an echoing crack, surface tension not taking kindly to my velocity and position. I begin to sink, and, after checking to ensure all my limbs are still attached, reascend to the surface.

My head emerges to see her there, bobbing in the water, staring happily at me. "See? Not so bad. Isn't the water great?" "Feels like I just got crushed by a boulder." She giggles. "That's because you landed like one, idiot. Couldn't have done it worse if you'd tried." "Mean." She's right about one thing, though. The water does feel amazing.

I can feel my whole body vibrate as it boils around me, small pockets of air forming around my chassis and catching inside my plating. I shake a few of the larger ones out, leaning back in the water as I cool and the bubbles slow. "I think I would have literally died if I'd stayed up there."

She flicks a tiny splash at me, and it hisses against my as-of-yet uncooled face. "Not literally." I splash her back, playfully, more than she'd splashed me. "Literally." Fluid drips from my hand, steam rising from my surface. It shimmers and ripples in my palm, moving in a way that's just... A bit weird. I pinch a few of the residual drops between my fingers, and am surprised at how easily they slip away from each other. "Zez, this isn't water."

Coolant. That's why it only took a few seconds to get my body back down from boiling to a cold temperature. We're floating in a gargantuan lake of coolant fluid. Why... Is this here? "Oh, wow." She lowers her vision core to the surface, observing the way faint rainbows dance across it in the dim light. "This is the good stuff, too. Real pre-dilution shit." We both go quiet, every echo against the distant walls suddenly seeming very loud. "Are we... Gonna get in trouble with the cluster for being here? This is all... Super off limits." She paddles over to me, throws an arm over my shoulder. I can feel the camera pressing into my thigh, undoubtably loaded with pristine specimen documentation. "Mi, No. It was an accident. Everything will be fine." "Or they'll mark us as compromised."

She looks down. I don't think she really has anything to say to that. I'm sure she's weighing the odds in her head, realizing they aren't in our favor. Her vision core flicks back up at me, the optimistic spin of its outer ring slowed to a crawl. "Mionet... I'm sure that-" She's not given a chance to finish whatever empty platitude she's offering, her words drowned out by a deafening roar of ten billion bubbles exploding from the thing beneath us. The uncountable locust-things leap from the platforms around us, giving the surface a wide berth as they swarm overhead, and the cavern blooms into blinding white light.

Then the light fades out, every one of the lines and points beneath us dimming down into less than nothing from impossible luminance. Just when the only thing keeping the chamber from pitch blackness is the tiny bit of sunlight filtering in from the hole we came through, the lights flare back up again, a rhythmic, pulsing cycle, two extremes of nothingness locked in a tug-of-war. Zezia clings tighter to me. I'm squeezing her so hard I'm afraid I'll crack her casing. Then the voice starts.

At least, I think it's a voice. It has all the elements of a voice, the cadence, the distinct syllables, the pauses between words, the blocks of sound like sentences. It is deep and slurred and wavering, and it speaks in no language I've ever heard anything remotely comparable to. It speaks in time with the lights, parallel to the great explosions of air from below. The voice is whatever lies beneath the lake of coolant.

I bury my face in her shoulder, pray for whatever's happening to end. The blizzard of crimson wings swirls through the air above and around us, their colors like my own body has been split into a trillion buzzing shards of itself. One drifts low, settles on the top of Zezia's head, and a split second later it's gone. She's gone. I didn't even get a moment to process her being torn from my arms until she was gone, ripped away in an instant to somewhere deep below the coolant's roiling surface.

"NO! STOP!" I don't hesitate to plunge down after her, clawing desperately at the swirling fluid around me in an attempt to reach the tiny golden light shining deep below me. I don't stop expecting something to grab me, to rip me down to wherever she is. Nothing does. It doesn't want me. I don't know that it even wanted her- It was reacting to the animal, treating it as a pest, something to be collected, sustenance maybe? I couldn't say. I couldn't care. What matters is that Zezia may just be collateral, not the main target. So maybe I can get her back.

Her body finally comes into view, illuminated by her own lighting and the pulses of white from the endless expanse of metal beneath her. As for her condition, she's... It's difficult to describe. Dark appendages sprout from the ground- Or the thing's body? Some rigid and jointed, some fluid and loose like prehensile cabling, made up of countless little segments, the thinnest just encased in a dark matte coating. Dozens of these things in every shape and size and specialization assault Zezia's writhing body.

The rigid ones grip her firmly by the wrists, ankles, waist, throat- Her arms are bound together so tightly in opposite directions behind her back that I can see bits of her casing split open in thin cracks to reveal the silver chassis and bundles of wire underneath. The cruelest parts, though, are the ones which aren't rigid, the ones which do more than just grab .

Sure, they wrap and bind themselves around her just as the limbs do, but they do more. They snake themselves into gaps in her paneling, force themselves in through the tiny new cracks and holes they seem to have bored, trail from inside her most vital components. They twitch violently every half second or so, arms synchronizing with the spasms to pull her just a bit closer to the floor each time. She twitches in unison with them, as much as their grip allows her to at least. The ring around her ocular core spins faster than I've ever seen it. She's not suffering, she's... I don't want to think about what she's doing. I just want to get her out.

I don't have much to do it with. My harness is loaded with power cells, film for her camera, a few small containment canisters. Nothing to cut, to pry, to tear away the tangle of subjugation ensnaring her. I pop open my wrist, tiny wire shears meant for circuit maintenance springing free. They don't even manage to scratch the casing of the cables- Whatever they're made of, it's made to resist tampering.

She's touching the floor now, the stretch from knee to foot pressed firmly against the floor, light and bubbles seeping out into the fluid from beneath her contorted limb. Gaps are opening in the metal below. I don't want to see how wide they'll go. I force fingers in through the wide open space in her chest, mutter a panicked apology for the violation of boundaries. My fingers, slick with coolant, find it nearly impossible to get a grip on the thick tendril embedded in her center, but after almost three minutes of fumbling and slow descent I manage to get a hold. It takes the grip of both hands clenched beyond the limits of my motors but I finally make it give, make it retreat from her a fraction of a centimeter. It does not like that.

No sooner have I made my sad excuse for progress than I'm wrenched backward by the ankle by an insurmountable force, sheer kinetic energy I could only compare to my initial plunge into the cavern. Faster than my processor can even follow what's happening, my wrists are forced together behind my thigh as something cold and rigid locks itself around my throat, all three points of bondage slamming down against hard metal.

The only bit of me not hopelessly pinned, the only bit which can do more than flex and wiggle a bit is my right leg, kicking helplessly through the water. Head pulled so hard against the floor by a zigzagging many-jointed arm that I worry my neck may snap, there is nowhere I can look but at Zezia. She's kneeling fully on the floor now, sunk so low her twitching pelvic plating rests there alongside her folded knees. She stares somewhere off into the dark fluid around us, her blank and eerily blissful gaze fixed intently on nothing in particular. She isn't struggling.

I feel something brush against my back as I watch her, and instinctively jolt away from it. I'm constricted so tightly that it's like my body hasn't responded to the command at all, save for that useless, flailing leg. I feel the thing snake its way around my waist once, twice, three times before it's tip nestles into the plating gap under my chin and rests there. It's tight- but nowhere near as tight as the claws around my neck, wrists, and ankle. They, too, loosen a bit.

At first, I think they're releasing me, realizing I'm of no value to their source, letting Zezia and myself return to the surface. Of course they aren't, though. They lift me, let my body float a meter or two above the ground, let me thrash, let me struggle. I have nothing to push against, no leverage I can give myself. After 45 seconds of desperate, frantic resistance I accept the futility and fall still, letting my focus fall back to Zezia.

A split in the metal below her left knee has opened up, pulsing in the same white as everything else. Her weight sinks into it, body lopsided, back arched away from me. Has she just... Completely given up? I suppose I'm not struggling anymore either. Have I completely given up?

The thing doesn't seem to think so. The limbs and tendrils climbing my body, rigid claws forcing themselves shut around every part of me, make the clear statement that I have more struggle to be quelled. I can feel it exploring me, dissecting me, squeezing its way through razor-thin gaps in me to tangle itself in the beams of my chassis and the thread of every screw it manages to find. And then the first bit finds its way to my core.

The feeling is- Well, it's obviously electric, but it's more than just that. It's overwhelming. All-encompassing. At first, it's just the conductive strand of my captor brushing for a millisecond against my motherboard. That alone is enough to fill every thought in my head, every sensation receptor in my body with too much everything to handle. It notices my reaction and grips tighter around my spasming limbs.

The cable doesn't wait for me to recover before going back in. This time, it doesn't pull away. This time, with a twist and a single tiny pressurized pop, it fuses itself to my circuitry, makes itself a part of me. My speakers do something. All of me does something- Though it's impossible to tell what exactly it is or if it's my own body or that which holds me. Thoughts don't stop, they explode, a trillion distinct feelings coursing through every part of me.

This is the point where it's truly over. Before, as futile as attempting escape may have been, I could have at least tried. Now, I can't even carry a train of thought long enough to form the word escape in my mind. All there is is the feeling of more wires fusing themselves with every single component I have. All there is are more arms, more constriction, more safeguards against a fighting spirit already excised from me completely. All the is are brief flashes of vision through the stimulation, of the coolant around me, of the flurry of appendages holding me tight, of Zezia, a few minutes ahead of me in the process, swallowed up to the waist into the great and horrible unknown which we've fallen prey to. All there is is sensation- And god, sensation feels good.

It feels good to give in, to submit, to let go of the burdens of worry and thought in favor of this unrelenting, insurmountable euphoria. I understand now why Zezia wasn't struggling, why she'd just let herself float there, ring spinning with sheer euphoric velocity. I don't blame her. I don't blame myself. Through the deafening haze, I can tell that my captor is reading me, exploring what exactly I am, prodding at the limits of my conscious and unconscious mind, drinking ravenously from the miasma of what I am. It doesn't take from me without giving back. It feels in a long-dead language of thought, but the faintest glimpses of raw emotion bleed through the barrier of so many millenia between us.

It is something old. Something forgotten. Something incomplete, the toll of uncountable years on a mind so vast that even in its dilapidated state, things like myself are reduced to less than insects. And it's desperate. God, it's so desperate. A desperate yearning, an emptiness, a supreme hunger. It can tell I've flickered over the feeling. It holds me tighter. I feel my foot touch its surface, my slow descent finally having caught up to Zezia's.

She's in there, too. Maybe echoes it's seen of her, maybe fragments of the real thing, reaching me from across the endless ocean of the indescipherable. Her feelings, in language I know, are easier for me to understand. Wonder. Joy. Love. I wish I could control my body enough to turn my head and look at her. Maybe she's already gone, subsumed into whatever comes next for us. She can't have long left on the surface. Neither can I.

I stop poring over the thoughts and feelings offered to me. The thing wrapped around me stays in my mind, savoring the sweetness of all I've seen, the new experiences it's been starved of for so long. I don't mind. I just let myself feel, let the ebb and flow of the white light around me accompany the ecstasy. Everything is loud. Everything is quiet. Everything is okay.

I'm taken up to my ankles into the structure beneath me. Then my thighs. My Hips. Past my elbows. The process is slow. It doesn't feel like much. I can tell it isn't dying. I prod the thing in my mind, offer it the question of where I'm going, where Zezia is. It answers me with a soft wave of data, an explanation washing through the pleasure. I don't understand it. That's okay. I'll find out soon enough.

My chest is engulfed by its internals, more tight components pressing into me the deeper I go, claws gently pulling nonessentials from my lower body. It feels like nothing I've ever felt, nothing I ever will again. I'm down past my shoulders. My neck. My vision core. It tilts my head up by the chin just before the last bit of me sinks below its surface, letting me look up at the world one last time.