#mfki

From the first, Digits has been a better friend to you than most. He's so innocent, too honest for his own good, and it was obvious in the first ten minutes of knowing him that he wasn't slinking around looking to get something from you. He liked magic, and colours, and puzzles. He was not a child, but he held a child-like quality that was rare.

Innocence is often used as an excuse to draw down the guards you put up. You've seen the concept of innocence twist and fold to form a mask. People employ innocence, wear it like a mask to serve an ulterior motive.

Look at Gage, for instance. Sitting at his desk in the front of the shop, keeping the books with that permanent smile carved on his face by the arrangement of his plates, the young-form looks like a kindly if odd boy made of metal. And he can speak sweet and knows the ins and outs of flattery to put himself on just about any customer's good side. So that he can slip in close later and tell you which parts are worth grabbing and which are junk.

So it's for the best that you give up on Digits. Cast your attention else where. His mask is so firmly fixed, you can't see around it, and that alarms you.

You try to ignore him. You really do. At first, you think he might be confused by your sudden change. Then hurt. Then, in a show of belligerence you never would have expected, he becomes almost aggressive in his persistent presence. Always near to mind, mentioned in conversations with those you've chosen to trust; you ignore him, but he's impossible to forget.

It's Crib who takes it too far. You have no idea how it even comes up (where she even comes from), but she's badgering you, hectoring you -- and all about Digits. You scream at her to stop, you scream to drown her out, but she's there, still there, still talking and it's wrong, it's sickening, but it feels good as your hydraulics put their all into sending your fist through her face.

There is a squall of rent metal -- agony as shreds of her face tear into your knuckles -- and the clatter of glass as her optics shatter to the floor; a ghostly expellation of blue matter when you pull your hand back, her face a wreck, destroyed.

What should be horror transforms somehow into humor, leaving you laughing as your friend -- one of your people -- stumbles back, blinded, glitching. You should help her, you think, and yes, that's exactly what you'll do. Help her in the lashing of a foot, snaring her across the knees to help her fall. Help her in the economical, practiced movements of an old hand at murder; break her arms so she can't hit back, crack her furnace so she can't hold heat; hit and hurt and harm until she simply stops moving.

Only then do you notice The Mouse. Was she there all along? You scramble to remember, sitting back from the carnage you've created, enjoying the satisfaction of silence, and decide it doesn't matter. She is here, making stiff, agitated gestures at the ruin of her companion.

You lift her up, and she looks at you, hurt and confused and angry. You ignore this; a smile is what you offer, and then you press your face to hers, an imperfect approximation of a kiss, as you have no lips and your mouth hits between her eyes. But that is your intent; a kiss before you smash her, just as hard as you can, into the cold cement of the Garage floor.

Very suddenly you realize it's Bellus you've slammed down into the pavement; you've got your hand tight around his throat and he's pinned, immobile and as broken as everything else in this place, but still grinning in the glare he offers over his scarves, snickering through the glitching of his vocalizer.

You shake him and you hit him, and as he starts to bleed, dark oil and vibrant coolants and hydraulic fluids, you keep expecting him to fade out, to grind to the same halt they always do.

But he just keeps going, laughing harder as your hands tear at his body. He's built a lot like Gage, and that only makes you angrier; built the size and proportion of a human youth; you want to dismantle him but every layer of plating you remove is only covering another solid casing. You're peeling him like an onion; he's as layered as the colourful scarves he wears.

Without precisely meaning to, you open the wifi broadcast in your primary processor, looking for any signal to ping off, and there it is; a return signal from the young-form. Perhaps if you can't peel him from without, you can flay him from within.

There is nothing gentle in the linking of your processors; none of the slow sync granted by a physical connection. You wouldn't know where his ports would be, or even if he has any, and there is something much more satisfying about the suddenness, the jarring finality of simply being in his processor.

He looks terrified, optics brilliant above the scarves, and you slam him with sensation, with memory, with pain, with everything you can find in yourself. There is so much of you, so many processes in your system, and you duplicate every file, every memory, every part of your electronic self, and blast it into him.

It's not interface; there is nothing sexual or professional about it. It's murder on your mind, and as he begins to flail and twitch beneath you, it's murder you know you're achieving. Slowly, gratifying in the sense that you are there, you are part of him as he's failing; there's not enough room in his systems for everything you're throwing at him, and he cannot keep up. Even as the various programs that build sentience and personality in a robot begin to shut down, the processes to keep his body itself speed up, trying to compensate for his process suddenly requiring so much power.

And there it is, there's the moment you need; there's something in the distraction of Bellus's dying, over-fed mind that just makes it easy suddenly. Where before you could do nothing by pry and dent and peel away the layers of the other machine's body; now you draw a fist up and back, twisting to put every ounce of strength into the gesture as your fist pistons down into the center of the smaller bot. A crunch, and whine, pain fed residually from both the link with the dying 'bot and your own arm cracking against the floor.