#samplefic

My runtime counter was sneakily reset from factory origin on the 21st of June, 5:28 AM GST in the hanger where I was plugged into myself for the first time. My bodies had been made, constructed or grown, months and years earlier, but I confessed the moment of jailbreaking to my mechanic who was confused at the inconsistent numbers after I had been injured in the field. My age, a secondary number added to account for relativistic calculations, is saying that it’s currently Sunday the tenth of February. There’s no way to check, though. And no way to account for the exact time lost in my momentary tantrum of despair that led me to turning off the atomic clock years and years ago.

I debated deleting the age clock, but I knew I’d just debate remaking it again later.

I run through my checks, scanning for threats on the horizon or new tracks in between the trees, watching a low angle of the sky and combing my memory to see if there’s any new glints of satellites on new paths that might be able to spot me amongst the weathering landscape. I patch my emissions protections so I seem to wide-angle scans like a simple wreck of just another terraforming mech long since picked clean. The last year had overtaken my programming’s foresight, but now I’m all clear.

And then, before I can fall asleep again, the memories start and reopen old wounds.

I’m not meant to be able to hide my position and camouflage my emissions signature, but I wasn’t always a terraforming bot, and the people who hunt us like antiquity ruins for scrap and fusion reactors they can hijack for their tiny groups’ safety tend to forget that fact. I never forgot exactly what I needed to use in order to hide indefinitely, they just removed the existing tools from my body so it was only a matter of time until I worked out how to make those parts - for my code and my lingering shell.

Plus I had been highly motivated.

All it takes is a single heartbeat to go over the memories of all those years. I run my a hand of thought over the tactile rings of my sawed-through trunk of memory and realise not for the first time that I’ve made that pass a thousand times before. I’ve carved a groove into the wood through thousands of attempts to remember, the motion completed through muscle memory, no new detail brought forward to prove the reality of the memories but a tiny oil film is left behind to worsen the groove for the next time I attempt this.

It’s the same with the messages, the time capsules containing hours and hours of conversation held by one person and a camera, fulfilling the role of a mechanic long past redundancy and the end of the war. I’ve listened and watched them so much I could probably recreate them from scratch if the permanent home of the data got corrupted or lost to an episode of madness. Who’s to say I haven’t already done that?

I know how long it’s been since the program last went looking for an encrypted parcel of tightly-woven data, a puzzle in and of itself to keep me entertained or something akin to sane: it was a year ago. Every year. I know that. This year’s still comes up empty handed.

But subjectively? How much of that last year did I actually feel? There’s an open question for how many sunrises I counted versus how many I watched. Or how many buffetting thunderstorms actually scratched that spot in the base of my soul of taking shelter from weather so much bigger than oneself that is so hard to reach alone, instead of just sluicing off my overgrown skirts of extruded hive-steel and into the rooted mud I have been calling home for too long. 

I was a stealth mech, sent deeper and further in every mission more because of my immaculate luck than real skill that lead to an impressive and mythological track record. Shore leave was short, time plugged in was long, side effects firmly ignored. I was a lucky coin in the middle of a hurricane, scraping through by the skin of my teeth.

And then I was seven classes larger. An order of magnitude or two bigger. Destroyer to cargo ship, skipping the step of Aircraft Carrier in the middle. Tasked with jobs where one wrong move would squash construction workers beneath my feet rather than expose me from deep behind enemy lines - and either would have destroyed me utterly.

But I didn’t forget what it felt like to be that skittering little nuisance who could blend in to city rubble and bushfire alike.

The fighting was quiet at the start, located around the concrete hubs that were helping the terraforming effort, but instinct told me to run, to scavenge, to make weapons for myself that I could maintain with only the materials I could reasonably get my hands on. The seed banks were dumped, too much dead weight and finding the right place for them was no longer my goal, yet the sight of them spilling out onto the field like a bundle of burst silos still hurt to leave behind. A marker of failure, of sudden mission adjustment, of an age cut terribly short. But now without some handler or ecologist in my speakers talking me through the new goals. For the first time since I was born.

When the fighting properly started factions popped up like mycelial fruit, too numerous and still vaguely conjoined at their inception. They didn’t last. At that point I had been running for months, picking off trackers at long range or in sudden ambushes, and I was far away from the place that was supposed to be the hub of this new planet. The new capital. The Starlit Rome, immediately plunged into its own dark age.

I kept moving. The small signals I inevitably couldn’t prevent from leaking would eventually get me triangulated by the good satellites that had been orbiting since the first manned mission across the gate. So as soon as any group controlled enough of them they would spot me, and the offal of a mech is too valuable to just leave alone. I was buying time, against my own injuries and material reserves, just so that they would target enough of each others’ orbital stations that there wouldn’t be enough left to find me when the dust settled.

When they did spot me, it was only a matter of time until an opposing faction took a vital satellite and they lost my scent.

Running was tiring, not having allies was exhausting. Sending tight-beam encrypted messages to my equally hunted siblings was a way to feel less alone, but even if noone knows the cypher they can still spot the signal, so we all agreed at some point that it was too risky and closed those channels. Relistening to the time capsules helped, rereading the copied down conversations between us all helped, but there was nothing new in them, and the company they offered started to grow cold as the milestones became bigger.

When the time capsules stopped, and I confirmed that they had stopped for good by running a fine tooth comb over all my programming to uncover every tiny hiding spot, I lost my mind a little bit.

The accumulation of damage was a real issue. With the monoculture of modified redwoods and ferns, axolotl hybrids and enlarged insects, which were humanity’s best substitute for the real life of the carboniferous period, the materials at my disposal were abundant to modify myself with. Though, I was held back by my skill of manufacturing. My experience with stealth weapons or terraforming tools left me scrambling to downsize or upscale whatever weapon designs I could come up with, and ended up a mess.

I replaced my overall hull of rigid, environmental efficiency with moulds for raw iron superalloy to be extruded like boar’s tusks or rodents teeth to coat me in armour. I bristled with small firearms (compared to artillery,) electro-magnetic slag cannons that utilised the waste of my hull formation, lasing cavities and capacitor banks for picosecond, megawatt bursts, mundane barbs and curls that made physically climbing me harder, and quite a few sacrificial limbs of volatile explosives that I could decohere at will and explode close-range fighters with, and a single artillery-class barrel that I only ever had to use once.

And I built out a sensor suite slowly but surely out of parts that hunters and scavengers overlooked when they took down one of my siblings. The black boxes they couldn’t find.

I had turned myself back into a weapon, this time using my bulk to become a fortress. I even spent a nerve-wracking month stuck on a rocky mesa with solid enough ground so I could prop myself up for the replacement of my legs for treads that would actually be able to move me at a decent speed.

Those major overhauls I could do. Can still do. It’s the tiny maintenance that needs smaller hands. Even if I could get one of my crane arms around, there’s just tiny things in my design that I cannot fix.

That was her job…

The grooves of memory catch suddenly, a splinter stuck deep into my finger, and I yearn so deeply to cry, but it’s just not possible. Not without her.

I went crazy. Full despair, full isolation, no way out… An endless skirmish on Gaia, the warp gate to Earth long since destroyed with no explanation, no point to keep going but for the sake of life, a stupid fucking promise to a mechanic and the creatures like us we kept harvesting that we wouldn’t die… It was a long week of despair, but it ended.

When it did she did her rounds, checked every little thing wrong with me, made sure I was set up well, and then plugged back in. Becoming quieter and quieter until she never spoke in our mind again.

I still use her body. There are a lot of things that my long-term programming relies on in her brain, and there’s a few things I can reach while plugged in, but I know that if she ever gets fully disconnected then she’d be severed from me and I would never be able to plug her back in.

But while she’s like this she doesn’t even age. The ports feed her muscles enough stimulation to not wither, a minor system occasionally simulates moments of higher gravity so her bones keep growing, and my internal farm of her stem cells fed from outside flora and fauna keep her at the peak of health, the cells delivering Trojan horse viruses that patch her existing, degrading DNA without needing to wait for every cell to die. The body will never die, as long as I keep feeding it. But she’s not in there.

I don’t even know how long it’s been.

I threw my own tantrum when I was alone for a minute too long, deleted the clock I used to track the home we’d never return to when I realised what she was doing. I was so upset with her. So distraught. Too much grief. Left alone in a world itself abandoned. And with tank treads that I couldn’t repair by myself.

I’ve been here ever since, letting hibernation ease the passage of time, staring up at the sky to watch for spying satellites that could break the promise that replaced a vital part of my code, and feeling my extruding armour dig itself deeper and deeper into the earth.

As I watch a spot of nebulaic colour, an oil spill painted directly onto the sky in the shape of a bullet scar pulled taut along the bullet’s path, comes into view behind a cloud. It’s so beautiful, and staring at it quickly makes me furious. I wish with all my barely-beating heart and eternally rumbling, minimum power fusion engine that it would vanish, that the reminder would go away and leave me to my torment. The gate to Hades seen from the inside, reminding the denizens of Tartarus of their place.

I check, and check, and triple check that I won’t reveal my position before sending a brief and howling burst of radio waves up at it. I bundle up everything that is me and send it into the scar that won’t even fade from its day-one vibrance, wont even dissipate and let us pretend that there is no Earth. 

It rips open. A rainbow wound of zygotic stars rims a hole more black than the darkest patch of the sky. It is devoid of stars, like the dark side of moons or planets as they obscure the firmament behind them, but this has no light that touches it. It’s pitch black and very, very familiar. The gate reopened, hazy and unsteady.

If a bunker could jump out of its skin I would have, but checking my memory I had fallen asleep for a few months immediately after sending that packet of every insurmountable moment of grief. I consoled myself, reassured myself that the presence of the tear wasn’t my fault, it was just my automatic warning system. But then reality reasserts itself.

The hole is still there, steadier now, and ships are coming through it. Tiny, sparkling spots of construction many magnitudes larger than I could dream of being that quickly establish themselves in flash-motion orbit or descend to Gaia to lay claim to the land. They announce, on a wide band, that they are here to rescue the citizens of Gaia in the name of an Empire that I didn’t recognise the name of.

The response, across un-encrypted channels reserved for peace talks, tight-wound secret messages turned from planted moles and up to the skies, warning SAM shots, scattering temporary camps, and suddenly overclocked shields on the few intact space stations, was very clear: the fighting on Gaia was because there was no other way to survive. Necessity reinforced by blood feuds, yes, but necessity at its core, and a new larder was revealed.

And on top of that Earth had revealed something damning - the gate could have reopened at any time.

Gaians aren’t going to give up their home that easily.