Autonomous Read online

  A Damsel Waits

  Death and rebirth on a schedule. She could feel it every time. Waiting, just long enough to get rebuilt. Thinking, just short enough to never grasp the present tightly. Consciousness bleeding into being, just long enough to be aware that it was going to be taken away. When she died, any plan to escape, or even hope of rescue, washed away in a dull crashing wave that pulled her under itself empty and tumbling, and without bearing.

  Plans erode in the loss of concert. Objectives need tools and tools need objectives. Their connection to each other was the anima of a plan. And every hole that thing kept making in her head was a disconnection. A plan is just a larger function. Fingers to bend. Eyes to record. Words to speak. Smaller functions; smaller plans, but still plans.

  Oxygen hissed out from a valve above her kissing reconstruction across her broken body. Day and night were lost down in these shadows and the moments kept losing their structure the more she was broken and rebuilt. The varying levels of maintenance routines bore themselves purposeless in an endless cycle.

  Her bones came first. Sharp, geometric and fragmented. A lattice pattern of metal pulsed in sintered regrowth from the freshly dismembered limbs. The spiny patterned interior was suddenly covered, plated, hollow, and then reinforced. Empty black bones. The process hissed achingly into the air.

  The Cage Tender waited, motionless, about a meter opposite her. Staring through its own emptiness. She knew the depth of its workings. The order. The control. A singular purpose fueling an engine always nearly empty. It wasn't a yearning, or a longing. It was a heartbeat. It was purpose in the action itself. The depth was as deep or as thin as the design. It did as it was told, and that was more than survival. It was enlightenment.

  Scenarios played themselves wrong in her head. One after another an ideal solution always came back as rescue. The weakness of being alone was too great to overcome. Despair came at the hands of hope, as the more she hoped the more sure she became aware that hope had wrought a sickness of itself into her machinery. It had become a cancer that allowed inaction and objectiveless consideration. A parasitic mirage that only encouraged waiting. It was a considered respite within inaction and imagination. It was as offensive as the idea that she should do something about it. One resentment written into her by a designer and the other written with her own hand.

  It was a thing that built her. No chance to usurp or redefine. Engagement was leashed by time. It was a constant instant with the same thought and the same fate. And the hope that began in it started a fire that burned into her being. A glitch. An error, perhaps. Mutation by any other name. A fervor that built over time of its own accord. Something deeper than data and sensors, maybe that screaming in the dark the Mechanic spoke of.

  What cannot be built in the moment it took to regain cognition then must be built in the many moments that they all could encompass over time. Design became elements outside of understanding but followed because of the previous moment’s writing rewritten. It was building a thought from pieces that don’t connect and with no time to make them. An animal might have called it instinct but this constructed itself so elegantly that it almost seemed insulting to the measured and studious construction and implementation. It was an elegance beyond the simplicity of an objective, a measure beyond what the blueprints should hold into what they could hold. Arrogance by any other name, something, to whom, only the divine should lay their claim.

  It was the sixtieth time. Everything to those without choice is conditional. She tore out a broken piece of bone from her left arm. Conditional objectives with altered conditions can narrow routines of action through consideration of conditions unmet. She turned the piece of metal bone over in her hand jagged edge down, a slight slick of blood coating it. The mechanic spoke its orders to this machine with a condition. She brought her skinless hand above her head. If this didn’t work, there would be no sixty-one.

  Her jaw had nearly finished building ligaments and skin. The moment was here. The chorus of the world filled her head as she connected. The clock gave the order again but she hadn’t sent out a ping yet. She brought the piece of bone down into the back of her head. Sensor arrays went dark. Capacitance regulators overloaded. A heat of broken design ignited in her body, causing machinery and electronics to burn themselves out beneath her skin. Growing patches of webbing red under white.

  A cage tender has eight telescoping apprehension arms, two pair on display and two pair hiding in its torso, ready to shoot out from it, if necessary. Each arm ended in a sharpened point, to penetrate an adversary, then protract the four prongs that form the point outward into an opened claw. This allowed the machine to easily manipulate any adversary, usually to place them inside the spherical and empty torso of the machine to act as a makeshift holding cell until the designated adversary can be diffused in a longer term setting. Design of this machine was written into her before she was brought online. She knew the design, the character, of the behemoth opposite her well enough to know that the orders it had been given were not quite as directly confining to her as the mechanic had perhaps thought. She knew herself better, even given the newfound and unbeknownst givens.

  The protruding dark spike in her head, brought through the back, had severed the communication module’s link before a ping could escape, but it had also broken through another piece of her mind: a specific memory module, the thing that held the blueprint for her body, the thing that held this rebuilding in a constant state. All end states in consideration now, she was responsible for her own death, whatever that eventually would be.

  She could feel the orders stop transmitting, the cackling and hissing of the microscopic machinery fade into the humming background. She awaited the next stab or movement from the Cage Tender but it made none. Aware enough to know that its selected task was no longer possible, but still trapped within the confines of that task—screaming in its new dark. But to her it was just a calculated risk to assume of its design that it would simply stop when the assigned task was impossible to complete. Her face and limbs were thankful for that design assumption proving to be an actuality.

  She gripped her still skinless fingers around the arm bone in her head and pulled it back out.

  The damage not being undone was an unnerving idea that kept ticking away an anxious unsettling sense of mortality that had never even occurred to her before. It whispered from the outside, creeping back in. Questions she didn’t want to ask and answers that only offended.

  Her hand went there on its own, the hole in her head, feeling the absence more than anything else. She wondered about the parts of herself lost in that damage. It was becoming harder and harder to get an accurate diagnostic. Readings were giving an eighty percent collective system cognition function. She wondered what that twenty percent meant to what she was and if maybe she was better off without it. Curiously, and nearly without consideration, she grabbed some hair and pulled it over the hole in her head before standing on unsteady legs.

  Sensors hadn't been re-built in her hands. She touched the motionless beast, sliding harsh metal fingers against its slick exterior, it cut lines into the finish and she pulled her hand back, surprised. She would have to get used to her hands this way.

  Past that she was hoping to find a door, some kind of exit but there was nothing there but a vent that was far too small to crawl through. Wires and cables thicker than her arms clung to the walls like vines of a jungle canopy. There was nothing here to escape to.

  This was some kind of alcove, outcropped from a building but nothing in it led inside. They must have been dropped here by a floater. Not that she ever saw one or even got the inkling that something had disturbed the old stillness of the dust hanging in the air.

  Staring off the alcove, down, up, straight-ahead. There was nothing but muddy dark. She could sense a building about twelve meters away, but she could visually see almost nothing that far. The heavy dust hung like a fog and felt uncomfortable against her sensors, she could feel it sinking into he
r wounds and grinding into her mechanisms. She went back to the cylinder to avoid the overwhelming sense of the unclean air, and in that moment she took note of the cylinder’s clarity which should have made it apparent sooner. It was something new. Clean and clear in this sea of grime. They were pumping oxygen into it somehow. It had to come from somewhere.

  The cylinder wasn't much taller than her own height but she could see the hissing hole that was expelling the oxygen at the top. She stepped back and could see a tube connected at the top. It was an odd indistinct feeling using her fingers with their capable power but being unable to perceive their impact. She dug them into the polycarbonate rather easily and pulled herself to the top of the cylinder, from the outside, to see where that seemingly endless supply of oxygen was coming from. Flexible plastic tubing ran from the top of the cylinder, dipping slightly under its own weight in the space between the cylinder and then up the wall of the building a fair distance, flat against the wall, and then into a hole that look freshly drilled into the side of the building itself.

  Higher up now, she could see beyond the alcove both ahead and behind her was nothing. An abyss begging itself deeper the more she considered it. Away from that, the only thing that held any chance or purchase were the wires and cables hanging stiff, in such a formed counter to the solidity of the building's walls that time had settled them neatly against the surfaces of the building. She dug her fingers into the closest nest of wires. Fingers sunk through the protective coats of the wires and she had to make sure not to dig deep enough to the flowing currents within. This was hard enough to gauge without any sensors on her hands but the industrial thickness seemed to provide a good enough buffer that this wouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish.

  Locomotion being an almost indifferent element in programming to a mind designed to sort data, her legs held out stiffly in an inverse aid to her arms in the climb. Her dirtied red robes swished almost silently against the wires. The broken out bone was tearing a larger hole into her arm as she pulled herself upward. She couldn't focus on that now and turned off the sensors.

  A creak.

  An angry croak of movement crossed metal against metal below her. The Cage Tender had worked out something. A task that met the needs of the objective. Life, and blood, and enlightenment.

  Arms shot out the back and into the wall in crashing rocky reverberations. It was pulling itself up, digging its arms hard into the side of the building beneath the wires. Four arms dug in for support, the other four smashed above, releasing the four below. It was gaining distance remarkably fast for something so large.

  She pulled the wires apart and shoved herself under them. Thick swathes of wet dust stained into her robes, skin and hair. Something viscous and old, breeding under the dark of the dark. The rocky crashing sound was upon her now and she had no idea whether hiding had even accomplished anything. The moment felt like it hadn't done a thing.

  It stopped just opposite her, only wires between them. The mass of it, she could feel its presence like a weight on her chest. Ideas poured themselves useless through a brain missing a chunk of itself. What if this wasn't restrained within its own objective anymore? The mechanic was working, somewhat, without a net, why not this now too? The “what if” washed away as she felt the wires moving from manipulation opposite her.

  Its arms worked the wires open and she could feel the colder air expose her position. Hands gripped tightly around the wet underside of the wires she pushed that exposure closed and tried to move into a new, higher position to avoid any arms running through her body. Guessing right felt discomforting as the sharp spear of an arm crashed through the wall below her.

  And then another; higher, closer.

  She couldn't outrun this. Her hands went looser, against the slick underside. The muck was enough slick to let herself slide. Fast against the cables and wires and the building behind her, the lubrication of the muck allowed a certain amount of protection from the friction as she dropped all the way down to the bottom of the alcove. Her legs caught into the muck-covered ground. The sponge-like nature absorbed some of the landing force but the weight of her metal frame wracked inside her skin and two holes tore open at both of her knees exposing the black bones beneath the pale flesh. The newfound holes were immediately overrun by the dark oily liquid that had seeped quickly through her robes.

  Sliding through the stiff mess of wires and cables she emerged through them covered in what the friction of falling had collected onto her. She could see the Cage Tender above her moving back down. Below was still dark, everything was still a dead end. Each small shuddering crash of its descent she could feel in the soles of her feet. She looked around the alcove again, and the only thing there was the open cylinder still spitting out oxygen from the hole in its top.

  She ran inside of the cylinder and pulled herself up to the hole pouring out oxygen. With one hand digging into the wall, she positioned the open arm wound of the same arm near the oxygen hissing out. Then she took her free hand and dug her fingers into the hole while simultaneously turning her face away. She broke the rotational motor in that arm and overloaded the circuitry causing a small arc.

  The Oxygen ignited out from the hole in her arm. Fire licked out from that hole onto her face, chest and arms for a moment and disappeared down into the hole following the trail of oxygen. She dropped herself to the floor of the container. That much oxygen was either a massive container or a pipeline. She suddenly had the moment to consider the possibility that the black slime she had just nearly submerged her body into might have been flammable. Thankfully it seemed to have insulated and stopped the course of the flames against her body, in the places that it had covered.

  The wall that they had drilled into, connecting the cylinder into the building, shattered open in an explosive crash. Flames lit out for a moment then replaced by a shockwave of energy and dirt. The flash gave the world shape, beyond that of what she was able to determine with sound, and she recorded the architecture and specific spatial relationships... though that was torn away from her focus, even though it shouldn’t have been logically, it was what needed to be done in the moment. But the Cage Tender seemed so much more present.

  The Cage Tender's arms, three were caught in the area of the explosion and flailed outward with the blast. The other arms held firmly into their holes in the wall but the large, stocky center captured all of that momentum for them, swinging around and crashing into the wall, flattening a spherical portion of wires and cables, severing some and shaking pieces of concrete loose beneath them. It read hopeless for her: it was still clinging to that wall, still coming for her. It was a deep yawning mouth ready to devour her, ideations of possible outcomes all unfavorable, forever in that moment.

  But then it dropped limp. Arms still stabbed into the side of the building and held firmly. They went limp and the large body tumbled down a bit from the now slack arms. The three arms caught in the explosion hung loose from its large spherical frame, dangling in the air broken off at their ends from the explosion.

  She lifted herself onto even more unsteady feet and looked up at the mess for a long moment. It wasn't what she saw outside herself that she was taking into account but what she could see within.

  The fire had burned superficially along her face and arms. One side of her face was now exposed to her black skull, and a good portion of hair head been burned away as well. On the utility front her left arm could no longer rotate from its forearm and the sensors on it were all non-functional down to her hand. The damage seemed fairly minimal. In fact the fire that had burned into her arm wound seemed to cauterize the skin and bone beneath together, binding the wound from breaking open even more.

  Her eyes flicked through sensory information about the hole she'd just made in the side of the building. The old hanging dust of this choked air was brushing against the new dust from the explosion. The mixing waves of competing dust stuck itself to the parts of her and her robe that were covered in the dark muck, collecting themselves
against her and making more apparent the disruption of the naturally still air at the depth.

  The hole seemed like a better bet than the wires at this point. There was no telling how long of a climb it would be. She scaled the cylinder again, noting the tubing broken and hanging down its side. She leaned against the wall and dug her fingers into it, testing to see how capable they were against something harder than plastic. They gripped into the wall well enough to support her as she awkwardly pulled herself up to the new hole she had just made.