I float a few meters slightly above ground level, my body ethereal. Everything around me is desert and sand dunes. I follow after a machine that avoids something that wanders the deserts.

The machine is a large monowheel bike. The rubber of the wheel is replaced with three rows of dozens of evenly spaced excavator buckets, the middle rows buckets facing and rotating the opposite way.

I control this machine through some unknown means and cannot move too far from it. I use this machine as a proxy to move around and chase outlaws. The person I am chasing is similarly as ghostly as me and uses their own machine. People can't see each other's bodies.

This person's machine was illegally made and I am something similar to the police. My job is to destroy their machine. Their machine is a giant metal millipede with hundreds of segments and a drill at the front.

I find this machine after searching for a little bit and a chase ensues. I catch up as mine is built for speed, each bucket kicking up showers of sand, and I shred off almost ten sections before they retreat underground. I latched a marker onto their machine before it retreated so I wait for it to resurface before going after it again.

…

Night falls and the marker finally shows promise. The marker, represented by a symbol of meat on a bone, rises out of the ground in a bowl of sand made from being surrounded by high rising sand dunes.

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I move quickly after my mark that's not too far, finding them and promptly smashing into them, destroying their body down to scrap. After finally getting rid of them I collect the most valuable parts like the drill bit and electronics in the middle of the monowheel, held floating in the center.

Unfortunately they had a backup machine. Fortunately the transfer of consciousness was started too late to complete fully and the leftover incomplete mind did not properly firewall themselves against tracking.

Even better, the infantile mind that's left seems to be coming back to the marker instead of running, hiding, or getting a machine better than a simple backup. I decided to not wait for them and move to intercept them.

Midway between each other after moving for some time the desert cuts off suddenly and a vibrantly green rainforest continues forward. The sand dune I was moving down turns into a dirt hill, at the base of the hill is a simple wooden fence made of logs.

I dig the teeth of the excavator buckets into one of thicker trees and climb up it. Each rotation of the monowheel sends a spray of bark and splinters of wood out onto the rainforest floor. Using this height advantage I scout the rainforest for any obvious disturbances.

I can track Millipede but I still don't know if they are alone or are made up of many smaller machines that can split off to throw me off the scent.

I don't see any major destruction from its passage or any signs of major resource harvesting so the machine can't be bigger than I can handle. I drop off the tree, slamming into the ground sending dirt raining everywhere, and continue to intercept.