Eimose kept his eyes on the dark ground ahead of him, fearing that he would be able to feel the change the others felt towards him after he confessed everything he’d done. How he’d gone searching for a fugitive under GreenHouse’s orders and then led to three innocent person’s captures (counting the robot). How he’d shot and killed a man, albeit in defense, and ran when the world around him burned. But the weight on his shoulders lifted once he gave tangibility to the words hanging over her head and if he wanted to somehow balance out the scales of right and wrong in his life he needed to start with a slate cleaner than the one he had.
When he’d seen the Combatant’s accusing eyes, horrifyingly human mask and the skull respirator, he’d had an inkling of recognition to the Efficiency he’d spent time with. Once he’d seen it in action and talking back, there was no doubt in his mind that this was the same robot, though strangely in a different body. Brit had pushed him to help carry the unconscious Regal while the larger man tossed Jeringy over his shoulders, rushing to the panel of the wall the Combatant had pointed out to them. After replacing the panel and safely in the enclave, they worked together to get the younger men awake, which didn’t take too long as they woke up with a start when an array of bullets sprayed the panel protecting them.
Eimose peaked out from behind the panel despite Brit’s warnings to remain wary, watching the Combatant fight the four trained and armed assailants. He’d never tell the robot this, but he’d been entranced by the way it fought the first time he’d laid his eyes on it, and he wasn’t going to miss watching it in action.
He didn’t know exactly what entice him to leave the safety of the tunnels, but something in him stirred when he saw the robot fall to its knees with two opponents still standing. His brain shouted at him to just leave the robot and escape with the three other humans so that all the evidence of his past would lay buried under the framework he’d built. So when his body carried him out into the open to grab the gun from a fallen warrior and consecutively take out both hostiles with well-targeted shots to the head, it was a surprise to everyone, including himself.
Which led to the current moment where he was awaiting the aftermath of his story, letting the last few words linger in the darkness while the others soaked it in.
“So what you’re saying is that you were a Scout and you killed a man and then ran away?” Jeringy summed up in less than eloquent terms. “That’s nothing, do you not remember all those people we all just killed. And before he became part of our crew, Regal was a--”
“Not another word,” Regal growled. “I told you that was off-limits.”
“What I’m trying to say is that we all have a past we want to forget, but it’s part of the thing that defines us and we’ll never really get away from it. Do you want to go back?”
“Go back to what?” questioned a confused Eimose.
“GreenHouse. Do you want to go back to them?”
“No!”
“Then let’s just go from there. Would you like us to keep calling you Eimose or do you prefer 8...9...whatever your name was?”
“Eimose, please.”
A moment of silence followed before Brit spoke up.
“Don’t expect to get off that easily with me. I’ve been around people who’ve claimed to have renounced GreenHouse and they have a bad habit of betraying me when things get sticky.”
Eimose expected Terra to say something, but the robot remained silent, leaving him uncertain about whether his version of the story dampened the hate they felt towards him. The heaviness of the silence was finally broken by Brit once again, asking everyone if they were satisfied with their level of information so they could get a move on. It only took two minutes of fumbling in the dark before Regal and Jeringy started arguing with each other after bumping into one another too many times to count, almost resulting in a fist-fight if Terra hadn’t stepped between the two and there was a sickening crack when their fists smashed against her metal exterior. A multitude of cursing ensued, most of which Terra hadn’t heard before.
“So what’s your deal anyway? I’ve never heard a Combatant that can talk before. And I guess you were an Efficiency before? How does that whole thing work? Like, the whole body transfer thing.” Regal asked.
“Mind taking this one?” Terra asked Neiman.
“Taking what?” Regal asked just as Neiman agreed.
“The entire science behind what Terra is and her situation is still vague at this point in time. I did, or rather my programmer, all I could to investigate in every way imaginable from vacuum chambers to extreme heat and cold to electrical impulses, and nothing would give me a straight answer. Although I pride myself on my ability to produce results and find answers to the questions of the universe, what Terra is has left me absolutely baffled. You see, what me and my team fig--”
“Hold up, hold up,” Regal interrupted. “I’m more confused than I was before. Do you enjoy talking in the third person or are you someone else?”
“Maybe you should change out of my voice when you’re talking,” Terra suggested, smiling to herself when she realized the elderly man was speaking with the voice of a young girl.
“Good point,” he admitted. “Is that better?”
“Woah! Who the fuck?” Jeringy and Regal cried out while Brit and Eimose’s faces contorted in surprise at the lower, deeper, and elderly voice that came from the robot.
“My name is Neiman. I believe my programmer was featured in your tale, Eimose. I would prefer you call me by my creator’s name since he integrated his personality in with my code and I am a copy of him. Terra and I will be sharing this body until we get to Onto and I can create my own if there is not one there already. It is a pleasure to meet you all.”
“So there are two of you in there.” Jeringy summarized.
“I believe I made that very clear, but yes.”
“Can you read each other’s minds? Do you talk to each other? How come you can switch voices? How is that even possible? Won’t your codes or whatever conflict?” Regal inquired.
“With any other program hosting the same body we would have issues, but Terra is not a code or program, she is something different altogether. How she was able to transfer her consciousness from an organic body into a mask, only to be transferred to a robot is beyond my knowledge. We cannot read each other’s minds nor would we want to. I have already gone through puberty and do not wish to relive the mindset I had during that time. And only one may use the voice at any point in time, though control is usually Terra’s since she uses less power than I do when functioning. If she talks to herself, it is her talking to me, so please refrain from responding unless you know what she is saying is directed at you.”
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“Wait, did you just say something about puberty? How old is Terra?” Eimose blurted out.
“I don’t really remember and years are different everywhere I’ve been, but I think eleven or twelve?” Terra took over the voice.
“Years?” Eimose said, incredulous.
“What else would it be?”
Eimose was a loss for words at the thought of a twelve-year-old taking down a small army of Combatants. She was a child! When he was twelve he remembered running down the dorm halls naked because the friends he’d had at the time dared him to do it, yet this girl had somehow gotten herself trapped in a robot and was kicking ass and taking names.
“There’s no way there’s not a story behind that,” Regal stated.
“Oh, no, we’re not stopping for story-time again,” Brit announced. “I would have thought everyone wanted to get out of here alive first, but I guess I’m the only one.”
Eimose was still hung up on the fact that a child was residing in a robot’s body as the group continued to fumble forward in the darkness. If it--she--was really eleven or twelve that meant he was over ten years older than her and yet the first time they’d met he’d been sobbing like his life depended on it. A deep shame crept up the back of his neck when he thought back to a mere twenty minutes ago when he’d contemplated ditching Terra to the mercy of the armed enemies even after she’d saved all their lives.
He wondered if he would ever be able to truly turn his life around.
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“In eighty-five meters we will be making a right turn, which leads us to inclined ground, where we will hopefully reach some sort of exit,” Neiman spoke to only Terra.
“Have you been here before? How do you know so much about hidden tunnels and stuff?” She asked.
“We haven’t been here before, what are-- Oh right, ignore the robot talking to herself,” spoke Regal.
“Echolocation. I’ve been running it since we started running around in the tunnels it has proven quite useful. I can only read out about a hundred meters depending on how much power I funnel into the sensors. It seems very much likely that we will be able to safely get these people to safety and we can stealthily retrieve the bag without them hindering us.”
“Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that,” Terra admitted, bringing up the tracking beacon to appear on her display.
The red light took a moment to find as it was now just a singular point in the floor behind them. Terra suspected it meant that the tracker had traveled even further underground, meaning that this place most likely had an even more elaborate maze of networking tunnel systems besides the level they had traversed. Running on full power meant that the echo-whatever thing could run at full capacity and she wouldn’t get lost anymore searching for the bag.
It took a few more minutes before the group turned down a more narrow tunnel that had a gentle ascend upwards and gradually grew brighter. By the time they reached the dead end, Regal and Jeringy had stopped bumping into each other and instead focused on complaining to how dusty their clothes and regulators had gotten.
A rusted hatched was the only thing keeping the five from the outside world, and Terra made quick work of it by swiftly tearing it from the bedrock itself when it refused to budge. She tossed the useless bunch of metal out of the hole and jumped out, offering a hand to the others to help them out of the darkness and into the red sky.
“So, where is the river from here?” Jeringy questioned, looking around at the dusty plain.
“Just follow me, I know how to read the clouds,” Brit sighed as if it was common knowledge for everyone to be able to somehow ‘read clouds.’ “We need to relay the location of the base to the rest of the crew so we can finally rid ourselves of these damn Piranhas once and for all.”
“Alright, maybe we’ll run into each other in the future,” Terra said as she jumped back into the hole to get back to her original mission of finding the bag with her power cores in them.
“Wait! What are you doing?” Eimose cried out, getting on his hands and knees to peer down through the hole at her.
“I forgot something.”
She didn’t even bother looking back to see the gears working in his head and plunged back into the darkness, following the red light. Terra did, however, turn around when she sensed a heat signature following her. Low and behold, Eimose was struggling to keep up with her and there were clear signs on his knees and palms that he’d fallen a few times to keep up with her.
“What are you doing.” She demanded.
“I think I forgot something too,” said Eimose, winded. “I promised that scientist Neiman that I’d take care of something for him and I don’t intend on breaking it.”
“Neiman, what exactly haven’t you told me?” Terra questioned.
“I may or may not have entrusted the safety of your power banks and an incredibly important chemical along with classified blueprints and documents to him. In my defense, he was literally the only one capable of getting it out of the GreenHouse facility who’d actually try and follow my instructions. There have been more before him, but he was a last-ditch attempt since no one else has acted on my guidelines.”
“I can see he’s working out great too.”
“You must admit, he has proven he has gusto. He’s still alive, and in his defense, if you were human you’d be dead considering how many bullets have already hit you.”
“The only reason they hit me is that I let them! I mean, if I had my original body then bullets wouldn’t be an issue anyways! Maybe if I was really truly human I would die, but I don’t want to live through that again.”
“Have you died before?” Eimose asked in alarm.
“Yeah, and it brought me to this place.”
“Oh. How...what...happened?”
“It’s a long sucky story which is made even suckier because it’s lead me to this conversation.”
Eimose shut his mouth and kept attempting to follow Terra into the dark cave.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what? Turning Indo and Petri to GreenHouse so they would die in front of me? Or for the fact that I have to share a body with the person that created me? Or for the fact that the one thing you were supposed to keep safe is in this god awful place and we have to look for it?”
“I’m technically not really Neiman but a prog--”
“Shut up, Neiman!” Terra yelled in frustration.
She picked up her pace until she was standing directly over the glowing red dot. There were no fissures in the ground already, so she decided that the fastest way to get to the tracker would be through brute force focused on a single area. Terra formed her crystal into a pyramid and made a groove in the ground where she balanced the pyramid point-down. Letting go, the pyramid formed jagged points all around it, balancing it more securely in the ground. Winding her arm back, Terra unleashed all of her pent-up emotions on her crystal, watching in satisfaction as a crack began forming after only three hits, growing larger and larger as she continued punching.
“Warning, tunnel collapse imminent. I suggest you stop and focus on creating a smaller opening as the entire system may give out. Need I remind you Eimose is in the vicinity and may not survive hundreds of pounds of rocks falling on him.”
Terra ignored him, not breaking pace with the rhythm she’d created.
"You need to stop," Neiman urged.
Strike. Crack. Strike. Crack. Strike. Crack. Strike. Crack. Crack. Crack.
The floor suddenly crumbled and she and Eimose both fell into the unknown.