2B runs through the landscape, trees blurring all around her as she dodges and weaves through the thick foliage. Her new limbs allowing greater range of movement and boosting her speed to an absurd degree, only her enhanced processor allowing her to keep up with it. She’d already broken the sound barrier, and a wave of air was chasing her and her wake tore through the trees.
She still wasn’t used to the body, and while it had become standard fair to teleport into battle the recent infiltration had made that unfeasible. So 2B had decided to sprint there instead, her new body only being marginally slower than the aerial troop transports.
It wasn’t that she was urgently needed at the front line either, if she had been the teleporters would have been used, no 2B just wanted to test out her new body and there were plenty of opportunities on the frontlines. She’d been in the ‘front’ for a handful of minutes, and the sounds of explosions and gunfire hadn’t ceased, even though she was minutes from any active conflict. The front was thousands of miles, and throughout all of it one could find artillery and counter artillery barrages.
2B was vaguely surprised there were trees at all, but they grew rapidly and if she looked around she could see the remains of battle, craters and ammo casings. This place had been the site of a minor battle, only a few thousand bugs and machines, and the forest had been utterly demolished. And now a bare few days later it looked nearly untouched.
Her sensors pinged and 2B dashed to the side, the motion destroying two trees and throwing her out of the path of a large serrated spine, which itself tore through a few dozen trees before slamming to a halt and exploding. 2B traced the shot to its origin and her sensors pierced through all the obstructions blocking her view, showing her a small bug hive. Newly grow and not even a full day to its name, with a bare thirty spawners.
The thing that had fired at her had been the bugs own artillery, nearly all hives grew their own stationary defenses, and these were a particularly annoying one. Supersonic explosive spears, coupled with fairly powerful sensory organs. 2B knew Balistraia would simply use shields to divert the spines into the ground or contain the shrapnel and explosions, but she had no such method, and so settled for dodging each fired spine while charging closer.
The hive only had the one artillery spitter, and it wasn’t a large one. A bare range of five miles. With her current speed the thing only got off two more shots before she was cutting it in twain. Which raised a new issue, it obviously hadn’t been the only spitter, dozens of them fired at her, some firing dozens of needle thin spins, others globs of acid or fire, one a bolt of lightning. Dozens of unique projectiles, and she dodged them all, backflipping through the air and launching dozens of shots of her own, each hitting a spawner or spitter.
There were a few biters in the hive, but they were freshly made. Meaning this hive had likely just sent off a raiding party. Meaning she had ended up attacking at the optimal time. Which was bothersome, she’d been looking for a challenge, not a slaughter. This hive wouldn’t have warnented a tank squadron, much less an android accompanied one. Just a note to bombard the place with artillery and send some scout drones to check that it was gone.
Her new body put her beyond any individual bug save the command or champion variants and as she tore through yet another armored flesh sack 2B couldn’t help but smile, even if the body still felt somewhat odd her normal one couldn’t have pulled off half these movements without breaking a limb or tearing an actuator. She would have been hit at least a few times, but now she could move at these speeds even without her armor. And she had no idea how fast she’d be with it.
2B cut the last spitter in half, one that had apparently been manipulating gravity to launch hyper compressed balls of plasma, and stood looking over the devastated landscape for a few instants, a much larger period of subjective time passing. Before she dashed away, making it a few hundred feet away before the first bugs she killed self-destructed, taking the remnants of the hives with them. A design flaw she had no doubt the bugs already had a work around for, if they’d been alive to implement it.
She leapt up into the air, stepping off of nothing and leaping ever higher. Her eyes let her pick out the dozens of battles happening bare miles from her. Artillery shells breaking up hives identical to the one she had just demolished, all of them seemingly seeking to hide in the forest. The bitters the hives had made were all fighting a seemingly endless tide of metal, tanks, drones, and the rare android fighting in a brutal melee, the bugs pouring in faster than the metal tide could kill them, and the ground churning with burning blood and oil.
2B felt a few of her new weapon systems lock onto the fight, even though it was still miles away and she let them open fire, the long ranged precision shots not putting to much of a dent in the horde, but she watched a bare few bugs rupture as her shells tore through them. Fights like that one would stretch on for hours, until the hives were destroyed and reinforcements dwindled, or until Balistraia ran out of tanks to throw into the fray.
There was no elegance or grace, it was strength and brutality against strength and brutality. Any actual tactical planning was limited to where and when to fire each shot, not in any grand maneuvering. The point wasn’t to kill the bugs after all, nor was it to force them into a narrow choke point. It was to get them to fight while stealthed drones and androids destroyed the exposed hives.
This front had no command bugs present, all having already been assassinated by Balistraia. And so the nests weren’t hidden, nor did the bugs plan beyond the most basic of tactics. It was effectively a mop up operation, and that was the ideal to be up held for as long as possible. Without an overarching intelligence the bugs were far easier to deal with, and when one emerged it was noticeable as the fighting ground to a halt.
Some hives had operated tactically without a command bug present, but those had been old ones who’d been fighting the engineer for weeks. These new ones had none of the combat experience nor the true intelligence to make up for the lack of it.
As 2B started falling back to the earth she couldn’t help but think that she preferred this war far more. One without constant deception and betrayal, one where she wasn’t forced to kill her own allies. Simple true combat, it was almost freeing.
-------------------------
2B had left the battlefield shortly after she destroyed the last hive, not wanting to get covered in the dust the orbital bombardment would kick up. But she did have to admit it was quicker than killing each and every bug in the fight, just pull out everything but the drones and remove that chunk of landscape entirely. With no command bug the bugs would be too stupid to realize what was going to happen.
The world would shake, a molten crater would form, and a chunk of landscape already ruined by the preceding battle would eventually become a lake. Without any worry of the bug's corpses causing any issues.
2B didn’t even notice that by the time she got back to the main factory her movements were smooth and natural, that it was no longer taking her concentrated effort to move her new body. She just walked into the common room from the sectioned off teleportation chamber and started off towards the engineers area, ignoring the few other androids lounging around the facility, most of which were in the newly installed pool. If a one hundred foot deep body of water could still be called a pool. Apparently it was ‘underwater combat training’ but as asocial as 2B was she knew of a pool party when she saw it.
On earth the facility had been small, just a few bedrooms and a common room, here they had far more space than anyone knew what to do with, and any ‘suggestion’ an android made was installed if only the barest reason was given, neither cost or space being an object. 2B didn’t care for it, she had been, and still was, content with her room alone. She had no need for mazes, virtual reality chambers, obstacle courses, or pools, even if she had used the combat holograms for some light training.
She strode through the chaotic mess without a second thought, taking what shortcuts she could and rapidly arriving at the engineers workshop, His location having been marked on her internal map.
Inside she saw the human, messing with what looked like a toy replica of a spaceship. But given the scorch marks on the wall, and the fact it was floating under its own power, it wasn’t just a toy.
----------------------
2B wasn’t late to our ‘session’, a glorified way to describe what was basically just talking for awhile, but that didn’t surprise me and with a gesture the model ship I’d been testing floated its way over to a shelf filled with another dozen designs.
“Hey 2B, I see your trying out the new body” which looks lovely, god the increased performance is fantastic, “anything wrong with it? Changes you want to make?” I knew there weren’t, but that was the whole point of this, getting 2B to talk. And to do that I needed to ease her into it with something she was familiar with ‘debriefing’ or work talk.
Really the only issues of 2B I could work on, I still find it funny that we’re doing a therapy for someone else, were her socialization ones, she had no relationships outside of her work, and few there regardless. She had a tentative friendship with 9S, which had a host of complications, like the fact that she had routinely killed him, and then there was the mutual crush they had on one another. And she could technically be called friends with her old operator 6O, but she only spoke to 6O through emails these days given Balistraia had basically stolen all the operators jobs. And now they are all doing work for the civilian government, which seems like a punishment somehow.
Does it? Wait no yeah definitely, I’d rather fight the bugs than run a nation. In fact thats fairly obvious given we went back too Nauvis to avoid it.
Ahh yes, avoiding one problem and justifying it by working on another problem. My favorite.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
2B shook her head, shaking me out of my prior chain of thought. “This new body functions adequately, Though the new appearance is jarring on occasion and some sensations are muted.” I nodded at that, the combat form was only barely humanoid, and the muted senses were a feature. Having pain or pleasure nodes is a liability, the only sensation a combat body needed was tactile and pressure.
I’d tried adding all the sensations a human body would have to the combat one, to see if it lessened the dissonance, but it didn’t. While the alternate non-combat bodies worked just fine, and as it was I was assuming it was the added weapons systems and ‘non-human’ senses and sensors the body provided that messed with the androids. Not exactly something I could leave out and still call it a combat body though, so now they just couldn’t wear the things for over a day before Balistraia would start pestering them.
“Well I’m done here for a bit, why don’t you sit down on the table and we can talk for a bit?” 2B nodded at that, and with a motion fast enough to nearly startle me she appeared on the table I had gestured too. “I see the enhanced perception is working, does it feel like I’m talking slowly?” with her enhanced processors time would genuinely feel like it had slowed down, which I knew from experience could be annoying. “Yes, it’s not much of a difference, helpful in combat” I nodded, she’d most likely adjusted to that already, slowing thoughts when around others and speeding them up in combat. Something a human, and therefore android, brain did automatically. Mine didn’t and I wasn’t that keen on doing it myself. I was fine with it taking subjective minutes for someone to move from one word to the next. I’d just do something else while I waited.
With 2B sitting on the table I took a chair nearby and handed her a puzzle cube, which I had just designed and made. “Good, though you should try and sped up or slow down your cognition at will, try and solve that as fast as you can” and with that her fingers blurred as she rapidly tried different ways to solve the thing, this was actually a fairly important lesson she needed to learn. Thinking faster wasn’t thinking better, and right now she was still making her decisions with the same subjective speed, so she made the same decisions, just faster. While this did mean she’d reach a solution faster, it was slower than just taking that extra time to come up with a better solution.
Still the puzzle popped open with a click, and a candy popped out. A mit bit childish, but the combat body still had taste buds and a sense of smell, it was even enhanced. “Less than half a second, that's not as much of an improvement as you should have gotten, lets try another” if she’d bothered to use her new senses rather than relying on her eyesight she’d have noticed that the puzzle's solution was basically written on the thing. And until she got that we’d keep this up, and I handed her another harder puzzle. 2B started solving the puzzle, and I doubt she noticed that her speech sped up with her cognition, another thing she needed to work on if she was going to talk to other people. “Is there a reason you have me solving these? Normally we just.. Talk” I didn’t shrug, by the time the motion completed minutes would have passed for her. “We can talk anytime, but adapting to a new body is something I can make easier so I will”
And really I’d already gotten through most of her issues, at least gotten talking about them and there wasn’t much else I could do for her now aside from being available to talk. And given my multifaceted self there would never be time I couldn’t. At this point it was more about getting her to relax and working through current issues she faced. And this was both. “Though if you’d like to talk we can stop” 2B shook her head, and with her enhanced speed it broke the sound barrier, causing her and me to flinch but we recovered before the sound stopped echoing. “I was just curious” then I saw as she changed the setting in her eyes, the machinery flickering, then she stared me in the eyes and solved the puzzle without looking, having spotted the infrared paint lines, if not the magnetic fields, that held the ‘cheat code’ so I erased the paint on the next puzzle but left the magnets, though I doubted it’d take her long to realize the new trick.
“I’m beginning to get the idea” she murmured as she handed me the fifth completed puzzle, this one having nearly microscopic etchings with the solution, all in all it’d only taken twenty seconds for her to get my point. “That you are, so I’m going to change the game a bit, this next one will need you to use your new speed to its highest extent, with perfect precision. No tricks, pure skill” I’d already had this one made, I used it to test my own reflexes routinely, though the margins on this one had been made narrower, she was faster than me by a not insignificant amount, she just thought slower.
It took her longer, the puzzle took actual minutes to solve even if you did everything perfectly, and it took her more than a few tries, but eventually I watched as her eyes concentrated on her blurring fingers and the puzzle fell apart as she finished the last sequence. She actually smiled as the pieces fell though her fingers and clattered to the table and I nodded “okay that's the easy one done” and as I handed her the next one her smile died a rapid death. I felt vaguely amused as she took to the new puzzle with a nearly uncharacteristic level of anger. I imagined that’d only grow, as this puzzle wasn’t even solvable with her current speed, not unless she really got it perfectly which while technically possible was improbable.
Should we really be messing with her like this?
You really are the boring one, this is harmless and we aren’t doing it for fun.
Well we mostly aren’t doing it for fun, it's to find her limits and give her something to work towards.
But shouldn’t we tell her she can’t do it?
I refuse to believe you're actually a part of us, A. she wouldn’t work as hard, and B. it wouldn’t be as fun.
Is he just the nice bit? Are we bullying our own conscience?
No, not at all. Haven’t you met our conscience? That guys scary.
He was the one part of us to survive the brain slurrification thing, and it only made him angrier. He just watches us, waiting for us to step out of line.
Wait… why are her fingers moving that fast, she can’t move that fast.
Magic? It’s effected by emotions…. And makes the impossible possible…
Damnit, do we need to design a magic proof puzzle?
Do you feel that?
My thoughts quieted as I stared at 2B, needing the workshop's sensors to see and measure her fingers movements; they were nearly twenty percent faster than they should have been, a drastic improvement. And I felt something as she stared at the puzzle, it felt like I could see from her eyes, it was faint like I was looking into a mirror from far away but as I focused on the sensation the sensations expanded, and I began to feel a vague sense of stubbornness, defiance, and faint annoyance.
I found my eyes drawn away from her own and back towards the puzzle and found myself thinking about the exact order and timing the puzzle required to solve, then my mind made a code that’d cause 2B’s fingers to move with the current motions and speeds and then I felt as 2B’s fingers copied it perfectly. Neither of us moved as the puzzle fell apart. The sensations growing as it felt like I spread into a new body, but the sensation was far more jarring than it should have been. I connected to similar things to 2B’s body all the time, I was more than used to it.
Uhhhh, she solved the impossible puzzle
Why is that the thing your worried about.
Because this just kind of feels like the minds but touch different
Less familiar… but not for us
Then I realized it, this disorientation wasn’t mine, it was 2B’s. She’d never been in more than one place before, and I could imagine that being jarring. But the disorientation slowly faded, and I felt her confusion fade. Then her face snapped to mine, a faint narrowing of her eyes telling me just as well as my new connection that she was annoyed with me. “That puzzle was supposed to be impossible?” well…. No? It was Improbable. Her glare didn’t lessen.
-----------------------------------
2B sat, staring at the puzzle in her hands, not moving, not blinking, not even breathing. She’d heard from the minds, and even the engineer himself, just what he was, but she hadn’t understood. How can you understand being everything you built? Everything the things you built built? Before she’d just shrugged and thought he was aware of it, but now? Now she understood.
She could feel it too, feel him, just the barest tendril reaching into her but with it came a flood of information so vast it felt like she was drowning, she felt hundreds, no thousands, no millions, of machines coming online for the first time, and felt nearly identical machines get destroyed. She felt, saw, and was in a thousand battles, dying in droves in each. Every wall destroyed, every shattered plate of armor, she felt it.
The recoil from her millions of turrets and cannons, the burning of her missiles and engines, the chill of space against her hull radiation from the stars warming her sides. Seeing through every camera and feeling each of her billions of limbs moving in concert.
She exhaled with each burst of steam from the reactors, inhaling as pumps fed more water to her hearts, feeling the power bursting through her veins, allowing her body to move, she felt places were battle damage had weakened the flow and felt drawn to fix it even if she didn’t know how, felt her revulsion grow as intruders tore into one of her disabled bases and longed to tear them to shreds.
It was madness, it was too much, far far too much for even her enhanced mind. She forgot more than she saw, more than she felt. But within moments the flood slowed to a trickle, her body shrinking from trillions into just two small things sitting in a room within herself. One holding a puzzle and one watching the other with concern in his eyes, then the flow lessened even more and she was herself again.
Solving the puzzle after that was trivial, she remembered how it was made after all, and now she knew the optimal way to move her body to reach that goal.