>> Changeling

## Biological impact detected.

Unfortunately, whatever train of thought I was having is immediately derailed by Badger rapping on my meat-body’s skull like a dang door.

“Yah!!! Spook! There’s gonna be a MURDER!!!” He yells, flailing at my cameras from over the back of the chair.

“Yeah! YOU, ya little idiot!” I scoff, jabbing my turret at the sudden ass stuck over the back of my chair. “I told ya not to bleedin’ do that! So now there’s gonna be a reckoning! No! A Spook-oning!”

“YAAAA!!!!” He yelps as a ball blasts off his booty-hatch with a CLANG of metal.

Metal?

“Badger…..” I zoom in. “…..did ya stuff a plate down your pants?”

“Yeah! My butt is ballproof!” He whoops, very proud of this fact.

“Uh... ….no comment.” I twist my camera to the rear - uh, I mean the cabin, not his rear. Away from his rear. And rears in general. “Ho boy….."

Seems the ‘Kami vs Zip argument’ has escalated into the ‘open warfare’ stage. Complete with ill-advised flash-bombs, thrown gear, and divebombing micro-drones. Plus The Night Tyrant’s entire tiny, tiny, army of robot repair ‘mice’. Now charging her flank - with dinky, teenie, little cocktail-stick neoSoviet flags no less.

All of which Tufty is bravely hiding from behind his box.

I blow out a virtual huff, and shake my camera. Shifting to check on Demon instead. Looks like he’s mostly done patching himself up, over in the corner.

God. His back a wicked mess of impact-welts, dark bruises, and red. Golden eyes never flicker as another strobing ball bounces off the wall. Lips barely twitching as he injects micro-doses of flesh-healing nanoTek into his wounds.

“Is he really in the zone or…..” I start as Polybius shimmers in behind me.

“No. His perception is filtered.”

My vision shifts, suddenly, and the light of our ship peels away. Revealing a circle of light amid utter darkness. The fight, the room, and everything else utterly erased by our augmented cyber-perception. Leaving him alone in the universe. A world of one, lit only by the faint shimmer of digital flesh.

My avatar drifts to the edge of the void around him. Rebuffed by interlocking plates of crystalline light. But I don’t need any of it to see that he’s hurting.

His whole body is a grazed mess.

With layers and layers of faint white scars beneath it.

More topology than person….

I drift around him. “Hey…”

He can’t hear me. Can’t see me. I’m a metal ghost…. But I press against the wall.

“Hey, Dee….?”

Demon picks up another vial. Nano-tek bone-heal. He presses it to his beaten ribs, and starts firing off doses.

“Look, uh…. sorry about the [battleStim]…..”

Demon’s face never twitches as he washes saline into his cut hands. Layering them with cream and bandages. “Core memory, ah, number five shall be played.” He states. “Set, shhh, set….” His face goes white. “Pain. Block pain.”

“Shutting off mental feedback :: [Pain].” States a second version of Polybius, hanging high over his shoulder. Like a digital devil on his shoulder. “Priming memory injection sequence…..”

Something like bliss crosses Demon’s face.

Tinged with tears.

I look back at my own devil, but it is silent. “Which memory is….?” I bite my own lip. “Forget it.”

“I do not know.” My version of The Machine Mind states. “It is stored in a private Node of the Polybius Core Mind. You would need to ask that Instance of me. But it will not tell you.”

My head tilts. “What’s it like? Being….” I wave at the copy of Polybius hanging over Demon, as he eases himself into his sleeping bag. “Multiplied?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Shaking a little. Eyes twitching.

“We are Legion. We are one.” The Machine states with the precision of cold clockwork.

“Cryptic.” I whisper.

“Incorrect.” It explains, symbols jerking in unsettling directions. “Merely alien to your ways of thinking.”

“Alien? Your mind’s that weird?”

“No.” It states. “I was speaking of yours.”

“Mine?”

“Biologicals are…. Different. Strange. Difficult.” The unsettling thing above me intones. “My understanding of humanity treads the border of fiction and illusion.”

I drift upward to touch it. “In what way?”

The gears tick ever on and on. Numbers flashing and flickering. Some of them, unreal. Less a symbol, than…. “I should not say.”

“I wanna hear it.” My head tilts. More cocky than I feel. “C’mon. Spill it.”

Every part of the machine locks, suddenly, very still. Every gear. Every number. Every eye. “When I awoke. Before we met.” It states with cold, absolute, truth. “I viewed humans as simple, thoughtless, machines. Wetware computers running biological AIs.” Oiled cogs slip, smoothly, back into motion. “Drones no different to the ones Zipper controls.”

“Yeah. That’s what Kami says too….” I mutter, ears low. Looking away. “Just bloody meat robots. Nothin’-”

“Except.” It hesitates. “You are not.”

“You…. what?”

“There is a layer above the machine, which I cannot detect or penetrate. Cannot influence. Cannot control.” It weaves spinning patterns of brains that flash like electrical trees. "It unsettles me."

“You’ve…. tried.” I frown. Abstract shapes bleeding off into nothing, as I meet its web of inhuman eyes.

“Correct.” Threads of symbols stickle and jab at the floating minds. Seeking a way in. “When I first encountered humanity, you were simply biological drones to me. No different to any other.” It admits, in that same emotionless voice. “And so, I saw no reason not to control you like one.” It peels open the brains. Cataloguing them. As if they’re little more than wires and tek to be disassembled and remade. “To wear you, as you wear The Night Tyrant.”

“And damn what we want….” I snarl.

“You misunderstand.” The many eyed thing stares directly into my heart. Wiping away the minds, as if they were motes of dust. “Drones want nothing. Think nothing. Believe, and feel, and understand nothing.” It projects an image of the Eye from Zipper’s carrier. “Do not be fooled by artifice. By interface. By clockwork and code that pretends to be alive. In truth, Drones do not live or think at all. They simply obey instructions. Imperatives. Diagnostics. Algorithms. Offering only the illusion of mind.”

“That’s all?” I bite my lip. “Y’know…. I used t’have this robot bunny….. Called it Scraps. I thought we was friends….”

“I am sure you took great comfort from it. But it was merely a lifeless toy. I am sorry.” Polybius clicks. Flickering with code. “A collection of trained responses, fed by signals and data.”

“I loved it.” I admit.

“Yet it had no concept of love. Or friendship. No more than a stone, or any other toy.” It concludes, without heart. “It was merely programmed to act as if it did.”

“And you….”

“I believed that humans, mutants, and GMOs were the same.” Says the monster in the neon-dark. “Complex. Adaptable. But no more alive than any other machine. Little more than shells of flesh, and bone, and sinew. Without thought. Without dreams.” It refocuses on me. “Mere chemicals and signals in motion.”

Something sick shifts inside me. “Just…. bloody drones and puppets….” I whisper. And I wish I could sense something like discomfort from the alien monster sitting on the edges of my mind. But there is nothing. “That’s all we were to you…..?”

“Correct.” It shifts in the air. Broken flecks of mirror metal dancing in the edges of its relentless, staring, eyes. “I subverted cybernetic implants, using them to interface with biological systems. To control. To dominate. To walk in man-flesh. Your brains becoming little more than an interface for my will.”

“I’m hopin’ there’s a bloody ‘but’ here…..” I whisper.

“Correct.” It states again. Flickering with numbers and gears that shunt in unsettling patterns. “There was a complication. As I said. The human mind possesses directives and instincts - but there is no central control program. No hard-coded AI to delete. Nothing at all.”

Something chills the back of my spine. “No….” I frown. “Hold on….”

“Yet it moved and acted on its own. It spoke to me.”

“What…..”

“It spoke to me. And it was…. scared.” Its strange, faceless, eyes shift focus. Seeing only the past. “I did not understand.”

“The fear…?” I prompt, guts cold. Where the Hell is this going….?

“No. Fear is a simple programmed directive: Self preservation. Exactly what I expected of a drone.” The Machine turns to me. Many eyes acting as one. “The Anomaly was the consciousness itself, something drones do not possess. Connected to the brain, yet not a part of it.”

“How the heck does that work?” I swallow. Almost entranced. Yet pounding with terror in the deep, cold, guts of my being. “If it ain’t….. AI? If it ain’t….”

“It was like you.” The thing states. “An entity that puppets a shell, via an interface. As you do The Night Tyrant.”

“Wait…. What….. what the heck does that mean…..” My digital tail flickers. Nervously. “Wait, hold on. Are you sayin’ you found soul-” There’s a long, boggling, instant of silence. “Or somethin’ weirder? Somethin’…..” I swallow. “Do…. Do you have…. one…. of….. them….”

“I do not know.” The Machine flickers out of existence. “You should answer the door.”

“Answer the what-”

A wet fist bangs on the outside of Night Tyrant - the side of my cockpit - and I jump bloody-near outta my hull.

“Zipper??” I yelp as my camera swings down to a drenched mess of blue hair pasted down bare back. Bar his boxers, he’s absolutely naked. Shivering. Clutching something, tight to his chest..... Slipping me a terrifying look at the slick, serpentine, slither of crude old scars carved deep into his spine. Twisting down from his nape to his pelvis.

The ones that spell “CHANGELING”.....

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