A cold sun began to set over a quiet cityscape. It laid in ruins, forever freed from the cacophony of rush-hour traffic; yet also bereft the soft heighty notes of songbirds.
Humanity had long since abandoned this place, tainted like so many others by the Beilan Island Incident. The entire eastern sector of the city had been dusted with lethally contaminated air, leading to the deaths of countless residents and the disorganized evacuation of all that remained.
Even now, decades after the event, parts of the city and swathes of the surrounding land retained lethal levels of radiation. Houses had begun to rot and concrete buildings crumbled piece by piece every day, all still bearing the belongings left by those caught up in the immediacy of evacuation.
And in the middle of it all, mere blocks from the irradiated city center, an android sat motionless next to a smoking crater. Some of her comrades were strewn around her in pieces. On-board diagnostics read like a mile long receipt of damaged components and severed cable connections, and she had trouble keeping track of them all between sudden power failures and subsequent reboots.
Motor functions--disabled. Her primary power distribution system must have been damaged, and the secondary too. Or she didn't have any limbs left to move.
Communications were fubar. She'd been sending a ping out to HQ every few seconds since the impact, but none incurred a response and she had heard nothing on airwaves that she had known to be active. Her batteries were running out, and she was already surprised to have made it as long as she did- four days with no charge; though she chalked it up to her 10% total functionality.
She'd always wondered what it would be like to die- if it was like any other power cycle, or if it was something more... peaceful. Slower, calmer. No relief was coming and their area of deployment was so far removed from civilization that there was no hope for she and the rest of her unit to be found by luck alone.
Despite the damage she had accrued, the system responsible for her artificial pain response was still functioning perfectly, and it didn't take long for it to convince her that unconsciousness was bliss in comparison.
Perhaps it was due to the ravaged state of her internal systems, or the fact that her artificial mind had been stressed far beyond its intended limits; but for the first time in her short life, she chose for herself.
Her final action was one of self-termination. She closed the 3rd-level redundant power connections within her one at a time, disconnecting her batteries.
She felt relief, and oddly, satisfaction.
And then nothing.
-----
A man carefully crawled over the rim of a crater and into the remains of what he could only barely recognize as a parking garage.
The crater itself was a shallow pit dug into the concrete, but it was easily fifteen feet in diameter. The roof of the complex, and most of the walls, were cracked and split by whatever explosion had carved the ground out. Parts of the ceiling had already collapsed, and he was sure that the rest of it would come down soon enough. Without time to waste, his feet moved him quickly, steadily, and quietly towards the broken android propped up against one of the still-standing walls.
He had noticed others like it in scattered pieces, strewn about the crater and the building's exterior in a gruesome fashion. Though intact, he doubted there was anything to be done for her. Weeks, possibly months without a charge, extreme pressure damage- even if her extremities seemed fine, there was no telling what the shockwave and shrapnel had done to her internals; not to mention the rubble pinning her to the ground.
But still, he considered, the batteries used in these models were powerful. If even two were intact, he could store enough charge to power the electronics in his kit for weeks.
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He knelt beside her and pushed at the broken chunks of concrete strewn over her legs, looking for an interface port. He found it on her right side, below where the ribs would be present on a human. He pulled the pack from his back and sat it beside the android, retrieving a multi-system interfacer from it, and began to screen for defects and hardware failures along with intact components. What he found was nothing short of a miracle.
All of the android's internal systems were intact minus primary power distribution, long-range radio communications, internal diagnostics, and her central motor control assembly. She must have been further from the explosion than it seemed, or behind a wall when it happened.
The damage was extensive, still, but nothing that couldn't be fixed- even her batteries were intact, and retained just enough charge to stop them from accruing empty cell damage- but there were other objectives fulfill, before he could start salvaging parts.
He stood up and turned to face the back of the garage, toward the ramp down to the sublevels. If what he was looking for was on the top floor, he wasn't going to find it- not after the explosion that ripped the roof off and knocked the 2nd story floor out from underneath.
Left of the ramp was the door to a stairwell, dark enough to require a light but passable enough to traverse. Bits of rubble littered the stairs and crunched with each footfall, the shadows cast by the steps themselves making it impossible to avoid the noise. Human remains were visibly scattered around, both in the stairwell and more sparingly on the upper level.
Just bones, now, but recent enough to be discernable. He guessed they were the reason a squad of dolls was dispatched, and he could guess that whatever they had here was worth defending to the last man.
Even so, he had to go no deeper than the first sublevel to realize the fruitless nature of his search. He could see water on the floor of the stairwell, and his last step down put him in a half-inch of it. The explosion must have ruptured the building's water main, which failed to drain properly; leaving much of the first sublevel covered to an inch, and everything below it completely submerged in dirty greenish water that the beam of his lamp struggled to penetrate.
Whatever may have been here was either destroyed or inaccessible now, and he couldn't afford to waste time looking for ways to clear the drainage and find out. With silent resignation he ascended the stairs and returned to the android at the foot of the wall.
He cleared a spot beside her and sat, studying the MSI as it ran through more diagnostics- though his eye was only tracking her operational information, as the rest was gibberish to him.
>Model: Five-seveN Special
>Status: SELF-ASSESSED INOPERABLE; RECOVERY UNSCHEDULED
>Commander: CLASSIFIED
>Objective: CLASSIFIED
Internally censored objectives, a black-name CO, and no imminent recovery attempt. A furrowed brow grew above his eyes. Whatever they came for, he wouldn't be discovering it quickly. Not once he reset her.
He'd brought a sled with him to drag salvage back through the streets, and a few minutes later he'd carried her out and tied her down.
Eight miles through debris and car-choked streets. It would be a long haul.
-----
He prodded the MSI as it ran primary and secondary diagnostics for the fourth time that morning. He'd spent the night scrounging up workable scrap from the area around his dwelling- a crumbling, but still mostly sturdy three-story apartment complex- and fixing it up to facilitate field repairs on the android.
She was looking better now, and workable to say the least. He had patched her powerbox as best as he could manage, and rewired much of the distribution system for the sake of internal integrity, then hooked her into the makeshift solar generator he'd rigged up on the top floor. The MSI turned a favorable diagnosis, finally, and he'd left her to charge- incapable of an independent reboot, of course- while he returned to the place he'd found her for the rest of his gear.
The rest of his night was spent toying with her core firmware, looking for a way in. Computers were never his strong suit, and he struggled, but with the MSI's help he found what he needed.
Due to the extensive damage to her frame, and the subsequent power surges, her firmware was left somewhat vulnerable. Gaps in code that were flashed out of existence, and internal telemetry failures that opened new avenues of attack. By the early morning hours of the next day he'd gotten his virtual hands on her directives core, and found a way to change the information present.
>Model: Five-seveN Special
>Status: OPERABLE--MANUALLY DISABLED; RECOVERY UNSCHEDULED
He paused as the next line scrolled up, requesting new input with a short burst of flashes.
>Commander: ANTON BRESLIN
He hesitated, calling up memories of his life before. Then pressed delete.
>Commander: CAPTAIN ANTON BRESLIN
If he was going to lead again... might as well.
>Objective: UNIT SURVIVAL
Breslin nodded, satisfied. He shut off the android's boot blocker through the MSI and took her off the charger, scooting his chair back across the dusty floor. He could only hope for the rewrite to stick as she audibly began to revive.