Image of enevelen crawling across a small straight of hill, flanked on both sides by splashing tides. Behind her follows another cyborg with a strange mask and a staff. In the distance, several destroyed skyscrapers stick out of the ocean. [https://i.vgy.me/Yy5qQl.png]
Surrounding what used to be Sacramento Valley, but had in this modern era become the Sacramento flooded bucket extension of the acidic Pacific Ocean, what remained of the coastal mountaintops were now sanded cliffs and holes. An occasional post-human lifeform crawled through these cavernous peaks with bare metal feet and torn, flapping flag-canvas shawls pulling them back and away from their destination, toward whichever direction the stinging ocean wind wanted to drag them.
Enevelen puttered along the thin, dirty cliffs, despite the difficulties the sewn-together pieces of her face presented in their hastily repaired state. Repairs for her mouth, skull, and exterior chassis had come at an excitingly cruel cost that had left her in a substantial amount of debt. Sacrifices had to be made, and in her haste to pursue her next job, she had chosen to compromise the repair of her balancing gyroscopes. The essential inner organs had narrowly escaped being destroyed by her tantrum a few nights before, but retrospectively she felt, of course, they were yet another part of her she could have easily broken. The devices had survived only because she hadn't thought of it at the time.
Thus, in order to repair her head, she had chosen to compromise her ability to walk. It was pathetic, she felt, wobbling along like this. It looked too human. She was disgusting. Her compromised sense of balance made it very difficult to hold herself upright, but she could crawl just fine. What she did, to make her way across the sandy cliffs and in between the open caves of the peaks, was to climb up and around the inclined ground a bit like a feral animal. She attempted a bipedal step every once in a while to maintain a regular pace, but each step felt like a collapse into the ground and frightened her.
She had just completed a job, one which had required her to slash at a victim's knees with her blunt knife from below, and was now making her way to another. To make up for the cost of the repairs to her body and face, and hopefully to pursue a further repair of her gyroscopes, she would take on a second commission to earn the credits necessary. For any normal hunter, taking on additional work like this would be suicide. Jobs take weeks to prepare for, to collect essential resources to pursue... but of course, she did not care. It would be difficult, but she was desperate. She had collected the additional job from a widely disliked class of commissioner, the type that was usually avoided by most hunters for their tedious requests ("Please recollect my misplaced transistors! I left them around here somewhere...") and habit of trying to finagle discounts out of her because of either an unwillingness or inability to pay the standard hunter rate.
Still, it was money, and because of her difficult financial situation, she was thankful for the unpleasant offer's availability. There were of course, dozens of requests she could choose from of this nature, exhausting tasks like retrieving stolen goods of very little value (of emotional value but not necessarily function, such as jewelry or pre-war artifacts) or erasing data from protected servers (which could get one killed easily due to their precarious locations) which would all normally cost much more than an average hit. However, the commissioners requesting these tasks were almost always broke and had little to offer for them.
Hunters who took pity on these individuals were quickly killed, and so Enevelen knew the tasks were often better ignored. This commissioner, however, had managed to scrape together a few thousand credits from what remained of his savings to persuade her. He would not make any return on the payment once the job was completed, but it was very emotionally important to him. Enevelen did not understand this desperation, but money was money.
Enny stumbled on the rubble by a cliff, causing the ocean waves to lap at her feet and scorch the rubber sealant between the metal plates. She screamed in frustration at the sudden injury, though she did not feel it. The ocean had consumed this area of the peaks up to the nape of the mountain, such that the large swirling waves of acid saltwater could easily jump up overtop and swallow a person without warning. She pulled herself back onto the sandy peak with the craggy stone of the wall, kicking herself mentally for being stupid enough to let another potential repair bill fall into her lap like that. Upon inspection, however, the damage to her foot was not too severe. She sighed in a cautious relief.
The sunshine was deceptively peaceful despite the danger of the trek, something about the violent sun beating off of the writhing waves was almost aesthetic in appeal. Though, due to the cruel sound of the ocean and the blasting wind from every direction, there was no calm to be committed from any facet of the area. Everything here was a death waiting to happen, and she was very aware of it.
Scavengers littered the area ahead she knew, frequent travelers of the sunken metro area that the waves continued to pillage. Long ago, the sea had invaded the streets of the city, leaving the west coast as mostly burned out, sunken husks of skyscrapers poking up from the hostile water. Wind clawed and wailed through the shattered windows of what was once high-rise office buildings, now a group of twisted rectangular metal flutes screeching into the empty ocean. They sat among many other sharp structures that had not yet collapsed into the ocean, leaving the skyline looking more like metallic acne on the skin of the sea than any sort of former civilization.
To someone who hadn't known the area before the flood, the skyscrapers would appear as frightening booeys and not remnants of a sprawling metropolis. Almost no footprint of the developed world that had come before remained aside from the resilient structures, as anything of the sort had been swallowed by the burning sea. Aside from the thin peaks of the coastal mountains surrounding the bay, you would find no evidence of any land mass at all. Nothing remained.
The scavengers would row little canoes through openings in the structures, groups of four or five masked and decorated cyborgs pilfering the floors of the building for abandoned devices and metals that could be resold or recycled for personal use. They would fill their little boats with unique finds, and row themselves back to the shore. In the wind-blown caves of the peaks, the strange people had built small settlements (what a terrible place to live) where they would unload and catalog the salvage. Once this was done, and the tide had either risen or fallen to allow them access to a different floor of the building, they would return for more. Sometimes, she had heard, they'd make their way through the interior of the buildings to reach lower or higher floors, but she did not know how they would accomplish this without being burnt away by the flooded acid in the stairwells or killed by the collapsed and sparking infrastructure. Perhaps they would pump out the water somehow? She did not know.
Long-neglected objects of no real value that they had obtained would be used to repair their broken bodies, while other finds would be sold to interested travelers in markets. Their bodies, Enevelen recounted in disgust, were asymmetrical monstrosities of table legs, dead skin, spark plugs, and burnt-out fluorescent office lights, all horribly cocooned by recollected shells of dead cyborgs that they had either killed or collected. Many, she supposed, had washed ashore from having fallen into the ocean and drowned. The strange nature of the acid had eaten away at the metal and mummified the organic components within, which the scavengers would scoop out with tools. They would tie the remaining exterior onto themselves with wire and this would keep them alive for another several months before the interior of the corpse corroded further and had to be replaced again.
They were known for making use of spare parts to keep themselves alive, which Enevelen found incredibly frightening. The freakish nature of their continued existence made her and most other cyborgs incredibly weary of scavenger territory. Unfortunately for Enny, however, her second, small-paying but essential job required her to steal from them.
She had come upon one of their settlements, a decorated tarp strewn across the entrance to a cavern. It matched the image supplied by the commissioner in the request, though the cavern itself was much smaller than she had expected. The scavengers did not have much land available where the sea did not threaten to swallow them whole, but for a reason unknown to Enny, they also did not appear too afraid of the ocean. How could they row those fragile boats across, held together by welded metal? It looked destined to sink and kill them. She didn't understand. Perhaps they did not care if they died, considering they were made of dead, welded bodies themselves. She wondered, quietly as she surveyed for observers, if they had much of a consciousness at all, or were truly just empty bags of wires and metal mimicking the behaviors of a true human.
The community would be out scavenging from the sunken buildings at this time, she had observed, leaving their homes and storage available to her. With a quick and difficult crawling-walking motion, she scrambled from behind the rocks and into the cavern, pulling the curtain aside and freeing herself from the elements.
...
It was dead silent beyond the entrance, the cool interior of the cavern empty of sound aside from the soft howl of wind outside. A drip, drip, drip of the ocean water collected in puddles neighboring the downward-sloping path before her. The water crawled down the chiseled stairs before her like a thousand tiny waterfalls, making only a slight drizzling noise as their sizzling gasses left the dark space difficult to see.
She stumbled along the wall, careful not to step outside the uneven steps, noticing as she went various framed images hung with chickenwire from nails in the stone. What strength, she thought to herself, to have gotten the nail into the wall. For each, she noticed, they were images of anything. Unmodified humans, prints of the old natural world, framed drawings of food and animals drawn in toy chalk... no doubt these pictures had been recollected from the buildings they regularly visited. It was an interesting and nostalgic gallery of the past centuries, mostly that of the twenty-first. Perhaps she'd like to get something like this from one of their markets? She had to admit it was an appealing sale. A picture of her childhood town, perhaps. Something to look at between jobs, maybe.
In the basement of the cavern, she observed dirty shelves and tables, lit by hanging electric lights. The bulbs, she noted, were of a bizarre variety. Some were blinding, clean white LEDs, while others were buzzing fluorescents. One lamp was a black light and made the wall behind it purple. Stains of water and oil were illuminated by it, creating a surreal artwork of color. Did they notice the surreal patchwork of colors, in the cave, she wondered? It was strange to see a space so disorganized in look, as she was so used to the desert sun and the long, flat colors of the sand and sky.
Along the shelves, she found rows and rows of discolored plastic bins and crates of varying types. They were filled with salvaged goods, some interesting and some not so much. One she pulled from the wall was filled with bent paperclips of every color. It looked like rainbow sawdust or tangled wires. How would anyone get these apart? Another bin on the opposite wall was more interesting. Several cracked and dead smartphones from the early twentieth century, some of very old value. A handful were of a model with a built-in keyboard, before the touchscreen implementations. It was such a strange sight, as the commonality of the flat, featureless glass types were more familiar to her. The later devices had originally been designed to stop functioning after two years of wear and thus were only really practical as table coasters or items to dismantle and repurpose. She had known people to buy the aged cameras within the phones for use in survey equipment, as small lenses of their quality were difficult to manufacture in the modern era without expensive three-dimensional printing devices. The individual parts themselves were most likely very valuable.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
What caught her attention was that, as she could recall, her parents adored these devices. Took them everywhere, like an additional limb. They functioned similarly to a brain augmentation in that they could allow a person of natural flesh to do many things modern cyborgs now took for granted, like video recording or information gathering, among other things... Each of these cracked, fragile black devices had belonged to someone... had BEEN someone. They were like coffins.
Enny held one of the more rugged-looking models in her hand, pressing down on the side-most buttons of the curved cracked glass. To her surprise, a white image of a half-eaten apple appeared on the black screen, which startled her. It was quickly replaced by a digital keyboard and instructions in a language she did not recognize, overtop a blurred image of a tree and unaugmented humans. She aimlessly poked at a few of the characters on the keyboard, causing the device to vibrate and erase what she had typed. This confused her, and losing interest, she tossed the device back into the bin.
Plungers, clothing, pens... the other bins were not much more interesting, and she quickly became bored of them. Wandering past, she perused the collection of images again that the commissioner had supplied. Pictures of rooms and hastily scribbled maps of the cave's layout... it wasn't much to go on, but she suspected she'd find "it" eventually. Following the trail of mismatched lighting and the information she had been given, she entered what seemed to be the sleeping quarters of the scavenger's commune. Some beds were made, some not, all the fabrics of either in tatters, stitched together from multiple pieces. Everything in here had been repurposed, she supposed. They did not make anything of their own, only stealing from those who had died centuries ago. Shouldn't these things be left alone? It felt to her nauseating to imagine sleeping in a space made from the remnants of corpses, of a world that was abandoned. Of the dead.
Still, it was nostalgic she admitted, to see items and fabrics that reminded her of an era before the military, before... everything, she supposed. It was almost comfortable to imagine sleeping in a space of real fabric, of real items... nothing synthetic... nothing printed.
And yet, she acknowledged, how nauseating that was. Was it comfortable for cyborgs to sleep in a cocoon of a species that had abandoned them? That had shed their physical form for a conglomerate consciousness in a Shoebox? It showed in their faces, their attempts at imitating a human body in form, but with only recycled metals and string. They were freakish, and it was strange that they attempted to rekindle a form that she and the other cyborgs had long since attempted to abandon for mechanisms more efficient, more advanced. The bodies and lives of the scavengers were patchwork, she insisted to herself. They were husks.
A large, discolored pinkish plush bear stared at her through the doorway of one of the rooms, no lights turned on. It sat alone on a matted bed with one button eye, the other a painted bottle cap. The large head of the bear slouched over onto one of the cool cavern walls, and its gaze seemed to judge her. She wandered over to it and knocked it down onto the floor with the muzzle of her gun, drawn from her hip but not yet loaded.
"Worthless thing," she mumbled. "Worthless, childish thing."
A growl from nearby startled her. She turned quickly, dizzying herself as she stumbled to look in the dim light. She held her pistol two-handed with the barrel of the silencer pointed in the direction of the human sound. A person bundled in a soft blanket, sleeping soundly in an indentation in the wall. A second bed, she observed. The creature grumbled slightly, before rolling over and away from her.
She lowered her weapon slightly, stepping forward with her hand on the overhang of the indent, to survey the being. She craned her head close to that of the creature to see their misshapen face. It was scrap metal, puttering away like rattling shingles on a roof. The creature was snoring.
Strange of two of them to sleep in the same room, she thought. Wouldn't that be uncomfortable to not have privacy? At least it was unconscious. No threat to her she presumed. Why sleep during the day though? Wasn't it still daylight outside?
She wandered back out of the room, trying to perceive which room the commissioner had taken pictures of. The shots were blurry, and the dark and strangely lit space had not done the photographer any favors.
Eventually, Enevelen stumbled upon something that looked accurate to the hole of light pictured in her data. It was another room for sleeping, this one looking more sparsely decorated than the other, as though whoever it was that had occupied it hadn't lived there long enough to build much decoration. She wondered to herself, did they take on a new occupant? How would scavengers obtain new... members? Maybe make them from scratch? If so, why...?
In the back of the room, similarly unlit, sat a small chest. She wandered over to it, quick to check the room for sleeping combatants (there were none), and picked the lock of the box with a tool. Within was a wad of green, red, and blue papers, wrapped in an aged band of rubber. It was physical money, paper money, from the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second centuries. An interesting collection, she noted. Currency of multiple eras. Again, worthless in this current time with the advent of digital non-physical credits and the lack of any ruling government to regulate a conversion, but still very interesting.
Along with this were small printed photographs of unaugmented humans (none of them were the same, perhaps the scavenger had simply collected pictures of of strangers to fantasize about), a couple of old, tattered yellow books ("Ulysses," "Infinite Jest," "L'Étranger..." early Quebecian works, maybe? She did not recognize them...), and... ah-a! The item she was most interested in.
It was a small, rusted metal key, which dangled from a long string that had been tied with a bow at the end. It was exactly as the commissioner described it. She wondered of its corresponding lock, but knew it did not matter. Getting it back to the commissioner would net her the pay needed to repair her gyroscopes and allow her to walk again. Quietly, looking around to see if anyone had seen her theft (was it theft? Scavengers were thieves themselves. She was just reclaiming the item...) she pocketed the key and scuttled back out of the cavern, careful to close the chest behind, locking it again.
She followed her hands, leaning into the walls as she went, stumbling through the darkened hall with her gun drawn. She stopped to load it briefly with a ballistic charge. It whirred to life, though she covered the sound with her shawl so it would not carry in the enclosed space.
Up the stairs she toddled, out into the blistering wind.
...
Wandering along the rocks, her cowl blasting to the right while her body struggled to the left, she glanced behind herself and discovered a brownish-red figure following behind. A short, disjointed-looking thing with a large staff. It had large, sharp wiring pointing out and back from its head like a barbed-wire sun, its face obscured by a disjointed mask. The sight shocked Enevelen, who pretended not to see the form while she continued to struggle along the rocks. She was in no shape for a fight. Despite this, she readied her pistol for a defense, if provoked.
The two continued to wander along the cliffs for several minutes before Enevelen glanced again behind her to see the figure much closer than before. Enny did not react but was becoming restless. A strong TAP from behind on her back made her stumble, and before she could turn around, another TAP knocked her down onto the gravel. She fumbled herself around onto her back and pointed her gun at the figure's head.
"What did you take?" a sharp voice scrawled out from behind the figure's mask. It prodded at her leg with the staff, which Enny could now see was a sawed-off cauterized piece of rusted iron. "What did you take, hunter?"
Enny continued to grip the gun, though the sun made it difficult to see the figure.
"I didn't take shit," she lied. "Get out of my face you abomination, this fucker's loaded!"
The figure laughed. "Abomination? Why do you call me that?"
Enny didn't reply, but kept her gun pointed. The figure's voice was that of a woman, electronic but crisp. It crouched down, the staff laid across its legs as it leaned in at her.
"You can't walk, can you? Did you injure yourself?"
Enevelen gestured forward with the gun in a threatening manner, hoping the creature would at least flinch. It stayed still, seemingly unfazed.
"I didn't take shit."
"Yes you did, you went into our home. You took something, you were probably paid to take something. This happens often."
The figure whacked the stick at Enny's legs, and she fired the gun in shock. A LOUD blast of light fired through the figure's mask, leaving a scorching hole a few centimeters from the right eye. The figure fell backward but quickly steadied itself. It lifted its mask from its face, showing disjointed humanoid and mechanical shapes underneath. The jaw of the figure hung off its cheeks via metal springs and was pulled up and down as it spoke by an internal mechanism. The image was terrifying to Enevelen, who chose to cover her eyes with her hands.
"Ah, at least the costume startled you. So you do have a soul."
The figure whacked Enny's feet a second time with the stick, causing her to return the gun towards the figure, taking another defensive posture. She quickly charged another shot, though she had difficulty making eye contact.
"So what did you take? Was it something you find valuable? Maybe we don't want it back. Maybe we're not as petty as you hunters seem to think we are." She leaned in closer to Enevelen, tilting her head slightly. Her eyes glowed a bright red, two neon rings framed by uneven metal brows. It was an uncanny sight, terrifying to her at this distance.
"You know we have names? Though you call us "Scavengers," we consider ourselves fishermen, archivists, a family... Our community is called "Sanfa," which is I think slang for the San Fransisco Bay... It's not meant to be fancy, just a nickname. To separate us from the others. We are descendants."
The scavenger placed their forehead directly against the end of the gun's barrel, pushing it back towards Enevelen.
"My name is North, what's yours, hunter?"
Enny, shaking, gripped the gun's handle tightly, wracked with fear and disgust.
"B-back up. Back up."
The scavenger (North?) stared quietly for a moment, before leaning back away from her, returning to a squat.
"You hunters are so strange. Always very frightened of us, I've noticed."
Enny lowered her gun slightly, trying to calm herself.
"What did you take? Show me, please."
"No."
"Why not?"
"It's... I need it. For my legs." Enny grumbled. Why tell her that?
"Your legs? We can fix your legs here. Why do you need to take something?"
Enny became frustrated at the response. She attempted to stand up, struggling as she went.
"Fix my legs, with what, duct tape and rebar? No thanks. I need repairs, not replacements. I'm not like you."
"What makes us so different? Honestly?" asked the scavenger. "We're people, we're both human, or, you know, we were. I was, I assume you were too once."
"Shut up."
"Does that anger you when I say that? I mean tell me I'm wrong, hunter, your kind always tries to separate us. We sell our finds to you and you treat us like criminals, it's so bizarre. What separates us? We think the same, we talk the same-"
"..."
"What frustrates you about that? You know there's not much different behind the metal, we're kin in at least that way. Processors, a marriage of organic and mechanical, you know, I've got human skin too. Do you have some around the face? Mine is the stomach, allows me to eat cooked food and experience natural tastes-"
"...stop."
"Stop what? What am I saying? Do something then. If it bothers you. Thief."
And she did, Enevelen fired her weapon again at the scavenger. It struck them in the shoulder, a misfire due to Enevelen's difficulty with balance, and the scavenger fell backward onto the ground. In doing so, the scavenger's shoulder blew to pieces, but not before they managed to thrust the staff towards her and into her ribs, knocking Enny from her knees and back onto the ground, as she clutched at her gut. The piercing left only something of a scratch, but the punch to her stomach made her nauseous. As she fell onto her back, she held tight to her gun but quickly lost control of her body and began sliding down, off the edge of the cliff. She grabbed at the rocks to stop the descent, the waves yet again clamoring up to meet her. They bit at her feet, and the familiar burning sensation returned. She garnered what strength she had in her arms and hoisted her body away from the flames, away from the brutal sea. The acid ate away at her toes, and she brushed them off in the dirt as she lifted her heavy body onto the mountain peak with a guttural loud groan of frustration.
"Don't try it again, hunter!" yelled the scavenger, who had run a good distance back towards the settlement. "Go back to your desert, to your machines!" They had picked up their scorched mask and placed it back on their head as their form disappeared over the horizon.
Enevelen gave a dismissive gesture and attempted to pick themselves up, failing and falling back to the ground. They crawled along, attempting to make headway back to civilization. Good riddance, she thought, holstering her gun. She could at least cash in the other bounty, and return the key. Repair her legs.
But wait, where was the key? She patted at her shawl. The key? The key? She looked around in fright.
It had fallen into the ocean.