Image of a strange floating box-like device, as seen through the electronic crosshairs of Enevelen's rifle. [https://i.vgy.me/twpaBD.png]
Enevelen curled her body into a dirty concave nook of the rock quarry, nestled underneath a large, sandy yellow dune. She had begun quietly pulling parts from her satchel and a second, adjacent bag, assembling her rifle piece by piece in preparation for her next commission. The wind had begun to pick up again, causing her poncho to ripple and flap in the air behind her like a tattered, yellowed flag. She wasn't too worried about anyone seeing it from this height, but decided to stuff it down into her belt just to be sure.
To her right, Chlorophi was nestled into the dirt, facing away from the landscape and silently hunched over their tablet. They had been taking notes, seemingly, but Enny was not sure on what. Chlo tapped away at the surface with a stylus, barely moving the rest of their body while they did so. There was no screen on the device, it was a pale slab with a subtle elevated rim for grip. It looked cheap, a dirty piece of plastic with faint square panels along the side that served as big, chunky buttons. It also appeared to respond to touch gestures; she had watched Chlo occasionally tap and swirl their index finger around the surface in a circle, cradling the small pen with their thumb as they did so. Enevelen hadn't used a device like that for a very long time, but supposed that Chlo's wireframe anatomy likely did not have many of the internal HUD programs that most cyborgs had grown accustomed to. It made sense for them to use an external device like a tablet, though it was a unique sight in this age.
The quiet clicking of their stylus on its surface was prevalent against the soft hum of the wind, creating a deafening silence not typical of Chlo's energetic personality. Enny had noted the sharp contrast in their behavior when deep in thought; they would become like a statue, their iron body sitting perfectly still while working away at whatever book or device was occupying their attention. Their attitude was trance-like... Several times Enny had startled Chlorophi just by waving a hand in their periphery, or speaking slightly louder than usual. They would often fall into a very deep focus, allowing their hands to work at a frantic, efficient pace. It was strange to watch.
Chlo's handwriting was sharp and quick, a tight chicken scratch with limited legibility to anyone but them. It looped and fell sharply, though the pace was consistent. Sometimes they would pause for a quick moment, their entire body stopping dead, before quickly returning to their quick scraping along the tablet. The dull, quiet sound of their stylus tapping away at the device at such a mechanical speed was somewhat frustrating, Enny felt. It was an obnoxious white noise that invaded the desert's soft void of sound, a silence which she desperately craved to better focus on her work. Enny was tempted to isolate and remove the frequency from her hearing, but she worried that would affect her awareness of their environment, and possibly lead to someone getting the jump on her. She decided to try and just mentally tune it out, if possible.
Enevelen had never taken the time to learn cursive despite having had many opportunities to do during grade school and onwards, so from an angled glance, the digital scribbles looked more like twenty-first century abstract expressionist art than any written language she would be familiar with. She could make out a handful of words, notably "human" and "humanity" featuring prominently in most of the sentences, as well as something like "mother" and "trauma." At least some of it was in English, but Enny couldn't be sure about the rest. Plant culture was mysterious and totally unfamiliar to her, but she had assumed for the most part that a majority of them spoke and wrote in their own language, whatever that might be ('plantinese...?' or maybe 'plantish?') and had only really learned English and other human languages for the benefit of cyborgs.
She was tempted to ask Chlorophi what was being written down, to possibly distract from how infuriating it was to watch and hear, but at this point in her long, empty life, Enevelen had made a general habit of avoiding small talk and casual conversation in general. She did not enjoy conversing with people about unimportant things... like discussions about jobs and events of the day... It really annoyed her. Enny had observed from regular, reluctant experience, that most other people seemed to exclusively prefer talking about things that did not matter.
There seemed to be a similarly obnoxious blueprint for every conversation she'd ever been forced to sit through, just a long ramble about nothing with someone who she didn't care about. Other people were never interesting, and never did or said anything interesting, she felt. Talking to others always felt like a waste of her time. Enevelen supposed that this exhausting monotony was the average behavior of all people, having met so many in her lifetime that had acted this way.
Ironically, however, she considered herself to be fairly extroverted. On average, Enny enjoyed the company of friends... doing little adventurous activities, maybe dueling, or collaborating on an exciting job... It was the small talk that bothered her, and made her almost violently resentful.
A reason for this intolerance, she assumed, was that her social skills had been heavily molded by her time in the military, as augmented soldiers gave quick, simple answers, and did not babble beyond a tactical discussion. That was what she was used to, and that was what she tended to do herself. Enny did not want to bore people, and she did not want to be bored herself. Along with that, she despised the idea of vocalizing her personal thoughts and feelings to anyone, and hated the idea of someone doing the same to her. It was just more time wasted, she felt, and inevitably cringe-worthy.
No one needed to hear any of that, she'd insist. It was time-consuming and frightening to dwell on. Enny also felt that opening up to others about her personal views or concerns was an immediate weakness that others could easily take advantage of. She had no interest in sharing her opinions on things, or what her opinions would even be. She couldn't stand the idea of allowing people to pick her apart like that, and loathed the idea of purposely exposing her thoughts to external analysis. What would be the point? She's already seen enough of her gross artificial innards during routine maintenance and nightly self-analytical examinations, and the inside of her mind was likely just as disgusting.
Through her scope, Enny could see a small white object hovering over the golden horizon, approaching at a sluggish, methodical pace. It was chunky and crab-like in shape with plump, curved mandibles clutching what appeared to be an innocuous grey crate. She observed that the crate had stylish rounded corners and an angular seam around the middle, a shape reminiscent of fire-proofed lock boxes that one would find under an office desk. The polished, clean surface of the contraption looked extraterrestrial compared to the ramshackle titanium of most cyborg tech that Enny had become accustomed to in this era, and the container's surreal appearance indicated that it likely contained something of extremely high value. She could only guess what that might be, but assumed her lack of information on the container's contents would have no impact on her ability to carry out its termination. As was typical of her work, the anonymous individual who had requested the hit had only given vague instructions that the shipment was to be either 'captured' or 'completely destroyed.' She had decided that the latter was the preferable option, as lugging a huge crate across the Hourglass desert would most likely be incredibly tedious, and not nearly as fun as simply blasting it out of the sky.
After she had accepted the job, the individual then supplied the geographic origin, travel itinerary, and structural integrity of the container. No other information was supplied with the request, but they had also included basic contact details in case more was needed. The contact option was a regular inclusion for any commission, though mostly a formality, as Enny never really expected any of her clients to actually supply much of a response to her inquiries. All she had ever heard back in the past had been thinned reiterations of the previously-supplied factoids, and at one point a memorable and embarrassingly passive-aggressive reply of, "You ask a strange amount of questions for a bounty hunter! :)"
This ambiguity was perfectly acceptable with her of course, as she generally despised asking questions. Enny usually preferred to skip all that, and keep the job simple. She'd shoot first and ask questions later, as was typical of bounty hunters. Becoming any more involved with a job than was necessary almost always guaranteed a traumatic experience, which she'd had enough of in her lifetime already. The clients would promise large sums of credits for a hit, and that was usually enough to satisfy any curiosity.
Enevelen had periodically tried requesting payment in advance, especially when starting out, but quickly found that doing so would often paint a big red target on her back. Most jobs she'd take on would come with the added nuisance of dozens of other bounty hunters clamoring to steal the hit, even if the commissioner had purposely intended to keep it quiet and exclusive to only her. Taking a good sum of credits upfront was a sure-fire way to place herself directly in the middle of the circus, as it was a widespread belief that successfully taking another hunter's job was the easiest way to win further work from that client. Not only that, but by picking off a hunter that had already been paid, it allowed others the option of simply taking the money without even bothering to follow through on the job. She had no clue how her clients actually felt about any of this behavior, but this was partly why she always denied accepting too many credits before a job. This was not a fair system, and she knew the risks of being too greedy. Not many others did, it seemed, and that may have been why she had outlasted so many of them.
Enny watched as the shipment puttered along carelessly, hovering a few meters above the sand like a child's lost balloon. It wandered a path perpendicular to her line of sight (by no accident of hers of course, she had scouted this location out by wandering the desert for an entire week) with an obnoxiously slow and callous meander, appearing so pathetically obvious and pompous that it was almost begging her to shoot it.
She screwed her long, rimmed barrel onto the end of her rifle, the various metallic fillings and wirings adorning the exterior rattling excitedly as they clattered into place. A familiar, comfortable electric hum sounded from the body of the gun as she flipped a switch on its butt, though as per usual, during this process she kept the whole contraption resting close to her body and stuffed into the dirt. The distinct echo of a powering-up pulse rifle would appear like a lighthouse signal to any of the regular hoard of rotten pedestrian pseudo-hunters that may be dawdling around her high-up, open-faced desert grotto. It was always a sure guarantee that at least one of those morons would snoop on some loose scrap of information that her clients would leave trailing behind (they were never as anonymous as they'd hoped) which weaker hunters tended to cling to like phlegm getting caught in a human esophagus.
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They loved to regularly, intrusively, wander onto her carefully organized battleground with a pea-sized laser pistol and a thirsting desperation to get their skull removed by one of her frighteningly destructive rifle shots. A lot of them knew better, the minority of heads that she had missed among the hunter population, but the rest would be quickly transformed into colorful splatters in the sand. She was like a painter, she joked to herself. She was a very skilled painter.
"So you say you've never actually been inside a Shoebox?" interjected Chlorophi, cutting through Enevelen's malignant thoughts. The sudden appearance of the question caused her to flinch. The plant had been staring silently at her for the past ten minutes, she realized.
"I... have not, no."
Chlo rolled their clunky welded body towards her, leaning their head into their stilted hands like a child at a slumber party. "I'm not sure I totally understand what happens inside those. Does your consciousness just completely dissipate into the larger whole, or is it something you can kinda separate yourself from at will, wherein it doesn't take too much of a conscious effort to mentally sit outside it, as yourself, while still inside the virtual space...?"
The plant attempted to illustrate their description with vague hand gestures, a box within a box, a ball with a hand sitting outside it. Enevelen was not able to visualize what was being communicated with the imagery.
She was tempted briefly to scold Chlo for inciting the conversation, but the urge was quickly relieved from observing the plant's curious and very human demeanor. The Shoeboxes would likely be a very confusing topic to their species, so it made sense to try and explain it, Enny reasoned. It likely wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience.
"I think it's different for each one... Bigger cities like Cleveland I know are fairly territorial, they've forcefully absorbed other smaller ones into themselves like prey. They feast to become stronger. The smaller ones, the towns, are seemingly more self-aware, and are easier to communicate with, so I assume you could exist within their digital space while maintaining your identity if so desired."
Chlo nodded in understanding, interlocked hands raised close to their chest like an excited child. "Oh! So they're like animals, but their intelligence and predatory behavior are dependent on population density..."
Enny nodded, satisfied that her explanation was sufficient.
"Yes, that's an apt comparison. The larger ones are incredibly self-absorbed (ha) to the point of becoming totally predatory and one-dimensional in their behavior. At least with the smaller ones I've been able to hold actual conversations, and they're not immediately desperate to devour my consciousness. The Cody Shoebox in what used to be Wyoming was an example of one that I actually ended up taking a handful of commissions from at one point, and they seemed very aware of themselves... very polite."
"How so?" asked Chlorophi.
Enevelen swung her scope back over to the goofy-looking crate floating across the desert. From the expected trajectory, she trained her view horizontally across the landscape to spy between the dunes. Interference would be likely, she knew, with a target this obvious, so she had eagerly prepped herself for an exciting little shoot out with whoever would be dumb enough to try to wander into view. She noted a party of dying bushes and a few decaying mountains among the dunes, but nothing she saw appeared remotely blood-hungry from a quick glance.
Far in the distance however, hiding from behind the bend of a melting sandy cliff's gaping maw, she caught a subtle glint of the sun that was quickly hidden from view. A flash of metal among the sand, she observed excitedly, hyper-zooming her scope onto the location with a gleeful expression of bloodlust.
Sure enough, behind the cliff face squatted what looked to be three humanoid figures, laughably assuming that they were hidden from view behind a thin betrayal of flat, jagged rock. They were crouched in the shadow of the cliff, clutching rather large and tough-looking assault weapons that were much too big for their frail, featureless bodies. They had been decked out in makeshift kevlar-imitation armor, the kind obviously designed for a real, non-augmented human, as if they were playing soldier in a war two centuries out of date.
Enny could tell right away who these clowns were... mannequin androids built and deployed by whatever cocky nearby Shoebox had decided to involve itself in her hit. As a hilarious unintended result of their decision to abandon their human bodies for eternal life as a digital blob, doing any sort of activity that demanded physical interaction in the real world like running maintenance on their Shoebox from the outside, or interacting with any of the disgruntled cyborgs not via digital communication, unfortunately put them in a very awkward position. Their collective non-physical consciousness interacting with the world outside their dinky little boxes required either paying a hunter to operate as proxy for their bidding, or spitting out some cheaply printed android bodies to waddle around in themselves. In doing this, they often had to retrain themselves on basic humanoid behaviors like walk, speak, think, and so on. To Enevelen, it was always pathetic and hilarious to see these cocky bastards attempt to wander back into the world they abandoned, thinking they still had any right or capacity to interact with the fungus-like monstrosity that their society had grown into while they had been away.
She trained her scope over one of their heads, loading the chamber of her rifle. Their vintage imitations of pre-Shoebox armor would offer them no protection from her shots, and she would eagerly make mincemeat of them. This was a personal grudge.
"Did you find something interesting, Enny?" whispered Chlo. They leaned up against her like a loving pet. She did not reply.
...
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Miles away, the three mannequins inspected their weapons anxiously, and peering over the wall they had positioned themselves behind at the slowly approaching shipment. They had been separated from their city, isolated consciousnesses cobbled together from bits and pieces of multiple people's thoughts and feelings. They had been struggling terribly for the past few days to grapple with the sense of individuality these fragile, temporary bodies had given them, barely able to comprehend the weight of thoughts like "I" and "You." To them, these were frustrating concepts to understand, and even worse to try and communicate to... "each other." They had always been the same person for the past two centuries, but now they were apart from the whole, and so far it had been an incredibly painful experience. The city had sent out ramshackle consciousnesses of its own form before in these quickly-built bodies, and the same results would always occur regardless of any preparation they'd try to involve, but this time it would be different.
It was embarrassing for them to dwell on. They were so powerful in their Shoebox. They could buy any hunter, they could have them kill anyone they wanted. They could devour whole other cities, and had several times. They had grown very big and terrified every other city in their physical vicinity, motivating all the others to put up massive, over-built firewalls that they would then effortlessly crawl overtop to kill and absorb whatever screaming, terrified rival mass sat within. As soon as they'd try to step out themselves and get anything done by hand, however, which was always a last resort, they were like helpless children. Object permanence became a frightening new concept to them, though 'individually,' an impossibly long time ago, it had been something they'd understood with ease. They rediscovered vestiges of these foreign concepts, 'next to,' 'behind,' within their consciousness as muscle memory long lost to their new forms.
A frighteningly intimidating term also occasionally reappeared during these rare excursions, like an old trauma bearing its fangs from the deepest pits of their collective memories....
'Death.'
One of the mannequins laid in a heap on the ground beside them. It had been their de facto leader, having volunteered reluctantly, as none of them truly wanted to consider themselves individual from one another. It had poked its head up over the rocks to observe and estimate the arrival of the puttering shipment, when a shot rang out from an unknowable (to their limited instruments) location in the massive expanse of desert.
Its head lay in pieces along the ground, purple gunk from the inside of the machine's humanoid brain having stained the entirety of the wall behind them, as well as what little remained attached to their body. Pieces of frayed wiring and plastic decorated the space like a spilt basket of children's toys, and it was by far the most terrifying, incomprehensible image their weak, struggling minds had observed in a very long time. Unfortunately, they could not remember how to scream.
...
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"Ah, that was clean," mumbled Enevelen to herself. She looked over to Chlorophi, who had been straining with their body's limited sensors to see what Enny had hit. "Was it another hunter, Enny, or are you just firing at the bushes?" they laughed.
Enny clicked her tongue in self-satisfaction. "Just some bugs that crawled into my web." She raised a non-visible eyebrow and glanced over at her plant friend. "You squash one, and hopefully the others get the hint."
Chlo laughed at the line. "You're so cheesy, Enny."
In the distance, Enevelen watched as the shipment slowly approached its receiver's hideout. It would fly by at a breakneck speed of 2 mph, she calculated. She prepared her rifle for the exciting finish to this excursion, wondering sarcastically if she'd be able to make a dent in its freakishly thick three-inch, plastic exterior.
She popped a steaming plasma battery out of her rifle's chamber, realizing she'd embarrassingly loaded one she had already fired once on her previous job. Hopefully that wasn't a sign of her skill slipping, she joked mentally. The battery bounced across the sand and Chlo took the opportunity to try and catch it in their hands, possibly out of morbid fascination with the capsule that had just taken someone's life. It was too hot, they discovered, and they winced as the hot metal outer shell of the battery singed their iron hands.
"Oof! Yowch!" they exclaimed, cradling their hand in the armpit of their shawl. Enny shushed them, returning her attention quickly to her scope. The tension was mounting as she trained her sights on the object, metaphorical sweat beating down her visor as she leaned her body into the dirt crevasse to stabilize her aim. She quickly pulled from her satchel a second battery, this one cold to the touch, and clicked it into her rifle's open chamber. She then slid the gun's pin forwards and loaded the object into the body with an extremely satisfying *CLICK*! This was followed by the soft, but loud VRRRRR... of the rifle's mechanisms charging their next penetrating shot.
With a quick pull of her finger, she fired on the shipment, and the transporting mechanism flew back into the air from the sudden loss of weight below it. The crate exploded open onto the sand and dirt below in a massive spray of coagulated blood, coupled with several punctured human organs. Some were torn and dangled out of the top part of the container, still clutched by the floating mechanism, like a bundle of noodles and peanut butter stuck to the roof of a human mouth.
Enevelen involuntarily puked onto the ground in front of her at the sight, discolored industrial-organic slush dribbling violently out of the slits in her rebreather. She choked slightly from the blockage of oxygen, and grasped at her neck as her rifle fell to the side. The weapon left a slight burn on the dirt below it, but was quickly kicked aside by Chlo rushing to assist the collapsed Enny.
She shouted an exclamation into her clogged and disgusting face-mask, suddenly feeling more trapped in her own dysfunctional, sloppy, artificial body than she ever had before.