Image of Enevelen sitting, hunched over on a rock in an empty desert, picking at something on her chest. In the background we can faintly see a humanoid figure lying down with blood splattered away from its head, and a weapon laying next to it. [https://i.vgy.me/Tj6H8c.png]
In the middle of the Hourglass Desert, far from anything that could be conceivably called civilization, Enny sat crosslegged and hunched over herself on an exposed pile of rock. The elevation was among a small outcropping of sandstone, surrounded in all directions by expansive ripples of featureless dunes. She was seemingly alone, with the exception of the dilapidated splatter of a former cyborg laying in a heap a good distance away.
The burning, unrelenting desert sun continued to bite at her head and shoulders, her body curling unnaturally over her lower torso as she clutched her knife in a deadbolt grip. With her free hand, she tugged at the silicon polymer flesh along her chest, stretching it to obtain more immediate access to the small holes of buckshot that had decorated the front of her body. Luckily the shot hadn't been fired from too close of a range, as the cyborg she had just beheaded hadn't appeared too familiar with the distance capability or projectile spread of the lever-action shotgun he had been charging at her with. The match-up between his dinky little vintage boomstick and her current-era long-range head remover at a range of 75 yards, and running uphill from his angle as the cherry on top, was almost embarrassingly one-sided. She was honestly shocked the moron had survived as long as he had in this desert without having been picked off by small fry hunters, or any one of the thousands of scavengers that roamed the area. The weapon would've maybe been enough to scare them off to some extent, but not for long. She chalked it up to statistics, it was inevitable she supposed, that at least one or two of the thousands of pedestrians who wandered out here would've survived long enough to seek out a life-ending facial from the wrong end of her rifle.
Still, the stranger hadn't seemed all that incompetent, as he'd managed to get at least one or two shots on her from a laughable distance, a feat she found almost impressive. The worst of the damage was a large hole of frayed wiring and torn silicon near the edge of her waist, surrounded by a sprinkling of trypophobic shrapnel discharge. It stung like hell but didn't seem too life-threatening for her level of inhuman durability. More of a minor inconvenience than anything. The difficult part would be picking it out.
Small leaks and dribbles of blood-oil leaked out from the map of holes across her stomach, the frothy ooze pouring down her chest and onto her burlap pants. They were already dark in color, and engineered hydrophobic (most of her clothing was relics from an earlier era), so it did not stain. A good deal of the fluid had pooled on the rock below her, smeared around beneath her pants by the now-blackened soles of her mechanical feet. Her legs kicked and twitched violently at each other as she aggressively picked at the wounds with her knife. The buckshot had to come out, at least the larger chunks of it, or it would most likely short-circuit her internal mechanisms before she'd get the chance to see an engineer. Even then, she wouldn't be able to afford the procedure anyway. It had to be done by hand.
Enevelen's heads-up display assured her that the leaks themselves were nowhere near fatal, luckily, though she was concerned that the display might itself be unreliable. She had made a habit of dismantling and deactivating a majority of the processes in her brain that related to detecting injury and simulating bodily pain because, for the most part, they only ever served to be an unrelenting nuisance during work. They had not been designed to be switched on and off as often as she had, which left her a bit paranoid that the system was somehow getting more sensitive to minor injuries. Getting hurt was practically synonymous with the act of breathing to her, so she didn't need some stupid little voice in her head informing her every five seconds how many lacerations had decorated her lower back during a knife fight, or how close she often was to collapse from near-fatal blood loss. Having experienced many years of being shot and stabbed in the neck, back, and any other area on her body she had left occasionally unguarded, by both friend and foe alike, she did not need the machine inside her to keep tabs on her injuries. It was her default state to be in physical pain, as hilarious as that was, and she did not find the mental sensation of injury to be remotely essential. Also, due to her previous involvement in several country-wide scuffles, Enevelen had experienced enough nursing her augmentations that having a secondary sensory array running to give her pointers on how to stay alive was as tone-deaf to her as informing a serial killer that seventeen consecutive murders might lead to jail time. It was beyond redundant.
Unfortunately in this particular instance, since the shrapnel of the buckshot was incredibly small, and the wounds were of a particularly diverse spread, she was forced to keep her pain receptors turned on for this procedure to locate and identify each invasion of metal. She picked at a smaller wound with her knife, the sensation of hurt sending shock waves through her body as the polished day-glow metal scraped against the underside of her skin. She grunted in frustration, slowly worming the blood-soaked buckshot out of the hole and onto the dirt with a resonating plink, plink. The pain was excruciating, but at least once the material had been removed, her grey silicon leather-like skin would be able to repair itself on its own. Overall, her body didn't have any other capacity for self-repair beyond the outer skin, so any of the holes that had dug too deep into her mechanisms would likely have to stay untreated until her next maintenance visit. Things would inevitably break, but as long as she kept a close eye on most of her internal organs, she'd be able to manually repair a lot of them before anything started malfunctioning.
The knife itself was a bright metallic mix of pink and blues, a holographic-patterned metal that looked aesthetically pleasing compared to most other scavenged weaponry. She was not well trained in the use of knives, but she had come from a long line of military veterans obsessed with finding and hoarding the coolest-looking switchblades available, and this one that she had snagged off of a rival hunter was *particularly* beautiful. It was useless in a fight however, being that it had been designed to look good and feel good in the hand, but not much help in a physical altercation. That had been partly the reason for her acquisition of it, being that the novice carrying it had been attempting to use it in defense of her bare-handedly crushing his larynx. He hadn't stood a chance, but his knife was incredibly cool, so of course she had chosen to carry it with her as a memento of his stupidity. She wondered briefly in-between flashes of white-hot pain, if glorifying weaponry like this was at all disturbing to others. She had long since lost any sort of measured judgment for whether or not any of her interests or behaviors would be considered frightening or unhinged, and in all honesty, she didn't care.
...
After another thirty minutes of popping shrapnel out of her body, she took a sigh of relief and wiped the blood from the knife by sliding it along the hip of her pants, like one would with fingers stained with barbecue sauce. Flipping it back into itself, Enevelen returned it to a holster on her side, before lifting herself onto her feet and taking a long stretch into the air. Noting the distant body, now buzzing with gnats, laying splayed out a good distance away, she collected her rifle and its adjacent bag from behind her seat and slung it over her shoulder. Enny wandered over to what remained of the stranger, his blood and the seasoning of plastic-organic bits trailing out from the stump between his shoulders. He was a short thing, possibly young, not unlike her rival hunter Cord-Eel. It was the most likely demographic to attempt charging her with a shotgun from a great distance. She felt a slight tinge of guilt staring down at what was once a man filled with youthful vigor, but knew that most of the creeps that had tried getting into the business at this age were at an immediate disadvantage to seasoned hunters like herself. If he hadn't understood that at this point in his life, this gruesome fate was likely always how he was going to end up. The kid was doomed from birth.
Still, she thought, poking at his leg with her rifle... the balls on this guy to go at her with such an old weapon. Where had he obtained it, she wondered. Maybe a family heirloom? A treasured item of the scavengers that he'd nicked during their sleep? It wasn't often she encountered a twenty-first century weapon (possibly older) in full working condition out in the desert like this. Perhaps it had been a result of desperation, the only working weapon in his home. That painted a bleak picture... perhaps his family had fallen on hard times (which was somewhat the norm at this point) and the boy had taken on a nearby job with the cowboy optimism typical of the Peacemaker-born generation. Maybe he had gotten lost on his way to the job and had been wandering the dunes for days, even weeks. He was not the type built to last in such an environment, a lot of his body was made up of white plastic piping that was moreso designed for liquid and biological nutrient storage than any sort of heat durability. Absent was any real defensive plating or agile mechanics. If Enny hadn't killed him, the sun surely would've, possibly within a matter of hours. If anything, she had saved him from a much more painful, agonizing demise. Part of her resented him for having gone out into this inhospitable battleground of a biome, knowing the danger and prominence of so many skilled hunters that were working various jobs in the area. Even more so, she found it infuriatingly stupid that such an undefended novice would charge a hunter, assuming it would end any other way than his total obliteration. One more statistic for the desert to notch into its sand, she supposed. It was unfair for such a young cyborg to get this far out into this territory and not have much to show for it. Their society was brutal, but it was predictable.
She'd bury him in a sand grave, she decided. He deserved that much, and she had already obtained her bounty that week so it wasn't really necessary to go through the effort of selling his remnants to scavengers on the coast.
That being said, she was very curious about what bounty he had been pursuing... what was his destination, with such ambition? From the pocket of his torn, blood-stained satchel, she retrieved his PDA. It was cheap, and running very low on battery, so it wouldn't likely be much use to her. Still, she flicked through its digital contents.
"Day 38, still no sign of the monument. I'm going to die out here unless I can find someone to rob materials off of."
He must've meant the ruined obelisk, a large white stone that had previously stood a few hundred miles back, she surmised. It had collapsed weeks ago, due to strong winds and an eroded foundation. The moron had been traveling without satellite assistance, relying exclusively on waypoints and outdated information. No wonder he was so far off track, and in such a terrible shape. She didn't feel like reading the rest of the logs, she could already guess how unpleasant the lead-up to their encounter had been.
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Also among the PDA's contents was a directive log on the boy's current job, meaning she had been correct to assume he had been an aspiring bounty hunter. It was a commission from a Shoebox, seemingly. Colorado Springs, it looked to be. Enny had always wondered if Denver had swallowed it up already, but it didn't seem so from that information. Denver was known to be incredibly predatory when it came to other Shoeboxes, and even high-ranking hunters would steer clear of their caverns.
That being said, did that mean Colorado Springs was somewhere nearby? Shoeboxes were often concealed in very isolated and secretive spaces, far away from both battleground territories of the desert, as well as populations of cyborgs. They often hid in caves.
Maybe she'd follow his tracks, Enny schemed, to see what job the city had given him. Nothing wrong with picking up a little extra work on her way back to town.
...
For several days, Enevelen wandered along the upper rim of a dune, her footfalls sinking several inches into the peak like fresh-fallen snow. She could probably swim in it if so desired. The sand was warm, and soft to the touch, like wading atop a pillowy mound of cotton. It was a wonderful feeling for her bare feet, never the threat of stepping on anything sharp or coarse like that of the concrete ruins that make up the bedrock of most towns she encountered.
She liked the in-between space of the Hourglass Desert, and despite its reputation for bloodshed and dangerous groups, she felt comfortable here. It was like walking on a cloud, even, though one with a hard surface of rock packed somewhere underneath the sand. She never worried about falling through, as the dunes were packed so tightly that they might as well be ground. Their shape was otherworldly for sure, and she didn't know much about their formation. It was something involving the tides and winds of the oceans she supposed, which had grown deeper inland than she had once known them to be. The continent in the past two centuries had for sure been both scorched and completely flooded... but the scenery this process had left behind, though barren, was rather beautiful. It almost made her briefly forget her animosity for the species that had left the whole world to erode itself away, into this inhospitable space.
Still, maybe that frustration was why she appreciated it, deep down. An environment free of humans like this was undoubtedly beautiful. In a way, she was grateful for their migration, to allow her these moments to be alone with the world like this. It was an intimacy that had mostly been unachievable in the years preceding the development of the Shoeboxes.
Soon enough, Enny had found what she had been expecting. Having passed the fallen monument a few days back, she'd discovered an open-mouthed sandy cavern hiding away behind a particularly large set of dunes. It sat precariously between the hills, looking almost as if it could be swallowed at any moment. Enny knew that ironically, this was exactly the type of space their kind would want to hide themselves away in. It was a space isolated from anyone else, and in the worst-case scenario, they would be able to bury themselves for all eternity, never to be found or encountered by another living creature for thousands, if not millions of years. That time frame would be a blink of an eye to their virtual consciousness, and ideal for waiting out this terrible environmental crisis that they had created.
Enny wandered into the cavern, being careful not to trigger the sloppily-concealed proximity sensors near the entrance. Colorado Springs had grown unaware that to most modern augmentations, these sensors were incredibly easy to spot and avoid. Even if they had installed nearly a dozen along the dark, echoing footpath, they would be worthless to a hunter with even the cheapest of stealth technology installed.
Enny stepped with little effort over and around the laughable web of infrared beams, taking a quick rest against the wall of the cavern after clearing a majority of them. She had been wandering on foot for weeks at this point, and while her cyborg body was barely breaking a sweat, her mind was tired from the exhausting mental toll of staring at yellow dunes, blue sky, and blaring sunlight for so many unending hours. The nights had been cool and refreshing for sure, but the dark, wet interior of the cavern was honestly a wonderful sight. Barely any light, and even less as she wandered deeper in, it was a relief just allowing her eyes the chance to adjust to the difference. As much as she did enjoy the warm outdoors, she still found it incredibly relaxing, just to have this brief moment in the pitch-black hole.
Sure enough, there at the end of the cave sat a small box, not much larger in size and very similar in appearance to a portable power generator. Its little blinking lights on the sides and top were flickering rapidly, and the octopus of wiring splayed out from its base seemed mostly undisturbed. It had likely only encountered a handful of physical beings in the several decades since its development and none of such a massive threat to its existence as Enevelen.
She glanced around the hole, observing the variety of machinery that had been built into the dirt walls around it. These devices likely stretched on for a handful of yards into the earth, she supposed, as a device as advanced as this likely required as much processing power and storage capacity as it possibly could. However, she knew from her studies into the technology that a Shoebox could operate without any external support (that being that it could exist on its own, the tiny little box floating free in orbit of the earth) for an estimated two-million years, or possibly longer. They were built to last, though you wouldn't think it from observing the cheap, comically simplistic look of the little plastic block sitting in front of her. Was this really the most advanced piece of modern technology her species had ever developed? It was almost pathetic to see in person, it looked so fragile... Though, she knew that giving it even a slight kick would likely stub her toe. The thing was outfitted with such high-density metal that it would likely weigh more than the entirety of the fallen stone monument she'd passed on her way here. She resented it for being so durable, it felt like a mockery of her form, which had been so expensive to maintain. She wanted to smash the Shoebox to pieces out of spite, but that was not what she was here to do.
Glancing over at the dozen or so mannequins that sat posed in charging bays surrounding the room, she tip-toed overtop the wiring surrounding the box, careful not to let her rifle's bag bump any of the mechanisms on her way across the space. The statues' blank faces were lit from below by the boxes' blindingly colorful pseudo-LEDs, looking like a crowd of mummies hanging along the length of a wide cupboard.
"You guys are always so creepy," Enny mumbled to herself, cupping the chin of one of the slumped-over mannequins in her segmented fingers. With her hand, she directed it towards her visor as if to simulate eye contact. "You always looked like crash-test dummies to me, freaky as hell."
Retrieving a wire from the back of her head, she popped the external plug into the side of the mannequin's neck. The faceless creature flinched in surprise, its hands jumping up towards Enny's throat, before freezing in place, and then falling back down to their sides. Enny moved her head side to side to confirm the mental sync and the mannequin's head mimicked the motion. She raised a hand to her visor, and the being did the same towards its featureless face. This was an interesting phenomenon that occurred when transmitting one's consciousness through another body, the two always moved with the same muscles and speed as if in a hypnotic trance.
"Ah, you have snuck up on us. What are your intentions?"
The voice was soft and feminine, hovering in Enevelen's mind like a daydream. It was pleasant but very strange. The sound was obviously mechanical and sounded very similar to hers. It had strange pitch modulation but was also more natural and friendlier than she had been expecting.
"Were you the one that sent out that kid to pursue a hit? I found his body in the desert, he was miles offtrack."
She heard laughter from the voice in her head.
"You are lying, we can tell. Looks like you ended up killing him in self-defense, hmm? He was quite inexperienced anyway. We are not surprised."
Enny leaned against the wall, next to the mannequins, and the one she had wired herself into imitated the motion. She wondered if her body resembled them to any extent.
"We are reading your thoughts, honey. You underestimate our capabilities. It is true, you are just another mannequin to us," the voice explained, a coy confidence rolling off its virtual tongue. "He had come to us looking for work, as many of them do. We'd given him money to kill some of the proxy drones that had been sent by Denver to collect a roaming shipment. Do you know of it?"
Enny responded in the affirmative with a brief thought. She decided to keep her wandering mind silent for the time being.
"Ah, you killed them already, it seems. Do you know what happened to the shipment? We never received it..."
Enny remembered the floating white box that... had been destroyed during the event. She watched her thoughts carefully at this moment.
"Oh dear, that is a shame... Not that you'd care, but that was meant to be a gift to one of our nearby friends... a celebration of peace and friendship for the past few decades between us. We were very worried Denver had had it destroyed, but that would have been a bit confusing considering their drones had also been destroyed. We were unsure of what had truly occurred."
"I took out the drones, yeah," she blurted out. Talking aloud was more practical and natural to her than trying to think out her responses.
"We appreciate that. As annoying as it is to have to order another shipment, we might as well compensate you for your assistance. Here."
Enny noted within her visor that several thousand credits had appeared in her account. Excellent. "Did you happen to see who might have... well, never mind that. It's none of your business."
Enny thanked the being for the money, before preparing to unplug herself.
"Do you have contact information we can have in case we want to hire you for a job? You seem reasonably skilled at tracking and difficult assassinations..."
Enevelen mentally spelled out her network address, before the two said their goodbyes. The voice mumbled one last phrase before Enny pulled the plug from the Mannequin mounted on the wall.
"Hey, if you ever get tired of this life... we always have space inside for..."
She yanked the chord from the machine, cringing at the offer.
Enny could never stand that part. They always offered her the possibility of assimilation into their mass, the thought of it making her gag. Did they think she didn't like her body? It was not their place to ask. Their attitude was disgusting.
They thought they were being generous, but who would she be once she entered their space? Would she retain her thoughts, her identity? Would they gobble it all up, pressuring her into their mass? She liked having a body. She resented them for even offering. Ugh.
Walking back down the length of the dark cavern, she grumbled to herself as she strapped her rifle back over her shoulder. A thought came into her mind of the boy's disgusting, sun-cooked remains. She wondered if he'd been better off joining the Shoebox than taking its commission. He had been under-trained and under-prepared for the mission. She wondered if the Shoebox had even offered to take him in. Why her? Did it read her thoughts as unsatisfied with her job and physical existence? Did she not seem content with living her life in her cyborg body? Did she look like she even wanted to associate with the remnant consciousness that had abandoned her planet for life in a conglomerate mass, floating in a virtual box? Rampant, frustrating questions peppered her mind.
As she exited the mouth of the cave, the sun blaring into her eyes yet again, she looked back at the awning and debated kicking the sand walls down to seal the cavern. She could trap it forever, she thought to herself. It would be years before they'd even notice.
After staring for a while, she marched away in a silent rage. She hated the Shoeboxes. They were the true killers of that young boy, she affirmed to herself, and she'd never forgive them for that.