You spend a long time waiting. Since you've decided not to go about any major changes to your body without your pilot, there's nothing much else you can do. You allow most of your systems to hibernate, much like how your pilot is sleeping. It keeps their power draw at a minimum.

Whatever sort of fuel you run off of, it must contain a lot of power generation potential, because so far, you've hardly burned a fraction of a percent of your fuel. But, it isn't limitless. With your tank currently at about twenty three percent, you will need to find more fuel eventually.

Remembering that there was a refueling section available from the repair bay, you decide to do use that once your pilot wakes up.

One by one, the other ray frames are disassembled and carted away to be stored somewhere. Eventually, each of them has been taken apart completely, and you are the only one left. The arms retract on all the repair bays, their operations all finished for now

Time passes. The night is quiet and still. The only sounds are the crumbling of stone, trailing ever so slowly down from the cracks in the ceiling overhead, one tiny speck of sand at a time. Enough to form small stalagmites on the concrete floor over spans longer even than you've been lying dormant here.

Your system time reads August 22, 06:32 when you first detect a change in your pilot's breathing, and he slowly begins to rise in his seat.

Having long since made your decision, you put a message up onscreen.

Recommendations:

Replace missing cockpit hatch with Ibex or Ocelot hatch.

Replace Ironside left arm with Fire Dog left arm.

Replace Ibex right arm with Zera right arm.

Your pilot is slowly rubbing his eyes, yawning and stretching. When he finally opens his eyes enough to look around, he goes stiff with surprise. He spends some time eyeing the inside of the cockpit, before he relaxes.

“Right, that all... really happened...” he sighs, face falling. A few tears run down his cheeks, before he hastily wipes them away and shakes himself. “No, have to keep going...” he mumbles, and properly looks around again.

You still have all of his options displayed along the far-side monitors, with your suggestions closer to the center. “Right, yeah, fixing this thing,” he says to himself, and starts tapping through the repair bay's menu.

He quickly selects to pull off your current arms. You send off the message to the repair bay. While it gets to work unhooking everything, you clear those suggestions, leaving only the choice of hatches.

“Ibex or Ocelot...” he wonders, continuing to go over the info he has arrayed onscreen. “Still can't get the Ocelot, but the Ibex parts suck,” he laments, craning your head to look at the Ibex's wrist blade, which snapped off after just a few punches in that last battle. “Let's go for the Ocelot,” he decides.

But that will have to wait until you have working arms.

Once your pilot has decided on that, you clear the suggestion for the hatch. He squints oddly at the blank screen for a few moments, before you display another message.

Hatred for Hex detected. Do you wish to designate Hex as an enemy?

You give him 'yes' and 'no' options. Despite his squint growing into open concern, he presses 'yes' anyway. You clear the screen.

It's a creative idea, proposed entirely unprompted from among your subprocessors. A possible way to discover more about the enemy your pilot mentioned, without being overly obvious that you are fishing for information.

You ask your follow up question.

What are Hex? Describe to aid identification.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Your pilot's eyes lock onto the question briefly, before he says, “Uhh... how?” He blinks at the screen, then pokes it. It takes a moment to understand his line of thinking. So far, he's only interacted with you by poking the screens inside your cockpit. To make things a little easier, you add another part onto the end of your message.

Speak to answer.

Your pilot recoils slightly, blinking even faster than before. “This thing can understand speech?” Another momentary delay, then, “Uh, the hex are robots. But like, they move on their own. Which is obvious...” He raises a hand to his face and groans.

“God, that's a terrible explanation. Let's try this.” He clearly thinks it over first this time, before giving a much more coherent answer. “The hex are robots, controlled by artificial intelligence. They can be regular work robots, drones, or huge ray frames.”

He pauses to consider the second part, then shrugs. “They can move on their own, but with piloted machines I guess you couldn't really tell, so... Really, the best way to identify them is that they'll try to kill and destroy everything on sight.”

“The hex a curse. Spreading, corrupting, and destroying everything.”

He finishes his description there. You spend some time processing it all. You note that, importantly, he uses hex in two different ways. It can either refer to the dangerous robots, or the 'curse' itself.

Response Logged. Improving identification of hex.

Thanks to his description, you should be able to identify them now. Of course 'robots that move on their own' is a pretty straightforward descriptor, so it's not a high bar of difficulty to achieve in the first place.

Just as important, his description calls into question just what you are. Are you one of these hex because you are an AI? Is the ability to move autonomously vital to the classification? What about the violence? Whether you could move or not, you're clearly not immediately violent toward everything around you.

So then, what is the difference? Why are the hex your pilot hates so similar to you, yet distinctly different?

There are no answers to be found of course. You are merely occupying time until the repair bay finishes its work. When it does, your pilot taps through the instructions to attach the two desired arms to your presently armless torso.

There's another wait for the next process to complete. As you discover as their systems come online, the Fire Dog arm is a bit larger, but not significantly heavier. Probably designed for a somewhat lower weight ten meter frame.

Everything connects easily enough, and you run through the necessary system checks before charging up the motors to get the arms to move well. Then, your pilot sighs loudly and takes up the controls.

“Alright, let's get that Ocelot,” he says, and commands you forward, walking to where the Ocelot's storage area is mostly inaccessible behind the repair bay you've been using.

You lean into the narrow gap. With your arms sized significantly down again, squeezing in could be doable. But your pilot doesn't do that yet. He looks around the cockpit, like he's searching for something.

“Where-” he starts, but cuts off, just as he's looking to his far left. He reaches out and touches the blank screen there with the palm of his hand. You have no idea what the gesture is meant to indicate though.

“I thought it was here,” he says this time. It's not the best hint, but it's something. Checking back, that monitor was where you displayed his options for left arms. You display that graphic again.

He immediately perks up. “Ah, yeah, there we go...” He taps on the section of the table showing the Fire Dog arm's information, and this time you take a guess and respond by removing the others, leaving only the Fire Dog's info.

“Here it is,” he notes, pressing his finger to the screen once more, but holding it here this time. He's touching directly where it lists the grapple line. “I knew I saw something like this in here. But how do I use it...?”

He draws back, beginning to consider, while you check and make sure you have working access to the module's systems. Once you're sure everything is in order, you display another message.

Grapple Line Activated

With that, you tell the system to turn on and prepare to fire. It does so by extending out from where it's attached to the underside of your forearm, just like how the small phaser worked a while back.

He holds your hand up to inspect, and you overlay a simplistic box around the grapple line, labeling it for him to see. “So now, let's just...” He extends your arm, aiming at the Ocelot, and hits the trigger.

Normally, that trigger would fire the rocket launcher built into the same arm, but you have no ammo for it. You tell Pilot Assist to use the grapple instead, and it does so. It fires the short distance between, latching tightly against the shoulder of the frame.

You start to pull. The line goes taut, trembling and straining. When you check, the system is reporting that it's pretty close to its maximum load limit. It does get the job done though, the Ocelot slowly sliding across the floor toward you.

Why is the grapple line so weak? Checking through the information you loaded, you find what you're looking for. Apparently, it's rated for towing various smaller objects, or moving things at a distance, with the maximum it will support being the lightest of ray frames. Like, a partially disassembled nine-meter frame, for instance.

What you would need for more than that would be a combat grapple. Those are rated for hauling frames at speed. You recall that there is one of those listed among the various parts available, but oddly enough, it's mounted on the arm of the Ocelot itself.

For now, you display the load on the line for your pilot to see, so he keeps being gentle and doesn't yank on the line, which would almost certainly break it.

He gets the Ocelot right up to the gap, hesitates, then taps one of the buttons on his controls. It's actually the right one this time, releasing the grapple so it retracts back into the launcher.

Then, with a little effort and wiggling, he manages to pull the Ocelot frame through the gap. You hand it over to the repair bay, and your pilot promptly orders for it to be disassembled too. From there, he searches through the options in the menu, until he finds a way to take apart the subsystems installed into the frame's individual parts, and does so for the cockpit's hatch.

Once again, you're left waiting for the process to complete.