“I still have more questions.”
“Ask and ye shall receive,” the twins mused, both of them flitting to and fro around what looked like a modified casement maintenance bay, fitted with additional tools, some of which were… Surgical in nature. He even saw a staple-gun on one of the robotic arms, but much to his relief it was a rather mundane specimen, its staples much too small to be of the neuroactive variety. Next to it, there was a long counter against the wall, covered with meticulously organized instruments, PDAs, and other devices - he even saw a few pieces of obvious blacktech, just laid out in plain sight.
“Why me instead of the new Sixth?” he asked, doing his best to appear less impressed tham he was. “His tolerance to void energy is surely far greater than mine.”
“His work here is much too important. With the Fifth gone, he is the only who can counter the First and Fourth without arousing suspicion. Stand here and unlock your suit,” the First Twin gestured while the Second Twin continued to tinker with the machine’s terminal in silence. The First Twin, meanwhile, retrieved a pair of medical supply cases from a hidden lockbox, placing them atop the counter and opening each in turn.
Seventh stood amidst the myriad robotic arms of the Twins’ strange machine, and moments later, a number of the arms equipped with manipulators stirred into movement, swiftly dismantling his exoskeleton around him and stowing it away, piece by piece. The process took several minutes - far faster than most exoskeleton maintenance bays could achieve for a full disassembly.
Then, came the needles, from out of sight, sinking into his back like traitorous daggers. The only thing to prepare him was “This will sting a bit, do not move.” from the Second Twin while the First looked through the unseen contents of the two medical cases, occasionally glimpsing at a nearby PDA.
A liquid began to pour into his back, and there came a spreading warmth, soon followed by utter numbness. “Is your pain gone?” the Second Twin questioned clinically, only to stop themselves with “Right, no persistent physical defects. Do you feel a numbness spreading?”
Seventh gave a nod. “Good,” the Second Twin said.
“We hope the numbing agent will suffice,” the First Twin added as she picked out four metallic canisters, labeled with blocky, easily readable letters - two said “BIOGEL” in orange, while the other two said “BIOTAR” in black. She tapped the wall which opened up to reveal eight slots, and filled half with the canisters.
A pair of handles rose from beneath, the twins prompting him to “Grab on and stay still.”
Then came the clacking of more arms from behind. There was the quiet whirr of servos, soon to be drowned out by the screech of surgical drills and the feeling of four at once burrowing into his back. One into the skull, three into the back, one of which went into the spine. Slowly, ever so slowly, they drilled into Seventh’s incredibly resilient bones, blood and fragments falling to his feet and being drained away by a pair of arms with suction hoses.
He felt no pain, and still he found the process difficult to bear, if only from the sound that reverberated through his skull. He couldn’t move even slightly, and so with a bit of focus, he spoke through clenched teeth, not moving so much as a muscle.
“What next?” he asked.
The First Twin ignored him, completely focused on operating the terminal, though the Second Twin gave him her full attention after a brief period of surprise. “Spine reinforcement, power source implants, communications implants, pain management implants. The Legion System will make you and your walker as one.”
“Pain management implants are heresy.”
“So is everything in this lab, and many of the Legion System’s vital components.”
“How so? Voidtech on its own is not considered heretical.”
“We had to create several new pieces of voidtech, most of which outperform the human-made artefacts they were based on.”
“...What? Did… Did you build that walker from scratch as well?”
“We just repaired a wrecked one salvaged from the tech-mines, but many of the features were our own additions.”
“There have been no complete walkers found in the tech-mines. No more than pieces.”
“Who manages the tech-mines?”
“You do. Are you…”
“Lying to the others, yes. The ruins stretch far beyond the area known to the others as the tech-mines.”
“Did the Fifth know?”
“Of course not. Had he known, the secret would have been broken years ago. It would not have helped him understand human technology anyway.”
“Why?”
“The root thesis of his research was misguided. He treated human technology as a unified theory, when in reality it is a disparate web of many fields. The most important lesson to learn is how many anti-tampering and safety measures their technology has.”
“Anti-tampering? Why, to prevent the unworthy from wielding their artefacts, as you are changing me to do at this very moment?”
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“Ah… Not quite so. For example, a gene-lock on a heirloom weapon could be considered an anti-tampering measure.”
“Seals to keep out the unworthy, then.”
“Call them what you wish, if that helps you maintain your faith. Here comes the first implant.”
His spinal cord was severed and reconnected by the implant, yet his body didn’t go limp - his nervous system had multiple channels that could stand-in for the main spinal cord, a rare and valued mutation that could not be passed down naturally. Seventh felt pressure in the back of his head, and then his vision started fading. The last things he heard before losing consciousness was a slew of profanities from the First Twin’s mouth, followed by “It fuckin’ severed his brainstem! I told you we should’ve calibrated the servos thrice!”
“Control your speech, you’re starting to sound like a Karuta again. He will wake up on his own. I give it five minutes.”
“I bet it takes at least ten.”
“A hundred chits?”
“Make it a thousand. We’re not some lowly Karutas.”
“Deal. Now inject the biotar before his brainwaves flatline.”
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Nesgon and Ouroboros retreated to the truly highest point of Canyontown, the flat top of the mountain, taking along a ten-bottle case of stimmix. For a while they just sat, listening to the wind, looking out over the desert and drinking stimmix. Even all the way up here, the old man would occasionally need to answer radio calls from below.
“The rescue convoy left about an hour before you returned from the underground. Some rovers, two of the smaller walkers, Acala in the lead,” Nesgon eventually said.
Ouroboros raised a half-empty bottle of pink stimmix to his mouth and downed a sip. It was still just as good as the bottle that Exile-town’s barkeep gave him. It still reminded him of that place. Of the devastation that he saw in his mindscape.
“A couple months from now, only the spire of glass will remain,” he thought as he drank, turning his gaze down toward the field of scrapped rovers before the gate. There, to the gate’s left, Amalgam still stood, resembling a statue more than a walker, its self-repair casement covered in elaborate, swirling patterns of purple paint.
“Have them bring Amalgam into the ship once everything else is dealt with.”
“They would do it even if I didn’t tell them to,” the old man responded, taking a swig of his drink. “They believe it’ll break out of the shell and go off on its own if you ever need help.”
Armless chuckled. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that did happen.”
Thus the two dragons sat atop the mountain, drinking.
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In series of six, Asura and Shell woke the statues.
In series of six, the statues fell to their knees in a meaningless gesture of loyalty.
They required a self-repair period of over an hour after the first six, yet it grew shorter with each group of statues awoken.
“It burns less every time we do it.”
“Void energy pathways are difficult to build from scratch. Building them atop burnout is fastest, but implausible without significant self-repair capabilities.”
“Yours.”
“Yes."
“What next? I don’t see any statues still standing.”
“The walls of this place are filled with yet more hollow soldiers, waiting for a will to guide them. For now, however, we delve deeper, into the heart of this edifice, so that we may see through its eyes. Walk.”
And so Shell walked, back through the long hall and out through the holoshroud. When he briefly looked back, he saw no more than rubble past the door. He walked and walked, towards the crossroads and down the other path’s winding corridors. He was met with a rectangular chamber, in the corner a builder-caste skeleton inside a solid black shell in the shape of a jumpsuit. There was a variety of excavation tools by its side, yet the walls remained pristine. While Shell looked about, he felt the now-familiar heat building in his body.
“How long have they been here?”
“We have no way of knowing. It could have be anywhere from days to months. Touch the wall opposite the entryway.”
Shell did as ordered. There came the rushing of heat, the arcing of lightning, the flashing of light, and the door opened as the one before it had. Just as the one before it, its precipice was obscured by a holoshroud, this one projecting a solid wall. Shell knew it not to be a holoshroud, yet he stepped through it anyways, and was proven correct when his sight was filled with the image of a great chamber.
It was empty to the naked eye, yet its walls and floor were etched with an inconsistent pattern, the silhouettes of a hundred different things. The heat building again, one of Asura’s arms stretched out and pointed towards the other side of the room, whose wall bore the largest silhouette among them.
Without the need for a command, Shell walked towards it and placed his hand upon it. Rushing heat, arcing lightning, flashing light.
The segment of black-stone within the outline lit up in hieroglyphs, the panel sliding out of the way to give access to a small alcove within, containing a three-part console with an array of lilac crystals embedded within the wall. Asura took the initiative this time, wordlessly taking to operating the console, pressing buttons and moving levers. One of its hands found its way to what looked to be a handprint scanner, and the machine came alive.
The lilac crystals flickered, and suddenly, the two of them found themselves floating atop the pyramid, looking out over the wastes - yet there was no wind, they still felt that they were surrounded by stone, and Asura’s distended limbs still feverishly typed away at the terminal, whose edges blurred where the spherical hologram ended.
“It still works. Outstanding.”
“What is this?”
“Find out yourself. You must learn to operate human technology without my help. Ask the risk question, and the machine will answer,” Asura prompted, removing its lower two arms from the keyboard in front of Shell.
He knew not what the symbols on the keys were, yet he understood them, and so took to typing.
“Query: What is the designation and purpose of this structure?”
There was a delay. He felt something flow into Asura’s mind and from Asura’s into his, and only then did the answer flash before his mind’s eye.
Tactical Reconaissance Outpost “Panopticon”
“First try. I haven’t damaged your nervous system as much as I thought.”
“You expected me to fail.”
“But you didn’t. Now look, towards the glass spire.”
Asura pointed, and Shell looked. The hologram shifted, and suddenly, he stood at the edge of a ruined settlement, Igron-marked exoskeletons and skeletal remains littering the ground amidst burned-out shells of printed buildings. In the center, there towered a great spire of glass, far into the heavens, and within its base, there raged a man-shaped fire. The final tombstone of a fire-born elder.
“Was this not the location of an exile settlement?”
“It was, once. You know why this place is this way. The slaughter that took place here was the very thing that galvanized those who live amidst the split-peak mountain, gave them the strength to defeat my pain-maddened self.”
“We’ve sent death unto the homes of friends to the Serpent of the South, now he and his shall choke the blessings from our inbred bones and swallow our empire of dirt whole…” shell thought as the realization of his atrocious history truly sank in.