After the battle, it was labor. Stabilize the wounded. Strip the dead of their possessions. Mostly weapons and ammunition. Armless had expected more casualties than there were - they found only forty-three dead bodies, of which five were defenders. One trait was consistent among all the dead - they were of the warrior caste, and their wounds were one of two types. Extremely severe and numerous, or inflicted by a blacktech weapon. Some corpses had singular gaping holes half a foot across, the flesh and bone within twisted and contorted, charred to nothing. The nervous system violently turned to rapidly-decaying lilac crystal, patterns of burnt-away flesh where they once had tattoos. Others were just bags of scaly skin filled with metal dust and shredded organic slurry, covered in holes made from the inside out. Much of their liquefied insides poured forth and saturated the soil, giving rise to a powerful copper smell.
Among those still living, many were walking sieves. Their bodies were riddled with small bullet holes, covered in severe burns, gashes and bite marks. One in every six men was missing a limb, yet the stump neither bled, nor scabbed over. Even the Word-bearer dealt with his wounds in an astonishingly short period of time. In only two and a half hours he was walking around, albeit slowly. He learned to not exert himself after the third time he covered someone in a spray of blood from trying to lift something.
All said and done, the wounded were gathered in the town bar, given food and drink the same as everyone else. The elder and several builder-caste females served some sort of small boiled onions, immensely savory and oozing with thick, meaty juices. They tasted faintly of copper.
The drink was to celebrate victory, yes, but also to aid the wounded in recovery. The elder broke into his personal stash of what he called "the good stuff". Even cut with three parts water to one part stimulant mixture, Armless felt a solid kick. The others reacted much more visibly still, chuffing and hissing with each sip, steam visibly rising from their wounds. The defectors were cared for and allowed to drink alongside the townsfolk just the same, and while the Word-bearer was sequestered, he wasn't denied drink or medical care either.
The walker was left standing outside the gate as it towered over every building in town, let alone the walls. The fabric which previously covered it had been ripped to shreds and burned by stray bullets and energy blasts from the battle. Despite the overwhelmingly positive, celebratory atmosphere that filled the town bar that night, Armless couldn't help but think of the machine. There was something in the transmission logs, a digital echo. Alas, this wasn't the time to dwell on such things. This was a time to celebrate, to eat and drink. And celebrate he did. The skull-faced gunslinger found himself a nice corner at the back of the bar, set down his left arm on the table, and started drinking. He drained bottle after bottle of saccharine, pink stimmix, crushed meat-onion after meat-onion with both his teeth and the biomass grinder at the back of his mouth.
The dissonant noise of a full bar, the feeling of his insides ever so slowly twisting back into an unknown, original shape. Like a great serpent, untangling itself after a long sleep. Another bulb. Crunch. Swallow. A thought crossed his mind as his body analyzed what the bulbs contained. “All three components of umami. Still tastes like overpriced meat substitute," he thought. He flushed it with more stimmix. He knew what his weapons did to their targets. He could see Rika in her usual spot, the others having given her a wide berth. She was busy pulling slugs and shrapnel out of her legs and pouring stimulant into the wounds in-between sipping the substance herself. Vezkig was… Nowhere to be found. He wasn't present during the battle and he didn't come to the bar afterwards. “Probably still back in his workshop," Armless pondered as he took another sip. “Or ogling the walker.” Crunch. Sip. Swallow. Crunch. Sip. Swallow. Something wasn't right about the way the machine reacted to his presence, he could feel it. He couldn't quite recall why, but Armless knew it was wrong. He knew not even an authorized pilot would have admin privileges for one of those. Maintenance privileges, maybe. But Administrator-level access was supposed to let one access a unit at the firmware level. He retreated into his mindscape, searching for anything to do with credentials or certifications. Everywhere he looked, the same series of alert messages stonewalled his search. The most common was “Read attempt failed.”. Sometimes, he got “Data recovery in progress, please try later.” or “Hardware boot failed, please try later.”. Only once did he get “Data classified. Please seek out the nearest ID scanner unit to request access.”
There was only one device he knew of that had any chance of achieving that, and even if it couldn't, he wagered Vezkig would be nearby. Armless finished his drink, got up, and walked out of the bar. He got a few concerned looks, but a simple “I'll be right back.” seemed to assuage any concerns. As before, the night sky was covered in stars and moons. As before, the main street was deserted. Vezkig's shop, however, was “Closed”. “Of course he's gone to examine the walker," Armless thought. He started making his way to the southern gate, but something made him pause.
“Blue.” So much blue beyond the gate. Not blood. Flowers. He began walking faster than he usually would, and soon enough, a realization came to him. They were growing wherever blood had been spilled. Among the field were a few patches of lilac, as though wherever he killed, the void-tainted blood of his victim made a mark. The walker towered over it all, gazing down on the remnants of a defensive slaughter without any judgement to be had. And there he was… Vezkig. He was quietly struggling to try and get his hoverslate to go any higher than four meters off the ground, while also leaning upwards to try and get a good look at the massive thrusters on the walker's calves.
Armless approached the walker, hoping to not disturb Vezkig as he climbed up its legs and towards the cockpit hatch. Only… It came alive at his approach. It wasn't very obvious, but he could tell. Its stance became a little less rigid, one of its fingers shifted ever so slightly. The lens on its torso emitted a scanning pulse, illuminating the field of flowers for but a moment. He received a communication request, which he approved. “Administrator in range. Request: Authorization to eject unauthorized modifications from cockpit," the machine's deep, synthesizer voice rumbled in his head. “Approve," he thought. The cockpit slid open, and all of the hardware which had been added in to make it usable without a mind-machine interface came flying out at a surprising speed, quickly enough that it landed over a hundred meters away. The voice rumbled in his head once more. “Obstruction removed. Unit status: Combat-ready.”
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Armless couldn't help but let out a chuckle, and as he did, Vezkig peeked out from behind the walker's leg. “What's funny? And why aren't you at the bar celebrating with the others?" the lizard questioned. He didn't sound annoyed or upset, just curious. Like it was strange to leave the celebration after a victorious battle. He didn't seem to have noticed the walker ejecting the Truthseeker modifications. “The walker's scanner might be able to help me learn something about who I was, before all this," Armless said. At that moment, he also sent the machine a set of instructions. It was as such: To derive his ID from the scanning pulse it performed, request access to the data which his body claimed was classified, kneel, and use its scanner-lens to project an image containing the result.
It did exactly as instructed with far less noise than he expected. Even as it kneeled, it moved its left leg out of the way to avoid harming Vezkig as its foot ripped a channel through the soil and stirred up a localized gust of wind in the direction it was moving. The projection was a simple rectangle of text, large enough for Armless to easily read from where he stood.
SHELL MANUFACTURING MANIFEST
ENDOSKELETON ID: NO MARKING FOUND
EXOSKELETON ID: NO MARKING FOUND
BRAINCASE ID: NO MARKING FOUND
BIOGEL DISTRIBUTION INFRASTRUCTURE ID: NOT MAN
SELF-REPAIR SYSTEM ID: NOT MACHINE
POWER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM ID: NOT THE VOID
LOCOMOTIVE SYSTEM ID: GREATER THAN ALL THREE
SENSOR SUITE ID: SOMETHING IN-BETWEEN
ASSIMILATION SUBSYSTEM ID: I AM FREE
SKULL-PLATE ID: IDENTITY ERASED
Armless stood there and stared. He dismissed the message and sent the walker a mental command to return to standby. It stood back up. Armless picked one of the lilac flowers and began making his way back to the bar. Vezkig was left hovering a little less than a meter off the ground, dumbfounded by the events that just transpired. From where he was, he couldn't have gotten a good enough look at the projection to read it even if it hadn't been backwards, and so he had no way of knowing what Armless had learned at that moment.
As he walked on through the empty street, Armless mulled over the revelation. It was all falling into place. His memorybanks weren't just damaged during re-entry, his past self initiated a hardware-level purge beforehand. He couldn't recover the data even if he wanted, because it wasn't there. In effect, the vast majority of his memory had been set to “write only” at the hardware level.
He found himself walking the deserted main street of a small frontier town, grasping a testament to the slaughter which occurred only hours prior. A small, lilac flower, with six narrow pointed petals and a white center. He gazed to the heavens, to the innumerable lights in the sky, and dove into the depths of his memory once more. There, in that emptiness, he found the answer to his plight. It was not some key memory that showed him the truth, but rather just how much was missing. Not years, decades, or centuries. His memorybanks had enough space to store millennia of memory, and the vast majority of it had been either purged or damaged recently. With a thought, he put his cognitive enhancements to work calculating just how much memory was gone. A robotic version of his own voice chimed in his head only a few seconds later. “Two-thousand one-hundred thirteen cycles, five months, twenty-one days, six hours, forty-nine minutes, and three seconds of non-readable memory found. System recovery unsuccessful.”
He let out a chuckle and raised the flower to his eyes, juxtaposing it against the night sky. He couldn't help but laugh at the machinations of his past self, and with a synthesized voice that was not entirely his own, he nearly in-audibly spoke to nobody in particular. “Of course. I couldn't kill myself in a way that mattered, so I did the next best thing and tried to erase everything I was.”
With a voice entirely his own, the Man With No Past spoke to nobody in particular. “Can't spend eternity digging up the past. There are things that need doing, wrongs that need righting, here and now.”
A breeze from the mountains to the north picked up, blowing southward. He let go of the flower, allowing it to drift into the desert, to be forgotten forever. He hadn't noticed up until now, but there were clouds coming over the mountain. Strong, grey clouds, filled to bursting with water from who knows where. This desert would become a muddy mess before long. Perhaps this world had a rain season, it would certainly explain flowers that slept in the dead soil and bloomed at the first sign of hydration. But alas, this wasn't the time to dwell on the weather. There was a celebration to attend. The bar door opened for him almost instantaneously. When he crossed the precipice, there were no sideways glances. Most didn't bother to look who it was, or simply didn't wish to gaze upon his exposed visage. Many gave him a look and a nod. A few raised their drinks to him as his eyes met theirs. The Commando. The Marksman. A Warrior clad in black, missing an eye and all his limbs save for a hastily bolted-on cybernetic right arm. “Just a scratch," the Warrior hissed through a mixed grin of broken and pristine teeth. There was a small pile of teeth and pieces thereof on the table. His gaze drifted to where Rika usually sat, but she wasn't there. He assumed she had left for one reason or another, but once he began to make his way towards his little corner in the back, he noticed the bullethole-riddled amazon sitting in one of the empty seats, it bulging under her weight even with a solid block of polymer having been placed beneath it as support. Speaking not so much as a word, Rika pointed at him and did a beckoning gesture.
“You. Here. Sit," she silently demanded. Armless didn't see a reason to do otherwise, and so he did, leaning as far back in his chair as he could without toppling it, using Apeiron as a support. Its grippers dug into the floor, but he didn't particularly care. The barkeep noticed, giving a brief glance before returning to tending the big meat-onion boiling pot that was one of the centerpieces of the celebration. He didn't seem to care either. Everything on the table was as he had left it - a polymer bowl, half-filled with those boiled meat-onions in the center of the table. Five empty pink stimmix bottles, one partially empty bottle, and four unopened ones. Everything save for the additional three bottles of the horrible green stimmix that Rika preferred to drink, plus one bottle which she had just raised to her mouth and began draining in a single long sip before crushing it and dropping it on the table. She exhaled a puff of noxious-smelling breath and spoke, going out of her way to establish and maintain eye contact despite the fact she had to turn her head to the side at an uncomfortable-looking angle to do so “You wish to retaliate. To journey to the mountains. To strike back against the Truthseekers.”
Armless nodded. Rika huffed, and opened another bottle of stimmix. He followed suit and took a sip from the half-empty one to his left. She drained the bottle halfway, and spoke again. “Tonight, we drink. Tomorrow, we prepare.”