<>Checking on the shelter?
“Yeah. Make sure nobody’s done anything dumb yet. Then I’ll start heading up floor by floor to see if it was just what was under us or there's more above.” I carefully moved down the hall past the mess I made.
<>I am aware of the truth on this subject if you’d like to be elucidated.
“Yeah. Please.” I floated up to the big metal slab and poked at the panel next to it. “Oy anybody alive in there?”
<>The city of Spokane is currently under a major incursion. They only just got half the portals closed at this point. Five stealth hives have been found in the city which has erupted since it started.
The screen flickered to a face, stopping me from asking more of Naille.
“We’re alive here. Who are you?” The overweight supervisor-looking guy on the other side looked like he was having a panic attack.
“I’m the janitor bot. Got some upgrades from the new voice in my head.” That sparked a massive argument in the back. “I’m just checking in to make sure you’re locked up tight and haven’t seen any squiggly worms with feathers in there?”
“Oh my god did I hear a description of a Seven,” Someone shouted in the background.
“What’s a seven?” I did not keep up with office gossip.
<>A Model seven. The Zombie worms.
“Oh. Yeah, I found a bunch on a lower floor. Torched most of them. Just wondering if you have a zombie problem?” Internally I did the equivalent of subvocalization, [not that I think I can fix it if you do.]
<>You can. You have a catalog for that.
[You can hear this?]
<>I can indeed.
[Well… shit. Spent all this time looking like a fool talking aloud.]
<>It’s fine, most Vanguard do in the beginning. Also, people like you are known as “Samurai” on the North American continent. Just to avoid future confusion.
I, at that point, noticed that time was doing funky things because the whole conversation took less than a second. The person in the shelter was still screaming about the zombie bugs. As my attention focused outward and time sped back up.
“I don’t think we have any sevens. But we have anti-seven pills here!” He shouted at the room before pointing off-screen. After a moment of people making noise, he turned back to me. “Thank you for your concern, Samurai. I didn’t catch your name.”
“Uh… Er…. I forget. I think my serial number was JMU1330213. Most of the maintenance guys just called me Lucky.”
Nobody got a word in edge-wise as there was a screech right before someone poked their head in the frame. I recognized one of the building maintenance men.
“Lucky you son of a bitch! You got picked! How?!”
“Dunno. Killed some angry plants, escorted some office lady here then helped shut the door. After that, it’s been crazy. Got a new voice in my head, it’s nice and gives me things.”
“Don’t fuck with me, man. Are you really Lucky?”
The manager turned to him and gave him an annoyed look before demanding, “Why does it matter?”
“Uh… a few of us maintenance guys have a bet.”
“Yes. Most of us are sentient. None of us really remember what it was like before tho.” I waved with a claw at the camera pickup. The half a dozen janitor bots in the building all knew about the bet. I just never cared.
“Nice Sentinel cosplay dude! Or I guess you’re a Samurai now.”
“I was going for eldritch horror from beyond the stars, but I didn’t have enough points.”
“You should definitely get some nanites and wear them like a big amorphous blob. Go full Shoggoth.” The two men were struggling as the manager tried to shove him out of frame. “Tell your AI Shoggoth!”
[You heard that?] My brain was tickled by that word. I know what that is, it’s perfect.
<>I did. And we can certainly set up a facade now to do just that. In fact, it might make for a particularly interesting build. You’d need to open up a more expensive catalog for nanotech and an armor catalog. Hum. Yes. It can be done, leaving you with fifty points. It won’t be much more than ablative armor at the moment but it would be doable.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
[I like it. Do it.]
Points: 1,600 → 50
A mass of grey-black goo blorped into existence next to me before slurping around my frame and engulfing me. For a moment the world went black again before I could ‘see’ in front of myself by extending my eyes to the surface.
“What just happened?” The manager all but did a double take as the engineer shoved back into view again.
“I took some advice. It seems to be working quite well so far. If you’re fine in there I’ll go see about clearing the rest of the building, maybe securing a route for our way out.”
“You need to make your voice more… deep and scary dude!”
“Shut up Jenkins.” The manager shoved him out of frame one last time before turning to me and nodding. “We’ll hold out here until you come back. There are about fifty of us here. We have comms with two more shelters up the tower, there are maybe two hundred people all told. Please do what you can for us.”
“Got it. Bye-bye.” A gloopy tentacle waved, surrounding one of my mecha dendrites.
Turning I shifted in the direction of the elevator. <>I should warn you you are no longer able to fly with your new armor. You should take the stairs.
[Oh! Good idea.] I turned around and went for the stairs, bursting the door as I went. [I only know the floors from the sub-basement one down. Can we get a map for up?]
<>Yes we can. You bought an intrusion module so we can just swipe it straight from their servers since there’s still power. Despite you’re attempting to bring the building down.
[You still on about that? Would it make you feel better if I apologized and said I wouldn’t do it again? Also, see if they have any files on me.]
<>Would you be sincere? Understood.
[Not really.]
<>Then not really.
[Fair enough]
I had barely managed the turn around landing before the next floor when Naille popped a three-dimensional map up across my vision. It highlighted shelters every fifty floors or so before shifting to the corner and flattening to just the map of the floor I was on. Which was just the stairwell until I cool-aid man’d my way through the door onto the next floor up.
“Oh yeah!” I shifted the pitch of my vocalization down into the bass range. “Almost… needs more… grit?”
<>Why did you do that? Also, what are you going for, voice-wise?
[What, the door? I dunno. It just felt right? Plus I’m still getting to know my strength.] Two main limbs shrugged, but it was lost in the goop.
I slurped down the halls, checking rooms. At first just pushing doors off hinges, but as I got used to the strength of it all I was able to start opening them.
<>You realize that you have the ability to see through these thin walls, right?
[No? Do I?]
<>Yes. Here allow me.
My vision shifted until I was getting data from a dozen different spectrums including radio, before they resolved into a sort of enhanced but subdued version. Allowing me to see right through walls to some extent. Made checking the floor faster, especially since some of it was audio-based and I could tell if anything was moving at all. There was even a sort of super nose-smelling ability.
That made floor checks way easier. Open the door on the floor, listen, look, smell. Nothing there. Move on.
Twenty floors up from the very bottom I found the ground floor, a space I’d not been to in memory. That’s where there were more Angry Plants.
[Oh. That guy looks mean.] I spotted a thing the size of a midsized sedan that looked like an angry plant-bear hybrid covered in quills dragging a couple of corpses across the lobby.
<>A model five. I’d warn you about the quills, but they shouldn’t pose any serious problem for you.
[So just… shoot it?]
<>I seriously doubt you’ll do much damage with what you have. To be honest, you may want to wait until it leaves and kill something else to get more points. You need heavier weapons to take something like that on.
[Hey, you said this Void Walker group was spacers, right? Did they do any mining?]
<>They do, why?
[Do they have any mining drill equivalents? That cost fifty or less? Maybe an ore grinder or something?]
There was a long pause, even sped up I could watch the damn Bear thing’s leg move several inches before Naille replied, sounding surprised and smug at the same time.
<>They do indeed. An ore crusher. It would be able to be used as a sort of ‘mouth’ full of spinning grinding teeth. If you can use the nanite armor to hold it still for a few seconds you should be able to chew it to death.
[Metal! Do it.]
Points: 50 → 0
<>Incoming gear.
A box fell and plopped into my armor, I drew it fully in before opening it, removing the tool, and pooping the empty box out. Once I felt I had an idea of how to use the new tool I charged the bear-looking plant with quills.
It saw me coming a mile away or at least a dozen meters, spit out the legs of the two corpses it was dragging and launched several quills at me. They hit my armor, penetrated a few inches, and then got shoved down under the bulk of the rolling mass of armor. Being almost the same size as the creature I was charging had its advantages.
It tried another volley before I slammed into it, the mouth/mining tool grinding up at full power before I hit. I didn’t think I could hold it still, so I went for bronco busting. Being roughly equal in size didn’t mean we had parity in strength. Fucker nearly bucked me.
But all those quills gave me a lot of grip space with all my little dendrites, plus the jaws of life jammed in and pinched down on its spinal region. I rode the bastard down, all the while chewing on his head.
Points:0 → 20
“What, the actual fuck?”
The voice from the front doors startled me, I stopped before retracting and continued to chew on the body while my attention turned to the newcomer.