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[>>Now replaying: Log 3.41 - Disconnecting from your Community]

Date: Error

Location: The Bunker at Progress’ Head // Zephyro’s Domain

//We are social beings.//

//We can’t do any of the things we do on our own. No human being can. The Pharaoes didn’t build the Pyramids themselves, Hoover Dam wasn’t built by the president. If you want to eat, chances are very low you can actually manage to balance your own diet in such a way that you would survive for more than a year. And don’t give me that “I am a huntsman” bullshit. You learned how to hunt from someone, you’re using weapons and ammo made by someone else, while wearing clothes made by yet another person. Point is, without other humans, we are nothing. We become more than the sum of our parts if everyone is allowed to focus on his, or her, strengths, without the need to constantly make up for their weakness&%$&%//

[>>DATA CORRUPTED]

General Turret looked at me with chagrin, but before he could speak, the recording continued.

“Not this again,” Voni said. “You’re scaring Tin.”

“Well, he should be scared…” Pina mumbled, pouting.

“Look, it’s just a normal Machine. It can’t be the Saint’s prison.” Voni said, holding up a hand when Pina opened her mouth, “Or the Tyrant’s Prison, Pina, cool your core. All stories agree she’s been dead for hundreds of years, right? Even if she were still alive, imprisoned somewhere, do you really think they’d stick her in some sort of warehouse together with the oldest tech we have ever seen, then surround her with a peaceful machine colony?”

“That turret isn’t peaceful,” Pina said, pointing at something outside our view.

“The cheek!” General Turret mumbled. “I haven’t shot anyone in my entire life!”

“It hasn’t shot anyone yet,” Voni said, oblivious to his commentary.

General Turret nodded sagely, until Voni went on to say “I think it’s broken. I think we can actually—”

The recording froze again.

He winced. “I meant to edit that out, Ma’am. I had originally detained the civilians with my authority alone, but after this moment, the smaller female civilian proceeded to test the boundaries of their confinement. When she notices I do, in fact, not shoot her, the three proceed to talk more openly about err… taking your laptop computer.”

Zephyro looked like he had just seen a Ghost, and I suspected I looked much the same as I stared at the general, wide-eyed. “Well did you stop them?! If they unplug the network cable…”

“Of course, Ma’am.”

“Well, how?!” I asked, hearing the edge in my voice before I even felt that familiar frustration building again.

> Who do you want to be, Sam?

I exhaled, slowly. I was still safe, not disconnected. “Go on, General.”

“I explicitly told them that removing Saintech property from the premises is forbidden under penalty of death.”

“And…?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“They completely ignored me, Ma’am. But as of now, they are still operating under the belief that only the two younger civvies can flaunt the rules. The oldest is trying to get them to take the Laptop and retreat, but the younger ones refuse to leave without her.”

The general had the grace to at least look sheepish. Not sure how he managed that with sunglasses and a rigid posture.

I, on the other hand, was close to openly slamming my forehead on the table.

“Okay, okay!” I said, trying to think of options and coming up empty.

I needed to solve this, and fast. “Chris?”

“Beep!” The sound didn’t echo in my soul this time but came from speakers hidden in the war table.

“Can you do anything with the Bunker defenses to distract them? Stop them from taking the Laptop?”

“…Boop.”

I cursed, and obviously, that was the moment Zephyro spun towards the door and said “They are here, Sultana.”

“Already?!" I asked, spitting the word like a curse. "Chris, time?”

{SAMANTHA_v0.1}

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{DOWNLOADING DATA 99/100%}

{15.6 LTB/15.7 LTB}

[>>Estimated time remaining: 00hr, 11min 23s]

“Eleven minutes and twenty— What was that?” I said, as something clattered to the floor. I grabbed Pharus from my hip before I even realized I was looking at a large bronze shield, still rolling along its edge before falling flat. Looking up, I spotted an ominous hole far up in the wall.

“The air ducts!” General Turret yelled.

Zephyro and I tensed. But before we could say a single word, the General spun around, pulled a giant rotary machine gun from nowhere, and traced a bright stream of bullets across the ceiling. After a second of cacophonous noise nearly rupturing my eardrums, three red figures fell from the ceiling and hit the floor with the sound of shattering glass, accompanied by a shower of stone and dust and clouds of blue.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

“Permission to search the enemy corpses for weapons, Ma’am?” the General said, giant rotary gun still spinning with a high-pitched whine.

“Granted,” I said, and the general stowed his gun and started to rummage through the enemies he had killed, absorbing their Logic as he did. I should probably have asked to take it for myself, but he’d earned it, and I had more important things to do. “Zephyro, what are we—“

“What was that?” Tin said in the recording, afraid, and I froze to see what was going on. Debris had landed all over the table, and probably hit some button or another. The recording had skipped forward and was playing in realtime, according to a readout hovering above the surface in bright cyan.

“I’ll go check,” Pina said, pulling a long, thin cylinder out of her coat as she started running towards the exit of the lab.

“Pina, no, wait!” Voni yelled after her, but the girl didn’t listen. The last thing I saw before she ran out of the frame was her pressing a button on the cylinder’s surface, and it elongated into some sort of tactical baton.

“F…damn!” Voni said. She looked like she wanted to run after the girl, but a quick glance towards the turret made her stop. So she remained where she was, hugging Tin even tighter.

“I can go and help her,” Tin said, but Voni shook her head.

I tore myself away from the display, glaring at General Turret. “You didn’t say this was live!”

“Apologies, Ma’am, but it wasn’t! We just caught up to Realtime as, err…” He glanced at Zephyro, who was visibly torn between protecting me and being with his people in their darkest hour.

“We caught up to Realtime because the Vizier’s CPUs are struggling to maintain his Domaintime.” The General finished.

As if to prove the point, the Vizier gritted his teeth. He was glitching again, and the distortions grew more intense by the second.

“Go, Zephyro!” I said. “We can figure it out on our own. Go and be with your people!” I left the rest unspoken. We all knew there would need to be a decision. We all knew it was either the kids, or his last chance of saving his people with anything approaching certainty.

“Thank you, Sultana,” he said, turning away from the command table.

He stepped forward, with purpose at first, but then more and more hesitant, until he stopped.

Still facing the door, he said, “It probably does not have to be said that Allah loves Children more than anything in the world. They are the Future, Sultana, and the Future is all that ever mattered to my people.”

Why would he…

Then it hit me.

“You knew,” I said.

The Vizier didn’t respond.

“From the beginning, from the very first second, you knew! You knew there were children inside the bunker, and that you couldn’t harm them! That’s why you didn’t just cave in the entrances at the first sign of trouble! And that’s why you acted like a schoolboy hiding his report card ever since the General mentioned the kids!”

Zephyro kept looking away, but I knew him well enough by now. It felt like weeks since I met him, but times of of crisis have that funny element of welding people together. I recognized that set in his shoulders. It asked for clemency a thousand times over.

I… did not know how to feel about that. All this talk about me saving his people, about siphoning off Logic and having an eternity to build a paradise for them… it had all been a lie. Or perhaps not. It probably had been the original plan, if everything hadn’t gone to shit.

“Why?” I asked.

But I would never get a response.

In a sudden explosion of speed and violence, Zephyro unsheathed his sword and spun, just in time to parry a devastating blow from a figure in a cracked red shell.

I stared at it. How?!…

[end_of_history]

[DPM filesize: >XXX LKB]

[>>Calculate exact filesize?]

“HERE IN THE DARK VALLEY OF DESERTED PASTURES, YOUR DEATH WILL CAST NO SHADOW!” the Shackled screamed, falling into a flurry of blows that the Vizier only barely managed to block. The red figure moved so fast, it almost seemed as if it was teleporting.

“Run, Sultana! To the roof!” Zephyro yelled, finishing the sentence a mere split second before the Shackled decapitated him.

It was so sudden.

But then, death always was.

General Turret hefted his Minigun and started firing.

Pina ran back into the frame, yelling something about “Those Who Take” and needing to flee.

Time slowed, as did movement, until Zephyro’s head all but hung still in the air.

He looked focused, serene almost, his brown eyes narrowed in concentration as he strained to defend against an attack he had already failed to block.

I wondered if that was it for me, too, if I had died with him because I had been connected to him at the time of his death. But then the world shattered into lines of green and purple, bizarre layers of code rearranging themselves over and under another.

A microsecond of sound [my desperate scream, the minigun’s whine, the wet sloshing of the sword] hung suspended in time, repeating over and over and over again. {Eternal.} Until it melded into a monotonous cacophony.

Then everything went black, white, and back to color again, and Zephyro stood behind his opponent, the his ornamented sword thrust deep through the Shackled’s chest.

“Be at peace, infidel,” Zephyro said, panting. He coughed, and an entire mouthful of blood spattered over his ripped chainmail, stained his ruined robes, and drenched the floor a dirty red.

He pulled the sword free, and the Shackled stumbled forward, onto his knees. The figure was silent, twitched as if trying to reform itself. The Vizier did not hesitate. His sword glowed divine silver as he swept it through the Shackled’s neck.

Instead of being decapitated, the Shackled’s head exploded into thousands of red shards.

And instead of blood, its red, fragmented throat spewed forth Logic.

It was nothing short of a geyser, a massive boon, more Logic than I had ever seen in one place before. In an instant, it flooded the throne room, washing the entire floor with a soft cyan glow. And it kept coming. Seconds later, the Logic stacked so high that I instinctively started to wade through it as I rushed for Zephyro. The blue stuff wasn’t water, though, and I stumbled and almost fell when it didn’t offer any resistance. If anything, it urged me forward to the Vizier’s side.

“Sultana, you must—“ he coughed again, blood squeezing between his fingers as he tried to stop it with his hand. “—flee! You must sit the throne!”

“There’s still several minutes left, Zephyro…” I said.

The sounds of fighting coming from outside had stopped.

Then, after a moment’s hesitation, I said: “That wasn’t the last of them, was it?”

He shook his head.

“And further, Sultana, I must beg you a thousand pardons, but… we both know the time for planning is over. You tried, but there is no saving me.”

I stood in front of him, unsure of what to do. A part of me wanted to comfort him, and another told me to run. He was going to die. I was going to lose him. I was going to lose this man who could have been my friend, and whom I had been stupid enough to like.

“I will hold them off, then join you on the roof when it is time, for—” he wheezed. “For you to leave.”

“But—“

“I beseech you, Sultana. Do not let the sacrifice of my people, and mine, be in vain. You must claim your Blessing. You must unlock your talent and its secrets, no matter how long it takes. It is the only chance for my people to survive.

“So please, go. And take the Essence of the infidel with you, before his misbegotten ilk gorge themselves on it. You are going to need it—“ He coughed again, turning away as more blood mixed with the Logic.

“You should take it,” I said, even though I knew he never would. “With it, you can heal yourself and…” I trailed off when he didn’t respond.

“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning a thousand different things, and also just one.

I wanted to stay. I wanted to help him fight and keep him alive. Pay him back for all he had done for me. Try to be the person he saw when he looked at me. Prove that I could be good enough, to be worth the admiration.

I inhaled, and the Logic rushed toward me in a tragic torrent of power.

{INCOMING LOGIC - 2.2 LKB}

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 3231 LB}

My eyes went wide with shock. That was enough Logic to— How strong had that Shackled been?

“We need to go, NOW!” Pina said, voice garbled as though a broken tape recorder played it back in slow motion. “We might still slip past them!”

“But the Machine…” Voni replied, countenance cracking just like the image hovering above the table.

“Leave it!” Pina said. “We don’t know if the Shackle took!”

“But we used the rest of our Shackles on the other machines!” Tin said. “If we don’t—“

“We can get more Shackles, Tin, maybe we can get another one out of the Music Box.“

“But—“

Fuck, fuck, fuck…

“No, Pina is right,” Voni said, chagrined. “The turret might not shoot us if we leave, but it will definitely shoot us if we take the Machine. It’s just too risky.” Hesitantly, she grabbed Tin by the shoulder, and after the boy looked at the laptop one more time, they turned to the door.

“Chris! Turn on the screen!” I yelled. Luckily, they knew what I meant and immediately did as I asked. The screen of my laptop flashed so bright, just its representation hovering over the war table floodlit the entire room.

The kids turned, stunned.

“The Saint has heard our prayers…” Voni whispered reverently, all thoughts of leaving clearly forgotten. I could barely hear her as I ran past the throne and up the stairs, blood pounding in my ears.

From the top of the stairs, I glanced at Zephyro one last time. He was staring at the entryway, shoulders hunched, blood trickling down his blade. He did not flinch, did not falter, didn’t turn once as he stared down the dozens of Shackled creeping through the broken throne room doors.