There were four locations where the remaining Diliman Scouts could be found, and to each, they assigned exactly one person. James couldn’t leave Aurelia as she was, so they were left in the 122 Mercury safehouse. That wasn’t to mean that they’d be wasting their time; James would try to figure out how the new Aurelia worked, and what parts of her were still intact.
Meanwhile, the Alliance’s automata forces were tasked with turning the whole city block the safehouse was in into a silicon hamlet, covered in sparkling blue vines that would power the nanostructed industry that would soon spawn from it.
***
C4T wasn’t a particularly fast traveler. Its walking speed was that of a cat’s, so if it wanted to make good pace, it had to run, but that would be energy inefficient.
The moment it left the safehouse and Coronel and the pilots were out of sight, it went ahead and slaved the nearest pack of Wolfbots. Five of them galloped and skidded to a stop in front of it, and it climbed atop one of them—a fitting steed for one as righteous as C4T. The Wolfpack, with C4T as king, set out for their objective.
The travel allowed it to mull over idle bit-thoughts. It did not consider itself a top philosopher, but it was confident in its propositional logic solution algorithms, capable of chipping away at a nearly-infinite search space to come to an absolute answer.
But there was one question that always had two answers: should life struggle?
Smarter Machines than it had come to the conclusion that yes, life should struggle. Life is struggle, they said, an embodiment of the universe’s self-rejection of the entropy that governed it, so it was natural for life to struggle.
There were many propositions that belied that conclusion, and it was little help that those propositions were open-sourced. Even if C4T had pored through them, the datastreams were just too wide. It simply did not have the capacity to understand the process that led to the conclusion, and this irked it so badly.
And so it tried, for so many years, to craft an algorithm that could find a singular solution, an algorithm that could be run on its meager hardware. It’ll be simple, it once thought, to narrow two possible answers into one.
Perhaps its neural network would turn rampant before it could find a solution, and its memories would have to be trimmed, along with all the learnings and mistakes on the way to crafting the optimum algorithm. It began thinking of having kittens again—perhaps they could find the meaning, and perhaps, they could even find it together.
Life is beautiful, every Machine thought, every struggle given form and every death not in vain. C4T resolved itself, once again, to record the memories of life as it saw it, and perpetuate even the last ripples of a candlefire snuffed out.
Before it knew it, the hospital was already there. It had ignored the gore and gunfire of the Wolfbots protecting it along the way. Those Wolfbots weren’t truly alive, even if it could sense a spark of life in them. Perhaps, one day, that spark could be set free.
C4T hopped off and ordered the bots to secure the perimeter. It would enter on its own.
For the thousandth time, the diagnostics on its voice modulator confirmed it was working perfectly. James had helped to adjust the voice quality to avoid slipping into the uncanny valley. Aurelia expressed glee over the shitty text-to-speech emulator, so C4T, despite finding the irony in “increasing quality with degrading sophistication,” counted it as acceptably optimized.
The hospital itself wasn’t big: two stories high, and there was just one parking bay for the ambulance, which itself was just a converted van—not exactly a specialized vehicle. Any smaller and it was at risk of being called a community clinic.
The glass double doors had been smashed in. Judging by the amount of dried blood, it must have been an overwhelming number of Alphas.
C4T went deeper inside. With high-quality all-color nightvision, the dark was no problem. Streaks of blood drew thin lines across the floor, walls, and ceiling, freezing instantaneous moments of bladed weapons’ cutting arcs, and these continued all the way until the end of the short hallway, terminating at an elevator door.
It checked the first floor rooms to be sure. It confirmed no active signatures, save for a lonely mouse in the ER. C4T cracked the door open, setting it free.
Stolen story; please report.
Beside the elevator was a staircase, plastic chairs and bed frames scattered about its middle platform. Again, more streaks of blood from the same weapons.
It snuck through the debris, making no sound, and reached the top of the stairs. That was where it encountered the enemy: a small group of Alphas, sleeping in the hallway. There were the same blood streaks again, all the way until the other end.
It deployed all its four blades, like tails of a chimera eager to kill.
It trotted up to the first Alpha. The blade sunk into its skull so easily.
Life is so beautiful, but these—these were just puppets.
It cut all their strings and reached the end.
Before the last door, C4T dispatched the last Alpha—then it noticed its fingernails were bent backwards. It looked up to the door and noted the scratches across its steel. What a durable door.
Just then, it heard something coming from the other side. It was rhythmic, with a regular pattern with slight variations—oh, the pattern shifted?
…Music? There was a guitar—the knowledge of construction of which seemed genetic to humanity, it observed—and some sort of wind instrument. A neural model query returned a “flute recorder” as the most likely match, whatever that was.
Retracting its tentacular blades, it knocked on the door in a way only a cat knew how.
It put its fore limbs up against it…and started scratching.
***
The four scouts had been stuck in that hospital for nearly 24 hours. After they beat a hasty retreat from Commonwealth Highway, and getting separated from the others, they got chased down by a small horde straight into this hospital.
Well, alright, there were just 20 or so zombies. It wasn’t a lot, but they panicked. Panicking wasn’t what the Diliman Scouts were known for, but it happened, and they were here. At the least, they didn’t panic so badly that they weren’t able to realize their mistake after 10 seconds and start tossing bed frames down the stairs to trip up their pursuers. They were already resigned to make a last stand at the top of the stairs, but then Josefa found the door to Surgical open, all the way at the end of the hall. All the other hospital doors were just made of wood, but the surgery room’s door was special.
Not even the apocalypse can interrupt the doc in the middle of an op sort of special.
Given that they had about three days of rations, and radio silence would have been lifted before they totally ran out, they stuck to the safe side and chose the shut-in life.
After three hours of zombies scratching on the door, it got boring. This must’ve been what the soldiers in the trenches of WW1 felt being pounded by artillery on the daily—just pure numbness and desensitization.
Naturally, Josefa and Valora started jamming together to pass the time. Josefa was a prodigy at the flute recorder, and Valora was—okay with a guitar, but she didn’t really care about that. As long as Josefa could bang out some nice melodies on top of the same four chords for an hour, it was all good.
Four chords wasn’t good enough after 30 minutes, though, so Valora started to experiment with chords that she couldn’t even begin to name. For the first time in her guitarist life, her skill was actually increasing.
“For the first time, I think I’ll have to thank you for lugging that thing around,” Lyra told Valora. As the team medic, she saw no point in lugging around a guitar that would ultimately slow down Valora’s movement, and cause her to get wounded when she shouldn’t have. Prevention was better than cure, after all, and Lyra was more the team’s mom than the team’s medic.
“This,” Valora said, “this is the exact scenario I pictured. This is all the reason why I bring my baby around.”
Josefa fluted an affirmative: a brief, playful, high-pitched note. Lyra and Valora giggled. The girl never really said much, but she was expressive in other ways. It just so happened that flute recorders were incredibly loud and clear in the middle of a battle, too, so flute signallers became a thing once again, all thanks to her. No one else picked it up as a hobby, though.
Meanwhile, Buboy, the only man in the group, continued absentmindedly sharpening their machetes. On top of what each member already carried, he always carried around an entire roll of the things. He couldn’t help it. He was a street vendor for the latter part of his life, earning lucrative sales from selling machetes to passers-by and drivers stuck in Manila traffic.
This was all completely legal. Machetes were regarded as gardening tools in Philippine law and culture. Every single house—didn’t matter if it was made of concrete or cardboard—had one…which would then disappear one day, so the household would buy another one, only to rediscover the old one, so now they had two. Sales never dropped.
All the man wanted was to sell machetes. Thankfully, the market seemed to have shifted in his favor.
These were the people who heard C4T’s scratching.
These were the people who opened the door, to see a metallic-black cat, sitting exactly in the sunlight (per James’s instructions), look up to them, meow, then fucking speak. Josefa’s recorder squeaked.
“Friends · Of · James · Castell-anow,” its shitty TTS emulator said in glorious, disjointed staccato precisely tuned to be unable to pronounce Spanish names. Of course, it didn’t forget the passphrase: “The · Morning·is·Bright. The · Wind · Is · Calm”
C4T wasn’t quite sure about this next part, but… “Follow · the · Fucking · Cat · if-you · Know · what’s · good-for · You.”
It waited for a favorable response. It waited quite a while.
“That sounded a lot like James, doesn’t it?” Valora said.
Josefa replied with a low, affirmative pip.
“That’s the password, right?”
Pip.
“…Right.”
As far as they were concerned, it all checked out. They followed the cat.