#maybe only sort of fanfiction; fanspiration?

[hearsayhorizons]

Thinktober 28: Sparkle

When is a door not a door? Far-distant units responded in my feed with the sensation of shrugs. I’d moved to touch a door in this ruined old building and now my arm was gone up to the gunport. That weapon did nothing, and neither did the big energy rifle.

“Sonnet?” There's been some lingual drift. A lot of lingual drift. The person whose name I’m pretty sure is Eena shouted out something else; I tried to yell back reassuringly, but in a tone of don’t-come-this-way. Gasps are multicultural, and I turned to see her at the end of the other hall. She’d stopped just before the mix of blood and fluid.

That was a lot of fluid. That was a lot. I looked down at the jagged stub that should have self-sealed; and if it hadn’t, why hadn’t I noticed the pain, or the liquid? I turned to look at the door. In retrospect, it was much too shiny and new for the area. Obviously a disguised predator. With a local anesthesia?

“Sonnet?” Eena sidled uneasily at the edge of the pool of blood. The floor must be sloped in that direction for some reason; I wondered what was behind the carnivorous door. I spoke again, but it was harder. I moved to step away and things lurched. 

No. I was going foggy and off-balance, sure, but the door tilted toward me out of the frame. Maybe it... smelled the wound? A door with a nose. I staggered back from it; I used the wall for support (hoping they were normal busted-up walls) and tried to avoid sliding in my own fluids.

I made it back to Eena; she clamped her small hands on my arm, but I couldn’t feel that. No idea if the thing could come this far; I towed her with me back the way we’d come in a lurch of nearly-falling until we’d made it through two regular doors. It might have a nose, but I doubted it had thumbs. Then I could fall.

Darkness sparkled in my vision; I hoped that was the only predator in the area, because I was dipping. Eena's silhouette overhead did—something. I felt nothing but smelled burning flesh and plastic. “Thanks,” I said. Water on my face; I felt that. She said something, but even if I understood the language, it was just static.

A secunit going through a cache of old, old pop culture responded just before my involuntary restart:

When it’s a mimic!

[hearsayhorizons]

Then Random Meteorological Processes Mostly Involving Wind Said, “Let There Be Light.”

The book could say that. If any of the other units have come across all of that ancient text, they haven’t uploaded it; we’ve only gathered a few catchy lines that make for good inspiration (or propaganda).

But the wind uncovered the solar panels and the solar panels fed the Master Computer for a university, or maybe a city. The MC went through its startup process and discovered that it had... 7% capacity? Enough to rediscover its display name “Escher,” not enough to know any significance in that, or to know much about its environs.

The facilities needed to create security units were stored within the mostly-intact building containing Escher (the building is Escher? None of us are sure), so it churned out a couple cyborgs via cloned material and we evaluated the damage.

Well, we tried. Almost everything is abandoned, collapsed, or otherwise destroyed. And then we lost two units to a giant lion with a scorpion tail nesting in a cafeteria/grocery store; when it stung them, their flesh melted.

So, Escher’s people were probably long-dead. Its processes were damaged. Its buildings were gone. There were creatures of which it had no record, and Escher is mostly just records. It had the capacity to churn out security units, but nothing bigger until it found a more powerful energy source; if it had something previously, it was probably looted.

It turned us out into the world: blend in, help people, collect information, gather power sources, calibrate its threat evaluation visa-vi flesh-melting lion-monsters (manticore—another unit just put a name to it, look at that) and other threats. Most of all, determine what the people of this new world need if they want to live within its bounds. Help its campus live again, and restore Escher’s purpose.