#whoaaaaaa were halfway theeeeere

[microsoftedgy69]

Goliath, part 2

[prologue] [part 1]

You're in the middle of sparring when you realize. The main plan doesn't exactly involve much actual combat, but some of the What-Ifs do. If push comes to shove, you might have to go hand to hand at some point, and you haven't done that in half a decade -- because you were glasses for most of that time, and terrified of physical violence for the rest -- so you made yourself a classic old sparring bot to get back into it. It's simple, pure metal with no discernible face and a fighting program that's supposed to learn from your moves and attempt to always get one step ahead of you. It's Brobot without the emotional baggage, essentially.

You're not far from the shore where your boat is anchored, and are rolling through the dirt with a pair of metal wrists in your hand, when you realize that you have been corrupted.

Something is wrong with your output. When you go through your logs, they tell you that you must have been talking, even though you don't remember saying anything. When you check your blog, there are several posts you don't recall putting there. You hurry to check your messages, but it doesn't seem to have gone that far -- thankfully, you haven’t told any of your friends to obey, submit, or consume lately.

Yesterday's craving for cookies makes more sense now, you think. It's also fantastically ridiculous.

It doesn't worry you much. You can get her propaganda out of your system, you've done it before. It doesn't worry you much, until you try to move away from the sparring bot, and your body does something entirely else instead.

In stunned silence, you watch your first surge forward and, with force you knew you had in you but never actually used, punch right into the metal head. You watch the material give, dent, then break, watch the edges cut into your hand, wrist, then arm. Your shark skin is so tough that in the year of you having it, nothing has actually broken through it before, but this will do it.

You have pain receptors, carefully crafted long ago, but you don’t feel anything, right now. You feel like you are glasses again, perched on somebody else’s nose, watching idly whatever the hell this guy is doing with his body. None of it seems like a very good idea, to you, but it doesn’t feel like your call to make. Your hand takes a shard of metal from the sparring bot’s face, and then your body pushes itself upright. You look down as you get a better grip on the shard, aim, and plunge it right into your own stomach.

Hm.

Well.

That doesn’t really do much of anything to you. You still don’t feel any pain, and when you pull the piece of metal back out of yourself, you can see something thick and brown ooze out of the wound.

It’s chocolate milk.

You must have hit your synthetic stomach that also doesn’t actually do much, digestion-wise. It just sort of keeps the food there for a bit until you go to the bathroom. This will be a bitch to fix, but it’s nothing you’re not prepared for.

The thought pulls you back, pulls your mind in between your shoulders, pushes your thoughts through the wires inside your arms. Yeah, right, you were prepared for this. It’s not part of Plan A. You didn’t want this to happen, but you suspected it might. Your emergency protocol in case of corruption was to put up a bunch of fake information about yourself she could find, like that your vital hardware is located in your stomach. It’s not. That would be stupid. It’s sprinkled all over your body in multiple hard to reach places, like the important piece of storage that’s lodged deep in your right thigh. She doesn’t seem to know that, which means she can’t have gotten very far yet.

You can get her back out.

Unfortunately, realizing what’s happening and pulling your consciousness back into your body has reminded you that you can, in fact, feel pain.

Crying out, you crumple to the floor, your good hand clutching your bad hand clutching your stomach. For several seconds, you don’t know where to start -- you can turn off the pain, but you should amp up your security software first, you need to get her out but you can’t do that if your mind is clouded with the pain of a stab wound to the guts and your hand falling apart but if you waste too much time getting the pain under control she might advance further into your data and you can’t have her finding out where your real vital hardware lies ---

Your scream rips through the undergrowth, loud enough to make a flock of birds flee from a nearby tree, to make you feel the vibrations of your own voice hum through the roof of your mouth. That helped. Kicking her out is a matter of a few, practiced steps. You can take care of the pain later; you’ve felt worse before.

So you stay where you are, curled up into a little ball, eyes screwed shut, teeth clenched, fingers twisting into each other, enduring. You’ve stopped crying out -- you’ve stopped making any noise at all, only focusing on your very inside, on what keeps you running, what makes you you. This by far isn’t her first attempt at corrupting you or your brothers, and over the years you’ve learned to adapt, keep updating your anti-virus, keep finding new measures that keep up with whatever she has been up to. You assume that this time she got in because you must have left some sort of trace on the drone you and Roxy sent her, which of course isn’t ideal. It means, however, that you opened the door for her, and you damn well know how to close it again.

She doesn’t put up much of a fight. You assume that she got what she came here for -- your vital organs and your immediate future plans. If you put up enough of a struggle, you figure, she will believe in that success.

The second you reach 0% corruption, you slump forward, face first into the dirt. It muffles your pained groan for the few beats you spend like this, before your feet start shifting against the ground in an attempt to somehow deal with the feeling of having a hole in your stomach. The way through your programming to turn off pain, at least, is a quick one now.

You flip the switch, and stop feeling anything. The moan you let out doesn’t vibrate through your mouth, but at least you hear it. You almost laugh at yourself. You don’t quite feel like it, though.

Walking the Earth with your touch receptors turned off is always weird, but it helps you get things done quickly. You check in on your brothers first, to make sure neither of them got caught in any sort of crossfire. They are fine, your plants are fine, your cat and your fish are fine. You want to pat yourself on the back for acting quickly enough, but once you chuck the broken sparring bot into your workroom and then sit down there to fix yourself, that sentiment leaves you pretty quickly.

You fix your stomach, then glue the cuts in your skin shut again, both your stomach and your hand. It looks like you have scars now, for the first time in your artificial life. In the back of the room, you have way more skin left over, rolled up like fabric, but you’d have to sew a whole new suit from it if you wanted to keep a body without scars. You don’t have time for that right now. You have to-- you want to act fast.

You have just about fucking had it.

Once you’re all glued up, you turn your receptors back on, then leave the workroom to say goodbye to the bots, your pets, and all of your plants. You check your sylladex to make sure that you have what you need on you -- a copy of SBURB, Dirk’s hand grenade. You step out on the deck, unnecessarily roll your shoulders, and message Roxy.

They reply immediately.

TT: She took the bait. See you in Rainbow Falls in five. TG: EFFIN finally TG: make it 3

Three it is. You nod to yourself, and open every other conversation that currently matters to you. To Alma, you say,

TT: Hey, I gotta bounce. There’s a note on the fridge about pet and plant care. TT: Thanks. TT: You know, for all of it. TT: Catch you on the flipside.

Messaging Palooka makes you a bit more nervous, but you don’t want to leave without another word.

TT: I’m off now. TT: Still reachable, but I’m on my way. TT: Just wanted to let you know. TT: I’ll stop by when I’m back.

You open your conversation with your… your ex-boyfriend, you suppose, too. You haven’t talked, since you told him what you’re doing. Something in you wants to let him know, but you don’t quite see the point in telling him that you’re actually leaving now. You wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. And if you stare at this any longer, your three minutes will be up.

sometimes to get to god, first you gotta meet the devil.

Your name used to be Dirk Strider. When you were a child, you were the loneliest person in the universe, and all you wanted to do was matter. Then one day, when you were thirteen, you woke up and were not Dirk Strider anymore. You had been demoted to a knock-off, a less important version of yourself that couldn’t physically do anything, that nobody cared about. You had to sit back and watch other people be relevant, watch other people do things and take control of their lives, while you were struggling with the mere concept of being a living person.

Jake doesn’t understand your constant urge to mean something. You didn’t expect him to; he’s been through this, he’s played his own session of the Game, he doesn’t want to hear anything about it anymore. You get it. It’s fine. He doesn’t have to understand that you need this, that you’ve been craving this since the second you were transferred into a pair of sunglasses, and that it’s the one, the final thing you have to do, to prove to yourself that you are a person.

You are real and you exist in this world, and you are going to leave a dent in it.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house while they set up the computers for your two-player session, and you send out pings into the universe. She will come here. You know she will. She found your fake body blueprints, and she found your fake future plans that showed you stopping her whole operation from Earth. She has enough incentive to get her shitty red spaceship back here, but no idea what actually awaits her. No idea that you and Roxy are ready to fuck this entire timeline just to get back at her.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house, and you wait for Her Imperial Condescension to come to you, so you can kill her. She will do what you want her to. People always do, sooner or later. You will get her where you want her, then you will induce the apocalypse, and kill the tyrant that has tormented you over the course of your entire existence.

And then, you think, with all of that out of the way, with your home timeline reduced to dust and your nemesis caught in the ensuing detonation of all you knew growing up, you will finally be ready, to go. To move on.

This is your moment in the spotlight. None of this is necessary for anyone else, except for maybe Roxy -- this planet is dead. Sitting on the roof, you overview the remnants of a society that has long since been eradicated. You are doing this for yourself. You are making yourself relevant, to only yourself.

It’s your gift, to you.

You run your fingertips over your other hand, feeling the scars in the rough skin of your forearm, and close your eyes. It feels good to be real.