REB Secure Chat Line V1.23G

  Aisling: The fish has swallowed the worm.

  Vivi: What the fuck does that even mean? Stop using fucking metaphors and speak like a normal person. Dust take me, you Seekers are all so fucking weird.

  Aisling has left the chat.

  Makesi: What Aisling was trying to say before you scared her off is that they scanned the card. Automated defenses are down. You're on your own this time, Vivi. Secure the Dustborn while Aisling and I close the rift.

  Vivi: Finally! I've been fucking bored waiting all night for the newbie to actually do her job.

  Makesi: Did you actually explain to her what her job was? Also, calling her a newbie already is a bit hasty. Remember, she could always say no.

  Vivi: I mean… sort of. I hit the broad strokes.

  Makesi: You didn't tell her what the card even does, did you?

  Vivi: Anyway! Comms off, we don't know if they can listen in or not!

  Vivi has left the chat.

  Makesi: They can't… they don't even have magitec—whatever.

  Makesi has left the chat.

  There was a click as the door to my cell unlocked, and a moment later, the emergency lights came on. Turning to look down at the Cicada, it was no longer a dead hunk of metal. One of its claws pawed at the hem of my pants.

  It had a mind similar to that of a dog at the moment, if a dog were an entirely alien construct that had just been given life moments beforehand. So really, it was nothing like a dog.

  Its mental construct, I saw when I looked at it, was a hollow glass sphere reflecting lights from vantage points unseen. I added a pink light, symbolizing affection, as it looked up at me.

  Walking around it so it couldn't see me anymore, I removed the light, then I walked back into its view and added the light. After doing this a couple of times, it started producing the pink light on its own when it looked at me.

  That was good enough for me. I leaned down and patted the drone on its ocular lens. The droning, buzzing noise it produced was pitched slightly downward, making it sound like the Cicada was purring.

  “Who's a good creepy little sonic drone? It's you! You're the best fucking creepy living drone in the whole wide world!” I said, returning the card to my pocket and tapping the device Vivi left me on the back of my collar.

  There was a loud grinding sound, and the collar unlatched itself with a clunk. I pulled it from my neck, just in time, as the spinal bomb at the back of the collar went off a moment later. A shard of shrapnel lodged itself in my hand, but I was otherwise unharmed.

  Opening my closet, I found my medkit, one of my few actual possessions. I was too valuable an asset for Atlas to refuse me one. It was one of their standard-issue variants with a few ‘nonessentials’ removed, or so they claimed. Really, they just took all the good shit out and left me with the bare essentials to prevent myself from bleeding out in the event they couldn’t get to me in time to do whatever magic put my body back together that one time.

  After pulling the piece of metal out with a pair of tweezers, I opened a packet of BioSeal-9 and pressed it against the wound, ensuring it fully adhered to my skin. Once I wasn’t worrying about getting blood all over my sweater, I clipped the medkit to my hip because it could prove useful.

  It would have been nice if she had informed me that it wouldn’t disarm the bomb, but whatever. I was free, and that was all that mattered.

  With a shove, I pushed the door open. Heading immediately towards the rec room because that was the fastest route to Aurin’s room. I knew the directions nearly as well as she did. The drone followed along behind me, hissing as it did so.

  It was rather strange navigating these corridors in near darkness, with only flashing emergency lights providing a modicum of vision. They had never shut these lights off before, and I’m fairly certain the bulbs were the variant that never burned out.

  Glancing up at one of the security cameras, it was rapidly blinking on and off, the next was just off, and the one after that had an indicator light that was glowing far brighter than should be possible. Whatever they did to the facility had to have been anomalous in some form. It wasn’t like they just blew the generator. They fucked the system that was running the facility.

  Given the living drone that was trying to get my attention, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about that.

  The rec room door was unlocked as well. I pushed it open only for Aurin to barrel into me. Her room was also unlocked?

  Was that part of the plan or just happenstance? If they chose to unlock every door in the facility… I shivered at my recollection of some of the horrors locked away around here.

  “What’s wrong?” Aurin asked, likely noticing my face fall at her appearance.

  “Just catastrophizing, don’t worry about me,” I said, burying myself into her as I scrounged around in my pocket for the map. “Oh! Right, I almost forgot.”

  Pulling the device Vivi gave me, I tapped it against Aurin’s collar, then the first moment it was possible, I yanked it off and threw it across the room, where it detonated.

  “Oh, wow, I thought that would defuse the bomb… or did you think that? I always get who thought what mixed up when we share our minds,” she said, rubbing her neck where the collar once resided.

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  “I think that one was me. Anyway, we should start heading—” I started, only to be interrupted when the Cicada let out a shrill buzz. Looking down at it, the drone was staring out the door, “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you talking to the security drone?” Aurin asked.

  “Shh, it has a mind… somehow. Fuck I should have installed a language into it before I came here,” I attempted to whisper back, with the alarms blaring, I wasn’t sure if she even heard me.

  Poking my head out of the door, I couldn’t see whatever was freaking the Cicada out. Looking into its mind, I reviewed its memories, moments before it screamed, the entire hallway warbled, as if the space holding it together had come undone for a moment before returning to normal.

  “Okay, we’re leaving now, out, out, out.” I grabbed Aurin’s hand and ran towards her exit. Examining the map, I saw we could loop around through the ward she was living in and make it to the spot Vivi indicated.

  “What’s goin—” Aurin was interrupted when, with a loud crunch, the hallway folded in on itself. The compressed metal, overlapping in ways that shouldn’t be physically possible, exploded into shrapnel that we barely avoided by slipping through the door.

  The Cicada was directly in the line of fire, but its hard shell prevented any damage.

  “Containment failure, the anomalies are out,” I explained, already huffing as I ran. In the past few years, I hadn’t really taken the time to exercise much. “I'm pretty… sure… I told you—god damn, why are your legs so long?”

  I had to take a moment to lean against the wall and take a breather while Aurin looked over the map. I hadn't really noticed before, but despite not sweating, I still seemed to cool at a normal speed. You'd think the lack of perspiration would make that an issue, but my body had apparently decided it wasn't going to obey thermodynamics.

  I never liked looking all sweaty, so this was a plus for me.

  “What do the little ‘x’ marks mean?” she asked after a couple of moments.

  I just shrugged. She knew exactly as much as I did, “Why don't we give them a wide berth just in case?”

  “Hmm, I don't think that's possible. We have to pass right by at least one to get to the spot where Vivi is hopefully meeting us.”

  I let out a huff, “Okay, what's the quickest route that allows us to slip by the least number?”

  “Well, we'd have to go through the place where they brought me—”

  “The staff quarters, right, I remember. They took you there once for a briefing, right?”

  “Yup! That time they showed me that weird cube,” she said with a chuckle.

  I remembered that from looking through her memories. The cube had battered her lockbox of a mind. It was a crude tool designed to… well, I wasn't sure if it was actually designed or if it just ended up like that, but it basically forced those who laid eyes on it to spill their secrets as if their private life were having a fire sale.

  Luckily for me, brute force wasn’t all that effective at bypassing the lockbox design. You needed several shared secrets of ours to even have a chance of getting through it.

  They didn’t even bother trying to show me the cube. I’m fairly certain Atlas knew I’d end up bricking it just by looking at it. I’d apparently wrecked a few of the test objects when I first got here—they weren’t very happy about that.

  Once I had caught my breath, we had to loop back to reach the staff quarters. Keeping the Cicada in front of us to act as a canary, we advanced down the hallway at a less brisk pace than before. While we walked, I took the opportunity to fiddle with the living drone’s mind.

  Anyone but me, Aurin, and Vivi were shoot-on-sight targets. It was equipped with a microdart launcher, but I wasn’t quite sure what that launcher was loaded with. It was either a potent neurotoxin or a tranquillizer. They used both varieties as standard-issue munitions.

  If it was the neurotoxin, well, that would be a little ironic, but I didn’t particularly care.

  I also installed the basics of English, so that it would understand commands. Since forgetting to do that last time nearly got us peppered with shrapnel. Interestingly, the drone's buzzing quieted the instant I added language processing.

  Arriving at a service elevator that was luckily still running off some kind of backup power source, we loaded ourselves inside, and Aurin hit the staff housing floor. We'd have to cross through it before descending back to the level that my cell was on. The direct route across this floor would have crossed through dozens of cross marks.

  “Are you doing alright?” Aurin asked.

  “Hmm?” I hummed, only to realize I had started breathing heavily at some point. Oh, right. “Last time I remember being in an elevator… things didn't go so well.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry, things are going to be better this time,” she said, reaching over to squeeze my hand.

  With a ding, the elevator doors opened to a corridor painted red as opposed to the clinical white that I had been living in for the past year. Of course, the staff would get nicer accommodations.

  Taking a step out into the hall, I paused when the surface my foot came into contact with was wet and sticky. That’s when the smell of blood hit my nose.

  Stepping back into the elevator, I raised my arm to keep the door held open.

  “Go, Cicada, make sure it’s safe for us, then come on back,” I said. It scampered out into the hallway, blood tracked all over its little claws.

  Aurin had already frozen stock still. I had tried to keep her at least somewhat innocent of… well, everything not relevant to me. She didn’t need to remember the things she did before she became my project. The things that landed her a death sentence.

  “I can get rid of this after we’re out of here,” I said.

  “No. It’s okay, I want to remember,” she replied, her voice cracking as she spoke.

  I let out a sigh, “Alright, but if you get traumatized by this shit, you can only blame yourself.”

  Standing there staring into the hallway, lit only by flashing lights as sirens blared in the background, I allowed myself to ponder whether this was all worth it.

  I mean, obviously Atlas staff were complicit in making my life miserable, so they had forsaken their right to existence. My moral system was simple like that. I had a lot of time to think before Aurin came into my life, and at some point, I'd decided to stop putting up with bullshit. You fuck with me, and that's it, one strike and you're out.

  It's more the fact that before all of this, I leaned towards being a strict utilitarian. The people outside this facility didn't ever do anything to me, and they deserved all the happiness in the world. Did Vivi just release hundreds of the kinds of things that would cause the scene in front of me for a worthwhile cause? Or was it just for the hell of it?

  Thinking this through, it didn't make sense for me to be the only target here. Unless Vivi was just an eldritch being, playing around, while being so far above us mortals that… wait, no, I wasn't mortal either. I keep forgetting that I stopped aging some time ago.

  Aurin placed a hand on my head, interrupting my thought spiral, “The drone is back, Ren.”

  Blinking a couple of times, I saw the Cicada staring up at me. It was now completely bathed in blood, as if it had dove into a pool of it.

  “Huh, that's odd,” I said, as I dove into its memories. It wasn't long before I found what was creating all the gore, and the only thing I could do was apply my palm to my face.

  Why the fuck would they keep that near the living quarters?!

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