Chapter 147 – Sentinel Decennial
"If I go through anymore character development, I'm gonna turn into the villain."
– Dolores, also known as the Dervish
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The only reason her hands weren't shaking, Leah figured as she lay inside her pod, was because they weren't made of flesh.
Her stressed breathing echoed off the panels around her nonetheless. It built like pressure in her ears, put her on edge, forced her to fight a rising panic. So, she dug obsessively into the sensor feeds of Tinea's tremor-sensing worms.
Sharp spikes shot across the graphs, but they all matched the echoes of distant explosions, timed with the impact of her own shells. There was also the constant drumming of Antithesis limbs striking the ground as they marched, but simple triangulation put them miles away.
Nothing beneath, nowhere close.
The confirmation of her safety released a little of the jittery tension keeping her brain in checkmate.
She flipped her attention to their points counter. 60588. It dropped to almost zero, only to climb back up quickly. Thousands of points every second.
Tinea'd already killed hundreds of thousands of model Ones, but the swarms weren't losing size. There were millions up there, and more reinforcing them in neverending streams from beyond the horizon.
Leah sighed—she was forced to sit back and wait for her girlfriend to get the points-based snowball rolling and building into an avalanche, and beyond using the range of her biggest gun to pick away at the Antithesis, there wasn't much she could do. Yet.
She just…hadn't quite realized how much she hated being stationary and vulnerable ever since that monster had broken the illusion of her Hatchet's superiority. The Memory Seal's blunting and the ability to check and check again for ambushes was probably the only reason she wasn't outright panicking.
At least Dolores was as good as her word, mowing down alien spawner after alien spawner beneath the river. It gave Leah confidence that they could see this incursion to its end.
Soon, she told herself as she fiddled once more with the blueprint for Daddy-Long-Legs's big brothers, soon.
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"Whooo! Four-twenty no-scope!" Gabby crowed to the laughter of the rest of their circle of friends, each one along for the ride from various corners of the world, their bodies at rest in high-end Class I Deep-Dive Somaports gifted by Dervish as thanks for the lovely samurai name.
Dolores snorted as she completed her twirl across the riverbed and aborted the births of several more fresh model Threes—appropriately graceful, for a proper Nerd did not disrespect the model she roleplayed, and Guild Wars 1's dervish was indeed a class of practiced and elegant reverence.
"Gabby. My scythe doesn't even have a scope."
Her voice echoed strangely inside the compressed air bubble—a side effect of holding back thousands of tons of river water with her Class III 'God's Domain' Mass-Field Regulator. The combination of pressure and heat was enough to ignite the plant matter around her on its own, if that reaction weren't being held in check by her Class III 'Twisting Nature' Wide-Area Gas Recombinator.
It was noticeable in other ways, too—movement faced more drag, there was a strange, alien buoyancy to everything in the dense air, and the Antithesis and their birthing sacks had a tendency to shrivel as their internal moisture was sucked out by the dry, compressed air.
"That's what I said!" Dervish's cheeky sister-at-Nerd yelled.
Dolores was already deep into the collapsed kelp forest, seeking more alien fetuses and nest-nodes to butcher before the sliced birthing sack's lower halves could hit the silt.
"Uh-huh," she deadpanned, carving another neat spiral through a tangle of raisin-looking, xenoformed kelp.
A spike of density against the repelling field's boundary warned her of a more powerful intrusion onto the battleground. Dervish's decade-long experience with fighting the Antithesis immediately had her hackles up, even if, realistically speaking, nothing here was strong enough to threaten her. Not yet, and not for several days of active fighting that would see the hives pouring resources into growing truly dangerous, dedicated models capable of hunting the kind of continent-wrecking power Class III Vanguard had access to.
Still, she shunted her playmates' somatic passenger-stream into her sixth and auxiliary Class III 'Cyberbrain' Neural Coagent, where they were reduced to accompanying her through audio and video. She'd expected the grumbling and booing that followed their loss of the stream's physical aspect, but…letting them ride her body during fun and empowering excursions was very different from exposing them to somatic injury and, Grenth forbid, Dolores's actual death.
They didn't deserve to lose that particular kind of innocence. Socially awkward she might be and unable to fit in, she was still a defender at heart, not a youngster driven to irresponsible endangerment of others in an attempt to prove herself.
Distracting Gabby with commentary along the lines of, "And my next move is gonna be a triple backflip three-sixty no-breathe, since we're apparently just making things up now," Dervish exited the always-on simulation that let her be just Dolores, let her experience a normal human's holistic existence.
Her eight coagents, each more powerful than any one human brain, ceased pretending to be no more than mundane zones in a mundane brain…and then there was the Sentinel Decennial, the Eight-Brain Hive seated in her Class III 'Ghost In The Shell' Identity Crèche, She Who Was Not Human. Dolores, occupied with entertaining her friends, withdrew from the Identity Crèche and into the auxiliary Cyberbrain. Sentinel was left with only the faintest traces of emotion to form a motivation and goal around.
But that was enough to act as an antidote to the cold disconnect that came with being estranged from hormonal biology itself, enough to preserve motivations and therefore unprogrammed agency.
"You won't," Gabby goaded inside the simulation. "No pixels, no glory."
Dolores snorted again, and then—because she was a Nerd with a capital N—actually did the damn backflip. Her friends erupted in cheers. Her kill count erupted by three dozen. The half-grown Antithesis erupted into a whole lot of violently bisected regret.
With only one-eighth of herself occupied with being Dolores, Sentinel directed her attention towards the intruder.
Power crashed through the wiring of her active sensors as she opened the 'Pious Renewal' Capacitor Network's floodgates, and, spewing a torrent of energy, she scanned the area of the intrusion.
As her suite of Class III Blink Sensors teleported the echoes home, she employed her third and seventh coagent Cyberbrains to analyse them with the same ease a person might twitch a finger. Number three, Sensory Cortex & Perceptual Systems, was responsible for tracking her senses putting together a coordinated picture. Number seven, Occipital & Temporal Lobes, mapped the sensory data onto the environment and built a list of targets.
Number eight, the Parietal Lobe, analysed the map and prepared tactical approaches towards each item on that list.
The storm of charged energies had grilled the skin of something. Something as large as a house, trying to hide in a crevice as it crept closer. Sinuous, snakey, even against the massive drag caused by the heavy atmosphere. But as its skin flashed into burnt plant-matter smoke, ablated by Sentinel's active sensory barrage, it flinched away, kicking up muddy silt.
Her Mass-Field Regulator tore the water from the mud the moment it rose above the wet river bed. The silt turned into dust so dry it stuck to the bleeding, burnt skin of the thing. It fled on eight spidery legs, entirely without turning its four large eyes, milky with injured cataracts, away from her in a cloud of sand that didn't want to settle anymore.
There was more cheering for Dolores, who did react appropriately, but for Sentinel, that all was rather in the background. Relegated to the sidelines inside her sixth Cyberbrain; Language & Communication Centers handling linguistic and social processing, along with the social scripts. It was perpetually underclocked lest Dolores would be too socially capable to match who she used to be before she'd unlocked Class III, and whom her friends got to know all those years ago.
The first Cyberbrain, Prefrontal Cortex, integrated what she'd sensed with her recordings on the Antithesis, and spat out an identifier along with a list of its capabilities and high-level directives: [Model Thirty-Three, assassin hunter, stealth-capable. Aquatically adapted with swimming membranes spanning between the legs. Rapid mobility, extreme regeneration. Known weakness: brain at the back of the head, near the neck. Immobilize, dispatch, ash the corpse immediately. Personal threat level: negligible. Threat level to allies: lethal.]
Danger evaluated and found ultimately lacking, Sentinel unobtrusively altered strands of the simulation until it was as though it had always been one with reality and the triple backflip three-sixty no-breathe felt a lot more real. Dolores regained substance, first tinging Sentinel's world with the colors of connection, then taking over entirely.
As always, to Sentinel it was a secret relief, constructed from residual emotions, to escape that strange otherness of a reality too frank and arithmetic and dead for the sensibilities of a person who had begun life as a sack of meat, and a satisfaction to see her purpose fulfilled.
"Oooh, we're back?! We're so back, girls!" the cheerleading Gabby yelled as Dolores reinstated the somatic elements.
"Adymra," Dolores prompted, "chains for eight limbs, please."
Naturally. They will be ready on command.
"Good."
In the absence of the higher cognitive awareness that the Sentinel Decennial possessed, Dolores relied instead on her Class III 'Pious Concentration' Neural Coagent Network Manager to automate the alien aspects of her Cyberbrains. She used artificial instincts stored in number five, Memory Systems, to modify her scythe's head and add a long stake on top.
Something to pin the creature down with once she got close enough.
Another barrage of probing energy, powerful enough to be a weapon, flash-dried the sand sticking to the Thirty-Three as it tried to sneak up on Dolores from another direction. Its half healed skin ignited anew and it flinched away once more, but she kept the deluge of charged rays going, cooking it from the outside.
The hunter alien adapted instantly. Instead of attempting another retreat followed by another futile ambush, it rapidly closed the distance even as its freshly healed lenses went cloudy again, their proteins clumping into uselessness under the withering forces.
Its leading claws mowed in a low arc towards Dervish, who responded with yet another iconic twirl that put her scythe's blade between the claws and her legs. She pulsed her Class III 'Fleeting Stability' Gravity Hook to become immovable, fixed within the Earth's gravity field, and her weapon's edge effortlessly amputated the Thirty-Three's talons.
"Sah! Sah! Yalla!" Yasmin cheered across the stream, entirely taken by Dervish's fantasy blend of North-East African and Middle Eastern aesthetics. The tiny Arab was herself born in Neogypt, and Dervish had managed to convert her into a massive fan and avid Nerd player of the samurai's namesake class.
A second set of claws was already heading for Dolores's neck. She pushed lightly off the ground and exploited a synergy between her Gravity Hook, her God's Domain, and her Capacitor Network by hooking into her own mass-field to levitate, and circulated the Network's energy to create a gyroscopic effect. Her floating body rotated around itself in typical videogame fashion to interpose the scythe yet again.
Noticing that nubs of fresh claws were already boiling from the previous amputation, Dervish took the entire lower half of the leg this time.
The torn limb spun free, but the alien's sinuous neck lashed out and it caught the biomass in its maw to recycle for regeneration. When she tried to punish the extension, the alien shrank away on its remaining six legs and skittered sideways like a crab.
It circled her, and Dolores could all but sense the alien thoughts running through its mind as it stared down at her and analyzed their fight. She was going slow, moderating her twirls and spins to sensible speeds so her passengers could actually follow the experience, yet even so, the Thirty-Three just wasn't a challenge.
Smiling, she ceased bombarding it with her probing rays and the barn-sized thing jerked out of range instantly, scuttling away to hide and heal while it wasn't being scanned actively.
It raised another cloud of dust to float on the dense air, but…Dolores didn't mind. Such mundane obstacles couldn't obstruct her advanced senses, and there were plenty of nest nodes for her to slaughter along the way as she calmly, inexorably, pursued the creature.
So she just enjoyed herself, balancing Gravity Hook weightlessness with traction from electric currents running through spools in her soles to recreate the Dervish's moveset perfectly, even when conventional physics didn't want to play ball.
Truly, being a samurai came with a whole lotta new avenues for the cosplaying Nerd.
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