Chapter 159 – Sgt. Stabby Reloaded; Act I

Idle humming—interspersed with small explosions and the repeated hissing of a graffiti spray can—echoes throughout the majestic entrance hall of the NewsMediaTainment Group headquarters.

Not a single one of the hundred or so office drones present so much as dares breathe, let alone interrupt the mad monkey masquerading as a retired badass in his fifties, salt-and-pepper hair included, by the name of Road Rash.

The spray can in his hand hisses again as he drops, drawing the vertical line of the second T in IT'S THE BATTLEPOET, BITCH! onto the wall.

Grinning to himself and bobbing his head, he hits the floor with a bounce, only to fire himself back up to the top of the wall by exploding the small autoreloading charge in his landmine-integrated feet.

Soon, the letter H graces the wall, but he isn't yet done.

More Road Rash-propelling explosions ring through the gigantic space.

Who needs a High-Explosive Pogostick, if one could just put the explosives directly in their heels instead? Or ladders, for that matter.

Road Rash chuckled to himself, "Hah. The Battlepoet's close-quarters explosive habits are an absolute blast to emulate."

– Road Rash, paying a cordial visit to the headquarters of a news organization particularly recalcitrant about adopting Tinea's preferred moniker. They, unfortunately, weren't particularly criminal. Not enough to warrant laser-tattooed foreheads, at least.

⁂

Afterglow or not, I hadn't failed to notice the way that Leah's expression still went a bit tense every time her eyes brushed past the medical bodysleeve we'd kept glued to the wall of our cabin. In easy reach meant in easy view too, unfortunately.

I'd decided to do something about Leah's hangups with bladed implements, and so I sat in the bunk, Sleeve across my lap, injured tail wrapped in breathing plastic and slowly regrowing. I hadn't yet decided if I wanted to replace the mechanical parts of the spinneret once that regrew, too.

Leah's trauma didn't seem too difficult an issue to solve, since she was plagued more by a nebulous, unprocessable idea of what must have been done to her while she was unconscious, than an event she actively remembered. It rested on the questions surrounding the unhealed cuts in the back of her throat after she'd woken and realized they'd taken her voice, and the stinging in the blind sockets of her stolen eyes.

Injuries we'd healed almost immediately after I'd freed her. But I wanted the trauma gone too, gone for good. If I could help her digest that nebulous fear with something, say, comical, then, I hoped, she'd be much better off for it.

There was also a tiny little Tinea somewhere inside of me, who was rather tickled at the thought of being responsible for more of Leah's healing. I patted her head, and carefully set aside that idea for the shrink.

'Hmm,' she thinks and scratches her chin, I thought to myself, and scratched my chin. Indeed, much thinkage necessary. Sgt. Stabby Reloaded shouldn't just be a joke. He should also make a nice bodyguard and medic.

And not just for our trip to what Leah had promised was a much nicer cabin inside one of her bigly spiders, but hopefully for the rest of Leah's long life.

Though that would be the perfect time to let her see what it could do, all while still surrounded by the rather intimidating number of guns across her entire army.

First, I bought a set of surprisingly cheap scalpels—special only in that they were made of an oxymoronic material we didn't have on Earth yet. Nonbrittle ceramics.

Earth did have several brands that sold a material they called elastic ceramic, but really, the stuff had a fracture toughness only a third of mundane carbon steel. The blades Tynea sold me were different; they had the sharp edge of the finest ceramics, without any of the fragility.

Freddy Krueger Jr. got a snazzy set of ten, one for each finger. Funnily enough, they counted as bottom-tier Class I surgery tools, so I didn't even have to unlock an extra catalog.

Hmm.

A few exploratory swipes with his arm revealed that Mr. Faceripper was simply too light to fight; a literal featherweight. His entire body whipped about like stiff cardboard whenever I waved one of his limbs.

He was also hollow. Weapons were heavy and needed a place to go.

I one-plus-one'd, and got over 9000.

Perfect.

Opening him up, I saw the band of electric probes, including the invasive jacks that would insert themselves in a patient's spine, and remembered that the Sleeve was supposed to run off of a mix of muscle activity and nerve signals.

Which meant I'd need either a surrogate body to steer the thing, or a computer system that could interface with the…interface.

That would also hold the combat software.

"Tynea," I asked via the Quanta, "can I buy biological drones?"

Certainly. What are you looking for?

I patted the Sleeve. "A brain in a jar, to pilot the suit when nobody is wearing it. It should still be usable in its clinical role when necessary."

Seeing as you gave it claws, she replied, do you intend to turn the Sleeve into a combatoid?

"Yup. A bodyguard."

And you want it to still be occupiable?

"Yup. In case of emergencies."

Hmm. How much do you want to spend on this project?

Eh. This wasn't supposed to be a whole thing. But on the other hand…biodrones could be useful for other things, down the line. Sonde, and any of her siblings that may or may not already be developing, would probably want to be able to visit us out here.

If, metaphorically, my head was their planet Earth, they'd need the equivalent of spacesuits. For us, a space walk meant canning some Earth environment and making it portable. For them it would mean traveling from within a bit of Tinea brain, in the form of some sort of drone.

But… "We're kinda low on points at the moment. A few hundred, a thousand at most—" a quick look at our points counter, currently stuck at around ten thousand, had me add, "if you think we'll make 'em back today."

That should not be an issue. Dervish's floods will have caught only some percent of the landlocked Antithesis. She was after those in the river.

"Speaking of which, is she still playing with the weather?"

She is. It'll take a few more hours of evacuating water for the river to develop the currents she's looking for. I don't expect that you'll see more convenient fighting conditions before noon tomorrow.

It was currently midnight. The delay was a bit annoying, considering Leah had so clearly expressed her desire to go home, but maybe the fun we'd just had helped take the edge off the pressure.

Still, any distraction I could provide would be nice.

"Alright, give it a thousand, Tynea."

Understood. That will give us some leeway for the fusion of medical and martial capabilities. They'll remain rather…inelegant, however. Would it be acceptable to forgo occupiability in favor of simpler second-party medicals?

"Huh? Why?"

The Sleeve is a clinical tool. We can convert it into an effective fighter, but seeing as it wasn't designed to be one, the adaptations will need to be extensive. That is fine if we use the full volume of its insides. But if we're required to compromise there, then the conversion itself will be compromised.

"Half-assed?"

…Indeed. Such conversions should always be…fully assed.

"I see." I nodded wisely.

It would be easy to give the Sleeve a medical autopurchase module, however. These are autonomously restocking magazines, which would allow whatever medic routines we install in the drone to buy, say, another Sleeve and an injection of medical nanites to save an injured person. It would let the Sleeve outsource some of those emergency capabilities you wish to preserve.

"Come to think of it, it might've been a bad idea to shove an injured person inside Dr. Knifemurder anyway, considering the acrobatics I want him to do."

Oh? What were you picturing?

"Well," I began, smiling with amusement…

⁂

A spike of stratego-meteorological synesthesia intruded on Dolores's VintagePoker session, to warn her of progressing real-world conditions detected by her AFK routines. She followed up with a quick scan across the information, and decided that her attention was warranted.

Dolores discretely glanced around the noir room, taking in the carefully composed and beautifully made-up faces of her friends. Then she stood and folded her hand of cards, forsaking a quarter of her winnings as per the rules of unplanned disengagement.

Everyone else perked up, too, as she spawned a hologram of the map above the table.

Might be she could get her forsaken chips back if she could distract everyone else with something interesting enough to take a break from the game…and if not, well, couldn't blame her for trying.

Ah, but she'd need to be careful not to tip her, heh, hand, or her friends would finish the game on principle. She even refrained from undoing the underclocking of her auxiliary Social Processing cyberbrain, though it would've enhanced her gambit in other ways.

Motion around the table quietened as the holomap spun into view. It was centered on her spot in the river, with a variety of color-coded lines representing the various currents moving throughout the St. Lawrence River.

A clear macropattern was beginning to develop, many blue lines running closer and tighter together, shading slowly past yellow and into the red as they neared the massive steaming bowl in which Dolores's body rested.

"That's not just a little whirlpool," someone muttered, slowly twirling her artificial mustache.

Dolores didn't answer, didn't even glance at the culprit, only at the hundreds of thousands of icons signifying little Antithesis critters getting pulled in by that whirlpool. She let the silence weigh on the room as she leaned on the table, and coincidentally rested her hand just so near the big, yellow, Escalate button.

If she could get someone else to suggest a break to watch her do whatever she was going to do, she'd lose none of her winnings so far and could rejoin the game later.

But one wrong cue and they'd…anchor out of spite. Truly, social-engineering a table of smartasses was its own mini-game.

⁂

Smiling happily, I watched as Leah's Big Brother drone lifted the new module into the uncovered receiver unit of the Sim Cell. Orange lights were flashing in the opening—the age-old caution signal around moving machinery. Almost as iconic as the blue color of the BSOD.

Quantum comms! We had 'em!

No more radiosilence 'cause of some stupid Nerd putting rivers where they don't belong!

For real! Tsk. Newfangled weatherfucking gadgets. In my day. Hmph.

Our comms would still be pretty limited, though—without investing at least one more token into a Class II Quantum Networks catalog, we were restricted to pairwise communication. Leah had even had to unlock an extra sidegrade catalog that allowed my Quanta's organic-analog comms to connect to her technological transceiver, but at least that was only Class I and didn't cost her any tokens—not that she could've afforded anything else, she was already back at zero just with the Class II Basic Nonwaveform Communications catalog.

I still had two, even with the Class II Biodrones unlock to transform Chief Kittyclaws's insides into biodrone innards, since Tynea had rewarded my eradication of the Nines with one token.

We still didn't have Mesh access, or access to any other samurai for that matter, but oh well. That could wait until we had more points to spare.

Between Sir Stabfast and the nonwaveform communications upgrade, we were kinda low again. Just five thousand points remaining, between the both of us. I'd be getting a bit nervous about future upgrades and home fortification if we didn't still have lots of Antithesis-killing ahead of us.

Leah was a little less sanguine than myself—she'd seen my newest side project get up and jump out the airlock—but I just leaned into her and stroked her back. She was aware I had something genuinely fun planned with him and trusted me enough to try and curb her anxiety around that entire thing.

That kind of open-mindedness was very promising, I thought—those Memory Seals had really done wonders for us, letting us explore our hangups instead of staying stuck.

The new module finally slid home with a satisfying clunk and activated to run whatever tests it needed to declare itself functional.

Leah and I waited a little longer for the thing to finish, sitting together on the airlock's rim, enjoying the mostly peaceful atmosphere. She'd piped the outside audio of the ongoing rainfall inside Daddy-Long-Legs's cabin, and only the occasional gunshot taking out some newly arrived Antithesis pierced the vibe.

The fun I had planned had my feet kicking, and my anticipatory joy was slowly infecting Leah too, uneasy as she still was.

I decided that, Nerdy shenanigans or not, it really was a good day.

Uh, night, rather.

Really early morning? The clock did read zero thirty.

⁂