Chapter 175 – Walkies

If I can stop one heart from breaking,I shall not live in vain;If I can ease one life the aching,Or cool one pain,Or help one fainting robinUnto his nest again,I shall not live in vain.

– Emily Dickinson

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I just sat there, for a long time. Feeding the broth into my mouth, paying attention only to the taste, including the occasionally weird ones from the various wing-building additives.

Sonde sat halfway in, halfway out her blind inside my Quanta, still digesting her first in-body experience. She'd gone back to being a highly complex bundle of signal patterns and potentials spread across neurons, but she had also adopted some of the mannerisms she'd learned when she was more literally the brain of a physical body: Her recorders were clustered into something vaguely head-like atop a long neck, which she would sway along axons to recreate something akin to a neural Doppler effect to entertain herself.

Tynea held her silence, thankfully. If she'd spoken up, I thought I might've exploded. But after the unwelcome and unhealthy adrenaline-dump from fears I couldn't put holes into, I kinda needed the mental nothingness.

It let my brain work things out in the background, which in turn rewarded me with a semblance of calm. Leah still liked me. I wrapped that certainty around my shoulders like a stole, and it quieted the remaining emotional roughage in my gut.

She hadn't let Tynea's finger-on-the-scales in our early relationship bother her—rather, she'd acted entirely unsurprised. That reminded me of her words back during my first confrontation with Tynea:

Your AI isn't out to fuck with you. She's just, you know, got different priorities.

She seemed to roll with the punches so easily.

Or, if I were quite honest with myself, I might just have some particularly badly placed hangups for my AI to deal with. Incompatibilities.

Once I was all done with the broth, I decided I could do with a walk. More busywork for the body that didn't require any focus. More time for the mind to digest the last hour.

I walked into the roomy cabin, where Leah was once more ensconced within her piloting pod. Its furnishing really looked insanely comfortable—so lush even a top 500 CEO might have to break the bank for something to match it.

But the moment I entered the room, she got up and met me with a hug. I let myself sink into it for a few seconds, so glad for her to be who she was. Attentive enough to see behind the curtains of the mind, and mature enough to not be weirded out by what she found.

How different everything might've been, how much worse, if she'd turned out to be some kinda manipulator instead.

Guess I'm still kinda morose.

I returned her squeeze and stepped back to tell her, "Gonna go for a walk, okay? I'll bring the gear."

"Gotcha," she replied, ruffling the hair at the side of my head. When I leaned a little into her palm, she gave me a very cute smile, and that too, felt like a balm. Another knot inside me loosened. "Need me to stop the spiders?"

"Nah. Slow down a bit, though. I'll be back in an hour."

"Okay. I'll have 'em keep an easy trot, then."

I nodded and leaned in for another hug, which Leah met with an easy grace. Then I grabbed Sonde's massive drone, which buzzed its wings again until I'd settled it in my arms, and moved down the corridor towards the boarding ramp where I'd stowed my gear. The Auxiliant's hovering gun module was ready and waiting for me; it pinged my UI with a warning that it was down to 42% fuel. Gonna have to fill that up when I return, then.

Leah's Frankenstein biodrone bodyguard sat collapsed in a corner of the boarding ramp's airlock, appearing asleep with its metabolism slowed way down. Its little wiggler with the eye hung like a wilted flower and failed entirely to respond to my presence.

I'd leave it, in case Leah wanted to take a moment outside, too.

The Chrysaora's battleskirt was simple enough to equip, and so was the Auxiliant's tech jacket. The Second Wind's many straps and tubes were manageable by dint of being motorized and programmed to maneuver themselves into the correct configuration on my arms.

Lastly, I unclipped the Raptor's Dance javelin from its bracket in the ceiling and had it hover along as well. It was all kinds of neat that Leah had thought of me and my stuff in her Moving Castle designs.

Ready for our war walk, I stepped into the airlock and let it cycle. It was a tiny, well-lit room, lots of smooth and hydrophobic surfaces, made to be aggressively clean. The cycle took a few seconds, but then I was free; smacked in the face by winds and a melange of ocean and river scents. The giant moth in my arms began wriggling the moment the unruly air currents hit its wings and set off hardwired reflexes made for navigating those.

The ramp lowered itself a few meters, but it didn't touch the coastal road we were traveling along. I'd be jumping off.

The Implacable's great legs churning the air to either side was an imposing sight, and loud—yet most of the noise came from the air they were whipping through, not the machinery and electronics animating the beast itself. Waves of beaten air sent rhythmic pressure across my sensilla, creating blurry shadows and sharp contrasts in my spatial view.

It was enough stimulation to attract Sonde's attention, who excitedly began feeding herself into the drone yet again. Seemed like she was far from done exploring things today.

To our right lay the expanse of the river, currents still choppier from Dervish's storm than I suspected they ought to be.

To our left, parched forests clung to tiny, rocky hills, dying the death of a slowly collapsing climate. Couldn't find so much as a brook carrying fresh water, yet there was one cluster of suspiciously healthy trees in one of the many modest valleys. Sometimes, the Antithesis didn't even bother to hide their presence.

I decided to go check it out.

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Along the way there, Sonde was entirely dedicated to exploring everything. I'd set the Auxiliant to accompany her to keep her safe from surprise Nines and the like, while she flitted from dying tree to scraggly bush and back again, employing feelers, claws, and a long tube of a tongue to investigate every last crack she found.

I walked slowly, Raptor's Dance in hand, and paid special attention to my own body. How I moved, what my muscles felt like, what my tail and wing arms did to my balance.

I spent a lot more time padding on my toes these days, even with my wing arms held close against my back and sides—all the extra limbs with their extra weight had shifted my center of gravity backwards, and I'd gotten used to compensating by leaning forward a little.

The bum leg had pretty much finished healing—it didn't feel noticeably weaker than my uninjured one, but the added attention I'd been paying over the last few days made me realize that my legs had changed to accommodate the new limbs, too.

From my calves all the way up to my glutes, my muscles were considerably more defined and larger, which I'd have expected from the workout they were getting, even if the gain was a little sudden and fast. But I had invested in alien muscles for my new body, so I wasn't too surprised. Just happy to see the more practical side of that upgrade as well.

Yet my ankles and knees were a little bigger and sturdier, too, and that wasn't as explainable. I didn't mind it, and in fact thought it'd be the difference between chronic pain from that compensatory lean, and remaining healthy a few months down the line, but I also didn't know where the changes came from.

My first emotional response to the impulse of asking Tynea about it was a grumpy, testy one. I didn't want to deal with the bitch living in my head for the moment. But…well.

She wasn't going to go anywhere.

There was plenty of time to work some of the frustration out on the nest of the Antithesis we were approaching, along with the rest of the deep-seated shock Tynea had given me with her confession.

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The first sign of Antithesis indeed being present, was a lone model One. It was perched against a tree's trunk still two dozen meters away, head stuck inside a hollow.

Searching for late-year nestlings, perhaps? I couldn't hear anything scrabbling around though, not even with my sensitive antennae, so I figured it wouldn't find anything.

Either way, I wound up a javelin throw with a long step, let my hips and torso rotate like the throwing arm of a trebuchet, and let my arm snap forward like its sling, fingers guided into a good release by muscle memory built during my dream training.

The loosed javelin described a flat arc through the air, rising just slightly above the alien at its apex. There was just a moment where I thought I might miss when the One perked up. It jerked its head from the hollow at the speartip's approaching whistle, but a snatched heartbeat saw it pierced by my spear.

The weapon's momentum forced its fragile neck against the hollow's rim. Shattering bones echoed mutely from inside the hollow, a twisted sound finding contorted twins in its own reflected sound waves.

My moth dragon's buzz told me I'd have to move quickly to get there before Sonde did—the thing's talons were still twitching, my javelin's edges were deceptively sharp, and this wasn't how I wanted the young dataform to build personal familiarity with physical pain.

Indeed, I barely had time to extract the weapon and stab the flying alien one last time, before Sonde parked herself on the trunk right above me and tried to stick her head inside. Chuckling, I planted a palm against her face and held her back while I hummed gently into the hollow.

Sonde stilled as the echoes hit our antennae and gave our spatial senses something to work with. It was some animal's old nest, stinky, moldy muck stuck to the bottom, with the walls quite smoothed over. There were disintegrating egg shells still inside—decades old, probably. Some other bits that might once have been some feathers' stems.

I sighed. "Seems like whatever species used this kinda bolt hole has gone well extinct," I whispered. "Damn Antithesis."

My little big moth didn't care much. Instead, she began buzzing her wings in a way I realized mirrored my earlier humming, trying to copy my echolocation.

It didn't take her long at all to figure it out either, and soon I had to dampen her loudly vibrating membranes with my hands while I explained that we didn't want to be giving our location away just yet.

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We got moving again before long. The One's cadaver had begun sweating its death hormones, and that was something all Antithesis were keyed to. Smelled it like sharks would smell blood in water—from very far away, and in very small amounts.

It put us on a timer, and we also didn't want to stick around and risk soaking in the scent; no way could we surprise their nest if we stank of their own death.

As we closed in on said nest, I transmitted coordinates that told Sonde where I wanted her to station herself. High above the trees, well beyond the range of any Four's tentacles, and with plenty of distance to any Ones, too.

She followed instantly and without distraction—I realized quickly that that was because I'd given pretty direct instructions. The bud had grown up feeding on me and my psyche after all. She was conditioned by her own nature to follow where I went, figuratively in the form of adhering to my commands, and literally in a physical sense.

Something to keep an eye on, I promised myself. Kids were supposed to grow up and become independent at some point. I had no clue if that applied to beings like Sonde, but if it did, I wouldn't want to wake up one day realizing I was steamrolling her.

Was there such a thing as teenager cogitants? And even if not—would that mishap with my bionites, all those few days ago when they accidentally jailbroke the Quanta, change that?

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