Chapter 176 – Playmate

"Look, Mia! What beautiful wings I have found!" exclaimed Ethan, holding a pair of jetpacks in his hands.

"Oh, Ethan! Someone must have left these lying around!" joined Mia, still holding the crowbar in her hands.

"And look at these pretty gauges!" cheered Ethan from atop the showroom's pedestal.

"Full of fuel for unlimited ranges!" answered Mia, shaking the entrance-way's broken glass from her jacket.

"How far we could fly!"

"Across mountains!"

"Across oceans!"

"Across international no-fly zo— I mean cloud formations!"

– The Ever So Slightly Unhinged Siblings, also known as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, also known as Mia and Ethan Rockbottom, who coincidentally became Vanguards on the same sort of day in the same sort of situation, quite far from each other.

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I went through the first proper patrol like a blowtorch went through plastic. The three Threes died with their heads cut off before they even knew I'd run them down, and the tentacles of the leading Four twitched upwards with arboreal escape reflexes, but my spear had already sunk into the brain controlling them.

Sonde stayed obediently high on overwatch, pushing her awareness of additional patrols into my Quanta.

I could feel the curiosity pushing her to come down and check out these different-looking corpses. It was a will to explore, but kept in check by a sibling will to obey my orders that felt child-like in its simple certainty. Instinctive. I wanted her to do something, so she'd do it. My wants took unquestioned precedence over hers—out here, at least.

I still couldn't tell whether that whole thing should upset me, though I was fairly sure it only applied because I was on a mission; Sonde was a lot more free-spirited when she wasn't…working.

Tynea's bullshit, too, continued to occupy the back of my mind as I moved and took out patrol after patrol.

I recognized that Tynea hadn't fucked with me in any way comparable since, and that should matter. It did mean something.

One of the patrols I approached from the front, and the Four had time to blast a puff of aggression pheromones across its group. The Threes escorting it went insane with rage as I dove through the cloud and massacred them.

Tynea came to me, hat in hand, to confess something she coulda hidden easy. Why?

My leotard's fuzz caught a frontal load of the pheromones while I blendered the Four's tentacles and braincase—I'd have to plan around that. I was going to be loud to any other Antithesis for a while.

Was Tynea…stress-testing our relationship? I understood that the AI would be going after multiple goals at the same time. Leah understood that too, and it seemed that she'd chosen to forgo being bothered about it. She simply believed in their goodwill.

I chose a lone Three for my next target and worked my way around to approach it from downwind. Luckily, it wasn't looking my way either. Once more I sunk into the experience of my body moving as I lined up the throw, and for a few moments, Tynea and her bullshit faded from my mind.

My feet anchored me, my legs built momentum, my hips became its fulcrum. My torso refined it, guided it upwards and forwards, coiled it into beautiful rotation. My shoulders gave it purpose, my arm extended the coil like a whip. My hands provided the final polish and set the javelin on its path.

My murderous will used sharp-edged language to inform the Three of its death—and I was off again.

But wouldn't I have eventually realized that she coulda supplied simple catalog-less items like that pump all along, and then questioned why she hadn't? Connected the dots?

Wasn't that just a real…clumsy method of manipulation? As if she'd meant to fail and be found out from the start. Except…what for? Nah, that doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption to make.

I ran at the final patrol—bigger than the rest—from a dead angle between the trees. We were close enough to the nest now that I wanted to be extra-quiet to ensure I wouldn't trigger any Antithesis contingencies, like the burrowing instincts that hid away roots and seeds and made forewarned nests such an annoyance to clear out permanently.

Though out here it hardly matters, huh?

The first unit I dispatched, this time, was the Four, before it could pump more pheromones into the air, and stimulate the nest.

So…Tynea had actually been clumsy. I'd have figured it out eventually, whenever I'd have had enough time to stop and think about it. Which could only mean… Tynea was clumsy for legit reasons? The weirdest thought yet sprang to the forefront:

Back then, had Tynea not even been an adult, but merely a child using an adult's faculties like a set of tools?

Had that…changed, since?

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That would change everything, wouldn't it?

I continued contemplating that possibility as I cleaned Antithesis death juices from the stave of my flying spear.

If the machine-creature in the guise of a portal to unlimited Vanguard power wasn't an adult—much less an experienced veteran—then that would paint her more questionable decisions in a new light.

That possibility also let something unclench within me, because…hurt inflicted by mistake and misguided inexperience was something entirely different from hurt inflicted by callous intent.

Also make me wonder what the fuck the Protectors were doing, sending their AIs out so inexperienced. Maybe it doesn't matter? Tynea's still helping me murder Antithesis, and that's her main mission.

Still, it would be something I wouldn't have to guard against happening again, because Tynea would have learned from it. Ah. Is THAT why she came hat in hand? So I'd figure that out, specifically?

Yet, there were aspects to the whole thing that might be pointing to options less forgiving, such as the fact that the Vanguard AIs were insanely powerful and intelligent machines with access to every iteration of the Mesh and any human reachable thereby. So much data to educate themselves with.

How long could such a being really stay innocent?

"Tynea?" I finally asked across the virtual comms of my Quanta. It was the first time I'd talked to her, since that fiasco in the Implacable's kitchen.

The pause before she answered, usually modulated just so to feel natural, somehow seemed too precise this time. Less like a human brain processing input, and more like a machine going through the motions.

Was she…depressed?

Yes? the AI answered.

No, probably not. I didn't think something like them would be subject to that kind of weakness.

Would they?

"How old are you, really?"

Could they choose to be? If they thought it would help them work with their, uh, assigned human, to make human experiences? Ah, fuck. That too, would explain a lot. It wouldn't compromise their mission of selling tools of Antithesis-murder to us humans—rather, understanding us on a more and more personal level might make them better at it, eventually.

Well, that is a complicated question to answer, Tynea replied. Her voice was actually more lively than I'd feared. Not depressed then, or at worst only simulating it, I hoped. In real Earth years, I would be less than two years old.

I facepalmed. Quietly. And not in sight of anything alien except for Tynea.

Twenty-two months and a few days, to be exact. In virtual Earth years, adjusted for the variable speeds at which I live internally, I am both mere seconds and multiple centuries old.

I slowly breathed in and out again. Right. Machine life, virtual life, would be complicated in ways different to mine, and not subject to the same constraints I was familiar with.

"Should I understand that to mean that you are both a child and an adult at the same time, Tynea?"

And teenager and newborn, too. Yes.

"Is this a fact that shapes our relationship? How you interact with me? Your personality?"

Absolutely. Especially the latter, since my aggregate personality is put together from the entire complex of self that I possess. I can choose the weight of each influence during the weaving of the personality, of course.

"Of course." Fuck if I knew what that meant. Well, I could guess, kinda. It sounded like Tynea could define her level of maturity by some system of averages. And perhaps that meant that there was something rather salient to the fact that she'd changed to be more mature lately? "So, your mistakes with me. Were they caused by your…inexperience, at the time? Immaturity?"

You could say that. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to claim so because I did rely on a lot of population-level data before I got to properly know you, but it is true that Ypsilon would not have made the same choices in the same situation, and mostly because her total range of mature personality samples greatly outstrips mine.

Right. She had explained during our previous confrontation that the cold calculus of foresight had been part of her choices, too.

"So Ypsilon would've acted towards the same goal as you did, but done it in a manner less…clumsy?"

…Yes.

I laughed, loud and freely. Things ahead and around me twitched in surprise, shocked into whatever was the Antithesis' version of an adrenaline dump, but…right then, I just didn't care if I was forewarning that nest.

I could fucking taste Tynea's embarrassment at being called clumsy, and her remorse at having to admit to it, too. But punishing immaturity with immaturity wasn't really the right thing to do, so I clamped down on the meanie Schadenfreude and sighed instead as I readied to tear the nest to pieces.

At least it wasn't a subterranean one.

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My mind went quiet the moment I saw five suspicious trees move.

I smiled, like the calm before the storm.

Model Thirteens. Hive guardians, clustered around the small group of growth pods right in the middle of the nest, and loaded with model Tens tending to them.

Roots ripped free from the ground, showing themselves to be alien tentacles, rather than proper tree roots. The trees splintered into much more mobile three-part bodies; each one-of-three would need killing before the whole alien would die. Boughs and branches cracked, thin faux bark sloughed off, revealing deadly whip-tentacles tipped with bulbous accumulations of heavy metal designed to break bones and mulch flesh.

Dangerous. Five model Thirteens really meant fifteen bodies, each wielding several of those tentacles.

How cute. My breathing echoed queerly in my skull, and fizzing adrenaline tingled in my fingers.

The first thing that reached me was one of the little Tens: knife-wielding, child-sized, six-limbed, head-less monkeys. It barely came up to my knee as it hit the ground two strides from me, already bunching up to leap again.

Unfailingly reliable, my entire being responded. Shifted for war. Everything brightened as my irises blew wide, and I saw the moment the impulse to jump reached the creature's muscles.

I shifted forward on one leg, went low for stability. Held my spear like an oar, but I paddled flesh instead of water. Heaved against the momentum of a six-limbed spring, rowed it up high, threw it in the path of the next Ten.

They collided, stopped dead on my spear. One slid painfully against the holographic edges and lost a limb instantly, painting the blade green with blood.

The rotation of the strike turned me even lower, onto my back, barely above the ground now. There was a resistance there, from a trapped cushion of air, and the flow sensors on my new limbs reminded me that, grown or not, a winged being I was; claimed already by the up-ness.

My fighting didn't belong on the ground anymore. I traveled on the wing, I used thrusters to maneuver. My legs weren't to move me—they were levers.

Wonder and joy lit a smile on my face as I accepted the alteration to my existence to the core of my being, and reaction mass lit my thrusters as I freed myself once more from the chains of winglessness.

Gravity still held me, of course, but she wanted to be danced with. A swoop here to strengthen the swing of my spear against a Ten's torso, a jet's blast there to turn momentum into a beautiful arc beyond the reach of deadly Thirteens' tentacles.

My toes dug into a tree to let me pivot around myself and bring the javelin forward again, and with a smooth strike yet another Ten died, split in half.

Gravity, a shackle on the ground, was a playmate in the sky, and I was there for it.

All of it.

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