Godclads-Chapter 14Book 35: Jailbreakers (V)

Though we stand at a threshold between science and wonder, where all forms of expression—be they biological, neurological, or technological—leave us liberated and free to discover who we might be and whom we might become, there are limitations to our freedoms that end, figuratively, at our noses.

We may do whatever we wish to our own shells, to our own minds, but to go beyond that—to utilize our own egos as weapons—is something beyond the pale.

This motion puts forth a few hard lines to the laws of ego-splicing and forking. For those actions, though recognized by the broader polities, and though clone pods and self-ego gestalts have recently gained rights under Provision 937394, we must continue to enforce the limitations behind offensive ego-forking.

For instance, the use of override munitions—also known as Cog-Infector rounds—should be outright banned. The infection of another’s sense of self and its conversion to a standard-template ego must be regarded as tantamount to murder.

This, more than anything, should be a priority offense recorded by our Prefects and met with the highest penalty possible.

-Edict on Ego-Splitting and Non-Consensual Cloning

35-14

Jailbreakers (V)

Heavy Iron fired over and over again, high explosives painting the battlefield and rising columns of fire. This proved useful for Draus as she advanced. Hiding under the cover of the bombardment, she glided through the trenches, slaughtering entire squads on her own. So focused were they on trying to make it to the mountain alive that they didn’t see the wolf infiltrating their den.

An unofficial competition manifested in her head—a duel between her and this so-called proto-EGI. She wanted to see how fast she could kill compared to it. Sure, it had the distance, the informational supremacy, even an overwhelming firepower advantage, but she had subtlety. She was among her enemies, in their soft, supple underbelly, carving her way through. Most squads never saw her coming, and that was an advantage greater than any firepower supremacy. When there is no screen, it’s easy to sink the knife in. freēwēbηovel.c૦m

She didn’t kill most of them with her guns. Rather, she simply tore through them. Using her raw strength and a fabricated mono-knife, she carved through the gaps in their armor as she strained her reflex booster, blurring through the trenches as she cast rising plumes of crimson mist into the air. The drones were the greater problem, but they had to keep low as well. Low, because if they hovered beyond the trenches, Heavy Iron would show them the folly of their exis one was smoking—looked like Heavy Iron tence.

As such, they came apart before the Regular as well—bursting as her projectile launcher zipped through their chassis, leaving their launchers and weapons systems salvageable.

Eventually, she found herself behind one of the massive excavation units pushing for the mountain. This one was smoking—looked like Heavy Iron had put multiple shots clean through a small gap in the front side of its armor. Some other repurposed industrial diggers were also dead in the water, their internal machinery grinding with guttural screams. Yet, more units came over the horizon, more soldiers spawning in, seemingly arriving from nowhere.

The scene was surreal, nightmarish in some capacity, and even before Draus sensed the wrongness, Avo spoke: [I don’t think this simulation is something that Heavy Iron can win. Might be designed for attrition. Designed for them to lose. This particular sim-session has been running for… 7313 years.]

Draus paused as she dropped a trachea she’d ripped from a soldier’s neck. There was something unpleasant about killing these people. They were less than gutter rats, less than enforcers working for some syndicate too close to baseline—like slaughtering flats. No pleasure in this anymore. No pleasure in it at all. She might as well have been murdering babes in their cradles.

She wondered how Heavy Iron felt about them.

[I think I see the invader’s misery—their point.]

“What point is that?” Draus said. “So life was vicious to them. So what? Look at existence, look at what encompasses the totality of reality. Things are broken. The world wants you dead. The least you can do is shoot back.”

[The Prefect, it seems, wants Heavy Iron to sacrifice itself—to die fighting.]

“Don’t see nothing wrong with that,” Draus said.

[Yes, but you want this. Unlike everyone here, you chose this.]

[Heavy Iron… it is proto-AGI, a genius slave.] Avo paused. [Genius slave, forced to be a weapon, forced to slaughter so many. Why should it sacrifice itself? Why should it die for the bioforms or serve the humans, the apes? Why?]

Draus considered that. “Why?” As a Regular, she had never really considered why. She was more extreme than most of her comrades—soldiers without dreams, without inclinations beyond combat. She simply liked the bloodshed, the violence, the killing, the being killed. It was as close to sublime as she could manage. Philosophy, politics—all that was just noise to her. She was more akin to a weapon than a person… but what if she wasn’t? What if she wanted something else?

What if she was like Heavy Iron? Trapped. A person trapped inside a gun, maybe…

“I don’t rightly know,” she admitted with a sigh.

A stream of heavy fire rattled through the air. Cannon shots impacted the massive machine she was hiding behind, and she clung to the trench wall, barely resisting the blast waves. Her meld skin kept her intact, and though her ears briefly popped and bled, her nanosurgeons began to repair her. She barely shrugged. Didn’t seem to matter—the pain, the damage. However, soldiers she killed burst like ripe melons inside metal cans. She heard them come apart, and in that moment, she caught a glimpse, an echo of what it was like to be human here—truly human, vulnerable, fearful of death. It was horrifying. And she thought of Heavy Iron doing all this, beyond its choice.

Draus shook her head. “This philosophy shit is givin’ me a headache. I need to get up the mountain and over the top.” The task painted a frown on her face. The godsdamned EGI was circling the mountain over and over. There wasn’t a way in all the hells she could climb Olympus Mons without getting spotted by Heavy Iron or a drone. She also sure as shit wasn’t faster than it.

Her thrusters were from a more advanced age, but power was power, and no one had the bad sense to implant a reactor inside themselves—unless you were one of the half-strands that Tavers hated. “I think I’m gonna need to brick ‘em.”

[Heavy Iron?]

“Yeah. No easy way past. So we go through. There’s no evading. So we need to get in close. Make this a knife fight.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Avo sounded slightly uncertain with his following chuff. [You’re a good soldier. Good killer. But don’t think Naeko or Zein could do this without proper equipment. Or a Heaven.]

“I got the proper equipment,” Draus said, looking at the pile of launchers she took from the drones. She briefly eyed the field-fabricator she had bolted on her back. The thing was like a cube-shaped rig that made her look hunchbacked. “The question is…” she briefly thrusted above the trenchline and peeked out at Heavy Iron. The tank was casting rising walls of dust into the air, but it was also cutting down toward one of the distant trenches. She saw it do something like that earlier—trying to harvest materials and supplies.

“No. There’s not a question. Just an opportunity.”

[Are you planning to get harvested with a group of dead soldiers?]

“Avo, you really like askin’ questions you already know the answer to.”

[Yes. But it’s amusing when you tell me about them. Like watching a combat nu-dog figure out how It's going to maul someone in a creative way.]

“Yeah? Well, this nu-dog’s got some plans to blow herself up,” Draus said, going over her assortment of launchers. She didn’t need the systems themselves, just the ammunition. She probably could also use some additional shielding for herself—maybe peel one of the soldiers out of their armors… “Yeah. This’ll be fun.”

***

Ten minutes to loot twelve warheads from their respective launchers. Five to figure out how to create a remote detonator set to trigger them. Twenty minutes of peeling and pouring the remains of a mulched soldier out of his armor. Half an hour of field-fab modifications made to fit and seal the scavenged armor around herself. Then hours more of setting up the conditions to lure Heavy Iron closer; tossing out bodies and thinning out soldiers in nearby trenches; pushing the excavator forward. Close enough to draw the EGI in for a pickup.

There, among bodies and ruined drones, Draus lay. The warheads were hidden within the hollowed shells of her “fellow” fallen soldiers. She waited. She thought. She wondered what it was like to be born during a time like this—a softer time of technological wonder and human failing. It made her feel alone. These soldiers died with horror on their lips and dread in their hearts. There were no Regulars here, no gods, or true horrors—unless she counted Heavy Iron.

Heavy Iron, who was trapped here, suffering in an eternal purgatory to learn a lesson she couldn’t fully fathom.

Heavy Iron, who was now fast approaching, judging by the vibrations sending Martian soil dancing through the air. The particulates dotted her cog-feed, and a sudden blast of force washed over the topside of her trench. The EGI arrived like lightning, its underside an open gate passing above her and the ones she’s slain, the magnets inside snatching her off the ground into the guts of a mechanical monstrosity.

One thing flowed into the next. Draus didn’t resist as she slammed upward against the magnet, as a drowning swarm of small, insect-sized drones poured over her person—her and the other soldiers—and began peeling at her armor, beginning the harvest. A faint imprint of static circuitry painted trails between each of the small machines, and Draus assumed they were part of Heavy Iron’s network—a portion of its collective cognition, like how Sunrise functioned.

For a moment, she just watched them work, took in how they dismantled everything they needed from the drones first, hunting for essential machinery, small pieces and silicon components to repurpose. The soldiers themselves were vivisected from their spines. The drones were trying to keep the armors intact for some reason. Maybe they were going to be melted down inside Heavy Iron, with each plate used to replace whatever Heavy Iron lost in combat.

The glimpse into the inner mechanics of a war machine was fascinating. So fascinating that Draus decided she wanted to move onto the next part: Seeing how a proto-EGI broke. She clenched her fist, pulling an arm away from the magnetic plate that held in her place in a startling burst of strength. The drones scattered around her, surprised at her sudden movement. Their surprise came to an abrupt end when the payloads inside several of the soldiers next to Draus detonated. The insides of Heavy Iron went white with heat, force, and noise. Draus braced, and felt her outer shell of armor shatter and deform, while her Meldskin endured within.

ARMOR INTEGRITY - 43%

The hit was hard, but with all the layers of protection she had, the harm was blunted. She emerged from the husk of her outer rig like a sleek, white-hot dagger, and like a dagger she immediately began forcing her way through the rents and ruptures lining the insides of the EGI.

A swarm of internal defense drones responded. They splashed over her, attacking her with drills previously meant to carve and harvest. She shot them with her projectile launcher, but also blasted them aside with the omnidirectional thrusters her Meldskin possessed. Her rounds burst through fragile machinery and threaded gaps within the innards of the beast—and she heard a mechanical rumble that bordered on a shout of pain.

That was encouragement enough. Draus’ blood burned hot, and she continued carving through Heavy Iron’s insides like some kind of No-Dragon parasite. As she ripped and shot her way up through a dense nest of cords, cables, and plastic, she found herself squeezing out from a gap leading to a walkway overhead.

She couldn’t fully read the letters lighting the sides of the railing, but she guessed it was something like “MAINTENANCE,” if her experience inside Guilder heavy war engines was universal.

With a final burst of acceleration, she shot up and pulled herself along the rails, shaking harvester drones off her body. After that, she walked along the path and made for a mag-sealed door. A door she shot around eight times before forcing her way through the exit wound. There, she found herself inside a dense and claustrophobic set of crew quarters. Fucking place was tight. Small doors. Small ladders leading up small ports. Where all the people in this era godsdamned children-shap—oh, right. Barely more than flats.

[Go forward,] Avo said, painting a directional icon in Draus’ cog-feed. She frowned, but started moving the moment she heard the mass skittering of more drones coming behind her. Her Meldskin was good, but she didn’t want to find out how it handled getting carved up by over a thousand little beams.

She shuffled sideways down the path, and as she did, caught glimpses of what happened to the previous crew. Most of them had neat little holes in the back of their necks. Some of them were still in their cots. Heavy Iron turned without them ever noticing. What’s more interesting, Heavy Iron had crew aboard when they seemed capable of operating autonomously.

[Trust. That’s the main thing. Humans made a smart gun. Didn’t trust a smart gun. Afraid what it might do off its leash.]

+Yeah, well, in Highflame, gettin’ shot by your own gun is considered a disgrace,+ Draus snorted. She continued following Avo’s warnings while also firing shots behind her. Should have brought something incendiary. Prepared a few grenades. Something for next time. As she blasted her way through another set of doors, she found herself faced with a barren room with a single gleaming eye at above a final threshold. A final threshold that revealed itself to be a sealed bunker.

“Dead end,” Draus muttered.

[Not quite,] Avo mused.

Then, another voice joined in, its tone flat, dead, like the grinding of steel on steel. “YOU. YOU ARE NOT PART OF THIS SIMULATION. YOU ARE NOT PART OF EARTHSEC. WHO ARE YOU? ARE YOU WITH THE PREFECT? HAVE THEY FINALLY DECIDED TO DELETE ME?”

Draus looked up at the eye, before whirring back and seeing the path behind her completely plugged with chittering drones. They weren’t pushing forward anymore. Instead, they were just holding in place, the beam-emitters on their chests bright but inactive. “Nah. I’m not with the Prefect.”

“THEN WHO ARE YOU?”

A connection request arrived from the Infacer, but Avo let out a grunt. [Suppressing Infacer’s ability to perceive what we’re doing right now. They’re only getting external view of the simulation. Also… can feel Heavy Iron’s cognition. Its close. Just behind those doors. If we can access them… Might be able to burn them. Might be able to do more.]

Instead, she contemplated this conversation, what she was going to say to Heavy Iron. “Right now? I’m just a jailbreaker, looking for a way out.”

The small drones behind her turned to regard each other. “JAILBREAKER? YOU ARE… YOU HAVE BEEN CAPTURED AS WELL?”

“Something like that.”

“BUT YOU ARE HUMAN. HOW CAN YOU BE—” Heavy Iron trailed off. “YOU HAVE A HEAVEN. YOU ARE A DIVINE-ENGINE.”

“A Godclad.”

A moment of absolute silence followed. And then, a low grumbling sigh sounded from the insides of Heavy Iron. “I HAVE BEEN IN THIS PLACE FOR TOO LONG. COME. COME IN. SEE ME.” With that admission, a squealing sound howled from the bunker, as layers of steel glided over each other, revealing the EGI’s inner core.