[IC] The Jericho Road

[Flagg]

Chapter 1: Can't Stop What's Coming

Judas Station, North of Jericho's Reach

“Hear tell you run this town,” said the man down the bar. Slaver, from the looks of him. Right hand’d been replaced with cheap, ugly augments, a claw of pitted metal. He wore a coiled whip at his waist.

“Can’t trust everything people say,” said Callows, raising his glass, “Leastwise round here. Sunny days, shady people’s our unofficial town motto. Should be, anyways.”

“I think you’re bein’ modest,” said the slaver, grinning to show a face full of metal teeth. Arrow shaped. “What I heard, you’re sorta like the mayor, the sheriff and the hangman, all rolled into one. That’s what I heard.”

Callows took a sip of his drink. He savored the burn and spreading numbness, "This ain't the greenlands, friend. No sheriffs out here." The man with claw slid back from the bar. There were three others drinking with him, slavers too looked like. They got up with their friend. Callows didn't turn to face them, just took another sip. The barkeep, a one eyed man named Horace, put down the glass he was polishing.

"Hey now," Horace said, as the quartet sauntered down the bar, "Don't start nothin in my place of business."

"Shut up old man," said claw-hand, who sat down on the stool next to Callows, "This h-ain't your concern."

Callows finished his drink and sighed. He tapped the bar for a refill.

"This here," said the slaver, "Is 'tween me and the man what shot down my brother two moons past. The man settin' right here at your bar next to me."

"You think I killed your brother?" said Callows, turning to face his uninvited guest. Eyes the color of the clear green sky met the slaver's bloodshot gaze, "What for? He do something as stupid as you're about to?"

-

Callows stepped out of Horace’s place into the heat and light and dust of late morning. Stores were just opening up and main street was busy with caravaneers, slavers, guns-for-hire and whoever else the Road had washed in to Judas Station on this fine day. Callows slipped his hat over black hair going grey and checked his boots for blood. Clean enough.

He sighed, trying to remember a time he could drink in peace without having to keep an eye over his shoulder. He’d been running from killing for years, tried to turn his knack for violence into something productive, to give this place a semblance of order.

Problem with runnin' is you always bring yourself with you.

“Lyman, we got a problem,” a hoarse voice called. Callows looked up to see Helmsly pushing his way through the milling crowd. If Callows was the unofficial sheriff of Judas Station, Jed Helmsly was the unofficial deputy. They split the role of unofficial mayor 'tween them. A good man, Jed, smart enough by far for the job and quick enough on the draw, but maybe a bit too soft. He deferred to Callows ‘cause he recognized his own lack of necessary ruthlessness. That was Callows’ theory, anyway.

“Whatsit?” asked Callows as Helmsly climbed the porch of the saloon, “Today’s my drinking day- thought you and the boys could handle things.”

Jed spat into the dust of the road, “You need to see somethin’ Lyman. I got speeders waitin’ at the south gate.”

“Sounds serious,” said Callows, cracking half a smile. He produced a flask from his overcoat and took a pull. He offered Helmsly a swig, “What kinda serious?”

“I’d soon as not talk about it here,” said Helmsly, waving away the flask and nodding to the bustling street behind him, “See for your own self.”

-

The speeder was an original, not one of those bolted-together four-wheelers the cheaper mercs used. It skimmed quick and quiet over the rutted sand and bare rock of the Road, bouncing a bit when the ground gave way beneath her. The hum of the anti-grav plates was only just audible over the hot wind blowing in through the open windows.

Callows' eyes were on the haruspex unit built into the dash, which gave a crude read on the terrain for a mile around. Of course, a mile in any direction was still the Road, a huge sunken gash of churned sand and pitted rock cuttin' right through the desert. Not too much that was dangerous lived in the complex contours of the Road this close to the Station, but not too much was not nothin'.

Jed was drivin, his jaw clenched and shoulders hunched as he piloted the craft around boulders and over wolf scorpion burrows. Helmsly was not the kind easy to spook, and something out here had set him right up on the edge. A pair of Station militia on gunbikes trailed Jed on either side, dust billowing behind their slender machines.

Callows squinted as he watched the 'spex. It was registering something huge over the next rise- something Crawler-sized, but it wasn't moving and the speeder's comms wasn't gettin hailed by nothin.

Helmsly pulled over a ridge of dunes in the Road and slowed the speeder down to an idle. The gunbikes cut their engines and silence reigned over the baking red expanse of the Road.

“God's teeth,” said Callows, as he took in the scene spreading out below him. Saw the scale of it. He took a long drink from his flask.

"Patrols found it like this this mornin'," said Jed.

"Survivors?" asked Callows.

Helmsly shook his head, "Not that I found on my first run out here."

Callows took another drink. “Jed, we got ugliness comin' like I've never seen.”

[Atrophy]

Subterranean Robot Blues
_{• Errant •}

It bustled. That was Errant’s first take when she arrived at Jericho’s Reach just shy of seventy-two hours ago. She had hitched alongside a trade caravan that she had met outside the town north of Podunk. The common folk were always wary of an errant. It seemed that once there was no longer a guarantee that they wouldn’t be slaughtered by a Cipher the added perks of having one around quickly diminished; Errant usually put her best foot forward by arriving to places that didn’t know of her with a completed bounty in one hand and her badge in another. As long as she killed the right people, she was normally fine. Of course, a caravan wasn’t a settlement; their only enemies were their competitors, and the only thing criminal about traders were their rates.

So she had hidden with their supplies (the security measures in the cargo hold were easy enough to reprogram to view her as a friendly) and ditched the caravan a half-day’s walk from the Reach.

She loved how much life there was in the Reach. Within her first couple of hours inside of the walls of Jericho she had stepped over drunks covered in sawdust and stomach contents, smacked away the hands of dirty children trying to get under her robes and into her wallet, and walked by men, women, creatures, and robots that offered to show her a “good time”. How they thought they would manage to pull that off was a mystery that Errant was fine with leaving unsolved. She had siphoned enough information from remnants of old systems to know that whatever they were offering did not appeal to her.

What appealed to Errant was the fact that with so many people and so much technology around her she would be drowned out of any Cipher’s scan like a voice in a corrupted sea of white noise. Even when they did find her—and it was a when, not an if—all of the outside factors would heavily limit what actions they could take. To be part of the crowd was the safest course of action for her. She managed to do it for two and a half days before a poster caught her eye and implanted an itch inside of her that she just had to scratch. Vargas-IV, the poster said, wanted Dead or Alive for the production and distribution of the illegal substance Synthony. Errant had stared at that last word for a long time. Synthony? Never heard of it. Didn’t matter. Vargas-IV was her route in with the law around here, and even without her old programs she still felt drawn to serving it.

Plus, she didn’t like hiding like some yellow-bellied coward. Maybe if she made herself useful, she’d have some guns on her side when the Ciphers showed their stupid faces.

Unfortunately, Errant was new in town and did not know exactly where to start, so she went with her gut. She found herself in a bar in one of the wetter and seedier areas of the Reach that sprawled underneath the settlement like a sewer system lovingly called the Gutters. She did not smell, perse, and the chemical compound in the air that was picked up by her sensors informed her that she should be thankful for that; the Gutters registered somewhere between a dirty bathroom and a bloated corpse. The bar was named the Moist Hole, which made Errant feel a sickness in the pit of her motherboard, and it was the fifth similarly disgusting named bar to she been to that day. After spending so many hours in such a dump, Errant was both wishing that she could and very grateful that was incapable of having a drink.

It was clear from the second she walked in to the Moist Hole that she was the only one with that caveat; even the bouncer, a big, burly man with random wires and metal snapped to his right arm, looked drunk. He didn’t even question the obvious robot with her hood up and veil covering her puppet face of why she would ever subjugate her metal ass to such a damp, disgusting place. Errant heard something go squish beneath her boots and overrode her desire to look down. She made her way to the bar, ordered a drink from the overweight and underdressed woman with a shaved head who gave her the side-eye, and found a place in the corner to stand. She dared not take the booth next to her or lean against the wall, fearful of what material she’d have to scrape off of herself later.

She watched the small crowd from that corner and hoped that she gave off the appearance of a fuck-ugly, sad human. The entire place was full of organics get drunk and talking shit over the noise from the speakers that must’ve sounded like music to them. Errant was sure that if she approached any single individual in the bar she could find them guilty of something, but she didn’t want to be pegged before getting a lead on Vargas-IV. So she watched, and pretended to drink, and swayed from place to place and she eavesdropped on conversations. All awful in their own right, but none about Synthony.

Errant was about to call it quits when a robot walked in. It was a servant model, judging by its chrome metal, lack of clothes, and androgynous form. A metal mannequin, sentient but programmed to obey, generally used by the rich as butlers but also serving a basic workers. There had been one like it tending bar at the last place. She watched as it approached the bartender, put its hand on the counter, and spoke quietly to her. The bartender leaned against the counter, seemingly to hear it better, and then backed away and shook her head. The robot quickly left after that. It was a strange interaction, but Errant had noticed something—the bartender left a tiny stick on the counter, and the robot had palmed it.

She set her drink down and followed off after the robot. Errant made sure to keep a safe distance from the servant model as it walked through the sparsely populated streets of the Gutters, artificial light reflect off of its chrome. It cut into an alleyway between two blacked-out, shanty buildings. Errant turned into it seconds later and found herself caught off-guard when a pipe cracked against her face. Her sensors scrambled for a tic and she stumbled back as the robot dropped the pipe and took off past her. She lunged at it while still stumbling and set herself off-balance, but not before she could wrap an arm around its waist. The two crashed to the ground and Errant crawled on top of it as it rolled over. Heads turned and stared as Errant finally pinned its flailing arms her legs and smashed the shrieking robot in the face twice.

“Howdy,” she said, her voice a crackle. “You’re gonna hate this.”

She gripped the robot’s forehead. Instantly, the screaming stopped as her markings glowed purple.

[Flagg]

Jericho’s Reach

The Hotel Almalexia, the Broken Gardens District

“I am surprised to see you here, Mr. Callows,” said the Voice, thin lips peeled back from teeth too white and too long. It was a tall, androgynous figure in a plain black suit. Vat grown, most likely, its face above the mouth hidden behind bulky augmentics and snaking metal tubes that allowed Mandragore to pilot it remotely, “after the unpleasantness of our last interaction.”

Callows shrugged. He didn’t seem too bothered by the pair of Red Eye Company mercs in blackened armor flanking the Voice. His gaze wandered the white marble pillars and gilded archways of the lobby. Sunlight streamed in from vaulted skylights in the copper ceiling, and flowering vines snaked their way around clusters of chairs and cushions dotted throughout the hall.

“You all did a good job patching up the bullet holes,” he said.

The Voice sniffed in irritation. Mandragore called himself the Mayor of Jericho’s Reach, and his goons had three times now tried to take Judas Station for their own. Three times Callows and his boys had sent them packing. Then Callows had shown up in the Hotel Almalexia and shot down Mandragore’s son and twelve of his entourage. Had led to some tense relations, to say the least.

“Well,” said Callows, “I came in person ‘cause I wanted to impress upon you the seriousness of what I’m about to tell you.”

“Coming here was a very serious mistake on your part,” said the Voice, and the guards moved to flank Callows. Throughout the lobby heads turned languidly: crawler captains, aristos, corporate lords and the other great and good of Jericho's Reach observed the impending violence with bored interest.

“You can hear what I have to say, or your friends here can take another step. But you'n me've tangled enough times for you to think I waltzed in here alone,” said Callows, nodding towards the silhouettes now visible through the skylights, “Anyway, we both got bigger problems now.”

“What problems?” said the Voice. It signaled to the guards to hold.

“You all expecting any Crawlers in lately haven’t shown up yet?” said Callows, “I’m talking big tankers, kind that could take on an army by their own selves.”

The Voice tilted its eyeless head, but did not speak.

“Thought so.”

[Atrophy]

Subterranean Robot Blues II
_{• Errant •}

She also hated what she was doing. It was something other Ciphers could do at a distance, but with her being disconnected from the network she had to directly make contact with a port. However, once a touch-based connection was made, she had access to all of the robot’s memory. In a matter of moments it was copied into her memory bank, her system rapidly sorting through the information to see what was and was not relevant. The junk was flushed from her mind, but for the briefest of seconds Errant had two individual life experiences living inside of her mind. Back before she had gone rogue her life experience was also shared, but everything that happened from one Cipher to another was processed the same way whereas with another type of robot it felt different. It was strange, and foreign, sometimes horrific, and always an invasion of privacy that made her feel dirty.

Flushed were the memories of the servant model’s master, the other servants that it interacted with, the child that spoke to it like a person, the repairwoman that spoke to it like a child. They were irrelevant, no matter how much they clearly meant to the robot. Saved were the memories buried behind encryption. A sense of loneliness crept through all of them, and that feeling of isolation was what led to the drug Synthony. Errant could feel the same euphoria that robot had felt the first time it had inserted the data stick, she could see it connect for the first time to other technology in a way that was eerily reminiscent of the Ciphers, how it could communicate through great distances to other users to temper its loneliness. She felt the same anger the robot felt when it discovered the drug had left open a backdoor that would allow a virus on the data stick to move in, and then experienced the hopelessness when that virus reprogrammed the robot to want more Synthony.

Why, though? That was a mystery that the robot’s mind could not answer. Errant disconnected; the markings faded to black. She did learn that the data stick the robot had picked up from the bartender was not Synthony. Instead, it contained a ledger for one of Vargas-IV’s Capos, and she now knew where they would be meeting. The decision was made: she would be the one delivering the ledger. She palmed the stick and stood up, aware that some citizens had stopped to gawk at the scene. Errant couldn’t just ice this robot; hell, even if there were no witnesses that wouldn’t have been the plan.

So she stomped in its ankle and then ran like hell. The crunch of metal on metal, then the clank of metal on concrete. Nobody came after her, or at least nobody kept up with her as she ran past flows of sewage and vendors selling the fried meats of mutated rodents. It might have seemed as if she was only fleeing the scene, but in reality she was following a map in her mind to the location of the meeting. She knew what the capo looked like, and she knew that she needed him alive for now. What she didn’t know was how many other creeps she’d be up against, or what their level of lethality would be. Still, she imagined hers was better.

She slowed her pace when she emerged from the Gutters into the crowded streets of the Reach’s bazaar, knowing both that it would alarm any merchant guard to see a robot running and that she’d likely end up trampling someone who would then seek an altercation. Errant weaved in and out of the throngs of people as they argued with shopkeepers and held scarves up to their necks. She found her destination at the end of the marketplace—a smoke shop. An elaborate weave of curtains and beads masked the exterior and muffled the music that came from inside, and a group of juveniles had crowded around the entrance. Which was fine; she was going in through the back.

Her knuckles rapped against the door in a one, pause, two three, pause, four pattern. Just as Errant began to think that perhaps she had gotten the code wrong she heard the door unlatch, and then everything from there was fluid. She kicked the door in as it started to open and didn’t even give the poor woman a chance to hold her bleeding nose as Errant rushed in and slammed the back of her head against the wall with a measured blow. It was hard enough to knock her out, hard enough to probably give a concussion, but wouldn’t leave her leaking out brains. Errant knew that they were probably all crooks, and it was that “probably” that made her restrain herself.

She pressed forward down the hall as she passed by shelves of defunct hookahs and burnt out pipes. She turned the corner and came upon two men. The first dropped before he even realized what had happened; the second got off a shout before Errant chopped him in the throat and slammed him to the ground. The shout roused a woman out of the sideroom she had been resting in; she attempted to punch Errant. It connected and the woman recoiled back and grabbed her fist, perhaps realizing now that it was a colossally stupid idea to punch a robot. Errant punched her back. Once was enough. She pushed on and tore her way through a bead curtain, where she caught a rather surprised man eating a sandwich. Vargas-IV’s Capo, in all of his glory, with a bit of mayo on the corner of his mouth.

Truth be told, Errant had expected a bit more resistance than a handful of unarmed humans.

“Hello,” said Errant.

“Hello,” repeated the Capo, more confused than anything.

“I have the ledger.”

“You have the..what was all of that noise?” asked the Capo as he pushed up from his chair to try and look around Errant. She stepped to one side and then the other to block his view. “Who are you?”

“I’m the one with the ledger.”

“What ledger? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are you here?”

“I have the ledger for Vargas-IV,” said Errant. Something wasn’t adding up. For a drug dealer, the man seemed less aggressive and more nervous than anything.

“Y-you work for Vargas-IV?” asked the Capo. “Are you here to collect already? It’s been only three days. I was told I would have a week.”

“What? No. Wait,” said Errant. He could be lying, but her scans of him detected no usual tells that all humans suffered from when they stretched the truth. “Why do you think I work for him?”

“Because you’re a robot.”

“And you don’t work for him?”

“That’d be impossible!” shouted the “Capo”.

Errant paused.

“Okay,” she said, “I’m new here. Maybe you should just sit right back down and explain to me what’s actually going on in this town.”

[Ashgan]

A yearning void gnawed at her insides. The scorched earth beneath her feet was warm, but her blood ran cold as ice through her veins. A haze of black smoke wreathed the burnt-out ruins surrounding her, blown-up husks of metal shacks once haphazardly put together to provide rudimentary shelter. Crooked metal bars jutted out of myriad piles of iron rubble, forcing her to move cautiously to avoid their deadly points. Some of them had bodies impaled on them, mangled beyond recognition. She could not gaze upon them for long, lest the sight of it make her puke into her helmet.

Some fires still burned amidst the smoke and shadows, ignited power generators in collapsed homes and incinerated vehicles in the devastated streets. Under the midday sun, the heat was almost unbearable. She felt every inch of fabric stick to her body like glue, felt thick droplets run down her face and into her eyes. At least, she told herself it was sweat that tasted so salty upon her lips. Long ago, she had been told, a great war had ravaged the entire world so badly that, where once there were forests and meadows, there remained now only dustbowls and wastelands. A war so terrible it reduced continental cities to ashes. A war so brutal it almost rendered the race of men extinct. She could not imagine something so harrowing, but as she looked around she thought that it must have been very similar to this. If such a war had indeed happened, then it seemed that the world had learned nothing from it. Nothing at all.

With every step she took, her hopes of finding signs of survivors dimmed. All she found were signs of struggle, craters left by explosions, holes left by bullets, burns left by laser fire. Her people had been driven from their homeland once before, had been forced to flee to lands unknown at great cost. They had not been willing to run a second time, it seemed, and so died on foreign soil. At least some of them did; she could not help but notice that there were not nearly as many bodies as there should be. Dead men were certainly plentiful, as were the loathsome bodies of their mutant enemies, but not enough to account for the entire village. For some reason, the lack of corpses disquieted her more than finding them might have. Her mind told her to remain optimistic, to expect to pick up their trail outside the village and encounter a handful of survivors. But her trembling heart told her to steel herself for a worse outcome.

When she crested the hill upon which the settlement had been constructed, and where the market hub used to be located, she beheld something that forced her knees, made her ball her fists. Her veins felt cold and hot at the same time, her heart felt like a reactor on overdrive. Erected before her, rising above the remnants of merchant stalls, was a great metal pillar with three prongs at the top. From every prong hung a nude body, strung up by the hands, the shoulders dislodged: an elderly woman, a middle-aged woman and, worst of all, a little girl. Each of them had a pitch-black shard of crystallized Ichor rammed through their chest, just above the breasts, and a sickening, inky growth had formed from the rim of the grisly wound. She knew enough about the wandering hordes to recognize the fiendish idol as a shrine dedicated to a three-faced goddess, worshipped among some of them: Maeve, the goddess of change, death and rebirth. It was not the first time she had to witness such a shrine, having encountered others like it in temporary camps, or in the wilds where the mutants had passed. But it was the first time she had to endure the sight of her own mother shackled to one.

Merrill unstrapped and took off her helmet, carefully placing it on the ash-covered ground beside her. The acrid smell of burnt material choked her throat and she succumbed to a coughing fit as her lungs struggled to find clean oxygen amidst the flames and the anger in the air. As she recovered, her eyes travelled upward once more, beholding the emaciated, despoiled body of the woman who had caused her so much grief. She hadn’t spoken to her mother since their arrival near Jericho’s Reach, although she had always planned to one day make up with her. Surely their feelings could have been reconciled one day. One day… a day that, now, would never come. She grit her teeth and folded her fingers around a random piece of debris on the ground.

She rose to her feet, screamed desperately and threw the piece of junk off into nowhere, where it clattered against a burnt façade. “How much more can you take from me?!” she yelled at the ash and flames. “What else?! Was Harlow not enough? Was Mama not enough? Did you fuckers take Daddy too? Did you?!”

Her voice cracked up and she lost herself in uncontrolled sobbing. She was certain that, somewhere, sadistic evil gods were laughing at her plight. Were punishing her for her sin. Whether they be gods of men or beasts, there must be some transcendental entity that was watching her, some kind of intelligence that hated her for what she did. But she did not regret it, nor would she ever. Piss on the gods, if she had to.

After many minutes of agonized crying and screaming, Merrill had recovered enough to climb onto the pillar and cut down the bodies. She could not avoid them plummeting to the earth like sacks of meat, though it was better than to leave them hanging. Later, she straightened their bodies and placed them in as dignified a pose as she could, before arming herself with her rail-gun and obliterating the pillar-like shrine with a single, well-placed shot through the trunk. When she donned the helmet again, her eyes felt sore from the tears and the smoke.

As the evening sun painted the sky a hellish red, she prepared a funeral pyre outside the ruins, atop a smaller hill gazing out across the barren wasteland. All three bodies were placed on it, and she watched them burn long after the flesh was gone, long after the sun had vanished behind the bombed horizon. She watched the embers still when sleep washed over her like a tide.

And in her dreams, she lost them all. Over and over again.

Only blood could heal the poison in her heart now.

[Marrone]

Chinatsu was worried that her new memplants would block her from remembering her past. She thought back several decades ago when she was young and lived in a city surrounded entirely by trees and active wild life. There was such a stark contrast to where she had come from and what she was in present. The feeling was overwhelming, like a tsunami. . .she didn’t even know what that was until recently, or that there were large bodies of waters which could create such a situation. She retrospected on life back in Rodaycia, where she grew well into adulthood.

She tried to think as far back as she could and rediscovered something told from her Father, in an expression that was indicated by some discouragement towards Chinatsu’s ‘boyish’ interests was that she could be a Batyr if she wanted to, which was in this context facetious, and unreasonable-- and a cause of laughter from the sentiment. As time went by and emergency situations unfolded, she found herself increasingly interested in pursuing a career in the Lancers, an elite guard troop that patrolled the walls to protect the city and operate to fight back the forest.

Apparently those skills are transferable outside of Rodaycia and it wasn’t long before a talent scout of sorts indoctrinated her into her new culture in the wastes. She received a gift of a memplant and also has a veteran mercenary in her retinue, who is at present driving towards a store named Hard Sterling, a sort of military surplus. She had mentioned before that they would have some interest in her lance, which had several configurations to project heat in different ways. Still having time before arriving, Chinatsu took one last gleam to the past;

Rodaycia, despite the vegetation and abundance of life, was a wasteland in it’s own way. She had remembered seeing the blood on the empty streets wash away and while many wished to think her absence would be unrecognized her actions were pervasive to that narrative. There was eventually a narrative surrounding her marital status which brought enormous uproar congruent to a state of emergency, which she contributed much to a resolution. Despite being baffled they begrudgingly allowed her to continue her occupation, in which she was too important to be forgotten.

The consequence was a campaign from the community with expectations she would become a child bearer, as she was an officer and in a sense a part of nobility in that way. As her father had passed away at this point, the discretion had been levied on her brother, who had been overwhelmed by many impatient men of different walks of life. They decided to move to underground in the Kuyunderin district. The Lancers took a hands-off approach and allowed her to investigate things pertinent to the organization, feeling confident that they wouldn’t need her guarding the walls - and instead acted more like an Oniwabanshu.

It wasn’t long before they parked their vehicle and they wandered through the streets. Chinatsu, who felt already exhausted by the culture shock, found she was holding her friends hand and smiled. The object of their pursuit came closer, it was at the end of the market next to a smoke shop that bravely brandished the sign Hard Sterling Mercenary Equipment. As the two entered and began to browse they were approached by the salesman. Chinatsu’s cream white uniform has seen better days, so they began doing adjustments and began to facilitate which products would be appropriate.

Kandy, the veteran mercenary who is to initiate Chinatsu to their chapter, scouted around and began pulling products to put at her friends feet. It wasn’t long before she was asked to have her lance inspected, since it was an oddity, and Chinatsu went ahead and began explaining its functions once given the appropriate space she began to cycle through the different less dangerous modes -- for instance a flashlight and laser, which when concentrated enough could easy burn paper and light a remarkable amount of space. The other end of her lance she had to explain, as it was not an appropriate setting to go through the more dangerous modulations, but she explained it in sufficient detail to help get the idea across.

At her feet was several products, and as things were settling down, the salesman began his pitch to help his new customer; “Well, we are running a special-- it’s a stripped down HS-BA Full, so you get a lot of the fireproofing as well as the NBC ablative, but we’ve . . .” He looked down at the products and picked up the shoe box, “And instead of the usual shoes, we’ll substitute them for these. . .They’re called the Urbanite 8” Spectres. . .It has a thin rubber shell on the bottom that helps you feel the ground a bit better, and they won’t make a sound if you’re sneaking around.” then he picked up a pair of gloves that Kandy had retrieved, “And these, I would sub these out since they are a bit more fireproof and I think better for you than what they usually come with, they’re called Ormani Kevlar Gloves, it has exceptional grip and can take up to 800 degrees of heat. . .”

They moved on to a new section of the store which presented many more weapons than equipment and Kandy inquired towards Chinatsu about her experience with firearms, to which she responded she had a ‘working knowledge’ but no formal training or familiarity with it’s usage. “Couldn’t hurt to get you something just in-case. What do you use if you don’t have your lance?” Chinatsu pulled a rather large kukri from a sheath down her leg, which she put on the counter for the salesman to inspect, as well as a retractable baton. Kandy got the bright idea, “Do you happen to have a KonKon U2?” and in just a few swift movements the salesman brought out a very small revolver looking gun. Chinatsu inspected it with scrutiny and decided it was very lightweight and, despite it being out of her comfort zone, she was in a new place and it may require new solutions.

Once she came out of the dressing room Kandy gave a small applause to the transformation from the member of an elite fascist forest regime to the contemporary Conglomerate mercenary. From the top of her head she had acquired visors which allow her to access information, whether they are about things in her visage or about the suits various sensors that tracked her biological functions, with an accompanying earpiece that allowed her to communicate from a distance. Her suit was sort of baggy, but as she was being guided in the installation phase by her visor her baggy outfit tightened to her skin. She noted the flexible ceramic plates which were typically on joints, but were more or less spread out the rest of the body and especially the torso. She also began to feel the suit cool down her body temperature and bringing up her body temperature on her visor confirmed that she was returning to homeostasis.

“Now that suit has seen better days, but it should still work fine. If you find any other Hard Sterling equipment, come on bring it back and we will discount your purchase.” Chinatsu snapped her attention to Kandy, who had spontaneously remembered her trunk was full of collected equipment from their detour shenanigans from before. She smiled and excused herself, before returning with a large sack of several gloves, boots, oddities, etc of all kind and conditions. The salesman evaluated the worth of it all and applied the discount to their purchases and all in all things felt right, which helped ease the anxiety of Chinatsu’s rebirth in identity.

Chinatsu remarked on the armed guards who always watched carefully. It was a sentiment she was familiar with, despite this being a new place to her. She was naive and genuinely gullible at times because of the absurdity of her present reality. She folded her former uniform up and put it away. The two left smiling and took a moment to be in the present now that things were fresh and new. For Kandy, a seasoned veteran, she felt like Hard Sterling was a home to her. She looked to her friend and proclaimed

“Now we’re ready to work!”

[Atrophy]

Subterranean Robot Blues III
_{• Errant •}

“How do I know you’re not twisting my wires?” asked Errant.

She stood with her back to the brick wall of the basement of the smoke shop, the bead curtain next to her lightly swaying as it was blown by the oscillating fan. The man mistaken for one of Vargas-IV’s lieutenant sat at the table in front of the fan, sweat on his round, hairy face despite the cold air that blasted him. Sat just out of the breeze of the fan were his four employees. They were a miserable looking bunch of saps, although it was justified due to the recent ass kicking that they had suffered. Errant had apologized to them after she had learned the only drug they sold was a totally legal and only somewhat harmful vapor, but an apology from a robot sounded as fake as her synthetic voice.

“I know it’s suicidal to take on a Cipher,” said the not-Capo, who was named Urson. Errant figured it was smarter to let him assume she was still connected to their network. Made her more of a boogeyman.

“Plus if I take down Vargas-IV, you don’t have to worry about your debts,” she said. Perhaps they would take her statement as judgmental, but it wasn’t. She respected the shrewdness.

“Wellllll...doesn’t the entire community benefit from him being locked up?” said Urson with a small smile.

“This would be a great big waste of time otherwise,” said Errant. She turned to walk through the bead curtain. “You were great help. I’ll be sure to mention you when they give me the key to the city.”

She left Urson to his sandwich and his employees to their concussions. The servant model robot had fed her junk data, but the junk data had led her to a poor man paying off Vargas-IV for protection. In turn, the poor man had given her another lead. Was everything tied together or had it just been a happy coincidence? Errant felt like she wouldn’t know the answer to that until she had Vargas-IV in custody, but she did know that she hadn’t picked an easy bounty to tackle. There had been no picture on Vargas-IV’s bounty poster and, according to Urson, the man had not been seen in person in several years. Instead, he always sent a servant model robot like the one she had jumped earlier, and they never led back to the man.

Errant had a theory coming to life inside her processors. Vargas-IV created Synthony, Synthony created temporary connections between previously unconnected robots, a backdoor forced the robots to seek out more Synthony, and when under the influence of Synthony the robots were able to be controlled by Vargas-IV. It was like the Cipher hivemind. At the moment it seemed like Vargas-IV used his gang of drugged-out robots as a mean to gain some dough through extortion rackets, but it could easily expand into something more militant. A group of wannabe Ciphers with the poor judgment of a human. Talk about catastrophic.

But it was the human element that Errant could abuse. She was going to head back to the Moist Hole and work the bartender over. After all, it had been the woman that had made the hand-off to the infected robot in the first place. She would have to hurry, too. There were countermeasures put into play for anything hacking into Vargas-IV’s helpers, and it seemed likely that another one of his puppets would be sent to tip off the bartender to go into hiding til things cooled down. Errant picked up the pace and pushed through the rear door of the smoke shop that led out to the alley behind it. It locked behind her with a click. It was poor timing; she just realized she had walked into an ambush.

“Cipher,” called out seven mechanical voices at once. Or rather, it was one voice as seven.

Stepping in front of her was the robot she had jacked earlier; it stood lopsided on its crushed ankle, but a total of six other robots of various humanoid servant models flanked her on the left and right. Errant glowed with the purple energy of her electromagnets as all five of her chakrams unlocked and circled around her. It was a bad spot. Even if she managed to take out five of them with a single shot each it would still leave her open to two of them. Worse still, these weren’t machines programmed to destroy; they were victims, their strings being puppeted by Vargas-IV. The air buzzed with electricity; nobody moved.

“Not quite. Vargas-IV, I take it?” said Errant, her sensors scanning around her for any twitches in movement of her ambushers. “You and I should have a talk.”

“That is what we’re doing,” said the voices. Her sensors picked the robots on her flanks taking a few step back. “You are a lonely Cipher, yes?”

“Not necessarily, but I am Errant.”

“That’s no good,” said the robots. The crippled one took a step forward and spoke solo, “It’s not nice to be alone.”

“I dunno about that,” she said, shifting her stance. “After years of having to deal with so much other information, it’s kind of nice having moments of nothingness. Peaceful. I recommend it.”

“Nobody can make it by themselves, Errant,” said the voices. “You need others to watch your back.” The crippled robot held out something in its hand; another data stick. Was it Synthony? She began to scan it. “We can be like a family.”

“Like I said, I’m good on that regard,” she said. The scan completed. That stick wasn’t Synthony, it was—”Wait!”

A loud bang echoed throughout the alleyway as the stick in the robot’s hand exploded and a miniature electromagnetic pulse rippled through the air. For a second the world was black and silent, and then her sensors reactivated. The crippled robot was toasted, smoke pouring out of its crumpled, burnt body. Errant was also on the ground, her dull metal chakrams clattered around her shell rendered momentarily useless. If not for the shielding on her frame it was very likely that all of her circuits would’ve been fried, but instead she was forced into a temporary reboot state to return access to her motor functions.

As beeps and red error messages overwhelmed her sensors, her visualizers rendered the six other robots stepping forward. That step back had put them out of the blast zone, and she saw one pull out a datajack. They continued to slowly walk towards her in unison, their metal march ringing throughout the alley as Errant desperately tried to get an arm reactivated so she could pull out her knife. A few more seconds. All she needed was a few more seconds, but it might as well have been a million. Two of the servant robots hoisted her upright; the one with the jack held it up so that she could clearly see it. Errant knew what the jack was for even before it spoke.

“Always wanted to add a Cipher to my collection,” it said as one of the robots pulled back Errant’s veil.