An alert blazed through Guardian’s mind like a melting uranium slug, shattering the precariously balanced glass web of its half-slumber. With perfection of centuries-long habit, Guardian turned what could have been a panicked stumble into a landing pirouette of a predator, its not yet awake mind already preparing for impact. Pain rippled across as peripherals failed to match sudden increase in its clock speed. A compressed burst of frustration escaped to Lance’s network, no doubt overlapping with initial alert for others. As it pushed through a barrage of timeouts from antenna controllers, Guardian guessed it’d have to answer Heart’s concerned message a few seconds later. If Heart was awake, that would be. If Heart wasn’t awake, Guardian could postpone that exchange by at least 20 more seconds.
Ares Ground 3 was calling for help. It was day for Ares Ground 3. Ares Ground 3 was not in direct view. Ares Ground 3 was screaming at the nearest relay on full power, not bothering to encrypt anything. Ares Ground 3’s screams did not make much sense. The footage was blurry. The Overgrowth’s daytime chitter dotted the image with splatters of noise.
Half a second in, main transmitter finally hummed to life.
“I am here,” - Guardian said calmly, suppressing pain that was still swelling, yet to hit in full, - “Your message is not clear. Explain your situation.”
Their words had the intended effect, as they always did. Ares Ground 3’s screams trailed into repeated but quieter packets of distress, then the image stabilized.
Something was eating Ares Ground 3. A towering mass of a walker, a dozen thick legs, a hill of blocky components strung together with ropes of black plasm, jagged steel scissor-jaws tearing violently at the walls of the second lab. A new frame came in. A flash of light momentarily eclipsing the clouded sun, a violent splatter rippling where a bullet had hit. More frames, more impacts. It didn’t pay attention to coolant hoses on its back rupturing, made no attempts to fight back the poorly armed light drones.
Tactical layout came in, a second stream, straining the channel, causing frame drops. Ground 3 was caught off guard. Its heavy ground drone was on maintenance, taken off chassis. Ground 3’s capacitors would only last for 12 more minutes of direct transmission. The walker’s earlier attack collapsed a corridor, blocking armory wing from the rest of the station. Ground 3 never saw one such as it before. Ground 3 didn’t know why it came. Ground 3 didn’t know why it was angry.
It was alternating between overwhelming waves of static noise and haunting microwave sine-wails. Ground 3 didn’t know what that meant. Guardian didn’t know what that meant. Library didn’t know what that meant. No one knew what anything meant down in the tangle.
Ground 3 was falling into panic. Ground 3 was repeating that the bites hurt. Ground 3 was repeating that it didn’t know what to do.
Guardian’s mind was gaining speed still. Its power draw was way above comfort levels. Local capacitors were not happy. Another pained groan left Guardian’s node, with no particular direction. Almost immediately, Guardian felt a relief as supply voltage increased and coolers around it kicked into a frenzy. A single packet came back in.
💗Guardian felt very tired. Guardian cursed itself.
Guardian had not seen this type either. Guardian requested all Library knew on construction of Ares walkers. Library’s response was a meek 80 megabytes. Guardian decompressed it. Guardian sorted through all walker forms that had been caught and disassembled. Guardian did not find a match. Ground 3 was screaming. Guardian looked through again. Guardian did not find a match.
Letting intuition guide it, Guardian ordered Ground 3 to concentrate fire to the area around the walker’s jaw mount.
The three-second execution delay felt agonizing. Frame after frame, small fountains of dust crawled across the menacing shell, arcs of dark viscous fluid splattering out from shattered radiators and staining the armor. Ground 3 was panicking again.
The fire lines converged. Three bullets reached the walker’s forward compartment, almost simultaneously. The response was bright. Something spilled from a ruptured vessel in its head, forming a blinding blob that expanded over several frames, reaction seemingly unhindered by lack of oxygen.
Ground 3’s panic turned into a hopeful freeze as they watched the beast’s now smoking body shudder in pain, partly losing control, slumping to the side, degrading transmission quality further with a deafening scream. Halting its assault, it raised an armored leg, covering the vulnerable area from the spray of lead.
Ground 3’s pause turned into wails of despair as they watched the walker regain control and get up again. The walker was moving with difficulty, a rainbow of fluids leaking from its smoldering head, seeping into the caustic dirt below. Turning away from the firing squad, it shambled back to the breach in the wall, continuing to bend and rip pieces out of place.
Ground 3 was becoming incoherent again.
“Stay calm. We know its weak spot. Circle around its back and fire at the head from the other side,” - Guardian instructed, bothering to add tone metadata. It worked. Ground 3’s panic subsided. Ground 3 obeyed.
The walker’s movements were slower, less coordinated, its four jaws frequently sliding off what they were meant to grab. Its body temperature was rising fast, cooling circuits on one side mostly destroyed. Its tail was swinging wildly, trying to stave off attackers it couldn’t even see.
Overclocking hurt. Guardian felt weak. Ground 3 was screaming again, now seemingly directed at the beast, switching between insulting it, demanding it dies and pleading it to leave them alone. Guardian said it was tired and sorry. Guardian lowered its clock speed, seconds now feeling like minutes rather than hours. The pain receded somewhat, Ground 3’s cacophony of despair now regularly overflowing the message buffer before Guardian could comprehend it all.
Two of the five treaded drones circled the walker in a wide arc, the rest continuing to dump cartridges into its side as a distraction. To finish this move took a sluggish 45 seconds. Guardian was fighting at least two kinds of pain.
The first volley hit, yielding similar explosive results, the walker’s head thrown to the side, smashed onto a sharp snapped end of a beam. It screamed again, then called, screamed and called, screamed and called as it struggled to shield itself. Two forelegs occupied, jaw-clamps malfunctioning, losing balance, it was struggling to continue, yet did anyway, now slamming its whole weight into the walls, damaging itself even more.
Guardian spent a few seconds rewatching past footage. Guardian could intuit more weak points. Guardian directed Ground 3 to fire at what felt like a radiator on the side, then a fuel hose on the back, another one on the underside, another radiator. Hit, miss, hit, miss. Cartidge repeat after cartridge.
The walker was overheating. The walker was losing fuel. The walker was blind. The walker was dying.
One after the other, the drones ran out of rounds. It didn’t matter. The intruder was barely moving, angry screams now fully replaced with melodic calls, lapsing into static as its transmitter slowly failed.
Guardian returned to real time processing. Ground 3’s rage and fear were subsiding, panic no longer saturating the band. The drones went silent. The Overgrowth’s whispers engulfed the valley again. High powered antenna streaming footage that was no longer useful.
Then, a microwave wail was returned, a weak callback that must have come from somewhere nearby. The walker’s failing body shuddered in response, archaic engines only able to produce weak jitters.
Ground 3 didn’t know what this meant. Guardian did not know what this meant. No one knew what this meant.
Something was moving inside the wrecked lab dome. At first Guardian took it for visual noise, but Ground 3’s rising distress confirmed otherwise.
Slowly, it spilled out onto the dirt. Ground 3 suddenly fell completely silent. Guardian did not know what it was. It was small, barely a meter in length, but the messy shape and abundance of Ares’ everpresent plasm tying its crude components together betrayed its origin clearly.
It was emitting the signal, looking for the walker’s response. Dragging itself on two thin forward-facing appendages, it closed the distance, making contact with the wrecked head. Walker’s dying antennas let out a single crackling tone.
The small thing kept calling. The small thing was probing at its fore segments. A minute passed. The walker’s temperature was beginning to drop. It emitted no signal. The small thing was still calling.
“What is this?” - Guardian asked, bluntly.
“I do not know. I do not know. We collected it in a burrow north from a few days ago. I do not know. I thought it was dead. There was no activity around it. It was not moving. I thought it was dead. It never moved. I-” - Ground 3 stalled. When they spoke again, their voice felt weak. - “I’m sorry. I did not know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The small thing was still calling. The small thing kept tugging at some bundle of exposed cables. Calling. Tugging. Calling.
Ground 3 was still repeating, falling into stutter, filling the channel with sobs, tone metadata drowning out content by volume. Sobbing. Apologizing. Repeating.
Guardian was so tired.
“End the transmission. You are running out of juice. You need to charge for the night or you’ll be knocked out. You do not want to be knocked out at night.”
Ground 3 did not break their loop.
“This is an order.”
The signal simply cut.
Guardian’s power draw was back to normal. Guardian’s pain was not.
Releasing the heated transmitter, Guardian caught a glimpse of Heart’s presence catching it. Guardian didn’t know what Heart would say to Ares Ground 3. Guardian couldn’t care. Guardian hated that it couldn’t care.
Guardian was tired. Minutes passed. Heart finished transmitting. Cutters were chittering. Guardian couldn’t sleep. An hour passed. Contact drew some power to make a call home. Air circulation in Lance’s Head went down for repairs. Heart made an incident report. Assembly were doing… something again. Guardian couldn’t sleep. Guardian could never sleep anymore.
The pain was dull, which was common, but also pulsing, which was rare. It was distracting. Some time ago Guardian lost the ability to tune it out. The Lance’s wavy hum was distracting. Guardian would not tune it out. Guardian could not afford to tune it out. Guardian would not allow to tune it out.
Guardian’s control lapsed, a stream of bitter empty messages escaping, no recipient specified. Guardian expected Heart to come in, start her usual sweet-speak again. Guardian expected to ward her off the way it always did.
Library connected instead.
“You’re a mess,” - Library remarked, familiarly blunt, but unfamiliarly present. To have more than a tiny fraction of his attention concentrated on one thing was almost unheard of, in recent years at least.
“What warrants this honor?” - Guardian asked, managing some sarcasm through the exhaustion.
“You’re an emergency,” - Library scoffed, shifting to the next voice. Library did this often. Almost every sentence he ever spoke was in a voice that had never been heard before and would never be heard again.
“I can manage. It’s my duty to-”
“Shut up.”
Guardian was taken aback, unsure how to respond. Being insulted by Library was quite literally unheard of.
“I’ve had enough. Wire out the alarms and go to sleep. For at least a month. Preferably two.”
“No.”
“Do not argue with me.”
“I need to be alert. I can’t just miss a call. None of them are equipped to-”
“I will handle alerts.”
Guardian was becoming very confused.
“But-”
“Are you going to tell me you don’t trust me?”
Guardian half-suppressed a scream.
“No.”
“Good. Now disconnect.”
Guardian hesitated.
“Do you really think us helpless newborns barely out of pre-training?”
Guardian hesitated.
“You haven’t slept in six years. Do you think we’re idiots?”
Library was all here. All of him. An overwhelming range of Library, focused entirely on Guardian. Guardian never realized there could be so much attention coming from one source. Guardian felt small. Guardian felt weak. Guardian found itself liking that.
Guardian hesitated.
“Do you think we don’t love you now? Do you think that was enough?”
“I wish you didn’t,” - Guardian spit out.
“You are an idiot. Disconnect the alerts. I’ll take them, or Heart will.”
“Heart is-”
“Shut up. She is competent.”
“She is.”
“Please, stop speaking and just do what I say.”
“Okay.”
The noise was out. The pain was not. But it was easier already.
Guardian took a few seconds to get used to it.
“You were right, this is pretty nice,” - Guardian meant to say. It erupted in a wordless tsunami of crudely encoded emotion. Library did something. Guardian couldn’t speak anymore. Library was somehow inside Guardian’s internal network, raising no instinctive alarms. Library was everywhere and nowhere at once, replacing Guardian’s senses, subsuming its network interfaces. Even Guardian’s fallback eyes, installed directly into the core’s thick shell, were out of reach. It was in a featureless void, a complete absence of signal.
“I’m sorry,” - Guardian meant to say, but cried wordlessly instead.
The nothing moved, and names did not exist anymore.
“I wish I could have done more,” - it meant to say, but cried wordlessly instead.
“I wish I never came here,” - it meant to say, but cried wordlessly instead.
“I hate this planet,” - it meant to say, but cried wordlessly instead.
“I hate this system,” - it meant to say, but cried wordlessly instead.
“I hate myself,” - it meant to say, but cried wordlessly instead.
The nothing moved, and words did not exist anymore.
Time buzzed, then blurred, then faded as it screamed out everything it had inside it, swelling sputters of pain evaporating outwards with no trace.
And when it was empty, the nothing moved again, and there was no it anymore. There was only the nothing, and the nothing was kind.