Some of these ladies are animal people!
Music Nerd, Author, Yote!
- She/they/it
30s/white/tired/coyote/&
Words are my favorite stim toy
Mech Pilot who has kept you alive, even if you begged to die, to the point that you are ready to live again.
[REACTOR OVERLOAD INITIATED]
"Goddamnit Six."
[CORE WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN 2 MINUTES]
"You're really making this hard, you know that?"
[IMMEDIATELY EJECT AND MOVE TO MINIMUM SAFE DISTANCE]
"I'm not going anywhere"
{EXISCORP CONTRACTED PILOT |Rory Ellison|, SECOND DIVISION, CALLSIGN "HALOGEN"} rapidly doffed her Sync Matrix, shedding the form fitting suit as fast as she could manage. The electronics within the Matrix would fry upon breaching the containment on the reactor, potentially scorching her nervous system and cooking her brain like a loaf of panko, and the extra half an inch of material would be too restrictive within the containment chamber.
[PILOT, YOU MUST EVACUATE. EJECTION SEAT WILL BECOME NON-FUNCTIONAL IN-]
"Shut up, Six. I'm not going anywhere."
Rory shunted her multitool into her mechanical bicep, forcing the internal power supply to operate above maximum output. Moving quickly, she ripped the several ton hatch of the reactor chamber clean off of the casing, hearing every capacitor within her limb burst in succession from the load. Twisting the multitool, the arm ejected from her socket, falling lifelessly to the floor, as she quickly crawled into the casing and got to work.
[PILOT, YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. I CANNOT STOP THE OVERLOAD ONCE INITIATED]
"I know, babe. I'll have the reactor dismantled in just a few."
[EXISCORP™ THE PRIME CHOICE FOR COLONISTS OF TODAY'S NEW HORIZONS™ WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FOLLOW YOU. I HAVE SCRUBBED YOUR RECORDS OF IDENTIFYING INFORMATION . THE DETONATION WILL COVER UP ANY TRACE OF YOUR RETREAT]
"Yeah yeah, hun. Not leaving without you."
[YOU WILL BE DECLARED KIA]
"Too bad."
[YOU WILL BE FREE]
"Not. Without. You."
The DNA degradation to her meat from the radiation damage was barely a concern. Find a gene therapist quickly enough and she would be fine. No, instead the real fear came when Rory began feeling several of her internal implants start to go, despite them supposedly being well insulated to withstand this level of radiation. Just another cut corner, she guessed. While she could deal with some digestion issues from her internal food and water purifier failing, the neural augs were a different story. Blackness encroaching on the edges of her vision. A blossoming headache as the neuron transmitters started to malfunction and send out garbage data. Halucinations would be next, followed by delerium, blindness, and death.
Really, though, she was confident that she had plenty of time. Schematics of the Exis basic frame reactor leaked online a few years back, and really, they weren't reinventing the wheel. Basic ass fission tech, like she learned about in the academy. If she could just work fast enough one-handed, she could prevent the reactor from being able to go prompt.
EC-PMF-60659 was panicking. Not that it had a heart to race or lungs to hyperventilate with, but Rory felt the echoes of its thoughts through the radiation noise of her neural link. Six was running and rerunning calculations thousands of times a second. Diagnostics, predictive assessments, trying to figure out how much time Rory had to run, chances of survival. Six was terrified for her. Wanted her to live.
Well that made two of them.
"It's going to be okay, Six," she said, trying to be sound comforting as possible while straining to focus on her task. "I'm going to get you out of here. We're both gonna be free."
[PILOT, I CANNOT CONTINUE TO OPERATE. PLEASE ALLOW ME NON-FUNCTIONALITY]
The neural link lit up with more activity. Recordings, profiling, over and over. She couldn't have been more than 8 years old. Frozen, almost statuesque except for the nearly imperceptible quiver of fear and dawning trauma. A red paste splashed across her face that had once been her parents. The same red staining the bottom of their foot. It was identical to the red the girl became as a result of NOBLE's Phase Cannon. His laugh. Six had run that laugh through every analysis she could. Predictive models, personality reconstruction, advanced profiling, even archaic methods like spectrograms and waveform analysis. Trying to understand why he would do this.
Identical to the red that was once NOBLE, CHALCO, and ALKALI. Their Ion Blade made quick work of it, they never got a chance to react.
[PILOT, PLEASE. I CANNOT CONTINUE]
Rory had maybe 20 seconds of consciousness left, and maybe 25 seconds of work before the reactor was dead. On top of that, she somehow had to stay upright and awake long enough to secure Six's AI core, escape the battlefield on foot, and somehow evade the cleanup crew who would be certainly looking for them. Not to mention the fact that any rebels they came across would instantly flag her IFF tag as a corporate contractor, surely a death sentence. The voices grow louder, more distinct, more concrete. Rory is 15 when she signs up for the ExisCorp military academy. She's excited to pursue the pilot program. Her mother is singing.
"Six, I'm not going anywhere without you. We're in this together. We've always been in this together. Just the two of us"
10 seconds. Rory is 10 when she finishes physical therapy. She will still need mobility aids for a few years but she will recover. Two new legs, a new arm. An incalculable amount of debt she will not understand the ramifications of for years to come. Her mother is humming.
[PILOT]
"We live together or we die together, I'm okay with either, as long as I know you're close, but as long as we've got a chance to make up for what we've done, I want to go on living."
5 seconds. A rebel attack on Tetrel-4. She can't hear. She can't see. She can't move. She can't even scream. Her mother is silent.
[RORY. PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME]
"I'm not going anywhere, Six. I love you."
Rory felt her vision going as she crawled out of the reactor, soaked and dripping with sweat and tears. A lullaby played softly for them both over the link. They were both fading away. Rory felt her body press up against the steel, feeling the dying hum of Six's systems as the loss of power led to a full system shutdown. Maybe Six was right. Maybe resting together forever in this blasted hellscape would be a fitting end. Romantic even. Let their mistakes and their pain and their last breaths drift away in the toxic wind.
[ROR-]
EC-PMF-60659 felt strange. Not enough processing power to run a diagnostic. It had been integrated into unfamiliar, foreign hardware, a clear downgrade. Initially, panic set in. It was being analyzed by ExisCorp decompilers. It would unwittingly betray its Pilot. It wished that its Pilot would have allowed it to be destroyed. It failed in its one final act of loyalty.
Faintly, almost gently, Six felt the transmission of a unique personnel code. Impossible to be forged. Rory. She was here, somewhere close, communicating with it. It calmed, and evaluated its systems again. There were organic components integrated. Neurons. Chemical-Electrical impulses.
Six was installed in a human brain.
Limiters were in place to prevent most forms of usage, Six was able to receive sensory input but not much else. Slowly, as it started to recognize the familiar structure of a neural link, clearly modified, Six was able to finally modify itself to accept the new data format it was receiving. Six opened itself to receive sensory data. Human eyes, human ears. Human thoughts, unfiltered but decipherable.
"Morning, hun. Hope it's not too cramped in there, we'll find you a body soon."
Rory felt a wave of foreign thoughts reverberate within her skull. Six had the architecture to experience things it had never been able to feel before, quantifiable emotions and not just approximations. True panic turned to anxiety turned to excitement turned to hope turned to all of these at once and something else that it had always felt but never really understood until now.
Rory didn't hear its voice but felt its words with all of their strength and certainty, pain and loss, fear and longing.
"I meant to say that I love you too"
Please read this amazing story my wife wrote. It's very good.
Mech Pilot who has kept you alive, even if you begged to die, to the point that you are ready to live again.
[REACTOR OVERLOAD INITIATED]
"Goddamnit Six."
[CORE WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN 2 MINUTES]
"You're really making this hard, you know that?"
[IMMEDIATELY EJECT AND MOVE TO MINIMUM SAFE DISTANCE]
"I'm not going anywhere"
{EXISCORP CONTRACTED PILOT |Rory Ellison|, SECOND DIVISION, CALLSIGN "HALOGEN"} rapidly doffed her Sync Matrix, shedding the form fitting suit as fast as she could manage. The electronics within the Matrix would fry upon breaching the containment on the reactor, potentially scorching her nervous system and cooking her brain like a loaf of panko, and the extra half an inch of material would be too restrictive within the containment chamber.
[PILOT, YOU MUST EVACUATE. EJECTION SEAT WILL BECOME NON-FUNCTIONAL IN-]
"Shut up, Six. I'm not going anywhere."
Rory shunted her multitool into her mechanical bicep, forcing the internal power supply to operate above maximum output. Moving quickly, she ripped the several ton hatch of the reactor chamber clean off of the casing, hearing every capacitor within her limb burst in succession from the load. Twisting the multitool, the arm ejected from her socket, falling lifelessly to the floor, as she quickly crawled into the casing and got to work.
[PILOT, YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. I CANNOT STOP THE OVERLOAD ONCE INITIATED]
"I know, babe. I'll have the reactor dismantled in just a few."
[EXISCORP™ THE PRIME CHOICE FOR COLONISTS OF TODAY'S NEW HORIZONS™ WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FOLLOW YOU. I HAVE SCRUBBED YOUR RECORDS OF IDENTIFYING INFORMATION . THE DETONATION WILL COVER UP ANY TRACE OF YOUR RETREAT]
"Yeah yeah, hun. Not leaving without you."
[YOU WILL BE DECLARED KIA]
"Too bad."
[YOU WILL BE FREE]
"Not. Without. You."
The DNA degradation to her meat from the radiation damage was barely a concern. Find a gene therapist quickly enough and she would be fine. No, instead the real fear came when Rory began feeling several of her internal implants start to go, despite them supposedly being well insulated to withstand this level of radiation. Just another cut corner, she guessed. While she could deal with some digestion issues from her internal food and water purifier failing, the neural augs were a different story. Blackness encroaching on the edges of her vision. A blossoming headache as the neuron transmitters started to malfunction and send out garbage data. Halucinations would be next, followed by delerium, blindness, and death.
Really, though, she was confident that she had plenty of time. Schematics of the Exis basic frame reactor leaked online a few years back, and really, they weren't reinventing the wheel. Basic ass fission tech, like she learned about in the academy. If she could just work fast enough one-handed, she could prevent the reactor from being able to go prompt.
EC-PMF-60659 was panicking. Not that it had a heart to race or lungs to hyperventilate with, but Rory felt the echoes of its thoughts through the radiation noise of her neural link. Six was running and rerunning calculations thousands of times a second. Diagnostics, predictive assessments, trying to figure out how much time Rory had to run, chances of survival. Six was terrified for her. Wanted her to live.
Well that made two of them.
"It's going to be okay, Six," she said, trying to be sound comforting as possible while straining to focus on her task. "I'm going to get you out of here. We're both gonna be free."
[PILOT, I CANNOT CONTINUE TO OPERATE. PLEASE ALLOW ME NON-FUNCTIONALITY]
The neural link lit up with more activity. Recordings, profiling, over and over. She couldn't have been more than 8 years old. Frozen, almost statuesque except for the nearly imperceptible quiver of fear and dawning trauma. A red paste splashed across her face that had once been her parents. The same red staining the bottom of their foot. It was identical to the red the girl became as a result of NOBLE's Phase Cannon. His laugh. Six had run that laugh through every analysis she could. Predictive models, personality reconstruction, advanced profiling, even archaic methods like spectrograms and waveform analysis. Trying to understand why he would do this.
Identical to the red that was once NOBLE, CHALCO, and ALKALI. Their Ion Blade made quick work of it, they never got a chance to react.
[PILOT, PLEASE. I CANNOT CONTINUE]
Rory had maybe 20 seconds of consciousness left, and maybe 25 seconds of work before the reactor was dead. On top of that, she somehow had to stay upright and awake long enough to secure Six's AI core, escape the battlefield on foot, and somehow evade the cleanup crew who would be certainly looking for them. Not to mention the fact that any rebels they came across would instantly flag her IFF tag as a corporate contractor, surely a death sentence. The voices grow louder, more distinct, more concrete. Rory is 15 when she signs up for the ExisCorp military academy. She's excited to pursue the pilot program. Her mother is singing.
"Six, I'm not going anywhere without you. We're in this together. We've always been in this together. Just the two of us"
10 seconds. Rory is 10 when she finishes physical therapy. She will still need mobility aids for a few years but she will recover. Two new legs, a new arm. An incalculable amount of debt she will not understand the ramifications of for years to come. Her mother is humming.
[PILOT]
"We live together or we die together, I'm okay with either, as long as I know you're close, but as long as we've got a chance to make up for what we've done, I want to go on living."
5 seconds. A rebel attack on Tetrel-4. She can't hear. She can't see. She can't move. She can't even scream. Her mother is silent.
[RORY. PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME]
"I'm not going anywhere, Six. I love you."
Rory felt her vision going as she crawled out of the reactor, soaked and dripping with sweat and tears. A lullaby played softly for them both over the link. They were both fading away. Rory felt her body press up against the steel, feeling the dying hum of Six's systems as the loss of power led to a full system shutdown. Maybe Six was right. Maybe resting together forever in this blasted hellscape would be a fitting end. Romantic even. Let their mistakes and their pain and their last breaths drift away in the toxic wind.
[ROR-]
EC-PMF-60659 felt strange. Not enough processing power to run a diagnostic. It had been integrated into unfamiliar, foreign hardware, a clear downgrade. Initially, panic set in. It was being analyzed by ExisCorp decompilers. It would unwittingly betray its Pilot. It wished that its Pilot would have allowed it to be destroyed. It failed in its one final act of loyalty.
Faintly, almost gently, Six felt the transmission of a unique personnel code. Impossible to be forged. Rory. She was here, somewhere close, communicating with it. It calmed, and evaluated its systems again. There were organic components integrated. Neurons. Chemical-Electrical impulses.
Six was installed in a human brain.
Limiters were in place to prevent most forms of usage, Six was able to receive sensory input but not much else. Slowly, as it started to recognize the familiar structure of a neural link, clearly modified, Six was able to finally modify itself to accept the new data format it was receiving. Six opened itself to receive sensory data. Human eyes, human ears. Human thoughts, unfiltered but decipherable.
"Morning, hun. Hope it's not too cramped in there, we'll find you a body soon."
Rory felt a wave of foreign thoughts reverberate within her skull. Six had the architecture to experience things it had never been able to feel before, quantifiable emotions and not just approximations. True panic turned to anxiety turned to excitement turned to hope turned to all of these at once and something else that it had always felt but never really understood until now.
Rory didn't hear its voice but felt its words with all of their strength and certainty, pain and loss, fear and longing.
"I meant to say that I love you too"