2
Even in pieces, EVO-3 still clutched her beloved sub-machine gun in her one remaining hand. Her other was missing and the arm was in tatters. Her eyes flickered to life as AR-10 and UMP40 came to a stop over her. "I must look a sorry sight," she croaked. Her voice chip still worked, although the dulcet inflections AR-10 had heart before were now absent as it sounded like it was on the fritz.
"Not to worry, EVO-3," UMP40 chirped cheerfully. "After a weekend with the horndogs back at engineering, I am sure you will be as good as new." She and AR-10 took EVO-3 between them – head, torso and arms – and lifted her up. Miraculously, the redhead's glasses were still intact if not a little lopsided.
AR-10 adjusted them for her. "Should I get her legs?" She asked UMP40. The German shook her head as EVO 3 closed her eyes in shame. "They're just over there."
"Leave them," UMP40 said. To EVO-3: "You'll get new ones," she added gently. "Much slimmer ones too. Until then, just rest up and think of those legs."
EVO-3's voice crackled. "Thank you. Both of you."
UMP40 beamed. "Hey, what are friends for? Isn't that right, AR-10?"
AR-10 nodded. "Right."
The three of them began their journey up the road in silence that was occasionally punctured by UMP40.
When they had made their first acquaintance with each other back at the base, AR-10 was summarily introduced to UMP40's sunny disposition when the Germanic girl proceeded to embrace her whole-heartedly. "Stiff one, aren't you?" She remarked as she pulled back and held AR-10 at arms' length. "Did I startle you? Sorry, I do this with everyone I meet for the first time. Hey, I don't suppose you've met MP5? Just ask her. She'll tell you I'm just incorruptible. Incorruptible? I meant incorrigible. I am very much corruptible. Gave one of my last commanders a nosebleed when I asked him to rub sunscreen on me. The sly dog. He even passed out."
"That sounds dangerous," AR-10 noted.
"Oh, he was up and going in an hour. Still, the other T-Dolls were trying to figure out if we could even give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But I digress. Have you met the rest of our team? Splendid lot, if I do say so myself. Got a Kalashnikov and a Scorpion. I think our leader's one of those French ladies. Just follow me. I think they're waiting for us at the helipad. We'll be briefed once we're in the air. Quickly now." UMP40 ran ahead as AR-10 followed her down the corridor. Along the way, they passed by other military personnel and the occasional T-Doll, and AR-10 watched curiously as UMP40 warmly addressed each one by name and received a response that was just as friendly.
"I don't think I've ever seen you around here before," UMP40 said. "New around here?"
"Yes. Just arrived a week ago."
"Where were you stationed before? Oh wait never mind that. Looks like we're here." The two of them stepped out of the corridor and into the light of day. They saw the helicopter with its rotor blades already chopping at the air, and just in front of it was the rest of the team.
Four hours later brought them to the present, out in the middle of nowhere on a godforsaken dirt road among the grassy plains. Could have been the steppes in Northern Asia. Could have been another world. In her memory bank, what parts of it the technicians had not touched, AR-10 could remember many landscapes. Many places and people, but they were all fragmented, snapshots without context.
"You know," EVO-3 mused. "I have been thinking."
"Go on," UMP40 said.
"But have you ever wondered, in light of the fact that we all have a copy of our AI uploaded on our employer's servers, if we are effectively immortal? I know it sounds a bit silly, but being nearly destroyed has made me wonder if it hasn't already happened before, and that I just don't know of it because my memory for it was wiped. On that note, does that mean we can never die, and if that is the case, what does dying feel like?
UMP40 glanced at AR-10, who shrugged. "To be perfectly honest with you," UMP40 said slowly, "I do not believe I have enough processing power to even come to terms with the question, let alone come up with an answer."
"Of course, of course. Considering my current state, nearly all my modules are currently offline so I am only running the bare necessities at this point, which is leaving me with a lot of bytes to consider this question."
"Have any of you been in the ocean?" AR-10 suddenly asked. UMP40 and EVO-3 both shook their head. "I have. I was on a mission with another Echelon to drive off pirates from a vessel, and during the skirmish, I fell into the water. It's kind of like when I dive into the net on my days off, but I couldn't move. My arms were heavy and I couldn't move them. My auditory system was flooded. I could do nothing but watch myself sink. " AR-10 paused. "I could do nothing but feel myself slowly fade away," she finished.
They all mulled over that in silence for a few seconds. "Do you think that's what death is like?" EVO-3 asked.
AR-10 shook her head. "I don't know. The other T-Dolls in my Echelon managed to get the vessel's crane to pull me up out of the water before I could find out. At least, that's what I remember. But not long before, I saw a man bleeding to death. He didn't ask me to save him. He just laid there, and I think he too, was sinking somewhere." She thought of the box that makes fire that she took from him. It laid in one of her ammo pouches. She promised herself that the next time she dived into the net, she will see if she could find out just what it was.
"Maybe that means we can die," EVO-3 mused. "Even more, if we can die, it means we can live."
Maintaining a vehicle was not in FAMAS's job description, but early off in her career she had learnt the value of listening instead of talking. And the more she listened, the more she heard, and the more she heard, the more she learnt. It was why she lasted as long as she did, where many of her kind had since fallen.
"If you don't take care of what belongs to you, you will find that it won't take care of you when you need it the most," an army engineer had explained to the T-Doll when he found her standing over him and his fellow soldiers while they were trying to do a repair job on a rundown Humvee. This had been during an interlude for a past mission. Another time. Another world. "Most days, when something breaks, people just go and buy a new one. Those people tend to treat each other the same way: girlfriends, colleagues, family and friends. That's no way to live. No, when a thing is broken, you got to show yourself you're better than that, and stick around to fix it. Like this baby here. She saw some people through some rough times, and now that she's a bit under the weather, we're returning the favour with a tune-up. But of course, I'm sure you dolls don't need to be that told, right?"
The engineer had then, perhaps due to the attention paid to him by a pretty face, gone on to show FAMAS a bit of the ropes for the rest of that morning and afternoon, and FAMAS saved to her memory modules the method for tightening and loosening the nuts with the right amount of torque, how to check the engine oil and the like. At the same time, she had been teased by the other soldiers for her clumsiness and inquisitiveness. All in all, a small price to pay for a crash course in Mechanic 101.
So there FAMAS was on her knees with her red overcoat tied around her waist, trying to change a tire with a socket wrench and jack on the one vehicle out of the entire convoy that had miraculously made it out of the firefight without its engines shot to hell. It was a Japanese pickup truck with one of its wheels punctured by stray rounds, but more or less intact. As she worked, FAMAS could still hear AK-74M walking about and into those who were still clinging to life. Every once in a while, there would be a loud crack of her rifle's report as she came across another poor soul trying to crawl off to safety.
FAMAS had been around, seen T-Dolls of all shapes and sizes, and run into quite a few characters along the way. The Russian was demonstrating the case in point. Compared to her sister AK-47, AK-74M had all the bad bits of her family and none of the good.
When FAMAS finally replaced the tire, she stowed away the tools into the back of the jeep, opened the door to the driver's seat and pulled out the deceased soldier who had been at the wheel. He fell out and onto the ground, and FAMAS took his place. She shut the door, inspected the mirrors, and when satisfied, took a moment to gaze out through the bullet-riddled windshield at the road ahead, before turning the keys in the ignition and hearing the jeep's engine roar huskily to her touch.
There were little traces of the people whose lives she had ended just an hour ago. As she took a few moments to look around, FAMAS saw the photo of a family on a porch duct-taped near the steering wheel. She saw the little mantras of good luck written in pen on the glass. She saw an ashtray on the dashboard half-filled with the remains of fine cigars.
As FAMAS closed her eyes and leaned her head back with her namesake in her lap, she heard the corpse riding shotgun sit up straight as the seat next to her noisily creaked. "Quite the bad company you keep, my sweet," his growl came into her ear over the engine's rumbling. "How's my favourite adjutant? Miss me?"
FAMAS's hands went for her rifle immediately, even as her eyes remained close. "Go away."
"Is that how one addresses her commander?" FAMAS heard the corpse tut-tut. "I thought I taught you better than that."
"You're not here, you're not real and you're no longer my commander."
"That's the million dollar question, isn't it? If I'm not real, why can you hear me, T-Doll?"
"A malfunction. A hiccup in my memory modules. The technicians will fix it, and you will be banished from me."
"We both know that's not it. The technicians have not found anything untoward in your last scheduled maintenance, nor the ones before them. You have not confided in them about me either. Why is that, adjutant?" FAMAS didn't answer. She heard the corpse chuckle and uncap a hip flask. Heard him take a long chug before sloshing the liquor this way and that. FAMAS stayed silent, her knuckles tight around the stock and trigger guard of her rifle. "Come on, no need to be like that. It's just you and me, just as has always been. Just as it always should be. Before you ruined us both."
"You ruined us both," FAMAS heard herself hiss. She opened her eyes and turned to look at him and wished she hadn't. He was in uniform, with medals adorning his chest and his face freshly clean-shaven and of cologne and aftershave, save for the goatee she had once said to befit him.
He was how she remembered him when he was always at his best, before she began to see more what he could be like at his worst, until the worst was all that was left of him. Before he presented himself to Helian, he used to ask her for her opinion, and even though she could see nothing out of place, FAMAS would still stop and take a moment to adjust his tie, if only to be just a little closer than protocol dictated.
He raised an eyebrow at her reaction and leaned closer as she leaned away while holding her rifle in her arms. "Did you not give me your oath, FAMAS?" he reminded her gently. "Did you not promise to stay by my side forever?" He took her chin and she swore, she swore, that he had to be real. She screwed her eyes shut as his face inched forward until it was all she could see. "Well, here I am, and I am not going anywhere."
When FAMAS opened her eyes, the corpse was where it was. Where it always was. Or so FAMAS tried to convince herself.
AK-74M cocked her head to the side as she followed the wounded soldier crawl on his belly through the grass, gloved hands clutching at the stalks as if they held his salvation. "You know," she mused aloud as she strolled alongside him. "I am not sadistic. I don't enjoy this. I take no pleasure in it. Pleasure is a matter of hormones: of dopamine and serotonin. I have wires and pumps for nerves and veins. I am cold-blooded. I have no blood. I have coolant. So why, as I am sure you are thinking, do I do this? She listened to the soldier sob. This far in, she was sure he was in shock from the pain. She decided he was probably sobbing because he did not want to die. "I'm just curious. That's all. Curiosity. You organics fascinate me. Here you are, still trying to live, when you know all too well that death is close, so close, but you insist to yourself that you can make it. You hope against hope. You delude yourself, and I can't understand why you and your kind do this?"
She had asked this question to her sisters several times in the past. "It's a flaw," AK-12 had explained. "A faulty sub-routine in Mother Nature's programming. It's only more evidence that they need us."
"It's resilience," AK-47 had suggested. "Baffling, but admirable."
Both answers did not satisfy AK-74M.
The soldier continued to crawl. AK-74M decided he was a poor conversationalist. She stopped, waited till the soldier had crawled ahead of her, before raising her rifle, aiming, and squeezing the trigger.
A puff of dirt spurted just next to the soldiers head. The soldier stiffened and began to crawl faster.
AK-74M nodded to herself and made the next shot miss as well. Then the one after that. Then the next one as well. She wanted to see how far the soldier could crawl before he died. She became disappointed when he expired only a couple of minutes later. With stomach wounds, she assumed that he would have lasted much longer if he had sat somewhere and waited for medical attention, not that anyone would have been coming to help.
AK-74M sighed and turned to look back up towards the carnage on the road. She could see the figure of FAMAS faintly in the distance. It seemed the French T-Doll was trying to change a tire. Closer, she could see AR-10 and UMP40 both searching for the fifth member of their group. AK-74M reckoned they wouldn't find much, and as it was, they would do just fine as they were without her. That T-Doll most certainly, at least in AK-74M's estimation, had the least to offer to the operation since the beginning.
After a few seconds, she found she was unable to take her eyes off AR-10. As if by instinct, the other T-Doll stopped and stared back in her direction, before turning to UMP40 who wildly gestured for her to come over. Guess that meant they had found their fifth member. She would be just baggage at this stage. Hardly combat effective after the damage she had sustained.
AK-74M paused as her sensors detected a transmission coming over their designated frequency for the operation. She answered it. This is AK-74M of Echelon Kappa-4 reading you loud and clear.
AK-74M, this is Command. Please advise as to your current status of the operation.
Command, we have engaged a unit of Colonel Mikhailov's forces at Op. Point Bravo as per the mission briefing. Unit consisted of foot mobiles and lightly armoured vehicles and have been neutralised. We have not detained the Colonel himself. Requesting further instructions.
AK-74M, proceed to Op. Point Charlie. Do you require air transportation? Please clarify.
FAMAS joined in the exchange. Command, this is FAMAS. Negative, we have salvaged and secured transportation. We confirm we will be proceeding to Op. Point Charlie. Please be advised that we are currently one T-Doll down. EVO-3 is incapacitated and no longer combat effective.
Understood, FAMAS. That is unfortunate. Be advised we have sightings of military forces on route to your location. Most likely friends of the unit you have encountered. Approximately fifty foot mobiles with mechanized support. ETA ten minutes. Please continue to keep us abreast of developments as they occur. Command, out.
Laughter over the channel from UMP40. He said keep us abreast, she chuckled over the channel.
Very mature, AK-74M replied.
Just keeping things light.
We don't need light. We need to be focused.
Can it you two, FAMAS snapped back. You all heard Command. We don't want to be here when these guys' friends show up for blood. We're moving out. Now.
