Michael tumbled backwards across the floor, reflexive gasp cut short as his eyes and throat were instantly filled with harsh dust. He drunkenly lurched to his feet, wheezing desperately for breath that wouldn't come. Chunks of rock clattered to the ground all around him, rolling and bouncing through the sudden haze as they tumbled to a halt.
A bomb. The thought flashed through his mind as he backpedaled, continuing to choke and gasp for air. Even as the idea occurred to him, it didn't make any sense. Why? Who would place explosives, much less tinkertech explosives, in some abandoned ruin where nobody would ever come across them? And if it had been a bomb, how was he still alive? He had been mere inches away from the wall when it erupted.
Not a bomb, then. He felt faint, oxygen failing to arrive as stabbing pains shot through his chest on each inhalation. A tinkertech malfunction? The odds of that… The thought trailed off as he peered into the hazy cloud, blinking through watery eyes. Within the bright blur of dust, something dark moved. He forced another heavy blink as the shape swam into view.
Four gunmetal limbs stretched outward from a central point, splaying slightly upward before they plunged sharply to the ground. Spread out around the form evenly, each leg was easily three feet long, ending in jagged points that rested lightly against the concrete beneath it. As he watched, they shifted slightly, scoring grooves into the ground as it skittered back and forth, spinning in place. As the machine moved, the individual legs rippled, undulating and flexing and bringing its shining silver underside briefly in and out of view. Michael took one look at the shape in front of him, then turned and ran.
A split-second after he took off, there was a shrill whirring noise, and over his shoulder whipped a dark blur that trailed a hair-thin line. Ricocheting off the pillar ahead of him, it snapped back faster than a blink and Michael dove for cover in delayed reaction. He flew over the waist-high wall in front of him, throwing himself to all fours heedless of the pain shooting through his knees at the impact. A moment later he was up again, half hunched over as he sprinted without regard for direction.
Michael had barely made it a handful of steps when he jerked to a painful halt, stopped dead by his backpack tugging irresistibly behind him. Gritting his teeth, he hauled forward desperately, but his feet only slid in place, shoes rasping against the floor. His fingers clawed at the straps, tearing them from his shoulders, and he was free again, dashing around and over the scattered concrete barriers that divided up the floor.
As the far wall of the building drew closer, he slowed, ducking into cover behind a tall piece of concrete while panting raggedly. The urge to throw up rose, throbbing up through his stomach and head as the room spun around him. Slowly he wrestled it back under control, choking down gulps of air as the sensation steadily retreated.
He had been right to run; whatever that piece of tinkertech was, it wasn't friendly. Perhaps he could have dove for it, tried to grab it before it could react. If he had made contact, he might have been able to reach out with his power and lock it in place. Then the image of that black blur flashing by his head replayed itself, and he swallowed, throat dry. It was fast.
It was still there, at the edge of his awareness. Near where he had lost his backpack, the sensation of tinkertech jittered and wavered. Between him and the exit.
Looking around, he confirmed the sinking feeling in his chest. If there was a staircase on this side of the building, he couldn't see it, and he didn't want to move. Didn't want to expose himself any further. He didn't have time for a search, barely had time at all. He had to think of something, a way to escape. That was all he needed—a split-second to sprint for the stairs, get at least one flight down. From there, even a window would work. The third floor was too high, but the second was doable if he lowered himself first. Just had to get down there.
His thoughts were interrupted by the growing sensation against his skin. The mysterious, hostile tinkertech, growing closer, was making a beeline straight for his hiding spot. It knew where he was, just as he could sense its approach in turn. He was out of time, scattered and without a plan.
Michael bent double, fingers closing around a fist-sized chunk of concrete at his feet. It was rough, oddly shaped, and a little hard to hold, but the weight was heavy and comforting. Taking a deep breath and ignoring the tightness in his chest, he drew back his arm and stepped out from behind the pillar.
He didn't even have enough time to flinch before the thing slammed into his stomach.
His vision blackened, hearing vanishing as his entire world was replaced by agony. Half his body turned into a sea of fire, and for a moment he could feel the same sensations twofold. The tearing, burning pain, and the ripping, chewing, digging deeper past thick muscles and all-too-brittle bones and—
The world went white, and he screamed, a wordless-scratching-bleeding cry, makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop—
And suddenly everything was still. The fire banked, and for a moment his thoughts returned, too slow. Like molasses, oozing from the shattered cracks of his mind. He was on his back, somehow, and his head flopped to the side as he vomited, heaving nothing but spattered flecks of red across the ground.
He wanted it out. Like an animal caught in a trap, he could feel every inch of the metal reaching up into him, and it needed to be out. This very second, this very instant, it didn't belong and it needed to be out. His thoughts lashed out wildly, catching the invading tendrils, and they jerked backwards.
With the movement came the agony once more, and his world vanished into a shrill whine. The tendrils stopped, frozen in place. They couldn't move, he couldn't move them. Like grabbing the end of a poker glowing cherry-red, even the idea of further movement sent him twitching out of control, vomiting once more. He could only lay on the floor, focusing on his own bubbling breaths, each harder than the last. In and out, a slow rasp, as the burning spiral of fire shrank, replaced by ice flowing through his veins outward from the spreading pool of red. Smaller than I expected, a drifting part of him thought, even as the stain continued to grow, dribbling down his side and sliding past the clump of steel frozen in place within him.
Blood loss. The thought came to him slowly, ponderously. As it rolled to the front of his mind, he reached for the idea and felt it slip from his grasp. Dangerous, he remembered. Deadly, soon enough. Reaching for it again, he grabbed hold. He needed to stop the bleeding, buy himself time. A moment to think clearly, stave off the ticking clock that counted down with every spurt of life that left his body. He needed to know how bad it was, and remembered that first moment. When his perspective had shifted, doubled into something else. Steeling himself, Michael reached his thoughts out once more for the piece of metal, following the familiar tugging sensation that pointed down into his own body.
As soon as he made contact, he knew exactly how soon he would die.
The information spiraled out instantly, an overwhelming cloud of data pulled to the front of his rapidly-clearing mind. The vast majority tore away before he could grasp it, but what remained was enough. A list of missing pieces, parts of a jigsaw that were gone, shredded beyond repair. Numbers flowed through his head, pulled from a dozen different sources. The rising rate of blood flowing from torn holes. Dropping oxygen levels as one and a half lungs flagged, winding down. And then the final notice, where one of the tendrils had reached back, scouring against his spine. Nerves that had snapped and withdrawn, curling away from their previous connections. It wasn't until that very moment that he realized his legs refused to move.
Flutters of panic ran through him, but they were strangely muted and distant. He was too busy floating through the heavy fog of information, comparing constantly updating points of data to an entire collection of patterns and experience. It all came together to form a single number, counting down.
Seeing the number, something sparked within him, jolting him out of his daze of sensory overload. He needed to make it stop, to drag the slow spiral of death to a halt. As soon as the idea appeared, new information rose out of the fog with it. Places to clamp down, where the artificial legs could split apart into tendrils and wrap leaking blood vessels closed, or stitch together torn holes like the finest needle and thread. Schematics, almost, designed to patch the jumbled, bloody mess of his body into something barely recognizable, but stable. Enough to push him away from the brink of death.
He felt a sliver of relief as he saw the upcoming work unfold, like the most complicated rehearsal in existence. It was a promised dance of indescribable complexity, far too much to control individually, and his grip relaxed a fraction of an inch to guide the pieces of machinery into motion. Even the pain had faded, that previous knee-jerk burn at the slightest movement washed away under the smoothness that filled his mind. Relaxing the barest fraction, he stared upward into the bright blue sky as within him, metal moved.
And moved.
And kept moving.
Michael jerked, twitching as the realization flowed through him. The machinery had continued to work, spinning and unwinding through his body even as it applied quick patches to holes and spliced torn muscles and nerves. It had unfolded, stretching out to expand past its first designated task. He had distanced himself, given it an inch of ground, and it hadn't hesitated to seize the opportunity. Nothing that would directly hurt him, as even now it was still incapable of direct resistance. But in his lapse, the machinery hadn't hesitated to interweave further through his flesh, leaving innumerable pieces behind, and he stared in mixed fascination and horror at the crossing lines of metal. They had spread far deeper through his body, spiraling around his heart.
His half-formed thoughts of recovering comfortably in a hospital bed vanished like smoke in the wind. There was no need for the incredible analysis that the machinery provided, the consequences were obvious. Even as the realization arrived, another followed on its heels. An even greater hammer-blow.
Until now, the violent piece of tinkertech had been reacting to him like the robot it appeared to be. Staggeringly complex, yes, but programmed. It was designed for a role, though he shuddered to imagine for what purpose a tinker would make such a thing. He had approached, and it attacked. He had ran, and it followed, chased him down and nearly killed him. Would have, if he had been almost anyone else. But then he had subsumed it, dragged it to a halt within his flesh. That should have been the end of it. Instead, even as it followed his will, it had twisted the meaning of its commands and continued onward without prompting or notice. It was intelligent.
Diving back into the machine, he could feel it now. Unlike anything he had ever seen before, an indescribable other permeated every inch, every single strand of the technology. Alone, the fragments slipped through his grasp, intangible. Only as a whole did they come together to form something greater than the sum of their parts. Like a cityscape emerging from below, the cloud of information—an alien gestalt—rose into view, indecipherable and unintelligible.
As it lay spread out before him, even now it continued to work. Attempts to modify the myriad processes that flowed through and formed its intelligence found no purchase, sliding against an invisible barrier. Controlling the body of the machine required barely a thought, but he couldn't approach the mind.
An intelligent machine, he thought dazedly. One that was practically alive, though driven by an incomprehensible reasoning to kill. The complexity, the sheer accomplishment that the piece of technology within him represented… It was one of a kind. No, not one of a kind, he realized slowly.
A low, broken laugh shook its way out of his chest. It grew louder and louder, too weary to be hysterical but wild and mocking nevertheless. It was the Machine Army. It had to be. The only known artificial intelligence in existence, and inexplicably, unwaveringly hostile. One of the six quarantine sites across the United States, where even the combined forces of the nation's PRT were unwilling or unable to destroy whatever lay within. As he rolled the name around in his head, he could feel a prickling attention respond to his thoughts. The sensation of innumerable eyes, opening inside.
Suddenly, he was just tired. The previous distant clarity was already fading, leaving behind a throbbing, pulsing pain that shot through half his body, and queasy feeling of sickness. He wanted to be home, to slump down on the chair in the corner of his little studio apartment and just stop for a time. Let the world pass him by. Take a moment to just exist, without having to do anything.
Ever so slowly, Michael dragged himself to his feet. He didn't cry out, eyes downcast as his jaw clenched and feet shambled across the floor. One arm fell down to collide with his backpack, and he pulled it to his side, holding it tight against the patched-together hole that was his side, still shining and jagged.
His limping steps back down the stairs and out the building seemed to go by in a flicker of bright-dim-bright, through the dark interior to reemerge out into the beating sun. He twisted in place, searching slowly for a spark of familiarity around him. There, in the distance. The gleaming steel threads of the distant fence. Another drifting flicker, and it was right in front of him.
Michael looked up at the top of the fence. A few inches over his head, a height that had just hours before been barely an obstacle. His eyes fell once more, and he shuffled to the side, kept walking until the chains disappeared beneath his fingers. A vertical line that had at some point been cut at waist level and peeled back. On his knees, he crawled through, turning back to drag the backpack behind him and ignoring the jab as he stood once again.
The bus ride back home went by in a blur. All around him figures swam in the corner of his vision, occasionally peering closer in concern or simple curiosity. He only clutched the bag tighter, tucked his head lower. Then before he knew it, he was at his door, and his fingers fumbled the key into the lock. As the door closed behind him, he finally let himself fall backward onto the soft cushions.
