The ride back to the city was quiet. Michael sighed in relief when his hearing started to slowly return, the ringing growing less all-encompassing as the minutes passed. The little bits of ambient noise trickled in around him to break up the harsh, unnatural stillness. His head still felt stuffed uncomfortably full, but it seemed like the damage wasn't as bad as it could have been.
Finally braving a look around the van, he was prepared for a barrage of condemnation from the others. To his surprise, there wasn't any to be found. The back of the vehicle remained quiet, but it wasn't directed at him. Instead, the other mercenaries sat exhausted but more or less content.
A paranoid part of him whispered that they didn't know, that they wouldn't be sitting nearly so calmly once they found out that he was the one who had caused the urgent retreat, but that poisonous thought died when he made eye contact with Jolt. She had definitely been nearby when the tinkertech had gone off, but now she merely offered an easy nod. Whether it was acknowledgement or approval, he didn't know, but it certainly wasn't the hostility he expected.
Shifting his focus to Danielle confirmed it. The squad leader eyed him knowingly—Jolt must have told her what happened at some point amidst the chaos—but remained at her seat, relaxed.
Slowly Michael leaned back, uncertain but not quite as tense as before. As the van rumbled beneath him, the exhaustion of the long day finally caught up, and weariness wrapped around his body. His eyelids drooped.
Minutes later, he broke out of his half-doze. Danielle was speaking.
"…overall, good work," she said, gazing around the van to make eye contact with the other mercenaries. "The entire team made it out safely, and we still secured a sizable supply. For a strike against the Bastion, this was a clear success."
The words were clearly meant to reassure, though Michael couldn't help but feel that she was slightly overselling it. It didn't feel like much of a "strike" when they had cut and run as soon as they had been discovered, but he of all people certainly wasn't going to say anything.
"Are we going to have to unload it all?" one of the squad members asked, but Danielle shook her head.
"Everyone here is done for the night. We'll be getting out soon, right where we started. After that, you're all back on your own."
"Can finally get some damn sleep," someone muttered with a yawn, sparking murmurs of agreement. Michael clearly wasn't the only one feeling the late hour, and the group drifted back into silence.
The last few minutes passed quickly, and eventually the van came to a stop. One by one the mercenaries disembarked, and sure enough Michael recognized the back of the same restaurant they had departed from earlier that night. They were the second squad to arrive, the final vehicle pulling in a moment later, and men and women began to trickle away, vanishing into the city one by one. Danielle had strode over to exchange quiet words with Marcus and John, and Michael eyed the impromptu gathering, wavering.
Now that everything was over, the exit beckoned. The three squad leaders looked busy, and his previous urge to plead his case for the armored vest seemed petulant. In the end, he didn't care that much about it. Finding tinkertech had always been a nice bonus, not the reason he went out exploring.
Discomfort made him hesitate. For that brief moment it had felt natural that the tinkertech was his and his alone. It shouldn't have mattered, and yet even now he was still a little disappointed not to get it, and the current twinge was nothing compared to how badly he'd wanted it at the time.
Michael stopped that train of thought in its tracks. He wasn't going down that rabbit hole. Not here, out in the middle of the city at an ungodly hour. It was time to go home.
~~~~ ~~~~
Mid-morning found Michael sitting at his desk, a spread of electronics scattered out before him. His shield lay in pieces, unresponsive.
He wasn't sure when it had finally given out, either during the exhausting trek home or at some point overnight as the stress reached a tipping point. It had probably been while he was asleep; Michael hoped he would have noticed it failing while he was still wearing it, as tired as he had been. Whatever the exact time, the result was a pile of expensive-looking scrap.
That, at least, was a small mercy. Unlike back at the Bastion, his shield had gone quietly. There weren't any deliberate traps within the item itself, which certainly helped, but tinkertech still had a nasty habit of failing in spectacular and devastating ways. Waking up to an unresponsive hunk of metal was a bit more pleasant than a roaring inferno.
Looking at the remnants of the shield, Michael wished—not for the first time—that he could actually build tinkertech himself. Being able to control what few things he came across was good, but it left him frustratingly dependent. Otherwise, he could do so much more. Without a way to truly make it his own, the already-rare tinkertech wouldn't ever be exactly what he wanted.
The previous night was a particular reminder of how important those pieces of tinkertech could be, and how dangerous as well. The thought of facing that self-destructing tech on his own was sobering. Michael didn't want to think that it would have killed him, but he wasn't that confident. Without his shield, he felt unpleasantly vulnerable.
Another thought struck him, and he frowned. In addition to losing a comforting safeguard, he had potentially lost a way forwards investigating the Machine Army. Caution had kept him from moving too quickly before, afraid of damaging the shield, and yet it had ended up destroyed anyway. Now, the question remained if there was a way to continue where he had left off.
Sweeping the broken pieces together, Michael hummed to himself. There was only one way to find out. He stretched out on his bed, the scraps piled beside him, and cast his mind inwards. Twitching a tendril, he made contact, and was relieved when an indistinct signal roared through the sea of fog.
It remained too fast and too alien to make sense of, but the wake of its passage left a faint, lingering sensation. Barely present, Michael couldn't tell if it was his imagination or if he'd gotten a step closer to understanding the machinery, but it felt… hungry.
He shouldn't have had any reason to continue. Even if the feeling wasn't real, the tinkertech within him was undeniably trying to do something. On its own, it had tried to kill him. Helping it was the last thing he wanted to do, even if that particular signal wasn't related to him specifically. Unfortunately, ignoring the problem wasn't an option. His problem wasn't going to go away on its own, and he wasn't going to delude himself into thinking it might. He couldn't let an overabundance of caution hold him in place, unable to progress.
He had already put it off long enough. Shaping his thoughts, he loosed a fraction of the Machine Army, aiming it towards the broken pieces. Outside of his direct control, the tendril curled around a metal fragment and inexorably drew it closer.
A jagged line cracked open like a grinning maw from just above his hip to the base of his sternum, and the former tinkertech vanished inside.
As the metallic scar sealed shut, Michael was bombarded by a stream of information. At another time it might have been confusing, but each detail that flowed past was painfully familiar—a design he'd seen and forgotten a hundred times. Just as he knew the inner workings of tinkertech at a touch, the Machine Army shredded the piece and split out the same understanding.
Not all of the information was present. Whether it was due to the broken state of the shield, or merely because only one piece had been taken apart so far, the knowledge that passed him wasn't as expansive as what he knew should be present. However, what was there didn't fade. The shield was long dead, and yet he could still call up the elaborate mechanisms with all the effort of a passing thought.
The remaining scraps vanished in short order as Michael and the machine eagerly tore them apart, relishing in the gains that each component brought.
In the end, the process wasn't perfect. Calling up an image of the shield in its entirety wasn't possible; at first nothing happened, and then as Michael persisted, only a crippled framework emerged from the fog. There were pieces clearly missing, chunks of the design that sat empty and left the entire thing impossible to activate. As soon as he stopped concentrating, it dissolved violently, as if the writhing fog was eager to scrub it away.
The result left Michael conflicted. He had no idea how to bridge the gap between the missing pieces. Whether it was a single missing sliver or an entire chunk, it was equally inaccessible to anyone except a proper tinker. If the problem lay in the Machine Army's disassembly itself, the process was worthless. On the other hand, it seemed perfectly plausible that an unbroken piece of tinkertech might be copied over properly.
His thoughts flipped back and forth, almost mechanically, drifting away from the original problem until something suddenly appeared. In the middle of contemplating a piece of the recovered shield, he absentmindedly wondered about the surface of his own scar, and a brand-new design unfolded.
Everything seemed to freeze as he realized what he was seeing.
The blueprint before him was similar to the others that he'd seen before, layered in incredible complexity, but this time there were pieces that hammered down upon him, blindingly familiar. It kept the machinery's fundamental shape, but now a web of tiny shields lay along the surface of the new schematic, fragments from what he'd just re-discovered. The Machine Army didn't design or recreate tinkertech wholesale. It merged them, adding every new technology to the sum of its prior data.
Casting the image aside, his thoughts raced back to the previous broken design, the shield with its missing parts. This time, instead of trying to recreate the entire object, he kept only the core idea of a shield, and before his eyes a new plan unfolded.
Michael reined himself in with a supreme effort of will. The urge to leap forwards gnawed at him, but a pressing reminder held him back. Right now, the Machine Army was occupied. Specifically, it was busy holding him together. He didn't know how much of the machinery within his own body he could physically live without, but none of it felt completely unnecessary. Creating a shield wouldn't do him any good if it tore apart his heart in the process.
Feeling out the existing machinery in his body didn't help. He could tell what each part was doing, how it kept his blood flowing and heart beating, but the dizzying array of information wasn't organized in any sort of priority. There were no markings that set aside individual components.
A part of him made a note to return to that. He still didn't know much about how his body actually worked, but if he could figure out how to filter the data, keeping track of the status of any major organs would probably be a good idea.
Returning to the design that had appeared, this time he tried to study it slowly. It was hard to put his desire into words, to think about creating something without touching what was already there. He wasn't looking for a new design, but a layer of qualification, an adjustment to what was already presented. Something must have been conveyed, because the design rippled and shifted. It twisted into a similar schematic, and Michael looked at the change uncertainly. There wasn't anything to actually confirm what he'd attempted, and the result was larger than he thought possible. Then again, tinkertech had done far stranger things. A shiver of excitement ran through him, and he kicked the design into motion.
From the very depths of the machinery, he felt something stir to life. The very force of its presence churned the sea of data into a frenzy. The signal he'd previously felt barreling through him was an insignificant ripple compared to the lashing waves of activity that now rose, and only the reassuring grip of his power kept him from grinding it to a halt.
A void crystallized in the center of the Machine Army, deep within the meld of metal and his own flesh—a tiny sphere of twisted space. Inside, something moved. It lay beyond the reach of his senses, defying every attempt to reach inside, but Michael was anything but repulsed. The structure drew his attention like a moth to a flame, as he was swept up in the wash of data. Amidst the barrage he caught flickering shadows dancing faster and faster against the outside of the shell.
The feeling of completion rose, swelled, and burst. The edges of the void cracked like glass, flaking away into nothingness as space shifted, dragging towards the edge of the machinery. Shining metal emerged from nothingness, floating just above the surface of his scar. As the last corner emerged, it fell towards the ground, and only a split-second reaction allowed Michael to stretch out and catch it with a tendril. The moment he did, the tendril tightened with a reflexive jerk. His growing excitement was snuffed out in an instant as, even through the calming influence of the depths of his power, his heartbeat spiked.
The brand-new shield wasn't empty. Lurking within the fundamental design of every single component lay the same malevolent intelligence. The Machine Army didn't create tinkertech, Michael realized in dawning horror. It created more of itself. The shape was irrelevant; it was the mind infesting every millimeter of the structure that was the true form of the Army.
Just like the piece of the Machine Army inside of him, the design of the new shield was overwhelming. The sea of information within was smaller, understandable in chunks instead of individual threads, but it was still beyond him. Retreating, his thoughts grew grim.
The shield was useless. Without knowing exactly what was going on inside, it was a bomb waiting to go off. He had no idea what would happen the second he let go, and no desire to find out. Unbidden, the tinkertech from the Bastion detonating in front of him sprang to mind.
Wrapping around the shield, the tendril tightened.
There was no reason to let it exist. Unlike the fragment inside of him, his life didn't hang in the balance. It had nothing to hide behind. From the inside and out he bore down on the shield, crushing it with a groan of tortured metal. Inside, components fried and overloaded, forced to carry increasingly heavier loads until they burnt away. Section by section, the shield died with a whimper, wrenched apart and forcibly held back from an explosive end. As the last dead scrap dropped to the ground, Michael realized he was gasping for air. He took a long, deep breath, composing himself.
He turned back to the original fragment, the piece of the Machine Army inside him. He pictured the same idea of a shield from before, but empty, an ordinary piece of tinkertech, and shoved. The demand rang out, rippling through the fog, and nothing returned. Just as when he'd tried to properly rebuild his own body, there was only emptiness.
Very well. He should have known that relying on anything other than himself was pointless. Unwilling or unable, the Machine Army couldn't give him what he wanted, and so he would do it on his own. This time, however, he had a way to proceed. Unlike biology, he knew tinkertech. The Machine Army had let loose the secret that it could build from nothing, and now he would force it to work whether it wanted to or not.
Unconsciously, his lips set into a thin line as he burrowed into the machinery. Something simple to start, he decided. He remembered his first encounter with the machine. There had been a specific weapon that had almost skewered him. A suitable proof-of-concept. He pictured the long, sharp dart, clearly visualizing each dimension. With the image firmly in mind, he pressed down upon the Machine Army. This wasn't a request for a design, it was an order aimed at what he now knew lurked in the depths. The pressure rose, and under his grasp it stirred to life.
The void crystallized once more, and Michael stared intently. Around him, time blurred and smeared past.
Finally, the sphere shattered and a long, thin piece emerged. He retreated back to his body, rolling it between his fingers in triumph. The missing response from his power confirmed exactly what he had demanded. Before him lay a completely clean piece of metal.
This? This had potential.
