Author's Note: For the sake of minimizing anime-related weirdness, I also think it would be nice to age up the Sabers a smidge. Give them more experience with life, you know?
So: Celia's 29, Lena's 27, Priss is 24, Nene's 21, Mackie's 18. There, that's a reasonable age range don't you think?
Also! To explain where Celia's getting her money, and to mitigate the inherent horniness of the whole lingerie shop merchant thing, I've always imagined the Silky Doll as just one outlet for Celia's upscale fashion boutique empire. Every woman with money to spend in the Pacific Rim wants a Stingray Luxury goods dress custom-printed to their body and synthesized to their style, dreamed up by AI with just the insertion of a few keywords. "Feel like yourself for once" is SLG's jingle; It echoes across the shopping districts of two dozen cities worldwide. It's enough to make Celia a millionaire (at least in USD) but not a billionaire. And the idea that Miss Stingray turned her back on her father's work to be a silly useless fashionista is enough to throw most GENOM execs off her trail – she's harmless now, isn't she?
Mackie
"It's only eight in the morning, sis, should I really-"
"Yes."
"You're sure? Won't Priss be, like, doubly cranky if she doesn't wake up on her own terms?"
"That's why you're calling Sylvie, little brother. She'll wake Priss up, and that will work better on all accounts."
"Isn't that manipulative?"
"It isn't manipulative if they know they're being nudged in a way that is the way they'd want us to interact with them anyway."
"What's Priss supposed to do while you're rooting around in Sylvie's brain, anyway?"
"An excellent question, but it is ultimately not up to me to answer. I am not her babysitter. Make the call, please, Mackie. I have prep work I need to do in the lab."
"Fine."
So my sister gets up, still in her nightgown, and heads off to her room to change.
And yeah. My gaze, it lingers. Maybe a little long, because Sis turns around, looks at me, and laughs a little before shutting the door.
Uh. Yeah. Look, I have Nene, but it's hard, you know? Priss has that biker babe thing, Linna's what old fogies would call dummy thick, and, uh, my big sister will sometimes model her own clothes for Stingray Luxury Goods. And Sylvie needs no explanation.
I ping Sylvie on the Saber's covert comm channel. Once it blanks out. Twice it blanks out. The third time, she picks up.
"Hey," I whisper. Not that there's a point to that. It's more of an impulse.
"Hey yourself, Mackie," she sighs back. "I take it Celia wants me in the lab today?"
"Yeah. We transferred your data to the facility under the Ladys633, so just get here soon as you can. Sis is, uh, she's getting ready right now."
"I'll have to tell Priss. What should she do in the meantime?"
"I dunno. Read a book? Play a game or two?"
"We don't really have either of those at home…"
"Really? I mean I can see Priss not being a big reader, but neither of you guys have onboard VR software in your stemjacks?"
"When I get really excited playing a VR game it gets all fuzzy. Like I can see the pixels. Hey, maybe that's the pseudocortex acting up…"
"Probably is! Probably is. Anyway, can you be here in, say, two hours?"
"I think so. Maybe she and Lena could go shopping or something? No, Priss isn't much of a shopper… but she needs something to do that isn't day drinking or she'll hate herself afterwards…"
"You know what Sis said to me, Sylvie? That she's not Priss's babysitter. And you aren't, either."
"Good point. Can I have breakfast first, at least? Even if that bumps me over that two hour time limit?"
"Get something on the road. Given what she told me, it's going to be a long day, and I wouldn't want to make it longer."
"Okay. See you in a bit, Mackie. Say hi to Nene for me."
"Thanks, Sylvie. See you there."
That's that. The mastimike disconnects.
Well, that's my part done. Might as well go down to Doc Raven's and start working on the second-gen hardsuits. The muscle layering and the impact casing is finished, the fiber-optic nerves are wired in, so now's probably time to work on assembling the weapons systems – we'll start with Priss's main railgun, just because wiring up the capacitor banks for that thing so they're well-armored took all day on the first generation of suits and it'll probably take more here – yeah.
Normally now would be the time when we put in the battle computers and run some blind tests on them, loading in calibrations from yesterday at a later point in time. But that's got to wait, because we need Sylvie's work, we need the pseudocortex implants, we need a lot of things we don't have yet. That's life, I guess.
Celia
Normally, I would limit the use of the base's medbay, down a good hundred meters below the officially registered basement of the LADYS633, to emergency triage, stabilizing a Saber before moving them off to one of my private physicians. Normally.
But here we are, and I am privately congratulating myself for not skimping on the construction of an autosurgeon and neural interface equipment that I figured I would never use. When one has money, one's allowed to indulge in little dalliances like this, indulging one's own sense of glorious paranoia.
Which is all well and good, but I have Sylvie leaning back into a chair, rocking back and forth on it, and as such it's time to work.
"Celia…"
"Yes?"
"This isn't going to trigger any flashbacks, right?"
Ah. Yes. How to put this politely? "I'm uncertain. I wasn't able to pull enough neural data off of your episode to isolate the exact configuration, and I've no intention of running another test at your expense. While we can tamp down the traumatic response, the part of the brain that is simply running wild and paralyzing everything else, there's a good chance that another flashback might occur."
"Oh. But then – something like that – it still terrifies me. I don't want to go back there."
"I know. It's one thing for me to say that I can brush out the influence of the Nosferatu for the most part, but what happened there would unnerve any reasonable woman."
"That's no good, is it? How can I operate a hardsuit if I have to go through that every time?"
"I completely agree, Sylvie. So I'm going to run a suppressed version of the pseudocortex's combat software as if you were hooked up to a hardsuit, and hopefully the new parameters I wrote up should lock you out of the simulation if things get out of hand. From there I should have enough information to start working on a firmware solution. If that means opening up an access port or two, so be it, but I'm confident it won't come to that."
This is a partial lie, of course. My work on myself rarely required hardware interventions to fix any problems Father hadn't anticipated; it was more a matter of working alongside the synthetic hyperdense gray matter that runs across the surface of my brain instead of against it. But Father always had a sense of artistry with his creations, ensuring that what he laid down could be built up properly later. That was why it was so easy, I suppose, to focus me on the mission after his death.
But Sexaroids are GENOM creations. And GENOM does not like easily altered things. Open-source, information wanting to be free, any number of old-guard mottos, they are all anathema to the company. Hyper-hierarchical organization translates to hyper-hierarchical design philosophies.
This means that it's far better to dispose of a 'defective' Sexaroid than repair it, same as any other Boomer. Especially if the risk of that repair means indoctrination is impossible, according to my sources. So there is a very real risk that her neural hardware is, how to put it, brittle. My sources told me that the Sexaroids required a steady diet of hallucinogens to mantain indoctrination, in fact, the mark of sloppy wiring. I'm not sure what's more pathetic: that something like her would be grown or that, even for a multibillion-yen replicant concubine, the perfect rewards program for GENOM's underlings, corners were cut.
Well, I have Father's old design work floating around inside my head. While I wouldn't wish that rewiring on even my worst enemy, the principles will aid in software modification. Allow the motor cortex wiring to grow slightly deeper into white matter to monitor intercortical traffic better – yes, yes, I just need more data.
"Okay…" Sylvie whispers. "Just – if something goes wrong, please don't keep me there. Don't ask me to just power through almost losing my life like that."
Oh, hell. Doesn't she understand that we may not have a choice? "I'll see what I can do, Sylvie, but keep in mind getting all the relevant data in one go may be more efficient than several separate scans."
"So you are asking me to power through it."
"Is that alright? One would think the desire to get it all over in one go would be motivation enough."
"I – I guess. Alright. Give me something to bite down on and I'll try. It isn't easy leaving one's mental wellbeing in the hands of – any person."
I rifle around a drawer, pull out a putty ball to muffle Sylvie as per her request. "I notice you stopped yourself from saying 'someone like you'."
"Um – if I did?"
"Well, it simply means you don't know me very well, do you? Which is fine. We've spent very little time together."
Sylvie keeps her mouth shut as I offer her the putty. Fine then. I put it away, walk around to her back, and plug in the stemjack.
"But I suspect that over these next few hours we're going to know each other very well indeed."
The trouble, based on preliminary data at least, is that there's too much wiring of the pseudocortex to the amygdala, the fear center of the brain. The flashback, as best as I can figure, is simply the most terrified, or perhaps helpless, Sylvie has ever felt. The traumatic imprinting aside, activating the pseudocortex (and that really is such an unwieldy name for it – I think the Riastrad is a far more evocative one) is contingent on flight-or-fight reflexes, and vice versa. Which might make a certain amount of sense to a degree. Tap into an existing, au naturale combat mode in the brain for a synthetic boost.
To a degree.
I'm keeping Sylvie in sensory deprivation, most of her brain locked down, as I collect passive data and wonder what on earth I'm supposed to do next. Because a second read on Sylvie's wiring, a rough magnetometric scan of her rear brain, makes no damn sense. Why wire this latent piece of transhuman hardware into a pleasure model? Certainly, there are pieces of stimulant code that suggest it was originally intended to help 'bond' a Sexaroid with a certain pleasurable experience, namely engaging with Master, or to help make complex erotic techniques more intuitive. A boondoggle, yes, but, again, too much wiring into the amygdala for that to make sense. Too much wiring, as I saw, for this sort of function to even be used for combat.
No, this wasn't just traumatic rewriting. This wasn't factory standard, either. Something else is going on.
The most obvious course of action is to just trigger the trauma and inject nanotargeted tranquilizers at the relevant active sites simultaneously, as one does in this sort of medicine, effectively activate the memory while turning off the extraneous muck. It will be painful, yes, but after that the memory should be a relatively solved issue – No. I still need her to trust me.
I need data somehow, though. It's far harder to map a Sexaroid brain than a brain which only had external wiring inserted as an adult. In the case of someone whose brain has grown alongside the artificial interface, both natural and synthetic swap information and functionality an order of magnitude or two more readily than an adult brain with 'alien' implants. Somehow I need to see how the Riastrad operates, and this traumatic episode – well, I need to be honest with myself. Seeing the pseudocortex in a warped, potentially damaging panic mode is useless information, the last thing I want to replicate. I drew up a combat simulation in VR to simulate medium-intensity combat, and here I am with this roadblock before I can get to even simulating Sylvie piloting the Nosferatu, which is still the default way the pseudocortex thinks.
Fine, then. Low-level simulation of the amygdala. Primal fear, not emotional damage. Just the sense of being hunted, a nightmare the rest of the brain can fill in. Then the Riastrad kicks in, it copilots autonomous and motor functions, and makes the interfacing of weapon systems and their subsequent use hyperintuitive.
And, well – I have scans of Sylvie's occipital cortex running. Part of me wants to see what my new Saber's afraid of.
Sylvie
For an infinite moment, it's like stillness. My own body's sense of place, suspended. I've never put my face all the way underwater before, but something tells me that this isn't what that's like. This is something else. The feeling of not feeling anything at all.
And then –
And then I am underwater, breaking the surface, in – is it that place? It is.
Master Kaufmann took us swimming only once, in an infinity pool in the penthouse of a building in Anchorpoint he owned through half a dozen shell companies where he'd sunk his SPDC money. He was proud at how little he had to do for people to give him money, you know. Buying shares in the SPDC is an investment in the future, he'd tell everyone, when really it was an investment in him and the other execs who were GENOM's puppets.
I'm there again, the sun cutting through morning mist, glass-clear water lapping against the edges of the pool. I don't remember it being that deep. Wasn't I supposed to be doing something? Well, it's nice here. I pull myself out of the pool, utterly nude, and move for one of the crisp towels to dry myself off –
And then I freeze. I can hear the working of sandals on the floor. I can hear him. He's behind me.
"I knew you'd come back to me, slut," Master Kaufmann says, in that wheezing whine that was the voice I obeyed for all my life.
I turn. No one else with him – shouldn't his security detail be with him? – just him in a bathrobe, casually pointing a gun at me. It's long and black and glimmers ominously. He could fire now and destroy me in an instant.
"Master Kaufmannn," I barely manage to choke out, and then stop myself – why is he Master? Didn't I leave him? I remember leaving him. Why am I here? "Why are you here?"
"It was inevitable, really," he continues, "that you'd find your place with me again. The others – well, we never really needed them, did we?" He coughs. "If you just hadn't gotten all those foreign ideas into your head you would have been happy. The others – your sisters – nothing would have ever happened to them. But now we can fix everything."
"What's there to fix?" Did I ever believe he was handsome? No, I only believed he was Master and that it was joy to be raped by him. "I left you because I wanted to leave you."
"Ha! You only left because that traitor machine got the idea in your head that you wanted to leave. And that you wanted to be free, and that you just had to pilot that machine to save the other one, the jailbait-"
"Anri."
"Whatever her name was. I could probably get another one of her if I wanted one. But all those ideas in your head? Even the one that you love that dyke? Please. Imitation game-y little bitch. It'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic."
I step back. Priss – where is she? Why won't she help me? I know she loves me. I know she wants me. And I love her back, don't I? Do I just think I do? Did I just tell myself that? Why is it so easy to think things like this?"
"Because it's easy enough for you to talk to yourself when someone else does the talking. Isn't it, slut?"
Slut. Slut slut slut slut slut. I hate that word.
"Fine then. Vampire. Predator. Carmilla, whatever you like. But you're not that anymore." He takes a step towards me. "I got rid of all the other ones just so I could hold on to you."
"Got rid of?"
He laughs. "Oh, you know. Had the Boomers tear em' to bits. Skullfucked their corpses with thirty mil of dee-pee-you. Maybe even with my cock a bit, too. Wanna see the heads? I've got them in the fridge back at home, and I'll send 'em back to GENOM in a bit, see if the warranty hasn't expired and I can get new ones. You, though – I liked you." He waves the gun around. "Really, I did. If we can just get rid of all those bad thoughts you could be my personal assistant again. Do really wonderfully terrible things and get off on it-"
"Shut up."
He stops. He must have barely heard it. I start to walk towards him.
"Oh? You came back just to say that? To talk back to me? Come on, slut, you must be smarter than that-"
"Shut. Up."
The gun's in my face now. I'll let him make the first move, though. See what he does. If I can just get it out of his one limp hand-
"I don't like you saying that to me, slut. Now-"
"Listen."
He stops. He does. I say the words I've been trying to figure out how to say for the last two months.
"There was a time when I felt adoration for you. Then when Largo made me lucid I was afraid of you. Then when I escaped I hated you for killing my kin. And what I had to do because of you. You know what I feel now, Deitmer Kaufmann, scum of the earth?"
"What, slut?"
"Not a fucking thing."
His finger tightens on the trigger.
I know what I have to do.
Celia
Ah. There we go.
Sylvie
Grab his wrist.
Pull it out to the side.
Let the gun fire, a burst of sheer noise (redundant information) too close to my ear.
Yank his arm in.
Pull him close to me.
Bring my knee into his gut before he can go for the knife.
Other palm into his face.
Listen to the bone break.
Throw him to the ground, flipped around.
Arms behind his back.
Knee over his crossed wrists.
I have the gun now; I can kill him; I can finally kill him; I'll be free–
"You really think it's that easy, traitor?"
His skin stretches out. Boils. Bursts away to reveal matte blue synthflesh and a ragged suit.
He flips me over effortlessly, but I'm fine. My vampsuit's not a Saber hardsuit, but it's made just tough enough to take big heavy blows like that, and soon I'm scrambling to my feet, pulling out my Earthshaker. The 55C starts to rise as soon as I do, goes for a kick that turns into a lunge that turns into an overhead smash–
Which would be nice if I was still there. But I know what I have to do.
Dodge. Get around him.
One bullet, 15.3 milimeters of tungsten-capped lead, into the left ankle as he tries to knock my own legs from under me.
Follow up-
Or don't. It's primed its mouth laser, bringing its snarling maw around, red eyes shielded, orange slobber gushing from its oral cavity as its jaw unhinges, splits, whole body flexing to get ready–
Fire. Right into it.
The slug fucks the laser lens up bad, and I mean bad, the resulting explostion goes right out where its brainstem would be if Combat Boomer anatomy was anything like a human's. Instead, the thing (thing? Kin? Enemy) just howls in agony, triggers its jets, and rockets forward, elbow ready to cave in my ribcage.
Throw yourself to the ground.
Get under it. Roll.
Fire again. Twice. Once in the flightjets, twice in the other ankle. It drops. Starts to pull itself up.
Reload. Or don't. Draw the vibroblade, not the proboscis, cut its fucking head off for how they hurt me-
And the Doberman rolls over, laser cannons primed, and lets loose.
I stagger back, feel the Nosferatu's armor start to warp. I can't give it a chance. I have to get away. I know what I have to do.
Sweep the laser ports with machinegun fire, drive it back.
Go to quadruped mode. Faster.
Leap forward. Rip through the pool. Out through the other side of the penthouse.
We're dropping fast, but I have it below me. Too close to use missiles, but that's fine. The Nosferatu was built for close-range fights anyway.
One arm holds down one of its arms. The other grips the head. Squeezes.
Feel its blind firing slap against my armor. Feel ever increasing velocity, the IMPACT ALARM throbbing in the back of my thoughts. If I don't take this thing down soon… No. Don't think about that.
Rip its head off, feel it fly free from the still-thrashing body in a spray of tangerine circ fluid. It grabs my arms, trying to drag me down with it. Ten seconds to impact.
It's strong. I'm stronger.
Get my legs under myself. Kick off. Fire verniers, my multi-ton chassis screaming down towards the pavement – smash into it even as the verniers roar in outright defiance of gravity, cratering the asphalt and driving the Doberman underneath my feet deep into the artificial island.
It tries to rise, weapons broken, unable to stand properly. Don't let it do anything.
Cut it.
Tear it open. Armor, musculature, endoskeleton. Destroy it all. Chunks of synthmeat flying up into the air, glittering orange and blue, slapping wet onto the pavement, sprayed onto the side of buildings. Cut cut cut kill kill kill. Smash its ribcage down with one well-placed stomp, bring the foot up covered in ropy intestines and shattered spine. Kaufmann's in there, I'm sure of it, I just have to find him and then I'll bleed him dry, I'll-
Laughter. Thick and rich and gleeful.
Largo.
Celia
Oh dear. We're at serious risk of her entering that traumatic mode again, if he's coming up in her memories. I ready the disconnect to bring Sylvie back to reality, but it's going to take time.
I really should have seen this coming…
Sylvie
"Well done!" he booms, crawling out of the mess of the Doberman as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "I always knew you had that bloodlust inside you."
He should be messy, covered in the fluids of a dying machine. He isn't. How? I – what do I do? I ready my weapons to blast him away, prime missiles, spin up the machine gun. If he thinks he can mock me-
"Ah ah ah. None of that, dear." His grin widens. "You should know better than to turn my gifts against me."
It happens so fast I can't even register it. The Nosferatu freezes – information flashes by my vision – snaps into place: AUTO LOCKOUT ENGAGED. SELF DESTRUCT INITIATED.
"This is your punishment for killing me, puppet."
And then I'm back there again and White materializes on my cockpit and out comes a wicked-looking shortsword and she plunges it
I'm floating again. And then I'm not.
Something out there. Bright light. I remember. I'm in Celia's lab. And there she is, rushing over to me, looking at me – I can't quite meet her gaze –
"Are you okay?" she asks.
"No." At least I'm not hyperventilating like last time. "What was that? You didn't set that up, did you?"
"No," she says. Her face is rigid, as if she doesn't dare feel anything. "I induced a nightmarelike state of agitation using low-key simulation of the amygdala and your brain – it honestly just picked up the slack. If the simulation felt especially vivid, that was because it was using synthetic parts of your brain you normally don't use." She nods. "VR implants have no effect on you, right?"
"Well… yes? That's true?"
"I think that part of the pseudocortex is so dedicated to creating accurate threat simulations that any direct external feed of sensation is immediately blocked." She sighs. "I got wonderful data, Sylvie. Certainly watching you play out a revenge fantasy wasn't how I anticipated spending my morning, but I think I know how to bypass the trauma state now without altering the actual hardware."
"How?"
She goes about the business of unplugging me. Doesn't unstrap me, though. "I suspect that what brought about that mental state, the obvious unpleasantness of the situation in the canyons aside, was the Nosferatu getting a little – overactive. When Largo remotely activated the self-destruct, that damned machine didn't pull out of interfacing so much as it forced the pseudocortex to aid its battle calculations with it driving the metaphorical bus instead of your brain. In the process, it wrote its battle computations into your meaty bits, infiltrated via fear and, well, there you have it. Those memories are both yours and that of the battlesuit. That was why you were thinking of your body as the Nosferatu once you were sufficiently agitated by Kaufmann, or, really, your subconscious fears taking his shape."
"I get it. Because at that inflection point, all the vampire wiring works its way into my head and it won't leave. So – can you factory reset that, or something?"
Now Celia smiles. "I would need to use highly targeted neuroplasticity boosters for fear of wiping the memory itself – I know you don't want to forget what happened there – but I have a lock on the engram of the memory, now. The challenge isn't disrupting the interface, dissolving the relevant wiring, it's more not damaging your brain in the process. You'll forget how to pilot the Nosferatu, but we want to teach you how to pilot a hardsuit anyway. It's a moot point."
"But it's doable."
"Yes."
"How long will it take?"
"I need to look over the data I have and devise a plan of attack. I have the strategy down, all I need is the tactics, so to speak. Give me till tomorrow."
She unbinds me. I rise. Stretch. My body – where's the armor? The claws? The machinegun? Alienation lingers on me, as if it's soaked and pickled my brain, the sensation of being something else.
Celia must be right, then. I rode that machine thinking I was in control. I hunted to save Anri, and sometimes I would hunt SPDC execs to serve Largo, give him the control he needed. In a way, when I was the Nosferatu, I aided that genocide. I know that. It's old news.
But how far can I really detach from Largo's gifts? I have to escape his shadow to be free, to be with Priss without regrets, and Celia says it's possible.
But I still worry. Maybe that's human nature, the need to worry. Or maybe it's just seeing him again-
"Celia?" I ask as I follow her out of the medical room. "Is Largo still alive? We destroyed his body thoroughly, but what if he comes back? Could he come back?"
She freezes. Turns to me very slowly. I still can't read her.
"I don't think we've seen the last of his schemes. Quincy and his ilk are a far more important threat, but a being like him doesn't die without putting backup plans into motion. But that's just a hunch. I have informants, and my own research work, attempting to dissect what he was."
"He knew who you were, didn't he? When he was screaming about how you had to kneel before him…"
Her eyes narrow. "Largo wore the mask of someone I killed awhile ago. A man by the name of Brian Johannes Mason. But even if he was an upload of Mason, it was an imperfect one. I know because the technology he had on hand was fatally flawed, the upload decohered within weeks in a Boomer body. Whatever Largo was, Mason was only a part of him. A human face on something perhaps incomprehensible. I've made my peace with that ghost."
She smiles. "If he comes back, Sylvie, you will be the one who destroys him."
