"I really think you're just making much too big a thing out of it."
"Making a big thing out of it would have been a good idea."
- This Is Spinal Tap
Tsugumi was the kind of girl who could be described with fun words like "Sassy," "Feisty," and "Targeted for government elimination." The roof and the back wall of her holographic command center had been ripped open like a tin can that met a messy fate with an industrial buzz saw. Occupying the space directly behind her was her perky blue motion suit-clad rear and a hissing mechanical tarantula the size of a construction vehicle. Whether the eight-legged monstrosity could be considered an Endlave, had been deployed as special weaponry from an Endlave, or was related at all to Endlaves was debatable.
The auto-rachnid had its abdomen antenna pointing toward the sky and its mandibles clamping firmly around the back of Tsugumi's head. The eight pulsating red dots that made up machine's primary cameras were all honed somewhere between the top of her neck and the base of her skull. The spider's hinged mouth flexed with surgical precision in her long black mane, giving her something far more than just a simple tickle behind her ears.
Funeral Parlor's elite combat technician was currently a patient in the merciless care of the GHQ Services Ltd. Data Seeking & Harvesting Sentry 4500. Everyone responsible for putting the machine on the field just called it the Omni-Pwner to keep it short. These mass-produced bad boys were the worst enemy of rebel hackers everywhere and the best friend of anyone working in the Intrusion Countermeasures sector.
Tsugumi's tongue was hanging out, and it wasn't because she was just teasing Aya. She'd lost contact with the rest of her team when GHQ sprung their trap on her mobile command post. Now all of her most personal thoughts and memories (and several years of valuable insurgent plans) were being siphoned out of her neurons and transferred over a high-bandwidth data stream to the armies of a dozen different countries with no regard to her privacy or cognitive safety.
Society had gone to Hell ever since the alien virus invaded and the country had been taken over by a hyper-authoritative branch of the UN, but the real dystopia was inside of Tsugumi's head.
"Ug…" she murmured weakly with a few bubbles of foam gathering in the left corner of her mouth. Her eyes mindlessly rolled up into her black bangs as her nose curled nervously. The spider machine's front claws wrapped tightly around her shoulders like harnesses on a jetpack, but the only thing that would be blasting off today was her brain getting blasted clear out of her head.
Like a poorly timed Egyptian mummification, the spider machine excerebrated Tsugumi while she was still alive. Her bare fingertips twitched in her fingerless tracking pads as the spider's mouth made another pass over her head using scalpels coated in potent anesthetic.
The goal of this operation was to decommission the 19-year-old intelligence officer's scrawny LED-studded hide from her command pod and decommission her brain from the inside of her cranium. The machine had finished backing up all of the data stored inside of her head a couple minutes ago, and now it was working on the final step of destroying the original copy.
It was like a thousand tiny Q-tips invading her ears and cleaning out a lot more than just a couple grams of wax. As the rounded dimensions of her head felt increasingly lighter, the rounded dimensions of her hips and pelvis were the only real weighty part of her body she had left. The attic was empty and the party was all in the basement.
"Guh!" Tsugumi gasped involuntarily as her head lurched forward and her eyes blankly stared into the space in front of her. Her shoulders were jostled as the spider's mandibles fired a short defibrillator pulse directly into her occipital lobe to restore her basic neural functions. It ran a quick final pass over her head to make sure her logic patterns were as empty as a cleaned out cereal bowl before it released her from its grip.
Tsugumi stood in the semi-functional ruins of her command pod simply breathing. She didn't talk. She didn't mutter under her breath. She didn't shake her head in any kind of pain or irritation. Her hair stuck to her sweaty reddened face and obscured her eyes as she just breathed.
Three-quarters of a fragmented vid monitor suddenly enlarged on the cracked panoramic screen on Tsugumi's right. The image was a 2x zoom of Inori's coyly tilted pinked-haired head. Or more specifically, the extraterrestrial monarch who now claimed Inori's body as her own.
"Hey. Skimbleskank. Are you decent yet?" Inori-Mana muttered through the snowy video panel as if it were a shower curtain.
"Online and fully functional, Lady Eve." Tsugumi reported back promptly, quietly, and emotionlessly. She turned her head toward the screen like her neck was a ratchet joint, causing her hair to rustle away from her distant blue-gray eyes. She blinked in reflex every time the unsteady video image flickered white in her face.
"Ah! Just what I wanted to hear!" Mana clapped her palms together and giggled in the static. "Ready to help me go rat-hunting for your smelly old Funeral Parlor pals? I think we have all the info we need from you to wipe them out within a couple of days!"
"The obsolete organic units must be expunged. This world has no place for them." Tsugumi announced her commitment to slaughter her own allies with zero amusement or passion in her stoic voice. She simply acted on the mathematical instincts that pulsed through her head in a square wave.
"Well. I could do without all the techie talk, but I can tell your mind's in the right place. Keep it up and I'll always have a special spot for you, kitty. I think we'll get along just like the Old Inori and the Old Tsugumi now that we got you declawed." Mana's pixelated lips flickered into a wide sinister grin as her shaded eyelids narrowed. "You might want to wipe off your mouth, though. You're kind of drooling."
Tsugumi silently brushed the dark blue spandex on the back of her wrist over her mouth only because Mana's advice could be construed as an order.
The Apocalypse Queen turned her head away from the video screen and raised her voice toward someone off-camera.
"Wrap her up and ship her my way. I want the new meat CPU to still be fresh when she gets here."
Her soft and eerie smile returned as she glanced back toward Tsugumi.
"Try to take a little nap, kitten. You've been through a lot today and you need to recharge your batteries. I'll wake you up when I cut you out of all of that yarn."
Tsugumi closed her eyes and gently bowed her head on command. The spider machine behind her wrapped its legs around her shoulders, waist, and hips and easily lifted her relaxed frame off the ground. She rotated in a circle between its claws as she was wrapped from her toes up to her head in inflatable plastic like a delicate doll being packed for mailing. A small puncture hole over her nose supplied all the air she needed.
The finished result was a web-encased figure that could be identified as something female-shaped but not specifically Tsugumi-shaped. The only thing that gave away the identity of the webbed body was the triangular feline formations sprouting from the headphones on the top of her head.
The tarantula loaded its cargo into a hollow cabinet on its bulky metal abdomen and scurried away from the destroyed command module. When Funeral Parlor returned from their mission, they would find their base in flames and their pet hacker missing.
Author's note: Gliding over the Gumi.
