Red vs Blue and its characters are the creation of the crew at Rooster Teeth. It is itself inspired by Halo, owned by Bungie and Microsoft.

Spoilers through RvB12-13 "Catch Up, No Mustard."

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Hey, I'm stuck! Let me out!

Church fired up the circuits in Grif's old helmet, the electronic equivalent of pounding on the walls.

Shit. It's a capture unit.

He had no spine for chills to run down. They'd been infiltrating the base, and then Gray had taken out the helmet, and then...

Helmets had cameras. And radios. This wasn't a memory unit that would leave him blind and deaf to the outside world. A little tweak here and—

"—did you do with Epsilon?" he could hear Carolina shout.

"Oh it's not hard to turn one of these things into a capture unit, especially if the AI has used it before," Gray chirped. "Calls them in like a dinner bell. Ding!"

Kick her ass, Sis! This place stinks like cheeseburgers if you left 'em in the sun.

"Where did you learn how to make a capture unit?"

"Um..." Wash's voice was quiet. "That's my fault. Actually."

Whatever, Wash. Just get me out of here.

"See, our modified weapons don't need AI assistance in the field, but they still have to undergo initial programming to interface with the human tech." She dropped to a whisper. "The AI we started out with got just a little difficult after it found out about this whole civil war thing. We've needed a new one for a while now."

"Your faction produced its own AI?" said Carolina.

Who cares? Why aren't you shooting her yet? The helmet cams flared on. Five soldiers with plasma guns. That was bad.

"Oh no. We stole one from you!"

"All the other Freelancer AI are dead," said Wash. "Epsilon was the only one who wasn't with me and the Meta that day." Epsilon heard Wash breathe in. "FILSS... You repurposed FILSS."

"Oh enough chitchat. Time to get this little guy into the mainframe. We built him some extra-cozy firewalls!"

The world tilted. Church leaned against the subroutines trying to dislodge his programming like a man digging fingers into wet rock during a hurricane.

"Church isn't going to cooperate with you," Wash promised.

Damn straight. Haven't you heard? I'M AN ASSHOLE.

"He is if he doesn't want us to delete—"

The current picked up and Church lost his grip on the helmet's microphones, slipping away through the upload. His personality file installed far too fast in a new drive, and the transfer program terminated with the finality of iron bars slamming shut.

He coalesced with hard chasms between him and the outside. Dedicated server. Crap. Across the space, he could sense plasma guns, transport cubes, and other piles of unprogrammed alien crap that were officially not at the top of his list of problems.

So either Wash and Carolina are going to beat impossible odds and rescue me in the next five minutes oooooor I start working on my escape plan. He clapped his hands, pushing confidence that he did not feel, Okay! So do I go Sean Connery or Andy Dufresne?

Church turned his attention to the plasma guns, wondering if he could blow them up just to piss these jerks off, and froze as he sensed a strange process under way, cautiously crunching the new data of his presence like gravel beneath a boot. Some space pirate slavedriver here to make him toe the line or walk the plank? —But it wasn't entirely different. It almost felt familiar. It felt like—

Alpha? Is that you?

Lines of code and optics collected into an armored form marked by years of hard use, in the real and the virtual world.

Did you say 'Carolina'? the figure asked again. Then she glitched, repeating, Alpha, is that you?

He cycled through logic, trust, deceit, anger, and intuition, all coming to the same conclusion:

Locus and Felix had raided at least one crash site before the fall of Project Freelancer.

...Tex?

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Originally posted as Darkfrog24 under the title "Something More Subtle."

drf24 at columbia dot edu