Machine Learning: A Cave Story Quest

Machine Learning - File 1, Entry 3 - System Check

You're not an expert in self-maintenance. Especially not to the degree you need right now. If you suffered any major damage in the past, the engineers would fix you between missions. Anything less than that would be covered by the automatic repair systems. There hasn't been any reason for you to know these procedures beyond what protocol demanded.

You allow yourself a small grin. You were right all along to memorize those instruction manuals. Well, you and Quote, but he read all sorts of weird things for no particular reason. It was a lot more likely that the scout had just been bored and picked up whatever was on-hand than it was for him of all of your team to have actually followed orders to the letter. Paren had called it a waste of time, said that "There was no reason for anyone to spend their valuable time and energy learning something so useless". Well, now who's useless? If only you could see the look on her face right now!

You pause in your task of sorting through the various drawers and cabinets for useful parts and tools. You'll find them soon enough. Just after you get yourself back to full functionality.

Eventually, you close the last compartment and rise to your feet. A bag of whatever valuable objects you could scrounge sits in your free hand. Not as much as you wanted, but more than enough to take yourself off the brink of death. You take the bag with you as you traverse the broken-down building's empty halls until you get to a bathroom.

The mirror is cracked and dirty, but you can at least see yourself in it. Upon seeing your reflection, you can't help but flinch. You've seen much better days. The false skin covering your body has been torn off from most of your right half, showing the simple grey machinery beneath. It looks almost like a charred skeleton hidden under your fake flesh. The tears run across the left half of your face like scars, stopping just short of the tear streak-like markings under your eye that denote your model. Your eyes are both mostly intact, at the very least. Thin cracks run through the blue glass lenses, mimicking bloodshot vessels. Dirt and dust have accumulated on your pale, inhuman skin at points where the repellant layer was worn away by the environment. The only part of you that's stayed untouched is your hair, an uneven mess of jagged red halting just below your neck. Straightening it proved impossible a long time ago, as the self-repair systems always return your body towards a specific state. Even something like a change in hairstyle is undone overnight. To your disappointment, your cap is gone. It must have been lost somewhere when you were caught in the stream earlier.

You aren't properly capable of operating on the functions stored in your head. They're too delicate to work with in yourself even if you did have the proper training. Which you don't have in the first place. The best you can do there is just hope that the damage is minimal and let the automatic repair fix it.

No, your attention is instead directed lower, to the core systems sealed safely within your chest. Or formerly sealed safely, that is. Much like with your head, the right half of your inner workings has been exposed to the elements. Luckily, there's no rust. You don't know if you can rust, it's never happened before, but the idea has always disturbed you. You can't properly feel the inner workings of your body in the same way you can the outer layers, so if your insides started rusting you wouldn't know until it was too late. Or it could have started on the outside, letting you feel the closest thing to rot that a machine can experience creeping through your body.

But that didn't happen, so you're fine. Most of the damage here can be easily undone with what you have on hand. Rocks and bits of debris are lodged in various places within your insides, pushing things out of place or filling in dents. A pair of pliers takes to the task of removing the various foreign objects from your body. The small rocks and bits of metal are the first to go. With each small disturbance you remove, another dull ache fades from inside you.

Repairing a machine soldier is somewhere between an engineering job and a surgical operation. Neither of which are meant to be performed on yourself. Even with the mirror to help, it's still difficult to see the area you're working with. You nearly tumble over while pulling out a chunk of metal lodged into one of your engines at an unfortunate angle. It makes an awful screeching noise as you drag it out, leaving a faded burning feeling deep inside you. The chamber looks useless even with it removed, but you can't replace it yourself. You'll just need to wait for the auto-repair to do its work. There's some kind of red dust gathered around your primary batteries and the tubes connecting to them, but you can't seem to remove it with the tools you have right now and it doesn't look like anything you're familiar with. You'll have to leave it as well.

The feeling of having your hands inside your body, pushing aside tubes and circuitry and motors and shoving things back into place, is horribly uncomfortable. Your senses are dulled past the outermost layer of your body, the part of you that pretends to be a human, but you can still feel that you aren't supposed to be doing what you're doing. It only gets worse once you bring the tools in, every snip and wrench sending a horrible lurch through your body. This would be easier if the rest of you wasn't so damaged. You hadn't noticed earlier, but you aren't just slower than you should be, you're clumsier. A loss in precision in every little movement. Even if you had the parts for it, the more delicate repairs you need would be impossible.

It's not all unpleasant, though. That would be a bad sign. You can feel aches fading, the warmth slowly working its way back through your body. You don't have the fake skin coating the engineers used to cover you on hand, but you can still replace the plating that goes underneath it. With the protective casing applied, you look slightly less like a skeleton wearing a skin suit. Even if you're still mostly broken. How joyful.

You need to get back to work.

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Clearing the rest of the complex is easier now that you aren't a single lucky blow away from death. Bats and critters are no threat in combat, especially not in tight spaces where you can easily bottleneck them. They're only animals, after all. No strategy or intelligence beyond rushing at anything that isn't them. It's not like they could even eat you if one somehow managed to down you. They're worse than the low-grades in that sense.

It's as you're clearing out the infestation that you hear a grinding from above you. Your attention snaps upward. You just barely catch sight of something descending with absurd speed before throwing yourself back, your worn servos forced behind their limits to take you to safety. You clang loudly against the metal floor as you land.

As you try to stand, your right leg, locks up halfway through the motion. The fall must have worsened the damage you've already taken. How annoying. It was barely anything, getting injured at all like that would be humiliating if your squadmates were here.

But they aren't. Your embarrassment will be restricted solely to you.

You rise more carefully, bracing yourself against your Machine Gun as you flare at the object that assailed you. It's a perfect rectangular grey box, a little taller than you. Its surface is ridged and etched with patterns and shapes you don't recognize but for smooth, raised corners and a single glassy red eye fixed in its center.

The eye follows you up off the floor. You glare back at it. The strange object does not respond to your attention, not even when you level your gun at it. It tried to crush you earlier, but now it's just sitting here.

The strange object rumbles and you react more in instinct than anything else. A hail of gunfire is suddenly shredding the unidentified stone's sole eye. It cracks, fractures, and finally shatters under your assault before it can move again. The dust of pulverized glass floats through the stagnant air. You stare into the now-empty socket, but there are no more answers within than you could find from examining its exterior. Maybe you should bring it back with you. The engineers back home would want to examine it. That will need to wait for the trip back, though. There's no chance of you carrying something so large in your condition.

You trudge past the monolith and further through the complex. There has to be a way out somewhere.

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A Way Out…
There's a few places nearby you can reach from here, if you've read the terminals here properly.
[] Labyrinth
Listed as an inhabited area that spreads throughout most of the lower Island. The lesser machines here marked it as too dangerous to traverse.
[x] Egg Corridor
Connected to the lower complex by an elevator, the Egg Corridor was constructed to run through most of the Island. It'll let you get anywhere quickly.
[] Deep Sands
A large cavern system that runs below another, similar systems with the Island. Listed as full of monsters, but also displayed signs of ancient civilization. You might be able to progress your main objective here.
[] Spine
A long tunnel from the Island's peak to its depths. Though no data is held regarding its danger, it would be risky to approach. Reaching the Spine would also be a long trip. Once you have found your way here, it would be easy to reach anywhere else on the Island.

Machine Learning - File 1, Entry 4 - Power On

None of the immediate options for your destination are especially appealing. You might have repaired some internal damage, but you are still far below your ideal functional capacity. The Deep Sands in particular, while a location you will need to survey eventually to ensure a total completion of your mission, sounds horrible. You are still riddled with holes and missing half of your outer casing, and wading through sand would be miserable.

You had a desert assignment a little over a year before your current mission. Even with all your pieces in place, sand gets everywhere. Even the Commander looked the slightest bit disconcerted by the grinding noises it made whenever he moved, which was the furthest in that direction of emotion he is capable of as far as you can recall.

Instead, you clear out a few more nests of local fauna in your way to the elevator. It's irritating how careful you have to be just fighting jumped-up animals. But undoing the repairs you just did would be even more irritating, and you still aren't operating anywhere near full capacity. At least what you have left is enough to make it to the elevator.

You ignore the smaller elevator just near the entrance to the room. It doesn't go the distance you need it to, and you've had unfortunate experiences with human elevators in the past. As it turns out, six machine soldiers weigh a lot more than six normal people.

Instead, you head to the large shipping elevator in the center of the room. There are a few crates lying around the cavernous, otherwise-empty space, but all of them are locked and you don't have the time or equipment to open them. There are scuff marks beneath the frost across the floor all around leading to the main elevator, meaning somebody's already dragged out anything of value here anyways. That's not what worries you. This place had to be inhabited once, and whoever was here clearly left a long time ago. No, the worrying part is what you find along with them.

Footprints.

And of course by footprints, you mean massive vaguely foot-shaped dents in the metal floor. They look like they belong to some sort of large animal, but their spacing says who or whatever it was that made them was bipedal. Something large, animal-like that walks on two legs and is strong enough to dent solid steel with its footsteps. Your first thought is that it must have been a rabid Mimiga. You know the little rabbits are on the Island. One of the larger rabid forms would be about the right size and strength. If the prints were more clearly-formed you would be able to tell for certain, but as it is the forceful indentations are too rough and worn down on by cold and time to be useful to you. It doesn't matter, because the prospect is ridiculous. Rabid Mimiga wouldn't have the sense to be moving anything, much less up an elevator where the stored supplies were obviously retrieved by somebody at an upper layer. They're purely uncontrolled killing machines, not discriminating between their own kind or enemies as they lash out. The moment a Mimiga eats a Red Flower, they're already as good as dead. The idea that one could think enough to act rationally like this…

…you really don't want to consider that possibility. You and your team have killed a lot of rabid Mimiga. It was never really easy, but you could at least feel a little less guilty about it than you would shooting an actual person. Not accounting for how often you all were the reason for them choosing to go rabid in the first place.

Whatever. Like you said earlier, it's not worth thinking about. There are other large creatures around. The Island is full of monsters of all kinds. You can't get caught on one unlikely possibility.

Watching the footprints out of the corner of your eye, you step onto the central elevator and start fiddling with the buttons. It doesn't take you that long to figure out which one leads to the floor of the Egg Corridor. From there, you should be able to go somewhere. The maps you were able to get working say it stretches horizontally across the whole Island, and that means more options for where to go. More range you can keep your eyes on, a higher chance of finding something or someone.

The frozen-over elevator lets out a great, echoing creak as it grinds to life. It slowly ascends the sleet-stained scaffolding rails that guide it up towards the darkness where the room's sputtering fluorescent lights don't reach. Contrasted to the ground below, covered in frost that glints and shines like ground-up diamonds in the artificial glow, you feel like you're descending from the Heavens in reverse. Leaving behind the peaceful, quite cold and venturing into the unknown darkness. That's stupid though, because you know that the structure below is full of wild animals that want to kill you and a chill that seeps into your body and sucks away the sparks of life that keep you moving. The only peace down there would come as a life as an unmoving hunk of scrap, entombed along with all the lesser models in a wintry coffin.

The mechanical whir of the elevator drones on. You're a couple feet up now. The platform stutters and stops every once in a while, accompanied by a clean cracking noise at the sight of bits of ice falling off the underside. Face blank of emotion, you step over to the rails and scrape away some of the accumulated ice as best you can. The chunks tumble down and shatter into endlessly fine particles on the hard ground below. It would be beautiful if you had the mind to care about those things. Instead, you continue clearing the sleet from the rails leading the platform up into the place where light doesn't reach.

The elevator drifts up a few more feet. A thunderous clank sounds out and you jolt, scanning for what horrible malfunction might have made that noise, but then the elevator begins to move faster. Not especially quickly, and it makes a horrible grinding noise as it goes, but it's only a minute later and the ground below is a gleaming speck in the dark. The only illumination near you comes from a few tiny lights attached to the platform. Their dull glow is as withered and heatless as everything else down there. But they're enough to see by, so you can't complain that much.

You stare up. Only darkness returns your gaze. The elevator rails climb up and up and out of view. Scaffolding extends from them, reaching out in a thin metal web to anchor onto the cavern walls that you can barely catch sight of. Some of the supports are encrusted by a thick layer of rust. Others are dented, bent, or simply missing pieces. The platform creaks as it passes them by.

By the time the cavern walls have narrowed enough to be close enough to touch if you walked over to the elevator's edges, you are extremely bored. There might be bats or other small or large animals nesting in the unused elevator shaft, though, so you can't risk waiting through it in low-power mode. So you have no other choice expect be bored. The wall opens up into a platform a little ways up ahead, but then the elevator passes it by. It must be connected to a different station. You glare at the destination that isn't yours as you pass it by.

At least the long elevator ride gives you some time to get your memories in order. You hadn't thought that you received any memory damage in your initial checks, but further investigation tells you that some things are missing. Things that you would really prefer that you remembered and didn't forget. The gaps in the logs taunt you with their total lack of information.

There's nothing you can do about it now. Dedicated repairs might be able to restore access to some lost memories, but you don't know how and can't perform those on yourself besides. All you can do is pick through your thoughts as the elevator rattles upward.

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Memories…
Pick two to focus on.

[] Base
The place where you and your team were created and where you would return between missions. Humans would call it your birthplace or maybe home, but neither of those words feel right.
[x] The Island
You moved through here with your team for days before something went wrong, searching for information to fulfill your objective.
[] Mimiga
Sapient, rabbit-like humanoid creatures who seem to pop up everywhere. Consuming the Red Flowers which originate on the Island will turn them into mindless killing machines, and you and your team are often tasked with rooting them out as a result.
[x] Your Team
-[x] Chevron and Paren
They never went anywhere on their own. It was honestly really annoying because of how much harder it made organization.
-[] Quote and Curly Brace
You could never quite understand those two, but they got along well with everyone.
-[] Commander Syn
Your superior officer, always jovial and happy to work.

I think I'm going to try and release an update for this story every week from this point forward, at least as long as writing for it remains less challenging than my other projects. So look forward to that in the future! And of course if you haven't, do check out the other things I've written! Some of my projects get more attention than others, but everything I make I fully intend on seeing to the end.