Hello Coil/Contessa/Ziz.
One of them was involved in some way.
H+ Mayhem (Worm)
- Thread starter Jurric
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm tinker transhumanism mayhem
One of them was involved in some way.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Or Mayhem is an unreliable narrator with an overblown sense of his all too fallible capabilities. Or he's lying.
And when it does come, we can be hipster posters.
On an unrelated note, I wonder how accurate Mayhem's assessment is that Adam will turn the protocol on permanently at some point? I like Adam, but Mayhem is much more interesting, and I wouldn't mind it if they merged.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Research mind upload. Build upgraded body. Have both.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'd like the separation to continue. Mayhem is pretty much a Mary Sue; he can outfight Armsmaster, make everyone like him, build tinker gear on a whim, etc. His limitations are minimal: he needs to be fighting constantly, he can't be out very much, and he has a is-it-isn't-it adversarial relationship with Adam. (He also theoretically has no memories, but that really hasn't been borne out in the narrative.)
Adam, on the other hand, has flaws. He doesn't think of things (e.g. making a safe haven somewhere that isn't going to be immediately discovered, not calling Coil's bluff), he can be vulnerable, etc. His need to rely on Mayhem even though he can't really trust him is a great character limitation, and I hope it continues.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not objecting to Mayhem being a Mary Sue. He's a lot of fun to read.
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RazorSmile
ROB Used To Be A Knife Missile
This individual speaks TRUTH!
---------
In related news, boo to Adam going Full Mayhem. Everybody knows you never go Full Mayhem.
Or, if you do, it should be because you keep upgrading and enhancing and augmenting until one day you look in the mirror and realize, "No Adam, u r the mayhems*" or something.
*And then Adam was a Peter Watts character.
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Tisaku
Head Chief Thinkomancer
trooper
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
gravitic
make him lose
guy loses control
PRT troopers
PRT trooper
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's the British spelling. Jurric is an Aussie (or, at least, he lists Australia as his location); I don't know if they use British or American spellings there.
- Location
- Australia
Thank you for your corrections.
Technically I use Australian English, which is subtly different to both other spellings, but has roots in both British and American spelling choices. Personally I just wish that the UN would make up their mind and standardize things. Worldwide is probably to much to ask, but if they could just settle on one version of English, that would be grand.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh, neat. What are some of the differences? How do you spell these words: exercise, armor, color. Do you drink soda, pop, or something else? (For me it's soda, but for my Midwestern friends it's pop.)
- Location
- Australia
Honestly I'm confused myself. Armour is the 'correct' spelling choice for Australia, although I've recently switched to armor because these forums seem to prefer American spellings. At various time I've had an english teacher at school make both Color and Colour incorrectly. So I just go with whichever my spelling processor likes. Exercise? That's just Exercise. I don't think I've had trouble with that one.
I drink soft-drink. Or I just call it Coke, even if technically it's Pepsi of Fanta.
Honestly the exactly pronunciation of English in Australia depends on how old the person doing the spelling is. We originally used British English, but Americanization happened, and now everything is a jumbled mess.
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
We use a mix, pretty much. Some words use American spelling, some British, some a strange edit we've developed on our own. Our name for baby undies is nappies, for example, and we call the various types of carbonated drinks 'soft drinks' instead of 'soda'. Half the time I use American words interchangably, though, due to the sheer blending that country has on much of the Western world as far as exposure goes.
As an aside, didn't realize Jurric was also an Australian. Where you about, pal? I'm in the Victorian area, near Melbourne.
- Pronouns
- she/her
...someone should write a fic where a Blindsight/Echopraxia vampire (or three) tears through Worm.
Or leet fucks up and builds Portia.
- Location
- Australia
All over the place. I move a lot. NSW at the moment.
One of these days I'm really going to have to get around to reading those.
Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
I'm pretty sure Blindsight vampires only won because everyone was fucking retarded and they put the sociopath geniuses that naturally eat humans in charge of everything. Their society was literally too stupid to live.
"Give me a bigger-" Adam's voice trailed off.
"Adam? What's the note say?" Sveta asked as she drove past him on her wheel chair. She seemed especially happy about the roll cage he'd added last night as a safety measure.
"NOTHING!"
Uh... you better make sure Cricket understands this is a rhetorical thing and not a command, dude. Otherwise....
IT'S ON THE CHART AND MOVING HIGHER.
This is... shockingly astute of Mayhem. I'm honestly really curious what his Thinker rating would be, at this point.
....wait. How the hell does CRICKET know what a Deathclaw is?
Oh, your god, Cricket's a gamer. God dammit, how are you making me like the violent, sociopathic Nazi? HOW?
God dammit, this entire chapter has some GREAT banter.
So... it would have been better/more enjoyable if she HAD been trying to kill you. Gotcha. (It's official. Mayhem likes rough trade.)
I love the whole "pretend" part of that. Mayhem is arrogant as shit... but it's mostly deserved, so....
D'awwwww. You know what they say: The couple that assaults and horribly maims shitty videogame based villains together....
Krav Magna? Is that a martial art invented in Magna, Utah? (It's Krav Maga.)
You know, those two are fucking morons, but they DO know a few things! Like when to play dead.
Allow me to finish the unspoken part of that sentence: "...which would make things easier when I had to turn on her."
*opens mouth*
*pauses*
*closes mouth*
Well. So Cricket's a "Screw the Roses" kind of girl, then. ...somehow I am utterly unsurprised.
*facepalm* And now Mayhem's turned into a drug dealer.
*cut to Adam staring at the king sized canopy bed that's been delivered and set up in his lab*
*cackles*
Okay, this entire section made me laugh and laugh and laugh. Just... Cricket playing Robot Unicorn Attack. EVERYONE playing Robot Unicorn Attack. GLORIOUS.
Even odds says the fact that Cricket is a gamer and has played Robot Unicorn Attack shows up in their next video.
....oh, god. Tell me he's not making Cricket a laser-scythe. LIE IF YOU HAVE TO.
Uh... well. That's a hell of a thing.
Unless the topic is "Things that make Cricket have 'special' dreams.", of course. Seriously, I'm pretty sure that's like... really STEAMY love poetry to her.
- Location
- Australia
Thank you, will fix.
I am curious. Is this a bad idea because the idea of Cricket with a laser scythe terrifies you, because it signifies an emotional commitment, or for some other reason?
SETIFAN
Burning the midnight oil
- Location
- Germany
I figure that Adam is going ti give it the objective to kill the Slaughterhouse 9 and doesn't expect to survive.
Cricket. Laser scythe. This is combination that can't end well. Mayhem already has a lightsaber and now laser scythes? Clockblocker will never stop making Sith jokes.
Besides, if I was going to be terrified of the emotional commitment, I would have started screaming at the mention of tattoos. (C'mon, tattoos are a LOT more committing than signing some piece of paper or ceremony in a church. We all know THAT.) Honestly, every time I see Cricket in the story, I expect Adam to wake up in the next chapter with a marriage license stapled to the wall in front of him... and Cricket asleep next to him wearing a wedding veil. ONLY a wedding veil. (His panicked scream would wake everyone in a nine-block radius. Except Cricket. Mayhem does things RIGHT.)
I... wish I could argue against that point. But it's pretty likely, yeah. To be fair to Adam... there's a pretty good chance he WON'T. The S9 are a nasty group to tangle with.
3.5
- Location
- Australia
"…be OK, please be OK, please be OK, please be…"
My first action on waking up was to wince. My second action was to turn my pain off. Despite the sudden lack of pain, my head still felt heavy, and almost too large.
I slowly raised my arm, and traced the mask with my fingers. It was broken, although not badly, just a smashed hard drive…
He'd done it again, hadn't he? I'd carefully programmed in safeties so he couldn't take the mask off, delete the footage, or destroy it, but he'd gone and destroyed it anyway. The mask used to stream to a backup server in the clinic, but I'd used the office server, because my lab wasn't set up yet. I hadn't brought it with me, in fact I checked, and Mayhem shut down that connection the same night he got my lab equipment back so the PRT couldn't just watch everything I was doing. Damn it.
"…OK, please be… Um, Mayhem, are you all right?" Sveta asked.
"Augh." I said. My mouth tasted like blood, which I was actually starting to get used to. I just hoped it was my blood. Let's see. O negative, yep, it was mine, or someone else with the same blood type, which was unlikely. Good, I was worried for a minute.
"I'm alive." I told her, fumbling the mask off, and feeling the casing. It had been a while since I was last blind. I didn't like taking the mask off, I wasn't as used to working by touch as I used to be.
"Oh thank goodness. Can I um, get you something? I don't really know much about your medical kit, and I wasn't sure what to give you…"
"There's a jar called 'Post Mayhem.' Give me that." I told her.
It was basically my best attempt at a cure-all. Who the hell knew what Mayhem had been up to with my body? So I'd better try to fix everything, on principle.
Well, hopefully Sveta knew what Mayhem had been doing, although I doubted it. If Mayhem destroyed the recordings in my mask then he probably hid whatever he didn't want me to know from Sveta as well. Or convinced her not to tell me. Oh well, worth a shot.
Sveta handed me the bottle, and I drank it. I'd need to soak any wounds, apply some more specific treatments as well, but that should take the edge off things soon.
"Sveta, what exactly have I been doing for the last hour?" I asked.
"Um. Sleeping? Sorry." Sveta said. "You were unconscious for a while. Are you sure you're all right?"
"My implant isn't picking up any problems. What hit me?" I asked.
"Um… you said that being hit in the head with a shovel would end the Master effect, and then I saw you k-kissing that woman you called Cricket…" Sveta said.
I paused.
"Odd. It managed to work out a way around it's own order. That is very concerning." I said. Then a horrible thought hit me. "Sveta, when exactly did you hit it in the head?" I asked.
"Um, I don't know. A while ago. I'm sorry, I wasn't looking at a clock." Sveta said.
Ah, yes, there weren't really any clocks around the lab, because my mask had a clock function inbuilt if I needed that information.
"All right. I'm going to repair my mask, I'll tell you about the Mayhem Protocol, and then you're going to tell me everything it said and did." I told Sveta.
Despite what I said I didn't repair the mask. I spent a small fraction of the energy buildup from my power to make two new eyes instead. I finally had the technology to make them look human from the full body replacement tree. I had to sacrifice some of the scanning functions, I'd lose the ability to see almost the entire spectrum, but I was a lot better at working small than I was a month ago, and I managed to maintain infrared scanning, which was the most useful part, in my opinion.
I'd probably still use the mask, it gave me more data, and it had the ability to record more than just one hour of information. These were just a good backup. The tricky part was attaching them to the muscles that moved the eyes, so that I could actually look at people. The eyes were mostly mechanical, but my cell cultures were coming along well enough to coat the mechanical parts.
"And once Jessica stopped screaming she was really nice. I took her home, and she told me that I was very kind, and she didn't run away at all, even when I put her down and let her walk." Sveta said, getting rather excited about this 'new friend.'
"That's nice. Does she know where the lab is?" I asked Sveta.
"Um, no, she doesn't. I didn't wake her up until we were several blocks away." Sveta said. "She asked me what my hero name was and everything. I told her I hadn't decided yet."
It had been late at night, this area was mostly deserted. I wasn't sure about Sveta's ability to notice someone following her, but I was confident that the survival instincts of the junkies around here would lead them to run away if they saw her, not follow her back here.
"Then we went to her place, and she had a dog named Betsy, and it licked me, and I asked if I could borrow her shovel to help my friend, and she said yes and let me into the garden shed, and then I came and found you." Sveta said.
Have you every tried conducting surgery on your face by feel? It's a very involving task, especially as I couldn't turn my pain down all the way without losing some very important information on what I was doing.
"And I was kissing Cricket at the time?" I asked. Considering Sveta had a top speed of about five kilometers per hour, that was probably just before the Mayhem Protocol would have cut out anyway. He'd had the entire hour to function before he disabled the recording. Damn it, I made the mask sturdy enough that it should have prevented this sort of thing, but nope, it wasn't up to percussive maintenance by someone with all the memories of the one who made it.
"Um. Yes." Sveta said, sounding nervous. "You sort of had the cage thing on her head open, and… yes."
"Well thank you for hitting me over the head then. Please tell me it was only kissing."
"It was only kissing. You both had a lot of blood on your clothes, so you were probably fighting before, most of the time. Cricket looked very tired, and I think she was hurt, and she had this big glow-y scythe thing."
"Big glow-y scythe thing? We'll revisit that later, see if I can get some more technical specifications. Now, when you hit me with the shovel, did I move my head?"
"Um yes, sort of… up and to the side a bit, you were actually straightening when I hit you, and I was really worried that I hit you too hard." Sveta told me.
My left eye chose that moment to finish its boot up sequence. The muscles weren't properly attached yet, so all I was seeing was the bottom of my own eye cavity, but that was progress.
"Mayhem directed the blow carefully. Just so you know, never hit anyone in the head with a shovel again. You're far more likely to kill them than knock them unconscious." I told her.
"I'm sorry." Sveta said, sounding genuinely distressed.
"Don't be, Mayhem's good at tricking people. Probably best for you just to obey him in future, he should have my best interests in mind, theoretically. I'm going to have to rewrite his code from scratch though, try to find out what he's hiding, make it so he can tell when the objectives are being coerced from me, that sort of thing." I said.
I lined the muscles up, applied the correct pastes and chemicals to set things, and gently rotated my eye so I could actually see.
Sveta was watching with rapt attention, and probably a little bit of fear, like I was about to hit her or something. I don't think I'd been particularly surly.
"What happened then?" I asked.
"Well, Cricket put the corner of her small scythe thing in my mouth and pulled at my cheek with it, and told me that um… anyway, she ran away, and I took you back here, because I wasn't sure what else I could do. I hope that was the right choice." Sveta said.
"Um, there were two other men in the building, I think you were talking about Uber and Leet when you went there? They were both unconscious, but they were still breathing." Sveta continued.
I sighed.
"What did Cricket tell you, Sveta?" I said.
"She, um, said that Mayhem was hers, but I could have, um, 'the wimp' if I wanted. I'm not quite sure what…."
"I see." I said, starting to work on my other eye. It was nice to have eyes again. "Sveta, I realize you probably know this, but I want to make it clear that I don't belong to anyone."
"Um. OK, that's fine." Sveta said.
"In fact one of my life goals is dying alone."
For the purposes of this explanation, enemies didn't count.
"That's… kind of sad, isn't it?" Sveta said, looking forlorn.
"No it isn't. Dying alone means only one person is dying. Dying with a whole lot of other people is a massacre." I said.
"Um, I don't think…"
Sveta caught my one-eyed glare and went quiet. I didn't want to go further into the issue, and now hopefully she wouldn't try to do anything stupid when I did die.
"What time is it?" I asked. The clock function on the new eyes was still blinking at all zeros. I could set it with my neural implant, but that didn't have a clock function of it's own, at least not one I'd designed in a way it could be seen.
"I don't know. I think I saw a mobile phone over here though…" Sveta said.
She picked it up and handed it to me as I finished installing my second eye.
"This isn't mine." I said, flipping it open. The wallpaper was a picture of Mario jumping on one of those mushroom things.
"Sorry, it was in your pocket when I carried you here, it dropped out so I picked it up as well. I thought it might be important."
I patted down my trousers. No mobile phone. I wonder what Mayhem did with mine, and why he saw fit to steal Uber or Leet's.
I scrolled though it. Don't know why it wasn't locked. You'd think that a Tinker would lock down their phone with at least voice recognition or a fingerprint scanner. Then again, this was Leet.
I scrolled through the contacts, didn't recognize any of the names or recent calls. Nothing interesting in the texts, just a bunch of stuff between Uber and Leet, apparently this was Leet's phone, and it was his turn to collect the pizza. There was one of those note taking apps on the front page, I clicked on it, and it opened to a single note.
'Cricket has been sent after the puppet master. Perhaps she can find who pulls our strings?'
I searched the rest of the phone, found nothing, and incinerated it so Leet couldn't track it back to me.
I really should move. Cricket knew where I was living, and I didn't trust Mayhem to control her. Also I really didn't want her to get another chance like that. If Mayhem had chosen to interpret her command differently, or if she had chosen better wording? Things could have gone very bad.
Still, Cricket was the only one who knew where this warehouse was. Othala was still in custody, the junkies were either too high to have coherent thoughts, wouldn't talk to cops, or both, considering that no one had found this place yet. I'd been over the PRT vehicles, they hadn't been paranoid enough to put trackers in them. I was set up here. Moving would take precious days, when I was mere weeks away from possibly achieving my goals. The warehouse was ideal, the whole area around here was practically abandoned, I'd been able to set up running water and electricity with laughable ease. I was near enough major shipping companies that I could arrange mysterious deliveries and collect them in relative privacy…
It wasn't the best place, but it didn't need to last long, just another week or so.
I'd think about it later.
"It's seven AM. We have a meeting at Somer's Rock at nine o'clock tonight. I want you along for backup, and you need to be more mobile first. I also both look and feel like I spent last night fighting a crazy scythe-wielding Nazi with super agility, and we're going to have to fix that. See if you can find me some micro-thread please Sveta." I said.
"Right away." Sveta said, brightening up and backing the wheelchair away from the workbench. She was even heading towards the correct cupboard. Huh, well that was good. I could use a lab assistant.
How to do this? I had parts now, they'd come with the same shipment as the wheelchair, I also had energy, and as I spent it I became better at the things lower in the tree. Faster, more efficient. Some of those designs in cybernetics and full body replacement were very impressive, it was just a matter of choosing which one to peruse, and the crinkle of a note in my shoe told me Mayhem wanted more storage space. Either more brain-meat, or access to a large, Tinkertech quantum hard-drive.
He'd have to wait for that. I wanted the full body upgrades first.
"Um, your new eyes are very nice." Sveta said, handing me the thread I'd asked for. "That shade of blue suits you."
I shrugged.
"I don't actually know what color my eyes used to be. Never really something I bothered to note as a ten year old. I modeled these eyes after my sister's."
My first action on waking up was to wince. My second action was to turn my pain off. Despite the sudden lack of pain, my head still felt heavy, and almost too large.
I slowly raised my arm, and traced the mask with my fingers. It was broken, although not badly, just a smashed hard drive…
He'd done it again, hadn't he? I'd carefully programmed in safeties so he couldn't take the mask off, delete the footage, or destroy it, but he'd gone and destroyed it anyway. The mask used to stream to a backup server in the clinic, but I'd used the office server, because my lab wasn't set up yet. I hadn't brought it with me, in fact I checked, and Mayhem shut down that connection the same night he got my lab equipment back so the PRT couldn't just watch everything I was doing. Damn it.
"…OK, please be… Um, Mayhem, are you all right?" Sveta asked.
"Augh." I said. My mouth tasted like blood, which I was actually starting to get used to. I just hoped it was my blood. Let's see. O negative, yep, it was mine, or someone else with the same blood type, which was unlikely. Good, I was worried for a minute.
"I'm alive." I told her, fumbling the mask off, and feeling the casing. It had been a while since I was last blind. I didn't like taking the mask off, I wasn't as used to working by touch as I used to be.
"Oh thank goodness. Can I um, get you something? I don't really know much about your medical kit, and I wasn't sure what to give you…"
"There's a jar called 'Post Mayhem.' Give me that." I told her.
It was basically my best attempt at a cure-all. Who the hell knew what Mayhem had been up to with my body? So I'd better try to fix everything, on principle.
Well, hopefully Sveta knew what Mayhem had been doing, although I doubted it. If Mayhem destroyed the recordings in my mask then he probably hid whatever he didn't want me to know from Sveta as well. Or convinced her not to tell me. Oh well, worth a shot.
Sveta handed me the bottle, and I drank it. I'd need to soak any wounds, apply some more specific treatments as well, but that should take the edge off things soon.
"Sveta, what exactly have I been doing for the last hour?" I asked.
"Um. Sleeping? Sorry." Sveta said. "You were unconscious for a while. Are you sure you're all right?"
"My implant isn't picking up any problems. What hit me?" I asked.
"Um… you said that being hit in the head with a shovel would end the Master effect, and then I saw you k-kissing that woman you called Cricket…" Sveta said.
I paused.
"Odd. It managed to work out a way around it's own order. That is very concerning." I said. Then a horrible thought hit me. "Sveta, when exactly did you hit it in the head?" I asked.
"Um, I don't know. A while ago. I'm sorry, I wasn't looking at a clock." Sveta said.
Ah, yes, there weren't really any clocks around the lab, because my mask had a clock function inbuilt if I needed that information.
"All right. I'm going to repair my mask, I'll tell you about the Mayhem Protocol, and then you're going to tell me everything it said and did." I told Sveta.
Despite what I said I didn't repair the mask. I spent a small fraction of the energy buildup from my power to make two new eyes instead. I finally had the technology to make them look human from the full body replacement tree. I had to sacrifice some of the scanning functions, I'd lose the ability to see almost the entire spectrum, but I was a lot better at working small than I was a month ago, and I managed to maintain infrared scanning, which was the most useful part, in my opinion.
I'd probably still use the mask, it gave me more data, and it had the ability to record more than just one hour of information. These were just a good backup. The tricky part was attaching them to the muscles that moved the eyes, so that I could actually look at people. The eyes were mostly mechanical, but my cell cultures were coming along well enough to coat the mechanical parts.
"And once Jessica stopped screaming she was really nice. I took her home, and she told me that I was very kind, and she didn't run away at all, even when I put her down and let her walk." Sveta said, getting rather excited about this 'new friend.'
"That's nice. Does she know where the lab is?" I asked Sveta.
"Um, no, she doesn't. I didn't wake her up until we were several blocks away." Sveta said. "She asked me what my hero name was and everything. I told her I hadn't decided yet."
It had been late at night, this area was mostly deserted. I wasn't sure about Sveta's ability to notice someone following her, but I was confident that the survival instincts of the junkies around here would lead them to run away if they saw her, not follow her back here.
"Then we went to her place, and she had a dog named Betsy, and it licked me, and I asked if I could borrow her shovel to help my friend, and she said yes and let me into the garden shed, and then I came and found you." Sveta said.
Have you every tried conducting surgery on your face by feel? It's a very involving task, especially as I couldn't turn my pain down all the way without losing some very important information on what I was doing.
"And I was kissing Cricket at the time?" I asked. Considering Sveta had a top speed of about five kilometers per hour, that was probably just before the Mayhem Protocol would have cut out anyway. He'd had the entire hour to function before he disabled the recording. Damn it, I made the mask sturdy enough that it should have prevented this sort of thing, but nope, it wasn't up to percussive maintenance by someone with all the memories of the one who made it.
"Um. Yes." Sveta said, sounding nervous. "You sort of had the cage thing on her head open, and… yes."
"Well thank you for hitting me over the head then. Please tell me it was only kissing."
"It was only kissing. You both had a lot of blood on your clothes, so you were probably fighting before, most of the time. Cricket looked very tired, and I think she was hurt, and she had this big glow-y scythe thing."
"Big glow-y scythe thing? We'll revisit that later, see if I can get some more technical specifications. Now, when you hit me with the shovel, did I move my head?"
"Um yes, sort of… up and to the side a bit, you were actually straightening when I hit you, and I was really worried that I hit you too hard." Sveta told me.
My left eye chose that moment to finish its boot up sequence. The muscles weren't properly attached yet, so all I was seeing was the bottom of my own eye cavity, but that was progress.
"Mayhem directed the blow carefully. Just so you know, never hit anyone in the head with a shovel again. You're far more likely to kill them than knock them unconscious." I told her.
"I'm sorry." Sveta said, sounding genuinely distressed.
"Don't be, Mayhem's good at tricking people. Probably best for you just to obey him in future, he should have my best interests in mind, theoretically. I'm going to have to rewrite his code from scratch though, try to find out what he's hiding, make it so he can tell when the objectives are being coerced from me, that sort of thing." I said.
I lined the muscles up, applied the correct pastes and chemicals to set things, and gently rotated my eye so I could actually see.
Sveta was watching with rapt attention, and probably a little bit of fear, like I was about to hit her or something. I don't think I'd been particularly surly.
"What happened then?" I asked.
"Well, Cricket put the corner of her small scythe thing in my mouth and pulled at my cheek with it, and told me that um… anyway, she ran away, and I took you back here, because I wasn't sure what else I could do. I hope that was the right choice." Sveta said.
"Um, there were two other men in the building, I think you were talking about Uber and Leet when you went there? They were both unconscious, but they were still breathing." Sveta continued.
I sighed.
"What did Cricket tell you, Sveta?" I said.
"She, um, said that Mayhem was hers, but I could have, um, 'the wimp' if I wanted. I'm not quite sure what…."
"I see." I said, starting to work on my other eye. It was nice to have eyes again. "Sveta, I realize you probably know this, but I want to make it clear that I don't belong to anyone."
"Um. OK, that's fine." Sveta said.
"In fact one of my life goals is dying alone."
For the purposes of this explanation, enemies didn't count.
"That's… kind of sad, isn't it?" Sveta said, looking forlorn.
"No it isn't. Dying alone means only one person is dying. Dying with a whole lot of other people is a massacre." I said.
"Um, I don't think…"
Sveta caught my one-eyed glare and went quiet. I didn't want to go further into the issue, and now hopefully she wouldn't try to do anything stupid when I did die.
"What time is it?" I asked. The clock function on the new eyes was still blinking at all zeros. I could set it with my neural implant, but that didn't have a clock function of it's own, at least not one I'd designed in a way it could be seen.
"I don't know. I think I saw a mobile phone over here though…" Sveta said.
She picked it up and handed it to me as I finished installing my second eye.
"This isn't mine." I said, flipping it open. The wallpaper was a picture of Mario jumping on one of those mushroom things.
"Sorry, it was in your pocket when I carried you here, it dropped out so I picked it up as well. I thought it might be important."
I patted down my trousers. No mobile phone. I wonder what Mayhem did with mine, and why he saw fit to steal Uber or Leet's.
I scrolled though it. Don't know why it wasn't locked. You'd think that a Tinker would lock down their phone with at least voice recognition or a fingerprint scanner. Then again, this was Leet.
I scrolled through the contacts, didn't recognize any of the names or recent calls. Nothing interesting in the texts, just a bunch of stuff between Uber and Leet, apparently this was Leet's phone, and it was his turn to collect the pizza. There was one of those note taking apps on the front page, I clicked on it, and it opened to a single note.
'Cricket has been sent after the puppet master. Perhaps she can find who pulls our strings?'
I searched the rest of the phone, found nothing, and incinerated it so Leet couldn't track it back to me.
I really should move. Cricket knew where I was living, and I didn't trust Mayhem to control her. Also I really didn't want her to get another chance like that. If Mayhem had chosen to interpret her command differently, or if she had chosen better wording? Things could have gone very bad.
Still, Cricket was the only one who knew where this warehouse was. Othala was still in custody, the junkies were either too high to have coherent thoughts, wouldn't talk to cops, or both, considering that no one had found this place yet. I'd been over the PRT vehicles, they hadn't been paranoid enough to put trackers in them. I was set up here. Moving would take precious days, when I was mere weeks away from possibly achieving my goals. The warehouse was ideal, the whole area around here was practically abandoned, I'd been able to set up running water and electricity with laughable ease. I was near enough major shipping companies that I could arrange mysterious deliveries and collect them in relative privacy…
It wasn't the best place, but it didn't need to last long, just another week or so.
I'd think about it later.
"It's seven AM. We have a meeting at Somer's Rock at nine o'clock tonight. I want you along for backup, and you need to be more mobile first. I also both look and feel like I spent last night fighting a crazy scythe-wielding Nazi with super agility, and we're going to have to fix that. See if you can find me some micro-thread please Sveta." I said.
"Right away." Sveta said, brightening up and backing the wheelchair away from the workbench. She was even heading towards the correct cupboard. Huh, well that was good. I could use a lab assistant.
How to do this? I had parts now, they'd come with the same shipment as the wheelchair, I also had energy, and as I spent it I became better at the things lower in the tree. Faster, more efficient. Some of those designs in cybernetics and full body replacement were very impressive, it was just a matter of choosing which one to peruse, and the crinkle of a note in my shoe told me Mayhem wanted more storage space. Either more brain-meat, or access to a large, Tinkertech quantum hard-drive.
He'd have to wait for that. I wanted the full body upgrades first.
"Um, your new eyes are very nice." Sveta said, handing me the thread I'd asked for. "That shade of blue suits you."
I shrugged.
"I don't actually know what color my eyes used to be. Never really something I bothered to note as a ten year old. I modeled these eyes after my sister's."
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Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
Aww~ You have your sister's eyes~
Oh, that is fucking creepy. I love it.
Adam is quite the drama queen, isn't he? In a different way from Mayhem, but still.
Sveta is adorably weird.
This was a good chapter, even if not much happened.
