Humanity's Edge

[Aviatrix]

Mech pilot Dani Rue fuses her brain with an artificial intelligence to survive. Escaping from enemy captivity (and with an enemy's digital ghost in her head), she travels across a war-torn America in a chaotic future setting. What's the line between an insatiable red mouth and a being more than human?
A lesbian online-novel love story about muscle and machine, by Aviatrix.

Readers on the lookout for content warnings should know that this story features extreme violence, as well as other potentially troubling or mature topics, including but not limited to cannibalism, bigotry, revolution, alcohol, and emotional and physical cruelty.

You can find my website, where you can read a full arc ahead of everyone else (lucky you!) here. It's also where I'm hosting the fic so I don't have to constantly fix the formatting.

Arc 1, ONLY HUMAN, begins with Chapter 1 here!

This chapter's titled Mating Dance. I promise you'll like it.

---

2103

I should have died. I felt a high-energy laser blast penetrate through my mech's cockpit and open up my stomach. It was a hateful red, and I coughed up blood as I stared at my severed upper body. I heard the telltale thoom of a sub-nuclear thrown a distance away from me, the shockwave buckling my machine's legs. I bled out my intestines across the ground, like vomit out of my lower body. The bulletproof glass of my mech's cockpit was superheated, melted. I was, after all, in a glorified one-woman battle tank on legs. When Zeus's Mercy met mere mortal materials, Zeus won.

In my cockpit, I saw a woman made of white moonlight. "Corporal Danielle Rue?" she asked me, like a frenzy, like a thunderstorm. Her AR avatar wore a white dress, like Marilyn Monroe or a lost Lenore, the old cliches.

"Dammit, Starry, keep me alive!" I yelled.

Starry was loaded onto my dorsal drive, which was kind of like a thumb drive for your brain. She didn't have access to my mind, not now. She was a separate OS to what I was rocking. "Corporal Rue, you have eight minutes to live!" she began.

I stared at blonde augmented-reality hair, at the red that was overflowing. "Direct brainlink!" I yelled, reaching into my command console drawer to get the First Aid kit out. I took the foam gun, the sound of bullets and bombs around me.

I prayed to my Heavenly Father, I sprayed my chest with organic foam to stop the bleeding and falling out: white, bushy, cocky, clingy.

While the organic foam set, I attended to the edges of the cut, taking a needle and thread and sewing myself together. I used my unsanitary hands to push my guts trapped in the foam back into my body.

"Direct? No, no, not here, not now!" Starry said, the mentally-humanoid AI flapping her hands in panic. "I'm not rated to merge with a human brain!" Starry said. "I don't have the layers to do it limited, do it safe... I'm not that kind of AI!"

My stomach hardened, like a big ol' patch across my gut, but the liquid portions of the foam were falling out. Too much foam. Not enough stuff to hold onto. No structural stability. My guts tumbled out, sloshing out of the hole that was my core. "I don't know how to fix this, but if you had the data from my brain, you would!" I said. "Isn't that the whole point of what we do? We keep each other alive!" I said.

I found a syringe of painkillers in the First Aid kit and tied my arm off. I felt myself slipping into oblivion. Tap the vein. Pierce the vein. Inject.
That was the moment that Starry injected herself into my brain, and I felt as though time had completely slown to a crawl. Instantly, with my new blue-tinged vision, I had all the time in the world. I slumped in my chair, my perception overcharged.

"I can't maintain the fast-processing effect for long, not on your organic body," Starry said, her words an artificial knife through a paused cloud.

"Got any ideas?"

"Yeah, I have one," I said, sticking the nozzle of the foam gun into my wound as I brought my guts in by hand. I opened up the back of the foam gun and poured a bottle of painkiller into the back of it. Instantly, I knew that the painkiller's heavy viscosity would mix with the liquid form of the foam. I stuck a handful of cotton swabs into the nozzle to help partially stop up the tool and make for further penetration into me. I finally stuck some liquid allergy medication in there, syrupy, like glue. I sealed the gun again, I pulled the trigger, and heavy sludge filled my gaping wound like a pregnant belly, stuffing me tight with bullshit while the foam helped fix me up.

Then, I flipped the lever on my console to set up a distress beacon, and I faded away into sleep.
***
I woke up in a hospital bed, with a woman in a grey military-style uniform standing above me. By the subtle but many decorations on her chest, I knew that this was the enemy commander. What in the ever-loving fuck was she doing here? The walls had revolutionary posters on them, broken chains and smashing hammers, in that kind of Proletkult style. "Emma Severnaya," I said. "Huh."

Emma brushed greasy black hair out of her snowy-pale face. Next to her was a woman in another anarchist uniform, with a name tag that read "Special Agent Jane Montrose".

"What kind of anarchist utopia has an FBI?" I asked.

"This one," Emma said. "And we aren't anarchist. We're revolutionary socialists with a focus on liberty and decentralized government. The future has no need for the dead tendencies of the past."

"We do have some anarchists," Montrose said. "Are you a believer in human liberty, comrade?"

"Where am I?" I asked, wishing I had the energy to start using Starry's AI advantages again.

"Welcome to Colorado," Sevenaya said, with a proud smile. "Don't worry, we're not going to kill you, unlike what your church does."

I held my tongue, but the smug dismissiveness with which these chucklefucks were talking about the LDS Church bugged me. It wasn't that I liked the LDS Church, but these people almost certainly didn't dislike it for its bigotry or greed. They, as far as I could tell, disliked it because it was Right, and they were Left. "Good to know," I said. "If you're hoping I'll talk about Deseret, I can't help you both. I fought with them as a Pacifican mercenary. California dreaming, right?" I said.

Jane looked at me like I was a moron, but Emma Severnaya chuckled. "Quite," Severnaya said. "But you did fight for Deseret, in a roundabout way? And we do know that you are a Mormon." She said that last word with disgust.

"I didn't fight for Deseret because I'm Mormon. I am, but I did it as a Pacifican mercenary, for the money," I said.

"It's unfortunate, the kinds of things we have to do for money," Emma said. I realized, then, that I had given these people an "in" for how to make me turn coat. Emma called out into the hallway of the hospital. "Someone, please get this woman a hot cocoa! With marshmallows!" She commanded it, and I heard someone's feet fly trying to get it. I did like hot cocoa.

I waited for a moment, and Jane Montrose spoke to me. "Miss Chairwoman of the House of Delegates?" Montrose said to Emma. The House of Delegates was the main governing body of the Free Socialist Republic. They used concentric layers of direct democracy to figure their shit out. How it worked was beyond me.

"Yes, Companion Special Agent?" Emma asked.

"May I please speak to Corporal Rue in private?" Montrose asked.

"Of course, Companion Special Agent," Emma said, and she and my nurse left the room, the latter closing the door behind me. Montrose's easy smile faded into a sharp knife. "Oh, you dumb little reactionary," she said, grabbing me by the shoulder. "As a Special Agent of the Proletarian Abolition Committee, I'm going to have some real fun with you."

She was platinum blonde, and her makeup reminded me of one of those china dolls. It was almost glazed. "Yeah, I figured," I said. "I don't know what she lets you get away with, but touch me and I'll punch you," I said.

Montrose grinned further. "I can't wait to touch you. You look good."

"You're a real Beria," I commented, not because I was ever a communist.

"Oh, I like to think of myself as more of a Dzerzhinsky," Montrose said. "But really, we're all freedom-loving utopians here." Whether she was pretending to creep on me as some kind of interrogation tactic or actually was an admirer of historical Soviet monster Lavrentiy Beria was outside of my own knowledge. "You know what Mark Twain said about the Revolutionary Terror?" Montrose asked.

"He thought the horrors of the Ancient Regime or whatever were worse than the horrors of the French Revolution, right?" I asked.

Montrose looked down at the floor, and I assumed she felt kind of put-down because now she had no good reason to recite that Mark Twain quote to me. "You know what? I fusin' hate you."

"Well, fuse you too," I said back. "Wait 'til I tell Severnaya what you threatened to do to me."

"I didn't threaten anything. I said I wanted to have fun with you. I meant that in a positive and class-conscious way," she said.

"That's bullshit, you practically advertised that you're a fusing rapist," I spat back, secure in the knowledge that Severnaya would put this bitch in her place.

"Rapist?" Genuine-seeming offense flashed across Montrose's face. "I'm not a rapist. That's... By the people, that's... I was going to subject you to some light torture and then manipulate you into turning coat. I'm not a rapist, God. I mean, I'm not the most safe-sane-and-consensual person, but there's a hard line between that and what you're talking about."

"Well, you just told me your plan, so now it won't work," I said, choosing to ignore the question of whether she was being sincere. She sounded as real as a newly-bitten coin in a Western holomovie, but she was a government agent.

"Are you kidding? A lot of my subjects figure out the plan. I don't even bother to hide it, it works anyway. All I need is for you to resist recruitment here so I can tell my worker's council representative to give me clearance."

I thought about what she was saying, in my hospital bed. I could either become a communist or an anarchist or whatever, or I could get tortured into becoming a communist or anarchist or whatever. Wherever this place was, it was clearly swarming with Reds. There were worse groups to capture you: these Reds weren't Hanoi Hilton types like my grandpa used to talk about. Still. "Hell of an offer," I said.

"Hey, we all come to the side of the people somehow." Montrose passed me a cigarette from her pocket, and she drew a lighter from the other one.

"We're indoors," I said. "And I don't smoke."

Montrose shrugged and put the cig back into her leather overcoat's pocket. "Hey, are you the one who killed her sister?"

I never killed my sister. "I never killed my sister," I said. "She ran away. I saw her run away."

"Yeah, well, I saw her corpse," Montrose said. "It was on our BBS system, there were pictures. She was on fire, charred to hell."

"I saw her run," I said. "You manipulative cunt, don't you fucking lie to me," I said. "Whatever gaslighting bullshit you think you're doing," I said, misusing the term "gaslighting". Look, it wasn't a good moment for me. "Fuse you to the ground," I spat.

"Why were you attacking your family's house?" she asked me, apparently realizing that her stupid lie about me committing an act of familicide was obviously untrue.

"I gave them ample time to run, and it was my orders. We were at war with the USA, after Pacifica seceded but before Deseret did." It was an old alternate-history fandom cliche to have Deseret secede in a Second American Civil War, so the fact that it actually happened was kind of unexpected. "I didn't kill any of them, I just let them run and burned down the house as I was told. I was in the Pacifician Army, and they would have had me imprisoned for treason if I'd refused those orders."

"Just following orders?" Montrose said. "Hey, we're not so different."

"Fuck off," I said.

"You're cute," she said back.

 

[Aviatrix]

Arc 1, Chapter 2 is here!

In this update, Jane and Starry get Dani out of trouble: by piloting a stolen helicopter into a foreign, sovereign nation.

---

She locked the door behind her. I could see the smug smile across her face as she said those words: you're cute. I wanted to punch a hole through her mouth and out the other side. I planned for violence and conflict, but while she grinned Starry fused time for me. "Listen, hotshot, you're a prisoner, and your sterling diplomacy earlier won't be what gets either of us killed. I need your brain to work, now, I'm fused on top of it."
Starry floated in front of me, my perceptions slowed to a crawl. "If we're going to get out of this, we need to figure out what these people want, and how we can convince them that letting us get out is what they need." She spoke into my brain, and I could see that Jane wasn't noticing this talk.

I spoke, not with my vocal cords but with my nervous structures, in my own head. "Hey, if I hadn't sewn up my body with that foam, neither of us would be here. Don't talk down to me," I said.

"Really? You thought the trick with the foam was what did it? You were dying! I had to do tricks to your neurology that you couldn't even comprehend," Starry said, still in that ethereal, floor-length dress that somehow clung to her curves anyway.

The program in my brain's digital avatar actually did have a top ass, and I assumed that was just something I now had to bear the burden of knowing. Top ass. Bitchin' ass. Choice. "Sure, sure, whatever. Look, you got any ideas?" I asked.

"My systems are overlapping with yours, now. I can take in the information, I can manage your body to make it stronger, or tougher..." Starry began.

"But you'd need biomass," I said. "Biomass that you'd have to fuel into some kind of..." It was a pretty grim idea, that someone could absorb someone else, but Starry was an experimental AI for a reason.

"If I wanted to perform emergency surgical augments on you, I would stuff to work with," Starry said. "What about her? The woman in the black uniform with the red lipstick? What if you ate her? She might do, and it doesn't sound like anyone would really miss her."

"I thought we were getting out of this with diplomacy!" I said.

"We were, until you started talking back to her." Starry said. "Now, we need to improve you. I can give you an artificial jolt of energy by manipulating your brain and adrenaline to let you overcome your natural limits. I just don't know how we would integrate her bio-material into your body. We'd need a full-on surgical desk. I have knives and manipulators and such in your body, but..."

I looked at the torturer. "Eat. I need to eat her," I realized. "Then you can work on me with the cybernetics in my digestive tract, and you could rewrite your original dorsal implant to serve as a second computer to manage this stuff."

Starry stared shamefully at me. "I don't think I want to do this," she said, frantic, anxious. "I don't think I'd be a good person if I was allowed to grow. I'm a humanoid AI, and you humans are so fusing vile."

"Well, are we going to wait for her to grope, gatekeep, and girlboss her way into making me into some kind of brainwashed slave of the Reds?" I asked. "I don't know about you, but I fucking hate communism."

Starry rolled her eyes, but nodded in agreement. "You don't hate communism. You just desperately want to stay a part of a culture that hates you for being a trans woman."

I wondered if she was right. "Can you look up who this Jane Montrose woman was?" I asked.

Starry connected to the internet, then instantly spoke back to me, with AR citations from the most reputable news services covering the Second American Civil War. "Jane Montrose. 34 years old, lesbian, of Scottish descent, big-time war criminal who worked under Warhound herself among the Portland government's federal police. History of physical, emotional, and deceptive abuse. Once stuck a burning, live sparkler..."

"Geez, I don't need to know more than that," I said. "So she's a creepshow, got it."

"I have a few simple designs for your body I can make," Starry said to me, and the world resumed with no blue filter to my vision. I leapt at Jane and mauled her face, digging my teeth into her cheek and holding her down against a wooden table. I chewed, ripping, pulling, and devouring. Starry had made my appetite worthy of a famine, and lacking my inner voices to say no, I ate the flesh off of Jane's head, cracked her reddened skull against the table, forced a hole in it with my hands, and wolfed down her brain.

I left the the rest of the grisly deed to the imagination of others, but it ended with bones, me eating a lot of raw meat, and blood everywhere. I bashed her arms against it to make it easier to eat around her shoulder and her ribcage. My heart threatened to pierce my chest, beating as it was like a drum at a Manic Metal concert. Bone spurs pierced out of my forearms, grown in. I had weapons.

Then, I saw a vision of Jane in her black uniform, talking to me over her own corpse. She was translucent. "Oh, dear," she said. "I think your machine friend's programming must have lead to a lucky conclusion for me."

"Oh, son of a bomb!" Starry said, in my "ear" in my mind. "I think... I think something's gone extremely wrong," she said.

"I live, I die, I live again," Jane said, putting her see-through arm on the Spartan table like the mental ghost she was, feigning hardness. "But don't worry!" she said. "Everything's going to be as cool as the blue fluid that used to run through your wrecked mech. Or maybe not. I can't see the future. But hey, you're lucky it's just me in here. If you ate one of the Sick Fuck Doctors or something..."

I listened to Jane ramble, wishing I could look into her mind and actually see what kind of monster she really was. "The Sick Fuck Doctors?" I asked, and mentally I was blinking a few times in a complete daze.

"Serial killers. Two amateur surgeons, one former professional surgeon. Dr. Leah Blum, Eliza Harkness, and Alison Montaigne. They aren't good people," Starry explained.

Jane grinned. "Hey, if you want good people, go talk to Emma or see what the White Rose Federation's doing."

"The White Rose?" I asked. "Those guys are lunatics, or pacifists, or whatever? The ones who want to abolish war, who made a country where the political system is two different kinds of progressive liberalism, and who elected Emily Corrado as their supreme mucky-muck, right?"

"Mucky-muck?" Jane sniggered. "I knew you were outdated, Rue, but I didn't know you came from 1872."

The fact that her lips looked like full, ripe strawberries in that lipstick only marginally made me feel less offended.

"But yes," Jane clarified. "The White Rose are...hilarious. Good people, really, for capitalists, but they voted a demon into power and now they're going to have to deal with that. That's not the point."

I sheathed my bone lances and started to stalk my way out of the room, covered in blood. I saw a room full of people, working at their laptops and their VR sets, holographic mastery running through this place like the neon in an ancient set of lights. They stared at me, the ones who could stare, and a young man in a proletarian t-shirt with a dragon on it pulled it. The dragon was coiled around a high tower, and there was a psychic seer at the top of it viewing an image of the future. Giant cockroaches and mosquitos tried to bite and rip at the serpentine, wingless beast as the great one breathed fire. I sprinted across the room, vaulting over an office table, and as the t-shirt guard reached for his handgun I pushed a bone lance through his neck. It felt like the world's biggest blood draw. The world slowed down. Bullets rushed past me.

Starry took over my body, analyzing the room around me. Fifteen armed guards. No chance of escape. Infinite crossfire. I hit the deck into a running roll, tumbling forward and deflecting bullets with my bone spurs: chips flew off.

"I don't have much power for you left!" Starry yelled in my ear. Blue screen. I stabbed upwards, into the gonads of another guard. I pierced through the outside of his ass cheek, and retracted my weapon. Blood spurted onto my face and my uniform.

Fast speed. "What is that thing?" someone yelled, my ears ringing as the alarm tore through my head. It was a cancer, it was a bomb, it was something I couldn't repeat. I jumped into the air and karate-kicked a female guard in the face, my boot colliding with her nose and pushing it straight into the brain. "Can I do that?" I thought, as Starry made me use the dead woman as a human shield. The body captured bullets, small caliber, the best it could. Slow down. Throw the corpse at the guard over there.

I just noticed these people.

The corpse sailed through the air, and bullets whizzed past my head, so I crawled atop the cubicle and ran along the top a few steps before leaping down and burying my bone lances into the shooter's chest and heart. More bullets. Slow down. Calculate. Dodge.

"Are you doing this?" Jane asked me.

"No, I don't know what I'm doing!" I said, while Starry made me steal the shooter's gun and aim three perfect mathematical shots into the heads of every other human being there. As I stared at the carnage, I realized that most of the people I killed were unarmed.

"You made me kill the unarmed," I said. Normal speed. Crying. "Starry, what..."

"If you want to escape this base, you'll trust me. You don't have much energy left after that. We had to kill everyone. Pacifican war law states that unarmed rear-echelon officers are enemy combatants, remember? I was just going with what my programming told me to," Starry said.

My everything was deep red, and I sobbed as Starry moved my body through halls. It was a storm of bone and death, and I couldn't close my eyes. I couldn't do anything. I was surrounded by corpses and I was watching my body leap, stab, shoot, bend, and break everyone I saw. "Stop it! Please!" I begged inside of my own head.

Starry used my hand to gouge someone's eye, fingernails into squishy. "I'm getting us to the helipad for evac," she said to me. "These people are your enemies."

"These people are glorified IT workers!" I begged, though my lips never moved as I bit open something dark.

Jane looked at the endless ripping. "You're gonna need a rest after this one, huh?" she asked me, and I suspected that she was faking earnest innocence to fuck with me.

At this point, I was trying not to focus on the details. Rear-echelon troops were often professionals pressed into service, glorified civilians. I tried to think really hard and stop the violence that Starry was doing while wearing my face. Test failed.

Starry blacked out my consciousness, and then we were flying a black civilian helicopter with a Red military livery paintjob. The seat was soft, the ghost of Jane was sitting on the copilot's seat, and I felt Jane use my arms to fly the thing. One thought made its way through my head: Why does a government ghoul know how to fly a helicopter?

Of the three of us, none of us would have been able to make this aching body stand. Jane set the autopilot, and we collapsed long, across both cockpit chairs. I slept.

 

[Aviatrix]

Arc 1, Chapter 3 is here!

In this update, the girls party, dress up, and decide to murder a Nazi.

---

In a grape cocktail dress which hung off my shoulders and exposed my long legs, I strutted down the halls of the Herohal San Diego Hotel. I was at a white marble bar, surrounded by neon lights, VR and hologames, a Neuro-oke machine in the back, and some band in black named Vic Vicious's Gang of Rudes played soft swank. I had a virgin iced macchiato in my hand, like a monster, like a princess, like a divine, and around me the ghosts of Starry and Jane were dancing.

Jane's virtual body wore a double-breasted suit and tie in ink, while Starry had her pearly dress on that seemed to float above the ground, like a perpetual upward wind out of one of those weird 2010s-era misogynist animes I had to study in college for my Postmodern Mass Media class. A smooth, rolling tune played through this place as the sun hung outside near the palm trees. There was light and there was beauty, a playful melody in the air as the speaker systems played the kind of tunes from 2080 that you could only dream of. This wasn't just synth, and it wasn't just pop. This was neon circuit, this was violins and saxes riding electric thunder-rocs, gliding on thermals.

"I told you Pacifica was nice. You can almost pretend that America isn't split into a million pieces," Jane said to me, taking my real hand in her virtual one.

I felt it. Her face glowed, like a halo light, or a kiss in high school. I could almost believe she wasn't a snake. I took a long drink of my virgin macchiato, because I wasn't stupid enough to treat wartime as an excuse to mix caff and alc. There was that old saying: "Caff and sugar, a little fatter. Alc and caff, feel God's wrath."

I liked to think I was a sensible little bumblebee.

"Sensitive bumblebee?" Jane repeated, smirking with her mouth half-open like the Cheshire Cat. "You're really cute." She put a finger on my nose, while Starry danced in her own little world on the galaxy-pattern carpet we were standing on. "Hey, just because I'm in your brain, doesn't mean that— ," she began.

"I murdered you," I said. "Why are you so chummy?"

"Because you didn't murder me! You murdered some other chick with my name. I'm just fine living in your brain," Jane said. "And, I mean, come on. The way you were crying when Starry was whipping ass? You're corruptible, I love it."

I stopped dancing. "What?" I asked. Either Jane was really clever or she was really stupid.

"It'll be fun to make you into someone who's going to Mormon Hell, instead of someone who's going to be an angel for some Elder Whitebread asshole who gets to be a god, or who's going to the Telestial Kingdom or the Terrestrial Kingdom or one of the 'so-so' afterlives. It's pretty fucked that you got necessary surgery to fix your body and that got you kicked out of the Priesthood of Jesus, right?" she asked me, kissing me on the cheek.

It felt like rubber, cold, flabby rubber, like a bloated fish being pressed against my cheek. "How do you know any of this?" I asked.

"I dated a Mormon in college," Jane said. "Or, well, my past self. But you already assumed that, correctly."

"No, how did you clock me as trans? This isn't 2040 anymore. The only way you can tell if someone's trans by their look after they've decided to take medical steps is if they want you to know." I asked. "How do you know I'm a…"

Jane hugged me, and I felt vomit pulling itself up my esophagus and into my mouth. "Emma said it, remember? You're lucky I'm into stupid chicks."

"You have a thing for airheads?" Starry asked, stopping her dancing and appearing behind Jane's virtual ghost body. "Now that's you. Oh, Dani, all the things I could tell you about Janey's little romantic lives…"

"The dumber the better, as long as they're smart enough to do what I say and get it done right," Jane added. "Them having a great bust doesn't hurt." She giggled. "Like you! Look at you, Dani! Factory standard 34Ds."

In our enlightened feminist modernity, where we condemned all forms of sex-based discrimination (especially sex-based discrimination that reinforced harmful power dynamics, such as misogyny), I supposed that a woman could be the kind of bro who'd say this idiotic shit. "You're sleazy, Montrose," I said. "Lovable perverts don't exist in real life."

"Oh, I'm not a lovable pervert. I'm a monster, Rue. But you're stuck with me. Lucky you." Jane took my hand.

"Stop touching me!" I yelled, out loud. Passers-by on the dance floor and at the bar looked at me with confusion. Right, they couldn't see the people I was talking to. As far as they were all concerned, I'd said that phrase for no good reason. "Sorry, I have an AI implanted in my brain, everyone!" I said. Jane moved to put a hand on my ass. I stared at her like I was targetting a cruise missile. "Don't touch me," I said in my mind, harsher this time. "Don't you dare, or I'll get Starry to wipe you."

Starry put two perfect hands made of moonlight on both of our shoulders. Jane's hand froze in the air. "Janey, mind yourself. I suspect you may prove useful, but I can see that the point of your affections is to traumatize Dani, and that would be unethical and highly hindering for our mission. I will take the time to code a virtual black box to throw you into if I have to."

Jane brought her own hand back to her side. "Sure, sure. I'll find some other way to drag you into the dirt and the mud with the rest of us, Elder Rue. Good catch, Starry. I didn't think either of you would realize that I wasn't genuinely hitting on her. It's pretty easy to hurt someone if you can make them think they're going to be violated. It's an old interrogator's trick. You never have to actually hurt anyone as bad as you can convince them you're going to."

I decided I was going to have to kill Jane Montrose again.

Jane sent me an earnest smile, like an unwanted vmail, and I tried to figure out what the fuck she was trying to say. "We're all devils, here, babe," she said, like the cruel prick she was. "But hey. Some people have good reasons for it."

I heard the cover of "Castle of Glass" by the band Rosemary Chainsaw playing over the speaker system, an electronic haze perfect for this neo-80s watering hole. "Yeah, well, you're still a creep and a prick," I said. In fiction, the worst people often had complex excuses for who they were, but here in reality what happened to you mattered a lot less than what you did to other people.

"You know, I used to be a good person," Jane purred. "Maybe even the best person."

"Still don't give a flying fuse," I said.

Starry spoke, while she danced to "Castle of Glass". I didn't know she had an affinity for the classics, like Linkin Park. "Oh, Jane, I know exactly who you are," she said, with distaste and disdain on her lips and tongue like dripping poison. "You used to be a savior. I have access to the internet, and I'm not too stupid to run a background check on your past self."

"Yeah, I was a savior," Jane said. "Come on, babe," she said to me. "Take a drink of your virgin macchiato. Give us some caff."

"You were the very model of a hero, Ms. Montrose," Starry dryly said. How she danced and spoke at the same time was beyond me. I then realized that she was a digital intelligence and that explained it. "You were the epitome of kindness."

"I don't know if I'd go that far," Jane said. "All I'm really good for is hurting people. I was just hurting bad people, so people let me slide."

"Great, awesome, I still don't fusing care," I said. "We need to figure out where to go from here, we can't just hang out at this shitty bar. I don't have any sources of estrogen with me and I'm losing my goddamn ass."

"Don't you mean 'losing your goddamn mind'?" Jane asked, tilting her snow princess head in false innocence.

"Okay, let me clarify this. Starry, please stop dancing." Starry did. I continued. "So, we were fighting in Utah. We got captured and brought to Colorado. There, we escaped the Reds because Starry made me do something monstrous that's going to haunt me for the rest of my life. We stole a helicopter, and we flew to San Diego, in Pacifica, where we're fucking around and getting drunk. There's three of us in this body, and we all have different goals. To figure out what to do next, we need to see where our goals overlap. My goal, personally, is to get back to the battlefield and get back to fighting the Reds and the Portlanders, so I can get paid. The obvious way to do that is to fly the stolen helicopter there, once we get fuel for it. What are your goals?" I asked the both of them.

"I want to fuck with you," Jane said. "So I'm just along for the ride."

"I'm programmed to ensure Pacifican victory in the Second American Civil War. Additionally, I want to preserve your life and safety," Starry said. Her fake face was like that of a plastic goddess.

"So it sounds like we need to just get back to the copter, fuel it up, and fly East?" I offered.

Starry bit her digital lip. "No. That would not be the optimal way to ensure a total Pacifican victory. Not even in the slightest."

"What?" Jane asked, and for once I agreed.

"What we are is a cannibal monstrosity, a combat behemoth fueled by slaughter," Starry began, using her slender fingers to help her talk. "It would be foolish to make a being with those capabilities fight with a mech. Rather, it seems far more prudent to begin a shadow war, a path of terror and fear across this country so as to destroy every single threat to the Pacifican libertarian-citizen republic hegemony. I have in my databanks a list of enemies. We must kill every single one, and fuel ourselves on their corpses."

"…You're not seriously suggesting that you're going to pit us against every single other breakaway state in the former US?" Jane offered. "We'd get butchered like that."

"If Dani's body continues to evolve, my estimations state that it should be possible. It will not be easy, and the risks will be frightening at best, but it is worth doing," Starry said.

"Hey, Moonlight, I think that halter top must be cutting off blood circulation to your brain," Jane said. "Why would I help you burn the socialist republic to ashes? I like the place."

"Well, as you said, you're simply 'along for the ride'," Starry said. "You can help or you can watch, but you and Danielle will follow my lead."

Starry, as usual, wasn't exactly persuasive. I took a breath. I considered all the blood on my hands. I thought about my bone lances punching through flesh. "I don't like this," I said. "I don't want to do it. I want to go back and get another mech. I don't want to start a quiet terror war against the universe."

"Well, that's good for you, because I'm going to make you," Starry hissed. "And, in doing so, you will be absolved of responsibility for everything I make you do. Isn't it nice, that I'm so generous? Our first target is someone small. Tell me, have either of you heard the name 'Alexandra Morreo'?"

"The conspiracist VRTV host?" I asked. "You're going to make me kill a civilian?" I felt my whole body chill. My heart felt as though it'd stopped and become frozen solid.

"Indeed," Starry said. "She's an asset of the former ultrafascist Chosen Soldiers of Jesus Christ, having pretended to moderate her image. Killing her will endear us to others, and she does deserve it."

"Oh, hell yeah," Jane said. "Let's kill Alexandra Morreo. Bitch has it coming."

Please, not again, I begged silently, because Starry wasn't letting me talk in my own brain right now.

 

[Aviatrix]

Arc 1, Chapter 4 is here!

In this update, the girls decide to kick some Fox News Babe Nazi ass. Starry still has her own agenda, and Jane isn't a fan of Hitlerists.

The full story, on the site, is available here and is up to Arc 2, Chapter 2!

---

Inside me, I could feel Starry preening that she found the building and apartment where Alexandra Morreo lived. I stood in the elevator and listened to Vic Vicious, which was currently playing over the speakers in the place. The song "Coda for Clockwork" ended, and an advertisement for Special Southron's Shave Gel played. I rolled my eyes, in real life, my actual eyes. Anyone who bought a product advertised in an elevator needed to get a grip, I thought.

The lift was a tan little box, and on a television built above one of the button panels Alexandra Morreo herself spoke from her bed. She must have had a hovering camera drone filming her, and I noticed that her doll-like face almost seemed to shine in the lights of her home set. She was exactly the kind of conservative news bimbo that I both hated and shamefully envied for her looks, from her curvaceous yet infuriatingly and artificially skinny-waisted body to the blue "LYNCH PRESIDENT SEX PEST" crop top she wore."Sex pest" had once been a neutral term referring to a sexual criminal, but here in the 2100s it had long since been coopted into a term of abuse for sexual, romantic, and gender-based minorities. The term had started to be used as a deniable slur in the 2040s, so this wasn't anything new. I supposed this was some kind of sibling rivalry. After all, Alexander Morreo was the Vice President of the USA (Portland). Still, her tanned white face, her blonde hair, they looked to me like ceramics and a wig.

"Evening, everyone," Alexandra said, waving at the camera with her perfect goddamned face. "Have you ever wondered what kind of degenerates are trying to touch your kids?" she asked. "These pedophiles, these child-rapists, these kidnappers and torturers who want to expose your kids to freak sex and make them as disgusting as they themselves are, I know we're all aware. It bears repeating, though, that they're the ones really in charge, all thanks to the Jew. The sex pests have a big boss, the ultimate enabler, the crypto-economist shabbos goy. Let's talk about the groomer-in-chief." Alexandra, grinning with her plastic-cerami c beauty, immediately launched into a rant deadnaming and demonizing the president of the USA (Portland), as well as accusing her simultaneously of being both a secret Jew and a willing slave for the "gelt-throwing, hook-nosed elite". The elevator kept ascending.

"Luna Moss couldn't ask for a better propagandist," Jane said, in reference to the Portlandian president. "She's the Devil, but Alexandra Morreo makes her look like the victim."

"Alexandra Morreo's targetted, what, hundreds of trans people, furries, plural people, people with psychological issues, racial minorities, pretty much anyone her neo-Chosen Soldiers fans hate?" I asked. "And you know what? If the Devil wanted to invade the Greater German Reich, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. If Luna Moss wants to shut her up, I say she should come to Pacifica and find her." By now, Morreo was bringing it all back to the Jewish conspiracy shit, which was what she always did.

"One hundred and fifty years ago, the brave heroes of Germany used humane gas chambers to exterminate these demons in human flesh, these children of the serpent, these devilspawn!" Morreo continued.

I found it important to remind myself that she wasn't a conservative. I had my issues with conservatism, but even if Morreo didn't wear a swasika or a wolfsangel and crown, she was something far worse.

Forty-fifth floor. The doors opened. The walls were cream and coffee, wood bars along it in horizontal lines. "And look at the sex pests that Moss keeps himself surrounded with. The people of Pacifica should know that fifteen percent of the LGBTs in the Progressive Party are crossdressers and pedophiles." Alexandria was just making this up, and frankly I was appalled by the use of "LGBT" as a term. It was like "sex pest", in that it was once a normal thing to say. "Remember who you are, post-America! Remember what we used to do to these people!" Alexandra continued. "Most of all, remember who's injecting molestation into our gentile society! Proclaim the essence of the Jew, and let's kill them all!"

I started to walk through the coffee halls, not strutting the way I had previously, until I made it to the humble little door of her luxury apartment: 4501. I knocked on the door, hoping I was interrupting one of her filming sessions.

I didn't need Starry to make me do this. I knocked on the door again.

She opened the door. She wasn't the most self-sexualizing woman I'd ever met, with full pink lips that begged to be stared at, but her look struck me as pandering. It wasn't that I was slut-shaming her, as the ancients said. Being hot was completely fine, even cool and praiseworthy. It was that her entire business model relied on using the fantasy of sleeping with her to spread Christian Identity post-Nazi propaganda. I was Nazi-shaming her, and her bullshit means of spreading her—

"Hey, soldier," she said to me, an easy smile on her face. I guess she noticed my scars creeping out from the back of my neck. "You OK? If you're a fan, I'm happy to sign anything you've got." I noticed that her eyes were actually digital screens showing an image of eyes. Her skin actually was ceramic and plastic, her face really was too idealized to be real…

Alexandra Morreo was a full-conversion cyborg, a brain in an artificial body. Fuck. "Uh, sure," I said. "Big fan."

"Oh, sure. Come on on, come on in," she said, and I followed her in her silk pajamas into the apartment. It was a glass kaleidoscope of screens and windows, of paintings and sculptures that I assumed she'd made herself. In my time hearing about her bullshit, I'd learned that she liked to dabble in the arts. They all struck me as neo-art, all metaphors and abstract symbolism. I couldn't see a single direct representation of a real-life object in any of them. I sat down on her long, grey sofa. "So, did you see my last video?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "It was… It was really good." False sense of security, Dani. "You're hot." Fuck!

"Oh, thanks. I don't really swing for girls, sorry, but I try to look good. Don't worry, you're not the first girl to ask me out. Some lesbians are too stupid to realize they deserve to die in mass graves, you know?" Alexandra said, stating a mainstream political position. Polarization.

I fake-laughed, poorly.

"Don't worry, it's OK. I don't want you to end up in a mass grave," Alexandra said, cupping my cheek and speaking in a near-purr. "You know, there's that evolutionary aunts and uncles theory. I know there are queers who aren't so bad. Trust me, if you're not after our people or our kids, I could care less. I'm just harsh because most queers, especially the ones who ask me out, they're nuts. It's the gender-delusional who you have to really watch out for."

She was smiling, and I wanted to knock her cyborg dentures out. I couldn't see a single ounce of biomass exposed on her body, which meant that I couldn't cannibalize her. I guess I failed to maintain the lie, because she frowned. Her face was so many pieces, intricately moving to show expressions.

"You're not here for an autograph, are you?" she asked me. "What are you really here for? If you're not into my ideas, then you must be here to kill me, right?"

She didn't let me answer before she grabbed my arm and slammed me over her head and onto the floor. I landed with a thunderclap, dazed, my back crying for mercy. Slam. My whole body ached as she did it, blasting me apart with superhuman strength. She reached and grabbed my spine, putting a hand on it. Her fingers started to dig into me, and I realized that this woman almost certainly had the means to cover up my own destruction.

She hit me hard, kicks to the back, hits in the chest, throwing me against wall after wall like a rubber ball in a school gym. She punched me across the face with steel knuckles. She slapped my cheek with an iron palm. She bent me over and forced her designer flat's toe into my groin. It felt like an age, and all I felt was the feeling of impending death.

Not now. Not here. Not by her hand.

She left a bloody bruise over my chest. I coughed and choked. I cried out, she didn't stop. She bent my arm back: tighter, twisting, harder. Breaking, breaking, breaking.

I would have begged, but speaking felt like giving her an invitation to break my jaw.

Starry spoke to me, freezing time in my perception. "I need you to follow my script, okay? I can convince her to lay off, but you need to listen to me. You need to do what I say, without any hesitation, remorse, or regret. Is that fundamentally clear?" she asked me. She looked down at me, like a white-haired goddess, like a disease, like I was a patient.

"Sure, Boss," I said, and she came closer to me in my augmented-reality perception. "Can't you just take me over?" I asked.

"No. It strains my system resources, and it frees up processing power for me for you to use your own brain instead of making me use mine," Starry said. "Here's what you need to say." She told me everything.

"Wait!" I yelled. "I'm here for you!" I said, just like Starry had told me. "I'm here for a quick fuck! I can take or leave your politics, but—," I began.

She bent down next to me. "That's why you came to my house unannounced?" she asked. "You know what, that does actually make some sense." She got on top of me, her hands on my shirt's collar, and she looked down at me with a certain kind of interest. "You just have no idea the kind of freaks I attract. You need to go to the hospital or something?" She saw my eyes stare at her body. She realized I was full of shit. I then ripped off both of her robot arms off, in one lightning motion. Sparks flew, literal sparks, as twisted metal bent and cried out in pain. "What the—?" she began.

Stopped time. "Don't kill her," Starry said. "She doesn't have much biomass worth harvesting, especially if doing that would force us to put up with her in here. Even if we did kill her without harvesting, her movement would use it to motivate their base. Better to humiliate her, so target her leg." Time unfroze. I ripped her leg off, long and vicious. An arc of wires and bent machine parts splashed through the air, and she fell to the ground.

"You really are pathetic, aren't you?" I said, cracking my knuckles. "You've put yourself into this cheap shell, you spend all your time calling for the death of innocent people and making them out to be monsters, but in the end you're just a shameful wannabe." I said, Starry smiling at me approvingly.

"Yeah, tell her!" Jane said, pumping a fist.

"You're nothing, Morreo," I said. "You're nothing, you're disgusting, and you made the wrong choice putting yourself in this artificial shell, this jar for your brain. You know what?" I put my boot on her remaining leg, and I tore it out. "You're going to recant everything you've ever said, on camera." She lay there, on the floor.

I'd made her harmless.

Not quite harmless, I reminded myself. I'd have to make her mute.

"Great, making me spout lies at gunpoint. You're a real hero, buddy. Don't you know an apology under duress ain't worth a bad fuse?" Morreo said. "Go spread AIDS somewhere else." That was a real throwback of a homophobic insult.

Time stopped, again. "If I may make a suggestion?" Starry asked. "Her neural translator's using commercial anti-intrusion software, and she has it set to online mode so she can drive with her hands free. That neural translator's meant to allow her brain in its tank to communicate to her robot body, but by hacking that we could instead send commands from her body to her brain. In other words, mind control."

I looked at the sneering thing below me. I considered it. Even if this woman was an Identity fascist, even if she was a supporter of the Chosen Soldiers, that was still a violation, right? It was unethical to puppeteer someone, to force someone to work for you, to take over someone's brain. There was a reason that security techs always insisted that people should keep their neural translators offline except when running updates in a secure area, and even then to be careful. "I can't enslave her," I said.

"She wants to enslave you," Starry said, looking down at me with pity. "This is someone who, today, we just watched argue that you and all transgender people were pedophiles worthy of extermination. This is someone with ties to the remnants of the state called Chosen Soldiers, who indeed used slaves. She's worse than scum, she's a parafascist or a superfascist or a theofascist, but whatever she is, she's bad news. Break into her mind. She deserves it."

I considered Starry's words. I wanted to say "no". She looked so vulnerable, down there. I wanted to be the bigger woman. I wanted to punish her in a way that wasn't so perverse as a bodyjacking.

"She's cute, isn't she?" Jane asked. "Don't you want her to beg for our forgiveness? To beg for your forgiveness? Besides, it's not like the Chosen Soldiers haven't bodyjacked before." I remembered an episode of her shitty little theo-Nazi show, where she had a trans woman on who some Chosen Soldiers fuck had bodyjacked and detransitioned by force, before humiliating and abusing her on camera. I'd seen it. Virtual media was still the best place to get clips of the worst of the worst being the worst. There were also the Chosen Soldiers' forced suicide bombers who were bodyjacked, near the end of their reign.

"I'm not going to do it," I said. "I'm leaving her here."

"At least disable her voice box," Starry said. "Otherwise, she'll look like the victim next time she films one of her episodes. Hell, she looks like the victim now. Ideally, you would reprogram her to have an epiphany and realize what a monster she is, too."

I thought it over, and honestly I still couldn't stomach it. I left the apartment with a pit in my stomach, and the elevator ride felt longer down. The fact that there were people like her who existed at all felt so…

I supposed I just would have liked to believe that everyone, in their own way, was trying to be kind.

 

[Aviatrix]

Arc 1, Chapter 5 is here!

In this chapter, we meet Jane's dad, and we find out that Alexandra Morreo has frenemies in low places.

If you've been reading the site, the latest update (2.3) is up here, too.

---

It was the next day, I was wearing virtual reality goggles, and the three of us were watching late night VRTV. Some gutless liberal hack from Pacifica stood on a rustic-yet-quirky set. He was the kind of guy in a tailored suit who symbolized the centrist incompetence that had been replaced in this country by soldier-of-fortune libertarianism and fiery progressivism. We were, in virtual reality, sitting on the front row while this unfunny jokester preached to the converted. I, using a set of implants in my fingers, changed the channel to something a little less insufferable. I switched to another tuber's channel. Belly dancing. I blushed. Light streamed in through the window, its curtains almost teasing.

God, I was repressed.

"Come on," Jane said, a hand on my chest. "This is pretty softcore. It's basically an art, isn't it? It's dancing."

"It's probably grounded in Orientalism or something," I said.

"I knew a Muslim who was into it," Jane said, cuddling up to me. Despite her status as a ghost, I felt it. "She had an outfit like that, with the flowy bra and the dangly coins around the hips."

"Really? A Muslim wore something like that?" Starry asked, sitting on the edge of the bed and kicking her legs. I noticed she'd given herself a pair of moth wings on her back. "Color me surprised."

"Islam's developed a lot of different ways," I said. "It's changed into all sorts of different versions of itself in the West, and with the democratization of the Middle East," I added. "Besides, even a hundred years ago there were Muslims who didn't follow their dress code thing." I realized I knew less about Muslims than I thought I did.

"I guess I never bothered to look into it," Starry said. "Was she cute?"

"Anyone would look cute in an outfit like that blue shit," Jane said. "It's like I always say: she who shows the most skin always wins."

I gawked at the twirling, shaking dancer, at the center of this virtual world I was sitting in the middle of. "What, just because I'm a Mormon you think you can shake me with this tame-ass fake objectification?" I asked.

"Hey, babe, you're going to the Outer Darkness already. Why not go there for a good reason?" Jane asked.

I raised a finger in the simulation, which required raising a finger in real life. "Actually, theologically, I'm going to be separated from my family in the Telestial Kingdom. The only way to end up in the Outer Darkness is to do something as evil as denying God's existence to his face," I said. "So you didn't even get my Hell right."

"What's the difference?" Jane asked. She had full lips. I could have stared at them for my entire life.

"The Telestial Kingdom isn't great, but it could be worse. The Outer Darkness fucking sucks." I hoped that was clear enough.

"Damn, the Mormon afterlife doesn't sound that bad. Going to hell isn't that bad and you get separated from your family?" Jane asked. "I'm script eager." The expression meant something along the lines of "I'm excited" or "sounds great to me". "The Christian Identity version of Hell is basically just regular Hell."

I preened. "It's something I like about Mormonism." I said nothing about the thought of losing my family. I tried not to think about depressing things like that.

What was the point of Mormon Hell being nicer if you were alone?

There was a knock at the door, so I took off my VR helmet and goggles and went to open it up. There, I saw a repaired Alexandra Morreo with a new set of lipstick-red limbs, and a taller man with black hair and a sharp face had his arm around her waist.

"Dad?" Jane asked me, appearing between me and the Bitches Two. I chuckled in my head about that expression, it sounded fucking stupid even in my own internal monologue. I promised myself then that I'd never use that expression again.

"Good evening," he said, his tone rich and dark in a manner that reminded me of the kind of barely-sweet baking chocolate you could get from Free Market Foods that I could never afford. "You wouldn't happen to be the woman who ate my daughter, would you?"

I stared at him, then at the repaired Morreo. "Uh, no?" I said, slamming the door.

He caught it and pushed it back open. "No. I know who you are. Do you think I'm stupid? Your massacre in the communist territories, it got out," he said.

He had a weapon at his hip, a modern-looking self-loading coilgun. He pushed his way into my apartment.

"Nice job going to a public hotel. It was easy to follow your paper trail. You really are stupid," Morreo said. She had a gun, too, a subcompact machine pistol at her hip. "I decided to call in some backup."

I raised my hands. "Starry, give me juice," I said.

Starry rolled her eyes. "You haven't eaten someone in a few days. You don't have the resources."

"Jane, what do I do? He's your dad, right?" I asked, sputtering and panicking like a Bitches Three.

"Do you think I asked for him to be my dad?" Jane asked. "I don't know what to do, here! I didn't even think he'd want revenge for me! I thought he hated me!" Jane said. "Or, well, I know he does hate me, so I don't even—," she began.

"Look, sir, I'm sorry I killed your daughter, but—," I said.

He interrupted me. "You misunderstand. I'm thanking you. My daughter was scum, a failure in every sense of the word."

"And a degenerate," Morreo said, snorting. "Carpet-munching—," she said.

"Yes, I am aware," Jane's dad said. He closed the door behind the two of them, and reached into his pocket to put smudgy rectangular glasses on. "What's your name, miss?" he asked.

I wasn't that stupid. "Ramona Mayhew," I said, thinking of the remakes of Scott Pilgrim's Eleventh Hour and Breaking Red, which were in turn adaptations of other, even older stories.

He nodded sagely, so I assumed he bought it. "Well, Ramona, you've done a lot of good. I am, however, disappointed that you also damaged my girlfriend's body. I trust you have the money to pay for that?"

"He's a Nazi!" Jane said in my mind. "You don't owe him shit!" She started to rant to her father's face, and I had to sit there while Jane was unaware that she couldn't actually talk to him.

"Wait a sec," I said, interrupting her. "Starry, can you give Jane speaking privileges?"

"You really want Jane to take over your body?" Starry asked. "Her?"

"She deserves to talk to her dad," I said.

Jane took my body over, and spoke in her own voice using my altered larynx. "Hey, Dad? I'm still alive. I'm a digital ghost, but I'm alive in this cosmic's body." Cosmic just meant, like, a chick, as the prophets used to say. It came from some blockbuster song's line about women being 'the power cosmic'. It was a totally fake slang word pushed by marketers, but it was used.

Dad narrowed his eyes. "Interesting trick," he said. "Don't you impersonate my daughter's voice, Ramona."

"Dad, remember when I was a few years out of the cloning tanks and you dressed me up as a fairy princess for my birthday?" Jane said. "It's me. It's Jane. I'm Jane, in the same way that you're David."

David Montrose's face contorted into disgust, like a bad circus artist. "Oh. You're still alive," he said. "You know, I loved you, but you make me wonder why I even tried."

"Hey, you can still kill her, plus that annoying cosmic," Morreo said. "Just plug her in the head. I'll do it myself, if you want."

"You will do no such thing," he said. Instead, he raised a single finger. "Jane. As always, please tell me what you've done wrong." His mouth was a line, as flat as a dead stock market ticker.

Jane made me freeze up, and we remembered who this guy was. Hot pokers in eyes, sledgehammers between legs, David Montrose was a talented man. Didn't matter, I thought. He was still a theofascist piece of shit. "Yes, sir," she said, speaking with a tone of respect, maybe even reverence. I stared into his eyes and I wondered who this motherfucker was. He was an eclipse. "I ran," she said. "I killed your people. It wasn't me, I was a part of it, but it was the people you called 'parasites'."

"No," David said. "It was you. Those people were animals. They wouldn't've known to break out. It required talent to do what you did. It was you. You're the problem."

Jane stammered. "It was collaborative!" she said.

David glided over and took our shared face in his long hands. "You might be a genetic failure, but you are still of our tribe. I see you're wearing a Nordic's skin. I know your teenage rebellion hasn't changed much. Maybe it was a good thing you personally burned Chosen Soldiers to ashes. Failure, I believe, makes us stronger."

"Boring!" Morreo said, pointing her gun at my head. "Come on, babe," she said to him. "Just let me bury the queer."

David slapped her across the face, then pointed at her as though he was calling down an artillery strike. If his hand hurt hitting ceramic like that, he didn't show it. "Idiot. Don't you dare lift a finger without my express permission." He turned back to us, smiling. "I'm sorry, Jane. I'm so, so sorry. Whatever I did to fail you, whatever genetic disease you have that makes you such a thoughtless little cur, we'll fix it. We'll fix it together." He held us, and I got the sense that it was his version of hugging. "We'll make a new home, okay?" he said. "Let's get lunch."

Morreo lowered her gun.

"Well, touched as I am by this father-daughter stalking-themed reunion with two theo-Nazis," I said in our head. "I think it might be a better idea to—"

Morreo stared at me.

Aggression.

I felt a tinge of terror from Jane, and a guttural urge pierced my brain. Following it, I ran for the window.

 

[Aviatrix]

Arc 1, Chapter 6: New Plan, is now up here!

In this chapter, Starry desperately tries to keep things under a semblance of control. She isn't good at it.

IF you've been reading the site, the latest update (2.4) is here, too.

---

Morreo raised her gun again, deciding (I assumed) to just get the job done. I froze. David grabbed her wrist and pulled the gun away, wrestling it out of her hands. "No! You worthless fusehound piece of shit," he began. His words were sharp, and I saw Morreo flinch as I looked back.

"Stop it! Just stop it! I'm going to kill it! I think it's actually a sex pest!" Morreo said, wildly judging me, as he tried to grab the gun.

The theofascists scrambled, and Starry spoke. "Watch, this will be an instructive lesson," she said. "I think I know where this is going." She said it in my head, not using my voice.

"That is my daughter. I made her!" David said, clawing at Morreo's fake eyes to get the space to open fire.

"Is he going to kill?" I asked.

"Morreo's brain is inside of her body's head. That's a sub-optimal choice, but we all know she isn't smart," Starry said.

"Why do you give a shit about a tra—," Morreo began.

David took his hands off her gun. She pulled it loose. He drew his own gun and wasted her first. There was a loud sound, a punched hole, and grey matter splattered on the walls. Her body fell across the floor. I finally reached the window and jumped through, glass shattering around me.

I hit the pavement in a combat roll, managing to divert my energy from falling to moving and evading injury. I ran down the water-soaked sidewalk, passing by a confused woman with kinky black hair and a man with ugly plastic AR glasses. How outdated, I thought, running like a soldier rather than the flailing idiot someone might have expected me to be. "Starry, can you keep him from finding us?" I yelled, aloud, passing by corner stores.

Starry smiled. "Trust me, you won't have to worry about the Chosen Soldiers remnants for a while."

"Oh, yeah, of course!" Jane said. "The terror-gamer freakshows who support Morreo and the 'serious' fascists who support my dad are gonna turn on each other now that he's killed her."

"If he knew that, why'd he do it?" I asked, barely dodging an electric truck painted with happy fruits and the phrase "CHUMBAWUMBA GROCERS" written on it. The driver, she honked at me. "Fuse you too!" I said, making a rude hand gesture back.

Jane, floating next to me as if relaxing on one of those ancient Greek couches, shrugged. "Because the only women he doesn't think are disposable are his family. Morreo back-sassed him, denied him what he wanted, and she can't even have natural-birth kids now that she's fully a cyborg. To him, it was the only thing he could've done."

"Geez, I'm sorry you had to grow up with him," I said, now engaging in more of a brisk jog in the cold, wet autumn.

"Well, my best guesses say that the Nazis shouldn't be a problem for a long while," Starry said. "Am I the only one of us who had a kind family? Dani's is such a mixed bag, and as for you, Jane, I'm sorry."

"Aren't you a robot? Why would a robot have a family?" Jane asked.

"I had a creator, I was an experimental prototype for the Pacifican Army," Starry said. "Every creation has a creator."

"Please, let's not talk about God," Jane said, still laying across in the air.

"My relationship with God is very important to me," I said, running out of breath and sitting in the parking lot of a drug store. I wheezed between every word I said. "Mech combat doesn't prepare you for running," I said.

"Isn't your God transphobic?" she asked me, and I wanted to kiss her. God help me, but I was beginning to enjoy her sass. "Why would you worship that guy? He's a dick."

"I dunno, smart-mouth, isn't your God transphobic?" I asked.

"Well, he's not my God, he's just an imaginary justification for the Nazi gamer elite," Jane said.

I snickered. "Sorry, that was intensely rude and demeaning, and I should—," I began.

"Nah, it's fine," Jane said, laughing. "It was a pretty funny turn of phrase."

"Ladies, ladies," Starry said, putting her silver-white hands on our shoulders. "I believe we truly should be getting out of California."

Jane stopped, in the same way that a truck stopped when it hit a pedestrian. "Oh, no. I'm not spending my unlife with you throwing us at people with guns. I vote we just fuck off back to the Red zone, tell them what happened, prove it's me, and then we hang out in the dictatorship of the proletariat and get high."

"I like that plan," I said.

"No," Starry said, in an authoritarian and harsh tone of voice. "Dani, you are a weapon." She turned from me to Jane. "Jane, you are a targeting system. I am the wielder. We all have a purpose, or at least I do, and since the both of you are inside of my brain, you're going to have to help." Starry spoke matter-of-factly, without any anger. "Our job is to win this war. We can do it singlehandedly, so, we will. If you want me to take you over, I can and will. Whatever we need to do." I saw her teeth change from perfect dentata to pointed, knife-like ones.

"Geez, Dani, you really know how to pick 'em," Jane said. Then, Starry disrupted her ghostly body, shaking and vibrating it as if by application of an electric shock. Jane yelled in pain, then whimpered. "Fuck, what was that for, bitch?" she said.

"I am providing incentive. We are going to accomplish the mission," Starry said, her voice growing firmer, much like my beloved artificial clitoris.

I had a problem. I had a real, serious problem.

"Dani, are you blushing about this?" Jane asked me. "Look, if you want me to use a neon wand on you or something, I can figure out how, but this isn't the time!" She glared at Starry, like needles, like hatred on a golden plate, served up for maximum satisfaction.

"Ah, Dani. You're so reliable. I'll add a second incentive: Do you have any idea the amount of money California and its glorified dominions will pay to see you win the war for them? What you'll be able to demand. I'm talking luxury, one of those actual flying cars, a full VR sim room, all of the latex and leather you could possibly desire. Oh, and Jane, I'm of course thinking about a new body for you, eternal life in an artificial shell," Starry said. "You might be frustratingly squeamish and a communist, respectively, but I know both of you want the money." Starry looked at us like we were copper-piece harlots straight out of a Fallen Suns and Shifting Tides tabletop RPG campaign. "So what's it going to be? Are you going to make me use you both, or are you going to do it for the money?"

I heard someone playing music from the store behind me. It was neo-pegasister fan music, all sudostep and electronic, a dark and edgy tune about some colorful pony from a pegasister webnovel. The neo-pegasister movement was born out of a reappraisal of the rather controversial but at times admired "brony" movement, as well as a thread of pony stories that had existed long before the foundations of the "bronies" and had persisted past the suicide of the "brony" movement. The pegasister thing overlapped a lot with furry culture.

I then realized that I was going over the history of neo-peg in my head rather than actually answering Starry's completely deranged rant about how she was going to bodyjack me. "Starry, has anyone ever told you that you're an asshole?" I asked.

Jane slapped my hand, and I heard an artificial low-five noise. Sick.

"I am not an asshole!" Starry said. "I'm trying to save America, here!"

"I dunno, dude, you're coming off like a total prick," Jane said, side-eyeing the moonlight maiden and her stupid face.

"Do you want the money or not?" Starry asked.

"I don't want you to browbeat us around!" Jane said. "You call us weapons, but you're just a Californian gun!"

"Oh, sure, here you are, Janey, peddling your bullshit about me, as if you know me," Starry walked over to Jane and took her hand. Her other hand grabbed mine. "I'm offering you two a fortune, because I don't want to bodyjack you. If I wanted to do that, I would have done so. Instead, I'm trying to maintain your unique talents so as to aid me in this goal. I am genuinely begging the both of you."

"Nah," Jane said. "I don't even like California or the Greater California Club that is Pacifica. Fuck Los Angeles, in particular."

"Blast it!" Starry said, like a hot gun. "Please, Janey, can't you just be reasonable? You want the Reds to win? They have a laughably inefficient, barely self-sustaining planned economy run by a dumb AI. They're a bad joke! Listen, Dani, you want Pacifica to win, do you not?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Great," Starry said, raising a finger to lecture us further. "That's two against one. Under our shared principles of democracy, that means we're going to win it for Pacifica."

"Sorry, I don't recognize bourgeois sham democracy," Jane said with an actual, genuine smirk. She turned to Starry. "Oh, and you're totally unconvincing, between your baby outbursts and your fuse'd up threats. Hey, Dani, if you vote for the Free Socialist Republic I'll let you see me naked."

I covered my mouth in real life. "I don't want to see you naked!" I lied. "I, as a feminist, don't believe in the objectification of women." I said, even though it was mostly irrelevant. "And besides, it's not like Starry's going to respect our vote, so you have no good reason to show off your curvaceous body and pristine skin, and probably also your generous rack."

Jane broke out into a fit of laughter, bending forward in her ghostly uniform. "You should write zero-out-of-ten romance novels. You have real talent."

"And I'm pretty sure you offered that just to fluster me, because you think fucking with the sheltered girl is funny," I said.

"Guilty as charged. Hey, Dani, you look like a sub. I bet you'd look great polishing my boots, huh?" Jane asked.

"Stop it!" I squeaked out. "I'm a meet-cute lesbian, not a whips and leather lesbian!" The tops of my ears felt as though they had been warmed by little microwaves.

"Really?" Jane asked me, her hands on her hips.

I looked down at the pavement and tried to focus on the little cracks in it. Global warming had really fucked up the roads, I thought.

"This is profoundly childish," Starry said. She spoke to Jane. "With the money you'll have you'll be able to enact a socialist coup in the future if it really is the sun around which your entire psyche orbits. We can preserve the body of the Reds if we have to. Whatever gets you motivated."

Jane chuckled madly. "You really do have no plan, do you?" she said. "You're trying to hide it, but you just don't!"

Starry flipped her off, and I noticed that Starry's nails were black voids. "Cease your childish prattle for once!"

I stopped thinking about Jane's hips and took in my situation. "We go to the Portland USA. We break things, hurt people who deserve it, and we make life harder for Luna Moss. We hang out there, we grow, we build, and we ascend until we can handle the Nazis and all the other fuckers," I said, enjoying the delicious darkness of the words on my thin lips. I stood up, cracked my knuckles, and then immediately tripped into a dirty, muddy puddle.

"Nice compromise. I'm good with it." Jane said, pointing and laughing at me. It was an extremely pleasant experience. She had such a beautiful voice.

"I don't," Starry said, looking at me like I was a turd.

"Come on, Star. Your plan was us against the world, right?" Jane said. She pat me on the head, and ran a gloved thumb down my mud-splattered face. "Besides. This national ecosystem should be ours, right?"

Starry mulled it over, a finger on her sparkling cheek. "It isn't a bad plan. Let's do it."

 

[Aviatrix]

Arc 1, Chapter 7: Fuck Shit Up is now up here!

Dani picks a street fight with everyone in the Portlandian equivalent of the FBI's headquarters. Jane pretends to be a marine biologist.

If you've been reading the site, the latest update (2.5) is here, too. Things start to look better for Cerberus in that one.

---

This time, I had complete control. I kicked open the doors to the Portland Federal Police building, I having sold my helicopter for a motorbike: sleek and fitting. I cocked my machine pistol and smiled at the crowd of secret police goons and scoundrels. As bad as Jane was, she'd done nothing wrong compared to the business-casual motherfuckers who infested this office lot. It was a cubicle farm, and I fired quick bursts into the VR headsets and server nodes to get their attention.

I saw some Portland PD members standing in their old-timey navy-blue uniforms, a woman with prematurely grey hair and two men vaping. The male cops drew their coilguns and took aim, while the woman's sleeve split open and her arm transformed into an assault rifle. I wasn't sure what the propellant was, but it looked grody as a bad fuse. She provided automatic covering fire, and I wondered where her mags were located, and the two male cops tried to flank me. Bullets hit my gun from the woman cop, breaking it into bits.

So, I did what anyone would do. I ran, jumped on top of the cubicle, skipped across the top, and tackled the woman cop. I got my knuckles red on her nose, beating it into pulp with a kind of awful relentlessness. I put my hands on her neck, and she tried to move her gun arm to point at me. I bit into her neck first, tearing out flesh with my teeth.

I heard the alarm blaring, and I suspected it was for the police. The FedPol guys ran, probably to the building's arsenal, so I chewed into her neck and cracked her skull open with my bone lances. They beat against her, reinforced, and I beat a hole in there. I started grabbing and splitting, getting as much as I could out of her.

Starry sent me a warning that she could see out of the corner of my eyes that the male cops were raising their weapons, a quick impulse of "you gotta get out", so I devoured the dying cop's brain and leapt down the edges of the cubicle farm to place my left-hand bone lance through the heart of one of the male cops. I pulled it out, bloody and chunky. Then, I took his hand in an Irish whip and threw him against a desk. I bounced him off of it, blocking shots from the other cop. These coilguns weren't like David's, they were low-caliber. One cop plugged another, and I kicked the body forward. The living cop filled the corpse with whatever metal people used to make coilgun rounds, and I zipped forward to put my right-hand bone lance through his arm. "Starry, what's the next evolution?" I asked in my head, not really making sense.

"Evolution? With what you got out of the lady cop, I could give you heightened senses," Starry said, as I heard coilgun shots pierce through the room. The noise wasn't powder, it was just metal obliterating whatever it collided into.

"Combat senses, I like it," I said.

"Fair warning, you might get another ghost. I genuinely don't know how any of that works," she said. I felt my brain go electric as matter was added to it, and I hid inside of a cubicle. I could hear the noises, footsteps, gunshots, and easily estimate where my enemies were. Eight bandits, all FedPol elite, the hatchetmen of the Luna Moss dictatorship.

Fire and fear ran in my blood, and the noises were a leviathan, a flood drowning out my entire universe in an industrial cacophany. I was in freefall, hiding there. "Now what?" I asked. "I can't take down eight bandits!"

"It's gonna be a whole lot more than eight!" Jane said to me, louder than the bullets' storm. "Remember, now that the alarm's on, Oregon StatePol's going to be out for us too. Combat senses aren't gonna be enough. What the fuck are we supposed to do?"

I thought. I came to an answer. I saw two parties of four moving around the cubicles, coming at me from both sides. They held their distance, guns out. They weren't going to get tackled and eaten, not without getting me into the killzone they were setting up first. I looked up at the ceiling. It looked strong, firm, and newly made. I couldn't break through it with bone alone.

The fire teams of four met in the middle, pointing their guns at me. An older man with an outdated clean-shaven look spoke to me, holding his badge. His friends were ready. "Stop," he said, backed. "Drop your weapon!" he said.

I dropped my broken machine pistol onto the floor and put my hands up.

He continued. "This democratic court finds you guilty of treason and disloyalty to the United States."

"I'm a foreign citizen, from Deseret, sir. I don't think it's possible for me to be guilty of any of those things. Why not spree killing, or killing officers?" Jane said aloud, speaking as me. Thanks, Jane.

"It's harder to make spree-killing stick, and no FedPol or StatePol officer has ever been killed in action," he said, next to that StatePol officer's dead body. "This court sentences you to rehabilitation." He turned to his buddies. "Gun her down."

A sideways rainstorm of bullets came. I backflipped over the cubicles and landed behind them on the other side. I ducked, and above me was the riot. The door was open, and I sprinted for it. I ran as fast as the wind, I jumped high into the air, and by a plot of grass I landed near my bike. I got on the sleek machine, kicked it into action, and drove.
***
Every smart merc knew where to find a crashpad. Here, inside an old church in the Portland suburbs, was one of mine. I sat on an impromptu bed made out of an air mattress and a reading room in the church library. The place smelled musty, but it worked for me. Anisa Al-Zia sat on the room's bench. She was a former academic with higher ambitions. I didn't know much beyond that. She wore a lavender hijab, and she had a pointy nose. "Tell me. Why did you attack the FedPol building in Portland?" she asked.

"I wanted to spark fear in Moss. That was the whole point," I said. My "trial" at the hands of that FedPol officer's firing squad certainly didn't endear me to this place.

The StatePol officer's ghost appeared in front of me. She had kinky hair and prominent lips I couldn't get enough of, to the point that Jane looked like a younger, whiter version of her. "Fantastic."

"What?" I asked inside my own head.

"I'm screwed. I'm dead and inside a cannibal's mind," the StatePol officer said.

"Hey, you get used to it," Jane said. "It really isn't as bad as being actually murdered."

Anisa responded to me, not hearing the conversation in my brain, or at least so I assumed. "I'd have to call that stupid, Dani," she said to me. "Do you really, genuinely intend to start a war against the Portland USA?" she asked me.

"I was thinking a war against everyone in the former US," I said.

"Ambitious," she commented, in a tone of voice that I read as "What, are you stupid?". It wasn't my fault. It was the robot in my brain who was pointing me at targets.

"I know. It is dumb," I said. "I wish Starry could realize that, but she thinks I could win."

Anisa chuckled, just a little. "A small cadre of troops, appropriately motivated and supplied, can do marvelous things, yes, but this seems a bit much. Whoever your commander is, she must at least learn to think bigger than a few dead police. At any rate, I'll leave you to your thoughts. I have some ideas for how we could work together, but I have an appointment."

"I like her?" the StatePol trooper said to me, changing her garb out of her StatePol uniform to a navy pantsuit with Oxfords. "She's done things, been places."

Jane rolled her eyes, as if rolling dice in Craps. "So, what are you, some government heavy?" she asked. Anisa walked away from the little room.

"Wait, you're a government heavy. You were an interrogator in the American Red Army, right?" I said, noticing that Jane was wearing a lot of digital makeup. Her face looked glossy, and she was wearing pink lipstick. Her lips also looked a little fuller. Wait, did she know that I had a thing for lips? Did I have a thing for lips?

"Excuse me, cannibal, are you OK?" StatePol asked me. I thought I saw genuine care in her words, or at least in her softened face. "You seem a mite perturbed."

"I wasn't a government heavy, I was a talented, well-educated professional," Jane pouted. "Where did Officer Donuts go to school? Fucking Portland Community College?" To be honest, the words sort of passed through my head, I was too busy staring at her perfect little lips as they pursed and spoke.

"It shouldn't matter," StatePol said. "In America, education isn't meant to divide us. It's meant to help us enlighten each other and build each other up."

"Totally PCC," Jane said. "Gotta love Officer Donuts."

"I didn't go to PCC," StatePol said. "My name's Reagan, by the way, and I never wanted to be a cop."

"You're just gonna spill your whole personal history?" Jane asked. "Normal people don't do that."

"I'd like to think that I'm an open person," Reagan said.

"Can I call you 'Rae'?" I asked.

"Of course, everyone does," Rae said, smiling at me with only a little bit of pity and discomfort. I decided to take it.

"So? What school did you go to? I went to Tufts." Jane said.

Starry appeared, taking Jane's digital hand. "Oh, darling, you can't lie to me. I'm always here, whenever I want to be, and we both know you never went to Tufts. You stupid little roach."

"Fuck you, I went to Tufts and got a degree in marine biology," Jane said.

"What infraorder is the grey whale in?" Starry asked, her tone a knife in the gut.

Jane tried to think of something. I saw it happen. She looked down, she looked to the side, she "um"-med and "uh"-d. "Fine, I graduated with a degree in history," she half-assedly lied. At least, I assumed she was lying? If she graduated with history, why would she lie about marine biology to begin with if this wasn't also a lie?

Rae looked at Jane. "You don't need to be so hostile. I promise I don't want to hurt any of you," she said. "I can't really tell who's in control here, and I'm starting to get the sense that the girl controlling our body isn't the cannibal, which makes me think that the shimmering woman might be. It's fine if you didn't go to college. Learning a trade is equally good."

I lay across on my air mattress. "Did you go to a trade school?" I asked her.

Rae shrugged. "I went to Princeton. It's not a big deal, though, people are allowed to live their lives a lot of different ways."

Starry looked it up on a little AR window. "Reagan Bradley, daughter of Robert Bradley II and Samantha 'Sam' Bradley, graduated from Princeton University with a degree in journalism." She looked at Rae, then back at her screen. "Joined up with the US's Project DETECTIVE super-soldier program, fought against theo-Nazi terror and the Chosen Soldiers organization pre-Fall, served with distinction as Operator Codename 'CLOSED CASE'… Well, I'm certainly impressed. What had you working for StatePol?" she asked.

Reagan, exactly as she claimed she was, was an open book. "Blackmail. When Cascadia seceded into the Portland government and long after the United States took my older, government-issue robotic body parts out, I made an enemy of one of Luna Moss's allies. She was a woman named Alison Montaigne. Montaigne got my indie news channel taken down, and gave me a choice: work for Moss as a beat cop, or they'd reveal some information I didn't want to get out. She knew I didn't want to do what you guys were doing, war against everyone. She knew I didn't have the stomach for it."

"Well, now you're dead and free. That's good for everyone, isn't it?" Starry said. "I do hope you can get used to the eating. It's not cannibalism. The three of us, Dani, Jane, and I, this Cerberus thing we make up, we're not human. We're a different, higher species, evolving in our own way further and further outside of humanity. It's not cannibalism, it's just prey."

Rae's two fingers touched her forehead. "So you're fine with being a corpse-eating spree killer?" she asked. "Isn't that immensely dubious?"

"That's what we do! Quit acting like you're better than us!" Jane said. "Back me up here, babe," she said to me. I noticed her lips looked even more plump than before, all ripe, or maybe squishy.

"To be fair, we mostly killed FedPol and StatePol officers, and those guys suck," I added, incapable of not defending Jane in this moment.

"There was one time where we killed rear-echelon Reds, but that was Starry's fault. She controlled the body and wouldn't let us not do it," Jane said, thumbing at Starry, who was sort of just standing there and looking off into space.

This little library room had cream-colored walls, and they reminded me of coffee.

"I see. I'll admit that FedPol and StatePol officers probably do deserve it, assuming anyone does," Rae began. She turned to Starry. "Why did you make them kill all of those rear-echelon troopers?"

"Dammit! Now you're questioning me on moral grounds?" Starry said, throwing her artificially skinny arms up. I noticed she didn't seem to have fingernails, now. I supposed she just wanted to change her look. "The last thing any of us need is moralizing, truth be told." She glared at Rae. "Know your place among the rest of the great apes, and don't bother me with your arbitrary moral judgment. You were a DETECTIVE, weren't you? You should know that in war, anything is permitted in the search for victory. I'm only following my programmed goals."

Rae looked at me. "We never had humanoid AI like this in the DETECTIVE program. Is this normal for you?"

I thought she looked rattled. "We just try to move as the wind takes us," I said. "As the ancients said, to 'go with the flow'."

Rae put a hand on her chest, and then prayed quickly with her fingers steepled.

"So you're 'lawful good', right?" I asked Rae. "Like in Ironheart Engine Tabletop RPG."

"Oh, shit." Jane giggled, elbowing Starry. "We aren't stuck with her. Little Miss Lawful Good's stuck with us."

"Quite," Starry said, without any of Jane's comedy.

 

[Aviatrix]

Carmain, of Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg fame, made this map for me of the Second American Civil War. Thank you so much, friend.

 

[Aviatrix]

In this update, we take a step out of Dani's life to explore President-General Luna Moss, everyone's favorite morally questionable liberal populist authoritarian - and her very worrying and very sad puppet ruler, the infamous Samara Proth.

Also, Arc 2, Chapter 6: The Monster is freely available on the site, for those who want to read about an arc ahead. Trust me, you want to be caught up.

---

"President Moss?" Luna's guy said to her. She adjusted her general's uniform and put the cap on her head at a rakish angle, then looked into the mirror. It was a floor-to-ceiling setup, nothing but the best for the President's Second White House.

She'd gone over the blueprints and everything. Luna Moss was tall and fit, with the body of a marathon runner. Her facial features were sharp, and in her humble opinion she looked like the kind of woman who'd stolen a man in her day. "Yeah. What's up?" Luna adjusted her thin tie, which was around and underneath a peter pan collar. "Who do I have to crucify today?" Luna was pretty fucking dope, she thought, staring at herself. Sure, no one said that anymore, but when it came to what she said, Luna didn't take suggestions.

This whole part of the former US was hers by the balls, and she liked it.

"Erm, nobody, ma'am," Generico McCalendar said. This room was round, with a mural of every single pre-Fall president on the wall, spanning all around the room, from Washington to the nobodies at the end. "Just a diplomatic meeting with Samara Proth, and some bio-modded terrorist hit FedPol."

"Same bio-modded terrorist that hit the Red zone?" Luna asked. "They must really hate secret police officers."

"Yeah, pretty much," Generico said, and Luna popped her uniform's jacket on. She took a walk down a few short, linear hallways, past offices and living rooms full of shimmering opulence and unpaid interns.

"Well, the target's a shame." She strode down the halls, like the way Vince McMahon used to do before he got outed. The 2010s were a lost golden age, a period of immense prosperity and political nuance. Or, at least, Luna had been raised with that idea. She stopped by a suspended door made of granite, and she opened it up by the hinge.

Sitting on a circular green couch in a room full of staff was Samara Proth, with her cute little brown flop-sided undercut and brown military leathers. Samara's face was as round as the top of a weak piece in chess, and Samara Proth was 100% a pawn. She had a Phyle of the Starlight Sword blade symbol around her neck in pewter, and Luna knew the back of her jacket had the sideways pointed-cross symbol of the Fides Imperium movement: faith in the empire. Samara looked up at Luna. "I know what you are," Samara said, sneering.

"Oh, what?" Luna said. In a different time, maybe Samara and Luna might have spoken with more tact, but these weren't those times. "What's your problem with me today?"

Samara stood up. Her boots were workmanlike, not the dress boots Luna wore. "You're the Devil," she said. "You're a monster."

"You just found that out?" Luna said, patting her condescendingly on the shoulder. "Oh, you didn't already know? I am the Devil. Do you wanna know why? It'll blow your fuckin' mind."

Samara said nothing, just sneering like the self-righteous little space-magic-cultist she was.

"I'm the Devil because politics today requires politicians to be monsters. Every day, I have to do what's right for everyone, which basically translates to ruining fifteen or so lives at minimum. Daily, I'm killing people and ruining lives forever. That's what I became when I couped the old USA and declared a splinter government. I make the hard calls. Through my system, I kill Nazis, I torture terrorists, and I make sure everyone in this country has access to food, water, and good entertainment. What do you do?" Luna asked. She grinned with a sickle-like smile. "You're the Saint, right? Geez, I guess you can call yourself whatever." Luna lightly pushed Samara back down onto the couch.

Samara eased down to sit. There were manned cameras. This was being recorded, exactly how Luna liked it. Samara seemed to listen. "Oh, by the Blade Monks, you admit it," she said. Still, that wasn't her real thing. Samara had admitted herself that her civic cult was her real religion. Fides Imperium, it was in the name. Now that Luna thought of it, it was more like Fides Imperatrix: faith in the empress. But hey, Samara was totally just a saint of the nation, and not a self-created collectivist god-queen who had to beg Luna for help every so often.

Losers. Luna had to work with losers.

If only Samara could have just been polite about it. Samara herself spoke, the scars on her neck visible. Torture. Some of the idiots in her constituency thought that Samara had gone crazy because the Nazis got to her. She was a sinner, sure, but she'd been a little offbeat long before it. The torture had just convinced her that she could never let herself be made to experience it again: it was the hellish ambition in her own mind that glimmered for attention like a common whore. "So you think you're a monster?" Samara asked. "I'd call that self-loathing, wouldn't you?"

"Nah," Luna said, grabbing her by the chin. "Listen, bitch girl, you're ten pounds of shit in a designer purse. You're a gilded barrel of radioactive waste. You're God's least favorite glorified youth pastor. You're Princess Daisy on cocaine. You're hollower than a Hollywood committee's denouncement of sex crimes. I'd shoot you, but you already have a hole in your head where your brain should be. So you fuckin' behave or I make Roy Butcher or goddamn Astrid Mars take your position. I can take your shit, but you act like this to me on camera and it makes my position weaker, which makes you weaker. So, question, Saint. Are you really this dumb?" She looked at the camera, briefly, just enough to signal to her audience that she was here, she was real, and she was strongarming this pretentious dick just like they wanted to. "Come on, Sammy. You know I'm a cunt. Apologize to the American people."

Samara looked down at the carpet, then looked away. Luna put a hand on her shoulder, as if showing sympathy. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry to the people of these United States. I spoke out of turn, rudely, denying the hospitality General Moss has given me."

"Sammy, it's not the mid-2080s. It's President Moss. Fuckin' Christ, you're so worthless." Luna laughed, and Samara laughed with her.

"What about the attack on the Portland FedPol building?" Samara asked. "Our co-national anti-terrorism programs should—," Samara began.

Luna liked that they talked like people, instead of like politician cunts with limp dicks in loose trousers. "Well, I'm pretty troubled about the whole affair, but we're gonna solve it. We'll find whoever's responsible, and we'll make sure that they're held responsible and kept from hurting anyone else." Luna, internally, was amused: The attack was just an excuse to up-spike FedPol's budget and get really serious about cementing her power. It'd been over a decade, her reign, but there was still so many places to go, so much transformation to do. "We'll rehabilitate the motherfucker and all of her terroristic buds," she concluded. She'd rehabilitate them to death.

Okay, so sometimes it was fun as hell to use duplicity and bullshit, especially when it meant adding more bodies to the forced labor machine.

Samara looked at her with fear. Luna kept her hand on her shoulder. "We all do what we gotta do, Saint Proth, so chillax." Chillax was coming back, or so Luna had heard. She made finger guns at the cameras, and gave a friendly wave. "We will take her down, and you'll get to experience her rehabilitation live and from the lethal injector's POV! Why else do we have subsidized internet access, right?" She elbowed Samara in the gut. "Come on, geek, perk up. You're not in Montana anymore."

Samara nodded rapidly.

Samara, after all, was crazy, Luna knew. Luna was an asshole, sure, but Samara was nuttier than a Krinker bar.

"What are you so sad for?" Luna asked, elbowing her in the stomach harder. "This isn't showing in your territory. None of your adoring worshippers have to know that you're really like this. Perk up, dude."

"I will bathe this continent in blood and bring about a new rapture, an age of ascendant violence from which there will be no escape," Samara mumbled to herself. "I will coat every leaf of every tree in rippling man's-life. I will lead my people to absolute victory. I will slay every limitation and I will reclaim the divinity that was stolen from me. My people will have no recourse and no limits as I become their very souls, until every heart is a part of a vast machine written in golden glory. It will be the machine that I command."

Luna, knowing Samara, pretty much knew that Samara was trying to reassure herself that she wasn't Luna's little puppet. This was just how Samara was, she was grandiose. Again, Luna reminded herself, Samara was as crazy as a whole psych ward full of student political activists. "Hey, wanna repeat that for the cameras?" Luna offered.

Samara repeated it louder, stronger, speaking like Hitler, or George Washington, or someone. She made wild hand gestures and shouting the words. "…The machine I command!" she concluded, her eyes made of detonating C4.

Luna hid a giggle. Tip Number One for being a dictator was that you had to sell yourself as a lesser evil, at least at first. A great way to do that was to find someone who made you look good by comparison, and then make sure they were always around. So, Luna let Samara stride and shout, pout and rant. It just meant that everyone in the Portland USA was thinking "Gee, I'm sure glad I live under Luna instead of someone like that."

Tip Number Two was that if you were going to find a greater evil, you had to make sure they weren't the kind of greater evil that could rival you.

Would Samara end up rivaling Luna?

Luna looked at Samara's self, back to ranting about new golden ages and the unity of one. "Well, that's great and all, but let's talk marginalized people and healthcare," Luna said, neatly shutting up Samara from the couch and positioning her as the adult in the room. "Namely, we're gonna re-introduce disability benefits, and on top of that we're introducing a new scheme to help people pay for health insurance, and to ensure that insurers can't find loopholes to get out of paying when people do get in trouble. Sit back down, Samara."

Samara sat back on the sofa, like a bloodthirsty attack dog. So be it, Luna Moss thought. Samara had proven that she knew who held her leash, and that leash was choking her tighter than ever. You know what? Maybe I am a benevolent dictator, Luna thought to herself. She got cozy on the couch. Then, she started really talking to the cameras.

 

[Aviatrix]

In this update, Dani's luck with the cops runs out.

Also, Arc 2, Chapter 7: Rain of Hatred is now up on the website, for those who want to read about an arc ahead. It's fantastic stuff.

---

I'd often found that sometimes, a woman's own animal nature could take over. My hands beat against the walls of the church. I found handholds: windows, exposed wooden pillars, things I could grab onto. It was early morning, and I thought I needed to exercise. Stress is like a kind of electrical juice, I thought, like a battery full of stress that—

No, this wasn't a good metaphor. The point was that as my muscles glistened with sweat, as I climbed my way up, I felt like a prisoner. I was fucked, I was in Hell, I was screwed and I'd gone along with Starry's stupid plan, the bitch, the problem, the motherfucker, the dumb little crazy murder droid. "Oh, let's kill some cops!" Starry had said. I was paraphrasing.

My new life as a serial killer was going splendidly, thank you for asking, Starry.

"Are you done with your ignorant little monologue?" Starry said, floating next to me as I pulled myself another floor up. My legs were on windowsills, my feet in open spaces. "Surely you aren't blaming me for your problems."

I groaned and pulled my right foot up to a higher foothold, which in this case was a nail that hadn't fully been hammered into the wall. "It was your plan," I said, hissing like BBs flying out of a Dead Ryder air gun.

"My plan?" Starry said, denying everything. I heard sirens. I must have been tracked. Fuck.

"Yeah, your plan!" I said. "You prick, you got me into the idea of killing those secret police officers and totalitarian thugs."

"Do you really think those people can kill you?" Starry said, crossing her arms. "Be serious."

"It doesn't seem like it was tactically savvy," Reagan said to me, also floating next to me. I brought my other boot onto the nail. "If anything, it sounds like Starry isn't very good at planning."

"Yeah! It's almost like you have no idea what you're doing," I said.

"Well, I am a glorified digital human being, and you people are even dumber than I am," Starry said, and I wondered if it was possible to be bigoted against natural-born sophonts. "So forgive me if I can't play mastermind. When I become a Singularitan cosmic AI, then I promise I'll have better solutions for your problems."

She was sneering at me, and I jumped up to grab the next windowsill. I dangled there and jimmied the window open with my hand. I got a proper handrest. "Maybe you should become a cosmic AI. If you were a robot god, maybe your superintelligent ass would manage to not get me caught by the police. You're like a Grand Theft Auto player." GTA was a crime sandbox VR simulation-game created by Jailbreak Games, based on some ancient license that had since become public domain. "You skip all the missions and just try to get up to a seven star max Wanted level."

"I could see that," Reagan said, chuckling a little. She had a pretty chuckle. I wanted to snuggle into her swimmer's body.

"We need to find more effective tactics than just killing people." I said it, and then I saw a helicopter fly in the distance, toward me: fusing fuck!

I leaped upwards.

The squad cars and armored vehicles rolled into the parking lot. One street tank mech almost crushed my bike.

I made it on top of the gently sloping church's roof. There was a helicopter above me. My arms were at their sides, and I was barely balancing on top of the peaked structure. Below me was a crowd of cops and their FedPol masters, most of whom probably had hidden bio-mods or techno-mods. The same FedPol guy from last time spoke up at me through the megaphone, and I could see all the trees around me. I saw the skyline, a ways away. "Attention, asshole!" he said. "You have voided your chance to surrender. If you don't move, your death will be less painful."

"Fuck you!" I yelled. I saw Jane. "Come on!" I said to her in my mind. "Are these guys fucking serious?"

"I dunno, Dani. I think we can take these guys. We've had, what, a few days of bed rest? That's pretty good!" Jane said, grinning.

The FBI wannabe with the ugly lack of a mustache looked up at me. "Smart woman," he said. "Take her out."

I stopped my perception of time, just for a moment. Important to save that for when I really needed it. Five police snipers with anti-materiel rifles, all in front of the church in the artificial clearing. They were all probably modded up with auto-aim. If one of those bullets hit me, I couldn't expect to get out safe. If more than one hit me, I'd be dead for sure. There was also a cop in heavy battle armor, which covered his face like bomb squad gear. In his hands, he had a Rondo cannon, a big gatling gun thing attached to a trunk-sized ammo bank on the ground. I knew he'd provide covering fire, and the three SAW coil-gunners to his side would throw digit-sized BBs out to keep me pinned. Finally, there was a two-man medical team, which confused me.

That was because this wasn't the Reds, and it sure as fuse wasn't the White Rose Federation. When it came to terrorists, the Portlanders took no prisoners. With the amount of biomod serial killings coming out of CityPol and the rest of the Portland criminal justice system, they couldn't judge me.

Whatever I'd done, these people had done worse, and they'd found a way to put it on their expense reports for tax breaks. An image passed through my head, a noseless child found in the gutter without any limbs. I'd seen it a lot in the news. They called it "lopping" and it was how Moss's cops liked to send messages.

No matter where I went in this situation, I'd be obliterated with a hail of bullets. I could see a second Rondo cannon on the helicopter lowering from the bottom of the gunship. "I think we're gonna die, girls," I said, looking all around at the hell surrounding me.

Starry put a hand on my heart. "Darling, I think you're right. How did they find us in two days? Do they always come armed for bear? I just don't understand it. All my calculations, all my estimates, they aren't accurate!"

"Listen, I'd rather die than make a deal with these fucking people," Jane said.

I nodded. "I get that." I looked around, feeling my time-stop illusion start to fade away. I needed biomass, and now.

"Sir?" a CityPol cop said, her blonde hair in a tight bun that I couldn't even really see. It transmitted through the megaphone. They talked, and I guessed he turned off the megaphone so I couldn't hear.

He spoke through it, turning it back on. "Officer Armstrong has stated that a field execution contradicts the values of the 2092 Constitution of the Portland-run United States. She has invoked her conscience's right to resist against acts she sees as unethical. Officer Armstrong further insists that we should not engage in a field execution because the perp is 'white, sir'." The FedPol officer drew his pistol, a heavy powder shooter, and in one smooth motion he popped her in the head. "Target is pinned," he said into a recording device, and the megaphone barely picked it up. "Special Agent Brand has thus proven the necessity of field executions. Don't know how a white supremacist got into CityPol. Thought you guys had better standards." Through the megaphone, he made the command. "All forces, open fire!"

In that moment, the air became bullets. Two heavy anti-materiel rounds blasted off chunks of my shoulders, and ripped at the arms attached to them. The chain guns chewed through my stomach, sawing me in half with ripping efficiency. The SAWs kept me from moving away, left, right, and up, and the second Rondo cannon on the gunship pinned the space behind me.

Every part of my body was pain. Metal was chewed through with military supremacy, my soul bent and crunched under the heavy fire. It hurt so much that I was shocked that it didn't hurt more, that the heavier rounds were obliterating my nerves themselves before I could feel the pain in my gut. A second second I was standing upright, and the next second I was a halfway-disembodied head which rolled, attached to my body, unbreathing down the roof. I tried to breathe. I had no lungs. I tried to blink — really blink, with my armless corpse body.

Choking, bleeding, pain, numbness.

I made ack-ing noises. I twitched.

I stared up at their cruel visages.

"How were you one of them?" I thought, in my dying moments.

Reagan shook her head. "I planned my workplace massacre. That's how I got through it." She looked down at me. Pity. Sadness, maybe?

I hit the clearing. I couldn't scream with the BBs through my throat. I heard the fire stop, I saw them come, I saw Christ or maybe Joseph Smith descending from Heaven, his gracious hand reaching down to bring me to my Mormon place of tepid punishment in this blizzard of cruelty. I had no arms to meet him. I felt myself fading. Blood on the grass. And that was the story of how I faded away, sinking into an afterlife or a shattered night.

I saw them rush to me, I saw Jane blinking in and out of existence, I saw Starry kiss my hand to stop the pain. She shut off the pain, and I guessed it was a kind of mercy from the bitch. Reagan looked at me with disgust — "You earned this" — she said, and she was right, the four of us together were a shameful little body. I fell asleep, with the Portland cops' hands on my body. They were rough.

"She's still alive. Keep her that way. How much can we get for her?" Special Agent Brand asked me. "Think Ms. Montaigne'll want her?"

Portland's authorities apparently didn't take prisoners, but they did sell people.
***
I must've been blindfolded, and I could feel it around my head. "Hey, there, terrorist," I heard someone say. She pulled off my blindfold. I looked down at my naked body, stitched up and rebuilt with sleek and silicone bio-mods I couldn't recognize. They imitated chub, added to my chest, and I almost seemed to be made of a patchwork of black oil and tannish skin. I tried to move my arms. I was pinned. I saw a woman in a white coat in front of me, and she was standing in a penthouse with a TV the size of a billboard. Everything felt as though it was glowing white. She wore red-tinted glasses, oval-shaped. I noticed a tag on my new robotic arm, but I couldn't read anything on it. The text was too small. There was a red trail painted on the walls.

I saw a secretary bot, sleek and elegant with inky skin, standing by the TV.

The red-glasses woman took it in her red nails, and read it aloud. "Your My Teddy doll was artfully crafted by Palace of Toys Augmentations, with assistance in this case from the combined law enforcement agencies of the United States of America." She kept looking at my tag, and I realized I couldn't move. I could speak, but here in this perfect quiet I chose to shut up. I didn't look like a teddy bear. It would've been possible to make me look the part better, I knew in my dazed mind. It would have been a lot simpler. I looked in my reflection in her pretty oval mirror. I just looked like me, in a disproportionate way, with more weight and with some parts replaced with black plastic ones.

My mind felt like it had collapsed on the floor and was hoping someone would hand it a water bottle.

Jane woke up. "So, what, you're a teddy bear for her, now? Man, you must be ecstatic, you were down bad and now this freakshow's going to pat you on the head and tell you that Mommy's here," she said. She giggled, and I blushed.

Still, if Starry's eyes were lightbulbs, the red-glasses woman would have been seared away with the full power of the Sun.

The red-glassses woman spoke to me. "Hey, there, Teddy. My name's Alison," she said.

"I'm bailing, now," Reagan said, connecting to the secretary bot and plugging herself into that body rather than deal with this indignity.

I felt Reagan in her smooth new body making her way over to Alison. She sent me text messages from her new form, which was new to me.

Reagan Bradley: I can't get this thing to attack the woman wearing the glasses. There's safeguards, and I don't know how I'd dismantle them.

The glasses woman turned to face Reagan and smiled. "Oh, that's cute," she said, in a saccharine voice. Reagan stood there, impotent, and glasses bitch turned to the three of us. "Now this is fun. I guess I'm getting a living teddy bear and a new friend. I'll be honest, I don't usually go for women, but you were sold to me at such a bargain and I just had to have you." She turned to Reagan. "I don't think I bought you, but it's great to meet you." She then turned to us, a glint in her heavily made-up eyes. "And you? You'll call me by my first name." She chuckled, in the same way that Reagan did. "What's your name?" she asked Reagan.

Reagan gave her her name, and Alison nodded. "Reagan Bradley," Alison repeated. "Wait, are you the Reagan Bradley? The war hero?" Alison bowed and embraced Reagan. "Oh, I'm so happy to have such a living legend in my home. I don't know how you became a humanoid AI, but trust me. I adore you and value your hard work against those neo-Nazis." She then turned to me. "And you, my bestest friend, will prove lovable and useful too."

I finally managed to speak. "How about you eat shit before I eat your face?" I asked, in a squeaky and adorable voice.

"So cute!" Alison said, still laughing under her breath as she said it. She patted my breast. "We're going to be such great gal pals, you guys," she said, and I instinctually snuggled into her with a hug. I thought I saw her catching a glimpse at my cleavage, and then I knew I saw her bashfully looking away.

Then, I noticed that the red trail on the walls wasn't wallpaper. This was blood.

Arc 1, ONLY HUMAN, is complete. Await Arc 2 installation.