[Punchy is asleep when Spectre appears, grinning as it sinks its long claws into the mind of the sleeping Shi. It can't permanently alter memories, but with his processor already flooded with the scrambled data of nightmares, he'll be disoriented for days trying to separate reality from fiction. Hadn't some tools disappeared after a visit from TM? And money from the register when Gage locked up. Not Luddites, but Scrappers attacking the Garage, one beaked and pin-eyed. Tonic's poisoned coffee.]
You don’t always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it’s just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, what you see is most often a blur and a jumble of memories and paranoia-fueled fears. You see things that cannot be, that will not be, and in waking you will deny again and again any suggestion your own mind comes up with that you may have given the images even the barest hint of credence.
But you dwell on these things, even if only for a moment; you reflect on the horrors your processor chokes up in your fitful and strained sleep. And you wonder, though later you will deny it, if there isn't something there, something worth considering in the pain-laced mental dramatics that so often sear through you in sleep.
And now, as something begins to tick toward your waking -- as the scrambled imagery begins to flicker, dim, and die -- you experience a disorientating certainty that something is wrong with the data in your memory banks.
Horror, confused and vibrant swallows you. And you wake.
---
With a rocking jolt, Shi lurches awake, processor screaming conflicting data and memory, backed logs of dream data scrambled into true mem files. There is a moment of silence, lasting only a second as his optics flicker to life before he's on his feet, rolling up from the floor in a smooth, dizzy motion.
He cannot recognize where he is. He knows he should, but the data files containing the information to place it refuses to come forward, and in it's place a thousand horrifying images flood him.
The Mouse, dead. Ether, alive, vivacious, promising forever but crashing, crashing and broken and sealed in cement so she can never escape. Pa's face, bloodied and bruised and grinning as he snaps Shi's fingers one by one by
no that wasn't Pa that was Lila Crib Ether CARRION is was Carrion done that not Pa
one as Punchy looks on, laughing at his weakness and
dreams these are dreams they never they couldn't ERROR isn't real this isn't real
there are children, infants disturbingly, messily compiled of flesh and metal, burning themselves on their own furnaces, cutting themselves on their own plating, and they stare and accuse because he could have, he should have been better -- he was trusted he'd been trusted
no no not real lie it was a dream ERROR i was dreaming i was ERRORlying i was sleeping i didn't mean i never could have i'm ERROR asleep i'm screaming i'm
Optics flashing a cycle of colours that flicker so quickly through themselves that the blur refuses definition, almost white, Shi leans against the bench he'd previously been sitting against. His arms shake, the plates of his neck flaring in the instant before the noise registers. There is a vaguely human element to the sound, a rasp of a scream overlaid with a klaxon alarm and a snarling, hitching whine of an engine that can't quite turn.
The noise lasts a solid minute, Shi's optics flashing and teeth grit despite the screaming blaring from him, and them his photoreceptors flick to and remain red for several seconds, the sound tapering down to an electronic distortion before everything stills, stalls, and stops.
"SHI001-MEMDAT: Error detected in MEMDAT (001.007.29) thread 0." He says, accent gone, vocals wooden and without their usual growl. The only difference between this passionless tone and the voice of his young self as a vague rasp from the age of his vocalizer. "Pound-000: MEM5T.c line 462 in MEM5Tclose: predefined data type. Major Error: Function argument. Minor Error: Bad value. Shut down eminent. Manual reboot required."
And with that said, Shi once again collapses onto himself, hitting the ground with a crash and going still.
((One last focused nightmare, contributed but the ever-so-productive and totally genius Incdrop. Her work is, as ever, under the cut, and warns for gore, body-horror, and death.))
You don’t always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it’s just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, more often than not, you find yourself locked in a nightmare. Nightmares made worse by the fact that, irrational as they are, painful as they are, the sequences concocted in your processor and fired by a glitch feel real as you experience them.
Dreaming of those you loved, those you care for, those you think of possessively as your own -- your children, your siblings, your friends, whatever the relation they are yours because you are responsible for keeping them safe once they sneak their way into your heart -- you see visions of moments, instances of betrayal, or pain, or horror of such magnitude it shouldn't bear thinking on.
But think on it you do, night after night when you allow yourself the luxury of sleep. It is to keep these things at bay that you stretch days and nights out along a thin rope of high-grade and obsessive work ethic. Because, you think, there must be some seed of truth, some seed of fact in these things for them to even exist in your mind.
You don't always dream when you sleep, but when you do, you never suspect for even a second that you are dreaming.
Even when your dreaming self desperately wishes you were.
"Weren' ya... I thought y'said y'were havin' twins, doll, wha'..."
Your head swims, adrift in a fog of sleepless magic. She cuts out like a bad signal, static and motherly with a tiny child on her hip amidst the glitched image. She smiles sweetly, but there's nothing but fear behind it, strained anxiety masked by her carnival face, her carnival voice. "Didn't you miss me, Shi?"
"Wh... 'Course I did, swee'art, b' where didja go? 'S been... been busy." Your words are reluctant to escape, reluctant to touch her, but she steps forward, distorting into broken edges and lines and reforming barely two feet away. The dancer's gentle laugh is a comfort, but it feels wrong, out of place, too high and too forced, a child blowing too hard into a recorder.
"I didn't go anywhere, silly!" And this time when she falls out of reality, she returns with a different child, greyed skin and blue around the edges. She is happy, still happy, still smiling with the lifeless infant flopped over her arm. "I've stayed in town this entire time!"
Confusion muddles your processor, little misfires slowing your thoughts, your reactions as you try to comprehend, to comprehend her, to understand her behavior and her actions. "B'... Wha'? B' Lila, wha' 'appened?" you manage to slur, trying to shake your mind of her stuttering appearance. "Y'used t' come 'round all th' time, an' ya di'n' even..." She stretches, widening, then snapping back into herself with a sound like blown fuse.
"I got a life, Shi," she says, teasing in her voice. "Anons helped me, and I had people to take care of. I had McCoy, and D̮͜y̸͎̥̣͇͖̰ͅl̶̠̱a̸͓̞̞͚ṇ̝̦̫̹̹, and now I have A̶l̸͠͝ic͢͞ȩ and C̷̀͞o̢ǫ͢k͢͏͠i͘͞ȩ and all of my new friends, Shi, and they love me for who I am! You wouldn't love me for who I am, anymore," she adds in a cruel whisper, her smile ever naive. "You hated when I started dating McCoy. You'd hate me now even more because I love everyone and you're a prude."
What? Where the hell did that... "Lila, I di'n', I don'... 'S none o' my bid'nes' who 'r what yer gettin' on wi', i' fuckin' worried m'when y'star'ed off wi' McCoy, but, ne'er hated you none, y'were... Yer m'feckin' sister, I w' jes' worried, f'feck's sake..."
"Shh," she hushes, lifting her son's limp hands to his ears. "Don't swear around the kids."
A wash of muddled embarrassment burns in your sensors; right, shit, you hadn't meant-- but-- "B', Lila, 'e's de--" But the child is a more resolved grey now, white, empty eyes staring back at you, hollow. Your eyes brighten in alarm, as you realize it's not the only child holding onto her. There are three now, three small forms attached to her like parasites two greys at her hip and the other, the original, A̡l̴̳i̜̟̗c͉͕̮̹e͕̮͇̪ hanging off of her arm. The new grey isn't even humanoid, no, it's a tiny kid, a goat, and after a glance to you it begins to suckle at her breast like a ravenous infant; you find yourself drifting backwards in unconscious revulsion.
"See, look," Lila pouts. "You always judged me. You can't even stand the sight of your own nephew. What kind of way is this for Uncle Shi to treat you kids!"
"No way at all," smirks A̛l͠i̵ce in her father's voice, through her father's pointed teeth. The group glitches away again, harsh this time, warping and dimming the lights along with. They crash back into focus, the room red and creeping with bright black mold.
And Lila. She is absolutely fucking covered in babies.
You're trying to back away now, your legs too heavy and slow, like you're running out of battery, running out of fuel. "Lookit yerself," you rasp, stumbling over the clutter of the room. "'Ve only e'er tried t' look ou' fer you, I w' only worried, an' look," you plead, gesturing to herself, to her darkened eyes, to her dulled metal, to the parasites gripping her body, "wha' the hell i' this?"
She only laughs, closing her eyes-- but she still sees you, each of the gems surrounding her optics blinking bright and red and staring you down. Her eyes are a solid black void when she reopens them, threatening you closer as she begins to tower over you. A new set of arms sprouts from her sides, and her legs fuse and grow bulbous, spindles, sharp black legs breaching her metal with a painful cracking. She laughs as the graphical bug distorts her and splinters the room, as she grows horrendous and more and more children begin to appear, clinging to her, to the shelves, to the ceiling, crawling across the floor, falling out of the air. "This is who I am, Shi!" she announces, grinning. "Don't you see! The anons made me whole again!"
You shake your head numbly, and it's not just fear that claws at your processor, but grief. "Wha've they done t'you," you choke out, tripping over a baby. Your sister's eyes are dead, but she moves with all the modest grace of her old self, and she's wrong, and you want to vomit but you lack the biology and you can't bring yourself to tear your optics away. "When th' fuck di' they 'ollow you out, how th' fuck c'you 'ave let them?"
"Language, Shi!" Lila chides, small metal spiderbots pouring from her mouth. This time when she cuts out, the walls begin to bleed. The ceiling drips with webbing and dead children. You finally lose your balance completely, crushing bodies as you fall, and the husk of your sister reappears with her face scant inches from yours. "You only liked me because I was naive and needed protection and you just can't handle that I'm better now."
You shake your head, trying to protest-- that wasn't it at all, that wasn't why you'd loved her-- but the chubby hands of infants grasp and worm into your plating, crushed and crushing and ruining your vocalizer. They continue crawling towards you, and you feel them, climbing you with their soulless eyes, threatening to bury you alive.
You struggle to stand, as the heavy bodies grip your clothes, as more and more children pour into the room, and all you can think is she doesn't understand, she doesn't understand why it's so wrong, and you have to tell her, you have to tell her, but as you get up in her face, staring her million eyes down, she scoffs.
"I don't need you, Shi. I'm better off without you."
The words gut and relieve you; and even as you feel your knees fail and buckle under the weight of the infantile plague, as your vision is obscured and your engine begins to sputter and suffocate under the unyielding wall of bodies, only one response, one thought sticks clear above the haze in your mind.
((Happy Valentine's Day. Naughty stuff under the cut.))
You don’t always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it’s just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, there is a chance that what you see is influenced by magic. The damn greys get their fingers into everything, stirring up trouble. You know these things only in waking; coming back from these dreams is like clearing a virus from your processor, like air returning to your furnace and letting the flame brighten again, like a gallon of purified diesel -- waking up from these dreams is more jarring than waking from any other dream, because your processor alone did not craft these images.
But in the dream, as with every dream, you are in the moment and you cannot tell, not by all the false rings and token signals that in waking will prove the data to be messily compiled false-mem documents -- dreams, in otherwords, no matter how horrible or how real. In the dream, you're living a moment, and you never notice the difference in those moments to the real world until the moment is gone.
Until the dream is over.
Sitting together in the garage, the weight of her in your lap is comfortable. There is little enough of her for the weight to mean much anyway, but were she anyone else, such proximity would be a violation.
Her kisses are careful, more her pleasure than yours; all you can offer in return are carefully applied bites, teeth pressing into her lips, against her jawline, at the tender junction of throat and collar. She doesn't seem to mind, for all that you can feel her heartbeat against the bites on her throat, pulse pounding against steel teeth.
Her hands rest on the smooth plating of your shoulders as you glide your own carefully up her spine, feeling the bone beneath the flesh in the strange, knobby way humes are put together. You know that if your fingers run up her ribs you can tease anything from a moan to a laugh from her; slide a palm over her shoulders and she'll groan. She's soft under your hands, for all that's she's scarred, but she's also ribboned through with steel, strong enough to still be here no matter how you snarl or fight. No matter how oddly, the pair of you fit together just so.
There is a click as the panels over your stomach fold back and away, a hiss of unreeling cable as you free a length of cord. This is not anything like your usual use for the jack, but she's machine enough for it to work, augmented as she is. Careful fingers reveal the ports on the back of her neck, and with a click and a gasp the connection is made.
It's not the same as wiring into another bot; the processes are different but you make do, feeding sensation through the link to incite pleasure, to encourage the speeding of her heart and the tightening of her hands on your shoulders.
A gasp from her, a sigh as you discover that you can direct the flood of sensation through the nerves of her body, everything organically connected to the mechanical part of her. Her head drops back, lolling on her shoulders as her hips roll, pressing against your leg. And there is a return from her through your link, pleasure in a way that you can't precisely define flooding back through you.
It fragments into black from here, the moment preserved in a jumble of mem data as everything fades, blurs, and ends.
It is a moment, a dream, and now it is gone, fading into something else.You don't always dream when you sleep, and when you do, the good ones never last.
((Triggers for violence, gore, and zombies. Everything under the cut is once again contributed by the lovely and most talented Incdrop.))
You don’t always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it’s just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, it is often a rich tapestry of guilt and hurt over things that have not yet -- that may not ever -- come to pass. You trust yourself just far enough to believe that you can keep your life in order. Gage is the only person who's dumb enough, stubborn enough, to stay in your permanent circle, and there have been nightmares enough to last a human lifetime of the ways you could ruin his life. The ways he could die, or break, or fail because of you.
Because that is what you do with the people who get close. That is what you do to those who trust you.
You corrupt and you destroy and you break every promise, every show of faith you can. Even when you don't mean to.
In waking, you will never acknowledge this. In waking, you do not stew in guilt for crimes not yet committed, for failures not yet accomplished. But in your dreams you know what you are, and how you will fail, and the monstrous glitch in your processor that allows your nightmares such twists and frightful power latches on.
And you dream of those you will fail.
"Psst. Hey sleepyhead. Wake up."
Tiny hands smack against your copper face. You are stuck.
"Wake up you fuckin' prick. Come on. Wake up."
You're trying. You're trapped. Inside of yourself, you can feel your joints straining to move, small motors jammed and skidding against themselves as if some terrible weight is crushing down on you.
"En-zi. Spider. You fucking piece of whore-shit would you wake the fuck up--"
You startle to your senses, staring suddenly into the enormous eyes of The Mouse. Delighted, she claps and laughs and jumps away, landing nimble on the sodden back-alley concrete. "Spider! About fucking time!" She dances on the ground as you pull to your feet, as your vision swims wide and you see yourself looking down on her. She kicks you like you've broken and your sight snaps back, and the little mute laughs, and laughs, and laughs with the sound rebounding off the rotting brick walls. "Come on!" she shouts again, and she runs into the street, invisibly pulling you along.
You stumble after her, your own footsteps too loud in your audio receptors, vibrating through your entire body before gathering about your head in a ringing haze. Surrounding you is an overwhelming grey, from the asphalt to the sky all in bleak city shades of decay. There's a fence to your right as you run down the street, barring you from a colorless field of grass and red. Broken-down buildings like molting brick carapaces line the wide, down-sloped road,
You think you've lost her as you trip further along, as she weaves under the rusting roadside cars, but her laughter on your addled mind draws you along until you find yourself at a simple, red wooden door, un-boarded like the rest of the houses in the urban neighborhood you've faltered into. She finds you staring at the address number which can't seem to reconcile itself, numbers blurring into letters into roiling faces into numbers and shapes, so she kicks you again, and you open the door. Inside you find friends-- acquaintances? Tolerated humans? Pun, Psi, Space, Havelock, Lu, and hell, even Neoma's there, talking to some grey nobody who disappears when you look straight at it. They're all gathered in what feels like a very homey living room, though the only colors that stand out are the warm tones of them and a square red pillow in the center of the coffee table. You approach them. What's all this then?
"Shiiiiiiii!" comes the cheerful cry. They're happy to see you, and the response fills you with begrudged love. Pun comes over to wrap you in a hug, while Space just throws you a two-fingered salute.
Didn't you see them? somebody asks, as you gently pry Pun from your waist.
See what?
Them! They're everywhere! How could you miss them!
And suddenly they're pointing to the doorway, terrified that you've left the door open. Rotting corpses shuffle along the street in a horrific parade. Mouths gaping, letting loose gutteral, agonized moans. One of them turns its head to you.
Shut the door! they scream. Shut the fucking door!
You slam the thing so hard it fractures, and you think it might never open again. The moaning, at least, is silenced.
"We have to get out of here," Psi declares, donning a military helmet. The pillow on the desk blooms into a map, but you cannot read it all at once, the geography shifting as Psi points his finger along the distorted streets. You need to get back to the garage, where you can escape to safety by your "super-secret" hidden tunnels. Lu chirps this is a fantastic idea, and begins to flutter about the room. They should all leave right away! And it doesn't feel right, no. You think you should all stay here, or at least let you go out first to kill some of the shamblers outside, but as you try to speak, your vocalizer only sparks quietly, and they take your silence for compliance. Well fuck it, then. You're still gonna keep them safe.
Everyone gears up, all pipes and bats and axes, though Have holding a stapler and Neoma decked out with a shovel like she's going to war stand out in your mind.
You are outside, and you are moving. Alleys pass you by like lights through subway windows, the gap of dark white sky each presents you with looming and antagonizing as you rush ahead. There are dead fuckin' walking, but taking the lead you beat down any you encounter with the sickening satisfying smash of rebar meeting skull. The kids aren't doing so bad of their own accord either, guarding at the sides and rear, stopping any shambler ambushes before they start. You feel proud of them, proud to know them, though you'd hardly admit it out loud.
It's not until the garage is in sight that you begin to have a problem. There are simply too many of them, flooding the wide cramped streets. The garage stands like a beacon at the end of the road, brilliant and inviting with vast expanses of fields behind it, but an impossible sea of the dead bars any further progression. They hardly see you, intermingling and mindlessly shuffling amongst themselves.
Suddenly you hear a high, childish cackle, and your head feels uncomfortably bare. You shout in alarm, whirling around to catch The Mouse, but as your hands close around the little thief, fear swallows her expression, and she stares at you in dismay as she dissolves into black ash.
As you replace your hat, there's a sharp, gear-wrenching scream from behind you. You lunge towards the source of the noise, but it's already too late; Pun's been bitten.
"Don't worry about me," she says meekly, barely a whisper as Psi bashes in the offending zombie's face with his bat. "I'll be fine, we should just keep moving." Already, she looks like she might drop, but such is easily ignored in the haze.
You give a disapproving huff, leading them all down the empty halls, concrete turned to tile and plaster, sterile, moldy greys and white. The fluorescent lighting clouds your head like footfalls, and you feel lost in the maze of alleys. It's not safe here. You continue for what feels like hours, until the walls turn brown and cave-like and you're all at once overtaken by a swarm.
And fuck, you fight, you strike and punch and lash out, but there are simply too many and they pin you, they hold you down, and you can do nothing but watch in horror as one by one your friends tear each other to pieces. You stand in alarm; Neoma and Have stand triumphant, over the bloodied, mutilated corpses of the others. Both are heavily bitten, the flesh green and rotted and mutating everywhere surrounding the teeth marks. Don't let them get too close, you think, as you stumble backwards down the cracking road, but you freeze when they start to approach you, as Neoma's eyes pitch black and red and Have's skin begins to balloon and erupt with horrible, weeping disease. They stagger towards you; you try not to flinch when your writer takes you by the hand and bites through your wrist; she seems to deflate and dissolve as the connection severs, metal glinting in her flattened grimace. You're left with the twisted, dead-awake corpse of Havelock, who limps closer to you looking very much like a dried out leaf. You raise your length of rebar in your remaining hand, trying to bring yourself to bring down the steel, but through the deformity she coughs and begins to talk.
"shi, hey, hey shi," she whispers, "did you know if you get like a fucklot of rubber bnands you can cut a watermelelelon in halfv."
Oh God fucking dammit.
"Go t' sleep, kid, ge' yerself t' bed," you growl, turning back to the garage. Maybe if you make it there, you can fix them all.
"i guess you've got a fancy shop and could use a table saw instead,"
"Go t' sleep." You walk, the broad road empty but for the two of you.
"but no just think about it like what if... what if you did that to someone's /head/, what if you got a zombie and some rubber bands..."
For fuck's sake-- "Have, w'ya ge' yer Bri'ish fuckin' ass t' bed!" you snap, wheeling on her with your weapon raised-- But when you turn back, you're looking instead at Crib, flickering hatred in her eyes. Her left arm is warped, oily black, tealed and dripping with decay.
"You killed her," she breathes. "I trusted you to take care of her and you killed her."
A cacophany of sound pierces your processor; the chain trencher bursts out of the garage on two legs, its great blade unguarded. Its engine screams demonic and it charges you both, and you try to run, but Crib grabs you by the throat and forces you against the massive chainsaw.
Your last feelings before the dream cuts off harshly are that of intense, rhythmic, shredding pain all down your spinal sensors and your engine rending, sparking, catching fire,
You don’t always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it’s just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, grasping at the past and clawing for some promise of a future, it's often in a terrible turmoil of symbolism and old anguish mixing with new fears and anxieties.
Having failed so many in your life, you dream apologies you'll never speak; you dream reparations that you will never make. That cannot be made.
In your dreams you give of yourself in a way that you cannot in waking. You latch on to those who you abandoned or lost, and in the haze of a dream find that they have never been seperated from you. It is often painful, often hateful -- sickening in so far as you can feel such a thing -- and yet again and again your processor dredges these things up.
In your dreams you can save them. In your dreams, you can keep them.
The work is heavy, hard, and more than a little repetative. After the third time the fabric of your shirt got caught in the plating of your waist as you bent and lifted, you had taken it off. Now, stripped to the waist with the loops of your suspenders hanging loose over your hips, you move unhindered.
Each brick is placed heavily over the last, mortar laid heavily between to hold it all in place. The structure you ring yourself with isn't large -- big enough only to house yourself, the bricks needed to finish it, and the form laying in the ring of hardened cement you've built into the foundation. She looks almost like her old self, laying unconscious in the dwindling light. You almost feel bad about the concrete that seals her to the floor.
The wall comes up to your chest before she stirs.
Hands a wreck with wet mortar and the dust of the bricks, you turn toward her as those mismatched optics flicker online. She's beautiful still, ruined faceplate and all. You don't even mind the changes to her chassis. After all, you know she didn't chose them. Your Ether never would have.
She tries to struggle, joints hitching where she's not sealed to the floor, hands scrabbling over hard cement. You only move so quiet her when dark tendrils of smoke curl up from her seams, oil burning as she strains her motors.
She lashes out at you reflexively, eyes alight with horror, and you catch her hands in yours. She looks at her fingers -- at each shattered and broken off blade -- and her optics widen, horror on her face. You squeeze her hands mildly, bracingly.
You wouldn't stop clawing me, yous say, soft and reasonable as she tries to pull away from you. Your tone is laced with regret -- you hadn't wanted to hurt her, but she'd left you no choice. Don't worry. You won't need them.
She striggles and she shreiks, and all you can do is frown. She doesn't understand. She doesn't see how you're keeping her safe.
It's just you and me now, you tell her, rising and turning back to your work. The light will be gone soon, and you want the walls to be up before the then.
Weakly, for all the venom and anger in the words, she demands you let her go. You gave her up once, she says, cruel and cutting; now do it again. When you ignore her, she goes quiet.
The walls are at eye level before she speaks again. She tries to appeal to your rationality -- what about Gage, she asks. What about your human girl and your thin-limbed little boyfriend? They need you, she insists, pleading, and you turn from your work again.
Kneeling at her side, you brush your fingers over her cheek, gentle and quieting. They're in the garden, you tell her. Your boy is there too. All quiet now. They understand, now. About us.
She looks horrified, and you just smile. But she's quiet now, quiet, and you go back to work. You're almost done now, anyway.
It's only as the slats and tar that will make your roof are going into place that she speaks again. You have to let me go, she says, and you don't have to look to know the dark streaks of oil tracking down her face -- slipping into the craggy ruin of her broken cheek, over her teeth to burn in the heat inside her -- are thick and real. No crocodile tears from your Ether, even if she calls herself Carrion these days.
You have to let me go, she says again, and you turn from your completed work at last, moving to sit behind her on the floor and draw her down to lean against you. And in the dark, alone at last with her, you whisper back, I will always be with you.
You don’t always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it’s just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, there is a tendency in you to grasp at memories and hopes and the faint whispers of wishes you've tucked away inside yourself; you take these things and braid them together, and sometimes they plait into something coherent.
These are the dreams that you save, rare and somehow sweet for all that they read bitter in the irony of how wrong, how backwards they usually are. You retain them as mem files, pull them out of your processor and save them on a disk dedicated to such stupidity, hidden away in a lock box with your violin, with Pa's bill clip. Precious, stupid, hidden things that no one else may see.
Sometimes you dream, and the dream is not wretched.
You sit in the cool light, back resting against the cool wall. Your face is tilted up toward the ceiling, watching the staccato flicker of the florescent lights as dull pain flickers up from your hands. Each digit is carefully manipulated, spread out and fully unfurled, but you don't want to look, don't want to see all the ugly breaks and scratches and fractures from the work you've done.
The hands working on your fingers are scarred and worn, gentle for all that they can snap the finer joints in half easily. As they work, the human attached to them hums quietly.
You will not look at him. You cannot look at him. The first time you glanced at him, he was younger, as when you were first built, and he smiled as he took your hands into his lap and began to work on them. The smile hurt to see, hurt when he should be -- when you know he -- you'd looked away as quickly as you could, optics dimming as he laughed.
The second time you tried to look, his face had been beaten bloody, though he still smiled through broken teeth; you remember when he came home that way, slurring his speech and dizzy from pain; the fingers on his stupid right hand broken.
In shock you'd looked away again, and when you turned to look later, watching his face as he realigns the pins of your digits, he'd seemed older. Greyer and with that little hook of a scar under his eye that had appeared after a fight, the year before his death. Every stolen glance at his face moves him forward in time, and now you are afraid to try looking. Afraid your gaze will show him dead.
Afraid that looking will kill him.
So you let him work, watching that light flicker, dim and short.
You don’t always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it’s just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, it is often horrifying in the loss of logic. Moments flow from one to another, and while you do not understand that you are dreaming, the part of you that lives by deeply rooted logic cycles is unnerved and distressed by the lack of sense portrayed in the circumstances in which you find yourself.
Moments pass and fade into one another, abstract and ill conceived, taking up time until something concrete can form to distract you from these pale, vague moments. If you thought about these things in waking, you might consider these dreams to be like as to the previews shown in a movie theatre before the feature. Distractions, time fillers, setting the mood perhaps for the dramatics to unfold later. They fade in from nothing, with no clear starting point, and bleed out into the darkness.
From the first, Digits has been a better friend to you than most. He's so innocent, too honest for his own good, and it was obvious in the first ten minutes of knowing him that he wasn't slinking around looking to get something from you. He liked magic, and colours, and puzzles. He was not a child, but he held a child-like quality that was rare.
Innocence is often used as an excuse to draw down the guards you put up. You've seen the concept of innocence twist and fold to form a mask. People employ innocence, wear it like a mask to serve an ulterior motive.
Look at Gage, for instance. Sitting at his desk in the front of the shop, keeping the books with that permanent smile carved on his face by the arrangement of his plates, the young-form looks like a kindly if odd boy made of metal. And he can speak sweet and knows the ins and outs of flattery to put himself on just about any customer's good side. So that he can slip in close later and tell you which parts are worth grabbing and which are junk.
So it's for the best that you give up on Digits. Cast your attention else where. His mask is so firmly fixed, you can't see around it, and that alarms you.
You try to ignore him. You really do. At first, you think he might be confused by your sudden change. Then hurt. Then, in a show of belligerence you never would have expected, he becomes almost aggressive in his persistent presence. Always near to mind, mentioned in conversations with those you've chosen to trust; you ignore him, but he's impossible to forget.
It's Crib who takes it too far. You have no idea how it even comes up (where she even comes from), but she's badgering you, hectoring you -- and all about Digits. You scream at her to stop, you scream to drown her out, but she's there, still there, still talking and it's wrong, it's sickening, but it feels good as your hydraulics put their all into sending your fist through her face.
There is a squall of rent metal -- agony as shreds of her face tear into your knuckles -- and the clatter of glass as her optics shatter to the floor; a ghostly expellation of blue matter when you pull your hand back, her face a wreck, destroyed.
What should be horror transforms somehow into humor, leaving you laughing as your friend -- one of your people -- stumbles back, blinded, glitching. You should help her, you think, and yes, that's exactly what you'll do. Help her in the lashing of a foot, snaring her across the knees to help her fall. Help her in the economical, practiced movements of an old hand at murder; break her arms so she can't hit back, crack her furnace so she can't hold heat; hit and hurt and harm until she simply stops moving.
Only then do you notice The Mouse. Was she there all along? You scramble to remember, sitting back from the carnage you've created, enjoying the satisfaction of silence, and decide it doesn't matter. She is here, making stiff, agitated gestures at the ruin of her companion.
You lift her up, and she looks at you, hurt and confused and angry. You ignore this; a smile is what you offer, and then you press your face to hers, an imperfect approximation of a kiss, as you have no lips and your mouth hits between her eyes. But that is your intent; a kiss before you smash her, just as hard as you can, into the cold cement of the Garage floor.
Very suddenly you realize it's Bellus you've slammed down into the pavement; you've got your hand tight around his throat and he's pinned, immobile and as broken as everything else in this place, but still grinning in the glare he offers over his scarves, snickering through the glitching of his vocalizer.
You shake him and you hit him, and as he starts to bleed, dark oil and vibrant coolants and hydraulic fluids, you keep expecting him to fade out, to grind to the same halt they always do.
But he just keeps going, laughing harder as your hands tear at his body. He's built a lot like Gage, and that only makes you angrier; built the size and proportion of a human youth; you want to dismantle him but every layer of plating you remove is only covering another solid casing. You're peeling him like an onion; he's as layered as the colourful scarves he wears.
Without precisely meaning to, you open the wifi broadcast in your primary processor, looking for any signal to ping off, and there it is; a return signal from the young-form. Perhaps if you can't peel him from without, you can flay him from within.
There is nothing gentle in the linking of your processors; none of the slow sync granted by a physical connection. You wouldn't know where his ports would be, or even if he has any, and there is something much more satisfying about the suddenness, the jarring finality of simply being in his processor.
He looks terrified, optics brilliant above the scarves, and you slam him with sensation, with memory, with pain, with everything you can find in yourself. There is so much of you, so many processes in your system, and you duplicate every file, every memory, every part of your electronic self, and blast it into him.
It's not interface; there is nothing sexual or professional about it. It's murder on your mind, and as he begins to flail and twitch beneath you, it's murder you know you're achieving. Slowly, gratifying in the sense that you are there, you are part of him as he's failing; there's not enough room in his systems for everything you're throwing at him, and he cannot keep up. Even as the various programs that build sentience and personality in a robot begin to shut down, the processes to keep his body itself speed up, trying to compensate for his process suddenly requiring so much power.
And there it is, there's the moment you need; there's something in the distraction of Bellus's dying, over-fed mind that just makes it easy suddenly. Where before you could do nothing by pry and dent and peel away the layers of the other machine's body; now you draw a fist up and back, twisting to put every ounce of strength into the gesture as your fist pistons down into the center of the smaller bot. A crunch, and whine, pain fed residually from both the link with the dying 'bot and your own arm cracking against the floor.
A spark. A flare. Something sharp and hot shooting up your arm where you're impacted through Bellus's chest. Your own engine revs, and you know only the brilliance of a sudden explosion, none of the noise or pain -- the satisfaction of having completed a task so thoroughly there is nothing left to speak of in it -- and then a return to that sweet blackness.
((This almost intolerably cute dream was contributed by the ultra-amazing and very adorable Lubird. This is so great, I'm not going to change anything, just going to give it a title and tags.))
You don't always dream when you sleep. Sometimes it's just blackness, beautiful, deep and calm.
When you do dream, you can never tell that you are. What is a memory - relived in the moment of the dream - doesn't seem that way. No one in the dream tells you that you are dreaming, and that you have seen this all before. And maybe, for dreams like this, you wouldn't want them to.
This dream is nice. You don't like to make very many friends; it causes pain and anger and unwanted grief on your part if something happens to them. But you make friends anyways despite your best efforts not to. And right now, you are at the side of one of them.
"What about that one?" there's rustling in the grass next to you, and you take a moment to look at the pinky-less hand extended upwards and then you direct your attention to the sky and pinpoint where the hand is pointed.
"Tha's Aquila," you respond, noting the star cluster and matching it to the constellation you had read about before.
"What's an A-Aquila?"
"Who, not what," you correct the smaller bot beside you, and then add "Aquila was Zeus' eagle. He was a mess'nger for Zeus. S'posedly carried a guy named named Ganymedes up t' Mount 'lympus to be th' cup bearer o' the gods."
"Oh," a pause, and then a quiet "Aquila" as if he's trying to commit the name to memory. You don't know if Digits understands what it is that you just told him. He doesn't say if he does. But he does utter, into the silence of the night, "Wow! He must have been h-huuuge to carry someone."
This earns a very small chuckle from you. "Yeah. Prolly was." You neglect to mention that this is mythology - Aquila and Ganymedes probably never existed. Digits doesn't care. He just likes the idea.
There's a shift next to you as the magician moves closer - you have your boundaries, but you know he's only moving closer because you're his friend. As many times as he's attempted to sneak hugs from you, it doesn't bother you too much.
"Ok. U-uuuh. This one?"
You look towards the sky to find the next constellation that Digits picks out.
"Oh," you prepare to answer, and you don't even notice when it begins to get fuzzy, and things turn black. The transition is subtle and seemingly natural; you never know when you're dreaming.
