Histaff

by Andries Louws

  The software embedded on the machine is rather sophisticated, the various pieces of coding having been perfected a hundred hardware generations ago. The open-source technologies available to the entire galaxy are inside its libraries, and its smart design assistant can transform a horribly designed wreck into a working product, no problem.

  And so it is that Katarenin, with the help of some additional information from her implants, designs and prints the most advanced dagger this solar system has seen. She does a few more things, pressing a few more buttons and syncing a few protocols, before grabbing the vicious looking items in her hands.

  She then puts it on a nearby bench and starts fumbling with her suit. Her helmet pops off, showing her dishevelled hair and dirty face to the world once again. She lets the heavy items drop from her fingers and grabs the dagger with trembling fingers.

  Taking a deep breath, she stills her shaking hands as she tightens her grip on the handle. Her breathing doesn’t stop, and instead, she starts hyperventilating. Then with a wild and spastic movement, she slams the sharp dagger through the top of her skull, right into her brain.

  Katarenin flops to the ground lifelessly, a shiny, metal handle sticking from the top of her head. Her noggin bounces around while the rest of her body is protected by the heavy-duty spacesuit.

  She lays still for a long time, hours passing before she stands with slow and sluggish movements. The animated spark apparent on her face previously now replaced with a blank, unmoving facade once again. Hands gloved in bulky yellow feel around the top of her head, gingerly exploring the metal object sticking out of her skull. Her face remains blank as she pulls the item free with a sickening squelch.

  Studying the sticky knife for a bit, she holds it above her head once again before jamming it back into her brain, this time at a different angle. Her lifeless eyes are trained on the robotic frame laying on the bench, keeping watch for any potential movement. The robot remains as lifeless as her current emotional spectrum, however.

  She stirs around her brain for a bit, the handle getting stuck now and then. She scrapes the blade through her skull, feeling that the sharp item scrapes across something hard. Giving the handle one last push, she lays back down and waits. What she is waiting for is not known to her, but she knows that something is supposed to happen.

  Then the skeleton storms into the room, his loosely hanging spacesuit flopping around his bony frame as he walks. The two pinpricks of light behind his reflective visor look at the scene. What it might think of a construction suited woman without a helmet laying on the ground, a handle sticking from her head and a mechanical body lying on a table above her is unknown to all.

  “Printer?”

  Its voice is back to being all fake and loud, the harsh staccato of noise causing some smaller tools to shift around as they vibrate. Katarenin slowly points at the now unused printer, the holographic display still flashing the bright green message that it is done.

  Its helmeted head swivels back to the lying woman. It walks close and inspects her still form. White-clad hands grasp at the dagger handle. Another squelching sound later and the skeleton is inspecting the intricate lines of circuitry woven through the thing. It turns it around, studying the item intently.

  The skeleton walks over to the printer and stares at the thing for a long time. Then it touches a single button and continues staring. Katarenin remains lying there, unmoving as her tormentor learns to interact with the molecular weaver in the least efficient way possible.

  Then the skeleton suddenly walks away, striding out the door with his suit loosely flopping around his bones. Katarenin does not follow, does not stand up, nor does she move. The skeleton strides back in a long time later, presses some more buttons slowly and walks away again. This repeats until Katarenin’s brain injury finishes repairing.

  She sits up with a sudden gasp. Tears well up in her eyes, frustration and despair boiling away inside her. She looks at the marvel of engineering she designed on the fly, the skeletal frame clad in mechanical muscle. The lithe and sharp curves should be hers now, the energy generator in her chest should be powering her every move.

  She stands up and trails a forlorn hand along its frame. A bittersweet feeling fills her hollow insides as she looks down on the improvised robotic body. That should be hers now. She really shouldn’t be inhibiting this fleshy prison anymore, and the worst part is, it’s not even her prison. Not really.

  She is still staring at the unmoving robot when the skeleton walks in again. She turns around, observing its actions.

  “First, are you a he or a she?” she asks.

  “I am me.”

  “Yeah, I can see that, you numbskull. I’m going to guess you are a he, then. Otherwise, I would have to weep for womankind. So, what are you trying to do?”

  Instead of answering, the skeleton slowly and meticulously undoes his helmet. His grinning skull becomes visible, causing shudders to go down Katarenin’s spine.

  “Protect skull. Look.”

  He turns around and slowly taps on the printer’s interface. He ignores all the useful automated prompts asking him if he needs help. Instead, he uses the slowest possible ways to navigate through the machine’s interface.

  Katarenin snaps. “No, you boneheaded, warp-torn kragg. Here is the design interface. See? This way you can refine structural details. It’s not meant for manual input. Is your head completely empty?” She falls silent as she realizes what she said. “I guess it is, at that. Basically the opposite of mine, hmm.”

  The skeleton keeps staring at her. She shakes the gloomy thoughts free as she addresses the skeleton again. “Do you have a name? I keep calling you ‘the skeleton’ but that’s a frown–”

  “Douglas.”

  “–ed upon term in a couple thousand systems. Douglas, really? Dark water? You seem about as thick as a river, so that part suits you.” Katarenin shakes her muddled thoughts free again as she turns back to the machine. “So here is the best way to do that. You were placing each cluster by hand. It would take years before you would get done. Then again, you’re probably too dumb to notice something advanced as time passing.”

  Katarenin forcefully teaches Douglas how to properly navigate the interface, showing him a few tricks and some advanced ways to use the relatively simple tools available. But just when they were getting going, Douglas turns around and walks away.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “Mana is full.”

  “Oh no, I don’t care. I, the great Katarenin, am teaching you, and you will not leave before you are proficient in controlling this primitive piece of shit!” She catches up with Douglas and grabs him by the scruff of his neck. The bulky suit she is in allows her to manhandle the rather light skeleton with ease. A circle flashes into existence briefly, air swirling around the formation’s centre point. Then Douglas’ skull droops, and his eye flames dim a bit as the lines and runes fade away. Katarenin drags him back to the printer and continues her exposition and explanation.

  Douglas cooperates in a sullen silence, following her instruction with measured slowness. An hour of forced learning later, the holographic display shows a rather fetching image. They scanned Douglas’ skull using the large scanning ring and loaded the information into the printer’s interface. Katarenin had kept hounding the skeleton until he managed to perform the act all on his own. She had then taken him step by step through the design process she herself used to produce the feminine robot.

  Now the two are staring at the projection of a metal-clad skull. The protruding zygomatic bone is covered in angled plates of metal and the eye sockets ringed with sturdy bands of dark grey reinforcement. The forehead is especially thick, the source of Douglas’ mana covered by a thick spike of a shining alloy. The semi-transparent projection shows holes bored through the skull, encasing the most central piece of frontal bone from both sides. The rest of the skull is equally covered in geometric reinforcements, the only original bone showing through being the lower halve
s of the upper teeth and the upper halves of his lower teeth.

  The automated design software had recognised the design as a form of armour plating and asked whether or not the user wanted to embed a logo. It had suggested a simple drawing of a star surrounded by planets and their orbits. Katarenin had immediately denied the prompt, incensing Douglas. The skeleton had recognised the logo of GalaxSec, and a one-sided argument followed. Douglas kept insisting on including the logo for some reason he didn’t manage to articulate in any meaningful way. The spacesuited skull had tried to articulate why he fancied the much-abused central policing force so much. Katarenin had ignored every one of his protests and forcefully continued teaching Douglas.

  The two had then had a second one-sided argument about the jawbone. Douglas had wanted to leave his mandible uncovered and had protested this point repeatedly with very few words. Katarenin had ignored his repeating protests. The holographic jaw is now a sharply lined mosaic of intersecting planes, the only curving lines on the thing being a sturdy yet surprisingly complicated hinging mechanism at the temporomandibular joint.

  All in all, it looked like some form of polygonal unicorn skull. Katarenin idly plans which steps she needs to take in order to make this look popular on the centre worlds.

  “There. Since no communication needs to happen, as if there is anything to communicate in that empty head of yours, it can be made from ceesteel. A few other alloys woven through these supporting structures here and there. Cover the entire thing in a layer of double lattice carbon diamond, and it should be able to withstand nearly everything. You are lucky this thing even does compound covalent bonds. The entire process will take a while. I can rig the door to stay open while it prints, but you can't move du–”

  “Make parts. Put together.”

  Douglas walks away. Katarenin is absolutely dumbstruck. She had expected that the skeleton would insist on stepping into the printer himself. The actual printing will only take hours but the strengthening of the molecular bonds will take days. Printing the thing in pieces and assembling it around his skull like a puzzle is a solution she hadn’t even thought of.

  Another realisation hits her harder than she expected. If this is going to take days, how long did she spend on the robotic frame? How long has she been cooped up in this grimy little room?

  Katarenin decides that she has enough things to worry about already and submerges herself in the task of printing. The puzzle of fabricating the skull cover in parts without compromising strength or integrity occupies her entire being for a little while. She then hits the button and watches the fine mist of matter spray from the top of the atomic builder once more. The lack of rare elements needed in the printing job means that the standard reserves in the hopper are more than enough for the entire project.

  Katarenin stands there, looking at the parts that slowly form. Her thoughts wind down now that the challenge is over and done with, Douglas is no longer there to take her mind off of things, and she is in full control of her body. Her mind’s eye travels towards the blue dot at the bottom of her vision that has been there since she woke up. Some blue screens had plagued her upon waking, but she had ordered them to disappear without much thought.

  She had initially thought them to be some artefact of a new form of nanotechnology, as that would have easily explained why she had felt so great upon waking. The usual hours of discomfort that accompany long-term cryo had been oddly missing.

  Calling up the screens once again, she reads the lines slowly one by one as her mind quakes.

  [ Name: Katarenin Auchinfon Tomat Peezes ]

  [ Race: Philotically twin-linked photonic mind ]

  [ Level: 1 (0/NaN) ]

  [ Class: None ]

  [ HP: 164/164 ][ HP/h: 0.052 ]

  [ MP: 0/NaN ][ MP/h: 0 ]

  [ STR: 35 ]

  [ AGI: 27 ]

  [ CON: 24 ]

  [ VIT: 1 ]

  [ INT: NaN ]

  [ WIS: NaN ]

  [ Technological parasite ]

  [ Controller of a flesh-clad arcane skeleton ]

  [ Universal Language ]

  [ Mechanically enhanced; +UNKNOWN Con, +UNKNOWN Str, +UNKNOWN Agi, -UNKNOWN Vit]

  [ Thought control (halted) ]

  She has crawled up into the fetal position, her fingers tearing at her eyes by the time her mind processes her entire status. She never asked for this, right? She's a remote-controlled controlling device? But her daddy always gave her freedom, as much as she wanted.

  Then again, she can want something, but she can't choose to want something. But a parasite, that's what she truly is? She tried, didn't she? She tried really hard. The relatively large chunk of metal in her skull and the filament wires threading through her entire brain she saw on the scan did make her act, right?

  It wasn't her fault that the remote control extension dagger she made on the fly wasn't compatible with the mechanical body she made. It was a pretty good body, too; it could have kept going for thousands of years with the amount of fuel she stuffed inside it. Good dagger, too. The tip should have pierced the housing and made contact with whatever was inside.

  Then again, if she really was a light-based being that probably would have truly killed her.

  She can feel her thoughts slide into the next step to take, like an inevitable yet logical waterfall, like the next box to tick in a process she can't halt, a new thing to try on a checklist. She mentally wonders what all the odd titles and terms at the bottom of the blue screen are.

  [ Technological parasite; you are a mechanical controlling force inhabiting and controlling a body not your own, no mana ingress point found ]

  [ Controller of a flesh-clad arcane skeleton; the body you are remotely controlling is a flesh-clad arcane skeleton ]

  [ Universal language; you are able to understand all intelligent life, both spoken and written words ]

  [ Mechanically enhanced; you are enhanced by various types of unknown technology, +UNKNOWN Con, +UNKNOWN Str, +UNKNOWN Agi, -UNKNOWN Vit ]

  [ Thought control (halted); your mind is being influenced in various, unknown ways ]

  Chapter Fourteen – The Overwhelming Desire to Learn

  Douglas is confused. This is not an unusual state of mind for the empty-headed skeleton, but the reason for his confusion is not normal. He runs a hard digit across the white surface of the ship, the distal phalanx of his pointing finger catching on the engraved runes. The previously pristine white surface is covered in a rather haphazard collection of crookedly drawn runes of varying artistic merit, each one shining with a faint blue light.

  The amount of admiration, joy, attraction, and other positive things Douglas is feeling towards the large, white object is pretty much overwhelming. A normal, full-fleshed being would probably never notice emotional fluctuations of this magnitude, but these extremely faint feelings are massive waves of turmoil crashing through his mind. His own mana - the power that animates his very being - flows through the ship. He feels the concentrated lines of power where he carved into the white material radiating with energy, the effects of the runes shining throughout the entire vessel.

  Douglas is also rather content with the new skill he has developed. It had come as a wild impulse at first. He had located the runes that strengthened the compacted earth spike formed by the spell into something stronger. He then randomly scribbled those symbols in the ship’s soft exterior. The skill he received from the blue boxes and the subsequent influx of engraving tips had only spurred him on.

  He only stopped when he felt faint headed, his mana reservoir in his forehead empty, and his finger bones worn down by half. He then decided to go look for Katare, sensing her to be in one of the adjoining rooms. There, he started studying the machines before he was personally taught by the great Katarenin. He left when his mana was full again - or when Katare let him leave - and went back to engraving.

  This repeated many times, and Douglas is now looking at the ship with fevered eyes. Each exposed part of the white hull is
covered in symbols varying from thumb-sized to a few spanning half a square metre. He had randomly switched between the three runes he had isolated, resulting in a haphazardly scrawled pattern of large and small scratchings. The initial runes are noticeably less professionally drawn than the later ones. The crooked and uneven lines he made transformed into beautiful calligraphy as Douglas got better at engraving.

  He even disassembled his ribcage, prying the bones loose from his spine, in order to fit under the ship. Especially the frontside bottom - as it is hovering mere centimetres above the hangar’s floor - was quite tricky to get proper access to. He had to extend his arm using a delicate chain of neck bones, rib bones, and his clavicle to get to the trickiest places. Engraving while keeping his mana from flowing into his non-existent rib bones was relatively taxing, but Douglas had persevered. Only after all the hard to reach places had been filled with scribbles - including the sloped backside of the loading ramp - had the skeleton pieced his chest back together. Taking his spacesuit off took some effort, but he timed it so his mana could recharge during those procedures. All in all, a trace of smug pride flickers through his empty head when he looks at the ship.

  Now a smidgen of confusion wins out over the other trace emotions. Douglas has been standing here, staring at the ship for a long time, and he is not sure what to do next. The woman is nowhere to be seen, his skull will be safe when the armour is done, and the ship is engraved. Douglas wonders what he should be doing next.

  Douglas looks around, searching for new and interesting things. Then he consciously sees the loading ramp for the first time. Before, he only had eyes for the shining white exterior. Now that the entire hull is covered in his mana, he observes the rest of the ship. He looks over the black windows, folding landing gear, near invisible seams that he had to work around, and the gaping, black hole that has a ramp reaching to the ground. With hesitant steps, the space-suited skeleton makes his way over to the back of the ship.