by DJ Molles
They hadn’t taken the news of Legatus Mordicus’s dismissal of them very well. Lux wasn’t quite sure how that could reflect poorly on him, but apparently it did.
Lux was a being of uncommon solitude. In The Clouds where he’d lived his entire life, he’d always been surrounded by others. Squires, and demigods, everyone constantly talking, talking, talking. He didn’t care for them, and while he’d never gone so far as Mala had in trying to change them, he’d certainly put a lot of effort into avoiding them.
So it was strange for Lux to experience something that he’d never thought he would experience: Loneliness.
He felt abandoned, cut loose, unmoored. The men under his command did not care for him, he’d become an enemy of the Nine Sons of Primus, and now, apparently, an enemy of Mala, and an enemy of the legions, and an enemy of humanity in general.
So what was he supposed to do? Who was he fighting for, exactly? If no one would have him, then whose side was he actually on?
And so he found himself going to the only person he could think of to…talk.
Yes. Talk. Lux of House Rennok was trying to talk.
And that person, of all the people in the world, demigods and humans and legionnaires and praetors alike, was Sagum.
Lux found him by the dim, blue glow of the light by which he worked, huddled in a child-like, cross-legged position, in front of two defunct mechs, propped against the port siderail of the skiff.
Lux swung himself easily up into the skiff, garnering a brief look of irritation from Sagum as the skiff rocked slightly and interrupted an apparently delicate procedure.
“Pardon me,” Lux murmured, not liking at all that he felt the need to apologize to a human. Further not liking that he still felt the need to talk to someone. And worst of all, who that someone was. If he hadn’t had his pride beaten out of him by the past several days, he might’ve rebelled harder. As it was, he supposed he would have to put up with being humble.
Sagum leaned back into his work. “It’s fine.”
Silence. Chafing.
Lux strode gently down the length of the skiff to Sagum’s position and stood over his shoulder, looking down at the mech named Bren, the face just as realistic as it had ever been, but lifeless now, a wax statue of serenity.
“I see you convinced him to give up his parts.”
“He didn’t need to be convinced. Only ordered.”
“So you had to order him to do it? What was all that concern about free will?”
“It’s complicated.”
Sagum hunched over what looked like Bren’s darkened core processor—distinguishable from Whimsby’s only because it was still pristine and Whimsby’s had a bullet hole in it. He gripped it tightly and bared his teeth as he pried at it, looking like he was trying to open it with the minimum amount of force necessary.
After a brief grunt of effort, Sagum’s long surgeon’s fingers prized it open into two halves. Wires connected them. Some larger, most of them very fine. No color-coding, Lux noted. All the wires were insulated with white.
Sagum studied the two halves for a long moment.
Lux continued to hover over his shoulder.
Sagum twitched, as though just remembering that Lux was there. He turned and looked up at Lux, one eyebrow cocked. “Did you need to speak to me?”
Need was such a weak word. Lux grimaced at it. “I was just curious about your progress.”
“Mm.” He turned back to his work.
Lux shifted around to lean against the siderail, right next to Bren’s inert body. “Do you think you’re going to be able to reactivate Whimsby with these parts?”
“Dunno.”
Lux frowned down at the fresh core processor. “You can’t just replace the core processor, right?”
Sagum looked at him again, a suspicious frown. “Do you actually want to know?”
Lux folded his arms. “I asked, didn’t I?”
Sagum sighed and propped his elbows onto his knees, the core processor hanging out of his hands. “No, I can’t just replace it. The core processor is the center of their memories. If I plugged Bren’s into Whimsby’s body, then we would just have Bren’s mind in Whimsby’s body. No, I have to splice Whimsby’s through Bren’s, to make use of Bren’s intact components, while still feeding from Whimsby’s memories.” Sagum returned his attention to the processor in his hand, selecting a small tool from a neat collection on the ground, like an orderly set of surgeon’s tools. He began poking around in the innards with it, but Lux had no idea what he was doing.
“But you don’t actually want to know about Bren and Whimsby, do you?” Sagum continued. “You want to talk about something else, but you don’t have anyone to talk to except the peon currently at your feet, because your praetors hate you and Mala rejected you. Clearly…” Sagum paused, grabbing a contraption from the ground and seating it onto his head—a magnifying glass of some sort. “…it bothers you that I’m the only person you have to talk to, which I suppose I understand, even if I do find it a little insulting. You’re a big important paladin. Or, at least, you were. Up until a few days ago.”
Lux just stood there, glowering down at Sagum. The words were so casual, so effortless—and fearless, godsdammit. When did peons get so uppity? But then, Lux wasn’t so full of himself that he couldn’t recognize the truth in them.
He let the glower fade from his face—Sagum wasn’t looking anyways. “As usual,” Lux gruffed. “You’re uncommonly perceptive for an uneducated peon.”
Sagum let out a single puff of amusement. Unseated a wire and inspected the lead. He laid Bren’s core processor down and turned and grabbed Whimsby’s damaged one. “Like I said, even though I find it insulting, I also understand. So go ahead. Hit me with it. What’s rattling around in that big paladin brain of yours?”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do at this juncture.”
Perhaps it was the fact that Lux had spoken with complete honesty, and hadn’t wasted any time getting to the point, but Sagum stopped what he was doing and looked up at him, his eyes overly large behind the magnifying lenses.
“I thought you weren’t in the habit of listening to peons and tinkerers,” Sagum remarked.
Lux winced. “It was a delicate situation. I needed to maintain some semblance of control. Legatus Mordicus clearly wouldn’t respect me if I let you speak for me.”
Sagum lifted the lenses from his eyes. “Oh, please. That’s bullshit. Don’t blame me because Mordicus didn’t want to respect you. You’ve had a high position in other’s eyes all your life, so you’ve never had to learn how to make others respect you. But don’t put it on me because you suck at it.”
“And I suppose you’re an expert on garnering respect from others?”
“Hell no.” Sagum looked back down and started fiddling with his work again. “If you want people to respect you, I’m the last person you should be talking to.”
Lux drew a finger across his lips. “And yet you stayed.”
“Yeah. I stayed.”
“Even when they offered you a position in Karapalida.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So do you respect me?”
Sagum glanced up momentarily, but appeared to be in the midst of another delicate process that required his complete attention. He spoke without moving anything but his nimble hands. “I don’t think it’s quite the same thing.”
“So you don’t respect me either?”
“Probably not in the way that you’re thinking.” A tiny, careful nod in the general direction of the praetorian encampment. “You want a bunch of hardened killers and fighters to respect you? People like your praetors? People like Mala and Mordicus? Well…that’s just not you, Lux. People like that respect people like themselves. Actually, for that matter, I suppose everyone respects people that are like themselves. And really, you’re not much like them at all.”
Lux found himself bristling at that. “I was trained to fight, just the same as Mala.”
“U
h-huh.”
“I could wipe out this entire encampment.”
“I’m sure you could,” Sagum said, agreeably.
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that you wouldn’t.”
Lux felt frustration rising in his chest. “Of course I wouldn’t!”
“Well, there you go.”
“That makes absolutely no sense.”
Sagum riffled through a collection of spare wiring and produced a lead which he inspected for characteristics completely mysterious to Lux. “It makes perfect sense. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t just become something you’re not. And the least respected man is always the one that is trying to be something he’s not. You’re trying to be perceived as some great military commander, but, let’s be honest here, they can see it in your eyes. They can see you don’t have the killer instinct that they have. So maybe the praetors obey, probably more out of habit than anything else. But they know that you’re not going to blow them to bits if they desert. Once the habit starts to wear off—once they realize that there really is no structure in place to force them to obey you, then they won’t, because they know you won’t stop them.”
“So I’m a lost cause, then. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, I’m saying that you’re trying to be something you’re not, and no one is ever going to respect someone like that.” Sagum stopped and quirked his head. “Huh. Hell, I guess I do know a lot about how to make people respect you.”
“Then why aren’t you more respected?”
“Because I don’t care anymore,” Sagum replied, attaching his selected wire to Whimsby’s core processor with utmost care. “I mean, I don’t care anymore now. It wasn’t too long ago that I really tried to be perceived as a hardass. But then all this shit went down and I was confronted with the uncomfortable reality that I’m a piss-poor fighter. I just don’t have it in me like Perry and Stuber and Teran.” He pointed to his array of tools. “I tinker. That’s what I do. And it’s far more fascinating to me than all that other shit.”
“So…” Lux sighed and lolled his eyes heavenward. “Your grand advice is that I should just get comfortable with the fact that praetors won’t follow me because I’m not willing to smite them should they not. Am I hearing that correctly?”
Sagum placed Bren’s core processer in the crook of his folded ankles, and lowered the magnifying lenses over his eyes again. “You know why I stuck with you instead of going to Karapalida?”
“Do tell.”
“Because you’re just like me.”
“Primus help me.”
Sagum smiled behind his eyewear. “No, I don’t mean that you’re a skinny, know-nothing peon tinkerer. I mean…you want the truth. Just like I want the truth. Which is why I’m sitting here, tinkering with two dead mechanical bodies. And you’re standing there watching me do it. You have a drive to know. A need to know. That’s why you were an Inquisitor, right?”
Lux considered this for a long moment, watching Sagum delicately thread the new lead through the tangle of wires. “Something like that, I suppose.”
“Well, then, fuck ‘em,” Sagum murmured through his concentration. “Let the praetors run off. We don’t need them. This shit isn’t gonna be won by armor and bullets. It’s gonna be won with knowledge.”
Lux found a stern smile crossing his lips. Sagum was right. And Lux himself had said as much before—he was motivated by a search for the truth. The very possibility of it tantalizing. Teasing him with its closeness, making him wish that he knew a thing or two about what Sagum was doing so that he could perhaps help and maybe speed the process along.
Of course…it still mattered to him whether the praetors stayed loyal to him or not. For reasons he couldn’t quite articulate in that moment. But perhaps their reasons for doubting him had more to do with what Sagum had pointed out: That Lux was attempting to be something he was not, and they could see it.
If they knew the vast treasure trove of knowledge they were sitting on in the form of Whimsby’s consciousness, would their opinion change? If they saw that Lux was fighting a different fight, one that had a far more promising endgame, would they rally behind him?
Sagum pulled his hands away from his work. He looked frozen for a moment, like he wasn’t sure what to do, but then he straightened and lifted the lenses from his eyes again. “Alright. Well. Enough chit chat. Time to see if I’m a genius or if it’s back to the drawing board.”
Lux pushed himself eagerly off the siderail. “Genius may be too generous. But you are very intelligent for a human. Particularly in matters of…” he waggled some fingers at Sagum’s work. “Gadgetry.”
“Oh stop,” Sagum remarked blandly, reaching across to something inside of Bren’s open chest cavity. He paused with his fingers on whatever it was, and glanced up at Lux. “I hesitate to make a big deal out of this on the chance that I’ve completely failed. But…are you ready?”
“Indeed.”
Sagum twisted something inside of Bren.
Bren’s core processor lit up again, like a light shining through a flawless sapphire.
A series of diodes glowed on Whimsby’s core processor.
Whimsby’s body came upright, legs splayed out, back as straight as a board, mouth dropping open and eyes stretching wide in a strange parody of shock.
Lux felt like the electrical current was passing through him just as much as the core processors. He opened his mouth to exclaim in surprise, but an eerie electronic warble came screeching out of Whimsby.
“Ah shit!” Sagum snapped, reaching for Whimsby’s open innards.
“What’s wrong?” Lux inched forward, wincing against the noise.
“That’s not right! I’ve heard that shit before when—”
Whimsby’s left arm suddenly jerked up, seizing Sagum’s wrist with frightening speed. Sagum cried out in alarm, and possibly from pain—the grip looked intense. Instinctively, Lux snatched his longstaff from the siderail.
“No, wait!” Sagum yelped, eyes connecting to Lux over his wrenched shoulder.
The warble became a pulsing, klaxon-like screech.
Lux’s eyes darted up to the encampment, already seeing movement: Praetors jolting upright, rifles in hand, searching the darkness for the source of the noise.
Whimsby’s head twisted, agonizingly slow, and faced Sagum.
“Oh-gods-please-don’t-rip-me-apart!” Sagum screamed.
Lux brought the longstaff up, feeling the thrum of its power, feeling his Confluence moving down the length of it.
Whimsby snapped his mouth shut, and the klaxon screeching died immediately, leaving Lux’s ears ringing. The breath whooshed in and out of his chest. He heard Sagum whimpering, the praetors shouting.
“Whimsby,” Sagum eked out between clenched teeth. “If you’re in there, you’re about to break my arm!”
Whimsby’s unnaturally wide eyes blinked twice, and then a more neutral expression overtook his simulated features. A momentary flash of confusion crossing his brow. His eyes went to his own hand, still holding Sagum’s wrist.
The fingers released.
Sagum jerked his arm away, already holding the angry red marks left behind.
Lux watched, his brain, his Confluence, on a hair trigger, ready to disintegrate Whimsby if he made another hostile move.
Whimsby’s gaze shot up to Lux, then to his longstaff, then to Sagum. And finally it went to the pile of wires and contraptions, and Bren’s inert form.
“Pardon me,” Whimsby said, his voice genial and level, with that strange accent of his. “My intention was not to cause harm. I am receiving some rather confusing inputs.”
No one moved for a few beats.
Whimsby looked at Sagum. His mouth snapped into a wooden caricature of a smile. Not at all the fluid, human-like expressions he’d been known for. Almost like his programming had returned to some basic preset.
Sagum recoiled from the look. “What is that? What are you d
oing?”
Whimsby’s lips pulled back, showing his teeth. “I am smiling. It is an expression that humans use to calm each other. Are you feeling calm?”
“No. Stop it.”
The smile snapped away. “Pardon me.”
Sagum glanced over his shoulder again at Lux. Raised his hand and waved it at the longstaff. “That’s probably not helping.”
Whimsby eyed the longstaff. “I am registering that as a threat.”
Lux pulled the longstaff away, pointing the muzzle at the sky.
Sagum leaned a little closer to Whimsby, in the same way you might inch closer to a dangerous beast locked behind questionable bars. “Whimsby, do you recognize me?”
“Of course,” Whimsby answered. “You are Master Sagum.” He looked at Lux. “And you are Paladin Lux of House Rennok.”
Lux could only see the side of Sagum’s face, but he saw the huge smile stretching across it.
“Oh my fuck, we actually brought you back.”
“Pardon me,” Whimsby said again, his head quirking to one side. “I should clarify: I personally have no idea who either of you are. But I am able to access some of Bren’s memory subsets. They have identified your faces as Master Sagum and Paladin Lux of House Rennok. The facial matches are one-hundred-percent, so I have no reason to doubt them.”
The smile on Sagum’s face drooped, right along with Lux’s falling heart.
“Wait,” Sagum said, all the excitement gone from his voice, now sounding cautious, as though he were dreading what he might learn. “Whimsby, how much can you remember? Can you remember anything? Do you even know that you’re Whimsby?”
Whimsby let out a wooden laugh, no spirit behind it, just poor simulation. “Of course. I am aware that I am called Whimsby. And as to your question about how much I can remember…”
The strange expression of amusement that had accompanied the creepy laugh suddenly dropped from Whimsby’s face.
“Oh.” Whimsby looked completely neutral again. “Well. That is a complicated question.”
“How? How is it complicated? What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I have many memories. However, it appears that the chronology of many of them is fragmented. So I cannot answer your question accurately.”