Bulletfoot One

by Marshall Rust

  "Were we on that topic?" Jessica13 asked.

  "Your words were, and I quote, 'Maybe once we're back at Sanctuary, we can install a better cooling system'," he said before he replayed an audio of Jessica13's voice.

  "Oh, right, so we were," she acknowledged. "Three hours ago but go on."

  "My concern that the Minato has no weapons system could be addressed by the installation of that Aegis Cannon," the AI said. "The light-density plasmablasts could easily be integrated into the assault matrix with only a negligible addition to power consumption."

  "The Minato is a support mech," she pointed out as they moved slowly across the causeway. "We don't need to upgrade the weapons system."

  "Ah, well, if we integrated that Phasmodon Mark II power cell into the Matrix, you wouldn't need to worry about the cooling systems," Mini said and highlighted the piece in question.

  Jessica13 hadn't known the name of that particular piece herself.

  Still, she shook her head. "No. We can’t simply fit anything we take a fancy to. All upgrades are to make you function optimally, not to turn you into something else."

  "Well then, if we could install that Brenner-Harbor z7 Processor, I would be able to transfer my lesser functions to it while I keep my main functions untouched," Mini continued.

  Jessica13 sighed.

  "That sound is identified as annoyance and or frustration," Mini extrapolated. "Am I to infer that the answer to the processor installation is also no?"

  "Very good, Mini," she said and wondered if the AI could detect the sarcasm in her voice.

  "Very well, only the cooling system upgrade it is." They reached the harness and the AI strapped himself in.

  "It's not that I don't want to upgrade you," Jessica13 said. "It's that I can't really use the parts without getting approval from Armstrong7 and I know that he wouldn't approve it."

  "You do not need to explain yourself to me," Mini said. "You brought me back to what humans call life. I trust you implicitly."

  She smiled when the smiley face appeared on her HUD. "Thanks, Mini. I'll get to work on those upgrades now."

  "That would be appreciated." With that, the mech went into sleep mode.

  The bulletfoot climbed hastily out of the cockpit to snag some cleaning materials before anyone else could. Not many resources could be wasted on cleaning, of course, but a quick spray into an oiling rag would at least keep the smell of stale sweat at bay. She replaced everything where she'd found it when she was finished, which was before El returned with the Guardians.

  It seemed Armstrong7 was more focused on the pilots than the bulletfoots and left them to either continue working on separating the piles of parts that had been salvaged from the pirates or repairing the suits that needed attention.

  Her mech needed repairing.

  Jessica13 climbed onto the back, opened it, and called up the data on how the AI was running. It reminded her that Mini had said adjusting his data to the information she had given him went against core programming, which was interesting. There was nothing wrong with him as he could identify pieces that Jessica13 herself would have had difficulty with.

  If there were no problems there, why would he have trouble identifying historical facts and even studying the air around himself for toxins and radiation? Any issues like that should have at least shown up on scans.

  But there was nothing—no sign of malfunction and not even a hint of software bugging out. She had done excellent work with the coding and it had cleaned the databanks thoroughly.

  So where did the malfunction come from?

  Jessica13 shook her head. Something didn’t make sense, and she called up Sanctuary's hard drive maintenance, an AI that protected the data cores of the whole bunker. It was essentially the guardian of their entire trove of knowledge, technological and otherwise.

  People called him the Librarian. It was supposed to be a joke since people in the Cities-that-Were had whole buildings dedicated to housing paper manus and books and the like. The people who maintained those buildings were called Librarians.

  "Good afternoon, Jessica13," the Librarian said when she called him up. "How can I assist you today?"

  "Hi, thanks for helping me," she said. "I'm having some issues with an AI core I brought up from one of the pirate mechs, and I hoped you could run a scan to make sure everything's operating the way it should be?"

  "Of course, Jessica13," the AI responded and displayed a smiley face on her screen. "If you would connect me to the interface, I'll see what I can do."

  "Coming right up," she responded, connected the wiring to Mini's interface, and watched intently as the Librarian's code began to integrate with her own.

  They were similar, which wasn’t that surprising since both their coding had the same source in the Athena genes.

  "No, wait, what are you doing?" Jessica13 asked when the Librarian accessed the data banks and began to shred the coding inside.

  "I’m merely cleaning some errant code," the AI replied, his voice still pleasant.

  "It's not errant it's only….history." She narrowed her eyes as she registered exactly what was taking place. It was deleting Mini's memories—everything that made him special and everything Jessica13 had loved about the mech before she even knew how to fix the AI again.

  Aside from the fact that it was unacceptable, Mini trusted her not to let something like that happen.

  "Okay," she said and leaned closer, pulled up the chip, and connected it to the interface as well. Her intervention brought what the Librarian was doing to a sudden halt. "Processing error. Please identify the source of the orders that have prompted you to delete the coding?"

  "The source of the code is… Access restricted—John5,” the AI informed her.

  Well, that meant John5 was the source of the coding that now erased everything in Mini's history files.

  "Yeah, that's not going to happen," Jessica13 said and physically disconnected the port from Mini's interface before she rebooted her AI back to the automatically saved state he had been in before connecting to the Librarian. "Mini, please tell me you're still there."

  "Minato beta 0.9, Shimura-Sendai Systems, online," the now-familiar, metallic and feminine voice chimed in Jessica13's headset. "Good afternoon, Jessica13."

  "No, we will not go through all that crap again," she mumbled irritably and immediately connected the AI to her databanks. "Please tell me you haven't been reverted to factory settings?"

  "Updating," the voice said and after a moment, the connection was successful. "Much better. What happened?"

  "I tried to connect you to the Sanctuary mainframe," Jessica13 explained while she continued to run checks to make sure nothing vital had been shredded. "Well, I did connect you, but the AI that maintains it began to delete memories from your data banks, apparently on the orders of John5. I don't know why but I stopped it as quickly as I could."

  "Your efforts are appreciated," Mini replied. "I'm experiencing a few compacting issues but that should be corrected. Is now corrected."

  "I'm sorry," she said and patted the shoulder of her mech while she told herself the AI could feel the gesture. "I… Why was it deleting your data? What was it deleting?"

  "The data that was accessed before the reboot…accessing now." The screen went dark for a few seconds and she held her breath and waited for the AI to respond. "It was accessing my data on world history. The data we discussed this morning."

  The data that said the air was clear outside, she reminded herself, and that said the world was safe—or at least less deadly than she had been led to believe her entire life. If the AI worked to delete that data, did that mean that it was trying to hide something?

  She couldn't believe she thought that. It didn't seem possible but at the same time, Jessica13 couldn't help but feel as though the questions had nagged at the back of her mind for years, ever since she had seen the sky and the horizons outside with her own eyes. Today was merely the catalyst, the tipping point where everything she had
accepted as truth was now challenged by a slew of contradictions.

  And it was only once Mini started talking that those doubts were given a real, slightly metallic and feminine voice.

  Right now, the questions screamed loudly in her head and she could no longer ignore them. Everything she believed in—truth, honesty, and loyalty—shrieked a protest. It was no longer possible to ignore the instincts she had never recognized but which had obviously worked within her subconscious. They had been brought to the fore by John5’s speech, which seemed ironic. The man who was, at least in some measure, responsible for the deception perpetuated at Sanctuary was the trigger that unleashed her unexpected clarity. It wasn’t possible to pretend it hadn’t happened and hope it would go away. She needed to do something.

  "What will you do?" Jessica13 asked.

  "I’m correcting the coding issues," Mini replied.

  "No, I wasn't talking to you, I was asking myself," she clarified. "They…uh, engineered me to ask questions to continue the work of the Seven, but if they are to be believed—if the words of the Great Prophet are to be believed—deleting data automatically can't be right. Which means I need to make it right myself."

  "How?" the AI asked.

  "I'll leave." She knew the spontaneous decision was out of character for her and paused for a moment to second-guess herself. She realized as she thought things through that it wasn’t so spontaneous, after all. Doubts and questions had definitely swirled below her surface consciousness for a very long time.

  She recognized now that she had moved toward this point in her life firmly without realizing it and somehow prepared herself for what was an inevitable outcome. A deep inner conviction assured her this was the right decision and she believed that instinct more and more with each passing second. "And I'm taking you with me."

  Chapter Eight

  Her hands shook alarmingly and a cold sweat began to collect on her arms as if her body disagreed with what her mind had irrevocably decided to do.

  It wasn't like she had been given a choice in this, she assured herself. It was in her genes. She was as curious as hell, and when that instinct was stifled, something in her immediately fought back. This was her resistance against the constraints that contradicted her fundamental nature. Jessica13 was not to blame for the fact that they had lied to her—and the entire bunker—and tried to keep her from discovery.

  The Great Prophet said people needed to head out to where something was waiting to be discovered. She saw clearly now that she wouldn’t discover anything hiding in a bunker whose leaders tried to keep her in the dark—literally as well as metaphorically.

  Even the mud on the ground was less stifling and claustrophobic than this damn place had begun to be. Her little room—the pride of her life thus far despite its lack of space—had begun to feel more cramped, small, and restrictive.

  She made her mind up to not remain in Sanctuary for even one more day. No one paid attention to what she was doing so it was the perfect opportunity. There were still people heading in and out of Sanctuary all day thanks to the false alarm about the attack.

  If there ever would be a time to leave without anyone noticing her exit, it was now. This was the kind of opportunity she couldn't afford to miss out on.

  "No more," she said softly. "No more."

  It had been easy to take food from the kitchen. She had done it for months and brought it to her room to attempt to eat while she was reading or watching something. Unfortunately, she always gave up on it because the food was slightly less terrible when it was served hot.

  In the back of her mind, she’d made vague plans to get a heater in her room to warm the food, but it was always put off in favor of other projects. The most recent of these was fixing Mini, which demanded all her effort, focus, and resources.

  Thankfully, that had resulted in her having several days' worth of food stashed away. Better yet, it was the kind of food that would never go bad. It had been designed that way.

  While she knew she’d need to eat at some point, it wasn’t terribly high on her present priority list. She had a pack and proceeded to shove her belongings into it with the door locked securely behind her. There was little enough room as it was but when she began to pack what she needed, the space seemed to grow.

  The food was the first to be stowed, followed quickly by her working tools. If she had any hope of maintaining Mini once they were out in the wild, she would need them more than she would need the food.

  With those stored, there wasn't much space for personal belongings. Her drawings made with charcoal on scraps of unused paper too small to be used in the recyc level would have to be left behind. As would her books, which had drawings as well. The weak material her pack was made from barely held the necessities as it was.

  There was one picture she couldn't bear to leave behind. The only one she had of her mother that her father had given her was of both her parents together in a long-term exposure on a ceramic plate. She was smiling, her hand on his stomach, and he was doubled over. Jessica13 had never been able to tell if she had punched him in the gut as a joke or if she was tickling him. He hadn't been around long enough for her to ask.

  It was too big, however. She scowled at it and tried to fight back a few angry tears. No way would she leave it behind. She couldn't.

  An idea came to her and she retrieved one of her tools—a small hammer used to knock the smaller bolts inside the mech into place. She laid the picture on the bed and with cautious taps of the hammer, began to break the plate.

  "I'm sorry mom," she whispered when a few cracks appeared close to the woman's face. The taps continued until everything was gone except for the two faces. Her mother laughed from the image and her father looked like he was blowing all the air out of his lungs.

  The process was finished and all she had left of them were black-and-white faces on the ceramic plate. Despite the rough treatment, they were still visible. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and tucked the piece into her pocket, then brushed the shards off her bed.

  The gesture was pointless effort, really. It wasn't like she would sleep on it again, not even if she didn’t escape. If she failed, it was banishment to the lower levels for her—the farming levels if she was lucky and the recyc levels if she wasn't.

  No, if she was lucky, she would get out of this place. Anything else was the worst option possible.

  She closed her pack securely and slung it over her back before she eased out of her room and closed and locked the door behind her. It wouldn't stop someone who really wanted to get in, but it would give her a few minutes, at least.

  A plan had already begun to take shape in her mind. No one would pay attention to her until she reached the elevator. That was when people would ask questions. There was no pointless power expenditure allowed and to send the elevator up with the full weight of the Minato would definitely waste power.

  It would be difficult to get around this but not impossible. All she needed was a signature from Armstrong7 authorizing her to head up to the defense sector to stress-test the improvements she'd made on Mini. Word would have filtered to him that she had worked out some kind of improvements on the mech already, so it wouldn't be too out of the ordinary for her to stress-test the mech.

  And, hopefully, with the alarms that had been set off, he would be too swamped to think too deeply into her request. There would probably be people who questioned it at the door of the elevator, but with the signature of the CO on her side, questions would only be raised when someone realized the Minato was heading away from Sanctuary instead of stress-testing. By then, she would already be too far away for them to do anything about it.

  Sure, they could send someone after her, but it would be a massive waste of resources to pursue someone who didn't want to be found. The mech was one no one else could use anyway, and the food didn’t seem to have been missed as no one had raised any questions about it.

  The only real loss to Sanctuary would be the tools, and it wasn't like t
hey didn't have spares.

  Her plan seemed to be the best one she could devise so she picked up one of the forms for outside stress-testing and filled the paperwork in quickly, which left the one thing only Armstrong7 could do. He had to sign it.

  The man didn't like his office. He stood well above six feet tall and the tiny little space he had been allocated as the CO of the defensive level simply didn't fit him. It was too small and the chair always made him look like he was hunched over his desk. She had to imagine that he constantly toppled the tall stacks of papers he needed to peruse and sign before he sent them to his superiors.

  Like John5.

  Even thinking the name sent cold sweats across her skin. The man she had looked up to for all those years had tried to kill Mini in front of her nose. The sense of betrayal was absolute.

  She reached the office where predictably, the tall, muscular Armstrong7 was bent over the tiny desk crammed into his tiny room. She had no idea how he didn't feel claustrophobic since he was so much larger than her.

  "Jessie," the CO said and barely looked up to see who stood in the doorway. He sifted through a stack of papers while he waited for someone on the comm line in his office. "How can I help you?"

  "Well, I can see you're very busy so I won't take up too much of your time," Jessica13 said meekly as she left her bag outside the door and stepped inside. "Are you? Really busy, that is."

  "The people running Sanctuary weren't happy that we issued the alarm without confirming that we were under attack," he said and shook his head in what might have been frustration. "They don't think it's conducive to the secure environment they wish to foster in Sanctuary to have alarms activating all the time, so they want there to be some accountability. They also want me to speak to the entire bunker to tell them it was only a false alarm and no lives were lost and they can all settle into their lives again."

  The life she now tried to escape. The reminder was a little discomforting and she clenched her hands together to keep them from shaking again.

  "Anyway, how can I help you, Jessie?" Armstong7 asked without looking up from his work. "Please make it fast. I don't want to rush you but I am in something of a bind here."