Fixit Adventures Anthology

by Erik Schubach

He warbled out a noise that sounded suspiciously like an, “Aww.”

  Then Vashon was holding a hand out, and Glitch trundled over and grabbed her hand gently with his grappler. She gave him a smile. “Thanks, buddy, you're tops in my book.”

  I smiled at them then went to work removing the wrist servo. My pad showed it to be almost an exact match to hers, though a bit more industrial, and not medical grade, it would work.

  As I removed it and prepped the connectors, my ranger continued her story. “Many cells of Betweeners had banded together for a raid on Gamadine. An 'all ships' was broadcast, and every Sky Guard vessel pulled off their patrols to go to the aid of the city. Records show I responded as well.”

  Wait, the Betweener raid of the second largest floating city on Prime? That was the most audacious and daring act of piracy ever attempted by the people who rejected Galactic Federation control or to abide by the laws of the Tau Ceti Prime government. They timed it in protest of the changing of leadership to Lady Peregrine.

  I looked over at the woman who held my heart. I remembered that the Raid of Gamadine ended with over a hundred Sky Guard rangers dead, thirty Gama City Guards, fifteen civilians, and three hundred and four pirates dead. It came down to the last ranger standing. She brought her own tumbril down upon herself and Tannon, the leader of the United Betweeners, as they were engaged in mortal combat.

  I blinked at the amazing woman laying on my workbench as I brought the prepped servo to her. Was she THAT ranger? They said she had died. But then my blood ran cold thinking of all the implants and her cranial processor. Maybe she had.

  She said as I slid the servo into her hip socket and started making the hard connections and power hookups, “I'm told I had stopped the pirates but was mortally injured. My dying body was put into stasis and sent to New Terra.”

  She's told? Records show? Didn't she remember? Was the traumatic experience blocked out? Or were they in the replaced brain tissue?

  Vash growled out the next as her hip started flexing in diagnostic mode when Glitch fused the power leads to the terminals on the motor, “My mother wouldn't accept the doctor's prognosis, that there was too much damage to repair. My body could be, and be technically legal, but not the massive damage to my brain.”

  I reached out absently, and Blip handed me the dermal regenerator as Vash sat up and flexed her hip on her own, testing her range of motion. She said in a haunted voice as I healed her flesh, “She knew... My mother knew I wouldn't want what she did. She contacted the Director of Sciences for Prime, Anna Germaine...” She looked at me and admitted, “Head of Covert Sciences. She tasked her with saving me at all costs. I became a black project, no record of me shared with even the Galactic Federation.”

  She trusted me with that admission. That there were things Prime hid from the Federation. It was a trust I vowed to reciprocate once I knew she was going to survive. I'm sure that just knowing that Covert Sciences existed would get me disappeared, or worse.

  My ranger swiveled on the table and slid to her feet, standing unsteadily. I reached out to steady her, and so did Glitch, Wrongway, and Blip. Flower squeed in sorrow she couldn't do the same. They all loved my girl. She smiled at us all and waved us off. “Thanks, I got this.”

  We moved back, and she picked up the makeshift power pack, the leads from it connected through her eye, and she took a few steps. Lights flickered in her good eye as she smiled. “Only eighty-one point three percent mobility and seventy-two point one percent efficiency, but it'll do.”

  Was it wrong that it turned me on a bit that she could run a self-diagnostic like that even on the bastardized system I had her cobbled together with? I just wish I knew more about organics, or cybernetics so that I could do more. But I did know machines and computers, and so I fixed the parts of my love that I could.

  She smiled at me then soured at my expectant look. She exhaled. Is it wrong I marveled at her synthetic left lung which was much more efficient than her organic right lung? What she shared next still haunts me. “I woke up... well, sort of me. Much like my heads-up display, everything was coming at me in data streams. I knew that I was designated Vashon. I could pull up all the data about myself, and I was panicking because I didn't – feel... well, human.”

  She looked at me like she was trying to explain something she couldn't explain to herself. The heartache I saw there broke my own heart. She straightened, but I pulled her into a chair, there was still a lot left to do before she was stable enough to move around, I had to do something about a portable power pack and protecting all the leads running into her skull.

  With a swallow, she shared, “I guess I killed three techs and injured a dozen guards in my panic trying to get out of there. I didn't know what I was, who I was. I can't tell you how terrifying that was, but terrifying didn't compute, and that compounded the problem until I was restrained and... switched off.”

  She got a look of resolve and shared, “One of the projects that Doctor Germaine had been working on in Covert Sciences was self-aware artificial intelligence.”

  She looked at me in a manner that told me she knew my secret about my pingers. My mother and I had done what Anna Germain couldn't. I actually believe that she hadn't known until she found out that Flower had 'woken up' after we got Glitch back home from Anna's lab, where they were going to dissect him and try to reverse engineer his consciousness. Vash was just waiting for me to tell her the truth about it, and I was ready, but after she was better.

  She sighed then continued as I slapped her hands away from the monofilament traces heading into her eye. And I started using flexible carbon-polymer insulator wrap on them, bundling them together. “I had been called in days before the... incident. They developed a way to map the memory engrams of the human brain and could even place false engrams in it.”

  My eyes widened, realizing that they could take, let's say, all of her combat knowledge and implant it in another brain, and that person would instantly have all of her training without having to go through the months and years it took to acquire it. It was like... programming the human brain. Wait, that was against the Humanities Act too.

  I saw her sharp eye studying me as I processed it, she seemed satisfied with my realization. Was she arming me with this information to protect me from what was sure to happen once we got her back to New Terra?

  Then she shared as I fashioned a carbon polymer cranial seal with Glitch's help as he gauged the exact dimensions needed for a hermetic seal and trimmed off the excess from my work. We were a well synchronized team, knowing exactly what the other needed. “They wanted to try to use my memories to make a battle computer AI for the Dark Fleet we have to counter the covert Obsidian Pacification Force the Galactic Federation has hidden from the member systems for generations.”

  They had a pacification what? I felt the blood drain from my face and a shiver go down my spine as I whispered in realization, “Ursula Prime?” But that was a quantum fusion meltdown that wiped out that system... right? She saw that realization in my eyes and nodded. Oh god, the bedtime stories of the Federation's Dark Fleet were real?

  I started to seal her socket, and she pulled away a bit. I gave her a chastising look, then a sneak attack peck on the lips, which made her smile hugely. And in her distraction, Glitch grabbed the back of her head with his grappler, and I pushed the seal in. She swatted both of us away with patty-caking hands. “Ow. You two sneaks.” I made it all better by kissing her brow above her eye socket that looked like a black pirate's eyepatch now.

  She gave me a scrunch lipped smile at that, eyeballing me with her good eye. I crossed my eyes at her. She chuckled, but it sounded tinny and two-toned.

  Oh, crossing eyes.

  I grabbed a fiber camera I used to snake into hard to reach areas when I worked on my pingers and started jury-rigging it.

  Her voice was low and wondering, barely above a whisper. “You don't see the monster, do you? The machine?”

  Ok, that was the first time I felt like slappin
g the girl I loved. I pointed at her in warning, she knew better to have ever questioned it. I whispered in warning to her, even though every pinger in the shop would hear, “It doesn't matter one flanterskelling, crystal licking iota if you are flesh, or carbon fiber, or steel. The ingredients don't make the person.”

  Hell, most of my family were pingers that didn't make them monsters or machines – they were people.

  Then I had to hug her when a tear ran down the cheek of the strongest woman I knew. She just nodded into my shoulder as I hugged her. Then after her shaking calmed I pulled back, giving her a seductive grin. “I'm probably the one person who's a little turned on by your... ummm... improvements.”

  She smiled, that wonder in her eye again, then it turned wicked as she said, “You'd love the pleasure bots in the city then.” I flicked her nose. She was being ornery, and I loved her for it.

  Vash sat back, and I eyeballed her for any other quips, then went back to work on the camera, setting up a wireless interface to her encoded systems core. Doctor Germain was going to be livid that a dirter hacked her military grade encryption so easily.

  My girl's synthesized voice carried a haunted tone as she explained, “I would have been a vegetable, or more accurately, a mindless machine once they replaced so much of my brain. I was a blank slate that could be programmed like any other pinger to 'act' human. I would have been if I hadn't volunteered for that black project earlier.”

  My eyes widened as I got what she was saying.

  “Anna imprinted my recorded memory engrams onto my new memory core. I became a copy of the woman I had been with one important difference. If she had known, I wonder if the doctor still would have done it.”

  She looked up at me and asked, “What is a memory?”

  I shrugged, mumbling, “Hold still,” As I reached up and clipped the camera to the wrapped leads coming out of her eyepatch. She pulled back and looked dizzy, closing her good eye when I switched it on and said to her, “Calibrate.”

  She nodded and opened her eye, I saw lights flickering in it as she communicated with her processors, by the lords of the cosmos it was sexy as hell she could do that. Her eye focussed again as I saw the camera start to follow me. Good, now she'd have depth perception.

  She chuckled, “It is sort of fish-eyed. My optical processor is compensating.”

  I nodded, well it had needed a wide field of view for what it was.

  Then I answered her question as I started looking around for something that would work better for a power pack than a dangling power crystal in a receiver and regulator. “It is all the information required to recall any given moment in time you see fit to be, well... memorable I assume. The data if you will.” I wasn't into wetware and biologicals, I was a mechanic, so I was sort of talking out of my ass there.

  She shook her head as I got Wrongway's attention, indicating the jury-rigged mess dangling at my girl's hip with my splayed fingers wiggling all around as I shrugged at him. He whistled and squeed something that sounded suspiciously like “Aye aye, Fixit,” and he trundled off, pointing in the wrong direction to find something to make my mess a little more elegant.

  We didn't know how long it would be before there was a lull in the storm long enough that we could get a medical evac down here for my wounded Sky Guard ranger.

  I went about checking her various other wounds. Blip had caught most of them. I ran the dermal regenerator along her ribs, feeling with my hands. She winced, hissing out a breath. She had a broken rib, nothing I had could deal with that. It would have to wait.

  She shook her head in wonder as she watched Dubdub go scavenging in the piles of parts stacked all over in the bays. “They really do love you, don't they? And they anticipate your needs.”

  I nodded, patting Glitch, and he made a low rumble, like a purr. “And they love you too.”

  Vashon took a breath, looking at the ceiling and picked our conversation back up, “Data? No. That is only part of it. Once I woke again. I was me again, but it felt like a dream. Like I was disassociated with my... well with my own sense of being. I knew who I was, where I was, but it was like you said. Just data.”

  She looked at me pleadingly as I accepted a bucket of warm water and a sponge from Blip to start wiping her skin down, getting all the dirt and blood off of it. By the gods she was beautiful!

  Her voice had that pleading tone I saw in her eye. “You see, there is an important component to memory that Anna and her team didn't anticipate. But I was living it as I remembered everything, all at the same time. All the data was there as you said, but the most important component to memories are the emotions tied to them. The emotions are what make the memories mean anything. To make them – real.”

  She shrugged. “That's what caused the rift between Lady Peregrine and me. Sure, the fact they turned me into this – thing – against my wishes was bad enough, but imagine looking at someone and remembering she is your mother, but having no emotion associated with it. It was like watching a video of a memory. You could see it but not feel it.”

  After a long exhale, she tried explaining though I was grasping it and it was horrifying to think of what it had been like for her. “My mother may as well have been the character in a book I was reading. So all the 'real' memories I had were the ones with emotions since I was awakened. My new memories had all the emotion and terror and rage at the feeling of not being human. So that is all I have to associate with my mother and Doctor Germaine.”

  I glanced back when I heard Wrongway returning with a triumphant squeal. I smiled hugely at the leather shoulder pack he had in his grappler. It had been my mother's. Part of her flight gear I used as my own now. I praised him. “Perfect Double Dub. You're the man!”

  I accepted it from him as he squeed an, “Awww.”

  I started wrapping my cobbled together mess in carbon polymer so I could slip it in the pack without it all shorting and setting my girl on fire. Pausing to fashion a redundant power and memory crystal receiver onto the mess. She watched me work in fascination.

  Vash shared, “We realized that my new memories had the proper emotional reciprocal, and the raw data was backed up in my new processor without it on the fly. Anna shared that emotional responses are stored in a different part of the brain, and must be associated with the engrams in a way they didn't understand yet. She promised that she would figure out how to reunite the emotions with my memories. She failed. My mother is a stranger to me, and the only good memories I have now are with you. And I don't want to lose them.”

  Flower turned to Glitch and spoke in the new audible binary they have developed the warbling high and low tones. I smiled when he sped off up the stairs to my office to retrieve some clothes for my tantalizingly exposed woman.

  I looked at her then closed my eyes firmly as I admitted in a hoarse, whispering voice, “Because she doesn't understand how AI consciousness works... I do. Maybe I can help reunite the two pieces to make you whole again. But it will take some time for me to learn your systems.”

  She looked almost ready to cry, hope on her face, but I saw no surprise in her expression.

  She rolled her good eye at my scrutiny and prompted like she knew what I was thinking, “Of course I knew Fixie. What kind of coincidence makes every pinger in Agri grid A1 attain self-awareness? The odds are precisely...” Light flickered in her eye as she finished, “Ninety-two trillion, five hundred million, two hundred and three to one that it was random.”

  I wanted to take her right there in the repair bay, it was so flanterslkelling arousing that she could calculate that in her head, I mean, just how hot was that!? I could only get roughly into the ninety trillion range with my lame organic brain.

  Glitch joined us with a set of coveralls, a shirt, and a piece of trollite. I asked as I handed the clothing to my girlfriend and stuffed the cobbled power core into the shoulder pack, “What's the trollite for Glitchy?” He looked at the burned out crystal with his ocular port as sparks drizzled out of the connection betwe
en his mobility platform and his orb-shaped body.

  Then the aperture in his eye widened as he slapped his forehead with his grappler, then took the crystal back from me and shot back up the stairs with a long squee. The poor Glitchy guy, I wonder what he thought he had brought me.

  By the time Vashon was dressed, we found out he had meant to bring my mother's work boots. I smiled at the old leather. I would have worn them, but mom had bigger feet than me... so did my girl.

  Vash patted his grappler as she accepted them and slid them on. “Thanks, buddy.” Then she stood tall. Looking like some sexy super soldier from the ancient databases.

  She stepped up to me. Her eye uncertain and pleading again, as her straight ebony hair slipped down her back, shining in the artificial lights of the shop. I looked at her in wonder. “You're so beautiful, Vash.” Then added as I felt a blush burning my cheeks, “I love you.”

  Another tear slipped down the warrior's cheek as she whispered, “I love you too, Vega.” She leaned tentatively down, and I raised my chin to meet her. She gave me a long, whisper gentle kiss that conveyed so much to me.

  Fuck! I didn't want to cry.

  Then she was all business as she took a half step back to look me over. “Now, let's look at your own injuries, Fixit.”

  I shook my head and grabbed her arm and gleeped when she didn't budge when I tried to drag her to the stairs. She was so strong, even after taking so much damage. I may have smiled a little as I felt her bicep muscle when I reprimanded, “No, first thing is getting you to bed, getting fluids in you to replace the blood loss – then my pingers will see to me.”

  She chuckled, “Are you copping a feel of my muscles?” Then inclined her head and asked as I blushed at being caught, “Is that an order?”

  I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  She saluted me, giving me a hungry look that set certain parts of me humming and warming up. “Yes, ma'am.” Then she let me lead her up to my cot. I lived in my office more than the storage containers on the other side of the compound that had been converted into living quarters for us dirters maintaining the grid.