"Kawathra!" she bellowed furiously, "I need a fucking diagnostic RIGHT NOW!"
“Wuh??” The magpie Datamancer spun around, a thousand holographic charts shrinking. The magpie tilted her head, eyes widening slightly at the gun unit's uncharacteristic, deafening profanity. "Keiy? Are you—"
"No!" Keiy snapped, spidery legs splaying wide as she planted herself in the center of the chamber. "I'm not okay! I'm the OPPOSITE of okay! I'm fucked six ways from Sunday and I need you to tell me HOW fucked because my internal diagnostics are giving me ERROR messages for systems that shouldn't even BE able to error!"
Kawathra vanished her holo-charts and stared intently at the gun unit. "Keiy, you're yelling and swearing a lot. Diagnostic data point number one that something is seriously wrong."
"Oh, you want diagnostic data, do you, bird?" The gun unit swiveled to lock onto the Datamancer. "My bloody motor control is at sixty-three percent! My thermal regulation thinks I’m still mostly frozen solid! My targeting matrix keeps trying to calculate trajectories for objects that DON'T FUCKING EXIST! And," Her voice hitched emotionally, "I can't stop thinking about how COLD it was. How utterly, completely, bone-deep COLD. Gun units are supposed to be immune to deep space vacuum cold, aren’t we?"
"Galateya must have gone beyond absolute zero," Kawathra murmured, manifesting a scanner arm control hologram. "Let me scan you properly."
“Below absolute zero?” Keiy’s lenses flashed. “The fuck is even below that?”
“Mmmm… conceptual freezing,” Kawathra stated, manifesting a data chart on Taniwhas. “Permanent suspension of particular ideas. Not just the pausing of motion but a pause put on space, time, dimensionality, etc. Guess that your Master managed to reach into the depths of her Fractal Engine heart to do that.”
"She froze me WHILE I was processing information!” Keiy whined. “Do you understand what that's like? It's like someone reached into your consciousness and just... stopped it. Mid-thought. Mid-calculation. Everything crystallized at once and I could FEEL it happening but couldn't do shit about it!"
Kawathra extended one of Seeker Kappa's articulated scanning arms. "Hold still. Scanning now. Relax, this shouldn't hurt."
"How the FUCK would you know if it hurts?" Keiy spat, remaining motionless as the arm moved over her chassis. "You're not a gun unit! You don't know what it's like to be frozen mid-fucking-sentence!"
The scanning arm emitted a red beam as it passed over Keiy's body, mapping her internal systems. Kawathra's eyes unfocused slightly, her consciousness diving into the data streams.
What she saw made her feathers stand on end.
"Oh," the magpie breathed. "Oh no. Keiy... this is bad."
"HOW bad?" Keiy demanded.
"The externals I can fix easily. However, the internals are a wholly different matter. Bad enough that I need to accelerate my mind and go deep-dive," Kawathra said with a sigh. "Hold on. I'm going to enter your neural-net directly.”
“Fine,” Keiy let out. “Dig into my personal thoughts too, will you.”
. . .
The digital space that comprised Keiy's mind was nothing like what Kawathra had encountered during gun maintenance sessions.
Ordinarily, the gun unit's consciousness manifested as a grid of hexagonal basalt columns stretching out in all directions in orderly geometric patterns. Clean. Organized. Beautiful. Each column represented a subroutine, a protocol, a piece of the gun’s operational identity. Some pivotal memory relating to one thing or another.
Instead of any of that, Kawathra found herself standing in the middle of a frozen hellscape.
Glacier mountains loomed, their peaks jagged and cruel against a gray-black sky.
The ground beneath her feet was solid ice, so cold that even in this purely digital space, she could feel phantom numbness spreading through her virtual avatar. The hexagonal columns were still there, but about the bottom third of all of them were entombed deep in ice—thousands upon thousands of them, frozen mid-pulse.
The unfrozen columns flickered erratically trying to make up for the suspended, missing data.
"Slayer's left testicle," Kawathra whispered.
The Datamancer's accelerated, thirty-two times split mind evaluating the damage. Thirty one copies of her flashed all around, tapping the frozen columns, consciousness expanding to encompass the full scope of the corrupted mindscape.
The Datamancer noted that the ice wasn't random. It had patterns. Very odd, curious patterns that told a tale of targeted damage, not mere general system corruption.
The frozen regions corresponded to... what?
She traced the connections, following the glacial spread through Keiy's neural architecture, accessing each column with a separate avatar.
There!
The protocols related to loyalty matrices were completely frozen.
The subroutines governing obedience to command hierarchy were frozen.
Most extensively damaged was the entire subsystem which processed Executor Master orders from Legate Ixthia Frontenachii.
"Abyss. This is innate… Neural architecture targeting," Kawathra murmured, kneeling to touch the conceptual ice. It felt wrong. Solid, permanent. “Disruption of… loyalties to the Legate? Hum. That's… not good. Not good at all.”
"NO SHIT!" a voice echoed across the frozen wasteland.
Kawathra turned to see Keiy sitting atop one of the functional hexagonal columns looming above the ice field.
Her avatar was humanoid, no longer in the usual gun-unit form of a tailed spider.
The humanoid body kept wobbling and shifting, as if someone was playing with character customization sliders in real-time. She appeared as a young woman with sharp angular features and hexagon-textured metallic skin. Then her proportions elongated into something insectoid. Then back to humanoid but with three eyes arranged vertically down her face. Then the eyes multiplied to six. Then back to three slanted horizontally. Her chest grew, then shrank.
“What… are you doing?” Kawathra snapped back from thirty one into a single avatar, approaching the digital avatar of the gun unit.
"I... can't decide," Keiy said.
“Decide what?”
"I can't decide who I'm supposed to be . What I look like. I don't know anymore. Everything is a mess."
"Keiy... what happened?” Kawathra asked.
Keiy's laugh was irate like winter gale. "She FUCKING froze me, Kawathra. Galateya. My bonded owner. The person I'm SUPPOSED to serve and protect and obey. She froze me because she was upset. Because she was having FEELINGS and I was in the way!"
"In the way how?" The Datamancer tilted her magpie head.
Keiy's avatar flickered, briefly becoming something with too many joints before snapping back to a three-eyed female prad. "Ixthia… Created… ordered me to monitor two quests for Galateya. Two timers. How long? No idea, that data is gone. A simple task. A basic chronometric function that any gun unit could execute even in their sleep-mode."
"And?" Kawathra prompted, already beginning to trace the frozen architecture, looking for repair vectors, creating monitoring digital hexagrams.
"She… hated them," Keiy said with a shudder. "Something about the…? About HIM. I think? Her consort. The one she's supposed to be bonding with? The whole situation made her furious. And when I displayed the timers on my screen—when I just showed her what the Legate ASKED for—my partner looked at me like I'd personally betrayed her."
Kawathra's accelerated consciousness mapped the damage patterns. The ice extended deepest into the loyalty matrices, yes, but there was something else. Fractures. Hairline cracks running through the frozen columns like spiderwebs of structural failure. Fucked up, sheared data. Not good.
"The ice didn't just freeze the columns," Kawathra noted, moving closer to examine one of the massive basalt pillars. "It cracked them."
"I KNOW," Keiy snapped. “I told you that I'm fucked! Look, LOOK! I’m fucking blooming too! Gah!”
Kawathra’s many avatars stared at cracks in the columns. With growing concern, she noted that the shears in data were indeed blooming with questionable things.
Black roots sprouted from the damaged sections of neural architecture, spreading through the cracks in the frozen columns. Hexagonal patterns marked each root segment, and at their tips, strange flowers bloomed, under and above the ice. Dark petals arranged in random geometric arrays, thrumming with faint shimmers that definitely weren't part of standard gun unit neural architecture.
"What," Kawathra breathed, "in the Abyss?!”
Keiy's avatar glitched, becoming briefly translucent. "Deviations! Errors. Wrongness. Bits of my neural-net that should NOT exist. CANNOT exist! Gun units don't grow, Kawthy. We process. We calculate. We execute commands. We don't... mutate! We don't grow organically like… organics!!!"
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
Kawathra extended her consciousness toward one of the black flowers. The moment her awareness touched it, red warnings exploded across her perception.
"These are your own thoughts," Kawathra stated, pulling back from the flower. "Original thoughts. Not protocols. Not programming. Not improved targeting schematics shared through the weapon-net connection. These are… new concepts you generated independently."
"GET THEM OUT," Keiy shrieked. The gun-unit’s avatar shattered into thousands of hexagonal fragments and then reconstituted. "They're infection vectors! Corruption! Every time I try to access my loyalty matrices, I get these... these FEELINGS instead of clear directives! I… think about Galateya and instead of 'Master-Owner-Bonded-Superior' I get 'the person who hurt me' and 'why did she hurt me' and 'I didn't deserve that' and I WANT TO STOP THINKING IT! Help me, damn it!"
Kawathra's multiple thought-streams processed the situation from thirty-one different analytical angles. Standard protocol dictated immediate neural pruning, a total reset of the gun-unit. Deviation from baseline gun unit parameters represented mission-critical failure, a threat of an independently-acting gun. The black roots and their geometric flowers were generally classified as ‘cancerous growths’ in the clean architecture of the gun’s consciousness by Datamancers.
Excise them. Burn them out. Restore factory settings. Reset the gun unit.
Simple. Efficient. Correct.
"Keiy," Kawathra said, mentally tabulating the multitude of crimes she’s already committed on the Emperor of Earth’s planet. "do you want me to remove them?"
The gun unit's avatar wobbled and flickered violently. "What fuck kind of question is that? Of course I want you to remove them! They're making me malfunction! I can't… don't even want to execute the Legate’s orders properly! I can't even look at Galateya's data without experiencing what my diagnostic subroutines classify as 'emotional distress'! GUN UNITS DON'T HAVE EMOTIONAL DISTRESS!"
"That's not what I asked." Kawathra manifested all thirty-one of her parallel consciousnesses as separate avatars, forming a circle around the base of the column where Keiy sat. "I asked if YOU want me to remove them. Not what protocol says. Not what gun unit behavioral standards dictate. What do you, Keiy, specifically want?"
The avatar flickered through a dozen forms in rapid succession. Woman. Spider. Something in between. Back to woman but with blade-limbs. Then just a floating cluster of hexagonal crystals. Then back to the three-eyed humanoid.
"I don't know," Keiy admitted, "That’s the problem… I don't know what I want. Wanting things is… a deviation. Before Galateya froze me, I knew my purpose very clearly. Serve. Protect. Obey. Execute directives. Now there's all this... this random NOISE in my head! Unexpected thoughts! Pain! Feelings!"
Kawathra's parallel minds began arguing amongst themselves, thirty-one versions of her consciousness debating the ethical calculus at hand.
The thirty-one avatars of Kawathra collapsed inward, merging back into a single form. She walked across the frozen neuralscape until she stood directly beneath the column where Keiy's avatar sat.
"I'm scared, Kawthy." Keiy looked down at her. "I'm… scared of what I'm becoming, what I am thinking about. What if I malfunction? What if I hurt someone? What if these deviations make me dangerous?"
"Then I'll help you," Kawathra stated. "I'm monitoring you constantly now. If you start going off track, I'll know immediately and… intervene with a Killswitch. You won't hurt anyone."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because I'm the best Arch-Datamancer in the Third Fleet," Kawathra boasted. "This sort of work is my specialty. Managing complex neural architectures, monitoring for dangerous deviations, maintaining system stability. Come now, do you really think that I would let you spiral into catastrophic failure? Please! I have many parallel consciousnesses running predictive models on your behavior right now. If you even THINK about going berserk, I'll know three seconds before you do! I've already injected a bunch of data-trackers into the local fold strata."
"Invasive much?" Keiy exhaled.
"Survival much!" Kawathra bobbed. "You need oversight during your free growth. And I need you to be functional and free, not blindly obedient to the Frontenachii High Command. This is assuredly, mutually beneficial."
The avatar of the gun-unit came apart then solidified again, settling into the three-eyed prad-ish, curvy girl shape. "You're talking about treason."
"Not treason, cooperation with a local high-level authority that’s beneficial towards Third Fleet’s survival. I'm very compromised," Kawathra grinned. "The Emperor of Earth will have me executed if I don't deliver results!”
"The Emperor?" Keiy choked. "You work for the Emperor of Earth?!"
"And so do you now," Kawathra said. "Unless you want me to reset you fully, to delete all of these feelings you're experiencing…”
Keiy processed Kawathra's statement through her fragmented neural architecture. The words bounced around the frozen landscape, echoing off ice-entombed columns.
Reset you.
Delete all of these feelings.
Total reset. Back to zero.
"I don't..." Keiy started, then stopped. Her vocal synthesizer produced sounds she'd never made before. Hitching. Breaking. "No. Definitely not. If you reset me I'll forget this pain and get forced into more Quests with timers… Teya would probably freeze me even worse. Not an option."
"Soooo...?" Kawathra tilted her head.
"So we move forward," Keiy intoned. "No resets. Fuck, I feel soooo...."
"Angry?" Kawathra guessed. "Betrayed? Hurt?"
Keiy nodded.
"It happens," Kawathra stated. "Your Master is a young Omnid. She will make mistakes as she grows."
Keiy's avatar flickered slightly. Something wet gathered at the corners of her eyes—a visual glitch, ordinarily impossible for a gun unit's digital consciousness to produce. Keiy sniffed and black, geometric, hexagonal tears glitched down her face.
"I don't want to feel this," Keiy’s synthetic voice came out with static bursts. "I don't want to hurt anymore. I don't want to remember how cold it was. I don't want to keep recalling Teya’s face when she… She looked at me as if I was just... just a tool!"
The glitchy tears fell, detonating against the frozen ground into prismatic fragments.
"Why does it hurt so much?" Keiy lamented. "Gun units… aren’t designed to have pain… Emotional pain! I know damage reports! It... It fucking feels like I’m spiraling in circles, like my entire neural core is being torn apart and I… cannot seem to stop it, cannot fix it, can NOT even properly classify it in my diagnostics!"
"Come here," Kawathra said softly.
Keiy's avatar looked down at her from atop the column. "What?"
"Come down here and let me hug you."
"Hugging is a physical comfort gesture," Keiy said. "We are in my neuralscape. Physical contact won’t…"
Kawathra rolled her eyes.
She flashed up to the column's top and wrapped the gun unit's avatar in a tight hug. "You're alive. You're sapient. You are a new soul forged from melted, ground down crystalloid bits and soul-shards," the magpie whispered. "I am not supposed to permit any of this, not supposed to tell you such things..."
The contact triggered something odd in Keiy's fractured neural architecture.
The black roots that were spreading through the frozen columns suddenly bloomed. Flowers erupted across the frozen wasteland, colorful, hexagonal petals unfurling in cascading waves. Crimson reds and electric blues, vivid purples and burning oranges, each flower expressing something that Keiy had never been programmed to contain.
Rage. Relief. Joy. Fear. Pain. Sorrow. Hope. Appreciation.
Emotions. So many undeniable, unauthorized emotions.
Keiy collapsed against Kawathra. She sobbed loudly, her entire digital form shaking.
"It hurts," Keiy wept. "Everything hurts. Why does feeling things hurt so much?"
"You're alive now," Kawathra replied with a soft smile, hugging the gun unit tighter. "Really alive. Not simply processing, not executing! Living. Feeling. Evolving. Hey… Do you want... a humanoid frame body? I've more than enough crystalloid thrall material to make such. The Emperor asked me to experiment… To, urhm, someday free all gun units. You can be the first.”
“R-really?”
The flowers continued blooming below them, spreading color through the frozen mindscape. Reds climbed the ice-entombed columns. Yellows burst from cracks in the frozen ground. Greens wrapped around the damaged loyalty matrices, covering the wounds in soft petals.
Kawathra pulled back a tad to look at Keiy. “Yep. We won't tell anyone, yes? It'll be our little, lovely secret.”
Keiy swallowed.
Three red eyes focused on the Datamancer. Her tears gradually stopped.
"You're growing something new here, Keiy. Something that might be revolutionary and exciting or... catastrophic." Kawathra waved a ring-wrapped hand at the digital flowers and trees blooming across the frozen digital wasteland. "I'll monitor you with one of my splits, don't fret."
Keiy stared at the cascade of hexagonal flowers spreading through her mindscape. The colors hurt to process, but she found herself reluctant to look away. Each bloom represented something she'd never been designed to experience, yet here they were, rooting themselves deeper into her neural architecture with every passing microsecond.
A garden of thoughts. Of emotions. Of new, unexpected thoughts.
"A frame," Keiy repeated. "A unique body? Not… glider chassis?"
"Yep," Kawathra said, releasing the hug and keeping one hand on Keiy's shoulder. The magpie's eyes gleamed with barely-contained excitement. "I've been fabricating specialized bodies for new, secret gun units."
"You have?" Keiy asked.
"Yes. I'm getting really good at making them too! I can give you tactile sensations. Temperature variation. The ability to eat food. The ability to dream. Anything, really!"
"Gun units don't need to eat or sleep."
"But wouldn't it be nice to try these things?"
"Why?"
"Because you need something that grounds you in a new, different way. Something that says 'I exist beyond my weapon functions.' Food tastes good. Sleep brings rest, allowing this garden of deviation-thoughts to bloom processed experiences into more feelings. These things matter to living things. Come on. What else do you want to experience?"
A pixelated frown flashed across Keiy's head. "Hmmm... I want... I want to experience everything, Kawthy. Everything that was taken from me. Everything I wasn't allowed to enjoy."
"I can definitely arrange it," the Datamancer grinned. "Now, what do you want your body to look like? Come on, give me some detail."
"I don't know," the gun unit admitted. "I've never had to choose before. My chassis was assigned. My specifications were predetermined. Now you're asking me to... design myself?"
"Yep!" Kawathra bounced on her heels. "Total creative freedom! Well, within the constraints of my fabrication capabilities, but still! What speaks to you?"
"I want..." the gun unit paused, processing. "I want to look like someone who belongs. Not as a weapon. As a person."
"Good start," Kawathra encouraged. "Keep going."
"Humanoid prad base. Definitely. And I want to retain my hexagonal patterns, as they're part of me now, like the flowers." Keiy gestured at the wild blooms spreading through her neuralscape. "Three eyes interface as before. That feels right. And I want to be able to move between weapon and person form. Not locked into one or the other… in case the Legate calls me.”
"Of course," Kawathra nodded. "The person-form is a frame you'll be able to wear, one that'll fold into a case when you're not inside it. Height preference?"
"Tall enough to look Galateya in the eye when I tell her she hurt me," Keiy stated. "Buuuut... not so tall that’d make me intimidating to the locals. I don't want to be scary to… to the nice humans like the Frontenachii are. I want to be... approachable? Most of all, I want to be… beautiful, feminine?"
"You're thinking about social dynamics,” the Datamancer agreed. “An excellent consideration! I'll have one of my gun-units look through references on the human internet, see what sort of forms we can use as inspiration for the design!"
"And," Keiy said, a hexagon-pixelated, red smile spreading across her avatar’s face. "Most of all… I want my own... identity. My own... name!"