He’d done it this time. There were two or three of the most ruthless, effective killing machines on his trail, and he was running out of ideas to throw them off his trail.
He needed to get far enough away to hide, and then he could wait till nightfall, when he’d be a little harder to find, to make his way back home.
But he was still a long way from nightfall, and even farther from the safety of his hiding place.
Perfectly still, perfectly silent, not even breathing, he waited for a sign of his pursuers. They’d be roughly the same external temperature as the trees around them, so infrared was useless. What they lacked in active camouflage they made up for in sheer speed, so they too would pause, scan for signs of their prey, and then explode back into motion once a direction was determined.
Laz was pretty quick, too, but there’s just no way to outrun killer hexapods on just two clumsy, human-like legs, especially over the loose rocks and tree litter that made up the hillside he was fleeing across.
Hearing no sign of pursuit, either the hunters were also pausing to listen and scan, or he’d gotten lucky, and had a bit of a lead. He took a chance, and quickly scrambled up to the top of the hill, and pointed his transmitter due east, toward home.
"Fluffy? Can you hear me?" he shouted silently via his internal radio communications pack. "I could really use your help, here, buddy."
"Laz? Yeah, man, I hear you. I think I’m only about a kilometer from you right now--I came looking after you..." replied Fluffy, his child-like voice coming in clearly to Laz’s mind.
"Two, maybe three hunters are after me, and there’s a whole box of treats in it for you if you can get me out of this."
"Oh, I am on my fucking way, sir. Top speed. Just sit tight, the cavalry is on the way. And you’d better not be kidding about the treats." The conversation was cut off as Laz thanked his lucky stars for man’s best friend. Or... well, close enough.
Laz hid between a couple of large tree trunks, where he could see most of the hillside he’d climbed, hoping to spot the hunters before they spotted him. Assuming they were primarily using motion detection, he squatted perfectly still from this hiding spot, and waited for canine reinforcements.
Fluffy couldn’t fly, but you wouldn’t know it from the rocket engine-like noise he made tearing across the meadows on the backside of the hill. While Laz had relied on stealth (and sheer panic) to get this far, Fluffy had a slightly different approach. And it usually involved making himself the center of attention as quickly as possible.
It had been only about a minute, and the dust, broken branches, and scraping of metal claws on rocks announced Fluffy’s arrival, coming to a halt right next to where Laz had been cowering.
"Oh, wow, there are actually five of them, but one of them is pretty far out." Fluffy reported via comms, his significantly more powerful senses picking the hulking hunters from among the trees and stones with ease. "I wonder if they want to play!"
Fluffy was twice as tall as a hunter, and eight times as massive, roughly the shape of an especially well-fed wolf, but the height of a clydesdale, his chassis had been designed by humans, and it showed a certain intimidating style for it. Smooth curves of mechanical muscle were interwoven with sharp angles of overlapping armor, like huge scales.
He raised his massive head, released a deafening howl, and bounded down the hillside like an excited puppy.
Fluffy obviously wasn’t the original profile loaded onto that body, but then, neither was Laz.
A few minutes later, as three thoroughly damaged hunters scampered back off into the low forest, Fluffy returned to present his master with a prize. The carcass still had two of the six legs attached, and Laz thought one of them was twitching as Fluffy dropped it in front of him.
"It’s as heavy as I am, what am I supposed to do with it?"
"Acknowledge it, and then recognize out loud that I am, in fact, a very good boy. As always, Laz."
Laz rose to his feet, nodding his head approvingly at the mangled hunter, and reached up to pat Fluffy on the side of his head. "Good boy, Fluffy. You are a very good boy." An enormous tail of intricately arranged cables and artificial muscles started wagging uncontrollably, posing considerable threat to nearby trees.
"Now, I believe there was some discussion of the ’T’ word?" Fluffy added.
"Ah, indeed. Treats are back at the house, let’s go."
Fluffy raised a front leg, giving Laz the footing he needed to climb on, and took off back toward more familiar territory, although with a bit more care for branches that might knock his best friend off his back on the way.
It was finally approaching dusk as they reached home, an oldtime ruin well outside the reach of the City patrols. Their main ingress was through a large hole in the second story’s outer wall, which Fluffy could hop into trivially. The overgrowth hid the knotted rope that Laz would use when he was out exploring on his own.
Inside, the original structure was a large U-shape, with the remnants of a domed canopy over the middle. The north side was a pair of enormous hangar doors, long since rusted in place.
Tucked neatly into the middle of this crumbling mass of concrete and steel, a dull titanium shine still came off of the would-be starship that made their home. They’d made a few modifications to give Fluffy a bit of room to live in the cargo hold, but he mostly spent his time lounging in spots of sun that found their way between the remaining slats of the roof of the hangar and down to the patchy grass and weeds around the ship.
The ship itself had been nearly completed when it was abandoned, and Laz had even been able to bring its powerful reactor online. Designed to propel the ship to the stars, it had a nearly indefinite lifespan at the tiny trickle of output the current inhabitants actually needed.
And while they rarely had uninvited guests since Fluffy’s upgrade, the onboard security had proven reliable enough at maintaining their privacy in the past. Even the most desperate raiding party tends to reconsider when faced with a pair of massive laser turrets designed for vaporizing valuable materials from asteroids. Plus, if they just closed the cargo bay hatches, the ship was impenetrable to all but the most concerted efforts.
As such, it had served as their refuge, their sanctuary, a safe quiet home, for decades.
Laz marched into the bowels of the ship, where he hid the treats, while Fluffy made himself comfortable on the heap of greasy rags that he’d assembled as a bed. Only a partially open eye and a twitching tail revealed his hidden excitement over the coming joy.
It amused Laz how much they both clung to behaviors from the oldworld. If Fluffy really wanted to get to the treats, he could probably tear his way through the inner structure of the ship, and make his own way to them. But despite not having a functioning digestive system, Fluffy’s sense of smell (and to a lesser degree, taste) were as keen as ever, and he enjoyed the tactile experience of munching on even these stale biscuits from before time. And because of that, Laz enjoyed giving them to him. They both felt a little more real for it.
Well, aside from the fact that Fluffy would just gnash at them, like Cookie Monster, never actually swallowing a crumb. But the enthusiasm was every bit as entertaining as the oldworld puppet’s.
The memory of the blue, furry fellow from children’s television brought a smile to Laz’s face. It must have been years since he last thought about any characters from television! So many stories lost to history, but at least he was lucky enough to have experienced some of them.
Or was that before he came online? It was so hard to tell what was his own memory, or part of the upload, that he’d more or less given up trying to keep it straight anymore. He was what he was: neither just an automaton, nor the engineer whose mind had been mapped onto him.
On the upside, he was ageless, and showed no signs of the kind of degradation that aging human minds demonstrated. He still loved being alive. He loved exploring, finding treasures in the ruins, and playing with Fluffy. And Fluffy couldn’t have been happier about it.
Being the only section of the ship that Fluffy could easily navigate, they’d made the cargo bay into a living room of sorts. Fluffy buried the tip of his snout in the box of stale, dusty treats, grunting gleefully as he huffed them as much as munched them. Laz settled into the patchwork recliner next to Fluffy’s bed, and pulled his bag into his lap. It was time to see whether the risk had been worth it.
He’d gone closer to the City than he could recall, but there were indications that something was active, and his curiosity was overwhelming. A tiny radio signal, like a digital cricket, had caught his attention from the edge of his usual roaming range, calling him into the patrol zone.
He’d been in a hurry, and gathered anything that looked vaguely interesting from the ruin, but had been chased out by the hunters before he could even inspect any of the treasures. His bag hadn’t been sending out the faint radio signal, so he kept his hopes under control, as the original prize was still probably in that dilapidated strip mall.
Still, this was a moment he relished. Flipping open the soft leather flap of his bag, he fished for the first item. It took him several seconds to recognize, with three hinged arms, and a sort of clamp in the middle. It wasn’t till the helical, pointed probe emerged from the clamp that he realized it was a sort of posh corkscrew. He set it to the right of his chair, in the "potentially worth trading value" pile.
Next, a small bottle, barely more than a vial, with a screw top. The label had dried, faded, and peeled off long ago, but it appeared to still have liquid inside its dark brown glass. He sniffed it, but finding no odor detectable from the exterior, decided to try the cap. He twisted ever so gently, slowly...
"Whoaaa!" Fluffy stood so quickly from his treats that he almost fell over. His eyes and ears locked onto the bottle in Laz’s hands, his pupils dilating to capture as much light information as they could. "What IS that? I don’t think I’ve ever smelled anything that strong that wasn’t mega-nasty."
"Vanilla, I think it was used by the drop, for obvious reasons. Usually in human treats." Laz replied, himself blinking and snorting to clear his senses as he closed the bottle, and set it in the trading pile. "I’m impressed how well preserved it was."
"It’s mostly ethanol, would that help?" asked Fluffy, one mechanical ear flopping to the side, in an entirely artificial imitation of far softer animal parts.
"Good point, definitely." replied Laz, pulling the next treasure from his bag. It had a sort of head, with four lower pods, like stubby legs. It was all smooth curves, with a power button on top, along with an engraved label, declaring the object "FLAWLESS Legs", highlighting that it was "As Seen on TV!" The bottoms of the pods reminded Laz of the blades on an electric razor, and upon this realization, he tossed it to the other side of the chair, in the "scrap for parts" pile. Not much use for a razor these days.
The final item looked like a peach-colored walkie-talkie, and Laz turned the volume knob without thinking. The thing crackled to life, and through the static, there was an unmistakable sound--a whimpering child.
"Well, that’s unsettling." Fluffy was making a slightly disgusted face.
Laz started scanning frequencies to see if he could find it directly, but grew frustrated, as he couldn’t seem to match the sound from the radio to any signal he could detect.
"Fluffy, can you find the frequency this is receiving?" His companion’s comms were both more sensitive, and sophisticated, built for battlefield reconnaissance, not laboratory work.
"Oh, yeah, I got it. It was lightly encrypted, probably just some privacy thing." The great dog shrugged, and wirelessly provided the details to Laz, who was then able to tune it in.
"But why would you want to hear that directly in your head? It’s fucking creepy, man."
Laz ignored him, and tried to reply. Directly from his mind, he reached out. "Hey there, kid. Can you hear me?"
There was no reply, and no change in the child’s noises. He tried again, but it became clear that this was a one-way channel.
"Do you have a vector?" he asked Fluffy.
"Yeah, of course, I even have an approximate distance based on the signal strength, and guessing it wasn’t military hardware sending it. It’s between two and six kilometers that way." Fluffy tossed his snout north, clearly disinterested in chasing after the spooky noise.
"I think this is a sort of surveillance device for parents, although that’s a bit farther than would seem entirely necessary."
"Trap?"
"Yeah, probably." Laz frowned, and disconnected from the channel. It had to be a trap, he thought. There’s no way there’s a living human child out there, right? Let alone one sitting next to a working baby monitor hardwired to a CB radio for range. Put that on top of the fact that this device was found several kilometers in another direction entirely, and in unfriendly territory, the coincidences stacked up enough to rationalize Laz’s instinctive fear.
After Fluffy’s bedtime story, in which Laz would recount some fragments of oldworld stories he could recall till his companion would pass out, snoring as loudly as unnecessarily. Fluffy’s profile was originally designed for a companion model, just the right size to fall asleep in your lap, and all the years in the ring never quite hardened him all the way. If you rubbed his belly just right, a hind leg large and strong enough to topple a small building would involuntarily start to kick.
With the flawlessly flea-less fleabag fast asleep, Laz retired to his quarters, the ship’s tiny bridge. The actual sleeping quarters on board were little more than cabinets with hammocks, and so he’d fashioned one such hammock into the relative luxury of the command center of the ship, where the stars would be visible through the gaps in the hangar roof.
He pulled his slight, meter and a half tall frame into his hammock, and shut off the lights with a wave of his hand. As a human, he’d been nearly two meters tall, but this body’s stature had been handy plenty of times for getting into (and out of) tight places in the ruins, and it was simply who he was now, after the better part of a century.
As he settled, he thought he could hear something just a little out of the ordinary. He’d lived here for decades, and knew every creak and groan the ship would make as it warmed or cooled over the course of a day. This was something... else. Even a quick fourier analysis of the recording of the room showed nothing unusual. He double-checked that his comms were inactive, and then shut them down entirely, just to be sure.
Yet there it was... just outside of the range of truly audible, something... sad. Almost a whimpering.
He struggled out of his hammock, and activated the ship’s command interface. In moments, he’d locked on to the signal’s frequency, and confirmed that it was still transmitting. The whimpering had ceased, but with the significantly larger receiver in the ship’s array, he could hear soft breathing, as if the child had fallen asleep next to the monitor.
He found it soothing, comforting to know that the child was safe, at least. He left the monitor channel open, and crawled back into his hammock. If something happened, he’d hear it, and could deal with it then. But for now, this slight reassurance was sufficient, and he could fall asleep without the nagging guilt that had started to build.
And so, Laz fell asleep. While the experience was intentionally similar to human sleep (alternating between an absence of consciousness and vivid, if bizarre hallucinations vaguely inspired by the events of the day), his machine mind was actually doing something surprisingly similar to its human equivalent. Wear and tear on systems was assessed, and where possible, repaired. Data was defragmented, classified, and stored for future access. Information that hadn’t been accessed in a certain timeframe was truncated to make space for new information. He slept.