My systems were beginning to wake themselves up from the reboot. After running a diagnostic, most of my speech impediment was repaired and should be functioning normally. A series of program relocations would make my movements more efficient to make up for the time spent walking through radiation. The reboot process was nearly complete.

Harsh noises were erupting around me and I could hear shouting coming from Lucy. My vision was finally coming back to see that I was in a poorly lit tunnel, where sparks flew off from the walls. We were still in the sewer and I was being dragged. Upon looking up, I saw that it was Norman pulling my limp body while Lucy fired back at the unknown enemy at the opposite end of the tunnel.

My hands formed into a fist and I could start to feel the index of my fingers. The reboot was working wonders for my coordination. Above us I could see an exposed manhole cover, where dim light was pouring from its edges. I pointed upwards towards the opening and spoke;

“Manhole.”

Norman’s head shot down towards me and then up towards the opening. He yelled for Lucy and pointed up towards the manhole. The ladder for the manhole was being held up by a chain that kept it in. Lucy fired two more rounds at the group of clinks who were trudging through the sewer, missing pieces of themselves. When my optics were at full functionality, I could see that there were five of them that were functional enough to continue pursuing us through the sludge.

The chain attached to the ladder was far too high for any of us to reach, even if we were lifted. Lucy was frantically looking around for a solution under gunfire.

“Shoot the chain,” I said.

Lucy look stunned at hearing me talk so clearly, but she quickly took the opportunity to aim her rifle towards the chain and fire. The chain let go rather easily, causing the rusty ladder to come sliding down between us. There was no way we could stay exposed long enough to climb the ladder, not without being pelted by a hail of gunfire. The sewer was filled with dust all along the edges of the walkway.

Lucy was waiting behind the corner of a turn-off for a chance to move, but instead I yelled out to her.

“Shoot the ground!”

Lucy met my eyes that were looking at the piles of dust, sludge and rubbish. She fired a series of shots into the piles that blew up in a cloud of dust, impairing the clinks from determining where we were. The adjacent gunfire came to a pause.

Norman helped me off from the ground where we both join Lucy at the bottom of the ladder. Norman’s eyes met mine for a moment and I could see that his eyes were twitching as if there was something interrupting them from properly adjusting. What was wrong with him, I wondered.

When it came my turn to climb the ladder after Lucy - the cloud of dust was beginning to become dispersed as five clinks charged through the sludge towards us. When I was nearing the manhole opening, they fired at the shadow on the sewer wall mistakenly thinking it was me. Once clear of the opening, I helped Norman through and we watched as the walls of the sewer fell on the clinks stuck in the sludge.  

The quiet, Paris Street seemed undisturbed by the fight which occurred below its street. My last memory before the fight was of waiting in the sewer with Lucy while Norman was offline.  I wondered how they managed to catch up to us so quickly.

 “Where are we now, how did they manage to find us?” I asked.

Norman and Lucy were surprised at my ability to provide clear sentences without the impediment.

“Henry, your voice!” exclaimed Lucy. She spent years listening to me speak inaudibly.

“The reboot must’ve fixed it, but I can’t remember much else besides escaping the church.”

“Same as I, Norman was dragging us from the sewer entrance before I awoke.”

Norman was turned away from us, trying to look like he was scanning the street for threats. His hand was beginning to twitch like his eyes. Memory corruption, no doubt. I don’t remember him being this bad.

“What happened Norman, how did they find us?”

He only gave us a glance before replying;

“While you two were rebooting, they passed by the sewer entrance and opened fire.”

A reboot? That would explain the sudden memory loss. I asked him;

“Why did we reboot Norman, were we being corrupted?”

Something flickered across his face and he looked away from us – then something caught my eye too. The streets were still covered in the shadows of the night, the moon barely illuminating the open space around us. Figures were moving all around us in a uniform fashion.

We were being surrounded.

Lucy was the only one of us that was armed, besides the flare gun that I took off of Norman once he was knocked unconsciousness. If need be, it could cause enough distraction for us to get away.

Norman put his arm around Lucy and told her to keep her head down.

Once he took the rifle from Lucy’s hands and ensured that his body was shielding her from any incoming fire, he was darting his eyes around at the surrounding streets. Even though my software was repaired, it didn’t fix the vision impairment from missing an eye. Norman probably saw twice as much as I could in the darkness.

“Where do we go?” Lucy asked. I could tell she wasn’t used to feeling helpless, but unfortunately we were in the open with nowhere to go.

It dawned on me how odd it was that the clinks weren’t opening fire yet, seeing that they had no problem shooting openly at us before. That all changed fairly quickly.

Once the first clink was out in the open, armed with a railgun carbine capable of blowing a hole cleanly through 4 feet of steel, Norman raised his rifle and fired off the first round in the ensuing firefight.  

Before the clink could charge its rifle, its head exploded into a cloud of sparks and chunks of metal. In the next moment - a beam of light darted between Norman and me into a building behind us. I could see now that there were bursts of light emitting from the rifles of those who hid in the shadows – they must’ve realized that normal 7.69 ammunition wasn’t going to be enough to take down the three of us. If you can’t match wit, match strength.

Being out in the open like these would ensure death fairly quickly; on the other hand cover didn’t mean much when it came to a miniaturized railgun capable of blowing through buildings with ease.

That’s when the realization came to me – looking behind I realized that the railgun blast made an opening in the building behind us, where we could make an escape if we managed to reach it.

Once the flare gun was in the palm of my hands, I yelled to Lucy and Norman to follow me. The flare shot from the barrel and landed ten feet in front of us. The flare must’ve disrupted the next shots because the two beams that fired went in two separate directions. One beam landed in the street that made a large hole and the second beam shot into the sky.

The flare was sprouting a cloud of red smoke that could mask our escape. The three of us were running now towards the opening of the building only fifteen meters away from us. Norman was running sporadically and not able to keep up the same pace as Lucy and myself. The buy us some time, I shot off another flare to further impede the clink’s vision. As I went back to help Norman - another beam shot through the smoke, blowing a hole straight through Norman’s lower half.

Lucy stopped to look back, frozen at the image of Norman falling down limp onto the cold concrete of the street below him. His face looked unaffected by the shot, expressionless as he fell onto his side.

Once we witnessed Norman die, Lucy was yelling in pain where she stood. This was no time to mourn unfortunately and I needed to ensure our safety.

I grabbed Lucy by her shoulders and practically dragged her rest of the way to the opening. The shot that struck Norman must’ve been pure chance, there was no way a clink could be that accurate. Once inside the building, sheltered from any line of sight, I held Lucy tightly against me so that she wouldn’t expose us. It seemed like an hour passed as the two of us sat there in the shelter of the decaying store front, its wares were scattered across the floor along with the debris.

Norman had been killed less than an hour from when I decided to peak over the edge of the opening to see that there wasn’t a single clink in sight aside from the one that laid destroyed on the street. Norman’s corpse was nowhere to be seen; only some torn fabric and synthetic material were there where he once laid.

They must’ve taken his corpse, but why?

Lucy was close behind me as we emerged from the shelter of the storefront onto the empty street – the flares had long since burned out. We stood over the place where we last saw Norman. If Lucy could cry, she should would.

When enough time had passed for Lucy to process that he was gone for good, she turned her gaze towards the clink on the ground- its body was still twitching in a final effort to regain control of its body. She walked over to it with determination in her step.

Once Lucy made it to the clink, she flipped it over so that it was facing upwards and began smashing its chassis with butt of the railgun. I was going to stop her apparent outburst, but the chassis popped open once it’s locked was broken. My guess was that Lucy was going to sync with the clink in its remaining moments of functionality.

“What are you doing?” I asked her, crouching next to her as I watched her take a cable from the slot in her wrist.

She was scanning the surface of the clink’s mainframe; it was very simply designed and contained various ports. Each was labelled in mandarin Chinese. Her finger stopped at the OS icon.

Lucy looked at me to explain her intentions, “They took him for a reason, I’m guessing they’ve been tracking him since we first entered the city.”

“There was corruption in him… he mentioned something about syncing with an older clink in a small village.”

Lucy said, “Doesn’t explain why they would take his body…there must be a reason why these new models are roaming here.”

I wanted to stop her from the possibility of being corrupted, like Norman.

“You could get corrupted too, you know that?”

She seemed positive of the risk.

“Yes I do, it’s the only way we are going to find out what’s going on.” She said.

There was a part of me that wanted to stop her – to avoid the same fate that Norman suffered. Without Norman, intact or not, we would not be able to complete our mission. I just hope Eve managed to find a place and was waiting for us. There was no telling what the clink’s rogue programming was instructing it to do.

“If I’m in there too long, pull me out ok?” she asked.

I agreed. Once the cable from her wrist met the clink’s mainframe, her eyes went back into her head and exposed only whites. Her body stayed still in its kneeling pose and she became synced with whatever code was left running in the clink’s system.

Next Chapter: Chapter Twelve: Lucy