Chapter Text
The sun had climbed high into the sky and begun its descent by the time X detected any signs of life beyond the occasional bird. Even then, they were subtle, and nothing visible to the naked eye or indeed the aided eye: he picked up, very faintly, half of a diagnostic code transmission.
Reploids had been designed to live and work among humans, and therefore were designed with a roughly human capacity for communication. It did not promote trust and respect, after all, if certain members of the population could easily speak on a wavelength that the rest could not even physically process. Accordingly, reploids with true wireless communications were unusual and tended to work only in very specific fields.
However, reploids were still machines, and with that territory came an entire encyclopedia of potential error codes one might throw. For ease of maintenance, the compromise was made, based on X's own systems and input, that even the most basic of reploids had a short-range diagnostic broadcast system, using a fairly standardized syntax. The idea was that even should speech be incapacitated, they could still easily and wirelessly answer queries for repair purposes.
And yet, reploids were also people, and when given an inch, people creatively made a mile out of it. It didn't take long at all for an entire reploid language to evolve from the error code list called, suitably enough, >I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. It wasn't illegal, though it was frowned upon by all sorts of authorities. Of course that had never yet stopped a subculture, and it was no more effective with this one. Seeing a huddle of reploids snickering about something with no evident speech between them was not an uncommon occurrence, and despite the evident dryness of the language, there existed no shortage of euphemisms, expletives, and wordplay inherent to it.
For his part, while X had always found himself on the side of having to lecture recruits to knock it off, he was inwardly proud of his technological offspring. It was a good system, and some of the phrases they'd come up with were impressively clever. And yet, because of his position and notoriety, while he'd heard it being spoken no shortage of times, he'd only rarely used it himself, and had never really gained much fluency in it.
X didn't respond yet. For one, he didn't think it likely that anyone would hear him. His sensitivity was far and away higher than any standard production model's would be. If he was hearing only partial snippets, most other reploids would hear nothing at all. Secondly, he didn't want them to spook at a sudden interloper, especially one with unusual capabilities. He simply kept sharp and listened.
'>I.40011-LOG: Argument expected. W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile.'
'>I.00012-LOG: Null statement. E.00986-NRG: Polarity reversed, check connectors. I.11111-INT: Self-awareness bootup process stage 1 initiated. I.75002-DIR: Action succeeded. W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. I.75090-DIR: Action queued. W.57823-SEN: Cranial crown plate damaged.'
X couldn't help but smile faintly. He had stumbled into a playful argument. As a high-context language, he couldn't determine the specifics without more eavesdropping, but it was apparent that two people were attempting to follow directions given to them by a third, and one of them was struggling.
He let himself drop from the scaffold, landing a little jarringly. As long as he was headed downwards, he at least didn't have to worry too much about heights. It was ascending that took so much of his focus…even if his legs did protest the landing strenuously. The three-point landing served him well in situations like this. Once he had regained as much of his sense of balance as he ever had, X determined in which direction the signals were stronger and headed that way.
The argument continued as he walked. >W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. seemed to be a name. Reploids adopted, or frequently were given, code names that amounted to call signs. Generally they were one or two codes long, though he'd once known a recruit that ended up with the unfortunate and unwieldy moniker of >E.00404-SYS: File not found. W.00142-SEN: Damage detected, left gluteal plate. W.00143-SEN: Damage detected, right gluteal plate. I.09076-LOG: Hypothetical. W.56773-CHS: Attachment failed. W.00152-CHS: Left gluteal plate detached. W.00153-CHS: Right gluteal plate detached. In short, he could not have found his own backside if it weren't attached to him, badly enough that he'd been given the entire sentiment as a title.
His own had ended up being >I.60011-LOG: Unknown variable., when nobody thought he was listening. It was accurate enough, but maybe a little on the nose, he'd always thought.
X didn't particularly hide his approach, keeping close to the buildings but not bothering to conceal his footsteps. From the air he would have been a tough visual target. From the ground, he was visibly a lone reploid with a tarp over his head and nothing in the way of defenses. Of course, from the air, any number of other senses would have picked him up instantly, but visual was still the easiest and primary one to look out for during sweeps. Infrared picked up as many forgotten bodies and pieces of scrap warmed in the sun as it did functional reploids, and while electromagnetic sensor arrays worked best, for the majority of reploids it wasn't useful from more than a few tens of meters, and less than that if they suspected they were being watched and suppressed noisier processes.
The other players in the argument seemed to be named >I.47860-CHS: Protective headgear affixed. and >W.20234-SYS: Unexpected behavior. More ominously, the both of them made reference to someone, evidently their superior, with the nickname of >E.10104-TLR: Conflict detected. That last one was a troubling name for someone who'd presumably fled authorities. TLR was the short code for the 'Three Laws of Robotics' category of errors. While encountering a conflict was nothing unusual, and indeed depending on their role a reploid might encounter hundreds of such conflicts a day, being named after such a thing…X would need to be careful. Whoever they were, they were likely irregular, if not even…
X shook his head. The capital-v Virus was basically eradicated, finally and for good this time. Any reploid claiming the label of Maverick for themselves now was undoubtedly irregular and almost certainly violent, but not likely to be actually infected with anything that dangerous. Its code had been fully analyzed and reliable methods of recoding the infected finally existed, and while viruses happened, the Maverick Virus was largely a thing of the past. The label of Maverick now existed mainly as shorthand to categorize a reploid as violent, dangerous, or criminal beyond what the lesser label of irregular would imply.
Whoever was bold enough to go around with a name like that was not likely, these days, to be a threat on any scale with which he needed to concern himself. Truthfully, even just being out here without specific orders and official permission made a reploid irregular, by definition.
Then again, considering that he was here on little more than a personal favor and unofficial permission that amounted to looking the other way…Upon second thought, that raised more questions than he felt like dealing with at the moment, and he put the whole concept of irregularity out of his mind.
When he decided he was close enough to be read, X interjected a statement of his own into the conversation. '>I.40114-SYS: Interrupt. W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. I.34100-COM: Identification sent. I.34101-COM: Identification requested.' Or, in roughly human-detectable speech, "Sorry for interrupting. My name is [vertigo]. Who are you?" He had decided on the spur of the moment to adopt a new call sign, just in case, and his most visible feature was exactly what it sounded like it was, making it an easy pick. Anybody could have assigned X that name with minimal information about him.
The idle wireless chatter stopped dead. X waited patiently. Nobody would have expected an outsider to show up in a place like this. He didn't have direct line of sight to them, nor could they see him, but he had determined they were in a building that had escaped the majority of the destruction surrounding it, at least structurally. In its day, it had been an office building, the first floor lined with shops and restaurants, as well as a lobby leading to the upper floors. Now, the first floor's windows had shattered, but the rest of the building stood.
Eventually, someone responded. '>I.00910-GEN: Acknowledged. I.47860-CHS: Protective headgear affixed. I.34100-COM: Identification sent. I.34018-COM: Awaiting signal.'
Well, that was promising. He was talking to [helmet], and they were willing to hear him out. X continued. '>E.78900-SYS: Organic residue. E.34323-DIR: Search already running. W.00016-NRG: Battery at sixteen percent.' he explained. 'Organic residue' was, entertainingly or concerningly depending on one's point of view, slang for a human. Thus, he was looking for someone, specifically a human, because there was no nonspecific singular term for 'person' in code. Then, because he wouldn't have trusted himself if their situation were reversed, X added, 'I.20019-SYS: No armament equipped.'
[Helmet] had been terse so far, but now responded with a flurry of messages. '>There are no humans here, if that's what you're looking for, but if you're really unarmed and need a recharge, let's have you step around to the front door and we'll get a look at you and decide from there,' the unknown reploid responded…more or less.
It took X a few moments to translate that to himself. He responded with a simple, '>I.00910-GEN: Acknowledged.' He made his way to the blown-out glass front of the building, eyeing its revolving doors jammed with debris before using his cane to pick a careful path through a more accessible side door that had thankfully been blocked open by a fallen planter.
The inside of the lobby wasn't as damaged as one might have expected. A massive chandelier still hung from the high ceiling, many of its crystals strewn across the tiled floor. A fire had destroyed most of the front desks, but evidently it hadn't spread far. Black streaks of char scored the paneled walls and the windows had exploded inwards from some outside explosion, but the floor was unbroken, and the stairs to the second floor mezzanine remained intact. Something moved on the second floor, and X looked up, the motion causing him to grip his cane a little more tightly.
"Doesn't look that scary," said a hushed but masculine voice, with the faintest face of a Japanese accent. "What do you think?"
"We could take him, if we had to," the other voice said, output volume low. It sounded synthesized and mechanical, like old robots in fiction from hundreds of years ago, before they were commonplace. "I'm not worried. And we got what we came for already anyway. We could head back."
The human-like male voice spoke up. "Well, Dizzy, or Vertigo, or whoever you are, what do we call you out loud? And who are you even looking for? There aren't any humans out here that I've ever seen."
X spoke, feeling rusty at even this much interaction. "Just V works," he declared, making a snap decision. "I can explain more when I've got somewhere to sit…I'm not very steady on my feet." He made a vague gesture with his cane, the tip of it never leaving the ground.
"V? Short and sweet. I can respect that. Name's Glitch." The reploid swung himself up and over the second floor railing, softening his landing with a quick burst of matter repulsors that X guessed had been cobbled into his feet well after his creation. He was not tremendously tall, though he was several inches taller than X, nor was he very powerfully-built. His frame was that of an intel reploid, not a heavy worker, and he had black hair that had once upon a time probably been straight, though it had since been frazzled by heat and stuck out in all directions. He'd been repainted several times as well, if the multicolored and layered chips across his plates were any indication, though his most recent coat was a mostly-intact racing green for his plating, over a charcoal outer skin that seemed to still be its original color. He was a new design, too, with individual segmented plates instead of the chunky armor that many reploids sported. X wondered how old he might have been. Not more than ten years, he guessed.
"Showoff," the digitized voice still hidden up on the mezzanine muttered. The sound of footsteps circled around to the more intact of the two staircases, hidden behind an opaque barrier from railing to floor.
"You new here? Or just new here?" Glitch asked, emphasizing the 'here,' but he leaned into X's personal space and squinted, then answered his own question before X could speak. "Oh, you're all scuffed up. I've never seen synth skin weathered like that. Never mind, stupid question, you've been around the block. What do you want with a human, though? I haven't seen any this far out here in a long time. You really wander all this way just for some meatbag?"
X bit his tongue momentarily. 'Meatbag' had never struck him as an acceptable thing to say, but he wasn't going to pick an argument about it. "I still have a few friends on the other side. They thought he might have come out here, so they asked me to look for him. They thought it might have been an urban exploration trip or similar."
Glitch snorted derisively, straightening. "I'm sure fucking around in a blown-to-hell city is fun when it's not your entire life. Ah, don't mind me, I'm not bitter or anything. Hey, Mack. Say hi to V, here. V, this is my buddy, Mack." He made a grandiose gesture, and X automatically looked over…only to not see anyone.
"Down here," the synthesized voice said, from around ankle-height. X looked down.
"You're a C-15 Mettaur," he remarked in surprise, the words escaping before he could quite stop them. He hadn't seen one of those since the beginning of the Maverick War, not quite a hundred years past.
Mack laughed, a strange, monotone bark of a sound. "Ha. I like this guy. He knows his antiques." Sure enough, Mack was not much more than a spherical black robot in a hard-hat styled helmet, painted yellow. Some of its paint had flaked with time and exposure, leaving bare metal. It had two yellow feet, two round eyes on the front, a battery pack in the back, and, X knew, several small interchangeable tools tucked away within the protective helmet, depending on its intended task.
Glitch slapped X on the shoulder. "Well, if Mack likes you, you must be okay. And you even know what model it is right off the top of your head, that's impressive. Come on, ask me how it's still functional. Or ask it, doesn't matter."
X wobbled dangerously from the friendly gesture, catching himself by planting his cane a little more firmly. "That would be rude. Unless…do you want me to ask that?" He glanced down at Mack, uncertain.
"Go ahead, he won't stop until he gets to tell the story. But doesn't V need a recharge still? We should take care of that," Mack reminded Glitch, with a pointed look. For an orb without a real face to speak of, just round eyes, simple eyelids, and a speaker port for a mouth, it had an impressive range of expression.
"Right. Yes. That. This way." Glitch turned and began walking deeper into the building, with an absentminded 'follow me' sort of wave behind him. X kept up as best he could, though he caught himself listing to one side in his rush. "Yeah, so! Mack, here, it was in a museum. Which is kinda fucked up, right? The only Mettaur model to be made with full awareness and emotional processing—which is kinda fucked up to begin with, that's a lotta weight to put on a little thing without even thumbs—and here they got the last intact one on display like a paperweight."
"Thumbs are overrated," Mack interjected.
Glitch took a sudden right turn into an empty doorway, its door long ago ripped from its hinges and flung to the rear of the room behind it. X caught the door frame with one hand and waited a moment to regain his balance, but Glitch didn't slow down. "So I thought, well, that's not right, displaying this poor thing like it's not a person. So I had a nice chat with the security system and told it that I was Mack's new owner, and walked right out with it."
"Just like that?" X asked, as he realized he was going to have the rest of the story told at him regardless, but reacting a little at the obvious pause for reaction seemed polite. At least Glitch had also paused on his way to…wherever he was leading them, giving X time to catch up. He didn't seem like he could walk without talking, nor could he walk or talk at any speeds other than 'full speed ahead' or 'dead stop.'
"Well, you know. In the middle of the night. And I told the system to just forget I was there, and it did, but alas," Glitch paused and put a hand on his chest, all melodrama for a moment. "Mack's a damn bowling ball, so it was pretty obvious that I had it in my backpack on the outside cameras on a whole other circuit that I didn't realize I'd missed. Still took them a whole hour to identify me, but then they tried pinging my tracker, and it didn't respond, so that got the whole Hunter precinct after me, and I got the hell outta there. You'd think I walked out with something valuable," he said. The roll of Mack's eyes was almost audible.
X followed him into a service corridor and down some stairs. "So…you came out here to get away from them?" he asked.
"Hah! No. Not for a while, anyway. I changed my identity and just kept going. It's not that hard, the cops are a bunch of idiots, the Hunters are a bunch of idiots too, and I mean, how am I gonna reactivate Mack if I don't have my workbench? It needed a lotta work after all that time sitting there. You wouldn't believe how many caps I had to replace in it, never mind every single rubberized polymer piece that had melted into gunk. They don't maintain things like you'd hope, for a reploid museum."
It occurred to X that the reason Glitch had eventually been found out was possibly less an actual security mistake, and more an overwhelming need to tell every single bystander he met everything interesting he'd ever done.
"Ah. And that's why Mack is here," X said, with a nod. "Reactivated after retirement?"
"I was never activated in the first place," Mack grumbled. Somehow. Its tone was still the same monotone as it always was, but it managed to convey an essential sort of grumbly-ness all the same. "Nothing illegal about that."
"Yeah, tell that to the Hunters," said Glitch. "The museum logged you as dead, you're legally dead, the end. I almost got busted for booting up a brand new reploid like they do a thousand times a day in the factory. But I didn't! But then later they started connecting some other dots and they found everything else I'd gotten into. It was a good run, so it was a really interesting list, and they showed up at my door, but I was already gone. So then since I was kinda getting cornered I had a nice chat with some of the old security doors that run under the wall, and they were stupid enough that they actually listened when I told them to forget we talked." He led all three of them downstairs. X took the steps slowly, one hand on his cane, one on the railing, while Glitch fairly bounced down. "Speaking of security doors and under the ground and all, welcome to the tunnels. Can't recommend wandering around aimlessly, though, you could lose important parts that way. Just so you know."
Mack, who had to take the stairs one at a time with its lack of actual legs, released an annoyed pinging sound. "You're leaving V in your dust. And me," it said, punctuating itself with a broadcast, '>E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile.' in Glitch's general direction.
This was all it took to fuel another competitive, friendly argument between the two, entirely in a rapid-fire exchange of rude system codes. X simply let them at it. He had to admit it was nice in a way to watch people just interact with each other, even if one of them came up to his knee at the most if it stood up completely straight, and the other was gleefully Maverick, self-modified, and probably overclocked, if X had to guess.
X kept pace as best he could, but despaired a little when they came to an open, dark space in the tunnels. Mack had built-in eye lights and Glitch had a flashlight in his fingertip, which was fortunately more than enough light for X to be able to see; less fortunately, the service tunnel had collapsed into a much larger subway tube beneath it, and the temperature gradient was so flat that thermal imaging wasn't helpful. X didn't want to spend the energy on IR if he could avoid it. While many reploids had night vision, they were often military spec, and he didn't want to give the wrong impression.
Someone had kindly banged together some scrap into rudimentary steps on both sides of the gap. Climbing down was simple enough with gravity and his cane on his side, but climbing back up the other side with no hand railing made X wish he could have simply jumped the gap and been done with it.
Glitch scurried ahead, leaving his new companion on the uneven steps. Mack cleared its throat, or more accurately, played a sound effect of someone clearing their throat. When Glitch didn't even turn to look, Mack played it three more times, without waiting for the sound to entirely finish before looping it.
Glitch finally glanced back. "What—right. Here." He stepped forward, leaned, braced, and held out one hand.
X blinked at it, then up at Glitch.
"Well? Dunno how you do where you're from, but around here, we help each other. C'mon, we don't have all day." He wiggled the slender fingers of his proffered hand impatiently until X took it, Glitch steadying him the rest of the way up. He had surprisingly warm hands, X thought, probably from running hot if he was overclocking.
"Thanks," X said. He couldn't remember the last time someone had offered him a hand solely because he needed one, without looking at him with pity. Or…no, he could, on second thought, but it was too long ago, and too much to think about.
He must have been making some expression, because Glitch looked at him for several moments in puzzlement before seeming to remember they had a destination. "We got ground to cover still, let's get going. Mack, you head on the short way and let everyone know we got someone on the way." He spun on his heel and took off, rounding corners a little too quickly for X to stay steady. The C-15 unit simply gave a nod and took off into a much smaller crawlspace that, likely not coincidentally given the general purpose of its entire design lineage, it fit into perfectly.
Glitch seemingly figured out how to keep his mouth closed while still actuating his feet, because he remained quiet for some time, leading X through a maze of tunnels. It occurred to X that his new friend might in fact be trying to get him lost, and also that it might actually work. He did more or less automatically track his location, but he had become accustomed to doing it via visible networks and satellite position, and he couldn't be sure that his distance estimations were correct anymore since he couldn't keep his legs calibrated. He had a rough idea of where they had been, but if it came to it, he'd be lost in the featureless dark for quite some time on low power if Glitch completely abandoned him here.
And right on cue, he wobbled around a corner that he knew Glitch had taken, and the other reploid was nowhere to be seen aside from a vague cloud of rapidly fading heat. X ground to a halt, looking around in the dark and wondering if he should risk switching on infrared. When the attack came, it was so fast that even though he'd been half-expecting something, his balance system completely failed to compensate. Hands gripped his clothing by the shoulders, twisting into it to tighten the grasp and reduce the range of motion in his arms, and flung him face-first into the reinforced concrete wall like a ragdoll, holding him there. His cane clattered to the floor, and the weight of a half-overheated chassis pressed into his back.
"Alright, V, let's hear it. Who are you and what are you really doing here?" Glitch's voice came from just next to X's left ear.
X didn't even bother struggling. He could have torn out of his jacket, reinforced though it was. Even without being able to track which way was up, he could have still tracked which way was Glitch, and that was more important. The other reploid emitted enough heat to light up like a beacon, now that he wasn't hiding behind something as he probably had been. By the time Glitch had finished speaking, X had already calculated six ways to disassemble him as neatly as a surgeon, compensating for his lack of balance, his low power, Glitch's estimated speed and strength…and he did none of them. That it was still such a deeply-ingrained reflex made X feel a little sick to his circuits.
"I'm an ex-Hunter," he admitted. It was essentially true, if an incredible understatement.
"Oh? Heard that one before. Deactivated one or two before, too. What'd you do to end up out here?" Glitch twisted X's jacket a little more tightly.
"I quit."
"Do you ever put more than three words together?" Glitch prompted, exasperated. X could hear the faint whine of the other reploid's systems under load, and wondered how many years off the end of his lifespan Glitch was burning, running at the speed that he did.
"I'm an older model. There's too much going wrong with me to fix. They don't even make the parts now. I never even liked fighting. I just thought I had to. I'm tired, Glitch," X explained, the word erupting from him as a plea, more forcefully than he'd intended. "I just wanted out. Somewhere I would be left alone." None of it was a lie. It wasn't the whole story, but stripped of the details, it was in the same shape as the truth.
Something in X's tone must have given Glitch pause, because he stopped twisting, at least. "Doesn't explain what you're doing poking around out here. Who's the meatbag? The one you said you're looking for, I mean."
"I only ever wanted to help people. That was why I joined the Hunters in the first place, and they have jurisdiction to look for missing people in the quarantine zone. He's one of those. Just some human with no sense. They had him on camera once, back outside the wall, and they picked up his phone location inside it, but he's a low-risk case so they couldn't officially spare anyone to go look. I volunteered. But like I said, I quit the Hunters. I don't care who else is out here or what they're doing. It's not my problem."
Glitch leaned on X a little harder. His cheek pressed uncomfortably into the rough concrete, metal cheekbone grinding it in further. X had to admit, privately at least, that he had gravely underestimated the other's strength. Glitch could do him some serious damage, if he decided to, and he wouldn't have been able to do much for it short of…well, he didn't want to do that. That was his last resort, and he only had one shot at it.
Besides, it wouldn't work. He had dropped his cane. Ridiculous mistake on his part, but his hands didn't always work as well as they used to.
"You know," Glitch said, much more conversationally now, "most reploids actually react when someone slams them into the wall and threatens them? Like tense up or something, at least? But you, I think you relaxed."
X chuckled bitterly. "If you really wanted to scrap me, you'd have just done it." And I might have let you, he thought, unbidden, but swallowed the notion back down.
Glitch considered this silently for several more moments, before lowering his voice coyly. "Could be I was waiting to make sure you wouldn't be missed. And you wouldn't be, would you, if you didn't come back from your little trip?"
X shrugged, as much as he could with his arms restrained half behind his back. "These days? They wouldn't even know where to look for me. I'll run myself out doing this, or something else will finally end me. Either way…I don't really care, as long as it's on my own terms."
Glitch waited a few more moments, processing, then released X so abruptly that X had to grab for the wall with both palms to stay upright. "Hah. You're something else, V. Never seen your make nor model, and you didn't even flinch. But you're telling the truth, I'm pretty sure. That or you're the ice-coldest damn thing I've ever met and we're all fucked. But whatever. I've done my big scary mean Maverick bit. Here, you need this." Glitch clicked his flashlight fingertip back on, bent down, and picked something up from the floor: X's cane. He tossed it into the air with a showy flip, caught it by the handle, and held it out to X.
"That's it, then?" X asked him, glassy green eyes flicking between the cane and Glitch's face. "Are we done trying to spook me?"
"Hah," Glitch laughed again, sharp and short, but it carried a note of apology. "Yeah. Sorry about that. Just doing my shakedown duty if we run into anyone we don't know trying to get friendly. Can't be too careful, right?"
X reached for the cane, not taking his eyes off Glitch. The other reploid let go of it once he was certain X wasn't going to drop it, no further tricks, and X let it settle into the curve of his palm where it fit like an extension of his arm. "I guess you can't, can you?" he agreed, relaxing his guard a little. "But you were going to try to retire me, if you thought I was a threat."
"Oh, definitely. Wouldn't be my first, wouldn't be my last. Nice to not have to, though. You seem alright, even if I do gotta rattle you like an empty can to get you to string together two full sentences." Glitch motioned for X to follow, and while he still walked a little faster than X liked, he was no longer actively testing him. That was what it had been, X realized belatedly. "Really. An ex-Hunter? You see the Maverick Wars at all?" Glitch continued. Evidently his inability to not produce words at speed was genuine.
"Yeah," replied X. The magnitude of the understatement was completely lost on his conversational partner, and probably for the better.
"Makes installing new parts you found off old donors a pain in the panels. You never know if you're gonna install something fun you took off someone and then boom, you're the next patient zero all over again."
X had to physically pause for a moment to suppress the facial expression working its way through his code. Glitch had a definite inbuilt talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. "At least antivirus has gotten a lot better and they can remove it now."
Glitch pushed a door open, even holding it for X. "Sure, if you wanna turn yourself in, they don't shoot you on sight first, and then you still risk getting lobotomized worse than even the Virus will do. No thanks, I gotta pass. Rather just have someone I trust shut me down if it came to that. But enough of the bleak shit. We're just about there. How's the battery?"
"Bad," X admitted, but soldiered on all the same.
"Well, hang in there, buddy, I'm not gonna carry you." Glitch led him up some access stairs and into the largely intact remains of a parking garage, flanked on three sides by larger buildings that had sheltered it. The fourth side had been open to the street, once upon a time, but that street was now choked with the rubble of the structure that once stood across from it. Most of the opposite building's walls had fallen away, and the frame had been twisted as though by a massive hand and now lay across the pavement, having come to rest through the top floors of the garage. Sun trickled through the gaps, but more importantly, a powered string of lights hung along the ceiling, leading from the picked-clean back office that the stairs exited into and out into the parking garage, where it wound around and through an obviously constructed barricade of piled concrete blocks and salvaged fencing around the ramp to the second level.
Mack met them on the way through the defenses. "Oh, good, you're in one piece," it commented. "Always hate it when they come in disassembled after all. Glitch didn't give you too bad a time, did he?"
X simply shrugged. "I've had worse."
"Boss says plug him in first, they can talk tomorrow," Mack said to Glitch, who turned to X.
"Hey, lucky you, V," Glitch said, giving X a cheeky nudge with his elbow that caused him to grip his cane. "Not real often someone gets to charge up before hardly even saying hi. You take V, he looks like he could just about brown out. I gotta report in and drop these off." Glitch held up his bag for a moment, then dashed off at what X was beginning to think was his preferred speed.
"I just about could brown out," X agreed, following Mack. Beyond the barricades, there was…well, a town was putting it generously, considering the situation, but it was certainly some kind of settlement, however ramshackle.
A floor to ceiling shed of salvaged concrete blocks and mortar provided some noise control for a squat, patched-together generator, built from the remains of several generators of similar enough models that it wouldn't simply explode on the spot. Other buildings were similarly built from anything at hand, largely from found lumber and plywood left over from abandoned rebuilding attempts. Anything that could be dragged in had been put to use: shelves from stores, furniture, scrap, debris…it looked like a home renovation center had been upended into a four-story parking garage and given a good shake, then arranged into small buildings on the basis that if it could be made to stand up, it could be made into a wall. Even so, X noted, everything looked sturdy, as if assembled by someone who knew what they were doing, and it had almost all been painted with a surprising amount of care.
Someone had even made little paintings of flowers along some of the edges, and random murals covered a few surfaces. That was a comforting touch, X thought, wondering who might have done it. It wasn't something he'd expected of a quarantine zone dweller.
The recharging pods had all been put under one roof, even if technically that roof was the garage's roof. There were three, and each of them was a heavily improvised affair, parts mismatched, casing frequently missing or held together with tape. The internal cushioning in the one that Mack pointed X to had been replaced with couch cushions, none of which were the same color. The glass cover was missing from another, and on the two that still had them, the glass had been cracked and heavily patched with clear tape. All three were cordoned off with curtains, though, and an effort had been made to make their little alcoves look comfortable.
"Don't mind how they look, the point is they work just fine," the C-15 assured him in its synthesized monotone. "I use this one all the time myself. It's got a good cable. Number two's starting to disconnect a bit if you wiggle it."
X gratefully sat on the edge and swung his legs around and into it, leaving his cane propped against the wall. He shrugged his tarp and jacket off, hung them from a convenient hook screwed into the wall, and settled into the cushions, fidgeting his shirt out of the way of the charge port in the middle of his back. The cover had a handle screwed into it, as the lift mechanism didn't work, so he pulled it down and settled into the charger with a slight click.
"Defragment if you need to," Mack said. "Nobody will bother you."
"Thank you," X replied, genuinely. He felt as though he should have said more, but he was too tired to decide exactly what. Instead he let his eyes close and his systems switch into sleep mode to defragment his storage and recharge his energy reserves. For one blessed moment, the complete lack of uncalibrated input and related errors just before he fell into defragmentation sleep felt like relief, and then even better, like nothing at all.