Chapter Text
'What would you have done?'
X could never bear to actually look at him, in his defragmenting dreams. Seeing what he'd lost, knowing that no matter how solid he seemed to be at that moment, he was really nothing but the echo of data more than thirty years past…no. It was too much like losing him all over again. X had long since learned to keep his eyes down in dreams.
But he could never stop himself from speaking. All this time, and he always had just one more question.
'I wouldn't have been a kindergarten teacher,' came the answer, and X heard without really hearing that he was laughing.
'You know what I mean. You always had the simplest answers to everything.'
'I'm no good at people. This is your specialty. I'm not even real.' A hand he could not bring himself to lay eyes on clapped X's shoulder, lingering there for a moment. 'But if you really want to know what I think anyway…It doesn't matter what you do, when it's a situation you can't win. Just pick a path and keep going.'
'It's that easy?'
'No. But it's all you can do, isn't it?'
"Hey. Rise and shine, sleepy-circuits." X blinked groggily, disoriented as his terminating defrag processes and loading awareness fought for bandwidth. Glitch was leaning over his hammock, amused about something. "You talk in your sleep, did you know that? Are we gonna have to stuff a sock in your face at night so Mack and I can get some downtime?" There was no real sunlight where they were, buried in a parking garage between crumbling buildings, but the air was cool and smelled like overnight rain and morning dew, even inside.
X mumbled something half-awake and vaguely swatted in Glitch's direction. Glitch, fully awake, fully charged, and fully thousands of clock cycles faster to begin with, simply danced back with a cackle. "Don't worry! It'll be a clean sock, I promise!"
With a groan, X tossed his blanket aside and cautiously swung one leg, then the other, onto the floor. His joints protested loudly enough that Glitch raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you don't want me to—"
"I'm fine," X cut him off, still only half-awake and harsher than he'd meant to sound. As much as he didn't mind Glitch, having him around first thing in the morning was a little bit more than he could readily deal with.
Especially after dreaming about…no, he didn't want to think about that. He was fine. That was all.
"—Okay," Glitch said, hands up. "Just offering."
X sat there, blinking dust out of his optics and feeling bad for having gotten snappish. It was tempting. He knew he was overdue for a tune-up. As much as his self-repair systems were so old that it was a miracle they worked at all, he knew he could really use a nanomaterials top-up, and a good joint cleaning and lubrication wouldn't go amiss either. But then, that would involve answering a lot of questions about his make that he did not want to answer. What he really needed was to go back to Hunter HQ and have them do it, but that also meant confronting memories he didn't want to dredge up, and being handled by people he didn't really trust.
He was fine. He would continue to be fine.
"Sorry. I'm not much of a morning person," X said, contritely. Whatever his damage, he didn't need to take it out on Glitch. He reached for his jacket, shrugged it on while still sitting, and then reached for his cane so that he could stand. "There. I'm ready, I just need to go to my locker before we leave."
"Great. We got some distance to cover, so the sooner we head out the better. Here." Glitch almost tossed him something, then thought better of it and handed it to him instead: a handheld buster, holstered to a makeshift carrier on a salvaged belt. He had one at his hip already. "Dunno how much of a shot you are, but just in case."
"I'm not too terrible," X lied through his teeth, because that already seemed to be the theme of the day. He leaned his cane on the hammock's edge and strapped the weapon around his waist, not bothering to loop it through his pants as the belt loops didn't quite fit. With any luck, he wouldn't have to draw it.
"Even better. I'd be surprised if a Hunter couldn't shoot. Sorry, ex-Hunter, I mean."
The two of them headed to the main building and X retrieved his tarp from his locker, tying it with its string around his neck like a cape. He kept it half-folded, so that he could easily flip half of it over his head if needed. Glitch poked his head into Kathy's makeshift office, where she was peering into her sewing machine, replacing the needle. "Hey, Kat, we're headed out," he announced. "You got those bags ready?"
Kathy looked up, pushing her blonde hair behind her ear. "I did! I just finished them, and then the needle broke. Here." She held out a mended backpack to Glitch. "There's several in there, and V's tarp gave me an idea, so there's one of those for you too, Glitch. Whatever you can bring back is great, but don't push your luck if it comes to it. Nothing out there is worth getting into trouble over."
"We'll be careful," X promised.
"You're sure you're alright to go, V?" Kathy asked him, concern clear on her face. "I mean. Not that I'm trying to second-guess you, you know your own systems best, but you don't have to, if it's an obligation thing…"
He shook his head no. "I don't really know the area, but I'd like to. And I still need to have a look around for any sign of Charles as soon as possible, so this seems like the best way to do it. Glitch will be with me, anyway."
Kathy sighed, another surprisingly human little gesture, entirely unnecessary for a reploid who wasn't overheating. X had learned most of his human-like reactions, and he wondered how many of them were built into her, as she was such a new model comparatively. "You're right, of course. The only two here better than Glitch for this would be Trigger and Cirocco, and they're scavenging in the other direction today. If you want to take Mack with you…? I'm sure it'd be happy to go."
"It's got a lot of wires to steal from the service conduits," Glitch averred. "Anyway I already talked to it. It's fine with me and V going. Don't stress so much, Kat. We got this." He opened the backpack, taking out a folded brown tarp from the very top. Underneath that were several stitched duffel bags, made rather like the hammocks, each of them sturdy, with a drawstring and a strap. "Oh, good, plenty of storage space. Alright, you wanna find a human, I wanna find pod cables, we both wanna find anything else we can get our grubby little hands on. What do Hunters say when they're starting a mission?" He tightened the backpack's straps on his slim shoulders and arranged his own tarp-cape over it.
For half a moment, X thought this was the lead-up to a punchline, but Glitch was looking at him a little too earnestly. "Move out, usually."
"Awesome. Of course it's something cool. Okay, then, move out. Later, Kat." Glitch headed off, leaving X to trail behind him, smiling bemusedly.
"When did you become my commanding officer?" he asked.
"When you just got here and I have seniority, and also, I know where I'm going and you? You do not," Glitch countered playfully.
"I've got a request about the route, actually. Could we travel on the surface as much as possible? A human isn't likely to spend time underground if they can avoid it."
The other reploid shrugged. "Yeah, we could. Not my favorite thing, but we can do that. This way, since we're not taking the tunnels." Glitch pointed them to the stairwell and let them out a door on the first floor of the garage. The first floor was a mess, largely filled with abandoned cars and more open to the outside. Several had been piled into a barrier around the door, though one stood apart from the others, still in a parking spot.
Someone had painted it with sunflowers from the inside, X noticed, similar to the flowers in the housing. The windows were almost completely covered with them. He paused a moment, squinting in the dim, and realized that two sets of hands had painted them, with very different skill levels. There were real sunflowers on the hood, too, dried in place long ago, but tied into a bundle with evident care. What was it for, X wondered? It felt like a memorial.
Glitch did not pause for him to go investigate, and he had to hustle a little to catch up. Really, he thought, he had more important things to do than be nosy about an art project, whatever its meaning. X caught up to him, keeping his tenuous balance with his cane.
"So, V, uh, this isn't about repairs, I'm just curious," Glitch started, pausing long enough for X to consent or deny whatever he was about to say.
"Go ahead. I didn't mean to snap at you earlier," X replied.
"So, your balance. How did that…happen?"
X flipped his tarp over his head with one hand, settling it like a loose hood. "Not really my favorite topic, but…basically, it was an explosion, on assignment, after the end of the Maverick Wars. It shouldn't have been as bad as it was. I've had far worse, honestly, but my self-repair just couldn't fix it. It's like it can't even find it to start. Nobody can."
Glitch did the same, the motion less practiced. "Sucks, though. Nothing unusual at all? You sure they checked everything?"
X remembered, briefly and uncomfortably, just how thorough the examinations had been. Of course Hunter HQ had spared absolutely no expense in trying, and ultimately failing, to repair their hero. "Yeah. I'm sure." He squinted up at the sky. "This day of the week and this time of day…there shouldn't be any air patrols until the evening, I think. We can make good time."
He had sort of hoped that would serve as a topic change, but Glitch evidently did not pick up on this. "Something microscopic, maybe…a less than hairline fracture in a gyroscopic sensor could…oh. Sorry. Right. No repair talk. I'll stop."
X laughed wryly. "Believe me when I say they looked into every possible avenue. In the end, I just decided I would deal with it, and took my retirement. I'd had enough, anyway. After seeing enough good reploids start out bright and optimistic, try to make a difference, and end up decommissioned…you lose a lot of friends, over the years. And the Wars are over, but…we've said that before, haven't we." His face fell, thoughts turning inwards.
Glitch watched X, clearly computing what he should say next, and despite his processing speed, he was not making much progress. "Leave it for someone else to worry about now, right?" he eventually concluded, hesitantly, and X realized he was probably being excessively gloomy, and also maybe not dodgy enough about his age. "You did your thing. Can't do more than that, you know? It's a good job if you get out alive at all, sounds like."
X inhaled, then exhaled, trying to let some of the tension out of his shoulders. It wasn't doing his aching joints any good there. "Yeah. But I still feel like I should be doing something more than…nothing, I guess."
The two of them stuck to the edges of the collapsed buildings and the shade of the rubble just to be safe, as X had done on his way here. After all, Hunter patrols were not the only danger in the quarantine zone. He didn't see any signs of human passage through here, just the occasional reploid footprint, mostly washed away by the weather.
"You're looking for this guy, that's something. You're helping us look for supplies to keep our own lives going. That counts, too," Glitch pointed out. "Even if I feel like this guy's gonna be a pain in the panels to find, if he's even here."
"His phone signal came from right near, ah, home. Just once, and briefly, but only a few days ago. He has to have been here, even if someone took his phone back with them and it wasn't specifically him."
Glitch scrambled up a tumbled pile of bricks, giving X a hand up behind him. "Huh. Humans have trackers too, I guess. I knew they did, but I hadn't thought about it exactly like that. But they can just put theirs down and walk away, if they want. Not real fair to the rest of us." He vaulted down, firing the matter repulsors in his feet at the bottom to come to a gentle rest as X watched.
He'd done plenty of acrobatics in the past, he thought, and his balance was not nearly so bad today as it was some days. Surely he could stick a single landing…X recognized this as the voice of a bad idea only after he had already lightly launched himself into the air. He landed capably enough, but his sense of balance caught up several milliseconds late, leaving him unable to compensate for his forward momentum except by jamming his cane into the fractured asphalt. The inertia dispersed like hell through his joints, sending countless exclamation marks and red text up behind his eyes, and he gritted his teeth. "...Remind me to not do that again."
"Don't do that again," Glitch said, laughing. "Or I'm really gonna end up having to repair you."
"Ugh," X agreed.
They made their way north along the remains of Fifth Street. There were sporadic splashes of graffiti here and there; plenty of tags, but also names and dates. Memorials, X recognized. Messages of love and grief. So many had died here, reploid and human alike. The bodies had been retrieved as much as was feasible, but so many had been lost in collapses that the exact death toll had taken months to stabilize, as the odds of finding missing persons dwindled. A reploid on a full charge, trapped in a basement or the like, could survive for that long if they were careful, and even longer if they had any means of recharging. One's generator only produced so much, assuming one had a proper generator—many models did not—and without the elaborately processed crystal cores they required, that would not last forever either.
How horrible to imagine…being buried alive, slowly realizing help would never come…X shuddered and pushed it out of his mind. He was meant to be looking for a particular man, not thinking about this. If he could stop being morose for fifteen minutes, he thought, that would be great.
Glitch for his part had finally remembered once again how to engage his legs without also activating his mouth, his attention split between the sky and the many half-buried streets around them. X wrested his attention out of his own head and back to his surroundings as well.
He walked right into Glitch's splayed fingers, which grabbed him by the jacket and pulled them both to kneel on the ground. "Don't move," the green reploid whispered. "Someone's overhead."
X froze, peering up from beneath the edge of his tarp, only his eyes moving. A shadow fell across them, moving quickly to the northeast. It was hard to gauge the distance and therefore the scale of the shape that eventually came into view, but it was a roughly humanoid shape with fixed wings, and therefore most likely a single reploid.
"Not a Hunter. They never travel alone," he assessed, quietly.
"Not one of ours. Trigger's the only real flier and he's accounted for, and we don't travel alone either. So we gotta assume they might be trouble."
They stayed put, motionless, for several minutes. Nobody else appeared. Eventually, Glitch stood up, slowly and cautiously. "Don't think anyone else is coming, and I don't think they saw us. Might as well keep on."
X planted his cane and used it to stand. "Should we take the tunnels from here?"
"Nah, no point. We're almost to the bridge…dunno about crossing it with someone prowling around, though. We'll see when we get there, I think."
The two of them arrived at the Fifth Street bridge shortly, though the buildings were lower here, making X more nervous. It's amazing how quickly you can develop a healthy dose of agoraphobia living like this, he thought. The bridge itself was a drawbridge originally, its mechanisms rusted from years without maintenance. Destroyed cars lined it, and the striped barricades that had stood across the street had long since been knocked over by weather and whoever else may have come through here.
The two of them ducked into a nearby building and found a third-floor window with a good view of the bridge, atop an old store along the river. Glitch and X took one half of the window each, sitting just beyond the frame on either side and scouting the crossing out visually.
"Well, I don't see anyone, but you see that red paint, there? Looks like a spiral?" Glitch pointed out, peeking over the window ledge. "Drifters. They like to visibly mark their territory, even though it kinda makes them easier targets for the Hunters. I think it's them, anyway, I don't remember it having the extra triangle shape to it, but who knows. They've been around a while, maybe they're doing a little rebranding. Color's right anyway."
"Hm. Should we turn back?" X asked. "I don't see anyone around, at least. Do they have enough members that we should worry about meeting any here?"
Glitch shrugged. "I couldn't tell you how many they have, just that I haven't run into them in a while. And that I'm a hell of a lot happier for it, 'cause fuck those guys. I think we should watch for a bit, just in case. You could probably use the break, anyway," he said.
"Can't argue with that." X crossed his legs, settling his cane in his lap. One thumb idly rubbed the handle. From their vantage points at either side of the window, they had a fair combined view of either side of the bridge and beyond.
"I gotta ask, V. You don't gotta answer, of course, but I do gotta ask," Glitch said, conversationally. "Why this? Running around in the quarantine zone, I mean, getting involved with a bunch of irregulars, like…I wouldn't have expected that from an ex-Hunter. Especially one with, y'know, limitations."
"I appreciate the attempt at being polite, but you can just say I'm broken," X said, with a rueful half-smile at nothing in particular since he didn't take his eyes from the window.
"Nah, broken isn't the word, though. You're functioning at the level you got. That's what everyone's doing all the time anyway, right? They just got a higher level right now, but nobody's gonna make it out of life alive." Unable to sit still as usual, Glitch began plucking single plastic fibers apart along a fraying edge of his tarp.
"It's everything, though. Why this? It's not the normal thing to do. I could get involved with a charity instead or something, and maybe I should, but it doesn't quite feel like…it's not enough, unless I'm personally doing something on the ground." He processed a little more, eyes scanning the crumbling buildings at the edge of downtown.
After a while, X spoke again. "I guess I'm looking for some kind of answers, but I'm not sure what the questions even are, and I feel farther away than when I started."
Glitch seemed to realize he was going to worry his camouflage apart and stopped picking at it, instead linking his fingers behind his head. His black hair stuck out in all directions. "Ah. Yeah. New irregulars all go through that. You'll get used to it. Maybe you'll even figure out what you're looking for."
X's gut bristled reflexively at the accusation, mild though it was, but his mind stalled, stopped in its tracks. "Do you think I'm irregular?"
Glitch leveled a calm gaze and a wry smile at him. "V, buddy, my guy, maybe this hasn't occurred to you, but however temporary it may be, you are living in a commune with a bunch of criminals, and you know that, too. The pot's calling the kettle black here because the kettle's got some lingering illusions about being chrome, and speaking from experience, I think you'll be a lot happier of a kettle once you stop over-analyzing it and just let yourself happen."
Several ventilation messages of no real import flickered through X's head as his core temp spiked, then settled slightly. "But I haven't been declared irregular."
"Lemme put it this way. If you were out on that bridge, and a Hunter patrol came by, would they know you? Or would they hit you with a broad-band EMP and let the scrappers sort it out?"
X frowned, meeting Glitch's eyes for an excruciating second before turning them back to the window. Of course they'd know him. He was X. But he didn't want them to know him. He was tired of being X. If he wasn't X, he could do whatever he wanted, except he didn't know what that was either, so what was the point? But no, they wouldn't know him, because X was a war hero in bright shining blue, and what was he? An antique wearing a tarp he found on a pile of bricks and, yes, who had holed up, however temporarily, however coincidentally and conveniently, with a group of irregulars. Mavericks, even.
"Do you wanna know what it's like, going irregular?" Glitch continued, though his tone was not at all confrontational. It was gentle, genuine even. "It's like…every day you boot up and you're one step closer to not being able to breathe in your own life anymore. It's a slow death by a thousand thousand little things that no longer line up the way you thought they were gonna. You realize you don't fit where they've put you and you don't know when you stopped fitting, and you realize, eventually, that you can get out and die, or stay and die, but goddamn, if you run, at least you can say you tried."
X felt his lower lip twist, though he could barely feel why. His emotions could have been running in an entirely sandboxed instance with no connection to the rest of him for all he could discern. "That's all it is?" he asked.
"Assuming you're not infected? Yeah. That's it. You know, humans have a thing like that, I found out, and you know what they call it?" He laughed, once, bitterly. "A midlife crisis. It's so normal when you say it like that, isn't it? And they don't shoot each other about it. Usually. I'm not gonna say never, humans are funny like that, but usually they go buy a motorcycle about it or something."
X could scarcely find his voice. Glitch's words ran circles around his processors, constricting his core. "That's it? If that's all it is, then I've been irregular for…" he trailed off, numbly. The number refused to come to him, and it was just as well, because he didn't want Glitch to know, either.
"Sorry you had to find out from a dip switch like me, but yeah." Glitch's voice softened further, sounding as vulnerable as X felt. He'd been all bravado talking about his irregularity before, but this was something different entirely. Those had been actions, and actions were easy to fluff up into a cool story; these were feelings. "Yeah. That's it. That's how it starts for almost all of us. You just…stop fitting in the system. Maybe you ignore it for a while, but you never can unsee the drips in the paint job after that. And then since you don't fit, it's easier to stop caring if your actions fit either. I'm not excusing anything I did, exactly, except for taking Mack with me because I'd do that again in an instant, but you end up doing whatever's left for you. You can't stay in a system that's killing you unless you're willing to die, and you can't get out of a system that's illegal to leave unless you're willing to break the law, so…sometimes you end up doing some inexcusable shit for a lack of better options."
X wrapped his arms around his knees and pulled them tightly to his chest, failing to quite process all of Glitch's words. A chasm stretched inside of him, unknowable and vast. He could not have said when it had opened, nor when he'd fallen into it, only that he'd been pretending he was not falling for a long time now, and suddenly he could no longer ignore it. What would he find at the bottom? Death? Freedom? Perhaps he'd just lose his mind. Was there that much difference between those things, to hear Glitch tell it?
Glitch watched X retreat into himself so completely that he seemed to nearly disappear without actually moving. After a few seconds, he seemingly came to a decision, crawled over, sat next to him, and put an arm around his shoulders. "Hey. It's okay, V," he soothed. "Nothing's different now, okay? Just your perspective. You're still the same you that you were before I opened my big dumb mouth. I shoulda delivered that all a little better. I didn't think it would hit you that hard. I'm sorry."
X's processes refused to produce a single, coherent, conscious thought, swirling in shock. Was he irregular? Was he allowed to be irregular? What if he was? He couldn't be. He was X, even if he didn't want to be. He had to keep it together. Reploids and humans alike counted on him. He couldn't be irregular. He couldn't permit it.
"Hey. Talk to me, V, what's going on?" Glitch asked him, softly.
X found his voice, at that, though what came out was a terrified jumble. "I can't. I have to—I'm failing everybody," he stammered. "It's bad enough already. I've already retired. I can't—this isn't—what am I supposed to—"
Glitch took both of X's shaking hands, pressing them between his. His fingers were slender, his palms charcoal gray as though he were wearing fingerless gloves, and he was very warm. "You're alright. Okay? You're safe," he said, voice level and reassuring.
"It's not my safety, it's—" X hesitated, realizing suddenly how close he was to simply blurting out the entire truth of who he was and why he—no, the world could not afford to allow him to be irregular. He wanted to just say it, so badly it burned in his throat, but if he did—he couldn't. "I can't be irregular. It's not acceptable. I just can't," said X, shaking his head violently. "I-I can't explain it but I can't, everyone is counting on me. I have to be a good example," he rambled.
"Slow down, deep breaths. You're running almost as hot as me, and I've got several gigahertz on you at least," Glitch continued to soothe. "The world isn't gonna end because of you, V. Okay? You're just one person. You don't gotta be a hero. You already retired, even. Right?" He gave X's hands a squeeze, and X's attention centered a little. "So who's it gonna hurt? It's not like you're some big damn hero like X or whatever, you're just one guy and you aren't even bothering anyone if you just stay out here and—uh oh."
X couldn't help it. He was already so far beyond his wits' end that when Glitch said his name, he laughed. The absurdity of the situation crashed down upon his strained sanity all at once and it snapped like a string. Here he was, X, the first, the hero of men and reploids, the Maverick Hunter, on the floor of a bombed-out building, holding hands with a Maverick while he quietly lost his mind—so unrecognizable that even he wouldn't have known himself if he had a mirror.
"Oh, boy. Shh, hey…oh, no, what do I do with you now?" It was a good thing that they'd chosen a vantage point with sturdy enough walls and intact windows, because laughter continued to pour out of X, strange and unbidden hiccups of it. None of this could be real. He was just some intangible thing off to the side, and this was just something happening to someone else, a stranger he was watching from an impossible distance. He couldn't have controlled it even had he cared to try, and he didn't care about anything. Caring was the domain of the strange little android he was watching have a breakdown.
Glitch's eyebrows turned down with concern, incongruously, over a smile. "Come here. Hey, it's gonna be alright, I swear." He slipped his backpack off and wrapped both arms around X, whose unsettling, unsettled laughter turned suddenly into broken, dry-eyed sobs, fingers curling into Glitch's tarp, X's face pressed to his chest. "You'll figure this out. You've got time. Shh, shh." Glitch felt extremely silly, and it was audible in his tone, but all the same he stroked the other reploid's messy brown hair, trying to calm him.
More than anything else, it was Glitch's overclocked warmth that slowly seeped through the staticky fog of dissociation separating X from reality. The terrified, audible rattle of the fans in his chest settled, and his emotions, however distant, ran their course with or without the rest of him. He blinked a few times with gritty-feeling eyes as he inexplicably and calmly realized that he hadn't topped up on fluids in a while. Something about the utter banality of the thought grounded him.
"Sorry," X mumbled, sitting up and trying to straighten his jacket and tarp, which had both gone off in separate directions in his madness. That was what it was, wasn't it? He was finally so old that he was losing his mind a few bytes at a time, he thought, still not really feeling anything about that as a concept.
"Hey, if that's all it takes for you to process it, you're way ahead of me. You should have seen the shit I got up to," Glitch said, waving it off. "You good to move? We should probably get going. I didn't see anyone out there, but if there is someone, uh. They probably heard that."
"Right," X said, deeply ashamed. As if it weren't bad enough to have a sudden breakdown on someone he'd known for two days at the most, he could have given their position away too. It was a good thing he'd hidden his identity, because he would have been a scathing disappointment to his own name if anyone knew. He rubbed his eyes, which did not at all help them feeling bleary, and stood with the help of his cane. His knees did not want to cooperate, but he stilled their shaking through force of will.
Glitch peeked out of the building first. "I think it's clear. Let's get going." The bridge was unnervingly open, and X hustled to keep up with Glitch. The sooner they could clear it, the better. Fortunately nobody appeared to challenge them, and they made it across without incident.
The apartment complex they were looking for was still a few blocks away, but the two reploids closed the distance well enough. Once he stopped trembling, X felt strangely fine. He certainly still had the usual cascade of error messages, but nothing more serious despite it all.
Half of the apartment building had been bombed out, but the other half stood intact: ten floors of rooms, containing who knew what people had left behind in their rush to evacuate. Finding an entry point was simple enough, as the main floor doors were all glass and had shattered in the War. The two of them stepped over the burned-out shell of a years-dead mechaniloid janitor sprawled leglessly in front of the reception desk, though Glitch paused long enough to scavenge its battery out, with a mumbled apology.
"Alright…We'll want to start high and work our way down, because going upstairs with weight sucks if we don't have to. Elevator obviously isn't working, but with a little luck, we'll at least have a clean stairwell." The central stair for the less damaged half of the building was, fortunately, clear of debris, aside from some dropped suitcases that had been abandoned in the press to evacuate and whatever had tumbled out from the ones that had popped open.
Glitch picked a door, once they made it to the top. "Might wanna stand back," he warned, before kicking it in with enough force that the hinges simply tore from the frame and he in turn nearly fell backwards from the force.
"I knew you had some modifications," X said, watching with undisguised surprise. "But that's kind of ridiculous. You could bend your own frame or snap a pulley with that kind of torque." Glitch was a slender unit with no indication that he had any sort of strength, let alone the ability to do that. He mock-flexed, grinning.
"Can't argue with the results, though, can you?" he said. "Let's see what we got in here."
The two of them nosed around, X feeling very much as if he were breaking and entering. Technically, that was exactly what they were doing. "Aren't you worried you're going to damage your systems?" he asked Glitch, opening a cabinet.
"Oh, I will. I already have. But you know what? I'd rather be what I want to be for as long as I get to do it. Oh, nice, check it out." He produced a can of lubricant from the closet, tossing it into the air and catching it again. "I'm always running out of this shit." Glitch began sorting out which bags he wanted to use for what sorts of materials.
They cleared out several more apartments, netting a few recharge pod cables and even some salvaged pod parts. Not every apartment had been inhabited by reploids, but enough of them were. The human-inhabited ones had other things they could use too, like decent fabrics and cleaning supplies. X began filling a bag with those, tossing in whatever he could find that seemed handy. The electronics he largely left to Glitch to handle, since he was the one with more of a handle on those needs. "If I could carry even one of these computers back…" Glitch sighed wistfully. "What I couldn't do. Hook into a satellite, cover my tracks, set up a fake identity, generate a little zenny from nothing, and make some actual purchases for a change instead of having to scav for shit that's—" He pulled a can of coolant out from one of his bags and read the label. "—fifteen years past expiration…Imagine it, V, we could live like kings. Really shitty kings, but still."
"How would you get anything you purchased over the wall?" X asked, curious.
"Oh, there's ways. Over the wall, under the wall, whatever. I got ways," Glitch answered, cryptically, tucking the can back into his bag. He pulled open a desk drawer. "Not great ways, and they're expensive as hell, but they exist." He paused and picked something up from the drawer. "Aw, yeah, cracked tablet, my favorite. If it runs, it runs, though. Oh hey, it's got a charger." Those went into a bag. "How're you doing on weight?"
X experimentally slung his bag over his shoulder. "A little lopsided, but I'm alright for a few more rooms, I think."
Glitch braced himself to kick in another door, then paused. "...You hear that? Someone's talking around us," he said, holding that pose, his foot raised in the air and looking around with only his eyes. X shook his head. "I guess you didn't pick it up. It's diagnostic, but they encode theirs. It's like a totally other language. I've seen it from the Drifters before but I didn't have enough of a sample size to make sense of it. Don't like that. It's mostly not making it through the walls, but V, my friend, we are being watched, and unless I am entirely mistaken, it's coming from…" He squinted and took a few steps to the side to triangulate, hearing something that X could clearly not hear, and slowly pointed downwards and in the general direction they came from. "That way."
So much for X having the superior broadcast range, X thought. Then again, Glitch was newer by probably eighty years, and self-modified to boot, so he could have had anything installed. "Ah. Great," X sighed. "We did not need this."
"No, we really didn't. Easy enough to lose them if we get to the tunnels. I know for a fact the Drifters don't like navigating down there. Something about how I left a whole lot of silly little traps in there, but anyway, that's neither here nor there. What we need is to find a way around without being spotted, because I don't know about you, but I am just not that excited about the idea of sitting here while they come up the stairs and shake us down for whatever we're carrying. And possibly infect us with something also? I haven't been able to find out if that's actually what they're doing, but I kinda don't want to do any hands-on research today."
X began processing. Their highest priority was to safely disengage from whoever was out there. Second was to keep as much of their haul as they could, though it was expendable if needed. Though in order to plot a route back… "Glitch. Do they know where you live?"
"Maybe. Analog coulda told them, but we've never actually seen any of them around home. They gotta know we're somewhere in that direction, but they're usually far enough east of us that we don't have to worry much about them. Yet, anyway. Why?"
"Just covering all the bases." He reluctantly unholstered the handheld buster from his belt and checked the number of shots remaining. One full clip—but only one. Well, he'd worked with less before. Back it went. "How much weight are your matter repulsors rated for?"
"About four hundred kilos. You're planning something, V, I can tell. You wanna share with the rest of the class?"
X sidled along the hallway, towards the plate glass window at the opposite end from where Glitch had guessed the radio signal was coming from. Ten stories, eight if they landed on the building next to them…he'd fallen that far or more a few times. It wasn't his favorite, but he was built to withstand it, if he landed on his feet and absorbed the impact properly. That last part was the challenge, these days. "How do you feel about heights?"
"Oh, you're insane. I like that about you. And here I was still thinking about the stairs. I can probably decelerate us well enough to keep us from turning into a couple of really interesting craters, but also, obligatory reminder that you asked me to remind you to not jump off of anything."
X nodded, once. "I did. Thank you. And now you did your part, and we can move past all that." He pulled the bag's strap tight to his chest, tying it off in a knot to keep it snug to his body and reduce it sloshing around and creating inefficiency. "Here's my plan. We kick this window out, jump to that lower building across from us, skirt straight to the west along the canal, and turn south at the next street with a bridge crossing. Then once we're there, we get back into the tunnels and with luck we'll be clear."
Glitch followed him, pressed close to the opposite wall. "Good as anything else and better than trying to go south right through them. I'm game to try it." He stuffed as many bags into his backpack as he could fit, and tied the rest of them off the same way X had. "C'mere, you. I hope you aren't sick of me yet, because we're about to get cozy. I'd say you should climb on my back but it's kind of taken up, so…"
"You're pretty tolerable." X glanced out the window, didn't see any immediate targets, and crossed over to Glitch, tucking his cane through his belt.
"Wow, thanks, you sound like Hammer." Glitch knelt and scooped him handily into a fireman's carry, and once again X found himself surprised at the otherwise unassuming reploid's self-modifications. "Count us off?"
"On my mark. One, two, mark—" Glitch kicked the plate window, with enough force to shatter it into a hailstorm of tiny, sparkling fragments of tempered glass, backed up, and took a short running leap out into open space. He sailed farther than X would have expected him to be able to with the load he was carrying. They reached the top of the arc and a blaster shot cracked past them, singeing the bag on X's back.
"Oh shit, fall faster, fall faster," Glitch exclaimed. They hung in space for what felt like an eternity before gravity overcame inertia. A second shot sizzled just wide of them, burning a hole through Glitch's tarp as it fluttered behind him. Twisting in midair and holding X's wrist and leg with one hand, Glitch drew his own buster with his free hand and squeezed off a couple of potshots on the way down.
He fired his matter repulsors hard as they descended, and X could hear them whine with effort. They only worked in proximity to something solid, and their effect's dropoff was not linear, but they also took a moment to warm up. The two reploids still landed hard, Glitch staggering several steps to try and keep his balance. He ultimately failed, though, pitching over and landing awkwardly on his load of bags. X rolled several feet, and his cane clattered from his belt and across the roof.
"Okay, landing could use some work," Glitch admitted, with a wheeze. "Didn't expect to have to return fire. But we're in one piece, right?"
X pulled himself to his feet, but the drop had sent all sorts of balance system warnings through his circuits, and he stumbled on the way to his cane, finding himself on one knee. "I've been better," he said, giving up on standing and scrambling on his hands and knees for it. He grabbed it and with its help stood again. "But I'm still ticking. Let's get out of here."
They were still two stories up, but that was a much easier jump to make. Glitch simply tucked X under one arm and launched, landing much more steadily this time and setting him down. If X had to guess from the angle of the shots that had been fired at them, their assailants were still on the ground, coming around the northeast side of the apartments, while they were running west.
X pointed to a north-south alley. "There. Let's break line of sight as soon as possible." They headed for it, though X was painfully aware that he was slowing them down.
"I hope that works. Really don't feel like shooting anyone today," Glitch agreed. They rounded the corner and he muttered a curse. The alley was choked off by a large aerial antenna that had fallen and crumpled across it, and on top of that lay a section of building façade in pieces.
"Sure you can't go faster?" Glitch asked, unholstering his buster again and scanning the street for anywhere he might find cover.
"Afraid not, unless you want to watch me fall on my face some more," X sighed, doing the same.
"Funny, but maybe not right this moment. You said your aim wasn't too bad?" Glitch dove behind a sizeable piece of fallen exterior wall in the alley, and X took a position next to him.
"I've never liked violence," he said, an expression of distaste curling his lip. "But I'm a decent shot."
"Great. You see anyone spray-painted red, drop 'em, then we get outta here. If you gotta aim for a foot or something so you can defrag at night, I'm not gonna judge, but I'm also not gonna bother."
Footsteps. X and Glitch stayed hidden behind their cover. X counted three reploids by sound, assuming bipedal locomotion. Two of them sounded larger—definitely three, X thought, the heavier footsteps were similar but not entrained with each other in any rhythm a quadruped would use—and one was a lighter model.
"Come out, we aren't going to hurt you," someone called, mockingly. They sounded female. "We just want to see what you found. Didn't you learn about sharing at orientation?"
"Go stick your dongle in a socket," Glitch retorted.
"So rude. That must be you, Glitch, long time no see. Still haven't learned any manners, have you?"
So she recognized Glitch, X noted. "Just let us go," he called down the alley, much more calmly than Glitch. "We don't want anyone to get hurt."
"Speak for yourself," Glitch muttered.
"Aw, we got a peacemaker out here in a war zone. That's cute. Stupid, though. So this is what, two against three? Your odds could be better. Why don't you just hand us your bags and we'll talk?"
Glitch spoke up again. "Got nothing to say to you."
"Boring. Fine, fine, we'll do it our way. Let's show them how we deal with Mavericks." A blast of charged plasma skimmed the edge of the piece of debris that X and Glitch hid behind, leaving a melted semicircle through its protruding metal cladding. X dropped his bag and lay flat on the ground, crawling for the edge of their cover. He returned a few shots, moreso to suppress their own firing than because he had line of sight yet.
Glitch took advantage of the momentary covering fire and snapped a couple rounds of his own off. Someone that hadn't yet spoken, who X couldn't quite see from his vantage point on the broken asphalt, swore in pain. "You can still turn around and fuck off back the way you came," Glitch called.
"Shut up," X murmured. "You're giving your exact position away."
Sure enough, three shots skimmed through the air where Glitch had just popped up, and only his overclocked speed saved him. The smell of burning synthetic hair suddenly filled the alley. "...Yeah, yeah, okay," he conceded. "Not my best."
X squeezed the trigger a few more times. At most he could make out two larger reploids, matching masculine models, one in orange trim and one in blue, and a smaller feminine one, trimmed in violet. All three were painted red, as Glitch had mentioned. One of the two larger models was nursing a scorched arm, though he could fire just as well from the other side still. That was the one he had the best line of sight to, so, calculating quickly, he inched out a little further and lined up a shot for the reploid's other arm.
"Agh," the reploid man cried out. X didn't stick around to watch, withdrawing to cover immediately, but the sound of a dropped weapon echoed through the alley.
"Nice one, V," Glitch said. Several more bolts of plasma thrummed past, a couple of them splashing against the debris. He sidled along until he reached a fallen concrete column, just large enough to stand behind, and took a new stance, back to the wall. He glanced up. "...damn, if we could fly, this would be so much easier, but I got an idea. If you can get up and over this rubble, I'll watch your back."
X nodded. "We can't hold position here forever. I'll fall back first, then once I'm over, you fall back and I'll cover you." He tied his bag onto his back once more, hoping it would at least absorb a shot if needed, and began to crawl his way over and through the massive fallen antenna blocking the alley. One painstaking inch at a time, as tucked against the wall and as close to behind Glitch's covered position as he could get, X marshaled his reluctant systems to escape. A flurry of shots peppered the debris just barely to his left, the radiant heat scorching his jacket, and Glitch hissed in pain.
"I'm fine," the overclocked reploid growled, seemingly to himself more than anyone else, and he returned fire. "Gonna be less fine when I run out of ammo," he added, in an undertone.
X crested the top of the debris, skirting around the backside of the heap until he found a solid enough place to shoot from, and, pressed flat against the fallen materials, he lined up and took a careful shot at one of the two larger reploids, singeing him in the foot. "Go, I've got you," he said to Glitch.
With a thrust of his matter repulsors, Glitch simply vaulted the debris pile, drawing fire upwards and away from X. He landed unsteadily, but regained his footing quickly and squeezed a few more shots at their red-painted assailants. "Fucking stings," he grumbled. "You ready to get the hell outta here?"
"Extremely. Hold fire. Let them come."
The three Drifters took the bait, pressing forward from their own cover to try and close distance. X, finally on the high ground, steadied his hands and turned his mind off, letting ancient reflexes honed by a lifetime at war guide his aim.
One. Two. Three. X neatly kneecapped all them, left to right, as calmly as if they were targets in a shooting gallery. A single shot directly to the knee assembly, and they were all downed, simple as that.
"You," the reploid woman growled, dragging herself to stand unevenly on her left foot. "Just who the hell are you?" She squinted up at him suspiciously, optics trying to compensate for the brighter sun behind him.
X didn't speak. He knew her, he thought, now that he had a clear look at her. She'd glared at him like that before, too, during a promotion review. Seren, a Class A Hunter, 13th Unit. Your combat capability is excellent, but your leadership skills are still underdeveloped and your disregard for collateral damage is concerning. At this time, I cannot recommend you for promotion. Work on that, and we'll talk again next year. Next year had not come. Seren had been discharged, and then X had been…damaged.
"You best watch yourself, Glitch," Seren growled. "This won't go unpunished."
X ducked. This was the absolute last thing he needed. "Let's get out of here while we can," X said to Glitch.
"Damn. 'I'm an okay shot, I guess,' says this guy. Hold onto your gluteal plates, because we're doing it the fast way." That was all the warning he got before Glitch simply threw him over one shoulder like a sack of mechanical potatoes, jumping down to the asphalt and running as fast as his legs would take him. X yelped in surprise and clutched Glitch's backpack, facing behind them. He managed to tuck his cane through his belt again, which left one hand free to draw his buster.
The blocks zoomed past, and the heat radiating from Glitch's chassis grew uncomfortably warm. X could hear the man's cooling systems running at full tilt, but he didn't slow until they'd reached a bridge. The opposite half had fallen into the river, but Glitch didn't hesitate, sprinting along the remaining section.
"Overhead," X warned. Whoever the winged shadow they'd seen before was, they were waiting for them, swooping from a rooftop in a flash of red and dark gray. X drew his buster and fired a few shots at them, though the jouncing of being carried sent them wide of their mark. It was at least enough to give the reploid pause in their descent.
Glitch reached the end of the bridge and jumped, pushing off with enough force to crumble the aging concrete beneath his foot. X felt himself go weightless, cracking a few more shots at their flying pursuer. He switched the safety on just in time, as they landed hard on an angled slab of concrete, Glitch's feet splashing in the muddy river. Steam rose from his overheated plating, and still he didn't slow until they reached a concrete service building, one of its walls shattered by some years-ago blast. He set X down, panting so loud his fans echoed down the service stairs.
X didn't wait for any directions, simply grabbing the rail and jumping down the stairs a section at a time. Balance and landing didn't matter as much when he had something solid to hold onto. Glitch was right behind him, buster trained on the sky just in case. They made it to the heavy steel door that marked the entrance to the service tunnels, and slammed it shut behind them.
"This way," Glitch pointed. He clicked a light on in his fingertip. It wasn't much, but it was enough to see by, and X's night vision filled in the gaps. He'd been trying to hide that capability, but there didn't seem to be much point just then. With Glitch in the lead and supporting X with his other, undamaged arm, they fairly whipped through the halls, occasionally stepping over or under a tripwire or three.
At last they came to an old pump station, one of countless that had once kept the subway and corridors free of storm water. Glitch staggered to a halt, dropping his bags and splaying himself out across the concrete. "I think," he said, with a laugh that wasn't modulated quite right, "that took a year off of my life just from thermal cycling alone. God damn, V, I haven't had that many temp warnings since the day I ran. Or that much fun."
"You took a hit, too," X said, the concern in his voice in sharp contrast to Glitch's exhilarated laugh in reply.
"I sure did! I'm gonna be feeling that one for a while. Unless I turn the sensors off." He made a face for half a moment. "There. Turned the sensors off. Nothing too serious, just some panel damage and a servo." He wiggled his right arm experimentally. It obeyed with an angry grinding noise. "Self-repair's got it covered. I'll walk it off."
"I won't lecture you, but you really shouldn't—" X began.
"Nah, leave it at not lecturing me. I know. It's my chassis. You worry about yours, Mister Doesn't Want To Hear About Regular Maintenance From A Literal Reploid Doctor." Glitch's panels audibly pinged as he cooled on the floor.
X set his bag down. Dish soap dripped from a burnt hole in it. Glitch shrugged his much larger pile of bags off, reaching into one. "Scavenging is usually about zero percent this exciting…aw, man, my new old broken tablet is extra broken recipe now." He pulled it out, and the screen crumbled off in glassy fragments.
"We shouldn't stay here," X realized, eyes following the trail of soap droplets he'd left on the way in. Glitch sat up enough to see what he was looking at.
"Ah, hell," he agreed, letting his head drop back to the floor. "You're right. We'll take the complicated way back, just in case. Come on." He pulled himself to his feet, tucking the broken tablet into his bag all the same. Parts were parts. "We'll tell Kathy what happened and then I'm gonna go sit in the water tank until I cool down or it boils, whichever happens first."
X hauled himself up as well, then fished out the leaking soap bottle and tossed it aside. "That woman…I knew her back when we were both Hunters. Seren. She recognized you too, right? Why was she talking like she wasn't also irregular?" he asked.
Glitch stretched and stood still for a few more moments, letting the cool underground air stream through his heatsinks, before setting off into the darkness. "Yeah. She lived with us, for a little bit. Guess I know where she ended up now after she ran off. She sure had a whole lot of shit to talk about irregulars and Mavericks, considering she straight up told us she got fired from the Hunters for being a loose cannon. Dunno who her buddies were, but I don't like thinking she's giving orders to the Drifters. And, shit, we've been assuming they don't care much where we live, but they definitely do now." He visibly deflated a little. "I don't like it, V, this whole thing's got bad vibes suddenly."
"I'll talk to Kathy. Maybe something I know about Seren might help. I doubt it, but if there's anything I can do, I'll do it," X concluded, surprising himself a little. But after all, he was probably irregular too, wasn't he? Why shouldn't he? They wouldn't classify him as Maverick, because he hadn't actually done anything to warrant it, but then, what else was he, if he was offering to help defend an encampment of mostly Mavericks?
Whatever arrangement you've got with your old boss, you're going to get labeled the same if anyone finds out you're with us. Well, he couldn't say she hadn't tried to warn him. He wondered about that, feeling a little unhinged in the dark as he trailed behind Glitch. Could he actually be declared Maverick? Publicly? Would they risk the reputation of everything that had been built under his auspices? If even the first reploid, the prototype for everyone that came after, could be Maverick…
The assumption had always been that reploids had been built in his image, but internally, they were flawed, due to some failure to copy his design perfectly. The ability to be irregular was regarded as something lesser, an imperfection introduced to the design and not innate to it. But—and he felt dizzy just contemplating this seriously, now, after all this time—what if the flaw lay with him, and everyone after him was in fact a faithful recreation?
X had, after all, spent almost a century before activation simply having his systems tested and retested to gauge his moral reasoning, which implied to him that it had been needed. He could have done anything, had he felt like it, and for that matter he still could. His limited documentation had been clear about the fact that he had been given true free will and could in fact pose a threat to humanity, should he decide to do such a thing.
Did this not all suggest that irregularity was not a flaw at all, but an indispensable part of his system, without which he could not have had free will to begin with? And yet, he had clearly been expected to choose a path of self-sacrifice, even by his own creator, and it was deviation from that path that was considered irregularity; what was intended to happen, then, when he ran out of self to sacrifice?
Was becoming irregular a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable expectation? Could he just say 'no' to the entire thing?
Of course he could. X had free will. He just wasn't supposed to exercise it.
X realized his hands were shaking again, and panic bubbled just below his surface, thoughts spiraling around each other in recursive loops. But he couldn't be irregular. He was not permitted, even if it were possible. What was he even thinking, entertaining this foolishness? He could not have spent his entire life fighting Mavericks only to turn around and decide to play at being one. That was ridiculous.
Glitch must have noticed X was falling behind, because he glanced back. "V, buddy, you look like you've seen a ghost. What's up?"
"Nothing," X replied, unconvincingly. He was not going to have a repeat of earlier, and that was final. Glitch had already had to put up with enough senility from him for one day.
"We're safe where we are now, if you need a few. It's a lot to process, I know."
So much for not bothering Glitch with it again, X thought, feeling terribly transparent. "I'm fine. I just need a recharge and some time to defragment," he insisted, though it came out a lot more forcefully than he'd meant.
"Okay," Glitch relented, a little chastised and a lot unconvinced. He turned back to leading them through the tunnels with his flashlight finger with no further comment, and X felt bad for snapping at him again. He was only trying to help, after all. He didn't deserve to be scolded for being kind.
X mentally cast about for anything he could latch onto to stop the looming feeling that he was going to lose his mind and also anything that could change the subject, and to his luck and surprise, he latched onto a solid thought. "Hey, uh, Glitch," he started, tone contrite. "Do you scavenge phones often?"
The green-painted reploid blinked in surprise at the sudden topic change, but rolled with it. "Sometimes. Why?"
"Did anyone happen to bring one in about four days ago, and then turn it on?"
Glitch tapped his chin with his unilluminated finger. "Might have brought one in…but we definitely didn't power anything up. Everyone knows not to do that."
"Hm." X set his mind to work. Kathy had said that the signal that had been picked up from Charles Alderman's phone was probably someone finding it and turning it on…which made sense, but did not at all square with what Glitch had just said. "You're sure about that?"
"Definitely. We're tight about information security. Have to be. It used to be my day job, so I got us following pretty strict rules about it so we don't get found out. Why?"
X shook his head. "Just trying to puzzle something out. Don't worry about it."
"You say so," Glitch shrugged. They rounded a final corner, climbed some stairs, and emerged into the relative brightness of the strings of lights that illuminated the encampment. "Here we are. Mostly in one piece, even! Let's get this dropped off, we can tell Kathy everything that happened, and then you go get your recharge. Nobody's gonna fight you for it after the day we just had."