Chapter Text
RPFL1-3203.P unplugged bright and early, and stepped out of his recharging pod. His apartment's bedroom was large enough for a reclining pod, having been originally designed for human use, but he didn't really see the need. The extra space he got from having a vertical pod was nice.
He stepped into the shower and turned it on, no warmer than room temp. Overheating first thing in the morning wasn't his favorite activity, and he ran hot most of the time. He soaped up, then rinsed off. Something about the morning ritual helped him feel more awake, even if he didn't necessarily need it. He certainly didn't sweat, nor was he prone to smelling like much, but he did sometimes pick up quite a lot of road dirt and the occasional bug, and he thought about aerodynamics more than most reploids ever had to.
Flip—that was his name, which he'd chosen himself, based off of his serial and also because he thought it sounded cool—was a very lucky reploid, and he knew it. He'd gotten to pick his name, which happened, but not as often as one might hope. Most didn't get to choose their career, at least not from the beginning. Almost none got to choose their appearance, let alone their specs. He'd been given an enormous amount of latitude from the moment he was initialized.
He still remembered that moment. Flip, not that he'd had a name yet, had become self-aware towards the end of the process, which was a strange thing to contemplate by itself, and his first experience was watching the seemingly endless scroll of bootup messages and wondering what would happen when they finished. He'd found out soon enough, though it felt like a century's worth of waiting at the time. His optics clicked on, ran a self-calibration, and the lab came into focus.
"Good morning," said the lab tech in charge of his initialization sequence. "How are you feeling?"
"Hello, world," Flip said, feeling clever, though how the joke had gotten into his mind in the first place, he couldn't have said. "I'm not sure if I'm feeling anything, to be honest."
"Well, that's reasonable," the tech said. Flip's social systems, still loading, began to track their facial expressions. Probably his, they guessed. No guarantees, his new understanding warned him, but humans with beards tended to be male enough of the time that it was a reasonable guess when faced with a lack of other evidence.
"How so?" Flip asked, then looked down. "Oh."
Quite simply, he hadn't been given a body yet. He was a central nervous system and basic cooling, but little else. All he could really see were some modules, half of a robotic spine, and quite a few cables. This didn't alarm him, though, mainly because it hadn't occurred to him that it might be a problem.
"Welcome to reality," the lab tech said, genuinely. "You're a lucky one. Starting now, you're a citizen of Reset Point. You've got a lot of decisions to make, but don't worry, they're good ones. Most reploids—that's what you are, by the way—don't get to decide any of this stuff."
Reset Point was a utopian effort. The thing about humans, Flip had determined later once he was assembled and out in the world, was that no matter what history said, there was always a subset of them who believed that this time, they'd get it right, and it would actually stick. It wasn't a bad impulse, he decided. After all, one couldn't succeed without first trying, and it had worked in his favor this time, so it seemed like a silly thing to complain about.
The other thing he learned about humans was that they were prone to really bad jokes, which also seemed like a constant throughout history. The name of the place certainly qualified, even if it had been intended in good faith, and geographically, it did qualify as some sort of point.
The goal of Reset Point, the tech explained, was to create a society in which humans and reploids were true equals. The world was locked in a war against virus-infected reploids and rebellious reploids alike, Flip learned. The virus, though the tech seemed to say it with a capital V, was experimentally curable now, and if they could cure the social pressures that pushed the uninfected to lash out, the war could finally end.
Or so that was the hope, at least. Towards that end, Reset Point was a model community, in which reploids were given the freedom to choose their jobs, their living spaces, their friends, even their appearances and capabilities, and in doing so, they would hopefully be content. They had full rights, the same as the humans of Reset Point, and identical legal standing in all matters.
Of course, practicality and safety limited certain designs, but Flip knew what he wanted from the start. Holding still like this was boring. He wanted to be fast.
"We can do fast," the tech said, jotting notes into a tablet. "Let me show you some options."
In the end, Flip had picked a light body, as streamlined as it could get, with matter repulsors and a thrust system that would allow him to skim over the ground, on top of a system optimized for high-speed kinetic calculations. He would be a courier, where his speed and maneuverability would be essential job skills, and he could go as fast as he liked, all day, every day. The rest was mere details, as far as he was concerned. He'd been assigned a male gender and appearance based on the current population, to keep it roughly 50/50. He didn't really care about that anyway, so it was fine by him.
He turned off the shower, flexed his thrust guides, and gave them the briefest puff of propulsion to empty the plasma channels, spraying water all over the inside of the stall. The rest of himself he dried in a more normal manner with a towel. Flip was a fairly plain model, from the outside. He didn't have much synthetic skin apart from his face, since it didn't recover well under self-repair, and wipeouts did occasionally happen in his line of work. Plus, it just wasn't as aerodynamic due to having a softer texture. His body was a medium gray, his hands were white and visibly jointed, and he'd randomly settled on mousy brown hair and teal-green eyes just to be done with it. His tech had suggested white armor with lavender edges and a few teal accents to match, and he'd signed off on it without much thought.
Once he was dry, he stepped into a niche in what would have been the bedroom closet, and the systems installed there assembled his armor onto him. Much of his mobility hardware wasn't part of his actual chassis, to save on heat; his main propulsion was, because it had to be connected directly to his power core as closely as possible, but his many gyroscopic modules, his matter repulsors, and most of his accelerometers were housed in his armor.
All of Flip's various pieces clicked into place: boots, upper and lower torso, arms, and finally, his helmet. His main and secondary systems connected, completed their handshakes, and reported that they were ready to roll. He grabbed his bag from its hook by the door and slung it over one shoulder, adjusting it so that it wouldn't end up tangled in the two vanes that projected from his back.
Flip hopped down the stairs of his building, one landing at a time, touching down only lightly before taking the next leap. He had heard about acrophobia, once, and concluded that it sounded fake. Outside, the morning sun shone brightly, until it rose behind Sky Lagoon, the enormous bulk of which eclipsed it completely. With horizontal space at the premium that it was, vertical space was the next best thing, and Sky Lagoon was one of many new floating-island initiatives to make use of it. On one hand, the constant shadow of the floating city was kind of a pain in the panels. On the other, its effect on real estate prices was probably the primary reason that Reset Point was feasible as a unified effort in the first place.
Flip ignored it, as he'd seen it every day for three years and it had kind of lost its interest at that point. He ducked into the little bodega on the corner of the first floor.
"Morning, Flip," Siobhan chirped, smiling at him. She was pink and red and gold, with red-gold hair and pale green eyes, and she had hand-painted freckles, because her designer had been kind of an artiste about her reploids and it showed. Her wish upon waking was to get to talk to a lot of different people, and so she'd been given a feminine appearance and assigned as the owner of a corner shop, where she could interact with regulars and passers-by alike. By any account, she was fantastic at it. Humans and reploids alike loved her. Flip and Siobhan had been activated on the same day and lived in the same building, they'd discovered, and had been friends ever since. He was thinking about asking her if she'd like to be his peripheral, but the occasion hadn't quite come up yet, and he didn't want to rush it.
"Hey, Sho," Flip greeted her. He picked up a can of nanofluid and set it on the counter. "Anything fun going on?"
"There was a battle not that far from here last night, I guess," Siobhan answered, while ringing him up. "A real one. The Reset Point Hunters and Repliforce both had to send a bunch of units to support. It's all over the news."
"Man. I'm good with a boring day, as long as they stay over there with that shit." Flip cracked the top open, drinking a quarter of it in one go.
"What's on the list for today?" she asked him.
"Lemme see." Flip checked the back of one arm, where a section of his mostly-white plating slid aside to reveal a screen, listing that day's deliveries. He specialized in rapid, small parcels, the sort of thing that the postal system wouldn't be quick enough to handle, and the Hunters had found enough use for him that they'd gotten him a civilian security clearance so that he was allowed to handle most of their materials. "Oh, boy. Sealed delivery from the Hunter precinct to their satellite facility, first thing in the morning. Bet they're busy as hell."
"They must be," she agreed. "Be careful, okay?"
"Pfft, the Mavericks aren't gonna come here. There's nothing even interesting in Reset Point," Flip shrugged, downing another quarter of his can.
"No, I mean don't run into any cars, dip switch," Siobhan chided him with a laugh. "I'm not worried about the Mavericks. We've got so many armed forces around us, they'd have to be both insane and stupid to think about doing anything here."
"Oh. Come on, I've never run into a car. Recently," Flip amended, before she could correct him, because he had in fact collided with a parked car once and ended up in the shop for a solid day of repairs as a result.
"Okay, okay. Go make your pickup before you're late," Siobhan said, waving him off so she could ring up the human lined up behind him.
Flip chugged the rest of his nanofluid and tossed the can into the recycler on the way out. He went through it at a ridiculous rate, compared to most reploids, but that was just the price of his systems running as hot as they did when he was working. As long as he maintained steady state between heat degradation and self-repair function, though, he was fine, and as long as he kept feeding his two-cans-a-day habit, he would stay fine.
With a glance down the sidewalk, Flip initialized his propulsion systems.
>I.77808-PRO: Gyroscopic stabilization system online.
>I.77809-PRO: Gyroscopic stabilization system self-check completed.
Status: OK.
>I.77810-PRO: Gyroscopic stabilization system ready.
>I.71010-PRO: Matter repulsors online.
>I.71011-PRO: Matter repulsors self-check completed.
Status: OK.
>I.71012-PRO: Matter repulsors ready.
>I.78090-PRO: Thrust system online.
>I.78091-PRO: Thrust system self-check completed.
Status: OK.
>I.78095-PRO: Thrust system primed.
>I.78096-PRO: Thrust system ready.
Flip rose into the air a few inches, balanced by an array of gyroscopes that would have made a jet jealous, and extended both thrust guides fully. With a whine, his thrust system spun up, and in a blink, two narrow, electromagnetically-shaped blades of bright plasma, almost like wings, burst forth from beneath the guide vanes. In the next moment, Flip was off towards the Reset Point Maverick Hunter precinct building.
He casually leaned his way around the few pedestrians out that early, as easily as if he were skating around a line of cones, and rather than stopping at an intersection, he simply took a leap over it, with an extra burst of power to his wings that weren't really wings. Just because he could, and because it was fun and also funny to him, Flip did a flip, landing and carrying on without a hitch.
The Hunters did not think much of his showing off, he knew, so once he got closer to the building, he slowed to something more like the speed limit, sliding to a landing at the front gate. They wouldn't do much but scold him, but he had things to do and places to be, and standing around for a browbeating would put him off schedule.
"Morning, Flip," said the gate guard. Flip made a lot of pickups and deliveries for the Hunters, and at this point, most of the gate staff knew him on sight. He had a tough time telling some of them apart, as they employed a lot of mass-produced Hunters from outside Reset Point, but he tried, at least. Today, he failed. "You're expected. Front desk."
"You got it," Flip said, zooming through at a gentle hover as soon as the gate arm swung up to allow him entry. Walking was just too slow.
The Reset Point Maverick Hunter Base wasn't terribly large, as such things went, but it was associated with a much larger training facility and base nearby, so it tended to be busy despite its size. Ever since he'd been activated Flip had idly wondered why they needed so much Hunter presence if the utopia was supposed to resolve tensions between humans and reploids, but he had gotten the impression that he wasn't supposed to ask that, so he never had.
Flip drifted his way to the front reception. "How's it hanging, Sarge?" he asked the reploid on duty, coasting to a stop with his elbow on the desk.
Sarge was a military spec model, painted in coyote brown, and a later addition to Reset Point after a transfer from some larger base. He was not at all a sergeant. In fact, despite his model, he'd ended up in administration, and that seemed to suit him fine. His first interaction with Flip had been yelling at him in the stairwell of the apartment for almost landing on him, as it turned out that he also lived on a lower floor of the same building. His second had been approximately forty-five minutes later, when he'd discovered that the new civilian courier was in fact the same upstart newbuilt reploid that had nearly used his head as a springboard. Fortunately, he was a good sport about it, and they got on well.
"You here to sign up yet?" Sarge joked, as he did every day that Flip came in. "We could still use someone with speed like yours, you know."
"Haha, keep waiting. I carry packages, not guns. Speaking of packages, what's today's payload?"
"Got a present for you," Sarge said, pulling a packet of paperwork out from behind the desk and setting it on the counter. "You know the type."
"The kind I don't get to open? Boring," Flip fake-yawned, but took it all the same, checking that it was sealed and tucking it into his bag.
"You know what I was just wondering?" Sarge asked.
"What's that?" Flip looked up from his bag, mid buckling the straps.
"So, your flight thingies," began Sarge.
"They're thrust guides, and they're not for flight," Flip double corrected, before Sarge could even fully word his question. He checked that his bag was secure and still not tangled in his flight thingies, then turned to actually face the other reploid.
"Okay, your thrust guides, which aren't for flight. Are those part of your armor, or do they attach directly to you?"
"Wow! Personal," Flip laughed. "You can't just ask someone where their vanes attach. In public, even? Sarge. I'd say buy me dinner first, but I don't know what we'd do with it."
"Yeah, yeah. Get outta here, I got forms to fill out." Sarge dismissed him with a chuckle.
Flip coasted out, doing a gyroscope-supported limbo under the gate arm that made the gate guard sigh in exasperation at him. There was technically no rule against it, and they both knew it. He headed back down the main street, weaving in and out of the morning traffic, occasionally leaping a vehicle or two that didn't quite maintain the speed he wanted.
He was so intent on watching the road that he only realized something was happening when the cars all stopped as one. Flip slid to a stop, wondering. There didn't seem to be any accident on the road, and there were no emergency vehicles, either; even the pedestrians had stopped. The quiet was eerie.
They were all staring up, he realized, so Flip looked up, as well. High above, a thin line of smoke issued from one of the enormous units that held the artificial sky island up.
"Huh," Flip said aloud to nobody in particular, and scratched the back of his neck, allowing his feet to touch the ground. "That doesn't seem good."
With no idea what to do, Flip simply stood there, watching. He squinted. A few tiny black specks milled around the edges of the island. At the distance they were, they must have been reploid-sized, or maybe even flying transports of some sort. There were little flashes in one of the glass tunnels, just barely visible, and he realized he was watching a skirmish.
Silently, a rolling cloud of flame erupted from the underside of the island's center. The sound arrived seconds later, an explosion so deep he felt it in his ventilation systems more than his auditory sensors, and Flip's eyes widened.
"That's the power center," someone said, backing away several steps before simply turning and running in the opposite direction.
That single person triggered a nigh instant street-wide reaction. Pedestrians ran, both human and reploid. Buildings full of people emptied into the sidewalks as sirens began to blare. Cars tried to turn around, got stuck on each other, and their occupants gave up, got out, and ran as well. Flip leapt to the roof of a truck, trying to keep his bearings in the sudden chaos. It was happening so quickly there wasn't even anyone to direct the evacuation, which was more of a stampede.
"I have to find Siobhan," he suddenly said aloud, coming to a decision without even thinking. He flared his thrusters and launched himself from the truck's roof at speed, teal plasma blazing behind him in a trail. He leapt from car to car, over the heads of the people fleeing on foot, deeper into the shadow of Sky Lagoon. The island's massive hover units were all trailing smoke now. He ran out of cars to leapfrog and had to slow down, pushing his way backwards through the crowd, where his lighter build worked against him for once.
The fleeing people thinned as he worked his way up the street, and Flip arrived at the corner store to find Siobhan standing in the doorway, simply staring up. "Flip?" she asked, as if disbelieving that it was really him.
"Come on, we have to get out of here," he said, picking her up in both arms. She weighed more than he did, but he was running on panic, and all that he noticed was that it took more power than usual to lift off from the ground.
The island was visibly drifting lower, now, the shadow deeper beneath it, and the flames now poured from two of the hover units as well as the power core. There was no doubt about it: Sky Lagoon was falling. Flip fired his thrusters, taking off with Siobhan in his arms at a speed he'd never before dared to achieve, carrying a weight he hadn't been sure he could support until this moment.
He weaved between and over abandoned cars, some of them across the sidewalk. Siobhan clung fearfully to him, arms around his neck, and he poured as much power as he could spare into his propulsion systems. Faster, faster, faster…and yet it only grew darker, as the falling city's incredible inertia surrendered to gravity. A strange wind at Flip's back picked up in the wake of the enormous island.
Flip pushed harder yet. His systems began sending up thermal warnings. He ignored them. His thermal limiters engaged, and he overrode them. The heat inside his armor became intense, then painful, then intensely painful, and Flip gritted his teeth and poured even more power into his propulsion systems, redirecting it from any place he could find a single unit to spare. His eyes watered as his tear reservoirs began to steam. His cooling system began to pressurize and leak.
He realized he was probably going to die of thermal damage, and Flip thought, If I can get at least Siobhan to safety, it'll be worth it.
Siobhan pulled her hands away from him, the synthetic skin on her palms burnt from the sheer heat Flip was radiating. She said something, but he couldn't make it out. His auditory systems were beginning to glitch from the combination of extreme heat induced errors and low power.
They still were not far enough away, Flip realized. If he was going to die anyway, he thought, then he didn't need to hold anything back. He redirected everything he had to speed, sparing nothing that wasn't immediately necessary for maintaining his trajectory. He couldn't even feel his systems melting. His thrusters flared white-hot as he vaulted over several cars that had collided with each other, and then simply never hit the ground again. Flip was not a flight unit, but with Siobhan in his arms, he flew, and the darkness closed over them.
The wind behind them pushed him even faster, and with one final burst of speed, they broke into the sun just as the far tip of the island island touched the ground. The impact was monstrous. Entire buildings smashed into dust instantly, fleeing occupants and all, and the cloud that swelled from the island's increasing point of contact rivaled any nuclear explosion. Flip couldn't even track the critical alerts he was logging. It was simply a waterfall of flashing red, and still, he didn't stop until the shockwave caught up to them and ripped Siobhan from his arms. He was flung to the ground, where he tumbled end over end with the rest of the debris until he finally came to a stop against something he could not make out in the chaos, helmet lost in the blast.
His entire body burned. Flip wasn't even sure how he was still functional enough to feel, but he wasn't functional enough to really see; there was only static, and flame, and so much dust and smoke that even if he could have seen, there wouldn't have been anything to see. His optics were probably broken, he realized. He could hear, in sporadic, crackling pops, but he heard Siobhan calling his name. She crawled back to him, tried to drag him, but she couldn't even touch him, he was so superheated. He tried to tell her to run, but he couldn't seem to activate his voice synthesizer.
Somebody else was there, Flip thought, hearing in bits and pieces and seeing in faint, staticky shadows from one eye. They pulled her to her feet, told her to evacuate, left with her. That's right, he thought, distantly and slowly. Go where it's safe. It's okay. As long as you're safe, I'm happy.
Flip's systems had run so hot that he'd sprung several nanofluid leaks from pressure alone. One by one, his core systems threw fatal errors, issued failures, and terminated all processes. The last thing he heard was Siobhan, still calling his name. With a final rattle of his half-melted fans winding down, RPFL1-3203.P deactivated, satisfied.
"Will you look at that? These things really can fix anything. I thought for sure this one was beyond repair."
"Not perfect, but promising. He isn't fully initializing, but we'll give him some time. He may yet come around, and if he does, I'll give him our gift myself."
Flip heard voices, which was odd, because he was dead. Wasn't he? Unless there was a reploid afterlife…but that had never seemed likely to him, and if there was one, this didn't seem anything like an afterlife should be. Whatever they were saying, he couldn't quite make it out.
The dead had no business hearing things, he decided, not quite consciously, and drifted back under.
Light filtered through Flip's eyelids. Go away, I'm dead, he thought, feeling irritable, even as his systems reported a successful initialization. Everything about his body was wrong, somehow. Everything hurt. Everything burned. Hadn't he been on fire? Was he still on fire?
His eyes flicked open, and he still couldn't see more than a bright, colorless blur. His limbs didn't respond.
"Ah. So you are alive. No, don't bother trying to move. You're still mostly disassembled."
Flip tried to speak, but try as he might, he couldn't seem to produce any noise, despite his voice synthesizer throwing no errors.
"That won't work either. The repair medium's too dense. I'm surprised you can hear me at all." A dark handprint and the outline of a large humanoid shape showed through the brightness, but no details that Flip could make out; just two faint green glows that could have been eyes. "Be patient, Flip. You'll be free and with the others soon."
Was that his name they just said? Flip could barely understand the words. Should he recognize that voice?…but his memory didn't seem to be working quite right. All he remembered was the sky falling, and fire, and Siobhan was safe.
Right. Siobhan was safe. So everything was fine.
Flip closed his eyes, and the fire receded.
"Wakey wakey."
With a gasp and a jerk, Flip awakened. He ached all over, and his systems felt like they'd been installed backwards, but he was alive.
Why was he alive?
"How you feeling?" A familiar face leaned over him, though it took him what felt like ages to place it, between the light being all wrong, and his memory seemingly having been run through a shredder at least once.
"...Sarge?" Flip finally rasped.
"Oh, good, you didn't entirely microwave your own brain out. I was starting to wonder, you took so long to recompile."
If Sarge was here…he must be at the Hunter base. Right? Except if he was dead, it would have been illegal to resuscitate him, and he was definitely dead. He remembered dying. Something didn't add up, but he couldn't assemble the words to ask. His system clock was completely scrambled, telling him it was hundreds of years prior, and his entire chassis still burned.
"Is Siobhan safe?" he finally asked. It wasn't what he'd meant to say, but it was what came out. He tried to move, and found that he still couldn't, even though now his body seemed to be working.
"Dunno." Sarge shrugged, nonchalant. "Funny, though, isn't it? They connect right to your back. I'd have guessed they were part of the armor."
Flip stared at him, not quite understanding. Clear tubes lined the walls behind him, large enough to fit an entire reploid into each, filled with some kind of thick, silvery gel. Several of them contained shadowy outlines.
"Your flight thingies," Sarge clarified. "They repaired right up, easy as anything. Amazing what you can do when you don't have human laws restricting you."
"What are you talking about?" Flip asked, still groggy, and not only from rebooting from what must have been a very final power cycle. Putting words in order had never been so difficult.
"Evolution," the other reploid answered, with a grin that Flip found terrifying, and a motion to the row of tubes behind him. "Death should be meaningless to the inorganic. We don't die. There's no reason for it. We get a little roughed up, but we're fixable. Biological things don't need to be telling us our business. You, them, me, what's the point of dying when we could be evolving?"
"That's," Flip said, then paused. His head hurt so much, so quickly, that he couldn't continue.
"Maverick talk?" Sarge asked. "That's right, it is. Welcome to the revolution, my boy."
"You're," Flip started, but cut off again, wincing against the light.
"Are you going to say 'infected?' You can say it. I don't mind. You are too, you know."
"No," protested Flip.
"Oh, you might not be feeling it yet, but you most certainly are. Shame you woke up so late. You could have met the man himself! He was just here, but he couldn't stick around. But don't worry, you got your upload from him personally. Hell of an honor. Now, just you calm down and sit tight. You'll be right as rain in a bit."
Flip squeezed his eyes shut defiantly. He would certainly not calm down and wait. He'd come back from the dead only to find that he'd been—he couldn't even bear to think it, and moreover, his head pounded with pain and code intrusion alerts, and he realized, belatedly, that he was bound to a lab table, and tethered with a recharging cable.
And where was Siobhan? He'd thought she was safe, but if this was happening, right here in what used to be Reset Point…
What if she wasn't safe? What if they got her too?
Barely thinking, Flip fired his thrusters at full power, ripping himself from the now-smoking table, cuffs and cable and all. It burned, but then, everything burned. He landed, rounded on a very surprised Sarge, and rushed him, still burning. Both of them crashed into one of the tubes, shattering it. Silvery sludge and fragments of glass spilled across the lab, and before Sarge could find his footing in the mess, Flip initialized his matter repulsors and rocketed out of the room like a shot, cable snapping off behind him.
He had no idea where he was or where he was going, and he could barely see still, but he plowed ahead, pushing through doors and the occasional confused reploid until he emerged into the blinding sun. There were shouts behind him, so he angled his thrust guides and took off, away from the ruined building he'd emerged from and towards the unthinkable crater of devastation that had been Reset Point.
"Ah, let him go, he'll sort himself out and come back soon enough," Sarge said, wiping silvery goo off of his chassis as he caught up to the crowd of Mavericks forming at the door. "These newer models just take a little longer sometimes."
Flip rapidly ran out of street. The remains of what used to be Sky Lagoon carpeted the scenery, destroyed beyond any comprehension of what they might have been. It was more than a bomb blast. It was a bomb blast with the shredded corpse of an entire city on top of it, and another beneath. He skidded to a stop, awkwardly, drifting into an enormous, twisted steel beam to brake, as his systems still weren't responding quite right.
What am I supposed to do? he asked himself. Did they really…am I going to go…am I already? He couldn't seem to sort his thoughts into any semblance of order. I don't want to be a Maverick. If I can get far enough away, maybe I won't… Won't what? He wasn't sure, but he had to get away from civilization, said some part of him, and Flip hoped it was a sane part. He couldn't hurt anybody if he went where there wasn't anybody to hurt in the first place, and there certainly wouldn't be anybody alive in the rubble that wasn't also infected.
Flip began to climb. He didn't trust his propulsion systems, for the first time in his life. His second life? He didn't have the capacity to think about it. Making forward progress and not simply stopping and flinching in the sunlight took his entire focus. Had he been rebuilt poorly, in whatever kind of external self-repair system they'd rigged up, or was this a symptom of the Virus? As long as he was busy scrambling over the jumbled debris of so many buildings, he could keep track of himself. If he didn't have that…he couldn't be sure.
By the time he found a place to stop, the sun was going down on the other side of the sky, and that was odd, because it hadn't felt like that long. His sense of time was as scrambled as his system clock. Flip must have been in a park, he thought, because the shattered remains of trees and sod were strewn around with the rest of the ruin. He sat down on a random piece of concrete in the shade of a huge spire that had probably begun its existence on top of a building.
And now what? He was throwing strange errors he'd never seen before: TLR violations, even though he wasn't interacting with anybody at all; nonspecific codes spanning the entire 99999-digit range at random, that simply told him to report to his manufacturer; and all manner of minor hiccups in systems from which he'd never once seen a single message.
Maybe there was nothing to do, Flip thought, with difficulty. He'd died once already. If there was a reploid afterlife, and if he'd gone to it, this was the bad one. Maybe the only thing left to do was die a second time, so that he couldn't entirely lose himself and start trying to spread the Virus…
He couldn't do it, Flip concluded an hour later, dropping the sharp piece of metal he'd settled on and giving up. He didn't have the physical strength to shove something through his own chassis and into something vital, and his hands weren't steady enough even if he could have. He'd do the next best thing, then, and just wait for his systems to run down. All he had to do was refuse to allow himself to leave for long enough, and it would take care of itself.
Flip spent that night trying to run his battery dry by running his thrusters until he couldn't tolerate the heat anymore. He still felt like he was burning up even when he wasn't overheating, so it was slower progress than he had hoped for, and his power systems kept recharging besides. He had a very efficient generator, and no way to eject his power core manually. When he wasn't trying to bleed battery power as heat, he paced. The sun came up much more quickly than he'd felt it should have. Where did the time go? He only realized he was talking to himself mid-conversation, because he'd been surprised to hear someone shouting, and even more surprised to find it was him. Where did his mind go? If he didn't find some way to anchor himself, he was going to completely lose it, he thought, watching several new cognitive systems warning messages join the endless scroll.
He sat down in the shade, hoping it would be enough to keep him from solar charging, and thought of Siobhan. He could go find her—no, he was a danger to everyone, but he was especially a danger to her. All that Flip had to do was stay here and not risk spreading the Virus, and she'd be safe from him. By the time he was watching the stars wheel overhead again at odd, seemingly variable speeds, he'd worn the edges off the thought until all that it said was that if he stayed here, then she'd be safe.
Flip clung to that as hard as he could, until he forgot where he'd gotten the idea and it passed into delusion. That was just as well, he thought in a more lucid moment. He wouldn't question it that way. Even the Virus couldn't argue with it. Anything it suggested, whatever sneaky way it tried to wheedle him into leaving the Sky Lagoon ruins, he could counter it with, Right, but then Siobhan won't be safe, and it seemed to have nothing to say to that. He could feel it creeping through his code, physically, like poison in his nanofluid veins, editing here, inserting here, deleting there, doing whatever it wanted to his mind and body.
As long as he could cling to the memory of Siobhan, Flip knew, he had something that it couldn't touch. Do whatever to me. I don't care about myself, and I won't let you make me hurt Siobhan, so I'm going to win in the end regardless.
Even so, some number of days that he couldn't really count later, he realized that he hardly remembered what Siobhan looked like. Flip knew that she was really important. He had died for her. He knew that. He had to die for her again. He knew that, too. She was his only compass, the north star to which all his systems had to point for fear of pointing anywhere else.
Unquantifiable time happened to him, and Flip barely knew who he was. The Maverick Virus was hollowing him out, a little bit at a time, to be a better vessel for someone else entirely. But he could fight it, he thought, probably out loud, though he couldn't be sure at this point. He just had to hold onto this one thing. He wasn't entirely sure who or what a Siobhan was, but he could remember that she had to be kept Safe at any cost, and if he moved from this area, she wouldn't be Safe. His task was simple. Everything else could go. He didn't need it where he was going.
After days, or weeks, or hours, or years, Flip's power systems began to lose the battle against entropy, finally, and he laid sprawled on the ground, watching his percentage slowly slide. He had no concept of time outside of that number as it ticked down. Most of his mind raged, trying to move him from the dirt, threatening and cajoling and promising. He still burned, but he'd stopped really feeling it. The chaos inside of his head was only so much background noise.
"I bet Sarge is disappointed," he said to nobody on one cloudy, early summer morning, and giggled weakly, vaguely wondering who Sarge was. The sun wasn't enough to bring his levels up, because something had gone wrong with his power systems' firmware as the Virus had taken over, and he was bleeding energy faster than he could recharge. Finally. Even if the Virus could have convinced him to get up and run, he wouldn't have made it anywhere interesting before collapsing. "I win," Flip declared, and closed his eyes.
Rain began to fall, pattering soothingly on his armor and chassis. For the first time since…whatever had happened, he could no longer entirely recall but he was reasonably certain from his surroundings that the world had ended…Flip wasn't on fire. Whether the Virus had given up, or he'd run too low on power to feel it anymore, he didn't really care. It was wonderful, and he smiled. He was done. Siobhan was safe, whoever that was, whatever that meant. He could rest.
>W.00002-NRG: Battery at two percent.
>W.00001-NRG: Battery at one percent.
>A.00000-NRG: Battery failure.
"Whoa. Someone's intact over here. Looks dead, but he's actually in one piece."
"And covered in weeds. He's been dead a while, seems like."
Flip registered voices. He had a vague sense that this wasn't supposed to happen at all but it kept happening anyway, though he wasn't remotely lucid enough to explain that to himself. He booted up as though he was floating up from the ocean floor, slowly and with an avalanche of errors…and yet, he still managed to initialize enough to open his eyes.
"Rusty fuck," swore one of the voices near him, and Flip dimly heard something jump back. "He's not dead?"
Flip sat up, slowly and stiffly. Things were in his joints that shouldn't have been there. Beetles had moved into his armor. Grass had rooted in between a few of his plates. He fished a fallen leaf out of his mouth and stared at it, confused.
"Keep your distance, I'm getting some Viral readings from this one."
Flip squinted at the source of the speech, trying to get his optics to focus, but at some point his eyes had filled with dust and pollen, and blinking wasn't helping. Viral…right. His memory was so scrambled that he could barely make sense of the data, and that was because…
"Stay away from me," he warned, in an uncalibrated, digital croak, from a voice that had filled with rain and dried several times over. He barely remembered how to even use it. "Please. I don't want to hurt anyone. I haven't hurt anyone. But I'm…not safe."
The two fell back and discussed this unexpected revelation. The most Flip could make out was that they wore Hunter colors. His hands twitched and his feet itched. It wasn't as severe as it had been, before, but something inside him was waking up with him, and it craved nothing more than to get to them, get into them, make them into more of itself, and he had to contain it. Flip's hands curled into fists, and he wrapped his arms around his knees, trying to keep himself still. The monster in his head wanted out. He had to hold it in.
"How long you been here?" one of them called back to him.
"I don't know," Flip answered, honestly. "Since…the…" What had happened? Bits and pieces of it came back to him. The world had…ended? No, obviously not, if other people still existed. "Since…" He remembered…shadow, and noise, and blasting wind, and…
"Since Repliforce dropped Sky Lagoon? Kid, that's been a while."
"Sky Lagoon," Flip echoed. "Yeah. I remember. This was Reset Point…and Sky Lagoon crashed. And I…saved Siobhan, and I died, and…then I didn't die…? They…infected me…?"
One of the Hunters looked at the other. "This poor bastard," he murmured. "What do we do with him? He's not violent, at least."
"See if they can unscramble and clean him, I guess. Maybe he'll know something." He raised his voice. "We're gonna take you in and try to fix you, kid. But we'll have to deactivate you to do it, and if we can't, that's that."
"You can fix me? Please." Flip almost crawled towards them, but remembered at the last moment that he was contagious, and it wasn't him moving his arms and legs. He clamped down on his self-control, and the Virus countered by lighting him on fire as a punishment. He flinched, then realized it was a hallucination, and the burning feeling was just his sensors malfunctioning again.
One of the Hunters pressed a few buttons on his rifle. "This won't feel like much," he promised, then aimed at Flip. Before he could even register a reaction, the entire world crackled into static and vanished.
Well, he wasn't wrong, that was pleasant in comparison to everything up until now, was Flip's last thought.
Flip was beginning to be very tired of waking up thinking he was dead. Surely this was going to have some kind of long-lasting psychological implications, he thought, finding himself half-awake at best and inside a capsule, surrounded by human programmers. This was a major improvement over the last few times, and he could actually remember those and even assemble a complete thought, so something must have been going right for the first time in…no, he still had no idea what was going on with his system clock, and he had no idea how long this had been going on. Too long. Good enough as an estimate.
"Hey," one of the programmers said, putting her hand on the glass. Flip tried to reach out, and to his relief, he found that he could, and he didn't have to fight any horrible thing inside of his own circuits to do so. He pressed his hand to the inside of the glass, meeting hers. "We got you. Just get some rest," she said.
That sounded fantastic, so he closed his eyes and let his hand drop.
"Flip! You're alive! I can hardly believe it!"
"He's still reinitializing. Give him a second."
Whatever was wrapped around him didn't move, and Flip was getting far too used to this process. He didn't really want to wake up, if he had to be honest, but it was happening to him anyway. Maybe he could just…not open his eyes for a bit.
"Is he supposed to boot up this slowly?"
"He's been through a lot. We don't know how much, and he might not remember clearly. It's hard to say. We did what we could with his memories, but the Virus did a lot of damage, and we couldn't repair everything."
"C'mon, Flip, wake up. It's me."
That was a little intriguing, he had to admit. He couldn't really place the voice, but clearly he was supposed to. Flip opened his eyes.
His systems felt unfamiliar, like they'd been installed backwards, again. His optics struggled to focus. It was always too bright, he thought. If anybody ever asked him, he'd recommend that bringing back the dead really should happen in a much darker room. When he finally managed to see with some clarity, he found himself looking at a reploid in pink and red, with golden-red hair, freckles, and an enormous smile beneath incongruously haunted pale-green eyes.
Flip didn't immediately recognize her. He should, he thought. She seemed important. Bits and pieces of his memory pinged urgently at him, but he couldn't seem to synthesize them into a single recollection.
"Flip," she said again, and her eyes filled with happy tears. "How do you feel?"
Flip just kept staring at her face. Surely he'd remember in a moment. He knew her, he knew he did, he just…couldn't place her whatsoever. The sense of familiarity was overwhelming. The details simply didn't exist. "I'm…alright, I think?" he said, hoping that maybe she'd say something that would make everything snap into place. "I think. This is real, right? I'm not hallucinating again? I'm…safe to be around?"
"You are," said the other voice, which turned out to be a human. Flip thought he recognized her from a brief flash of lucidity during the reprogramming process, maybe. "We couldn't remove everything, and we couldn't repair everything, but you're not considered infected, and the residual code isn't at all contagious or dangerous."
"Residual…code," he said, trying to process that. "How much?"
"About eight percent," she answered.
"Of his total code?" the female reploid asked. She still hadn't stopped hugging Flip, and he was beginning to despair that he might not recognize her at all.
"Right," the programmer said. "And his memories are…well, in most cases we've seen, over time, he'll learn to access them, but at the moment, he may not remember much."
That explained that, then, Flip thought. "I'm just glad he's okay," the reploid replied, hugging him again. Flip hugged her back, because it seemed like the right thing to do, and he still felt like he should know her. "But you remember me," she asked, sitting back. "Right?"
As Flip wracked his memory desperately, unable to answer, the slow evolution of her smile into something that only resembled a smile in the most superficial of ways might as well have uninstalled his power core with nothing more than a hammer and chisel.
"Give him some time," the programmer said, gently. "He has pretty advanced memory degradation. We've been seeing a lot of that recently with this iteration of the Virus, especially if they fought it, and from what we could tell from analyzing him, he fought tooth and nail for months."
"Months," Flip echoed. "How long has it been since…the…uh…" He frowned, trying to remember the name. 'Since the world ended' came to mind, but no, that wasn't what had happened. That was just what he'd feverishly started to believe after long enough. Eventually, it came back to him. "Sky Lagoon fell?"
"Ten months," the reploid answered. "You've been here, being repaired and recoded, for two of them."
If Flip hadn't already been sitting down, he would have needed to sit down. "Ten months," he repeated, in disbelief. Most of a year. How had he survived that? Well, he hadn't, he thought, dimly remembering at least that much. He hadn't survived it several times in a row, really. Being alive just kept happening to him regardless of his opinion on the matter.
"It was too long," the reploid said. "Oh, I thought you were dead, Flip, I thought you'd killed yourself saving me. I was so…" She shook her head. "But it's okay now. You're alive, and I'm alive, and…" She trailed off, haunted again for a moment until she snapped back to the present. The list of survivors must have already run out, Flip realized. "Well, we're alive. That's enough."
"I saved you," Flip said. That jogged something in his mind. He had saved someone once, someone important to him, who had only become more and more important afterwards even though he couldn't see her.
"Yes!" she said, excitedly. "You have to remember that, don't you? You got us away before it fell, and I thought for sure you must have fried yourself. You were running so hot, I thought, there was no way you didn't. I couldn't even touch you." She held her hands out, palms up, and they had darker tan marks in the synthetic skin, like she'd touched something scorching hot. Her fingerprints were indistinct, partly burnt off, and she hadn't replaced the skin yet.
"I…sort of remember. You called my name," he said, with a frown, trying as hard as he could to recall. "I remember thinking…as long as you were safe, whatever happened to me wasn't important."
"Oh, Flip," she said.
"So you must be…" Flip stared into her face again. It was on the tip of his memory…and he couldn't load it. Something had chewed great, gaping holes into the files, selectively rooting out key facts and details and scrambling them.
"This is Siobhan," the programmer prompted him, and an odd flash of pain shot through one of Flip's optics, just for a moment, as the input flickered out and in again. He pressed a hand to it.
"Are you alright?" Siobhan asked him.
"Yeah. I think so. You're Siobhan." Another pang shot through his eye, but not as harsh as the first. So it finally did even take the idea of her from me, he thought, unable to recall almost anything about her but her name and the briefest glimpses of his dedication to the idea of her, and the new fact that whoever this was sitting in front of him was Siobhan. His eye twinged a third time. I'm eight percent Virus, and even though I'm supposedly safe and it's supposed to be inactive, it's still trying to punish me for thinking of her. Well, if it didn't stop me then, it definitely can't now.
"Yes! I'm Siobhan. Don't worry, Flip, I'll help you remember." She smiled, even though she so clearly wanted to cry, and folded one of his hands between hers. "We'll figure it out together."
Flip nodded, and smiled, and his eye continued to ache any time he looked directly at her.
"But that's not fair," Flip protested. "I'm not infected. I can't even get infected a second time. I did exactly this job for years. I'm literally custom-built for it. What's the issue?"
"It's just company policy," said the reploid on the other end of the video call. "We simply don't hire post-viral reploids. We've had issues in the past, and it's too much of a liability."
"Do you want a letter from the lab? I can send you one right now. I've got the file right here. It's been over twenty years, and I've had zero incidents."
"I'm sure," agreed the reploid mildly. "But even so, I can't change the rules for just anyone who asks, and the early treatments especially were…not as well tested as today's treatments."
"But you're not even hiring reploids who've had the current antivirus, either," Flip argued. "Come on. Just give me a chance. I'm officially cleared for any and all employment."
"I'm sure you are. And I wish you the best of luck in finding it." With a click, they hung up, and the image of their face disappeared. Flip turned away from the screen and sat down on the couch heavily, folding his thrust vanes flat to avoid spearing them right through the cushions, even if spearing something might have improved his mood.
"That makes fifty," he sighed.
"Fifty?" Siobhan asked.
"Yeah. Fifty times, just this year, I got rejected on the background check. Why do I even bother anymore?"
"You'll find something better soon," Siobhan said, trying to be encouraging. "I know you will." She'd landed a job in retail and worked her way up to assistant manager over the years, being shuffled from location to location, but it had never been the same as her old corner store, and it didn't pay as well. Even on their combined incomes, their budget was tight, to put it gently. They had coasted for a while on survivors' fund money after the Sky Lagoon disaster, but only just, and it had finally run out a few years back, leaving them with little to their names and few prospects. Flip required a lot more maintenance than most reploids, partly from lingering post-viral issues, and partly because his new line of work did a nasty number on his systems. He'd been built for speed, not lifting heavy boxes.
"Yeah? I'm too spindly to keep loading trucks. I'm going through nanofluid faster than ever, and I'm only getting slower every day. That's pretty much all you get, when you've got a history of infection. Anything else? You might do some undefined scary thing and freak everyone out. Can't have that, no. Never mind that the main post-viral symptom isn't being violent, it's hurting all the time." Flip, for his part, had struggled to find any place that would hire him. Employers wouldn't let him work with the public. He couldn't work with money, or anything valuable. He didn't even get so much as a call back for office jobs, with a resume of almost entirely manual labor and the occasional bouncer gig stretching out behind him.
Siobhan sat next to him. "How are you feeling, by the way?"
"Honestly? Tired. Like…" Like I should have stayed dead way back when Sky Lagoon fell on us, Flip thought, but he already knew that there was nothing good to be had down that conversational road, just Siobhan crying, and he didn't want that for her. She deserved better, he thought, and the familiar pain shot through half of his head, as it always did. It didn't stop him. All this time later, and she was still his compass, Virus remnants be damned. He would still do anything for her. It just turned out that finding gainful employment that didn't tear him apart was somehow even more difficult than burning himself alive for her.
"…Like I just need a break for once. We haven't had a single normal day in a year, I don't think. Or if we have, I don't remember it." He felt along the seams of his armor, manually releasing the latches via internal command and tossing each piece aside. It had been a lot easier with a system to do it for him, but they couldn't afford to replace the one he'd lost in Reset Point. He still couldn't even afford to replace the helmet he'd lost somewhere in the shockwave, and he'd stopped trying to save up for it. Even now, they only had one recharge pod between the two of them.
"So let's go have a normal day tomorrow," Siobhan suggested. "We're both off, right? We can go out, see a movie maybe, go for a walk…I don't know. Whatever you want to do."
"A walk sounds…" Slow, he thought. But Siobhan couldn't think of anything except the day of the disaster if he carried her, no matter how calmly and no matter how long it had been, so he would go at her speed without a word of protest. "…Nice, I guess. Yeah. We could go for a walk. Let's do that."
Siobhan slid into his arms, and the two of them curled up on the couch, unmoving and quiet. Reploids didn't have biological urges, but one didn't need those to find closeness comforting. Comfort was in short enough supply. The war was over, Flip thought. Things should have been better. Why were they worse instead? Could it really be over for him when he was still, forever, eight percent Maverick Virus? Was it over for Siobhan, if she still had to live with him like this?
Some transmitter I am, he mused. She'd be happier without me. Flip had discovered, though, that as hard as he'd clung to Siobhan's memory to survive, she'd done the same. After the disaster, the only thing that had kept her loading up at the start of every day was the idea that Flip had died for her, so she owed it to him to carry on. It was only natural, from a reploid perspective, that they had fallen into a relationship after that.
Flip was her transmitter, and that meant something in reploid society that didn't translate well to human society. If there was a decision to be made, he made it on behalf of both of them. Siobhan was his receiver. She went along with whatever he decided, often without question. Humans didn't tend to understand the unilateral connection setup, he'd learned, and he'd stopped trying to explain it. If any asked, he called Siobhan his girlfriend, though that was a gross oversimplification.
He didn't call the shots for any love of power or want to dominate in the relationship. If anything, he saw her as holding the power. Any decision he made was for her well-being, first and foremost, and he didn't hesitate to consult her about it, even if she didn't usually offer input on her own. She struggled to make decisions about anything after the disaster. He did too, if he were to be entirely honest, but he could do it so that she didn't have to. She trusted him with her happiness, and he would protect that happiness, because it was his, too. It was that simple.
Humans often looked at them and decided there was some manner of sexism or religious fundamentalism in play, which only made them both snort with laughter. Neither of them believed in any kind of theism. They'd been randomly assigned a vaguely gendered appearance and some pronouns. Even a handful of such assignments would inevitably generate a pair that looked male and female to the casual onlooker. Reploid relationships simply operated on very different dynamics, with no reference to human parameters.
The next day, they set off on their walk. Flip and Siobhan had an apartment near the enormous wall around the Abel City quarantine zone. It wasn't related to, or even near, the Sky Lagoon quarantine zone. The damage caused by Maverick attacks, especially towards the end, had been so extensive that most major metropolitan areas had at least one section cordoned off until further notice, if not a few. The only positive about the situation was that the housing around them tended to be very affordable. It also tended to be cramped, not well maintained, poorly policed, and mainly populated by reploids, who over the long years of never-ending war against others of their kind had found themselves pushed further and further to the margins.
It wasn't the nicest area, but it was home, and not much usually happened there. The wall itself tended to be the safest area due to the number of cameras mounted on it, and that was where the two of them walked.
"Maybe I should change careers," Flip mused, as they walked. The morning sun shone on this side of the wall, and it improved his mood, even if he still found it a little too bright ever since everything. "What do you think? Maybe I should be a stuntman or something."
"I think you have to apprentice for that," Siobhan said. "Or just be custom-ordered to be one from the start. Haven't you had enough excitement already, anyway?"
"Yeah, true. I'd say I should get a boring office job, but I think I've gotten turned down for every single one in a twenty mile radius of us. What else is boring, anyway? Fast food?"
"That's the opposite of boring, and you don't even have a sense of taste," Siobhan pointed out, with a small smile.
"Right…taste. Uh. Postal worker, maybe? Wait, no, that's government, and you can't get government work when you're post-viral, never mind. Tax—no, that's government too. I could join the Maverick Hunters, they definitely take post-viral reploids, but I think the irony might do me in if the Mavericks don't. Help, Sho, I'm bad at this."
"Think about something else, Flip, seriously. We're relaxing today. Give it a rest."
"Yeah, okay. So, uh. How about the sports? That's a normal conversation topic that isn't job hunting, I'm pretty sure."
"The sports are doing fine, last I saw," Siobhan replied, humoring him. "There were points and somebody won. It was very exciting."
"Good for them. With the, uh, ball and everything. Damn, I'm really bad at this, aren't I? I swear I used to know how to carry a conversation."
The streets were empty, except for the two of them, and a small group of humans further down the sidewalk. Nothing odd about that, Flip thought. A handful of them lived here, too. Times were rough all around, and one's organic or inorganic status had no bearing on the need for affordable rent.
"Do you want to catch a movie soon, maybe? Matinee showing?" Siobhan suggested.
Flip thought it over. "Yeah. We could save a few zenny going earlier. Sounds like a plan."
They walked past the humans, or at least tried to, but one of them stuck his arm out, stopping Flip in his tracks. The other two fell around them in a loose triangle. "Hey, buddy," he said. "How about you give me that bag?"
Flip tightened his grip on the shoulder strap of his messenger bag. It wasn't nearly as nice as the one he used to have, back when he was a newly built young thing, but all the same it had been a gift from Siobhan once he'd recovered enough to finally leave the lab, and he'd taken care of it over the years. "There's nothing in it," he admitted, fighting a rising urge to…he wasn't sure what, but he didn't like it. He felt like…like…he couldn't quite put his finger on it. Whatever it was, it was encoded in some buried memory, still scrambled.
"Didn't ask." He grabbed the strap and pulled. Flip pulled back.
"I feel like you're not quite understanding the situation, here," another one of the men said. "We're not gonna ask nicely a second time."
"Are you stupid? The cameras are right there," Siobhan objected, though she shrank away from the two closest to her and closer to Flip. "It's broad daylight."
"Yeah, they sure are, so play nice and don't do anything stupid, and you won't get hunted. Come on, Miss Toaster, empty your pockets."
"I don't even have pockets," Siobhan said. "Please. We literally aren't carrying anything." She backed into Flip, who was still playing a heated game of tug-of-war with one of their would-be muggers.
"Don't give us that shit. You both look expensive. You gotta have something."
One of the men grabbed Siobhan's hair, and she squeaked in fear. A stab of pain so intense that for an instant Flip irrationally thought he'd been shot lanced through the left side of his head, optics to cranial plates, and several of his old missing memories began to unscramble themselves, unraveling so rapidly it made him dizzy.
He clapped a hand to his eye, staggering, and the mugger ripped his bag away with a triumphant scoff.
The eight percent of the fearsome monster still inside of his head and the ninety two percent of the reploid inside of his head saw eye-to-eye for just a split second, but that was long enough. Something rearranged itself in his code, settled into place with a click, and vanished, fully integrated. Ah. That's right. I remember everything now, Flip realized, with startling clarity.
Siobhan, his North Star in the endless months he spent watching the night sky wheel overhead, waiting for the end.
Siobhan, the center of his universe, obliterated from his memories by the Virus until nothing remained but the black hole of his emotions and the gravity that kept him in her orbit.
Siobhan, who he'd had to get to know all over again, because the Virus still hadn't released its grip on her inside his mind until this very moment.
He would gladly give his life for her as many times as he had a life to give; then, now, and forever. The voice inside his head that he had been so terrified of for so many years sounded exactly like his own.
I can die for her. I can kill for her. I can do anything for her. I always could. I always will.
Flip's propulsion system engaged all at once, kicking on as cleanly and smoothly as the day he was activated. In the first instant, he caught up to the man fleeing with his bag. In the next, he grabbed the man's coat with both hands, pivoting around him and leaving him off-balance. In the next instant, he threw the human with all his might and leverage, sending him crashing to the ground. Flip took his bag back as he zipped past him. The one threatening Siobhan he caught in one hand by the neck, accelerating him into the wall with a sickening crunch. The third tried to run, but he may as well have tried to run from a lightning bolt as Flip fell on him without hesitation, dashing him to the ground so hard he bounced and did not move again.
He turned back to Siobhan, splattered with blood, and stopped dead in his tracks. She stared at him in mute horror. The heat of whatever had come over him ran out of him like ice water, as suddenly as it had happened.
"Sho," he said.
"Flip," she said, trembling.
Flip looked up at the rows of cameras monitoring the street. "I…I…they were going to hurt you…I have to go. You didn't do anything wrong. You're still okay. I have to…I have to get away from you. The Hunters won't hurt you. If I run now, you'll be safe—" he stammered.
"No. I'm going with you," she said, still terrified, nearly inaudible.
Flip shook his head, thrust guides extending, eyeing the top of the wall. He could make that height, no problem, while his systems were working so strangely well. He'd run hot, but it wasn't the end of the world, this time. "No. You…you run home. You don't have to follow me here. You shouldn't be around me. I'm a Maverick, but you don't have to be. I'll run, and you go the other way, and—"
Siobhan looked at Flip. She looked at the cameras. She looked at the broken man lying on the ground at her feet, half-consciously moaning, and kicked him in the ribs, only once but hard, still staring into the camera like a deer in the headlights. She looked back to Flip. "I said, I'm going with you," she repeated again, barely any louder, but more firmly. "I'm a Maverick. Save me, Flip."
Flip inhaled sharply with surprise, then exhaled. "Okay," he said, with a nod, then again, "okay. I'm sorry. I'll save you. I'll do anything for you. Hang on." He scooped her into his arms. She held onto him, tightly, with her eyes closed and her face buried in his chest. He crouched, angled his thrust guides to compensate for the new center of gravity, and leapt, pushing against the sidewalk with all his might.
They cleared the wall. They did not look back.