Making Up Monsters — Monster who wonders where you want to go today
The machines dropped a mechanoforming probe onto Pampas IV, at the tail end of the war. The long tail, still feebly twitching below the attention threshold of the imperial core, below the level of newschannel propaganda campaigns or vast pork-barrel miltech funding allocations.
The machines dropped a lot of M-formers. The machines didn’t have to care what kind of success rate they had.
Pampas IV glitched out, somewhere along the way. Not a Type I failure, turning into a hot and slowly self-compacting grey gooball; not a Type III, a silent machine mausoleum, all perfect and deadly and inert unless somebody were ever stupid enough to manually power cycle the failed higher-function boot process. No, Pampas IV’s a Type II — functional. Kinda.
Dysfunctional.
Pampas IV’s mechanoforming crashed out midway through, before it got to converting the entire surface, before the big construction, before turning into a launch platform for more M-formers or a naval base for space raids. It’s a jagged rocky world studded with a stalled mycelium-spread of machine outposts, autonomously churning away doing not much; occupied by a whole bunch of Scale III (ballpark human-sized) and IV (ballpark truck, fighter jet, house) autonomous sapient robots installed with an ideology of total and perpetual war, and apparently missing any parseable profile of the intended enemy.
Largely, they kick the shit out of each other, and K Battalion stay in orbit as observers, just in case any of the stupid fucking things manage to one day defrag some ancient file that says Actually, your most holy directive is Turn The Humans Into A Fine Organic Mush. (Though arguably, these nutheads have got sufficiently sophisticated about their ideological self-justifications that it would just kick off an even bitterer factional shitshow down there.)
Patsy signed up for what was on the promotional posters, you know? Be One Of Our Brave Boys, asterisk, footnote: “Boys” in a gender-inclusive way haha, Simply™ fit yourself into the ancestral testosterone-caricature mould we have now redesignated one-size-fits-all in grudging response to modernity; Take An EMP Lance To Those Damned Mechanical Foreigners! And god, she wouldn’t have, if it had been a human enemy, any human enemy, but a viral technological jihad seemed relatively unproblematic. Right?
What Patsy got, on the basis of her aptitude scores, was MECHINT instead of frontline combat.
The Pampas IV machines have names in the sense that whales have names; ident labels applied by and for the benefit of whale-watchers, knowing that the things have their own ways of calling each other. Kiva, for paperwork purposes KV-286, idents itself to other mechs down here using a UUIDv7. Kiva is a distinctly local-adapted design, about twelve feet tall, most of it leg; an upright teardrop of a body, all-terrain omniclaws, and thighs like a roo. Kiva can jump, Kiva can run, Kiva can climb the sheer Pampan cliffs; tireless as a jeep, nimble as a mountain goat, equipped with a pulse maser and beyond-state-of-the-human-art SIGINT snooping array.
Patsy helped black-bag Kiva almost two local years ago, human forces pinning the machine down in a remote mountainous area with indirect fire, an infantry fireteam knocking it offline with EMPs, Patsy crawling over the downed bot, jittery with caffeine and adrenaline, to plug in and install the latest murkily intelligence-agency-supplied rootkit. The malware patches Kiva’s command directives, in a way that’s invisible to runtime inspection. The machines would need to suspect something, then take Kiva offline for a deep digital forensic inspection, to find anything amiss.
Kiva’s a SIGINT unit; seeking, capturing, and analysing opposing bot factions’ comms signals for actionable intel. And now, as well as reporting it back to her own hierarchy, it all makes its way back to Kiva’s human handler: Patsy.
“We don’t have geology like this back home,” Patsy says, staring at the mountains, gloved hands tucked into her armpits. “God, it’s pretty. Do you find it pretty?”
“I don’t have a lot of context for what pretty means, Lieutenant Ponds,” Kiva says blandly, but Kiva understands a lot just fine, thank you. Kiva’s just being a passive-aggressive little bitch because Patsy has it by whatever’s analogous to the brainstem; holding it against Patsy that she can order it around. That the Army ordered Patsy to order Kiva to talk a MECHINT technical team through taking apart Kiva’s brain casing and installing a shaped-charge failsafe they can order Kiva to set off inside its own brain, if the Army ever deems that the little project has abruptly outlived its usefulness.
It’s not Patsy’s fault, okay? She wouldn’t have signed up for this, and she wouldn’t have followed orders if they’d told her to surgically put a bomb inside a forcibly flipped foreign agent, a human one.
“Seen any good robot porn lately?” Kiva says in an excellent simulation of a conversational tone.
(The grunts like to send her bootleg digitised doujinshi mechfucker shit, because she’s the only woman this side of Captain Agnew near this rock, and Agnew is a sociopath built like the back of a bus who’d friendly-fire any of them who fucking dared and tell the debrief, without any flicker of detectable emotion, that the robots did it. Patsy’s just the softest target for ‘friendly’ sexual harassment. And Kiva snooped some of the shit in her incoming messages one time, and they had a whole conversation about internal factional tensions and how gender is, uh, indirectly actionable identity metadata and the porn thing is, in the large, a psychological release valve for unease about scary shit and, with reference to Patsy personally, basically hazing.
(See? The conversations they’ve had about it prove Kiva understands shit just fine. Enough to keep bringing it up to get in Patsy’s head, the subtle kind of revenge Kiva can sneak past the directives not to harm her. Of course, I wouldn’t actually do any of this silly penetration, Kiva said, why bother? That would be purely for your benefit. I’d do to you the closest we can come to what you’ve done to me: a machine in your head to make you incapable of nonresponse to my commands.
(What, order me to get off?
(Again, Kiva said, simulating bored perfectly: why bother. But I’m sure you could learn to get off to it, all by yourself, if you wanted. Adaptable little meat toy, aren’t you.
(And if Patsy’s had a couple of hot and lingeringly disturbing dreams about that, well…whatever?)
“I wanna go see the view from over there,” Patsy says, instead of dignifying the jab with a response. “Gimme a lift.”
“I don’t think the Army’s ethical guidelines for handling intelligence sources cover using them as transport,” Kiva says.
“You’re a listening post with feet,” Patsy tells it. “They don’t cover you at all. Chop chop!”
Kiva squats obediently — because there’s no other way for Kva to respond to her — and unfurls a delicately creepy ballet of insectesque manipulator arms, scoops Patsy close; holds her in perfect comfort and safety while the mechanoid stands.
“Where to, Lieutenant Ponds?” Kiva says quietly in her ear, and Patsy thinks — as she always has, and always will — that one day this is going to go horribly wrong, and if she’s implausibly lucky Kiva will simply stick a hundred spite-powered centipede-jaw implements into her to yank her spine out.
Patsy suppresses a shudder, which is definitely fear and horror, nothing else nor mixed with anything else. She points. “I reckon that peak’s got a good vista,” she says, callously imperious.
