Winterreise

Part 1 - Gute Nacht

 
"I came here a stranger; as a stranger I depart..."
 
Having spoken to no one in particular, Void turned his pale face toward the setting sun, the last rays of dying light touching upon his skin even as they receded from the land. For a moment, he tried simply to perceive the physical sensation of the light, rather than jumping straight to a calculation of its mathematical significance.
 
He could hear the distant bell of a bouy, and the crash of waves against the concrete seawall that surrounded the city. There was a biting, cold wind blowing from the North, but it brought with it the fresh smell of the sea. Salt mingled here with the smell of fresh flowers, as they had in a time which seemed a lifetime ago... probably because it had been.
 
He hadn't seen her since then. This was not unusual for the Void, as he had not seen much of anything since then. It had been three years ago, on this very day, the last time he had seen her. The last time he had seen anything...
 
... But he had gained a new appreciation for the wind in his hair, the perception of the sea in his remaining senses. He knew intimately its feel, its smell, even the salty bite of the air on his tongue. His hands stretched out until they found the chainlink fence that he knew stood there... cold, rusted iron. And yet, he supposed it would last until the end of days. In the end, the loss of his sight was nothing terrible, so long as that fence never moved from where the System had decreed it be placed... Gradually, the Void broadened his awareness once again to its customary level.
 
Now, all too clearly, he could feel the code bleeding into him, and out from him, glyph by glyph. And all at once, he was the fence, and the salt in the air, and the concrete seawall, and the waves. He was the distantly setting sun, and on the opposite horizon, the rising moon. And all these things, all of them, were him. Because they were, all of them, nothing.
 
... But none of them were her, though they bore the echo of her laughter in them, as a painting might carry touches of its artist without any such physical representation beyond the hallmarks of their own personal style. He had come here, following the shadow of that laughter, chasing that ghostly touch on his memory. He knew absolutely nothing as to where she was, only that she was somewhere in the other world, and that the time had come to bring her back, if he could.
 
He had not chosen this as the time to begin his journey, had only perceived from the gestalt of moving pieces that all was in its proper alignment. Or perhaps it had been a sign... one too many black cats crossing his path, perhaps the perception of a deer's track on the white concrete. That wasn't quite right, and on some level he was all too keenly aware of it, but it was the best he had to go on and in her memory, he decided to honor the impulse.
 
Not that he had any reason to stay much longer, unless it was to allow those who disagreed with him more attempts to expunge his existence from the Matrix. He had no true place among either man- or machinekind. Thus, it was left to him and him alone to follow such whims as whispered to him in the night...
 
Walking over to the phonebooth that stood guard over the little park, he lifted the receiver, gloved fingers brushing once over the keypad to orient himself before dialing nine digits in a particular order.
 
"... Yes. Inform him that I'm bringing his Artist back from across the Styx, and that I may not return. He'll probably be overjoyed."
 
He turned once again toward the churning sea, his face now cold with the arrived dark. The echo of a smile rose to his lips, though in truth even he had forgotten the reason behind the causal gesture.
 
"Oh, and have a good night."
 
As the handset clicked into its cradle once again, the phonebooth stood as it had before - alone. He had slipped away to quite another place, moving as he usually did... which generally consisted of realizing where precisely he was in the writhing mass of code that comprised the System. On this particular occasion, he had moved elsewhere in the City, a door closing softly as his feet made no sound across the floor... He had someone very special to visit before he could leave this place. Someone very special, indeed...
 

- Void

Part 2 - Die Wetterfahne

He walked to the other end of the darkened room, to where the drapes fluttered lightly in the breeze - he reached it just as the last taste of the sea traveled the same distance. Within the System, he could simply stand still and let everything come to him... But beyond it... Beyond it, he needed a point of orientation.

... Or at least a compass. Which was why he had come to the gray little room with all its lights put out. He shut the window gently, adding silence to the darkness which only grew deeper as the curtains flapped their last.

He had utterly ignored the quiet little girl who sat propped up in a wheelchair by the window, and didn't turn to face her now. She had nothing to gain from such a gesture, empty on both their parts. At length, she decided to break the silence.

"... Who... are you?"

"You know who I am... She told you about me."

The girl's breath caught in her throat, only the faintest rattle of her vocal chords betrayed that she had a thought to voice, but couldn't quite access the means. The Void was patient, and let her compose herself, for however long it took. Perhaps a few seconds, perhaps a few hours. Finally, she spoke.

"Have you... come to, um... Fix me?"

He reached out and touched her, with just the lightest brush of his gloved fingertips, stirring her code, glancing over it... all of it. Both that which was given to her by the System, and that which was created by an all-too-familiar hand.

"No."

"... Oh."

"There is nothing broken with you. You simply fail to understand your purpose."

The girl was again silent and still, but for the trail of two identical tears that trickled down her cheeks.

"What purpose could I possibly have?"

"To lead me to her."

The girl closed her eyes, for she could not shake her head. "I don't even know who or where she is... She came to me in a dream, after the accident."

"But her work is upon you, and within you... and that will lead me to her."

"... What are you going to do?"

Although his voice remained soft and impassive as usual, the answer was neither an expression of compassion nor did it wane in its firmness.

"I'm going to decompile your code."

"Will it... hurt?"

"Do you even remember what pain feels like...? Your time is short, little one. Now is hardly the most efficient time to worry about such things. Be grateful that you will feel what you feel, until you can feel no more."

He wiped the tear from her cheek, and began to take her apart, glyph by glyph. He was certain that it felt like being burned alive... That was how he remembered it feeling when he had destroyed his original shell. Decompilation was perhaps the worst way to die - or not even to die - to be unmade. And yet, the girl did not cry out, even once. Perhaps she had given in to the futility of continuing to live. Perhaps she had managed to enjoy the sensation of pain, so long absent from her dead little body. Void didn't care, because it had nothing to do with the eventuality. Whatever she had been before, she was now simply two collections of code.

One collection would lead him to her pod in the Real world. The other... well, he would have time to sort that out on the way. It was certainly familiar, and familiarly difficult to interpret. But he now had a bearing, and a favorable wind to travel by...

A moment later, the window was open again, though the wind was blowing from the opposite direction. And in the center of the gray little room, a gray little wheelchair sat very much alone.

- Void

Part 3 - Gefror'ne Tränen

Somewhere in one of the many tunnels of the Real...

Rusted metal groaned in protest as it was shifted aside. Slowly, one tentacle-like appendage snaked its way out into the dusty air, its claw opening into the fan of a small satellite dish as it took readings of the surrounding area.

Void's mind, having since adjusted to this occasionally necessary state of being, quickly organized and filed the results. There was nothing remarkable on his motion detector - a little debris here and there where his own movement had disturbed the standing wreckage that housed his octapus-like 'body'. Likewise, the high-density omnidirectional microphone was pleasantly free of troublesome waveforms. The temperature had dropped quite a bit since the last time he had taken a reading, and analysis of his surface plates picked up the beginnings of frost around his intakes. This wasn't a problem, as long as he kept moving - Void didn't suppose the Machine technology would rust quite as easily as the hovercrafts of mankind, anyway.

One last internal systems check passed, and Void fired up his induction engines, the Sentinel body rising from the wreckage. His many arms worked quickly, metal sliding along metal, to remove the last of the ice. Systems reported 100% efficiency, not counting of course the optical sensors, which had never and would likely never function properly as long as he remained the device driver. So long as his customary methods of orientation continued to function optimally, Void didn't care much about such a small inconvenience.

He brought up the pod reverse-lookup and began to plot a course, the black body of his Doppelgänger silently slipping down the tunnel as it began what would no doubt be a long journey, even after he had managed to reach the target field, far in the distance with much uncharted tunnel ahead.

And yet, he had a purpose, in this journey. And the ambition of that purpose would see him through, no matter how much frost, or how many ships, he had to plow through. Even with such ambitions in his mind, Void could not in good faith claim that his heart was the force to melt any such ice of opposition - he was a pragmatist: a fourteen-armed pragmatist armed with a laser cutter.

- Void

Part 4 - Erstarrung

He searched the snow, in vain, for the trace of her steps...

Having emerged onto the surface some time ago, Void was continuously aware not only of the electrical storm overhead, but also the obvious lack of any discernible 'ceiling' to his current surroundings. Being out in the open meant fewer angles to bounce radar signals off of, which left virtually his entire upper hemisphere open to potential attack - if something, Zion or Machine, decided to shoot at him from high ground, he'd be struck before he could react to it.

Nevertheless, he had traveled as far as he could through the tunnels, and it was now a matter of going forward versus turning back. Void was never one for turning back, even when it killed him - as he supposed it had at least the once. Still, the prospects for finding anything usable in a decommissioned field under heavy chemical snow were not favorable. And yet, he knew somehow that there was something out there for him to find. It was only logical.

Interestingly enough, his heat scanner began picking up readings from within a small cluster of supposedly abandoned pods... Making his way over to investigate, he found that the data on this field did not match with observable conditions... which was to say that although many of the occupants of the pods had simply rotted away when the Machines had abandoned this growing site, a few pods seemed to be generating and receiving power. One such pod was tagged as encasing the little girl he had deconstructed... and her life signs appeared stable, which was a surprise even to him.

Landing on the pod itself, he sank the claw-like manipulators of his tentacles into the metallic framework of the pod, and powered down his external systems, so as to not attract any more attention than necessary... He could almost pick up her breathing on the microphone. But he knew that he had destroyed her RSI, and that without the mind, the body could not continue to live... Perhaps some Machine life-support system had kicked in, and without higher function programs to stop it, it had simply persisted, drawing off whatever was powering this strand of pods in order to sustain a braindead husk... Clearly, he would need a brain reading, the Void reasoned. Following the power output to what he imagined was the Real-world equivalent of a junction box, he carefully tore into the covering and spliced in a connection with one of the many smaller instruments adorning the front of his bulbous, useless-eyed head segment.

Nothing. There was nothing. This girl was without a mind.

And yet as far as he could tell, she lived.

He decided, this time, to leave her as she was... Quite puzzled as to what this all meant, and where it would lead...

- Void

(Yummy story which I like the direction of.)

Part 5 - Der Lindenbaum

He remained - squidform crouched over the pod like a vagrant seeking warmth - for hours. He sat unmoving for so long that a rime of chemical ice built up over almost the entirety of his shell. It might even have choked his systems completely, but for the warmth of the pod beneath him, and the occasional jumps of electricity that passed between the various members of that single active column in the otherwise-barren field. As much as it had always bothered him to know that humanity sustained his existence within the Matrix, he had no choice but to admit that such a realization was, more now than ever, literally so.

At last, with a dull hum, his internal reactor powered on full, the ice flaking and cracking off over his exhaust vents, as the fusion reaction sent sudden heat throughout his form. The hot air turned to steam as it escaped his body, and for a moment it was as if he breathed again after a long time spent submerged in the frozen prison. But Sentinels did not breathe, and the Void, while living, yet did not live. He knew this - knew that in some ways, the poor little braindead girl in her pod lived in a more classical sense of the word than he did.

Frankly, he couldn't care less. Sentiment, like living, was a human construct.

His claws grasped and re-grasped, shaking the last remnants of ice from his form. His self-diagnostic check passed without trouble on all tests, each component reporting total efficiency in turn. Finally, he returned to the pod, and the splice he had made the previous evening. Even while his body had taken refuge from the weather, Void's mind had continued to work on the available information. At the most, he was at an uncertain end - a place from which any direction would be a guess. At the least, he was at a waypoint - a station to which he could return if the trail vanished into the snow and ice. He knew that the girl in the pod lived, not because she should by Machine standards, but because someone had tampered with the programmed way of things.

And though he did not know to what ends she had done this, he knew all too well the mark of her artistry - it was one of pure chaos, and once he had come to accept that her art lie in randomness itself, it was all too easy to note that mark where it occurred, as it did here.

The connection of energy to - and from - the pod was constant. Thus, by inserting a substantial block of null values into the energy stream, he was able to 'pinch' the connection long enough to follow it back through its separate conduit. This provided him, not with a duration, but at least with a direction. He took careful note of which cable the energy stream from the tower fed into, and marked it on his radar.

Then, finally leaving the pod, he rose once again into the chill air, the steam around his shell fading into the frigid air as he accelerated, following the twisted cables to their uncertain end, where he hoped he might find that which he sought.

Regardless, he knew that he could always return to this waypoint if his guess proved incorrect - provided it still stood.

... Provided he survived to return.

- Void

Part 6 - Wasserflut

All that day, and for many such days, he followed the intertwined serpents of the cables, their energy calling to him in the faint song of electromagnetism to his gauss meter. Laid out before him was the yellow-brick road, and he was its... well, he supposed he was probably more the Tin-Man, lacking as he did a heart to speak of.

These golden lines of energy, he knew, led as the Matrix feed itself did, back to their Source, which in this case he assumed was the Machine city. Void had never been to that place, and it was not now his destination. However, he could imagine the city itself, all lit up in palpable gold - a sensation better felt than seen. It was, perhaps, like bathing his pale codeflesh in the warmth of the sun - also infinitely better than simply gazing at the 'reality' of the moving gas-ball.

For all he knew, the Machine city was a dreary place to actually look at. It was probably all black and red, and full of random wires and rebar. Good thing he wasn't going there; it sounded like a perfect place to die.

Eventually, though the snow and ice had not broken, he perceived that the signal was growing... 'warmer', that it was stronger here than it had been even out as far as the pods... This was peculiar to him, as he did not expect current to behave in such a way. Coordination of his other instruments revealed the reason for the sudden jump in ambient energy...

Repulsor pods, which meant human ships - hovercrafts.

Scanning through the standard R/F channels, he picked up a call on a Merovingian line... It was coming from beneath the cable lines, due South, and it was broadcasting the signal of the HvCft Quinotuar, captained by Sieges. The Void thought for a moment... but just a moment, before marking his current position as a waypoint and heading toward the call.

It seemed that the patrolling Trust fleet had caught Sieges, most likely between runs from the Matrix or whatever outpost she maintained in this place. Void had always had a great respect for the Devil's Advocates because they had managed to keep hidden the locations of their various outposts. Even now, he had no idea where they were located, but he reasoned that if Sieges had been caught out here, her home must lie somewhere along his path... That was information that could prove useful... But only if she survived this encounter.

He sent a single transmission to the embattled ship: "Just hit them as hard as you can. I'll back you up."

He felt the Quinotuar's energy levels shift as it turned about, and he noted, approvingly, that Sieges apparently trusted him. No doubt this was because of her youth, her nature, and her overall lack of jadedness, but whatever the reasons, she was doing as he had told her. That was good enough for his purposes.

He pulled in, quietly, around the side of the ship that was turning, hiding in its shadow as the ship started forward. He had faced two of the four ships before, knowing well their layout and their crews... Of course, that first time, he had also had the elements of surprise and terrain. He had planned everything, and that was why it had worked... mostly. He had to admit that he had failed to accurately estimate Fenshire's desire to continue living... or perhaps it was his desire to protect his friends, and his wife. At any rate, there would be no second underestimations. Void would take out the Devildog first, then turn to the Titan, then the others. He didn't even have to weigh his desire to destroy Fenshire against his mission to protect Sieges - in his typical style, Fenshire's ship was bearing down on her first, the Titan at his side.

His ship had been upgraded since their last encounter, and Void knew that his laser would have little effect from long range... He was much smaller than the Devildog, but he had some element of surprise. Not to mention they said he was insane. So, he did the most logical thing he could think of; coming out of hiding from behind the Quinotuar, he rammed headfirst into where he imagined Fenshire would be standing and opened fire with his laser, dragging it across the ship's bridge.

It wasn't the most elegant attack, but as he hit the glass, it broke, admitting his many-tentacled body into the ship's guts. Void continued to make his way back, writhing this way and that as he dodged around pipes, cables, chairs, whatever else... The shouts of the crew and the blaring of the alarm provided him with enough audio data to employ a system he had been experimenting with: a crude kind of short-range sonar. Holding two of his arms at either side of his bulbous head in their 'satellite dish' configuration, he was able to measure the distance between the responses of identical soundwaves, like a pair of ears but with greater precision due to the mics' increased frequency range. It wasn't a perfect system, by any means, and he crashed and bashed his way through many things, but soon found his way to the back of the ship. Here, there stood one cargo bay door between him and the open air. Unfortunately, he didn't have time to find the controls to open it, nor the luxury of space to cut through it with his laser. Coiling his tentacles tightly around his body to soften the impact, he cut his engines and went into a free-fall, his body whipping around like a giant metal boulder.

It had the desired effect, and the door's hinge - not having been reinforced against sudden trauma from the inside of the craft, broke open, disgorging him back into the field of battle. As Void turned to face the rear of the Titan, the Devildog ran aground on the surface of the planet. Things were going perfectly, and now Fenshire's wife would die beside his own flaming wreckage, as Void had always intended it to be...

Unfortunately, The Titan had also upgraded itself, and was now boasting a vastly improved compliment of guns. The rear guns opened fire as he came around, and he found that he was pushed back from the ship's body by the sheer number of bullets bouncing off his shell. His systems reported steady decreases in all levels, and he was on the verge of turning away once again... when he caught another ship coming up alongside him. Sieges' targeting data labeled it as the HvCft Saltpillar, belonging to Neoteny.

Then, everything went black.

By the time his backup system kicked in, he found himself tangled and broken in a pile of scrap. Without being able to acquire another Sentinel shell through his usual means, he had no choice but to repair himself with whatever was available... He sat for the rest of that day, barely moving, while his cutting laser and smaller manipulators fashioned crude replacements for his shattered armor. Sieges was gone, as were the Zionites. He wondered, idly if she had gotten away alive...

The repairs held, for the time being, but Void knew that he would need to change his body soon, if he expected to survive to continue his search... Above him, the wires still glowed with their golden light - light which he could not see, but which radiated warmly on his metallic skin...

- Void

Part 7 - Auf dem Fluße

Hand, over hand, over hand, over hand...

The going was tough, and painfully slow. With his engines cut, he could do little but crawl his way up one of the line towers, in an attempt to manually reach the power cables he had been following earlier. Time remained against him, and the Void conceptually knew that if he couldn't reach a more favorable position soon, that all might be for naught.

Concept, of course, had no real place in this Real world. And so he pressed on, because it was all he was presently able to do.

At extreme length, he reached the top of the tower and clambered out onto the cables themselves. They buzzed with electricity, but after monitoring their electromagnetic levels for some time, he had found that the pipelines themselves were shielded enough to permit him to walk out over them. This was no doubt a maintenance concern addressed by the Machines. Machines... He thought to himself, still scuttling down the lines. If he could somehow attract a few Sentinels to this place - if he could somehow disable them without damaging them too much, he could use their spare parts to repair himself...

It was a risky proposition, but one infinitely preferable to this slow drifting down a frozen river of energy. At least the heavy chemical frost didn't seem to be able to build up on the warmth of the pipes - a small blessing in an otherwise so-far unfavorable journey. He walked back and forth over the lines, measuring them, sizing them up, gathering as much information about the surrounding area as he could. Blind and now disabled, he was at a distinct advantage to the systems of what would likely be multiple fully-powered Sentinels. Only his exilic nature - to use the tools provided to him in unexpected ways - was of any possible advantage to his own cause.

He knew that the line he was following currently did not lead to the Machine city, but he supposed that many of the other nearby lines would be monitored by the denizens of Zero-One, and that any disruption of their energy carriage would be dealt with by the dispatch of one or more Sentinels. Void hoped that there would not be too many more than one, but there was really nothing for it. He was far north from any known outposts, surrounded by chemical ice and snow, and was not currently likely to survive to meet his objective, much less return.

Scuttling over to two of the smaller pipelines (as he imagined this would provoke less of a response), he cut into each in turn with his laser, punching a hole in each casing and tearing it back a little with one of his arms. Then, gripping that same appendage, he pulled sharply, tearing the arm from his own body. The Void felt no pain, and the loss of a single limb from fourteen was a minor (and temporary, he hoped) inconvenience. He dropped the arm, making sure that one end of it landed within each incised hole, onto the humming energy cables. He monitored the energy levels as he watched them dip significantly in one pipe, and rise in the other, the torn-off arm acting as a bridge to connect the two flows of energy, diverting one to the other. He had no doubt that the Machines would notice a persistent fluctuation of such an irregular nature, and curled up to wait.

A few hours later, he was rewarded. Well, as rewarded as one could be, when one's reward was a pack of four hostile Sentinels. Void remained curled up, waiting. He knew that to the Sentinels' instruments, his reactor would appear to be functioning minimally, and his CPU would appear offline. He appeared to be nothing more than a battle-damaged husk. That was as he wanted it, and was really his only chance to gain the element of surprise - and to defeat this quintet of identically-bodied foes. On the plus side, his time spent as a Sentinel himself had given him a very clear idea of what they were - and were not - capable of.

He watched as they analyzed the area, taking note of the dangling arm, the triangular laser-cut incisions, and even his seemingly deactivated form. They would no doubt be relaying this back to the Machine city, and he continued to lie there, monitoring their equipment for compatible matches to his own needs. These Sentinels seemed to be outfitted with a number of upgrades with relation to their cold and remote atmosphere of operation. For one thing, their communication gear seemed to encompass a much longer range than his own, and they didn't seem to have a problem with the build-up of chemical frost. If he could isolate just one of them from the group...

One gave itself as a candidate, by approaching him, probing at his shell with an appendage, knocking on it, taking energy and damage readings. It puzzled over his makeshift armor, and sought to tear it aside to connect to his processing unit, to gather a dump of his internal RAM. As it opened its own shell-casing to link with his, Void struck. Before the enemy Sentinel could link with him, he linked with it, engaging in a deadly struggle for control.

The Sentinel's intelligence tried to lock him out, but Void was able to keep it from contacting the rest of its unit, which stood, repairing the broken pipe casings only a few feet away. They ignored their comrade's struggling, as its memory banks were penetrated and overwritten by the consciousness of the foreign Sentinel. As its very existence threatened to be entirely wiped from its own body, the hapless Sentinel was able to make one outgoing transmission - a distress call to its unit.

The Sentinels turned all at once, eyes blazing bright red, and turned on the body of the Sentinel that had been lying there, claws and lasers tearing at it in the attempt to remove a foreign body from their midst. The remaining active Sentinel pulled the link cable from its body, closing down its shell and partially powering down to run a self-diagnostic on its systems.

The foreign Sentinel struggled, spasming in the iron grip of four of its kind, its laser cutting a wide, unfocused scorch into the pipeline below its bulbous body. Despite its struggling, they were easily able to overpower it, and it went toppling from the cables, falling down the long tower, its reactor sputtering, dying... There was a smashing crunch as the Machine Sentinels drove it into the snow-covered surface of the planet.

Returning to the pipes, they resumed their work. The project leader queried the remaining Sentinel as it finished its diagnostic check, and the machine in question reported that all was in order. It had managed to expel the foreign presence before being overwritten. Just to be sure, the Sentinel unit leader ran a redundant check on subordinate #3. All systems reported 100% efficiency... Except for its occular receptors, which were inexplicably non-functional, and its CPU... which appeared blank.

Then, the sharpened point of a claw jammed its way into the leader's face, cutting off his central PSU. Void had used his diagnostic to quickly figure out where all the vulnerable parts on these Sentinels were located - most of them were housed behind the large central eyes of the machines. Without their leader giving orders, the remaining two machines hesitated for just a moment, attempting to determine which was to give the new commands in the absence of their controller. Void needed no leader, and thus capitalized upon the opportunity, springing into the air and landing on one of them, his laser punching brutally into the Sentinel's core, disabling its motor center. Unable to move, it could do nothing but watch as the Doppelgänger tore the other Sentinel limb from limb. Then, it turned back to face its last active counterpart...

Its business finished, Void's new body lifted into the air, following the same cables as before, still intent on reaching his unknown destination. In the face of his enemy, he had recognized his own image, and beneath the nondescript metallic exterior, there once more ran a raging torrent of ambition.

- Void

Part 8 - Rückblick

The energy of the errant pipeline burned beneath his many tentacles. He followed its meandering course until he could no longer received the wireless network containing his access point into the Matrix itself. He was now truly beyond broadcast range - trapped out here in the frozen wilderness, with only a thrumming twist of cables to guide him.

And yet, as his systems released all familiarity with the old topography, new formations became available to his sonar. New spires of steel and rock jutted up before his advance, and these he floated through like a piece of driftwood through the treacherous rocks and final resting places of so many ships on a foreign shore. He was close - he had no way of knowing this, but his sense of familiarity with his target told him that this was so. Here, he would find her, in this dead place - where she could hide away from life, and yet live.

He perceived slow, oscillating motions as he passed each jagged formation, and supposed that he was being watched by many an electronic eye. Perhaps she had built her own surveillance system from discarded Machine technology. He knew that NightTrace had physically seen her at one point... He knew not how deep her connections to the Machines ran, but he realized, ultimately, that she was a woman of vast resources and could likely have built or borrowed anything she needed.

That also meant that there were likely to be traps, assuming that she knew he was approaching, and did not particularly want visitors. It was a reasonable thing to assume; after all, she would not recognize him in this shell, nor would she have isolated herself so far into this frozen and silent part of the Earth, had she expected to be receiving callers.

He first heard, then felt, a scuttle amongst the debris. Ignoring it, he realized that there was nothing he could do - he was on her territory now, and had no choice but to play into her hands, merely on the supposition that she had never particularly desired him harm, and probably would not do so now. Then again, living in cold, dark silence usually drove one mad. And mad folk could hardly be trusted. Especially humans. Especially artists.

Finally, the pipes disappeared into the side of a man-made (or in this case, woman-made) cliffside, and he landed upon it, scouring its surface for irregularities... Unfortunately, the mismatched composition of metals and concrete made it difficult to identify any possible openings from mere difficulties in fusing the various parts of the edifice. Here was a car, and over here a park bench (just the frame). Above that, a few subway cars snaked their path through the corpse of human hubris - although perhaps ironically it was the subway cars that were being slowly devoured by rust, frost and pressure. Everything was covered with a thin layer of chemical ice...

That was it. He began scanning for any areas not covered with ice. Obviously, there were the energy cables, and...

He found it. A door in the mountain of scrap.

Of course, it was quite locked.

An in-depth analysis of the door revealed that it could only be unlocked from the inside, and was made of a material resistant to his cutting laser. He could probably have torn it open with his many arms, given enough time, but it was attached to an unstable-enough mountain of junk... He hardly wished to collapse the whole thing and crush his target inside. That would've been altogether anti-climactic.

Finally, his sensors noticed a port not entirely dissimilar from a neural jack - the sort one might use to connect to the Matrix, if outfitted with the proper plug in the back of one's head. Or, in the case of a Sentinel, on the side of one's undercarriage. In fact, the plug he had used to connect to his current shell and override it was compatible with the technology of the neural jack. Carefully manipulating it with his finer instruments, he positioned it over his own input jack. If this was a trap...

No, he KNEW it was a trap. But knowing her, it was probably a game, too.

At least, that was the prevailing theory.

Void took a mental breath, even though his machinery couldn't support the gesture, and plugged the jack into his port, powering his body down and entering her system - a system in which he did not control, or even necessarily know the rules. He was at a decided disadvantage... But he was still Void, and he was still a coder. Armed with the weapon of self-understanding, he ventured into the darkness, and the unknown...

- Void

9. Irrlicht

He could see her there, those crimson eyes, that pale face, a thin figure that stood before him in a place not far from here. But it was a fractured transmission, a slight shift in focus would reveal his own sentinel in tense structure, ever ready and calculating. A lack of focus in his own sense of vision would also disclose a faint image of a man that was him, well dressed but with eyes that caught the dusk and brought the night.

He was no stranger to the sense of cool focus that could draw guns faster than the speed of caught breath, but in his sights he could not keep this wisp of the figure of whom he so sought. Focus was fluid here, shifting between that which was the sentinel and that which could have been his..

The sentinel lept against a great wall with a loud crash, here he realized that his own form was also a matter of a shift in focus, once again he was a mind embedded within a fine machine with tentacles that automatically leapt as well to counter the sentinel before it.

Twin sentinels in a place, where in split vision Void could see her turning away, heading towards a door that led..

The sentinel against Void hesitated for a brief moment, long enough for Void to see his hands where tentacles once were and face the unmoving figure that was a forgotten version of himself standing before him, long enough for Void to realize that so long as this other sentinel self existed he would never be able to complete focus on the woman that exiting, to see where the door led.

The twin sentinels lunged towards each other with an odd mix of uncertainty, determination, and ferocity, intertwining their metallic limbs and struggling against the other vessel's equal capacities. They matched each other's very moves, Void always a moment behind as his vision would inevitably switch between that which was the sentinel and that which was the man.

In a blink he would see his own hands wrapped around the neck of the man who was like his former self, the veins.. they pulsated aside his forehead as his breath was being strangled.

In a turn there would be sharp destruction of twin cutting lasers, wrecking into each other with heartless precision.

She was leaving, would he ever come close to seeing her again.

There was a tear that strained from the corner of the man's dark eye, he was the only entity that stood still within this moment.

And Void could not tell if he truly wanted to strangle him or not, or why his hands were wrapped around his neck so tightly, he did not know because he did not know if it was necessary for this man to die. It was not attacking him like the sentinel was yet.. there was a confusion between function.. Almost as if to kill the sentinel also meant the death of this undefending figure.

Sound itself was shifting.

You could hear the crash of the battling Sentinels.

You could hear the closing of a door.

You could hear a gasp of breath.

Until you could hear no more.

The Sentinels were dead. Void as well could no longer manipulate that facet of himself.

The man was dead, his eyes had closed as Void had taken his last breath.

The construct began to decompile, even the very faction of his code began to deconstruct the way the walls did, the way the ground did, no difference in focus could abate this destruction.

He was no stranger to this sensation either.. the feel of your code rising.

All he could think of was the scent of gingerwood sweat, it's incredibly earthy texture, the spice of this immeasurably alluring scent.

Then there was not darkness, but viscous streams of red and pulp.

He was naked now, sticky as a punctured blossom berry. There was only one tentacle now, the one that inserted right in through the hood of his cerebral cortex. It took him a moment to recalibrate his mind enough to manipulate his arms into pulling this heavy metallic cord from his head.

The pain.. was instantly explosive as if it charged every cell of his new vessel, firing all the synapsis, connecting a mind with a body through the common language of excruciating and jarring physical pain. It felt louder than what a man could ever want to scream.

The body itself underwent a violent seizure as the mind tried to capture a memory it might have never had..

Of Sallo, of a door that led..

Somewhere not far from here.

Was this a cruel trick, for her to force him to destroy his previous vessels for this human one.

Somehow he knew that this was not a trick she played but one he had played to himself, to accuse her would be following a dare sense of a misguiding wisp. Choice was the trick, he had chosen this.

And he would find her.

"Jeder Strom wird's Meer gewinnen,
Jedes Leiden auch sein Grab."

(( Recently got Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's 1967 recording of "Winterreise". He's quoted as saying "One cannot sing "Winterreise" unless it haunts you." I take it the music haunts you, since you've captured the feel of it and continue to translate it to the Matrix-verse... Keep up the good work, folks.))

Part 10 - Rast

Now, he first noticed how tired he was...

All that he had sacrificed for, all that he had become, had in that singular instant of realized purpose been stolen from him, plunged back into the depths from which he had derived its gift in the onset. All was for naught; all seemed as it had been before. At long last, he had finally been granted a second chance at humanity.

The problem was, simply, that he had not wished for it. Nor did he desire it now.

A howl of pain and anguish reverberated around the tiny room, and it took his mind a few moments to realize that his flesh and bloody body was its source. His mind... That was another thing that was incomplete as a human being, and more complete as something very much inhuman. Such as was his nature as a machine - flesh or no flesh as the casing proved to be. His new body was yet another chassis. Admittedly, it was one of which he had once been quite intimately knowledgeable. This memory, recalled by the A.I. dominating the flesh, served him well in taking inventory of his current functions.

Everything hurt. Beyond his likely projections for the stability of his shell, the element of pain itself was an unwelcome weakness. He could ignore it, but the fact that it registered proved troublesome. He had nearly forgotten what pain felt like - it was an unpleasant recollection, to say the least.

Fingers opened and closed, groping clumsily as they sought the sides of the makeshift pod encasing his form. How long had it taken her to grow an exact copy of his body? Or was this yet another construct - and yet another trick? Perhaps seeking her out after all this time had all been a mistake - perhaps she was far too gone into being too far gone.

The metal felt warm beneath his touch, and he pulled himself with great effort out of the tank. He couldn't sense anything here, beyond what his fingers and ears told him. There was an odd ringing sensation in them... It was a B-flat. Not that that was relevant, but Void's mind struggled for anything in the way of logical data. He was forced to remember how to be human... and yet, he was not human. This world, this body... it was inefficient. If he could simply jack back into the Matrix...

Diagnostics completed, he paused a moment to recapitulate the information. Sensual range was limited. He had a full sense of touch - though even at rest, his limbs burned with the pain of sudden and unexpected usage - hearing, taste, smell... All the things needed to appreciate art. All the things needed to find her, though she seemed to be nowhere to be found.

Sight...

... Slowly, he opened his eyes. This body had eyes. A hazy image began forming before him - not of code, but of the world the way he had once known it to be. These eyes were perfect replicas of his originals... and yet, they were not his. When his old form had passed away, she had stolen some of his rising code, and had kept it within herself - partially for study, and partially for safekeeping. If he could now see (as clearly he now could, even in the dimly lit laboratory), then it meant...

Climbing from the pod, he lowered himself onto the cold, metallic floor, his knees buckling weakly beneath him, still not quite calibrated for proper usage. As he huddled there more by circumstance than by choice, naked and dripping with that oh-so-familiar red mucus, he realized that he had found that which he sought. Now that he had fallen to rest, he could feel the burning sting of the serpent within his newly-acquired body.

She was there, somewhere. He wasn't sure how. But she was there.

The eyes which were his own and not his own closed slowly. Succumbing to the relentless pull of his mortal fatigue, Void's body slipped into slumber, while his organic mind engaged in the traditonal habits of such biological hardware.

This was to say, for the first time since discarding his humanity, Void dreamed.

- Void

(( Just noticed this for the first time, and I wish I'd commented sooner... but... YIKES!!! Brain-bendingly good!))