Heart Like a Machine

Chapter 54

I opened my eye to see the wall beside me. I rolled over, feeling the boar cloak was placed on me. Aloy must have came in when I was still sleeping and put it on me. I slowly rose up from the bed to see my spear and a new Focus was on her desk. I got up, the pain kicking in now from both the stab wound and my eye. I walked over to see there was a little handwritten note from Aloy.

"I backedup your data onto a new Focus and gave you the overrides. Along with that, I added a device to your spear that will allow you to override the machines."

I smiled and grabbed the new Focus, putting it on my head. I grabbed my armor and put it on along with the boar cloak before heading into the main area of the base. Sylens, Aloy, and Beta were all talking to one another and there was a large map in front of the three of them. There was something jutting upwards from the projection. I walked over to them and stood inbetween Aloy and Beta.

"Morning," she said to me. "How are you feeling?"

"Still not great, but I'll get by," I breathed out. 

"Here," Beta went over and grabbed a chair for me to sit on.

"Thank you, Beta," I said and sat down, looking at the map. "What are guys discussing?"

"We're going to see what we can do about Nemesis. We're going to go with your idea first to see if we can get MINERVA to cloak the entire planet. If that doesn't work, Sylens is going to look into the data we retrieved from the Zenith base to see if there is anyway we can either make an override for Nemesis or contain it once more. It's not going to like it being contained again, but it will give us maybe sometime before we can successfully make an override for it."

"Your master override won't work?" I asked.

"Nemesis was made from the Zeniths. A technology that Earth has barely scratched the surface on creating," Sylens said. "The master override was made for the extinction of HADES and the override of other machines. It only knows as much as the owner and since we do not know anything about Nemesis, we can't override it."

"That's what you're going to look in to, Sylens," Aloy said. "That's going to be sort of our backup plan if this doesn't work. I hope it does."

"So what do we need to do?" I asked.

Aloy pulled back the image of what was jutting upwards from the map, "While I was fighting in Meridian, there was a spire I needed to go to. HADES was trying to get into the Spire and basically send out its signal to wake up the machines that Faro made. So what we're going to do, is recreate the Spire in all of the major continents on Earth. We might have to make smaller signal towers to help it reach the distance, but that's what we're going to need to do."

"Sounds easy enough," I said. "Probably isn't though," I said after I looked at Aloy's expression. 

"This is going to require a lot of machine parts and a lot of time to build. We don't have a lot of time to build these in all of the other continents. We can certainly do the smaller ones in time, but bigger ones, we're going to have to find a lot of people to work on it. And they'll have to work on it non stop."

"Does it have to have the structure of the Spire itself?" I asked. "Why don't we get the integral structure and build it on top of the highest point in each of the continents? It'll save us time on building it to the height of the Spire."

"That's not a bad idea," Beta said, pulling up an image of the Spire in Meridian. "It seems like it's at the peak of a mountain nearby. So if we do like Y/N said, we should be able to do it in time. Not to mention get the smaller ones done as well."

"And once we're ready, we take GAIA to the Spire and send the signal to all of the others," Aloy nodded her head. "That could possibly work."

"What do we need to build it?" I asked.

Aloy sent the necessary parts to everyone before contacting everyone who wasn't in the main part of the base.

"Everyone, I just sent the necessary machine parts that we need to make the signals. We need them as soon as possible and once that's finished, we're going to have to get everyone here and everyone who is willing to help as well. From there, we'll send you out to your necessary assignments."

"Sounds good, Aloy," Erend said.

"I'll do my best to help," Kotallo said.

"I have some of the parts already, but I will get more just in case," Zo said.

"I'll gather the parts that can be found here at Legacy's Landfall," Alva mentioned.

"We're behind you all the way, Aloy," Sona said.

"Thanks, guys," she said.

"Is there anything I can do?" I asked.

"Rest. I don't want your wounds to get any worse. Beta and I are working on something that might help you with your eye."

"What's that?"

Beta collapsed the image of the Spire and pulled up another image. It looked like a headset almost, but there was this circular part in the center of it.

"We were thinking of creating another eye for you. Made from the eyes of a machine. Not only will you have a second sight with the Focus, but you will also be given a third eye," Beta said.

"What will it do?"

"You know how the Focus can show you like tracks and machine weak spots?" Aloy asked.

"Yeah."

"The machine eye will help you detect other machines from afar."

I smiled, looking at the both of them, "You two are genuises."

"You should thank Aloy for the idea," Beta said. "I helped her with the design."

"What machine eye are you going to use?"

"They're all the same, so we're probably just going to use an eye part I already have. We're going to get it started, but we have to wait for your eye to heal before we can put it on you. And we're still getting a better design idea for the entire thing."

"Take as long as you need to," I said. "I know this will."