Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1) | 2024 WATTYS WINNER

58 - In the Dreams of Mad Things

Are you sure you want to do this?

Very.

Piper let her cheeks puff out as she exhaled, letting her eyes wander over the dead wraith. She circled it with slow steps, one hand out, hovering over its battered surface. With her implants she tried to sense if the thing really was alive in there somewhere. Her fingers hovered a few millimetres from the battered surface.

So far she couldn't feel anything. Couldn't hear anything.

She tried not to thing about the others watching, but it was difficult when all of their implants were pouring a different cocktail of conflicting emotions out into the room. Arrow, still crackling with hostility in Ferra's presence, but unable to hide their curiosity. Odiye, worried; protective. Ferra, her implants still bucking and writhing, as though an internal battle still raged inside her.

Even Toran couldn't hide his unease, one elbow cupped in the opposite hand, rubbing his chin as he watched her every move. His implants were coiled to spring, ready to react to any sudden danger.

Piper wondered if the control she'd exerted over a codewraith could be reversed somehow? She didn't really know. Couldn't know. The one whose mind she'd entered had been devoid of any real intelligence, just a brute algorithm, its mind stripped back to its core.

Only one way to find out for sure.

Bracing herself, feeling her chest tighten and implants heat with anticipation, she placed her palm flat against the codewraith's skull.

The metal was icy cold, enough to make her breath in sharply. She closed her eyes for a moment, searching, searching. Her fingers pressed a little harder against the metal. At first the machine remained inert; empty. Piper could feel its structure, her mind able to trace paths through every circuit inside.

She marvelled at its intricacy. Thousands of micro-nerve bundles followed the contours of its limbs like rivers, giving it a control and grace that no normal robot could match. It was thin, a coiled metal skeleton with bladed limbs that could carve up a human being in a stroke. Even body armour would have parted like butter in the face of those weapons.

But where there should have been a beating metal heart, she found a ruin, and a deep, gut-wrenching sadness hit her so hard that she choked.

"Piper?" Arrow's voice.

"I'm okay." She rolled her jaw, and shuddered, shaking the feeling away. "It's just a little ... weird."

"If you need to stop-," Odiye began.

"I said I'm okay. What I need is for you all to shut up. I need to concentrate." She felt ripples of hurt from both of them, but right now she didn't care. She couldn't delve into the mind of a codewraith and have a damned conversation at the same time.

Quiet reasserted itself, and with an effort, Piper pushed on through the hollowing sensation of the wraith's emptiness, moving through its body and looking for any flicker of line within its battered body.

She moved up from the dead heart, into it neck area, where clusters of sensors infested the surface, dragging data to the brain. More hunting around didn't provide any further signs of life, but she kept looking.

Piper found something just above the spine, where a human brain stem ought to have been. It was so small she almost missed it, but when she looked closer she found a tiny tremor of current, like the faintest human heartbeat.

Her consciousness lit up with excitement.

It's alive. Almost.

Piper nodded slowly, her fingers moving gently against the cold surface of the codewraith's skull as she hunted down the elusive sliver of life. Up she went, through the conductive bundles that carried the wraith's thoughts through the rest of its body, animating the machine into an imitation of true life. She moved carefully, tiptoeing up pathways that no human being had traversed before.