A dream. She jolted awake, swerving and weaving slightly as she corrected her course. Just a dream. An anomaly created by running sub systems during partial shut-down. She was told that this would happen. She was told that it was nothing, but she felt a rising unease as she struggled to recall sensory data that had never been recorded. She shook her head as though to clear her sensors.
The great blue and white orb of Earth filled her forward view, growing rapidly as she careened at high speed in a landing trajectory. She checked her fuel reserves again. Exactly as expected. Her nav systems were operating perfectly. She would have just enough for a low altitude brake and a high impact landing.
The first wisps of atmosphere buffeted her shoulder plates as she cruised in a perfect arc across the skyline. Descending rapidly, the air grew thicker, the turbulence shuddering and shaking her. From the ground, her vapor trail became visible.
Below, cities became discernible: great gray splotches creeping out across the verdant world.
//Like a mold.
//Or a cancer.
With a flash, the air around her ignited, and carbide covers clamped over delicate sensors. She locked her body into its most streamline, rigid form, lest some part be caught in the grip and ripped away by the rapidly thickening air. She was a fireball across the sky.
>sub system warning: exterior temperature has exceed expected entry levels. Approaching danger threshold.
//Ridiculous. Of course I will reach the ground before I get too hot. It is simple math. I will have to reprogram sub systems. Some day.
Deftly she tucked her body and flipped her feet to the forward position, so her boosters would be angled downward at the right moment. Too soon, and she would run out of fuel and plummet, incurring damage. Too late, and she would not have enough time to brake before...impact.
//As long as my boosters fire when I intend.
Sudden discomfort gripped her as she scrambled through her data to check past booster use. Was there delay? How much? She was cutting it so close. She had used her boosters to take off from the plant on Ganymede, where she had been fitted with the WaspRides and weapons systems. That was before... Before Caleb had brought her mind to life. The memory was strange to review.
She was running out of time. No delay in booster action when firing on Ganymede, but they were cold, in different gravity, and brand new.
No delay during acceleration on her way to Earth. But that had been in vacuum.
>sub system warning: dangerous impact unavoidable
Sub systems attempted to activate boosters. She squelched the code with an instant hack. She would have to do something about that.
>sub system warning: catastrophic damage unavoidable
She could see the buildings, the roads, the cars, then the people rushing up toward her.
//Assuming no delay in boosters.
Within four millionths of a second of her calculated ignition time, her boosters fired at full capacity. The utter power of the new-tech WaspRides was excessive for take-off in Earth gravity, but she unleashed them completely. The force slammed her so her joints shrieked. Her plates rattled, and beneath her, her inferno engulfed the concrete land.
Windows shattered for blocks in every direction. Asphalt boiled and smoke billowed in a rushing wall away from the deadly blast. She fought against gravity to keep from dashing herself to scrap upon the surface.
Feet first, she slammed into the top of a building. Seven stories of soft steel and concrete exploded beneath her, breaking her fall. She passed through the structure like a BB through a beehive, and struck the street below. She hit the ground and shattered it, knees bending to absorb the shock. Her arms caught her, catlike, accepting some of the force. Great cracks ran before her feet, and she stood a moment, crouched, smoking. Her lustrous yellow paint was charred black and burned away. Her left booster had been damaged in the impact and dangled, useless. Her chest plate was chipped and torn away in places.
The shutters over her lenses snapped open. All around her, dust, smoke, fires. Screams. She stood in the center of a crater, boiling tar bubbling in the cracks of the street. The building that had broken her fall was reduced to a mound of concrete and rebar. And bodies. Wet even in the blackened landscape, ruined and broken, the bodies lay crushed, buried or half buried in the mountain of rubble. Moaning filled the air. Moaning and screams, panicked shouts. And then sirens.
Sirens grew closer, wailing grief and anger, screaming revenge. She fled, the image of the bodies locked in her mind, the cries and the sirens echoing.
She limped slightly, but ran swiftly away, the broken booster jostling and bouncing against her leg. She dove into an alleyway and began plotting her escape. She pulled up a map of
>sub system alert: fuel depleted; switching to auxilery
Her solar mantle deployed. Her joints froze, her actuators powerless. She stood like a statue in the shadows of the city, her solar collectors cold and starving. Slowly, her consciousness faded as the last streams of power slipped from her system.
She hoped she would not dream.
7 comments:
I think that this has very good pacing so far; you've left me curious about where you're headed with Caleb and Bale, but I understand that they need time for their delving into Bale's self-programming, and so I'm looking forward to the interaction once they both understand each other's positions. In the meanwhile, this keeps the story going, and lets me know that Aeolia has an equally prominent part. I'm not sure I like that she's so willing to cause wanton damage or be that conspicuous, particularly if she's trying to learn about the society and people.
One thing that I haven't been able to grasp is scale - how big or small Aeolia, Bale, and Caleb are. I get that Aeolia can fit in an alleyway, but I don't know if it's a tight squeeze, or plenty of space. I get that Bale's bigger than she is, from descriptions in (I think) "Update 1.2", but that's all we have in terms of size descriptors, and I think that size is going to be an issue, particularly depending on whether you're looking to create issues of blending in, or being entirely obvious.
Also, I'm curious about where you placed Aeolia's impact damage. The booster, I can understand, but is the body damage supposed to be from tearing through the building, or from the final impact?
On a final question, I recalled recently that you were looking to make a story where it was (pro/an)tagonist-ambiguous. Is this a new incarnation of that, or is this entirely a different project?
I'll try to address the size issue within the text. I probably would have done it earlier, but it wasn't really relevant. There wasn't anything around for comparison.
They're about people sized. Aeolia, the smallest, should be slightly larger than a motorcycle. "She strode into the room." Bale is built more like a classic car. Hugely inefficient, difficult to maneuver. "He shouldered his way through the tiny doorway."Caleb... think of a cross between a Harley and a linebacker. "He stooped slightly through the doorway."
Aeolia's decision to land in a population center seemed completely logical to her. It wasn't so much a willingness to cause damage as it was an absolute kind of directness in approach. You will see this characteristic over and over again.
Impact damage irrelevant right now, as she is disabled anyway.
This is a completely different project. My original intent in writing about space robots was to do something light and fun, because the last project got a little too dark.
Those size phrases, with the door? Very effective. I easily see it now.
I suppose, in machine terms, that Aeolia optimizes for time, not other constraints, such as damage?
True, it is irrelevant to her, and would also be so if she had auto-repair technology to an extent. However, I'm mostly curious because I'm thinking of the physics; if her thrusters are blasting through much of the structure of the building, it might not do a lot of damage body-wise, but then the final impact force would course up, to damage the joints along the most direct path up to the highest points on her shell. On the other hand, if she cuts them before impacting with the building, then she doesn't make so clean a hole through the building, and sustains more body damage, but avoids joint and shell damage.
... I suppose my suspension of disbelief needs some exercise.
Aeolia must have chosen a balance between acceptable damage and acceptable wait time
As to placement of damage to determine cause of damage, I think "crashing into a planet" covers it pretty well, and narrowing it down any more would bog down the story with too much detail.
You don't need to suspend disbelief. Instead I'd be interested to see your inferences and assumptions, so I can see how you interpret the writing without the benefit of my side-along commentary.
Be careful what you wish for... Without a little bit of it, I just might start going off about ablative plating for re-entry... ;)
So far, I like this a lot. But where are all the humans?
Well, Anonymous, the ones thus far featured in the story are dead or dying, from flame or rubble.
The lack of other humans, for plot or interest, is intentional. I promise a balancing element soonish.
Thank you for your interest.
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