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Nellie and the Nanites - Bk3 - Ch.29
🕑 Added 2024-05-23 08:00:05 +0000 UTCChapter 29
Shutdown
There was no pain, not at first. That was the strangest thing. Large parts of her body had just shut down, but Nellie was not in any pain. It was almost enough to prevent the mounting panic, but not quite.
She lay, staring out of one eye at Lucy's blank, empty face. Slowly, a single piece of ash fell into view, drifting and swirling in the hot air until it settled on the visor, blocking her view as it landed directly in front of her completely frozen line of sight.
“Wow, this is all kinds of messed up!” A cheery voice said although she had no idea where the voice was coming from. “Hello? Can you hear me? Ah, shit, you can’t talk, can you?”
A familiar figure appeared in her line of sight, not walked, appeared. Not there, then there.
“Okay, so I know things look bleak,” Wasta Brill said, leaning down into her eyeline. “And I won’t lie, they are. The good news is that you can actually see this, so your brain is still working. That’s great news!” Wasta gave her four exuberant thumbs up. “Can you understand me?”
“HELP!” Nellie screamed in the silence of her brain. “HELP LUCY!”
“Ah, I think that means yes,” Wasta grinned. “I can feel you trying to talk to your AI. That isn’t going to happen right now.”
Pain and panic swamped Nellie. Did he mean that Lucy was….
“Whoa! Calm down. I said right now, not never. She’s taking a little nap while her systems right themselves.” Wasta stretched his back and walked over to look at the building they had been trying to get into. “Why the fuck are you anywhere near the I.E.S? Eh?” He blinked back over to her body, leaning down into her vision. “Just my luck to get downloaded by a dumbass.”
“HELP!” Nellie tried to scream again, still unable to do so much as a twitch.
“Right, right,” Wasta grinned. “Nerve-shredding panic. Let’s start by getting you able to move, shall we?”
Over the next two frantic minutes, Wasta talked, and Nellie slowly calmed down. She realized that she needed to focus on helping herself before she could do anything else.
“Great,” Brill nodded. “I can tell you are starting to think clearer. That’s a big help. First off, all your nanites are gone. It is going to take a few minutes to get enough of them created by that forge in your chest to do anything with, so just try and enjoy the rest, okay?” Brill chuckled at his own joke and scratched the top of his head before carrying on. “Now, you are going to have to direct the nanites yourself, which you can not, in fact, consciously do. It’s a whole thing, but it boils down to not having the right brain interfaces. So, we are working with the absolute basics here.” Wasta stopped and pulled a can of HyperDrive out of thin air, letting the words sink in. “Right, so I want you to concentrate on the image of a forge just roaring with heat and activity. As hard as you can. Right now.”
Nellie concentrated hard, feeling an immediate and potent increase in heat in the very center of her chest.
“Wow, that really worked,” Wasta Brill grinned. “Nice job. Looks like this might go smoother than I thought.” He reached out and patted her on the helmet. “Now focus on another thought. Health. Really, really clearly think about the idea of repairs, of moving and speaking.”
Nellie added the image to the forge, imagining an endless stream of fire that spread from the heart of the forge and into her body, repairing imaginary walls of flesh and metal as they went.
Time passed, and Nellie was lost in the image, only realizing how far she had come when a sudden, shaky breath rocked her chest.
“Ostie!” Nellie gasped in relief.
“Nice! We have speech!” Wasta did a ridiculous little dance.
“How are you here?” Nellie asked.
“I cheated,” Wasta grinned. “A thing about me: I always cheat. I included a hidden copy of myself in the download. Just in case the idiot who downloaded me got in over their head.”
“You’re an AI?” Nellie grunted as feeling began to return to her limbs.
“Naah, nothing so posh,” Wasta laughed for a reason that escaped her. “I’m a bunch of memories, experiences, and commands held together with tape and spit. Consider me your emergency program.”
“Lucy?” Nellie asked. “Will she be okay?”
“Sure,” Wasta said gently. “There is no permanent damage, but once she wakes up, consider placing her on bed rest for at least a week.”
“She really will wake up?” Nellie felt a tear trace down her cheek. “She won’t be reset or anything?”
“Completely fine,” Wasta promised. “You fall in love with your AI, too?”
“Did you?” Nellie asked, pulling herself into a seated position. Her legs were there, and she could feel them, but there was no apparent way to move them yet.
“Oh yeah,” Wasta chuckled in a way that left little to the imagination.
“Forget I asked,” Nellie sighed. “Why don’t my legs work?”
“Not enough nanites yet,” Wasta said with a smile. “You’ll get there.”
Nellie crawled over to Lucy’s body and rolled it onto its side. She didn’t know why, but it made her feel better.
“You might want to give that a jump start,” Wasta hinted. “If you want to keep it.”
“Jumpstart?” Nellie asked.
Wasta extended two fingers and jabbed them into the chest.
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to do that?” Nellie asked.
“No fucking clue, but the forge in that body is offline. It will begin to break down if you don’t give it a jump.” Wasta said and repeated the gesture.
Nellie closed her eyes and focused on the image of the tendrils emerging, but nothing happened.
“Fuck!” Nellie swore. “I need my fucking IMPLANT!”
After five minutes of complicated attempts to visualize her HUD, the implant itself, and even more obscure ideas, her implant flickered to life.
“I can’t do this,” Nellie snapped in frustration as the tendrils still refused to emerge.
“Why not?” Wasta asked, suddenly serious. “What is stopping you?”
Nellie opened her mouth and then stopped. What was stopping her? She had done that before, even when she had no implant. Was it Lucy being out of action? Was that it?
No, that felt wrong. Nellie had done it herself. That was a fact. She ran a systems check, ignoring all the red flashing warnings that were returned by her implant and focusing on the nanite forge and the new nanites moving slowly through her body. They were… Lucy’s. It was just something she could tell. The feeling was like recognizing someone’s handwriting, but completely different in every way.
“They aren’t mine?” Nellie wondered aloud.
“I wouldn’t stand for that if I was you,” Wasta grinned. “They are a part of you; make them yours.”
Nellie frowned. It was all very easy for him to say, but how did she do that? It wasn’t like she could just mentally reach out to them and…
The nanites began to shift. The change was almost invisible, but… yes. The energy signature was a tiny bit different now.
That extra sense that she had forgotten, that sense of her nanites, returned in a flood. Her legs spasmed once, then returned to function. Everything suddenly moved faster. Healing and replenishment speeds doubled as the energy signature in her forge shifted.
“I’m making my own nanites now,” Nellie smiled as power returned to her body, and two tendrils extended with a mere thought.
“That’s the ticket!” Wasta cheered. “You can do this!”
The tendrils jabbed through the weak points in the armor that Nellie already knew were there before snaking their way into the chest. She felt them moving through the artificial blood system and found the nanite forge inside damaged and inactive.
Over the next ten minutes, Nellie repaired and restarted the inert machine. It came to life slowly, barely a flicker of energy within, but it began to build.
“Ow,” Nellie groaned as her headache worsened. “Why the hell does my head hurt this bad?”
“You’re about to find out,” Wasta said with a wink.
Nanite Control Systems Generated.
“What the hell?” Nellie blinked a couple of times as the pain slowly faded. “How?”
“All you,” Wasta clapped excitedly. “Which is pretty good going, considering it is your only hope of surviving.”
“Explain,” Nellie got, slightly unsteadily, to her feet.
“That wave that it generated?” Wasta said as if about to mention very bad news.
“Yes?” Nellie asked.
“It hit your shuttle as well,” Wasta sighed. “Sorry, it was the last reading your sensors got before they ran out of power.”
“PUTAIN!” Nellie swore as loudly as she could.
“Yeah,” Wasta pulled a cowboy hat out of thin air and jammed it on his head. “Emergency mode is shutting down. Good luck, kiddo!”
Wasta waved and was gone.
Nellie looked around at the barren landscape that suddenly seemed very lonely.
“Fuuuuuuck.”
Comments
Clayton Danvers
Now you know Nellie will be back with a vengeance!
Mech Bagienny
It turns out that nanites are a children's toy and Nellie should run away and hide in some cave and never come out.
