Sector Sigma, Panopticon Tower level 108

Apparently, GMD likes to stay on top of the Panopticon for weeks on end. Spooks told me he got word that an Insurrectionist convoy will be passing through, and he wants to be the one to take them down.

This time he comes fully prepared, taking his chia pet and isopod tank along with him. We're holed up inside the thermal chamber, and since GMD is such a great conversationalist, I'm stuck watching the isopod scuttle along damp polyurethane fibres to nibble on bits.

It's still dark outside. A spot of bright red pops up on my thermal vision and I notice GMD setting aside a hot cup of Cocoa-Fix® on his makeshift crate-table.

> Calculating caloric content...

Stop that. I don't need to know, and frankly I don't want to know what is inside that cup of bubbling black liquid. It looks like it tastes the same as GMD's personality.

The problem with having six hands is not knowing what to do with all of them once I'm properly sitting down. I wonder how silly I look, with my little legs dangling off a crate three times my height.

"RFL-D-3901?"

"What."

"Why do you insist on staying outside during the tox storm?"

He just grunts. Typical Renfield moment.

Ok, maybe that's not such a good question to start with. "Have you decided on what to call me yet? Or will it just be MDRA-K1?"

"Stop making me name you, it's fu-frickin' weird. Like I'm your dad or something."

"I don't want to be called MDRA-K1." I blurt out, "I want to have a real name, like Renfield or Spooks."

Immediately the android part of me starts screaming about the word choice. Want, want? Are you serious? An android "wants" something now? What is this world coming to?!

GMD snorts in amusement.

"If you're smart enough to want something, you should be smart enough to decide." He downs the rest of the Cocoa-Fix®, "Name yourself, little android."

My eyes scan the room until I come upon a faded poster tucked behind rows of rusty lockers. It's a bleached image of a young woman, rosy cheeks, cascading black hair, eyes bright as gemstones and rolling in a sea of white specks. Flowers, I recognize upon a closer look. She has her feet up in the air and a smile that says come lie down in the grass with me.

"Madaraki Ishiko." GMD catches my gaze, "She was popular in the 50s, nothing short of a national sensation. Too bad some thug pulled the trigger on her."

I want to be her. I wish I was her and I was lying down in a flower field with nothing but a summer dress on.

"I like Madaraki." I mutter, "And I want to be a girl. I want to be her."

The weird noise might've been GMD laughing, but I choose to ignore him. He's a jerk and he can choke on that cocoa for all I care.

12:18 am

"Anything yet?"

Every five minutes, GMD unplugs me from my charging station so I can scan the wasteland outside. Every five minutes I come back with nothing but pitch darkness on my monitor and he grumbles in annoyance.

Like it's my fault the Insurrectionists aren't on time.

"Why are you so eager to eliminate your potential targets?"

He regards me from the shadow of his mask (why does he still keep it on? Does he ever take it off?), my psych-cores tell me he's definitely frowning under there.

"You're supposed to be a genius android, aren't you? Figure it out yourself."

"I am incapable of formulating a plausible answer, that's why I'm asking you."

"Fine." He huffs, taking another long sip through the straw in his mask, "Cuz it's my job."

"You are far more dedicated than others in the rifleman division."

Maybe he's heard that one too many times, the compliment is lost on him, "It's my friggin' job."

"Are you afraid of being removed from the Husk program?"

That was designed to get on his nerves, and it did. I can see him tensing under his big fluffy coat.

"The f-fridge I am." He spits through gritted teeth.

> Terror Management Theory: TMT is defined as the psychological conflict resulting from an individual's sense of self-preservation under salience of death. The fear of death produces terror, which the individual seeks to manage through escapism or beliefs...

Thank you brainbox.

GMD's head starts to droop. Since he told me to keep him awake during the shift, I jab him in the ribs and he bounces at least a metre high.

"Is the Cocoa-Fix® not working?" I poke him again gently. He grumbles and swats my hands away.

"Of course it's not. You really think they sell genuine caffeinated shi-stuff here? This is nothin' but dirt sugar water."

Dirt sugar water is putting it nicely. I'm sure if that liquid comes in contact with my steel exterior it would corrode my body down to the silicon bits.

"Of course, the Nexus has its contingencies." GMD suddenly continues, "Insomnification, adreno-chips, a whole load of other enhancements to get rid of sleep."

None of those sound quite pleasant.

> Insomnification: the process of inducing a permanent state of wakefulness. This is achieved by a neuro-interocitor implant which regulates the pineal gland's melatonin release, combined with electrochemical signals which stimulate the individual's brain. This technology has been employed by the Ministry of Defense for-

"Why don't you get any of these enhancements?" I interrupt my own brain before it can rattle off more information.

"It doesn't stick with me." GMD taps his head, "I get resurrected, remember?"

So there must be a base template upon which TRISS is rebuilding him, however Operation Husk works. Every time he dies, Renfield basically gets reset sans his memories. That means every callous, every scar, every tattoo (if he has any) is erased, he can't even get a tan.

"Surely there must be medical alternatives." I suggest. Then I immediately feel really bad for telling him to take drugs.

"Makes my hands shake. Can't aim if I'm on K."

Now's actually a good time for my built-in search engine to butt in because I have no idea what K is, but it doesn't. I'm guessing the Nexus or Spooks didn't think it was necessary for me to have an encyclopedic knowledge of colloquialism for drugs. Oh well.

"Anyways, why do you care?" GMD sounds annoyed again, "You're an android, you don't sleep."

"My program requires periodic rebooting and troubleshooting. I guess that's equal to sleep?"

"That's stupid. You just shut down, you don't toss and turn and have dreams like people do. Don't tell me you know what sleep is like until you've woken up with a stiff neck and bug bites."

I guess that's true. GMD can grumble about the discomfort of being human all he wants, but I can't help the pang of jealousy simmering in my programs. I wonder what dreams feel like, I want to get bitten by a bedbug. I also don't know why Spooks went as far as to give my brain jealousy bits, maybe it's a byproduct of my evaluative routines?

1:30 am

"What?" He is definitely blinking in confusion under that mask.

"Tell me something scary." I say flatly, "My sense of fear is attached to the danger assessment modules, the only way to know if it'll trigger correctly is to test out all possible fear-inducing scenarios."

A long yawn, "That makes no friggin' sense."

"Either way, it'll keep you awake and alert." Besides, if I can keep him talking then I won't have to poke him every five minutes then watch him jump into the ceiling, as fun as that is.

"Can't believe they built a real chatbot...you get paid by the word? Is that how this works?"

If there's a joke in there somewhere, it nyoomed over my head like a really fast flying thing.

"Fine." GMD sinks back into the comfort of crates stacked on cold concrete, "You know about the tox?"

"Only in the context of a storm."

"Not the storm, the people. The storm got its name from the people is my guess, strange that you haven't heard of them though."

IT'S BECAUSE SPOOKS "FORGOT" TO INSTALL SOME VERY IMPORTANT DETAILS OK

"I was runnin' a night shift like this one a few months ago." GMD gets started on another cup of his dirt-sugar-water, "Had a spotter up here with me too. We were looking out over the railings since it was a clear night, and then he said he saw something move in the distance."

Biiiiiiiiiiig siiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

"It looked like some kind of segmented bug, the ones you see around here time to time-"

> Centipede: predatory arthropods characterized by a segmented body and multiple pairs of legs. They are primarily carnivorous and can inflict painful bites containing venom. Lengths vary from a few millimeters to about 30 centimeters-

What do they look like?

> Displaying image search results...

EW NO PUT IT BACK PUT IT BACK

"-but it was much bigger, especially since we were both seeing the thing from a couple hundred meters away. It was crawling very, very slowly along the snow peaks, dragging itself along. We were looking at the trail it left behind to try and figure out where it had come from. The trail went all the way beyond the horizon."

"What's beyond the horizon?"

"Niemandsland. Old ruins, war factories, mass graves - things like that. We don't send recon drones out that far, because as soon as they make it to Niemandsland the radiation fries their insides."

"Spooks said she gave me anti-radiation plating."

"Trusting that woman is a one-way ticket to your own funeral. Anyway, we both see the thing in the snow, and I grab my rifle to look through the scope-"

He stops. Brings his palms to his face. The spike in his heart rate tells me that he probably didn't expect to scare himself with this story, but now that he's recalling everything, it's becoming difficult to shake off the old fear.

"Hey, TRISS." He calls out to the ceiling, "Take 300 marks off my account, I'm gonna swear my head off."

[Transaction completed. Would you like to check your remaining deposit?]

"Fuck off. I can't tell you this part without cursing, Madaraki. I'm serious. It wasn't some kind of weird snow-mutant centipede that I saw - I mean, we get plenty of those out there too, but this wasn't it. This was worse."

"What did you see?"

"An old man. At least part of him. The first thing I saw was his head and torso, he looked emaciated. If you can imagine using a vacuum to suction out his insides, he looked like what's left of that..."

> Run image generation simulation?

NO DO NOT RUN SIMULATION

"...and he was completed naked, in -27 ℃, which should tell you something. I watched him drag himself along the snow, there were bits of black scattered behind him. At first I thought it's dried blood, then I realized those were his frost-bitten, broken-off fingers. He was leaving fingers behind like tabak ash."

"What's tabak?"

"Not important. At this point the spotter grabbed his binocs and started lookin' too. Then he started screaming. Six months working with that guy - never heard him scream this loud before. We were both seeing the same thing: no legs, nothing below his torso. It was just...very long bits of bone that shouldn't exist in a human body, loose skin and sinew trailing behind him like strings. Imagine, if you will, something broke off his lower half, then tried to rebuild his legs without an understanding of human anatomy. His femur had got to be half a kilometre long."

"How is that possible?"

"Beats me." GMD swirls his now cold Cocoa-Fix® in his steel mug, "It gets worse. So he's dragging bones the length of satellite tower, right? There were things caught up in all that raw muscle fibre, like a caterpillar's hair. Guess what those were?"

I shake my head.

"Old machinery. I recognized the Hailstone logo on some of them right away - drones, computers, car parts, guns. Some were outdated for at least a century, which means they were probably scavenged from civilian bomb shelters before the war. Toaster, washing machines, even TVs. As he crawled, parts of his skin would...unravel, then latch onto a piece of junk and pull it in. That's how he got to be several hundred meters long."

The room burns hot, wait, it's just my core CPU heating. It's taking up a tremendous amount of processing power just to picture what GMD is telling me: a torso, its legs going on for the length of a transit shuttle, and sentient skin that snatches scrap metal.

"...What could possibly justify the existence of such a thing?"

"If I know, I'd tell you." GMD rests a cool hand on my overheating head, "Ahhh, that's nice. I heard this from the spotter, he said the tox storm inhabits some people, drives them crazy. Part of it's physical, of course, part of it's psychological. I'm guessing the swarm kept him crawling through the sewages of human civilization, scavenging for anything it deemed important materials. It probably also fucked up his cells."

"What did you do with him?"

GMD shrugs, but it comes across more depressing than nonchalant, "Same thing I do with everything out in the Bleak Lands."

Silence occupies the space between us. Finally, GMD breaks it with a bitter laugh.

"Still, it's almost Sisyphean, isn't it? Living out the rest of your days with snow and dirt between your teeth, crawling like a bug while some crazy sentient storm hijacks your brain to make you its delivery shuttle."

He doesn't bother elaborating on what Sisyphean means, but I can hazard a guess pertaining to cyclic punishment. GMD sighs and leans back against the wall, craning his sore neck.

"Well, how was that? Scared yet?"

"Not sure if my psych-cores feedback count as 'scared' right now," I hesitate, "But I think 'disturbed' is the better word. I feel uneasy. I'm also sad for the man and how he came to be in such a state."

"Androids feelin' sorry for humans now, huh? What a fucking joke...it's almost funny."

I don't understand GMD's reaction, but then there again I can barely understand the sheer variability of human emotions. Next to me, GMD starts to doze off again. I know I'm technically disobeying his wake-up orders, but he's also technically off his shift already, since sunlight is slowly overtaking the horizon. I can slack off a little, and he's got until daybreak to rest his weary head.