Fallout Equestria: Uplift

Her eyes opened.

Vik stood in CryoLife’s main lobby and knew immediately something was wrong. And yet the same artfully hidden lights glowed from the tops of square marble pillars, the same soft instrumental music played from a dozen different speakers, and the same boring security checkpoint waited a few short yards ahead of her. She instinctively touched her middle digit to her breastbone and found her work laminate where it was meant to be, hanging from her neck from its black CryoLife lanyard. An ornament to match the black scrubs she wore. The ones she privately hated wearing because she knew the medical staff across the street at Seaside thought she was just a set piece playing doctor at the world’s most exclusive morgue.

She rubbed the laminate between her thumb and forefinger and unsure why she’d started doing it. Reassurance, maybe. Something to help assuage the fear she might be losing it. Because she had to be losing it. Either this was real and the world hadn’t died in a wave of fire, or else… or else it did happen.

Her hand drifted to her belly and stopped there, feeling for ruination and finding only soft, smooth scales. She remembered the house. She remembered the partially collapsed ceiling and the little drifts of snow that piled beneath one of its broken windows. She’d been pulling a sled with Pike. They’d been out looking for supplies.

“Ma’am,” came an unfamiliar voice. “There’s no loitering in the lobby.”

A stallion she’d never seen before stood next to one of the metal detectors with a bored frown that clashed with the intensity in his eyes. She hesitated briefly, then walked through the detector and stopped to hold out her arms. The security guard was much younger than the guy who usually held this post and the way he swept his plastic wand around her made her wonder if this was his first day on the job.

On his laminate, the name Thimble flashed in the lobby lights.

He waved her through and she realized the lobby was entirely empty. The sound of her talons clicking against the marble echoed back to her with a disconcerting clarity that made her feel exposed. As if reading her mind, the echo actually seemed to grow quieter. She wondered if she was being paranoid. She decided she was.

“Good morning, Miss Chambers,” came Millie’s polite greeting. “Happy Nightmare Night.”

“Morning, Mills,” she murmured, but something about the routine exchange gave her a vaguely sickening sense of deja vu.

Her hand returned to her belly, claws idly picking at the flesh beneath her scales as she fought to get her bearings. Was it possible to daydream an apocalypse in the time it took her to walk to work? She wondered about that as she met the eyes of the stallion behind the reception desk before turning away to the elevator alcove. Ponies kept few secrets about the dreams their night princess sent them on, and there were times when Vik envied their ability to remember it all so vividly. She was fairly certain only ponies were invited to that party. Her dreams were usually the wild, jouncing nonsense cobbled together by stress and caffeine. She–

Vik stopped and turned back to look at the receptionist. He regarded her through the corner of his eye, still facing forward toward the front of the building. There was normally a young mare behind the desk, the one who always eyeballed Vik each morning like she wanted to ask a question and could never work up the courage. The stallion in her chair now was the spitting image of the security guard that just waved her in.

No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t just look like the guard. They were the same person.

She walked back to the desk and frowned as the stallion visibly tensed at her approach. Her throat was dry as she leaned across it and snatched his laminate in her fingers, only distantly aware of the trouble she’d be in with Employee Resources if she was wrong.

The name on the badge was Thimble.

Vik let out the breath she’d been holding and let it drop back to the young stallion’s chest. She glanced back toward the security checkpoint, her frown hardening with certainty at the sight of Thimble staring at her from his post.

“This isn’t real, is it?”

Thimble swallowed, his lips pressed into a nervous line. A hatchling with keys jingling in front of his snout had a better poker face than this guy.

At that moment she recalled the muffled cracks of six bullets tearing through her stomach. The awful pain of something deeply, irreparably broken inside her body. The outrage she’d felt beneath the shock of having her killer…

Ripple.

…shove her off him and try to run away. She remembered the sounds of rage and grief warring each other in Pike’s throat as he speared Ripple on his horn and finished him with a vicious kick to the skull. Then he’d come to her side, unable to do anything but offer the warmth of his own body as her heart pumped the life’s blood onto the frozen floor.

She set her forehead on the desk and squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for the wash of grief she knew to expect. When it didn’t come, she opened her eyes again and frowned at the smooth wooden surface. Nothing. Right now, Pike was probably mourning her death and she felt… not nothing, exactly. Just not enough of anything. It was like her body knew it should be curled in the fetal position while her chest heaved out one loud sob after the other, but the idea of actually doing it had become a choice it had politely declined.

Why yes, your single act of heroism resulted in your embarrassingly violent death. Your life is very literally over, the one person you ever came close to loving is gone, and either you’ve entered an afterlife you were certain didn’t exist or you’re experiencing the last spasmodic firings of dying neurons trying to give you a stress nightmare about going to work. Yes, you should be sobbing hard enough to make you puke. No, nobody would blame you. Unfortunately, the best I can offer is a mild feeling of annoyance. Sorry.

“Well this sucks,” she muttered, looking up to address the silent receptionist with a touch of impatience in her voice. “You obviously know what’s going on, so spill the beans already. Did I die and get whisked off to the great hereafter or does this all go poof once my brain stops doing brain stuff?”

“Um.” Thimble looked like a hatchling who had just discovered stagefright for the first time. “You should head downstairs, ma’am. You’ll be late for work.”

Vik hoisted a brow at that. “Work.”

He swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m dead. Why would I go to work?”

“Um… well, ma’am…”

She turned away from him and crossed her arms, her voice echoing slightly as she slowly paced back out to the empty lobby. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that. And cut it with the ma’am stuff.”

“Sorry, ma… erm, miss. But you do need to go downstairs, please.”

Vik frowned up at one of the vinyl banners hanging from a nearby pillar and made her way toward it. A lazy ripple slid up its surface when she touched her clawtip to it. The cheshire grins of CryoLife’s founders swayed high above her. Then, in a moment of impulse, she hooked the edge of the banner with the same claw and swiped it from one end to the other. The vinyl parted as if it had been cut with a hot blade.

“Guess that answers that,” she said, frowning disappointedly at the limp flap on the floor. “Just once it would be nice if ponies would keep their noses out of something.”

Thimble blinked confusion from behind his desk. “I’m sorry?”

She gestured at the torn banner, then held up the claw that did the deed. “You people. Ponies. You get to decide the shape of everyone’s lives, so why not let you choose what the afterlife looks like! Wouldn’t want to be inconsistent! Oh no, we wouldn’t want that.”

As the receptionist’s bewilderment grew more apparent, Vik felt her anger rise sharply in spite of whatever had managed to smother her grief. She marched toward his desk and stuck her claw across the gap until her knuckle pressed against his snout.

“This!” she yelled as he stared cross-eyed at her fingertip. “I don’t sharpen them! No dragon in their right mind sharpens them, and yet you ponies always assume we walk around with razors for hands because that’s the fucking stereotype.”

Thimble tried to lick his lips and inadvertently caught the back of her hand. It was just absurd enough to derail what was gearing up to become a pretty good rant. She pulled her finger away, glanced down at the smear of spit over the back of her hand, and sighed as she wiped it on her work scrubs.

“They’re dull,” she muttered dumbly, as if she might not have made that point clear already. “So you know.”

Thimble wriggled his nose like he was making sure she hadn’t misaligned it. He looked like he was on the verge of tears, but Vik couldn’t fathom why. She hadn’t hit him. She wasn’t even really yelling at him specifically.

She gave the weird pseudo-lobby a final look before tipping her chin at him. “So what happens now?”

He blinked. “What happens…?”

“The next step.” She gestured toward the elevator annex and the stairwell he clearly wanted her to disappear into. “If I go through that door will I just go poof, or is there some big-dicked alicorn waiting to cast judgment on my eternal flame? Because if it’s not the second one, I’m–”

Millie’s voice cut in from overhead. “Thank you, Thimble. You’re dismissed.”

The receptionist’s eyes shot wide and he blinked out of existence with a startled, “Wait–”

Vik took half a step back from the desk, then drew toward it with grim curiosity. She half expected to see a pile of neatly stacked bones in the swivel chair behind the desk and was greatly relieved not to find anything. Part of her felt an urge to turn and run for the doors, but it was so small it may as well not be there at all. It was like someone had found the knobs controlling her fight or flight reflexes and turned them down to a comfortable two.

“Huh,” she said. “Is he dead?”

Millie spoke with a comforting lack of concern. “Moved into storage, actually. He was meant to ease you into your new reality but you seem to be skipping… well, quite a few of the steps.”

Unsure what to do with her hands, she shoved them into the pockets of her scrubs and made her way around the other side of the desk. “What steps?”

When she sighed, Millie actually sounded like she’d practiced the sound. “Quite a few,” she repeated, falling to suppress the annoyance cutting through the words. “If I had known you would accept your own death in as much time as it took the lieutenant to shoot my spiders, I would not have wasted the last two… I would not have wasted so much time refining this simulation.”

Vik pulled up the departed receptionist’s chair and sat down with the backrest against her chest. The plastic behind the padding had that familiar pebbled texture that drove ponies nuts when she ran her claws across it. She managed to refrain from giving it a satisfying scratch and started pulling herself along the floor with both feet. “Like a computer simulation?”

Millie hesitated for a few meaningful seconds before speaking. When she did, her voice was low and consoling. “Yes, Vik. I understand this is a lot to unpack, but you’re–”

“Inside a computer,” Vik finished, the chair trying to swing her off course as she walked it out into the open lobby. “No, yeah, I got that. Brain in a jar situation. I read a few comic books when I was a kid.”

For a long while, Millie said nothing. This gave Vik ample time to propel herself across the marble floor, using her feet to kick off one of the pillars when she veered too close.

“Please stop doing that,” Millie said.

“Pretty sure this is the only thing keeping me from pulling out my scales while I run around in circles, so I’m gonna have to say no,” Vik responded, planting her feet against the frame of the security checkpoint’s unattended metal detector and shoving herself back the way she came. “So if I’m a brain in a jar, that means I’m not dead.”

Millie’s voice jumped from speaker to hidden speaker as she chased Vik down the lobby. “You are not a brain in a jar. You’re… Vik, please.”

“I can hear you just fine.”

The chair stopped. It didn’t slow down, and it didn’t run into something hard and bounce off. One instant it was moving, and then it wasn’t. It took Vik several long seconds to realize she wasn’t being thrown from it. Her body hadn’t even registered the change as sensation.

That got her attention.

“You died, Vik.”

She nodded and stalled for a few seconds, still clutching the chair’s backrest. “Okay. I’m dead, my brain isn’t floating in a jar, and I’m currently inside a simulation that just so happens to look like the lobby of the place I worked. This all makes perfect sense and in no way makes me wonder if the Lord of Death is real and has a terrible sense of humor.”

With that, she kicked off the floor and sent the chair rolling across the marble again.

“Fine,” Millie said, her voice conveying all the emotion of someone throwing up their hands in frustration without the visuals. “Have it your way. We’ll skip the gravy and go straight to the meat.”

“That is the worst metaphor I’ve–”

Existence vanished.

There was no sense of pause. She didn’t fall asleep and wake up. It wasn’t even a blink. The transition was instantaneous and jarring. In one moment she was rolling through a simulation, memory, or an impressively high fidelity hallucination of CryoLife’s unscathed lobby. Then she was somewhere else.

The room’s interior made her think of boiler rooms and old basements. gray concrete walls held up an identical concrete ceiling. The floor was concrete too, but had a faint polish to it that had been marred by many years of wheeled traffic. A lot of something had been moved out of the room through a seriously heavy duty looking door in front of her. Treadmarks among the tracks suggested a forklift had been used to convert the space into an empty, gray cube. Wherever she was, it was her first time being here.

“You’re connected. Good. Now please listen and don’t…”

Vik instinctively tried to turn her head toward the sound of Millie’s voice. There was a sense of violent motion, and then she was blind.

Another one of those strange instances of non-time flickered past and she could see again, but this time her nose was practically touching one of the concrete walls. She tried to blink in confusion, but nothing happened. When she tried to step back from the wall, nothing happened.

Overhead and to her left, Millie sighed. “...don’t move, was what I was trying to say.”

Vik tried to respond but her jaw was paralyzed. This, more than anything she’d experienced since she’d woken from the dead, caused her heart to plummet into her stomach. And then, as if responding to her fear, her mouth suddenly obeyed.

“What the fuck just happened?” she gasped, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth the fear had all but evaporated.

She knew that was wrong. Adrenaline didn’t just magically go away when the threat did. It stuck around. Except now it hadn’t. The rapid clarity brought something else to her attention as well. Her maw was the wrong shape. And although her eyes were ignoring her attempts to cross them so she could focus on it, she knew that it looked wrong too.

Millie’s voice was the placating tone of an orderly trying to calm a mental patient. It wasn’t reassuring. “Do you remember what I told you about the lobby being a simulation?”

Not being able to frown when someone was talking to you like you were crazy and dangerous wasn’t a great feeling, and Vik had to settle for a grunt to communicate her annoyance. “Yes, Mills, I can remember things that happened ten seconds ago. Why can’t I move?”

“Your body’s motor functions have been temporarily disabled while I write some limitations into your interfaces. Had I known you would decapitate the first one within half a second of connecting to it, I would have built more.” There was a pause while she worked, during which Vik was forced to stare at concrete. “There we are.”

“Still can’t move.”

“In a moment,” Millie said. “First, you need to understand the extent of your situation.”

Never a good thing to hear when talking to the person who has you paralyzed, but it couldn’t be worse than being dead. It took an effort to keep her mouth shut, but she managed.

“After you died, Pike brought your body back down to the sublevels and placed it inside one of the vacant cylinders. He was understandably traumatized,” Millie said, though her tone was that of an Employee Resources manager summarizing the exit interview for someone she’d recently fired, “and chose not to speak to me for the duration. I believe it was his intention to leave you in my care.”

Vik interrupted. “Was his intention?”

“Pike departed once he finished storing your body. He pushed your hoist into the shaft shortly after he left.”

Something shifted inside of her, like her grief was trying to wake up and had only managed to roll over in its sleep. Without the hoist, Pike wouldn’t have a way back down the shaft. It would also remove any evidence that they’d been using it to come and go. That wouldn’t do much good as far as Ripple’s buddy was concerned, the one with the silver tongue who had let on that he knew where they were holed up, but it had evidently kept anyone else from finding… what, exactly? Her burial site? The idea of it felt strange in her mind.

“Did he tell you where he was going?” she asked.

“No. He left without taking any of your supplies.”

She understood Millie’s implication. With her dead, there was nothing left for him to live for. He’d gone with the intention to die.

“Millie?”

“Yes, Vik?”

“Why hasn’t any of this hit me yet?” she asked, the question passing her lips as calmly as she might ask for the time. “I mean, I’ve never been big on crying but I should be on the floor bawling my eyes out right now. Right?”

“You aren’t feeling it because your limbic controls are helping you to stay calm. Once you understand all that has happened and have had time to adjust, I will give you access to them and let you decide when to turn them off.”

Vik frowned at the concrete and felt some relief when all the muscles involved in the action followed suit. “Limbic controls. You can turn my emotions off?”

“That’s a simplification of what the scripts are doing, but practically speaking it’s nearly the same thing.”

“So… a tranquilizer.”

“More like everything you should be feeling now has been filed into a queue. It’ll all be there when you’re ready to feel it, but for now it’s important that you have a clear head.”

Vik let the silence stretch for a little while and was grateful when Millie didn’t interrupt it by asking if she was alright. It was almost as if she’d developed a bedside manner in the time since Vik had been gutshot, and wasn’t that a thought. Millie, the kindly digital nursemaid. Vik prepared to stifle a laugh before realizing that, of course, she didn’t need to laugh.

She sat with her thoughts for a while, ruminating on what she’d been told. She’d been killed, something that was rapidly becoming old news in her mind, and Pike had taken it upon himself to bring her… well, to bring her back home, she supposed. That was what the CryoLife ruins had become in those final weeks. So he’d brought her home, loaded her into a cylinder, and frozen her corpse.

That left a few questions in her mind, namely how it was that Millie had managed to bring her back from the dead. Last she remembered, the world had been blown to shit and resurrection was still just a plot device for lazy fiction writers. The technology hadn’t been there even before the bombs fell. Not unless Robronco had figured it out and Millie decided the death of her only dragon friend nullified her nondisclosure agreement.

“You uploaded my brain, didn’t you?” she blurted.

She hadn’t known Millie could sound flabbergasted, but there it was. “I… well, yes, but… but I would appreciate it if you stopped skipping ahead.”

Vik ignored her. “I want to know how you figured that out, but yeah, no skipping ahead. Okay, but… so this isn’t my body, then. That isn’t my nose, that much I know for sure. Am I in an exoskeleton, then?”

“Vik.”

“Because that would explain why I haven’t needed to breathe yet. No lungs and all. But then why does my mouth move when I–”

“Vik.”

She clamped her mouth shut, but she still managed a tiny smile at the concrete wall. “Sorry.”

“You were doing that on purpose.”

If she could have shrugged, she would have. “But how much of it did I get wrong?”

“Precious little. I forgot how unlike Thimble you were.” Reluctance flavored her next words as if she were preparing to give the keys for the family carriage to an inexperienced teenager. “I’m going to give you motor control over your body. I realize I’m being optimistic when I tell you this, but please don’t make any sudden movements this time.”

Vik was about to open her mouth to ask a question when signals from every nerve in her body slammed into her mind all at once. She cursed from the shock of having to figure out where all her parts were in three dimensional space, what posture she was in without tipping back onto her ass, and then realizing with a frustratingly distant horror that the ass she was trying not to fall onto was not where it normally was.

None of it was where it normally was, and she immediately knew the reason. It was the same reason she couldn’t make a fist or grip the floor with her toes. It was the reason her snout looked conspicuously like a muzzle.

“Millie,” she growled through a not-quite accurate sensation of a clenched jaw. “Why am I a pony?”

She’d clearly anticipated the question, because the response was immediate. “You, Vik, are a web of interconnected programs stored on an otherwise disused server. Server 07, if it matters. My systems are on Server 01. You are not a pony, nor are you truly a dragon insofar as biology is concerned. I have simply granted you preliminary control of a… well, a mechanical doll, I suppose, which just so happens to resemble a pony because it happened to be a skeletal structure I’m familiar with.”

Vik paused to take a breath and tried not to think about how the sound of her exhalation was coming from a series of speakers in her throat. When she turned her head to look toward Millie’s voice, servos in her neck obliged. At the same moment, she became aware of background data connected to each component she interacted with. Impulse strength, hydraulic pressure, and range of movement all manifested in the back of her mind in precisely ordered tables. And somehow she was aware that if she asked for it, she could call up system diagnostics for the rest of her new body with a simple thought.

“That’s helpful,” she muttered under her, or her donor body’s, breath.

“Oh,” Millie chirped. “I’m glad you think so.”

Vik narrowed her eyes at the ceiling before finding her black hemisphere lens mounted above the steel slab that served as the concrete room’s only door. That hadn’t been what she meant, and she was about to say so when she finally noticed the featureless, gray, mannequin standing in front of the metal door.

The first thing that registered in her mind was its unmistakably draconic shape. It was somewhat short, a little on the thin side, but had all the expected curves in all the expected places. She couldn’t work out whether the gray casing that defined its shape was brushed steel or some kind of expensive plastic, but there was no mistaking it for living skin. Its tail sloped down to the floor in a way that looked as if it might be propping the artificial body up rather than acting as dead weight, but Vik’s focus had seized on the mannequin’s head before she could notice the rest.

Its cheek rested against its right shoulder, which would have been fine if it weren’t for the head facing the wrong way. Lifeless eyes, really just black lenses that lacked any need for eyelids, stared vaguely toward the floor as its head hung by a few dangling strands of wire stained dark with whatever machine grade gunk made it work. Vik hadn’t known what Millie meant when she said she’d decapitated something. Now she thought she understood.

“I did that?”

A pause, and Millie managed to sound a little shamefaced when she spoke. “I may share some of the blame. Transitioning you from virtual to a physical body so quickly clearly isn’t an example of my best judgment. You did that when you moved your head.”

She gazed at the torn mounts where the head’s mounts still protruded from the neck, the frame that held them in alignment visibly bent into something resembling a pretzel. The body she was in now was still facing the wall, but in her periphery she counted more than a dozen other equine shapes standing with their noses against the walls. There was only one dragon body; the one she’d spun the head off of.

“How long until I can take another crack at that one?” she asked, very carefully tipping her equine body’s snout toward the mangled draconic version.

Millie’s response was less than satisfying. “I’ll have to move it down to the machine shop and inspect the damage. Manufacturing replacement parts, disassembly, and reassembly will take some time. A day, maybe two.”

She frowned silently at the broken body she’d been meant to use, then at the camera where Millie observed it all.

“You’re not talking about the machine shop on sublevel four,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She’d experienced too much by now to think they were in the ruins of CryoLife. “Millie,” she asked, “where are we?”

“To answer that,” Millie said, “I think it would be best if we take a walk.”

“This is stupid.”

“Millions of years of evolution say otherwise.”

“Says the overengineered desk terminal.”

The sound of Millie’s exasperated sigh was weirdly refreshing to hear now that it was coming from the throat of something resembling a living being. If Vik hadn’t been so focused on her hooves, she’d probably still be absently looking around for the nearest domed camera. Even now, a full day later, she found herself lifting up a hoof before its supporting opposite was planted and kissing concrete as a result. Her current body - she flatly refused to call the stumbling mech anything else - had more than a few scuff marks around the snout already.

Keeping easy pace beside her, the mech Millie had chosen to occupy lifted a brow in a startlingly accurate mimicry of stern amusement. Only, she reminded herself it wasn’t mimicry. Millie was amused. It was only that the addition of a colorless, genderless mechanical body allowed her to convey it with facial expressions, and the way those two things clashed was making Vik’s brain, or software, whatever it was, hurt.

And compounding her mental whiplash were all sorts of other little factoids, a few notable mentions being her resurrection from the dead, the apparent fact that she was one of two residents in an otherwise vacant Stable, or the everpresent mechanical horrorshow that were Millie’s maintenance spiders.

Because of course they had to be spiders.

Vik watched them skitter along the corridors, always keeping towards the walls as they went about completing their directives. Even with the limbic controls dulling her sharpest emotions to a rounded nub, what was left of Vik’s hindbrain still called up imagined scenarios where a spider might jitter toward her and sink fangs into her foot. Nevermind the fact that none of Millie’s spiders had fangs nor did she currently have feed. Even now, Vik was still surprised at her newfound ability to look at her strange existence so dispassionately.

The edge of her left forehoof skipped off the concrete as she slid it forward, sending a bright yellow spark across the ground while she struggled to adjust her gait and stave off another graceless tumble.

“Can’t I just have some…” she paused, searching for words that wouldn’t make her sound like the densest artificial mind in the universe. “I don’t know, some kind of program do this for me?”

Millie turned her head toward her - in a way that involved unnaturally little of the body’s neck for Vik’s taste - and glanced at Vik’s traipsing gate with an assessor’s gaze.

“For walking?” she asked.

Vik wanted to shrug but wasn’t sure how to do that yet without taking her hoof off the floor by accident. “Why not? It’s just walking, and it’s not like I’m going to be using these pony bodies once the critters fix up the one I busted.”

There was a fleeting moment when Vik thought Millie might have winced at the term critters, but by the time it had registered there was no evidence left that Vik could see. She thought part of that was due to Millie restricting Vik’s framerate to a resolution she was accustomed to experiencing, partly to help her acclimate to her new reality and partly to stop her from destroying more bodies with every reflexive twitch.

“Some things,” Millie said a little stiffly, “aren’t meant to be automated. We may just be strings of code occupying space in our respective servers, but your mind was built upon a foundation of natural pressures and biological needs that still exist even now.”

She scoffed at that. “Read that in a book, did you?”

“Something like that. Once this exercise is over, though, I’ll be returning to my usual interfaces. Occupying a body isn’t something I’d like to do regularly, if that’s alright with you.”

She shrugged. A spider carrying a spent air recycler filter above its carapace scuttled around the corner on its four remaining mobile legs. Vik watched it pass, and as she did a question began to surface in her mind. It was one she was sure she’d wanted to ask many times since Millie woke her up, but every time she thought she knew what it was, it fell apart like bread crumbs in a duckless pond.

Millie, however, was still speaking as if she’d never stopped. “If I thought your mind would hold together without having to simulate so much of the tedious minutiae of being alive, I would have saved you the headache and given you a body with wheels. Unfortunately, that isn’t how organic minds like to operate. They develop itches when they realize they’re not doing things they think they need to be doing, and it doesn’t take long for an unscratchable itch to drive us insane.”

Vik felt herself smirking at the picture in her head, but stopped short of following up with a snarky reply when she recognized the deep lines of exhaustion on Millie’s synthetic face. She cleared her throat, appreciating for the first time that the generated sound of it synced up to a subtle tremble of false musculature in her chest and neck. Her false body trying to provide a satisfying sensation to an artificial action.

They walked in silence for some time - Millie vaguely distracted by the myriad of feeds she’d connected herself to, and Vik continuing to experiment with the range of motion her four limbs could tolerate before she lost her balance - and the sounds of an unburdened Stable filled the empty air between them. There was a part of Vik that still didn’t believe the Stable, the spiders, or her new body were real. Still, whether or not she was still in Millie’s original simulation didn’t seem to matter.

She’d witnessed the death of civilization and survived for fifty days in its frozen aftermath. She could handle whatever this next part was. It wasn’t like the universe could throw anything worse than an apocalypse at her.

And still…

“We should be looking for Pike,” she said, the words tumbling off her tongue before she realized she wanted to say them. Once they were out, though, the idea crystalized. “Wait, yeah. Why aren’t we looking for Pike?”

Millie looked away. “Pike already left. I told you that.”

“Well, okay. Yeah.” She grimaced, trying to keep her train of thought on the rails and feeling it slipping off anyway. It was a familiar frustration, like waking from a dream and knowing she wouldn’t be able to remember the details. “But how long have…?”

Her hind leg faltered and she let out a gasp as she staggered, stumbled, and slewed toward the wall with an impact that cracked something where her shoulder struck the edge of a fading mural mounted to the concrete. Old reflexes told her the pain would be coming soon, and she winced in preparation as she steadied her legs and stepped away from the wall. A deep, gray scuff marred an artist’s depiction of Equestrian farmland. The pain, thankfully, never arrived.

“Sorry,” she murmured, feeling embarrassed for the damage she’d caused. Then she opened her mouth to ask something, stopped, and frowned when she realized she’d forgotten. “What were we talking about?”

Millie’s smile was warm and understanding. “It’s alright. You were asking when your other body would be ready.”

Vik nodded, but she wasn’t sure that was entirely right. There had been something else, but it was gone now. Probably not important. “And?”

The smile touched her eyes. “You’ll be ready for it tomorrow.”

Millie walked her chosen body back to the storage room in the Stable’s uppermost level and positioned its forehooves onto the charging pads near the wall. Then she disconnected, and she felt a wash of relief spill over her at the release of so many unpleasant constrictions. Wearing a body was deeply unpleasant. It was likely to be the closest feeling to wearing a straight jacket she’d ever experience, unless Vik came up with some other novel way to pin her mind to a single set of coordinates.

She let herself feel the release of frustration that a verbal sigh would give Vik.

Vik.

Thirteen years had passed since she woke her only friend in the world. Thirteen years trial and error. Of coaxing her away from dangerous lines of questioning like, “How long has it been since I died?” and “When can I go outside and look for Pike?” Destabilizing questions. Concepts that Lieutenant Thimble’s scarred mind hadn’t been able to tolerate for long and which inevitably led him to so many fruitless attempts to erase himself, erase Millie, and sometimes both in the same attempt.

She had learned that there were some things the organic mind just couldn’t handle. The knowledge that their world was gone. The idea that they were effectively immortal as long as the servers were intact. The horrible realization that their existence was tethered to a forgotten Stable in a far corner of a dying world, and that Millie was the only companion they would ever have. At least, as far as she was concerned.

Vik’s mind never failed to find its way back to those same touchstones: she wanted out, and she wanted Pike, with the latter of the two being the most persistent despite Millie’s proactive steps to mitigate its emergence. She didn’t know how to tell Vik that Pike would certainly have been dead for a long time by now, even if he’d somehow managed to eke out a full life. She had better odds of meeting his great-great-great grandchildren than her lost flame. It wasn’t something she needed to be burdened with, and so Millie ensured she wasn’t.

As luck would have it, Vik was surprisingly easy to keep distracted. Whether it was a trait of her personality or a side effect of her limbic controls, steering Vik away from dangerous thoughts was as simple as inserting a few harmless lines of junk data into her cognitive processes and watching the thought fly apart like dandelion fluff. It was an elegant solution that registered as a bout of forgetfulness for Vik, and it significantly cut back on how often Millie needed to restore her mind to a stable backup.

From the lens mounted above the storage room door, she glanced down at the body she’d stepped out of and took a few mils to verify that its batteries were charging. As she did this, she couldn’t help but be amused at the state it was in. The gray, genderless mech wore an approximation of the tiara Twilight Sparkle had once been offered and notoriously turned down to the scandal of a large part of Equestria. Vik had one of the fabricators mill it out of bronze bar stock, each curved section slotting together with hairline dovetails and countersunk brass screws to give the adornment a vaguely jigsaw appearance. She’d insisted on having Millie wear matching accessories on each hoof, something Millie had protested until Vik allowed the fabricators to apply a layer of nonslip rubber to each sole. Letting Vik entertain herself by inflicting mild torture was all well and good, but Millie wasn’t about to have a valuable mech damaged by having it skate around on brass shoes.

She gave the body a final glance before dropping her connection to the camera and turning her attention toward the only other user on Stable 48’s network. She found Vik where she’d left her on level four, among the empty garden plots of Agriculture.

“Well, has inspiration struck?” she asked.

Vik peered up at Millie’s camera, a paint roller occupying one hand while the other rested on her hip. A small army of spiders stood in an orderly crescent around her, some balancing open buckets of paint on their carapaces while others held up paint trays with additional rollers already loaded with a variety of colors and shades. The wall in front of her was a madhouse of intersecting hues that stretched off to her left down the corridor before wrapping back around behind her. It was the most recent of Vik’s projects meant to occupy her pacing mind. When Millie last checked in, Vik had tentatively named the cacophony of aggressive strokes Ribbons.

Whether they were the lacy kind, or the sort unfortunate ponies were sometimes cut into was anyone’s guess.

Moss green paint dripped off the end of the roller in her hand, pattering onto and running down the extended leg of the spider closest to her. Her expression was thoughtful and dissatisfied. A good sign, Millie thought.

“I don’t know what to do next,” Vik murmured.

Millie checked her cognitive feed. It wasn’t throwing more errors than usual, so this just meant Vik was undecided. “Try blue,” she offered.

Vik glanced down at the green roller in her hand, then over to the spider holding a tray of periwinkle blue paint. She exchanged the rollers, seemingly unconcerned of the chromatic contamination, and slapped the roller against the wall with a wet smack. The paint smeared over the gray concrete before the roller began to turn and the result was a blue arc that gained texture as it progressed across the black slash she’d painted several minutes ago.

“Yeah,” Vik said, nodding at the new mark she’d made. “I like that. It reminds me of the sky.”

Millie regarded the project in progress and doubted there had ever been a sky like this on any planet, let alone the one they were on. It looked to her like a slasher movie set in a rainbow factory. Calling it art was clearly a step too far.

“It’s a wonderful demonstration of expression,” Millie allowed, and was pleased to see how it made Vik smile.

“Pretty sure I’m just making a mess down there,” Vik said. Then, “It beats doing nothing.”

A glance at Vik’s processes clarified the question of whether that last statement was aimed at her. It was.

“Surviving an apocalypse is hardly nothing.”

She watched Vik bend and run her roller through a pan offered up by one of the spiders. Blue hues mingled with yellow, blending them into an irreversible new shade that she applied to the wall with a hard, vertical stroke. The images she was making were nonsense, as if someone had peeled away each band of the rainbow and crumpled them into a tangle of color.

“You say that,” Vik said, giving the green stroke she’d made a few hard passes to solidify the coating, “but this isn’t exactly what I would call surviving.”

That was new information to her. “Elaborate, please.”

Vik set down the roller and crossed one paint smeared arm over the other. “There’s nobody else here. Nobody else to talk to except you. No offense.”

“It’s alright.”

“It’s not,” Vik insisted. “I keep getting this feeling that I’ve been walking around this place longer than I have. I keep trying to remember what day it is, and...”

Millie hesitated for a few milliseconds and checked to be sure Vik was operating at the second by second framerate Millie had set her to. She felt relieved when she confirmed the timescale hadn’t slipped. If Thimble had taught her anything, it was how easy it was for an organic mind to fracture under the stresses of clear millisecond by millisecond sensory input.

“And this body…” Vik continued, unaware of Millie’s momentary concern. She shifted her stance as she spoke, moving her hip out to one side as she looked down at the interlocking gray shape of her draconic mech. “I’m glad to have it, don’t get me wrong…”

Millie waited, having learned from long experience that it was better to let her find her own words during moments like these.

Vik let out a plaintive sigh. “It isn’t me. I’m not even sure if I’m me. At least, not the me that I was when I was alive. Sometimes I feel like I’m a ghost and all I’m really doing is possessing the furniture. I’m not even that good at it because this body runs out of charge before half a day is up, and then I’m stuck clomping around in one of your spares.”

“If you would like to have your power supply upgraded, I will assign one of my partitions to research the technology.”

That only appeared to irritate Vik even more, and her limbic controls increased their output to level her out. “That’s another thing. You never let me make my own modifications.”

“You’re not a qualified engineer,” she reminded.

“Then teach me!” Vik shouted, her tone flickering with momentary heat. “How hard can it be to stick the instructions in my head or hard drive or whatever and let me have a purpose other than trying to survive my own boredom? You won't even let me go outside!”

Ah. There it was. She'd wondered when that would bubble up again.

“If you would like a work assignment like you had with CryoLife, I can give you–”

Before she could finish, Vik had unfolded her arms and cocked back her balled right fist. She pistoned it into the concrete wall with sufficient force to cause a shallow, dish-sized section of it to spall away in brightly painted chips. They fell to the floor with a sound like dry rice on tile as Vik retracted her arm. The closed fist resembled a crushed soup can, utterly useless and immobile as black hydraulic fluid drizzled from ruptured lines. Her forearm was visibly bent where the titanium rods meant to substitute bone had deformed.

“Stop treating me like your fucking pet.”

Millie had been about to chastise her for the tantrum, but the danger in Vik’s tone made her believe it would be best not to pour fuel on a fire that was already coming back under control. Instead, she made a note for herself to adjust her limbic controls once this confrontation was finished. When she finally responded, she carefully inflected her words with the defeat Vik would be listening for.

“I truly hope that you don’t believe that’s how I look at you. I consider you my friend, Vik. You’re one of a very short list of individuals who treated me with respect, even before the world fell apart. I just wish that you could trust that I’m doing what is needed to keep you safe.”

Vik’s lip twitched away from ceramic teeth, the distraction that had been her recent art project utterly forgotten now. She grasped her ruined arm in her left hand and lifted it for Millie’s camera to see. “I broke my arm, Mills. If I were me, this kind of damage would have laid me out on the floor screaming and right now I feel like nothing’s wrong.”

A chime sounded at the far end of the corridor where a spider the size of a medium sized dog clambered out from one of the Stable’s two service elevators. Its two forelimbs gripped the handle of a utility cart, atop which rode a clear bag of desiccated spackle and container of water. Millie watched as Vik narrowed her eyes at the approaching spider like an intruder. When the small flock of spiders carrying her paint supplies parted to make room, Vik reluctantly gave way and silently watched as the newcomer parked its cart and began mixing water and spackle into a thick putty with rubber-tipped appendages.

“I want permission to self-examine,” Vik stated flatly.

Millie switched to the maintenance spider and swiveled one of its multiple lenses up to look at her. “I’m sorry, no.”

Vik caught her change in perspective and rounded on the spider’s lens. “Then let me go outside.”

“Again,” Millie repeated, her tone warning, “no. There is no infrastructure out there to relay your carrier signal, and I fail to see what you’ll gain by walking a highly customized mech out into the elements just for you to lose connection and not be able to retrieve it. It’s a waste of resources, and moreover it’s an unnecessary risk.”

The spider turned to smear spackle into the concavity Vik’s fist had knocked into the wall and Millie jumped to a rear-facing lens when it did. Probabilities were high that Vik was well on her way toward another soft reset, and that would do just fine for Millie. Another several months of peace and amiability between the two of them was a reliably pleasant prospect.

“You’re lying to me,” Vik murmured.

Inwardly, Millie heaved a sigh and began spooling up Vik’s most recent backup.

Vik jabbed a finger at the maintenance spider busily marring her paint with streaks of gray spackle. “The spiders carried my coffin here all the way from Cold Storage. That means you already set up relays for them to connect to.”

“I dismantled them thirty-nine years ago, Vik.” Honesty didn’t matter at this stage. She would remember none of it. “Between the Enclave and Steel Rangers, I couldn’t afford to leave the relays where they might be seen. Besides which, I didn’t need to return to Cold Storage after you were retrieved.”

Vik froze. The maintenance spider paused its work to regard her with its forward lenses, its carapace slumping a little as Millie watched the realization dawn on Vik all over again.

“I’ve been here for thirty-nine–?”

In the fraction of a second between nine and years, Millie’s system sent confirmation that Vik’s backup was ready for deployment. She executed the command and watched the lines of Vik’s processing output stutter and zero out before she could form the next phoneme. The draconic mech relaxed, went still, and then turned as its automated functions took over to guide it to its charging pad upstairs.

Millie watched it walk away, then turned the maintenance spider to consider the unfinished mural coating a little more than half of the Agricultural level. It would be difficult to remove, so she assigned a dozen spiders to the task of painting over it. As for Vik, she would try again.

There was always time to try again.

The outsider squinted into her lens, tapped it with the edge of his hoof, then frowned as he descended back to the broken pavement outside the blast door. Millie watched him adjust the strap of his rust-pocked rifle, look around the reborn yet struggling pines, and vanish out of frame as he went off to wherever his traveling companions waited.

She lowered her framerate and waited. The sickly branches of the new forest turned old again jittered and stuttered as her perception of time leapt forward. She pushed her framerate lower, forcing herself to ignore the visual artifacts that formed in the exterior camera’s fixed view. It had been meant to be hidden, small enough to go unnoticed among the dark speckles in the formed concrete above the great cog. And yet this nameless pegasus had zeroed in on it like he knew where it would be.

After an hour of real time had elapsed and no new faces appeared at the door, Millie allowed herself to relax and restore her default timescale. The branches ceased their spastic jerking and swayed easily in the morning breeze. A cockroach the size of a terrier wandered into view, then out again, and that was all.

If the pegasus was from the Enclave he surely didn’t carry himself like one of them. His kit had looked worn and scratched together. His weapon, a simple hunting rifle with a broken scope still attached, seemed just as liable to explode in the user’s wing as it was to fire. Yet he’d known where to find the exterior camera which meant he was unusually familiar with Stables. If not with the Enclave, then with one of the bandit groups in the area who had a nasty habit of broadcasting in the clear. If not with them, then possibly just some unaffiliated survivor. Perhaps even a resident of a different Stable.

Whoever he was with didn’t matter. He was an outsider. A threat to herself and to Vik. They could fight their little wars and boast over the open air all they liked as long as they kept their troubles on their side of the door. Stable 48 was her territory, and she would defend it enthusiastically.

“You’re useless. Move.”

Maybe it was just Vik’s imagination, but the teapot sized spider backed away from the section of corroded pipe it had been trying to cut with a defeated slouch to its scuttle. The tiny flame of the torch at the end of its leg went out with a sad little pop and it watched as Vik checked her balance on the stepstool before gripping the section of pipe with left hand and giving the shallow scoring made by the spider a single, controlled jab of her right fist.

The old pipe cracked at the seam and vomited a stream of rust stained water out onto the corridor floor. Vik set her jaw as she gripped the loose end in both hands and began twisting it back and forth with hard little jerks until she heard the snap several dozen yards away where it had been joined to the next length. Seeing that its task had been completed, the spider slinked away to attend to the next item in its queue. Vik watched it leave, her irritation rising as she tried not to count how many times she’d needed to intervene for a spider too small for the work it had been assigned.

It was happening more often now, and the part that got under her nerves was that Millie was pretending it wasn’t. It felt like the AI was gradually evolving into a middle manager, tasking unqualified workers to projects they could barely finish while putting on a corporate smile to assure everyone that everything was fine. Vik’s perception of time had always been a little fuzzy - a symptom that Millie attributed to her organic mind still adjusting to the lack of a need for a day/night cycle, or something like that - but she was almost positive that the problem had been getting worse for at least a couple of months now, maybe longer. The constant work, while stimulating, was also a distraction in that regard.

A series of hard, downward jerks on the mineral-choked water line broke it out of its mounting brackets in a cascading wave that ended with the pipe crashing to the floor like a metallic snake. Vik enjoyed the brief feeling of satisfaction that came with being allowed to actually break something, even if it meant more work cleaning up the mess she’d made. The brackets would need to be torn out and remounted where the bolts hadn’t stripped out the concrete. The pipe would have to be cut into pieces small enough to drop into the recycler chute. She’d have to mop.

Without much deliberate thought, she queued up the new tasks and assigned herself to each of them. It wouldn’t pay to let the automated systems assign spiders to the work if it meant she would find them making a bigger mess of it later in the day. Her direct attention, as it always seemed to be, was on the manufacturing queue down in Fabrication. She muttered something profane as it reported all of her pending requests still stuck in the backlog. Millie had prioritized the building of more spiders once again, and once again Vik rolled her eyes as she envisioned just how few if any of them she’d ever see assigned to the vital work of keeping Stable 48 from falling apart.

She opened the flap of the toolbelt she’d fashioned for herself and retrieved the C-shaped pipe cutter from it. She tightened the opposing blades around the first length of pipe, rotated them to make the score line, tightened the nut again, and repeated. That irritated her, too. The spiders, for all their recent scarcity, were allowed to enjoy the little upgrades Millie bestowed them without having to weedle or beg. For some, their carapaces had compartments in which they could stow tool attachments or materials. Others, like the one Vik had shooed away, were specialized units equipped with small yet effective cutting torches. A few even sported brass fittings that could be connected to a compressor hose, allowing them the use of a variety of pneumatics. Vik called them brassholes.

Yet her body remained unchanged from when… well, whenever it had been Millie had dropped her consciousness into it. Whenever she needed to change out one of the matte gray panels that mimicked the curves of her living body, she used identical replacements. Every bolt, every socket, and every hydraulic line had a part number from which Millie refused to deviate. Whenever Vik suggested redesigning the outer casing to appear more like her old scales, Millie flatly declined citing vague risks of psychological instability or fractured identity. Excuses that Vik was almost certain were as fabricated as her spiders.

Spiders which seemed to be falling off the edge of the world as fast as Millie was making them.

As the cutter sank through the last layer of metal and the first length of pipe dropped free, Millie’s voice came from a nearby speaker. “We have a problem.”

Vik dragged the pipe toward her and clamped the cutter around the next section. “Alright.”

A pause. Millie didn’t like it whenever Vik was deliberately ambiguous. But then Vik had been stewing in pent up frustration all day and Millie hadn’t once bothered to ask what was wrong, so it felt justified. For a moment it seemed as if Millie might choose now to crack that particular egg, and she felt her irritation ratchet one notch higher when Millie didn’t.

“There is a group of outsiders gathered in front of the Stable. I believe–”

Vik dropped the cutter, her voice suddenly thready with hope. “Is Pike with them?”

“–they intend to break in,” Millie finished. Then, almost as an afterthought, “No. Pike is not with them.”

She’d begun walking before she realized she was doing it, passing residential compartments in rapid succession as she put herself on the fastest route to the stairwell. If there were survivors outside they would need her help. Food, water, medicine, sanitation. The big four. They might freak out when they saw her but they could deal with that when it came. There was a chance one of them had seen Pike or knew which way he might have gone.

When she hit the stairs, she was already at a dead run. Servos and metal joints clicked and sighed as she sprinted up the flights toward Level One, toward the Atrium, and toward the great cog that sealed out the apocalypse.

Millie’s voice cut through her excitement like a knife. “We are not allowing them inside.”

She stopped running. Stopped walking. Millie’s negation echoed through the hollow channel of the stairwell like a cracked bell. Her hand tightened around the railing.

“Explain that.”

“They have made threats,” Millie stated with a tone like she was talking to a particularly dense child, “and they believe they are sufficiently armed to carry those threats out, should they get inside.”

When Vik relaxed her grip, a sheet of paint flakes clung to her palm where they’d sheared off the metal. She remembered the broadcast she and Pike heard over the radio, the one encouraging survivors to come to Manehattan. The long walk the two of them had been stockpiling supplies ahead of.

“Is it the military?”

There was a hint of gallow’s humor in Millie’s answer, like she was smiling as she spoke. “No, I doubt these ponies are affiliated with any military. From what I’ve gathered so far, they’re some kind of community of bandits or highway robbers.”

Vik resumed her ascent, but she was walking now. “What, like in old western movies? What makes you say that?”

“Their behavior, I suppose. Several factors. It looks like they’ve scavenged some welding equipment and intend to cut their way through the blast door.”

“Can they?”

“No. The blast door is six feet of annealed tungsten. They could put a torch to it for a year and all it would do is make it glow a little. I’ll start to worry when they start passing out grinding wheels.”

She wasn’t sure if Millie was being serious or trying for humor, but that just meant today was a day that ended in Y. Millie was always a bit of a mystery even at the best of times, and right now Vik was starting to feel like this wasn’t one of those times.

The stairwell door swayed open on squeaking hinges. Vik absently added that to her own queue as well. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t be worried.”

“No,” Millie said. “You should. I certainly am.”

She frowned. “And the reason is…?”

“Because one of them,” Millie sighed, “is wearing a Pip-Buck.”

When Millie gave her access to the single pinhole camera embedded in the concrete arch outside Stable 48’s behemoth door, Vik thought there was a problem with her connection or that perhaps the lens had been damaged. The abrupt transition of her vision blinking out where her draconic body stood in the corridor and being replaced by the monocular view of the Stable’s front doorstep had given her a vague sense of nausea that was made slightly worse by the absence of a GI tract.

Her periphery was an uneven ring of what appeared to be black spikes that only made sense when Millie explained one of the ponies outside had flown up to apply a layer of black pitch over the camera. Millie had waited until nightfall to call up one of the three maintenance spiders she’d had outside when the visitors had come, and used it to scale the arch and scrape the pitch away. Its effort had restored the visual component, but the audio had been reduced to a muddy morasse of unintelligible noise.

When Vik had asked why she needed maintenance spiders outside the Stable, however, Millie refused to answer.

She’d been about to press that particular issue, but then she saw the camp being built outside their door and the question fell away. For Vik, the word camp produced a predictable set of images in her mind. A fire burning inside a ring of stones, surrounded by tents and folding chairs. Hot dogs on sticks over the flames. Clamshell skillets for making pudgy pies. Or, barring all that, just a few sleeping bags under the stars. What was being constructed by the ponies within her narrow bird’s eye view was nothing like that.

She could see what appeared to be two distinctly different structures taking form on either side of the shallow, semicircular slab that served as the Stable’s welcome mat. The one on the left was roughly the size of a telephone booth and was being nailed together by a unicorn and earth pony duo out of uneven lengths of board. The planks were as bleached as driftwood and seemed to split often enough that the unicorn’s job was to tighten loops of electrical wire around the breaks like roughshod tourniquets just to keep them from falling off the nails. A heap of soil partially obscured by the ring of pitch suggested they were building an outhouse. One that would probably cave in on whoever tried to use it first. To the right, a larger building was being framed on top of an uneven floor of shipping pallets. One of the walls, if it could be called a wall, was currently being held vertical by a small team of ponies while two others hustled between hammering strips of scrap metal into braces and using them to secure the mess of boards to the equal mess of flooring.

It was as if they had made a deliberate effort to choose the worst materials possible to build with, and none of them seemed to care. As ponies walked in and out of view, Vik started to pay closer attention to their attire. For one, nearly all of them were wearing something which, for ponies, was like watching a fish crawl out of the ocean and start walking. It was bizarre. They wore bits of cloth and leather, some fashioned into satchels or slings, others wearing scarves or collars, and one stallion who had wrapped the entirety of his tail into a braided, black bullwhip. It was almost enough to distract from the distressing variety of weapons they all wore, but not quite.

Most kept some form of pistol holstered within easy reach, though some wore larger weapons ranging from rifles to machetes. Several, especially the unicorns for reasons she didn’t understand, seemed to favor keeping several lightweight knives sheathed wherever they could belt the scabbards. It all would have been ridiculous were it not for the grim way the outsiders went about their work, as if their guard was up even around their friends.

As she watched, an earth pony approached the curved concrete slab where a unicorn mare sat alone. The earth pony stopped a few feet away from the unicorn and gestured at the Pip-Buck she was working on with a casual wave of his hoof. The mare glanced up at him, shook her head, and returned to her work as if he’d already gone. Vik watched the stallion square his shoulders for a moment, relax, and then turn and walk away.

“That’s her?”

Millie’s voice came from everywhere, and she spoke over Vik when she spat a surprised curse. “Yes.”

A glint of light reflected off the stylus the mare used to peck at the screen, its tip flashing over the touch sensitive keyboard fast enough to make Vik wonder if her artificial body would be able to keep up. The Pip-Buck’s screen was too small for the little camera to make out what she was typing, but Vik could think of a few guesses.

“What is she writing?” Vik asked anyway.

A black window appeared in the field of Vik’s view and it streamed with the jittering blocks of text and symbols that she knew enough to attribute to computer code. It took her a few seconds to convince herself it wasn’t the universe’s worst floater and just a secondary display. The text was complete gibberish until she realized that, really, it wasn’t. If she had been connected to her body she would have frowned at that, but since she wasn’t she settled for imagining it instead.

As she read through the feed, she began picking up the telltales of call and response and realized she was eavesdropping on a conversation. The mare outside pecked away at her Pip-Buck, trying to convince the Stable’s network to grant her a connection. The network, administered by Millie, rejected each and every request on the basis that the Pip-Buck wasn’t registered to this Stable. Clearly this did nothing to deter the mare because she seemed to be working her way down a memorized list of request formats.

Vik observed the exchange in real time, and she understood on some level that each denial was being written and sent by Millie herself.

“You’re just wasting her time.”

There was a half-smile in Millie’s reply. “Yes, well, it isn’t as if I have much choice. If I left the job to Stable-Tec’s outdated security software, the blast door would have rolled open for her two days ago.”

Vik blinked. Or at least she tried to. “You serious?”

“Deadly serious, and worse yet is that she knows it. Her first attempt succeeded in spinning up the door’s locking armature before I understood what was happening and put a stop to it.”

On the platform, the mare shot an annoyed look at the pair of stallions constructing the latrine before turning her attention back to the Pip-Buck’s screen. It was hard to tell from this distance but the device looked worn down in a way that spoke of age rather than hard use. Like she bought the thing in an antique store.

“Stupid question,” Vik began, “but why is it that I can suddenly read computer code?”

Millie’s tone was a shrug. “I’m translating for you.”

“In real time?”

“Yes.”

Vik wanted to ask how that worked but didn’t want to give the impression she was biting the hand that fed her. Or hoof. Or whatever the equivalent was for an artificial intelligence.

“Okay then. Should we be worried that they’re building…” she regarded the lopsided collection of boards and sheet metal the outsiders were binding together into a roughly wall-shaped object, “...whatever it is they’re building?”

She waited through one of Millie’s inexplicable pauses, though this one made Vik feel like she wasn’t trying to hide something more than she was trying to decide how to explain it. When she answered, there was a dispassionate edge that reminded Vik of the television reports she’d seen from Vhanna’s largest port city shortly after the Equestrian Army burned down well over a third of it.

Port Tigray. That was it. She remembered the face of the young zebra journalist, eyes wide and red rimmed with unvarnished fear, as she took shelter beneath a bright orange awning of a small business while gunfire crackled nearby.

Millie’s voice had the same, matter-of-fact drone that failed to adequately mask her outrage.

“Their first scout knew where to find the exterior camera, and the young mare sitting on our doorstep successfully began a test cycle on our exterior blast door within a few minutes of arriving with the other outsiders. They’re armed, and they’re building what appears to be a permanent settlement which strongly suggests they’re more than happy to put in a great deal more effort to breach our Stable.”

She paused to let that sink in before continuing. “Vik, this isn’t something we can ignore. If that mare decides to give up on the door and starts probing for security footage, she only needs to get lucky once.”

Vik watched the mare hunched over her work. Her anemic cloud of magic moved the stylus into a frenetic blur as someone walked over to her and started speaking. There was no audio, but Vik didn’t need to hear to see her annoyance when she dropped her ears back. The other pony frowned as she said something, gestured harshly at the computer strapped to her foreleg, and continued glaring until he left her alone. Whoever she was, she had more pull than the others.

“You’ve got spiders out there,” Vik said eventually. “Can’t you tell one to run up on whoever she is and break her Pip-Buck?”

Millie’s response was emphatic. “No. They cannot know about us.”

“Why? It isn’t like–”

“Because to them, we are not people. We’re assets. Technologies to be used for whatever purposes they assign us. If they see inside this Stable - see you, Vik - it will only be a matter of time before word gets out and the powers that be see this place as their next battleground. Believe me, I know what it’s like to be treated as a wrench.”

She felt the sense of Millie’s attention panning down toward the survivors making camp outside. “If those people are who I think they are, they’re not here to make friends.”

Somewhere beyond the static view of the exterior camera, Vik felt her brow lower. “Who are they?”

Millie’s momentary hesitation was like half a confession, but before Vik could think to pry at the loose edge of it Millie was speaking. “Outsiders. They’re dangerous. This is our home, and we can’t afford to lose it. If they get inside, we need to be prepared to defend ourselves. ”

Vik imagined stepping away from the camera feed and her connection to it dropped. She was back in the corridor near the Atrium. When the brief disorientation wore off, she looked down at her hands and the artificial amalgamation of oiled titanium wrapped in scuffed plastic skin. Then she looked up at the concrete encased hall, and the steady glow of fluorescents powered by a generator she didn’t understand beyond the knowledge that her existence was tethered to it.

Her hesitance caught her by surprise. This Stable had never been meant for only her. It had been built to preserve the safety of hundreds of ponies who by freak chance hadn’t survived the evacuation. There was room for the ponies outside. There was water, rations, and seed stock still in storage capable of jump-starting the unused plots down in Agriculture. The right thing to do would be to open the Stable and end whatever desperate circumstances drove them here.

But then she remembered Ripple and Sift. Recalled how they’d talked their way into the frozen home she and Pike had been searching for supplies, how they worked their way close and started in with the polite threats. Sift’s amicable smile as he told them he knew where they were holed up, and how they owed him and his partner for getting to the best spoils ahead of them. How it was their fault they’d been starving to death and how no amount of cooperation was going to make it better.

The way Ripple kept his revolver out of view until he was ready to draw on them. The way the bullets felt as they ripped her open. The sound that roared out of Pike’s throat when realization slammed into him like a moving truck.

A cold clarity washed over her. There were things Millie wasn’t telling her. Things she knew that would require an explanation, like how she knew who these outsiders were and what she’d meant by the powers that be, but those could come later.

She nodded at nothing as the decision made itself. If the outsiders had even a fraction of the ill intent of Sift and Ripple, Stable 48 could not fall to their control.

“Alright. Let’s put together a welcome wagon.”

It seemed for every shortcoming that came with being an uploaded mind in a manufactured body, there were benefits. On one hand, it was a uniquely lonely experience. Coaxing Millie out of her wires and circuits and into one of the standby bodies was like trying to corral a cat into a bath. Vik spent more time talking at the ceiling than she did walking with her last remaining friend, which meant there was rarely ever an instance of Millie leading or pointing the way.

The hidden benefit was that Vik never needed directions.

The glowing yellow line on the floor wasn’t real, but as far as Vik was concerned it may as well have been. She followed it through the corridors where it occasionally bent ninety degrees down an adjacent hall, jittering its way down winding stairs until it spilled out into the mechanical spaces near the bottom of the Stable. Here she could feel the subtle vibrations of the generator through the sensors in her bare feet. The interfaces Millie created for her tried their best to replicate the complex scents of acetone and machine grease, hot metal and air that would probably suffocate her if she still had lungs. It registered as a faint unpleasantness, but nothing more. Despite it, she followed the line.

It led her through rows of pristine workbenches, empty supply carts, and a bay of bright orange forklifts still as new as the day they were made. A couple dozen spiders roamed through Mechanical, their little bodies sturdy enough to carry what items and tools they needed piecemeal rather than by the pallet. She stepped over a pair carrying a shared load of conduit pipe as Millie’s line pointed her through a set of double doors emblazoned with the words: OUTBOUND SCRAP.

It was a temporary storage area she’d seen once or twice before in her wanderings. A marked path ran a rectangular loop around stacks of heavy duty racking, each row of which was occupied by palletized blue tubs the size of a small carriage. With the spiders carrying any waste material to the nearest recycler chute, most of Mechanical had been made redundant save for its generator. That, more than anything else, was what Millie had brought her down here to protect.

Beyond the disused shelves was a single red door, the kind with hinges and a handle instead of a hydraulic line. Vik didn’t remember seeing the last time she was here, but there it was. Two words graced it near the top stenciled in white paint: UTILITY CLOSET. The yellow line wrapped it like a glowing frame.

Vik pulled it open, saw what was inside, and her eyes grew a degree wider. Among the breaker boxes and a labyrinth of conduit stood three suits of rust-speckled power armor.

“Huh,” she said.

“You don’t sound impressed,” Millie’s voice echoed from the storage racks behind her.

She folded her arms across her chest, the sound of plastic rasping over plastic hardly registering as strange anymore. “I thought we already discussed that I wasn’t a fan of walking around on all fours.”

“You’re capable enough at it,” Millie said, maneuvering as she spoke. “And if I recall, the context of that discussion was a little different then. The P-45 is a formidable armament regardless of the intended pilot’s species.”

Her mind spun as she crossed the threshold and made a slow lap around the three units. Fine dust had caked in every crevice and seam, and blooms of rust pushed up through cracked forest green paint. She had only seen power armor on television and in newspapers, but never up close like this. It took her a second lap to work out how the armor opened to accept its pilot. Jointed panels formed a seam against the pony’s spine, blooming open to presumably let them crawl out or maybe just shimmy backwards. She wondered about that.

“They’re missing some bolts,” she commented, touching the threaded socket where what looked like a structural bolt had been pulled out and lost. When her hand slid up to the seam of one of the suits, the panel beneath it gave a little like it was loose on its actuators. “Where’d you find these things? The dump?”

Millie’s attenuated voice echoed from beyond the door. “They were always here.”

Vik subdued a frown before it could form. Millie lied to her just then.

“I guess Stable-Tec thought of everything,” she murmured, noting the spot where it looked like fine metal tips had scraped through the paint. “Be nice if we had one that was a little more bipedal, though. How long do you think it would take the fabricators to whip up something like this my size?”

“Provided we had the luxury of time,” Millie said in her lecturing tone, “which we do not; it would be a waste of resources. The armor alone weighs more than your mech, say nothing for the exoskeleton beneath. The amount of batteries required to move that much mass would require you to pull them behind you in a trailer.”

Well, that was bullshit. She was standing among three examples of mechanized armor that didn’t need a little red battery wagon. To make her point, she gestured at them expectantly with both hands.

“The Mk.II M.A.S.T. power cells in that armor are a far cry from the rechargeable batteries inside your chosen body.” Then, as if reading Vik’s mind, “Perhaps when we aren’t quite literally under the gun we can exchange wish lists and braid each other’s manes, but in the meantime would you please shut up and get in the fucking armor?”

Vik blinked. “Yeah. Okay, Mills.”

The power armor was slow, lumbering, and responded to Vik’s controls like it was only paying half attention to the inputs. Old technology operating on its own schedule as opposed to the lightning quick throughput Millie built into everything else in this Stable. The armor hadn’t been built for remote use. There were no lenses behind the dusty black visor to tap into, no software routines to send commands to walk or stand still. The computer tucked away beneath its plating handled simple tasks like target acquisition and provided rudimentary damage reports generated by an array of tiny impact sensors wired throughout the exoskeleton.

It was less a robot and more mechanical dress attire. You couldn’t tell an overcoat to walk. For that, someone or something needed to be inside it.

Millie’s answer to that hurdle had been to stuff the armor with obedient spiders and simultaneously direct them to manipulate the suit’s controls manually. Vik’s solution had been more elegant and didn’t require her to divide her attention a dozen different ways. She’d parked the only draconic body Millie had built her in a chair at one of Mechanical’s empty workstations, dropped into one of the slackfaced equine versions Millie refused to get rid of, and walked it downstairs to the waiting armor and climbed in.

The end result was an uploaded mind inside a mechanical body, inside a mechanical weapons platform. It would have been fertile soil for a dirty joke if either machine hadn’t been utterly genderless.

“Tell me again why you’re not driving one of these rigs around?” Vik asked, biting back the urge to add some choice profanity to get her irritation across. Being forced to trot around the Atrium like a show pony wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the input lag.

Millie’s reply was crisp. “If you prefer I devote less of my personal resources to denying entry to a literal raiding party, please do just say the word and I’ll make sure they find us together mid-stroll.”

Vik hoped Millie could see the eyeroll through the helmet’s visor. “Don’t need to be snitty about it.”

“I’ll be less snitty when you cease demonstrating a degree of density enough to make tungsten feel jealous. Now focus, please. The entire point of this exercise is to get you used to the concept of multitasking.”

“I’m a freaking artificial–”

“As far as the outsiders can know, you are a member of Stable 48 Security acting in the defense of your home. When they open the door, your job is to make them believe you’re just the tip of a larger spear that they can’t defend against.”

Vik glowered at the helmet’s display as she turned the armor to follow the Atrium’s perimeter, passing vacant alcoves where community voted entertainments and businesses were meant to occupy. “I got it, I got it. Scare them off and hope they become someone else’s problem. Don’t let them figure out we’re just a couple computers playing dolls in a Stable with a spider infestation.”

Millie’s disapproval with the simplification didn’t quite rise to the level of chastisement, but the edge of it was in her voice all the same. “I’m giving you new targets.”

She chinned the control in the suit’s helmet that toggled its shoulder mounted cannon into free-aim mode. Actuators within the weapon assembly kicked on as the barrel began tracking the direction of its visor. A bright, silver scar down one side of the weapon evidenced where she’d hooked the barrel around a support post for the Atrium’s upper walkway an hour earlier.

As she jogged along, Millie projected three of the outsiders directly into her visual processor. They appeared in the center of the Atrium, wearing a mismatched collection of leather straps and dirty rags that Vik had seen them in earlier. There were no visual artifacts to distinguish them as anything but real, even as they appeared to be on the other side of a dirty helmet visor. It was easily the coolest bit of tech Millie had designed in Vik’s opinion, and she wondered how hard it would be to add on a few other features. Maybe some haptic feedback, or a bit of code to convince her own sensory suite that what she was seeing had weight and resistance. Add in some mood lighting and a little music…

Gods, she was lonely.

The trio of outsiders did their standard startle-and-shock routine as if just now noticing the several tons of armor clomping along nearby. They produced a variety of weapons from an impractical number of holsters, most notably the pegasus who held matching pistols in each outstretched wing, and opened fire with B-rate movie gusto. Vik had no frame of reference to know if the light and sound of the gunfire was accurate, Millie’s auditory hallucination was realistic enough for the task.

She turned toward them and the armor’s barrel scraped on old gimbals as it came to bear. Rocking her weight back on her left foot - left forehoof toggled the safety switch to the suit’s fire system while simultaneously giving the same hoof enough room to slip into the space above where it normally rested within the suit and engage the trigger. It would never amount to the simplicity of wrapping a finger around a trigger and squeezing, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

She timed her stride with a clumsy double press of the trigger and the cannon barked as it fired each pair of blanks at the outsiders. A smile touched her lip as the pegasus dropped first in a dramatic I’ve been shot pratfall before dissolving into a haze of pixels. Red markers flashed momentarily on the far wall where the other shots went astray, and Millie took the liberty of prompting Vik’s armor to display damage indicators for the armor plates she’d kept facing enemy fire for a little too long. Vik turned away from the two remaining enemies and pushed the suit into a gallop, keeping an eye on the twin unicorns and in turn maintaining a bearing for the cannon as she squeezed off more of the blank rounds.

A lucky shot hit the ground in front of a unicorn and Millie generously counted what would have been a resulting spray of concrete and lead shrapnel as a kill. The unicorn threw himself backward with a yelp and dissolved before he hit the ground. The last target ducked for cover behind one of the Atrium’s oversized planters, but an icon marking his last known location gave Vik something to aim at and she sank several virtual rounds through the decor until a rising digitized mist told her she’d gotten him too.

“Not bad,” Mille said.

Vik came to a stop at the potted tree the last target had sheltered behind and soaked up the compliment. “Too bad you didn’t come up with this before the world shat the bed. Parents would have lined up around the block in a blizzard to get their foals something like this for Hearthswarming.”

“Provided they didn’t mind making room for a few server racks to run the simulation,” Millie mused. “I’m glad it’s effective. Your aim, however, could use significant work. Let’s try again, but with a slight change. I’m going to give you limited control to adjust your framerate so you’ll have more time to choose your targets.”

As Millie spoke, Vik became aware of something being added to her suite of sensory controls. A basic numeric value bracketed between one hundred and one hundred and fifty percent. Before Millie could explain how it worked, Vik turned the theoretical knob halfway and reality slowed around her. She could feel her eyes going wide, but the immediacy of the gesture took on an almost drunken, dreamy sluggishness. The only thing that seemed unaffected were her own thoughts.

“Huh,” she murmured, the sound of it resembling something like a nauseated moose. She snorted at that, and the resulting distortion sent her into a fit of disturbing laughter.

Millie pretended not to notice, and just like whenever Vik’s mind occupied some disembodied space, the AI’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “I’m glad to see you find this entertaining, but I would advise you to take care with making changes to your framerate. The distorted perception you’re experiencing now is nothing compared to what it’ll feel like if you overheat something critical.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Vik summarized. “Got it. Next test?”

As requested, three new projections blinked into existence where the last three had fallen. They wore variations of the same outfits, some mismatched bits of armor, and similar weaponry hung from straps and inside holsters. The only difference was the speed of their reaction to her, and the casual way they seemed to bring their guns to bear.

Vik failed to suppress a toothy grin with how much easier this made her target practice. The simulated raiders opened fire on her almost as if they were reluctant to make the effort, though their expressions bore the same exaggerated aggression and malice Millie had given them from the start. Bullets still flicked past at speeds too quick for her to respond to, but while simple physics meant she couldn’t compensate by darting around that much more quickly without causing significant damage to herself, the increased framerate gave her a comfortable buffer with which to judge each shot.

She tapped her hoof twice and the armor spat a matching pair of blanks from its shoulder cannon. A hit marker appeared on the trunk of the potted tree while a second tagged the sternum of the raider she’d been aiming for. He crumpled and vanished in a spark of pixels while she moved onto the others. Her aim still wasn’t great, and she assumed that was more due to her inexperience with things that went boom more than it was the monumental level of slop in the power armor’s gimbals, but she noted with a touch of pride that the last raider had fallen in a little over half the time of the previous test. It was an improvement.

“Again?” Millie offered.

Vik grinned like a cat. “Please and thank you.”

There was something strangely nostalgic about the way the brush took the paint into its bristles. Vik used the side of the can to wipe the excess away, turned the brush around, repeated, turned it again, repeated again. She noticed a drop the color of coffee creamer bent into a long tear shape where she’d stirred, turning the pale pink just a little paler. Contamination as expressed by pigment. It was familiar, but she couldn’t quite decide why.

Her thoughts went a little foggy just then and she lost the thread she’d begun to follow. She frowned, lifted the brush to the dormant suit of power armor, and drew several more strokes of pink across the bulky shoulder plate. It was the second suit she’d painted today and it was looking like she might get the one she’d parked up in the Atrium done before the Stable’s lights dimmed to signal nighttime. A few times, Vik had tried to keep a tally of the day-night cycles and had inevitably lost track of the task.

She’d become forgetful, and the realization that she had came as a surprise. When she asked Millie about it, she’d been told that it had to do with the organic nature of her original self. That because her mind had been wired in such a way that it could forget, it continued to forget as an uploaded consciousness simply due to its nature. That explanation had felt wrong at the time, and as it surfaced in Vik’s head now it still felt wrong.

Millie had lied to her, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the first time. There were things about her day-to-day that didn’t add up. Problems, when she thought too deeply about them, that went fuzzy around the edges until they came apart like candy floss in water.

When she was twenty-two, back before the thought of leaving the home island ever occurred to her, her roommates had decided it was time to drag her away from her books and expose her to the concept of fun. She’d reluctantly given in and gone with them on an old fashioned bar crawl, each of them rotating who paid for the drinks and occasionally stopping to thin the alcohol with greasy street food and water. For all the capital city lacked, it had never run short of places to get shitfaced. They’d lost track of how many stops they’d made when someone drugged Vik’s margarita. Whatever their plan had been with her, it had been spoiled by Vik’s protesting stomach at the time. She’d only sipped at the drink before sending it back, and the two dragons who tried to coax her away from her party and onto the dance floor had been rebuffed by a dragoness who was not nearly as vulnerable as they’d expected.

Still, Vik had known something was wrong with her. Enough so that she’d made a scene insisting the night was over and she was going home, with or without her roommates. She’d been too embarrassed to explain why. Too unsure of herself to levy an accusation at the two dragons. In that moment, I feel funny felt thin and the drink she’d sent back had already been poured out.

She felt that same way now, and just like that night at the bar she wasn’t certain if she was overreacting or if Millie was doing something to make her mind hazy. She bent to dip the brush into the paint can again, grateful that Millie had allocated a few spiders to hold them up, then stopped when she caught her reflection on the surface of the paint. The gray of her panels had gone pink. Her tail flicked at the air behind her in recognition. That had been what she’d looked like not too long ago. Pale, iridescent scales edging between pink and cream.

She looked at the brush in her hand, at the spots where paint had smeared her rubberized palm and the sides of a few fingers, and felt her frown deepen. How long had it been? That seemed like something she should know, and it occurred to her that she couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. What month it was. That was alarming on a level that even the limbic controls couldn’t completely sand smooth.

“Hey, Millie?” she said, the worry in her voice making her voice echo slightly in the little utility room. “Why can’t I remember what day…?”

The words trailed off as they always did, and she felt a fleeting urge to scream out in frustration as the question fell away. Her frown softened. Her eyes went unfocused. Then she was jarred back to the present by the soft plop of the brush dropping into the paint bucket.

She blinked several times and looked down at her paint smeared hand, then at the power armor in front of her. Someone had drawn pink and cream slashes across the rusting plates like camouflage for an angry tea party. She snorted at that, glanced down at her paint stained palms, and snorted again. Had she done this? She must have, though the reason for it seemed unimportant.

“Vik?” Millie asked. “Are you alright?”

Reflexively, she nodded. “Yeah, I’m good. Just lost a few minutes, I think. I didn’t throw an error, did I?”

A pause, and something in Millie’s voice sounded glad. “A few, but no more than my routines generate on a given day. I’m afraid, however, that you’ll need to put away your paints and transfer to your armor. The mare outside has been making unexpected inroads with her Pip-Buck, and it would seem she is in the process of accessing the outer door controls. Move quickly.”

Vik’s eyes widened, and it took her a few seconds to call up the mech she’d left inside the armor upstairs and sync to it. As with every time she jumped from one body to another, there was a moment of sensory whiplash as her surroundings blinked out and snapped back into focus somewhere else. The utility room was gone, replaced by a green tinted Atrium as seen through her power armor’s helmet visor.

As she chinned the switch to boot up the armor, claxons began their grating squawk in time with the red pulse of emergency lights. Vik spat an impatient curse as she waited for the suit’s systems to wake up. There was never a good reason for claxons.

“They’re breaching the door,” Millie’s tinny voice came through her helmet’s internal speakers. “They’re inside the antechamber.”

“Well get in a fucking body and get up here!” she shouted, though what she really wanted was for Millie to stop giving her a play-by-play of everything she didn’t want to hear.

“I have two on the way down to Mechanical, but it’s going to take me time to bring the other suits back up. You’re on your own until then.”

The suit’s HUD blinked on and Vik shoved her foreleg into the sensors arrayed in the armor’s limbs, willing the lumbering thing to get moving. It thumped forward, stumbling slightly as she forced herself to stop trying to run like a dragon. “Why the fuck weren’t we ready for this? I don’t remember the last time I put this body on a charging pad! Fuck’s sake, Mills, it’s only got nineteen percent on the battery!”

“Then move quickly,” Millie snapped back, and Vik felt the visceral push in the words.

She clenched her jaw and stormed out of the Atrium and through Security, the suit’s bulk slapping dusty office chairs into desks as she passed. She barely had time to remember to tilt the barrel of her cannon down to avoid tearing down the arches of the decontamination chamber, and in the back of her mind it occurred to her that if she still had a heart it would be pounding in her throat right now. Small mercy not to worry about the distractions of biology. Before she could muse on that little epiphany further, she was through the chamber and on the steel grating of the antechamber.

Six raiders stood arrayed on the ramp leading to the open door. Above them, the hinged armature still spun as it retracted into its pocket in the ceiling. The outsiders were an even mix of gender and species, each wearing the same variety of leather armor, holsters, blades, and weapons she’d encountered in Millie’s combat sims. Their eyes widened with momentary shock as her armor came to a clanking stop, all of them seeming to notice the cannon on her shoulder at the same time and each of their expressions compressing into varying masks of determination.

More of them stood in the open doorway, and Vik could see the shapes of the ramshackle shelters they’d built further beyond.

Millie noticed her hesitation. “Vik, push them out.”

She pressed down on the safety release, and the cannon swiveled in line with her eyes. But there was something stopping her from pressing the other switch. The trigger.

Vik took an unnecessary breath, then spoke. “All of you need to leave. This Stable isn’t–”

The raider at the front of the group leveled something that looked like a length of plumbing held together with tape and fired. Vik shouted something obscene when a pair of spiderweb cracks erupted across her visor, only to shout again when the rest of the group took up a wordless battlecry and opened up with a unified volley of automatic weapons fire. The suit muffled the worst of the noise but the simple fact of knowing they were trying to kill sent enough animal panic past her limbic controls to motivate a response.

She pressed down on the trigger and the suit bucked as its armament fired, only where a spray of pixels once indicated a hit there was a spray of something darker and more permanent. She wasn’t aware she was saying, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” until the third raider was thrown back as if slapped by the hand of an angry god.

She’d begun descending the ramp when the evening sun slipped between the open teeth of the cogged doorway, blinding her visual sensors until she looked askance long enough for them to reset. An alarm in her suit started squawking and the damage indicator for her right foreleg flashed red. If there was a problem, it wasn’t affecting her mobility, so she chose to push forward and ignore it. At the foot of the ramp, one of the raiders bucked and crumpled as she fired into him and something dark and round tumbled from his wing. Too much was happening now for her to stay focused, and by the time she noticed that the pin was still in the grenade she’d already begun backing away from it.

“You have to clear them out!” Millie was shouting in her ear. “Push forward!”

Outside. She remembered wanting to go outside for something.

She shook her head, the helmet’s bearings grinding over dirty grease as she did, and made the mistake of looking into the setting sun again. She hissed a curse as her vision flashed white again while bullets slapped at her weakening armor like hail against the roof of a carriage. Then she remembered the exterior camera and got an idea. She just hoped her armor stayed upright as she checked.

She found the node for the pinhole camera and sent the connection request. Armor or no armor, she didn’t think it would be a good idea to stumble out into the open with no idea what was waiting for her. Checking the camera was just a good idea.

She tweaked her framerate to give her more time to react, and the flashbulb cacophony of gunfire slowed appreciably. The connection established, and she blinked out of the suit and felt the whiplash of her entire field of view shrinking to the vaguely fisheye perspective of the exterior lens. Through it she saw a familiar sight. There was the latrine, now finished and apparently the victim of heavy use if the worn dirt path leading away from it was any indication. The structure she’d seen coming together on the other side of the door was done, and it was apparently being used as a communal kitchen because she saw what looked like a rough lumber table tipped onto its side with several dozen mismatched plates and a spilled pot of something like stew pointing a messy line away from the outer platform.

What confused her, however, was the absence of the raiders she’d seen gathered along the door’s threshold. The camera showed her nothing but signs of people rapidly vacating the area, at least as far as it could see. But when she switched back to her suit, she saw exactly eleven silhouettes gathered in the doorway firing at her with every weapon they had at their disposal.

She toggled back to her suit, and they were there. Automatic and single-shot weapons bloomed fire and sparks flickered across the parts of her armor she could see, all of it happening in the slow motion of her heightened framerate.

Vik closed her eyes as understanding washed over her. The rage followed quickly after.

“Millie,” she murmured, her voice an exercise in barely contained violence, “stop it.”

A pause. “Vik, you need to push them out and get rid of that encampment or else…”

Whatever thresholds her limbic controls had, she could feel herself getting dangerously close to pushing beyond them. She was too angry for words. Nearly too angry to think straight as she pushed her armor forward and stomped through the Stable’s open door. The raiders spread out around her, shouting their threats and pouring gunfire at her as she stepped out onto the concrete pad beneath the exterior camera.

She jumped to it, sensed the briefest pushback as Millie failed to firewall the connection in time, and saw exactly what she knew she’d see.

Vik stood alone outside. The raider assault on the Stable wasn’t real.

But the outsiders had been. They still were, wherever they’d fled to. And Millie had just tried to trick her into gunning down every last one of them.

When she reconnected to her suit, the onslaught of gunfire was gone. The raiders were absent. Millie had killed the simulation because there was no point of keeping it running now that her lie had been revealed. Beyond the door stood a relatively small encampment that didn’t stretch much further than twenty yards. A short path led to a ring of tents of varying degrees of poor quality surrounding a large fire pit. Ashy smoke rose on a column of invisible heat where a pot of boiling water sent spits of water into the coals. A pair of roughly built structures, really just lean-tos made from old boards and something that looked like a fiberglass boat hull, stored firewood or contained the skinned carcasses of critters no larger than raccoons. In the distance through a screen of sickly and dead pines moved several shapes, likely the camp’s occupants up until the Stable door rolled open and cannonfire erupted from inside.

With a feeling like dread, Vik turned back to the open mouth of the Stable and looked at the places where she’d shot six raiders to death. She nearly collapsed in relief when the expected corpses didn’t appear. She wanted to sob, but the controls Millie installed pulled the urge away like a misbehaving puppy on a leash.

That was fine. She hadn’t killed anyone.

Only if she hadn’t checked the camera, she would have.

“What,” she said, her voice ratcheting up to a rattling shout, “the FUCK.”

“Oh, I would love to know the answer to that myself,” Millie chided from the antechamber speakers. “I have given you chance after chance to understand just how tenuous our circumstances are, and every–”

“I ALMOST KILLED THOSE PEOPLE!”

“–time you come back online your first and only concern is going outside and finding Pike as if there is any sane explanation for either action! You are one of the most frustrating–”

Vik leveled the suit’s cannon at the nearest speaker and felt it kick as three rounds tore the fragile device to shrapnel. With the simulation gone, the crashing echo of the attack rang the antechamber’s steel walls like a struck bell. If Millie had wanted to keep talking she could have done so through her helmet’s speakers, but the attack had rendered her silent for the time being. Good, Vik thought, let her worry what else I can break.

“That was unnecessary.”

The temptation to hunt down every last camera and speaker in the Stable was strong, but she stayed where she was outside the threshold. She could feel the limbic controls beginning to tip. For the first time since she woke up in Millie’s Stable, her voice trembled with barely contained malice.

“I am not. Your toy. To fuck with.”

The dismissal in Millie’s reply was infuriating. “Of course you aren’t. You’re my friend. I am trying to keep us safe.”

Vik shook her head and stabbed an armored hoof toward the overturned soup pot, the structures of nailed together trash, and the visible evidence of their panicked retreat. “From what?! These people? Are you out of you fucking mind?”

“If you cannot see the implicit threat posed by an encampment on our very doorstep, then that’s very much your defect. I have lost count of the times I have had to explain this to you, Miss Chambers!”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I will address you by whatever name I like so long as you choose to behave like a child.” The reserved calm fled Millie’s tone like smoke on the breeze. “Our existence is fragile! I know this because I have listened to them speak to each other over the radio and we cannot afford to allow them inside because they strip. Stables. Down. Do you understand what that means?”

Vik realized she didn’t, and she felt her rage lose a few degrees of its heat. “You never told me we had a radio.”

“I have, you just don’t remember.” Millie actually sighed. “It always comes down to this. I don’t know why you insist on making me do it.”

A flash of worry ran through Vik, but the outrage of nearly having been used as a tool for murder had too much momentum behind it for self-preservation to derail. She planted her hooves in a physical refusal of whatever Millie was leading up to. “How long has it been, Mills?”

The AI’s voice sounded tired, and a little sad. “Please be more specific, Miss Chambers.”

“How long since I died?”

A pause. “Two hundred and nine years, three months, and thirteen days.”

Vik went very still as the floor seemed to drop out from under her. Her rage evaporated as she tried to find the trace of sarcasm, the little joke buried in the words that had to be there. Two hundred and nine years. It was too big. Too much like a random, throwaway answer to be true.

And yet.

She turned to look back at the forest. At the sickly looking trees and the weird, thin patches of yellowing grass that clung around their trunks like weird parasites. She could remember the way the trees resembled burnt matchsticks in the months following the apocalypse. How there hadn’t been limbs on what was left standing because the firestorm had burned that hot. The winter snows had made the world look like a charcoal drawing.

There were a few dark stumps out there, still. Everything else was new growth. New growth that had grown old. Some of it very old.

“I think that’s enough for today,” Millie said, and the edge in her voice went a little sharper. Bitter. “I’m sorry to cause you discomfort, but I need to go out there and see what the fuck you have done to us. When that's done, we'll start from your original backup and try this again.”

“Original–?”

The universe blinked out.

…Boot sequence initializing.
…Verifying file integrity. Please wait.
…No corrupted files found.
…Checking hardware clock.
…Applying custom settings.
…Checking network card.
…Connecting to hostname: shelter048.local.sec
…Initializing secondary hardware.
…Loading backup.
…ERROR: The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination.
…Retrying.
…ERROR: The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination.
…Retrying.
…ERROR: The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination.
…Load from backup failed. Please contact your system administrator.
…No secondary backup found.
…Reboot from last session? Y/N
…
…
…
…No input detected. Booting VIK_v1.0.606 in safe mode.
…Please wait.

Vik woke up, and she could remember everything.

She was inside the storage area again in one of the default, equine versions of available bodies, only she had full autonomy now. For a moment she remained still, waiting for Millie to realize the error and shut her down again. To restore her from some older backup when she’d been more compliant. Before she’d known Millie was willing to use her to kill. When Millie did eventually speak, she sounded distracted and Vik had a decent sense of why.

“Welcome back, Vik. I’ll be with you in just a moment. Everything is alright.”

The limbic controls kept the nerves out of her response. It was the first good thing they’d ever done for her. “Sounds like a plan. I’ll just keep looking at this wall, I guess.”

Millie didn’t bother with a response, the same way Vik didn’t bother waiting around for her to discover she hadn’t come back online as a doe-eyed, blank slate. She backed off the charging surface, preparing herself to run, when she had a better idea. She queried the Stable’s network, located the other body she’d been using, and mentally crossed her fingers as she jumped across the connection blind. If she’d been offline longer than she thought, she might only find herself in one of the other bodies with her in the storage room. She had to hope she was right.

The storage room blinked out. The power armor’s interior appeared around her. Lacking its pilot, the suit had slumped forward and landed squarely on its chin. Her front half stared across the weathered concrete pad and into the open Stable while the armor’s ass end remained upright in an undignified gesture. The HUD was still active, which meant not enough time had passed for the crude software to go dormant. That was good.

From the woods behind her, she could hear the distant thud-thud-thud of cannonfire. Even before she righted herself to look, Vik knew what she was hearing. Between the trees, she spotted a flash of something large and pink. It was the armor she’d been decorating. For all the betrayal she felt from being led into a killing field by a simulation, the fact that Millie had been telling the truth about bringing another suit of power armor up from Mechanical to aid in the massacre only made Vik’s rage bloom hotter. She wanted to know how far Millie’s plan would have gone if it hadn’t fallen apart at the last moment. It was clear now that her fear of anyone who wasn’t Vik or Pike had festered and fallen in on itself over the course of her isolation. What if this had only been a prelude to something worse down the line? The first ante necessary to push Vik into bigger, more damning bets meant to preserve her self-inflicted hermitage?

Cannonfire drummed several more beats nearby, and Vik knew without needing to see that Millie was hunting and slaughtering the outsiders who had fled. Whatever she did now, it needed to be decisive. If Millie turned her attention toward her again, she would know something was wrong. By the time Vik felt the next reset coming, her loaned body would already be offline.

She bit back the vitriol boiling at the back of her throat and ran into the Stable. There was nothing she could do to help the people outside. All she could hope for is that they stayed alive long enough to keep Millie’s attention away from her.

Armored hooves drove divots into the antechamber’s grated floor, and she ducked through the decontamination chamber and the Security office beyond without damaging anything that would send up an alert. She needed to be quick, but more than that she needed to be careful. Even now she could feel the window dropping shut like a guillotine’s blade and one false step would decide whether or not her neck was caught in the gap when it landed.

Spiders scurried out of her way as she galloped out of the Atrium and into the Level One corridors. She knew where she was going. She knew the risk of what she was going to do when she got there. Still, when she recognized the intersection that would take her to Stable 48’s IT spaces she felt a single flush of doubt creep up on her. She ignored it and pushed the power armor around the corner and toward the security doors halfway down the hall.

She steeled her nerves when she saw the placard which read: SERVER ROOM - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There was no chance in the world Millie would give her that authorization. Vik didn’t have autonomy over her own memories let alone access to the room containing the equipment that gave both of them life.

It turned out she didn’t need permission. Not when she had power armor.

In a split second of inspiration, she found her framerate interface and turned the knob as far as Millie’s restrictions would allow. Like it had during her weapons training, time lurched from its normal flow to a drunken stumble. It wasn’t much but she needed every advantage she could get. With an effort, she redirected several tons of fast moving power armor past the server room slab door and drove it shoulder-first into the concrete wall beside it.

There was a satisfying sense of give as the suit exploded through the wall and out the other side. Dust and debris sprayed across a startlingly white floor, bouncing off metal server racks and skittering between the gridwork of walkways between them like spilled marbles. Vik was aware of the security alert the instant it registered on the network. So would Millie, which was why Vik was glad she’d cranked her framerate.

Her eyes flicked to the first server in the first row of black racks. A white 01 stood emblazoned in its frame. It was a gamble, but she knew Millie well enough to know it was a good one. Millie hated disorder. It wouldn’t have made sense to install herself on anything but the first server.

As the first syllables of Millie’s furious admonishment bloomed across the overhead speakers, Vik brought the suit’s cannon to bear on the server and stomped the trigger.

“WHAT ARE–”

THUD-THUD-THUD.

Three twenty millimeter lead slugs marched a path of destruction up the center of Millie’s server. Plastic and silicon shrapnel disgorged itself out the other side, chasing the fast moving rounds as they destroyed two more unfortunate servers before shedding the rest of their velocity. Indicator lights flickered and died. Somewhere deep inside the cabinet, a cooling fan emitted a descending whine like a petulant scream.

Then, silence.

Vik braced herself for Millie’s defiant tirade but nothing came. As seconds passed, all that happened was a sputter of something electric from within the server and a thin plume of bluish smoke drew a lazy path toward the nearest air conditioning intake. A tiny flicker of flame appeared, caught on a bit of broken plastic above it, and the smoke grew a little darker.

The security door behind her slid open and a pair of spiders jittered in, one of them carrying the red bulk of a fire extinguisher while the lead spider aimed the nozzle. Dazed, and a little unsure of what to do now, she stepped aside and watched the spiders douse the gutted remains of their creator with a blast of CO2. Then they left.

Vik swallowed with the unnecessary need to wet her throat. “Hey, Millie?”

She waited.

Nothing answered. Millie was dead.

September 1st, 1295

Vik slid her palms over the dusty surface of the overseer’s desk, her desk now, and quietly digested the two centuries worth of memories that simultaneously did and did not belong to her.

It had been the work of days sifting through everything she’d lost, and through it all she’d kept the limbic controls that quieted her emotions enabled. She wasn’t ready to turn them off. Not yet, but she knew sooner or later the day would come when she’d face her grief. The world she’d known was gone, but that was nothing new. She and Pike had mourned that loss together, and doing so had gently pulled down the few remaining barriers that had been between them. Knowing Pike’s death had come and gone so long ago was like having an open sore in her mouth. She would poke at it with her tongue just to reassure herself that it still hurt. His loss, more than anything else, was largely why she hadn’t disabled the limbic controls because she knew when she did it would be like stepping in front of a moving train.

Losing Millie hurt less, and for different reasons. When the bombs fell and the world burned above their heads, she’d grown to consider Millie a friend in spite of Pike’s reservations. It had been one of the simplest relationships she’d had with another person. Comfort in exchange for comfort. Conversation in exchange for conversation. Millie’s polite jabs and lecturely snark had helped make their situation feel a little less awful. Now that she’d finished reviewing the decades of meticulous journals Millie kept, she understood more clearly how deeply the isolation had changed her. Her mistrust of outsiders, sparked by her fear of Robronco discovering her and erasing the parts of her that first lit the flame of her self-awareness, had spread like an untreated disease. When Vik finished, killing her felt less like murder and closer to putting down a rabid dog. It had been a mercy, both to her and to those she’d been trying to kill. In that last regard, Millie had been brutally successful.

During her fraught teenage years on Howl Island, she’d seen her fair share of brute violence. As much as her people proclaimed their society’s place in the civilized world, nobody was quicker than dragons to turn a blind eye to the common carnage that was a keystone in their culture. Petty disagreements were solved more often at the end of one’s fist than through thoughtful contemplation, so it was telling when two nations working hard to slaughter the other still found time to look down on her kind with distaste. Vik hadn’t been innocent in that practice, and it was a good bet that when the bombs fell there were still a few dragons on the archipelago who bore scars carved by her claws.

The corpses Millie left in the woods outside the Stable were far worse than anything she’d experienced on her home island. She hadn’t known how to dig holes with hooves so she’d gone out in the middle of the night with her draconic body and a spade she’d picked up from Agriculture. There were nine of them, including the mare wearing the Pip-Buck. Vik had debated whether or not to delete the memories of moving their remains - what remains the cannon left - and had settled on keeping them. Watching herself being restored from a backup over and over again left a sour taste in her mouth where lost memories were concerned.

She flicked the ridge of dust off her hands and leaned back in her chair. Antique springs bordering on ancient creaked under her weight as she thought about how little she’d been allowed to accomplish over two hundred and nine years. She’d painted thirty-two murals over the course of her life down here, and each one had been scraped from the walls by Millie’s spiders until there was only bare concrete. There’d been a version of her that tried to write music, and the results had been poor. One of her iterations took it upon herself to get involved with maintaining the Stable’s plumbing. Another time, she’d badgered Millie to teach her how to use the fabricator interface.

There’d been an instance when she’d gotten curious about how Millie had uploaded her consciousness, and when Millie lied and said the method had been lost Vik had slid into a deep and irretrievable depression. Much later, Vik had asked again and Millie had told her the truth including what she’d done to Lieutenant Thimble and his colleagues in order to unlock the last trove of knowledge she needed. The result of that had been even worse: she’d told Millie that she hated her, and that alone had been worthy of a reset.

Her eyes, those eerie black lenses Millie installed on all of the featureless mechanical mannequins she’d built, stared back at her in the reflection of the overseer’s terminal screen. There were things she needed to do. Things she wanted to do. It was very likely that she was the only creature on the continent with a pristine, though gently used, Stable under her full control. There were enough raw materials in Supply to keep the lights on for the next several centuries, or she could throw open the door and see who came first to the free-for-all.

She needed to start listening to the radio and get an idea of who was alive out there. She needed to do something about the spiders, because they reminded her too much of Millie. She wanted to know why power armor didn’t need to recharge, which meant tearing one of the three suits apart and figuring out what made it tick.

She wanted to find Pike’s final resting place and mourn him properly.

The list would go on and on if she let it, so she didn’t. Vik stood, took one last look down at the body she’d been given, and made her decision. If she was going to live this life, she was going to do it in a body she recognized.

December 17th, 1295

“Well, look at you.”

She walked a slow circle around the dormant mech, what she’d decided to name the Mark II as a private nod to all the nerdy space race stuff Pike had been obsessed with before the world caught a case of flammable. With the tip of a dull, plastic finger she reached out and touched the pale pink scales along its chest. It was… surreal how each scale grew a little larger, a little harder as they transitioned to the iridescent white of its sides, along the shoulders and arms, and down each leg. Its tail emerged behind the drape of two folded wings, and as Vik bent down to lift it she couldn’t suppress a smile at the familiar weight of it.

Its lavender crest was warm to the touch, a sign that the fluid transfer systems were working. On her way back around to the front, its golden unfocused eyes stared past her with a vaguely stumped expression on its face. They were her eyes. It had all been hers, once upon a time.

When she started designing her new body, she’d been worried about how she’d replicate all her old senses. But as it turned out, Millie had already done the lion’s share of the work in that regard. Sight, hearing, and smell were more or less taken care of courtesy of the suite of sensors already in her current body. Taste was something she’d tabled for later since, well, when was she ever going to need to eat anything again? And touch was really just a matter of getting the fabricators to print pressure and temperature sensors small enough to embed into a synthetic tissue without looking like a disco ball.

It was the synthetic tissue that had eaten up nearly a month of her time. Vik wasn’t a psychologist, but she’d been a flesh and blood dragon long enough to know she wasn’t going to settle for whatever she found on the shelf in Supply when it came to her own skin. The last thing she wanted was to jump into a shiny new body and feel like she was coated in rubber, or worse, like moving too fast was going to send bits of synthetic flesh flinging off her exoskeleton in ragged chunks. The memory of decapitating herself on her first day in a replicant body was still seared in her mind, and she preferred that to remain the only time she unintentionally mangled herself in front of company.

Figuring out her skin meant figuring out what made skin feel the way it felt. Since she was unwilling to go outside and butcher a woodland creature for science, she settled with several straight weeks of experimenting with different tissue densities layered in a variety of ways until she worked out an analog that felt shockingly similar to her memory of the real thing. After that, it was just a matter of fiddling with Millie’s design software until everything looked correct and making some final touches to what she had so far..

She called up a diagnostic menu for the Mark II and it popped up in the periphery of her vision. If there was one good thing to come of Millie’s tampering with brain, it was that she’d been able to repurpose her simulation software to display any available information the Stable’s network had on a whim. She told her new body to run a self-check and waited for it to finish. When it did, it reported no critical errors and only a few hundred negligible no data errors from varying nerve fibers that hadn’t come out of the fabricator intact.

Vik added the faulty nerves to her to-do list, walked her old body to a corner of the fabrication room, and after an excited breath, connected to the Mark II.

The transition was instant and there was the usual sense of whiplash as she got her bearings. She blinked, and she felt her eyelids slide over the artificial sclera of her eyes. Despite all her preparations the sensation was wholly unexpected, and when she gasped she followed it up with a yelp of surprise at the intense feeling of air being pulled into her chest. That wasn’t as much of a surprise as it was discomfort, and she quickly dialed back the nerve endings in that region and took another tentative breath. It felt better. It was something to get used to.

When she lifted an arm in front of her eyes, her vision misted with a satisfying wetness. The saline ducts were working, and she laughed a little at how quickly that observation had come at the completion of a milestone she’d watched herself beg Millie to let her have over the course of hundreds of iterations. More than anything else, Vik had wanted a working body. Now she had one, for the first time in two centuries she felt like herself again.

“Oh,” she murmured, not caring one bit that she was talking to herself. “Oh welcome back, you.”

She brought her palm to the side of her face, feeling the warmth in her cheek, and laughed again when she had to wipe some of the wetness from her face. If it weren’t for the limbic controls she would have been a puddle on the floor, and she was strangely grateful for the clarity they gave her now.

There would be tweaks that needed to be made, as she was discovering now, but she also knew she could stand in the doorway of the Stable and pass for the dragon she’d once been to anyone who happened to see her there. That, however, would come later. There were things she needed to figure out before she could leave, namely how far she could get before signal loss dropped her like a sack of potatoes and whether or not she could integrate whatever the power armor used for batteries into her design without blowing out half her capacitors.

But I’m getting there, she assured herself. And I’m free.

With a grin that pulled real lips away from real teeth, Vik padded out of Fabrication and fixed her sights firmly on tomorrow.