Split Shift

“You’ve GOT to be kidding me!” Octavia roared, aligning her PIAR for the millionth time today. “What do you mean I’m not authorized? We already killed the other one, who the heck says we can’t access the rest of the files?!”

She fired off twice, but Celestia jumped forward to deflect the muzzle up to the ceiling. Even though her shots missed MM1 Cybak, the energy blasts hit the massive, loose pipe in the overhead, shaking the remnants of the flange’s bolts to iron oxide dust. The end sagged dangerously, groaning a sickly, lazy threat.

“Stop!” the princess commanded, her sides hurting fiercely. “We’re cooperating! We’re cooperating, now, so no need for any violence. Right?” Celestia shouted out her question. Octavia angrily complied, stepping back and lowering her weapon. Toru didn’t move, yet Tree Hugger still laid half-sitting in the water beneath a menacing foe, a hopefully non-lethal weapon held to her head.

“I am not kidding, ma’am,” the cyborg replied in monotone, the robot’s grip on his weapon steady. “You and everyone here simply do not have the clearance. I would escort you outside the facility, but I do not think you all intend on leaving peacefully.” The cyborg who called himself MM1 Cybak shifted his aim to Princess Celestia. Without turning to Tree Hugger, he addressed her: “I apologize, madam President. My initial scans did not indicate your identity. I respectfully ask that you vacate the area as lethal force is nearly authorized, and the area will become unsafe for noncombatants.”

His rifle-shaped weapon, the one that shot those balls of electricity, was steady in his superhuman grip. “The three of you are issued a warning: leave now, or risk death or serious bodily harm. Do you yield?”

“We come not in war, but in peace,” Celestia started, using every iota of diplomatic tact she had. It would take a great deal to convince a robot anything, she reasoned. His skin used to be of flesh, but it was solid steel, now. An uncanny replication of man, MM1 Cybak was a far cry from human now. “All we want is to leave. Howev-”

“However, with the nanobots swimming in your bloodstream, you’re a walking time bomb. I know. It’s fucking stupid, and I don’t know why they are set that way. They just are.” MM1 Cybak made an electrical sound that might have been a sigh. “Welcome to the fuckin Navy, where everything is efficient and makes sense. Oh yeah, watch out for idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. You might get splashed a little and turn into a robot. Anyway,” he continued with an annoyed matter-of-factness. The way his completely electronic voice conveyed emotion was as unsettling as it was intriguing to Celestia. Almost as intriguing as an instant knock-out from his weapon. “Leave or die.”

“Wait one sec-”

“Wait one aye,” MM1 replied, cutting off Tree Hugger and lowering his weapon.

Wide-eyed looks were exchanged between the living. Tree Hugger got to her feet, her wet shorts dripping as she did, and inspected MM1 closely. “What’s your name?” she asked, knowing full well as he had previously stated.

“Petty Officer First Class Cybak comma Manuel Foxtrot Period,” he/it replied monotonously.

Tree Hugger put her hands behind her back and cocked her head to the side, looking very closely at every part of the robot. “Mmmhmm, stand at attention.”

He snapped to, his back going erect and his weapon pointing to the wet deck.

“MM1,” she started slowly, inspecting his chin. She flashed Celestia a little smile, biting her tongue. “Did you shave today?”

“Oh my grr...” Octavia grumbled into her palm.

“No, madam president. My hair fell off when my skin turned into a eighty-eight percent titanium alloy.”

“Hmm, very well. Since you seem to be in satisfactory condition, I’ll let you remain at your post without, uh... reprisumand. Now unlock that terminal and let these peeps peep the need-ta-know. Right meow.”

“With all due re-”

“At ease!”

The robot pulled his rifle/launcher back up to his arms, his eyes returning to Celestia, “With all due respect, madam president, I cannot do that, as much as I want to. I-”

“WHO is your superior?” Tree Hugger shouted.

“Madam president, my chain of command dissolved a thousand years ago to just Commander Fore and then the same and acting president above him, Mister Fire Starter.”

“WHO IS YOUR SUPERIOR?!”

Cybak remained frozen for a second, the servos in his metal head audibly whirring. “You, Madam president, and you alone. Commander Fore was killed in action just a few minutes ago. Memory logs updated accordingly.”

“Damn straight, yo. Now, I don’t care about clearance sales or authority or anything. Unlock that computer and log these people as friends. Ambassadors from Equestria, on a quest-ria.”

Cybak dropped his weapon and stiffly strode to the computer, complying as silently as his hydraulics and circuits would allow. Octavia stepped aside as Cybak accessed The terminal. Celestia’s eyes caught Octavia’s for more than a casual glance, but a gentle, sincere, knowing smile broke the apprehensive tension. Celesia appreciated Octavia’s pretty look.

“You all have access,” Cybak murmured in a robotic tone, a trace of defeated contempt possibly humming through with it. Celestia shook off whatever misconception and refocused.

“Thank you,” she said, not knowing if the robot, who was once a man, even cared as he shuffled away. His form looked much less agile than the commander’s, even if the latter’s was mangled. Celestia guessed whatever transformation came of him had a different effect, and was afraid of any potential powers he had hidden.

As Toru sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand, Octavia set to discovering a way to leave. Tree Hugger was absorbed with inspecting the robot, and Celestia found herself with nothing to do. She could either look over Octavia’s shoulder and micromanage and be generally unhelpful, or she could drill the MM1 for info. Celestia snuck a long look over Octavia before descending into the flooded space.

“What’s this, then?” Tree Hugger disdainfully said, inspecting the imperfections in Cybak’s armor. “Did we iron last night? Because I think you just took your uniform, balled it up like, actually balled it up, and threw it in the corner. Is that what happened?”

“Tree, he’s made of metal, how could he ever-”

“Mmm!” she hummed disdainfully. “Look at that. When’s the last time we got a haircut?” Tree Hugger’s mocking inspection dragged on.

“What hair!?”

“That’s most unsatisfactory.” Tree Hugger laughed and walked around an uncaring machine, inspecting his humanoid structure up and down.

“Tree, cut it out. I want to ask him, or it, some questions.” Celestia looked the robot up and down again. Tree Hugger didn’t stop her tirade, but she did remain mostly silent, save for disagreeing hums and clicks.

Cybak, MM1, was likely a pretty average sailor, soldier, whatever. Six foot nothing, the metal man was likely nearly as uncaring as a machine, anyway. The blue, wavy metal along his ribs and forearms may have once been a uniform, and Celestia thought she could see a “U.S. NAVY” on his right pectoral. Otherwise, he looked overall mostly gunmetal black/grey. A wisp of a thought about the gun demon sent a shiver up Celestia’s spine.

“So, MM1 Cybak,” she started, the wet patter of the president’s wild feet and the tak-tak of keys behind her the only noises around, the pipe overhead resting. “Tell me about the nanobots. About yourself, and about this facility. Why is everything in such bad condition?”

“Cuz,” he started, his robot voice somehow conveying some sort of pathetic, lazy, selfish conviction. “No one’s been performing maintenance for a thousand years. That, and there’s been water down here for just as long, thanks to the water table and flooding pumps and the DNL, so the pipes have been corroding. God forbid we use space-rated metal for space-rated tech. If we had spaceship metal for pipes, there would never be any rust.”

Celestia shifted her weight to her other leg, her joints only mildly sore. “DNL?”

“Director of Nanoscale Robotic Laboratories, Commander Fore. You’ve met.”

“Why haven’t you been performing maintenance, then?”

“Who says I haven’t? This space was submerged for the first two-hundred years, but this is one of many spaces. The lounge faucet, the heads, the flooding pump piping, refrigeration, all sorts of systems require maintenance. The commander and I performed scheduled maintenance when we could, but even the cycle schedule became outdated before the water drained.”

Cycle? Some of the information Celestia had no clue or care about. “Okay, so this place is too big for two robots to keep up.”

“We tried. There’s not a whole lot we can do without replacement parts. Ever since people started living upstairs, we can’t exactly go topside to order them.”

“And who says the warehouses are even on the planet?” Octavia chimed in, not looking up from her reading.

“Well, America, not to mention the fucking navy, is kinda ancient. They haven’t been around for generations,” Tree Hugger said, bored of her inspections.

Cybak turned his head at last. “You’re an American, though, madam president.”

“Yeah, like, a tribe. America as you knew it, the kind that went to planets and founded colonies and research labs is long dead, man.”

Cybak stared out at that, his metal eyes spooked the princess as he seemed to think deeply. Celestia, informed but not too surprised, had nothing to add. Once the silence seemed heavy enough, she advanced the conversation.

“Tell me about yourself. What does ‘MM1’ mean? How did you get this way?”

“Machinist Mate First Class Petty Officer, paygrade E-6. That was my rank, or still is, when I was transformed. There’s no advancement when the nation and the world has moved on. Still, I do my job, I work on pipes and valves and all that crap, which is hard to do without tools or parts or technical manuals.” His voice was becoming so human, so colloquial, so disgruntled and emotive, yet it was still coming from a dinky little speaker in his face.

“So what I really care about are the millions of tiny robots in my blood,” Celestia said, steering the conversation again. “How do we turn them off without killing us?”

The cyborg lifted his head. “Good question. I’ve come up with three solutions since I’ve been down here.” He jolted from a statue still, startling Celestia. “First,” he said as he walked, his mechanical gait smooth, yet creepy. “Is to deactivate the electromagnetic inhibitors down here. This would release the robots into the water full scale, and self-replication would eventually take over the entire site, killing any and every person here in a slow, painful death. Very gruesome, the process would either take hours or weeks. I would know.”

“Nope,” Tree Hugger dismissed flatly. “Nope. Just nope, no way. As much as I’d want cyborg friends, I’m not gonna kill and die for them.”

“Second,” he continued, standing near the computer terminal, “and likely less lethal, would be to localize the power of the inhibitors to this area. Topside, the robots would all shut down and kill their hosts. However, the casings of the robots down here would fuse shut, sealing in the isotope and rendering them useless. It may be uncomfortable to urinate for a few days, but you would live easily.”

“So we live, and everyone upstairs dies?” Octavia asked.

“Double nope!” Tree Hugger chimed.

“Affirmative, that’s right-”

“No, that’s wrong, and that’s why we’re not gonna do that! Come on,” Tree Hugger said, “what’s behind door number three?!”

Cybak looked at the terminal he stood near, looking ready to carry out any one of his three options unfeeling, yet eager, as if he had been waiting centuries to do it. “Third and last would be to increase the power even greater, safely disabling the bots in a much wider radius. There’s a problem with this plan, however. The only way to attain that much power would overload the radioisotope generators, flooding the site with irreversible radiation.”

“So we may as well just unsafely deactivate the bots,” Octavia said. “Radiation is radiation.”

Celestia leaned back against the rail, thinking the options over. She contemplated hard, waving off offered suggestions from Toru and Tree Hugger. Octavia seemed just as perplexed.

“We need power to keep the bots on,” she thought out loud. “And that’s coming from where, exactly?”

“Four radioisotope generators, buried deep in the concrete. The half-lives of the isotope in them is four thousand years long, so there is still much power inside, and that’s why they are buried in concrete. Sturdy machines, they have generated a near-steady amount of electricity for their entire lives. However, they do contain much radioactive material.”

Celestia played with her bottom lip as she thought some more. “Can’t overload those,” she murmured. “I assume even if we overload everything, we couldn’t get out before radiation sickness would kill us.”

“Projections predict average survivability for organic life deep down would be thirty to forty seconds. Topside, three to three and a half minutes.”

“Fuck,” Octavia whispered. She idly tapped the monitor casing, staring blankly past her feet.

Silence hung heavy in the dead, wet underground. Celestia tapped the inversal chamber of her weapon idly as she tried to let her mind roam. It was so tough, after everything that had happened. The whole scenario was so damned frustrating. Celestia knew they were close, very close, to their goal, she could feel it. She wished she could just get a hint about what to do.

Toru shuffled to his feet, water dripping off his doughy back. “Why-” he coughed thickly. “Why don’t we just go topside, overload the reactor, and book it?” he asked.

Celestia rolled her eyes, catching Octavia’s again. She let the ensign take this one.“For one-”

“Negative,” MM1 said. “You are mistaken on two accounts, sir. Item one: the power sources are not nuclear reactors. There is no steam cycle, and the radioactive element is not the same element, or even series, as those in a reactor. Item two: neutron penetration of the earthen matter overhead would be too complete. Radiation would terminate or severely damage all organisms within minutes. Even slight exposure could prove excruciatingly fatal.”

The princess eyed the computer terminal between Octavia and the cybernetic mechanic. A question, possibly relevant, rose inside her. “Who wrote all those logs? Who was it that thought up your three ‘solutions’?”

MM1 Cybak crackled a sound like a laugh that made the royal skin crawl. Octavia and Tree Hugger visibly shivered. “Austin did. Commander Fore, formally, formerly. He was dead right about the nanobots abilities, too. Only problem is that they’re made to kill, not heal. They could, though. They sure as shit could. He even got some wizards to write a program a while back to make them heal, but you already got to know that.”

“So why do they kill if they’re unpowered?!” Tree Hugger shouted. “That’s so DUMB! Why bother having the stupid things if they just kill the host if they’re not powered?”

“Tree Hugger,” Octavia started. “These things were made to kill things. OPERATOR, since he called himself that, changed them.”

“Correction: he didn’t do anything. An enlisted member reprogrammed them over a thousand years ago, in direct conflict with standing orders.”

“Right,” Octavia said, steering the topic back to the forward direction. “So if we overload them, they’re useless, but harmless. If we don’t power them, they kill, we got that. How can we keep everyone alive and leave?”

Celestia looked down to her weapon again, a spark of inspiration taking her. “So,” she said, perking up a little. “What if we just carry an electromagnet with us? Keep the bots powered, keep them working.”

“How would we power the magnet?” Tree Hugger asked.

The princess raised her rifle up, a spark of inspiration flashing across Octavia’s shining smile. “Ensign, do you know how radioisotope generators work?”

Octavia scoffed. “Hot rock make piston go, piston go make spark spark. Learned that in middle school, come on.”

“So,” Celestia said, getting the exact response she had wanted. “If it’s so simple, think you can adapt a modified Sterling Generator using the PIAR’s inversal chamber as the hot end?”

A look of confusion ran just under the surface of Toru’s calm, slothish demeanor, but Octavia understood, contemplating the methods. “But Princess,” she started, crossing her arms across her stomach. “Wouldn’t the temperature be way too high? And the cold end would be at ambient temperature, unless we contain it. And still-”

“The hottest part is inside the weapon. On the outside,” Celestia said as she tapped the chamber. “It’s like a warm blanket fresh out of the dryer. Ther-”

“Therefore, we could connect the muzzle to the hot end, then half-cock the trigger to heat it up, we could get as much energy as we would need at a reasonable temperature!”

“Right,” Celestia said, her temples already aching from not only the memory of a hostage captain’s flesh melting, but also trying to come up with a way to build such a device. “Think you could make it?”

Octavia held up her weapon and inspected it. “If we scrapped this, I’m sure I could.”

“Oooh! I have no clue at all what you’re talking about, but we got tons of tools and stuff upstairs!” Tree Hugger said.

Celestia sighed a long sigh. “We’ll be down a gun, but that’s perfectly okay. Make it so.”