The End Of All Known Land
Also heads up: decided to just get all the tags posted here to save myself some time formatting. Any additional warnings for the remaining chapters will be posted here as well.
Chapter 10: Integrated Future
Primaries: check. Secondaries: Check. Coverts: check.
V1's hands trail down the soft expanse of Gabriel's transparent wings, thrown into perfect clarity by their upscaled visual settings. Each feather has been carefully smoothed back into place, not a speck of bloodfuel nor a mote of sand to be found in the countless vanes or barbs.
Even with this in mind, their digits continue to linger in his downy lesser-coverts just a moment longer, relishing in the soft texture of his outer wings. There's a not-quite-there prickling they can pick up faintly in their sensors whenever they brush along the runes that frame them.
"They were more ceremonious than anything, for Heaven's highest castes." Gabriel had once explained, when prompted one idle winter day. "If I were to give you the closest possible translation, it would simply be all my former titles."
"'Archangel Gabriel," He had started with the left wing, moving from the upper row of symbols down counterclockwise. "Righteous Hand of The Father, Judge of Hell, and Warden of The Inferno'. Grand denominations that I was so proud to carry."
That was years ago, now; buried under countless halcyon days of touch and violence and lust and blood. Gabriel has long-since bequeathed assistance with the upkeep of these secondary appendages to their meticulous tenacity, but after his accidental confession on the resort beach, it's become something of an after-spar ritual. One that V1 is more than happy to indulge in.
D-O-N-E, V1 spells into Gabriel's shoulder-blade with an easy, caressing touch. But regardless of the feather-light pressure, they still sense him start slightly upon tracing the first letter. Water kicks up around his body with a gentle splash, disturbing both the mirror-like surface of the courtyard pond and the easy silence of this long-abandoned celestial body. Then the archangel relaxes, as if remembering where he is, pulled back from the recesses of thought.
"Oh." Gabriel says, in a tone softer and clearer than the starlight above. No Earth nor shining sun can be seen tonight; just the endless darkness of the Universe, the glimmering celestial bodies that occupy its void, and both their luminescent wings. "Thank you, V1."
The warmachine pushes their fans into a brief, plaintive whirr as they spell out the customary response for gratitude along the small of his back.
Y-O-U-'-R-E W-E-L-C-O-M-E
When they lift their hands away from his radiant wings, the one to their right lifts invitingly. V1 slips beneath its expanse, and into the pool where he lounges with a loud splash, shattering the quiet of the perpetual lunar evening yet again. Even as they settle in his lap, perched upon the submerged benches along the stone boundaries of the pond, the archangel still towers an entire half-meter higher than them. The perfect height for his attentive hands to begin searching for the gaps of their plating, and then digging beneath V1's taut wires when they are found.
Dried blood and gore begins to flake away into the clear waters, most of which once belonged to Gabriel's body. His left hand trails to the shoulder junction of their Knuckleblaster, and a thin stream of brilliantly orange sand trickles down. Their reward center hums pleasantly in answer every instance of pressure upon their servos as he dutifully rinses debris from their joints.
It isn't as though they hadn't partaken in cleaning themselves before; bits of viscera would inevitably build up in their joints during their battles, hindering their movement and speed. But those days of simply picking away at their body are long behind them. Now, they lavish in the archangel's thorough touches, scrubbing grime and filth from the base of their thin neck to the bulk of their shoulders. He moves down each arm individually, unafraid of the talons that have both split him apart and given him concussions.
Just as they've come to know every inch of the archangel's body, so has he familiarized himself with every vein and cable they have. The warmachine all but melts into the attention, listening to the subtle splash of water as it's poured onto their chassis intermittently. Coupled with the steady beat of his heart, V1 is lulled into a comfortable standby.
As this timeless moment in a starry courtyard pool stretches on in languid quietude, V1 ruminates on the footage captured throughout the day.
It starts with a reluctant awakening before the sunrise in a decrepit, musty hotel room at Gabriel's persistence. He had ushered them outside to watch their bright star rise above the horizon and chase away the night, igniting the red-rock canyons of the western continents with flameless fire. The footage of a waxing morning cuts away to the high-resolution photos they took, then to another video file of the pair of them exploring a nearby visitor center.
They skim through clips of holographic flickers of now-extinct flora and fauna once dwelling in those rocky chasms, peruse images of metallic pins labeled "Canyonlands" and fading t-shirts in untouched rows by size. Gabriel had cut a hole in the back of one to fit their cumbersome wings. V1 takes pause on a snapshot they took of themselves in a hastily-wiped mirror, their frame draped with navy-blue fabric while the archangel looms over them in the background. The very back of the store, far enough from the torn open front of the ruined gift shop, had yielded a multitude of dusty books, ones not yet succumbed to the relentless march of time itself.
Both had opted to conclude the day with an exhilarating spar in the heart of the designated park borders. Gabriel had ultimately chased them into one of its narrower canyons, the crack of bullets and exploding rockets kicking up a deafening racket all about them. Thin spires of sandstone shattered beneath his brute strength, and their missed railcannon shots left craters in those striped slabs of rock. But in spite of all their wall-jumping and rocket-riding, the archangel had proven, once again, that he remains superior in open air combat.
He had decisively pinned them in the shadowed arroyo running along its bottom, and then rode them into the dried riverbed, yanking at every wire and cable his greedy hands could reach. By the time either of them had the sense to peel themselves apart, blood and sand caked upon their bodies, the moon could be seen in the coming twilight. From the surface of their world, it was nothing but a scratch-thin crescent against the darkening skies.
All evidence of that raging, harrowing battle is being washed away by the waters of these lunar ruins: fuel, filth, the lingering aches. To have him tearing out their wires in delicious torment in one moment, and then reverently performing much-desired maintenance like this in the next... surely even all the glorious abundances of his home in Heaven couldn't ever compare.
"Done." Gabriel murmurs, stirring them from the gentle tides of short-term memory. But even as his fingers slip from the joints of their hips, an arm lingers around their waist. V1 contents themselves with the firm warmth of his bulk beneath their back, and remains where they are.
The archangel's other hand slips into the loose fingers of their Feedbacker, tightening with a reflexive, easy squeeze from the both of them. A silent breath puffs out against their curve of their optic helm, followed by the slow scrape of holy steel against man-made alloys.
"THANKS." V1 spells, belatedly so. Gabriel hums happily in answer.
"You're welcome, my love."
The affectionate moniker lights up their reward center further with a heady rush of electric signals, just like it had the first time he called them that. It's a borderline possessive designation, and yet centered entirely around who they are to him, now. Just the same, there are a number of nouns that V1 has found fitting for their archangel: paramour, partner, boyfriend, to name a few.
More often than not, they settled simply for 'lover'.
They still spar viciously, they still explore the ruins of the Earth together, they still watch Old World movies from V1's mental library, they still talk about everything and nothing at all. But each morning, V1 wakes up in his arms; they are given casual touches throughout the day and unseen kisses in the black of night. Gabriel holds them like he does now, and reminds them, at least once every day, just how much he loves them.
It's funny how casual friendship nor intense rivalry hadn't ended at all that day; it's simply... gained a new facet to it.
The water stills just enough to allow for reflection of the cosmos above. There are so many more stars in the sky here than at the resort ruins, let alone within the limits of a city stained with neon. Gabriel's first home lies somewhere among them; a beautiful city of marble and gold in that swirl of stardust, visible no matter where the surface of the moon faces. Only the most holy of human souls had been permitted beyond those borders into God's first kingdom.
They wonder if they'll ever get to see that place, in these coming years. But for right now, they'll have to settle for word-of-mouth, and nightly glimpses of its distant glory.
V1 snaps a photo of the starry surface, just before it is disturbed again by a content whirr of their fans, cool water seeping into their system and stabilizing their temperature. But as V1 shoots the file off into their long-term memory, their attention is drawn to a similar, yet heavier sigh, drifting through the soft shadows that swathe them.
They glance farther down the stilling surface of the pool until it reaches Gabriel's reflection. His helmeted gaze is tilted up, fixed upon the remainder of the Heavens. Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun that houses the Sixth Sphere, is visible from here. A mere mote of light among the faraway suns, shining like a beacon rather than twinkling merrily. He had taught them how to identify the planets from the stars, told them about the rich, beautiful estates that cover its surface. No doubt his former home has been on his mind as well this silent night.
Their Whiplash slips from beneath the pond's surface, and places a single finger upon the arm adjacent to it. V1 does not spell their question yet, but they know they have Gabriel's attention already by the way his breath stills momentarily. They accent their unspoken prompt with a nonchalant glance upwards, neither pressing nor casual. His head does not angle down to face him, but V1 knows full well that he's directed a fraction of his many unseeable eyes down at them.
For a second, the two of them simply look at each other in contemplative quietude. One perhaps weighing the need for catharsis, while his other half runs a brief simulation on outright dropping their proposed conversation topic.
"There are magnificent bathhouses in the Eighth Sphere," he says, tone muted; it always is whenever this particular topic is brought up. "Pools that are the perfect temperature to soak in for hours. There were all manner of aromatic oils to add to the water, and the good company of my brethren. It was the perfect end to a long day of tackling work orders from one of the Dominions, or after many weeks in Hell."
He releases another longing sigh, more audible than the first, and V1 snags briefly on this revelation. That was all that he'd been thinking of? Then again, the cold waters of an abandoned moon are far preferable to a machine than heated pools. Cooling their body like this allowed for faster data processing and better background maintenance.
A quick internal search reminds them that flesh and blood take better to warmer temperatures for that than metal and circuits do, judging by how often their developers had moaned for a good soak in a hot bath during the late hours at the lab. Gabriel likely isn't expecting an answer, but they formulate one anyway.
I W-O-U-L-D L-I-K-E T-O S-E-E T-H-A-T S-O-M-E-D-A-Y, they trace, in no particular hurry.
It's a neutral enough answer. Gabriel had once told them, rather sternly at the time, that even a handful of decades is not a very long time for one of God's Angels. Seventeen years is quite likely within those parameters.
But what's the rush? After all, there still remains so much of the world to see and explore and discover. And they have as much time as they'll ever need to do it. V1 has still barely scratched the surface of everything available to them: ruins, mountains, coasts and deserts.
(It's mind-boggling, sometimes, to think of just how much more is out there to see.)
Gabriel seems to accept their proposal as a satisfactory one, his other arm coming up to wrap around them securely.
"Maybe one day." He murmurs, the plane of his chest rumbling against their back; V1 deems that the end of that conversation, and its subject matter, for the time being. Just as well, they are due home soon to a bed of soft blankets and sheets, and maybe one more romp before sleep thesm for the evening.
Spring is upon them in full. Gabriel will likely spend most of daylight hours with his knees in the dirt; they've already concocted plans for tomorrow as a result. So for now, V1 simply relishes in his familiar touch and undivided attention, and logs away the idea for another time.
One day. Not now, but maybe one day.
Whenever the warm winds of maytime return, Gabriel's mornings typically start at the first light of dawn.
All his eyes pry themselves open, and he is greeted by the shadowed corner of the apartment bedroom. Golden orange light leaks into the room in a thin slit, while a single, tiny light blinks steadily through the darkness just below. No doubt one of V1's latest salvage projects in its standby mode. It sits atop the bulk of their cluttered work desk, moved here a number of years ago. And if he squints, he can make out the chipped paint just behind it, when V1 had originally pushed him into its edge with every intent of taking him bent over its surface.
The warmachine in question hums and ticks, faintly so, against his back. V1 does not usually wake until an hour or so after the sun has risen, regardless of season. The bed frame creaks audibly as he finally frees himself of their grasp, but his partner does not stir. That it hasn't yet snapped in half beneath the stress of their frequent copulations is a miracle in itself.
The aging wood falls silent as Gabriel climbs from off the mattress and onto his feet, making his way to the dresser sitting parallel to the foot of the bed. An array of chitons sit within the top drawer, all recently washed, but not without a fair amount of faded stains, both of blood and soil. Scattered atop are the various brooches he's collected throughout their explorations of the ruins, his sewing kit, and a waxy-leafed lily that's taken a bit too enthusiastically to the lower lightning conditions. He'll have to cut it back sooner rather than later.
Once he's dressed for the day, Gabriel turns his attention to the slumbering machine half-buried beneath the assortment of blankets and pillows accumulated there. No light emits from their form, no fans blow beneath their chassis, but as he steps around to V1's side of the bed, he can hear all those little mechanical murmurs that lull him to sleep at night.
Gabriel gently, gently sets the weight of one hand just by their darkened, shuttered optic, leaning over their thin frame. And with the other, he lifts his helm up and over his chin, just enough to expose his mouth. He dips low, and presses his lips to the smooth, warm steel of their conical head. He swears he hears their internal pumps thrum just a little harder as his mouth closes and pulls away with a near-silent smeck.
The archangel smiles down at them, tugs his helmet back into place, and leaves V1 to whatever dreams a machine can conjure.
Stepping out from their living room door and out into the fading glow of washed-out neons, Gabriel lets the chill of a crispy-cool breeze roll over his bare arms. The night prior had been cloudy, falsely promising a spell of rain. Patches of blue have begun to poke through the gray mass, framed with the natural pinkish-orange of a swift sunrise. Humidity hangs heavy in the air despite the lack of precipitation, and a layer of mist clings to the verdant stretch just below the balcony. It's accompanied by the faint, delicate scent of jasmine
It is this sight alone that makes him linger on the patio, leaning against the vine-covered railing for just a few moments more, and drinking in the lush wall of greenery snaking up the opposite building. Ivy and climbing bellflowers, patches of purple amidst the emerald leaves, all but overtake the washed-out plaster. Just below, where once was only acrylic and cement, the soil is host to a wealth of spring blooms in every color imaginable. Grass and clover grow alongside patches of thyme and stubborn clusters of stonecrop. This sprawling stretch of life rolls all the way to the next intersection and around the corners, down broken streets and over decaying buildings and well out of his sight.
Most of the flora thriving in this city now grow wild, bolstered by steady seasons of sun and rain. Groundcover can be found all over the city now, wherever there is open soil. Shrubs and bushes planted a decade ago are beginning to grow bigger than the ruined hovercars, obscuring their rain-rusted frames behind thick foliage. The roots of trees, grown from both seed and cutting, are breaking up concrete foundations of their own accord, and even beginning to burrow beneath the plastic roads.
Contrary to his vigilant care at the start of his gardening endeavors, there are now only a few tasks that require Gabriel's daily attention, and those are usually finished not long after the sun hits its zenith this time of year.
The archangel vaults over the patio railing, and floats down to the gardens. Morning mists have left dewdrops clinging to every blade of grass, glistening like diamonds in the gathering morning light. He makes his way over to the third patch down from their patio, right where he left off the day before their trip.
Gabriel drops to his knees, and begins plucking the shoots from the earth, their shallow roots clumped with dirt. The motions, as always, are repetitive and soothing, bolstered by years and years of practice. His thoughts stray away from the task at hand as a result, to other things that would inevitably occupy his day.
The lilac bushes just up the street need pruning before their flowering period begins, and yet more oak saplings are ready to be planted in the northern outskirts of the city. A forest once grew wild there before mankind flattened it in their perpetual war; the soil might host yet another under a watchful eye and the usual monsoon rains. Or he can simply fetch more waterwort for the second lake to sprout up in recent years, the one in the swiftly-rejuvenating fields to the south.
(Or he could finally swallow his fears and sneak into the vast estates of the Sixth Sphere, where trout, dragonflies, and all manner of things that thrive on the phytoplanktons populating its lakes could surely be found. He wouldn't even have to go near the sprawling mansions that housed the souls of Mankind's benevolent leaders, nor see if they even still stood.)
Gabriel catches his hand just as it's about to tug a brilliantly red poppy from the soil by its roots. He's reached the end of the bed at the intersection of the street, where mulch becomes grass, stretching across to the other block, and clumps of lantanas have almost violently propagated on their own from seed.
Lantana, that butterflies and bees so love, and he knows exactly where they tend to flock and swarm in the Seventh Sphere-
He shakes his head vigorously, but not before releasing the stem of the poor flower. Seventeen years is not a long time for an Angel; for any Angel. His betrayal against The Council is likely still fresh on the minds of the masses. He must keep reminding himself that, even as his options for rejuvenating the planet's biomes are beginning to grow thin.
Restoration will inevitably taper off into cyclical care. As rich as the First Sphere is in flora, this planet had been nothing short of a wonder of biodiversity throughout its entire existence. The habitat of a small moon is but a fraction of its once-vast ecosystems both macro and micro. He's brought at least one of every plant available from its perpetually stable climate already to grow upon this sun-warmed surface.
The archangel lets out a long, near-silent sigh, and shifts his weight from one knee to the other as he rises to his feet. In his heart, Gabriel knows that if he's going to press on with this long-term task, a visit to the higher Spheres of Heaven is in order. Its native flora may pale in comparison to the fascinating varieties that had adapted to this mortal world, locked in the flow of time and change, but they would still lend greatly towards environmental rejuvenation. Nevermind what more complex creatures, like insects and fish and maybe even someday birds, could do to bolster this primitive cycle of life.
That day may come, but it certainly won't be anytime soon. Gabriel puts this daunting next step out of mind, and turns his attention to the lantana's once again. They'll need cutting back before they crowd over into the lavender.
As his pruning efforts start to reach where the dahlia's grow, planted the winter prior, his keen hearing picks up the muffled thud of metal feet colliding with loamy earth. A smile tugs at the edges of his mouth when warm metal and firm silicone presses all along his back in a swift slump. Four different arms wrap around his body and vibrate with a happy hum.
"Good morning." His head tilts, and the faint scrape of steel against steel cuts through the rustling of leaves as he rubs his helm down the length of their own. All his lingering worries fall away at once, quieted by his lover's presence. A soft whirr puffs out warm air from below their plating, rolling over his scarred skin and well-worn chiton. "You're up early."
Green and gray fingers slip into view to his right, and he pauses in the midst of snipping away an especially long stem covered in tiny red flowers.
"WANTED A HEAD START TODAY."
"How unusually industrious of you, V1." He can't help but tease, and closes the blades of his shears around the stem. Gravity's pull upon the newly cut flower is interrupted by their Knuckleblaster, catching it mid-fall between deft talons. "I thought you were going to take my head off during yesterday's attempt at rousing you before sunrise."
Gabriel senses the pinch coming before their Feedbacker's fingers briefly dig into the meat of his hip. Even as he reflexively jolts from the momentary sting, V1 remains entirely unmotivated to remove themselves from his back just yet; in fact, they just seem to cling tighter.
"ALL I DID WAS KICK YOU," They huff as they spell out their retort, casually twirling the lantana stem between their claws. "DRAMA QUEEN."
"Insufferable Machine." For all his posturing, Gabriel can't keep the laugh out of his voice. Unexpectedly, talons scrape along his laurels, something settles there, and then the warmth of their weight lifts away entirely. When he reaches up curiously, soil-damp fingers brush along tiny clusters of blossoms, tucked carefully among the golden steel leaves encircling his helm.
Affection seizes his lungs so tightly he swears it makes his heart stutter. Unseen lips stretch into a giddy smile, turning around just in time to catch their parting words as they saunter across the grass.
"BE BACK LATER." They say with a flirty tilt to their helm, before they withdraw their rocket launcher from its designated wing.
"Enjoy your day, V1!" He calls after them, projecting his voice to be heard over the echoing crack of a launching Freezeframe rocket. They become a blur of blue, one that could shame the shallow, crystal-clear seas of Europa. In record time, the machine soars around the northern street corner and disappears from sight.
A gleeful giggle bubbles up and escapes unbidden as he touches along the flower they decorated his helmet with. Heat flushes down from his neck to his chest, and lingers even as he turns his attention back to his flowerbeds.
(He knows he's not ready to go back, but he's beginning to think he one day will be.)
In hindsight, it had only been a matter of when this would have finally happened. All the time they've ever needed to do whatever they want, whenever they want to, and all the fuel they could ever want to do it. Naturally, that it came to pass so soon shouldn't come as a surprise to them, but it does anyway.
Seventeen years since their tentative emergence into this new life, and V1 has explored just about every available corner of this city.
Building interiors full of silent history solidified within their memory banks, shops emptied of their post-mortem treasures, street corners entirely mapped and the adjacent artificial landmarks recorded for navigational purposes. Sure, many of those days had been spent with Gabriel--fighting, fucking, talking, loving--but that had only prolonged the inevitable outcome of simply running out of new places to explore here, in their home city. The furthermost western suburban outskirts are now all that remain to be discovered.
V1 leaves behind the high rises and office complexes, and Mankind's structures shrink down in size to humble houses, sprawled in neat, orderly rows along acrylic roads still untouched by Gabriel's horticulture endeavors. These crumbling neighborhoods are cradled with new growth regardless, blanketing the blackened husks of trees and once-dead front lawns. Greenery pokes through the cracks in cement and from the sun-bleached ribcages of man and machine alike.
Upon arriving at their designated starting point, a broken gate into a once-walled-off community, V1 considers their options. They could begin with a sweep of the homes within the ruined concrete borders, or they could check out the smaller residential buildings outside, and work their way up each street in a grid pattern. Their wings twitch in thought as they regard the density of scorched houses and corpses here, versus the areas beyond its boundaries.
V1's head swivels a hundred-and-eighty degrees to look back towards the more-intact, idyllic looking homes, and catches a glimpse of flickering holos within its darkened confines. In one easy decision and with an even easier jump, they bound across the street and land right on the doorstep. A hollow thud rattles the wooden planks beneath their feet, followed by a near silent creak as they nudge open the door, and step into the dusty interior. There's little sign of struggle here, not like the gated-area just across the plastic road. Homes like this aren't rare throughout the city, but even during the beginning of their extinction, Mankind still valued their possessions over their lives. More often than not, they had been destroyed with them when a hungry machine finally caught up to those fleeing humans. Evidence of which is apparent in the roads leading out of here, where hovercars and cadavers alike lie charred on the elevated polymer highways.
V1 whirrs curiously to themselves as they enter the lifeless structure, starting their sweep with the open kitchen to the right. The flickering that had caught their attention turns out to be a holopad in idle mode, still plugged into its solar charger on the kitchen counter. While most of its data is corrupted, the interior parts are likely in better shape than those they've found on corpses. That goes right into their satchel along with the cable. The warmachine scours each cabinet, finding only food-related apparatuses and dishware, before turning their attention to the living room.
Where there would normally be a widescreen holo projector on the main console table opposite the couches, there is just an uneven ring of dust. If they could snort, they would. Many fleeing humans prioritized that item in particular, they've found. The remote for it remains, along with the modem for the wifi, But what really catches their attention is the thick, black rectangle, on the shelf just below.
A small cloud of filth particles kick up in the wake of dropping to their knees on the carpet, carefully pulling the plastic mass from its designated spot. They can hear the sound of something in the nearby corner scrap against the plaster wall as the attached cables are tugged.
V1 absently logs a quick mental note to investigate that next, hardly daring to believe what they've found. It's a home theater amplifier. The model is older than the others they've found over the years, but unlike those more advanced in support, this one remains intact. And if this had gone untouched by the chaos of the occupants fleeing their home, then surely...
V1 almost knocks over a floor lamp in their haste to get to the corner, and then they do end up toppling it when their wings flare with delight.
The muffled din of shattering glass goes entirely ignored as they examine the subwoofer in the glow of their optic light. A thick layer of grime covers every inch of it, and however many other speakers are placed about the house are very likely to be in a similar state. But with careful disassembly, cleaning, reassembly, and jury-rigging it to the solar panels they've already scavenged, they could have a working sound system before the end of the month.
Finally, an opportunity to show Gabriel everything they've been working on.
The warmachine is gripped with an urge to huff at the indifferent humor of this uncaring universe. Of course they would locate larger, and likely-functioning, electronics in the very last place they look.
No matter; it's in their grasp now. V1 heads back to their first discovery to carefully disconnect the amplifier from the mess of cables. After slipping its rectangular frame into their bag, the warmachine goes about the rest of the house locating the other pieces. There's at least one speaker in the corner of every room, and the receiver sits on a shelf just below where the amplifier once was. V1 logs each location, and snags the remote from its spot.
But before they leave, something else catches their attention, albeit briefly.
Two artsy-looking bookcases full of odds and ends sit against the back wall, just behind the lengthy couches. No books decorate its shelves, but amidst all the keepsakes and framed, faded photographs, there's a small marble statue. One that strikes them with familiarity the moment they behold the long, curly hair, ornately carved wings, and a very delicate-looking spear in hand. A weapon that resembled the weapons their archangel partner occasionally slings at them in the heat of combat.
Gabriel speaks of his work with the souls condemned to Hell sparingly, and rarely beyond what they already know of him. But mortals, ones still living at the time this small effigy was manufactured, most certainly regarded him as a Saint. Albeit, the depictions of him in the Inferno capture his likeness far more accurately than this artistic rendition.
There's a small button on the plastic base the statue rests on. They're half-expecting nothing to happen upon pressing it, yet it's still a pleasant surprise to see tiny lights, sunken into the plastic basin, behind to glow and shimmer with shifting colors. The likelihood of Gabriel sharing more of the stories regarding his prior lifetime might increase in statistical odds if they showed this to him, particularly the reasoning behind this human guise.
Before they move to switch it off and stick it in their satchel, V1 waits for the gradients to bleed into blue and gold. There's a bit of green with it when they finally get their desired combination, but it feels appropriate regardless. As soon as their desired colors stain the dusty marble, V1's internal optic shutters snap, and the moment is eternalized. They reach for the statue as they move the picture to a designated folder-
And freeze as a flashing pop-up obscures their vision, one they've never seen before. As they read the text, all the hot blood in their plastic veins suddenly seems to run impossibly ice-cold.
WARNING: HARD MEMORY STORAGE SPACE AT 99% CAPACITY
Daylilies only bloom once, from sunrise to sunset, before their petals close and wither away in the quiet of night. Snipping away their shriveled blossoms allows for more to grow in their place, but the roots of this brief, beautiful flower still need frequent watering.
Water droplets roll off the colorful petals: brilliant yellows as warm as the sun, gentle pinks patterned with white streaks, and bloody reds rising high above their peers. These are the only varieties of this particular species found on the moon. Royal purples and gentle shades of peach grow along the walkways and in the courtyards of the Third Sphere, and wouldn't it be nice if he could include proud gladiolus over by the underground garage?
Gabriel isn't sure why Heaven has been on his mind as of late, but he's more grateful than ever to have these thoughts scattered by the racket of an exploding rocket, not two blocks from here. The archangel doesn't yet turn away from the flowerbed, instead opting to empty his watering can before turning to face where his lover is returning from.
In the seconds he has before they throw themselves around the corner of the northern block, it occurs to him that it is unusually early in the day to be seeing them again; several hours earlier, in fact. So when V1 practically throws themselves around the corner, flying over the stretches of greenery painstakingly grown from poisoned earth, Gabriel knows right away that something is wrong.
He, rather irrationally, immediately assumes the worst: that other angels had arrived on the Earth searching for its disgraced champion. But just as he admonishes himself for that, V1 is upon him in an armful of shuddering, agitated steel and four flailing arms.
"What's wrong--V1, are you alright?!" Then the many years of reading V1's rapidfire hand-spelling kick-in, overriding his surge of absurd fear with confusion. "'Almost out of'--what?"
Their hands shake so badly he can't make out the last few words. A cursory glance as he sets them down upon the grass reveals that they have plenty of blood in their exposed tubing. "You're not low on fuel--"
He's interrupted by a violent shake of their head and their arms. His keen hearing picks out the brief uptick of all their internal mechanisms shuddering in their chassis, before it stills with an audible whirr of their fans, like a deep breath to steady oneself. V1's hands come up once again, trembling rather than outright shaking, and they finally begin to spell out the reason behind this sudden onset of terror.
"I'M ALMOST OUT OF LONG TERM MEMORY STORAGE."
"'Long-term memory'?" All his eyes blink, before going wide beneath his helm. They had used that term before. It's where they keep all the digital photos and footage recorded throughout their life, before, during, and after Hell. It had a limit? "Wait, what happens when you run out?"
"FILE CORRUPTION. SYSTEM WIDE ERRORS. INABILITY TO STORE NEW MEMORIES." They stop spelling for a brief moment, and the shaking resurges. "POSSIBILITY OF LOSING ALL DATA IF A CRASH OCCURS."
He hasn't seen them like this since the Inferno had almost caved in atop them both. Optic wide open and bright, shivering that overtakes their entire frame, positively frightened at the looming prospect of doom hanging over them once more. It's almost enough to make Gabriel panic right along with them, just like it had when the Empyrean went dark, and they had all been abandoned to the uncaring cosmos-
It's this thought that causes an old instinct to kick in, one that had carried him through hundreds of years of uncertainty and doubt. Gabriel straightens, sets his shoulders, and pushes it all to the back of his mind to be confronted later. Nothing will be done about this if the both of them descend into inconsolable states of fear.
V1, meanwhile, is trying to spell something else out, but they keep starting and stopping their sentences over and over.
"I DIDN'T THINK THIS WOULD-" Stop, start again. "NEVER HAD TO DEAL WITH-" They don't seem to notice Gabriel gathering them up in his arms. "I WASN'T DESIGNED TO-"
"V1, calm down," He interjects, softly but firmly. It's unsettlingly grounding to employ such a tone again, seeped in an authority he no longer holds but must take on now for both their sakes. "If we're going to fix this, I need you to explain what's happening to you more thoroughly in detail."
Stars, that look of terror they direct at him sets him off in all the wrong ways. But his words have their intended effect, and are followed with a swift, if not unsteady, nod of agreement. Three of their hands clutch at him with frightened vigor, while the fourth slips into his line of vision.
"OK." They say with quivering fingers. And with that, he lifts from the ground with a single pump of his wings, and flies them back to their apartment.
The journey is less than twenty seconds. By the time he's cut across the complex rooftop and touches down before the patio doors of their flora-filled living room, their quaking has lessened significantly. The holocube sits in its designated spot on the coffee table, between a vase full of cut tulips, and a small fern propagated from that first one down in the cavernous parking garage. It's still connected to a solar charger, blinking idly to indicate a full battery. A flick of his fingers is enough to disconnect it before he guides them both to sit upon the well-worn couch.
Gabriel slips the device into their hands as his arm slips around their waist comfortingly. The warmachine mistakenly tries to plug it into themselves the wrong way twice over before it finally clicks into their hidden port. No sooner does it flare to life does photographed text fly across the projected screen. They've hardly needed to communicate this way since V1 had mastered the hand alphabet, but it does the job all the same.
"A machine's internal data capacity is finite by design. To process and store new data, I will eventually need to delete old files to make room for more. It wouldn't just encompass the memories of my existence, it would also include my battle data, text files from books I've scanned and read, video and audio clips. All that I truly need is my source code to function, and yet--"
The text stops again, and there's a moment of silence as Gabriel absorbs their explanation, before they continue.
"In hindsight, I should have realized that this would eventually happen. As long as I have fuel, I can retain all data-related processors in working condition. But digital memory always has its limits, regardless of routine system maintenance."
They finish with a helpless little shrug.
"If I went through with purging any of that data, would I even still be myself?"
The holos pause on that last word, letting the finality of this fate sink in. What a terrible quandary; to either have holes in their memory, or risk losing everything, eventually. Gabriel himself does not remember every single moment of his long, long life, but he has never had to contend with his stream of consciousness coming to a halt through physical limitations. He can't imagine it at all.
"What can--" He swallows, trying to hide the oncoming tremor in his tone. "What can we do? How long before that comes to pass?"
O-N-E M-O-N-T-H, V1 writes into his thigh, and Gabriel can't help the shocked gasp that erupts from him. They continue through the holocube, like they hadn't wanted to see the words of that last fact for themselves. "I will need data expansion parts; a memory chip upgrade added onto my central processor."
He wracks his brain for something that could possibly help. The remains of humanity's technology has always been their area of expertise as opposed to his vast horticultural knowledge. Anything he himself had ever come across had rarely been untouched by the period of chaos that had engulfed their civilization following its zenith. He thinks about the ruined computer processors, fading neon lights, the countless metal carcasses that littered the world...
... But not all of them had been destroyed in battle.
"Would one from a fellow machine work?"
It certainly would, particularly one that had simply expired from a lack of fuel rather than a terrible wound.
The streetcleaner Gabriel brings them too, a mere forty-five second journey from their apartment, is merely encased in rust from the rhythmic rise and fall of seasonal humidity. No broken limbs, no sign of a skirmish nor an ambush. This machine, curled up in the corner of this sunlit office, had simply run out of time, like they are about to-
V1 pushes that line of thinking away with a sharp huff of their fans, striding past where Gabriel stands beside the entryway to the office, and across the dusty carpet to disturb this particular corpse. They drop to their knees, and immediately get to work.
A rough tug of their Knuckleblaster is all it takes to rip its bulky chestplate off. Tucked among the shriveled organs and empty tubes is the thin but entirely intact casing of its mechanical brain. This they are much more careful in prying open, unwilling to even risk scratching the delicate parts potentially encased within.
"Well?" Gabriel inquires anxiously somewhere over their shoulder, after the sound of it popping open cuts through the heavy silence. This goes ignored in favor of their rapidfire scanning of the exposed circuitry, identifying the needed piece within seconds of searching for it.
V1's Feedbacker fingers carefully pry at the delicate microchip, and it swiftly comes free from where it's attached to a processor socket with a firm but calculated tug. They hold it to the thin sunlight, seeping in through the foggy back windows.
It's in surprisingly excellent condition. Entirely intact, and virtually untouched by the passage of time and weather. But they won't know how much more time they'll buy themselves until they install the tiny semiconductor.
"GOT IT." They report with the Whiplash, and catch Gabriel's audible sigh of relief.
V1 pivots their head backwards to face the archangel, lingering by the office entryway just behind them. He looks all the world like a soldier awaiting orders, a comparison exacerbated by the fact that he'd switched out his dirtied chiton for his armor before bringing them here.
(The lantana blossom they'd crowned his laurels with earlier remains, and the sight of it, illogically so, bolsters their confidence. They are not facing this quandary alone; they have help.)
Then their gaze slides down to the hands hanging loosely at his sides; hands they've seen handle other organic, wire-thin flower stems with nothing but careful precision.
"Can I help?" Gabriel asks, cautiously so, after only a mere second of silence. He perks up when they enthusiastically nod, only to sputter with shock when they dig their claws beneath their chassis plating after.
"Oh--right." He says after a moment of stupefied silence, prompting a brief spike of irritation that winds their way through their wiring. It's certainly nothing he hasn't seen before, between however many machines he demolished prior to their first fight, and the countless other times he's slashed open a hole in their plating during a spar.
Swiveling around on their waist, legs following a moment after to tuck under them in a neat cross, V1 leans back on all their palms. Gabriel similarly lowers hiself to the floor, kicking up small clouds of dust beneath his weight, just as they locate the latch hidden deep beneath their chassis. There's a faint click as it's pushed down, and then their chestpiece lifts away to expose all the flesh and blood and wire that lies beneath their metal frame.
Gabriel's hands are almost unbearably gentle as he is guided to dig into the viscera, parting entire chunks of flesh and bundled cables of thermoplastic to expose bloody silicone. They reach past his thick hands with their Feedbacker, and jiggle open their own protective case, exposing the most vital and fragile parts of themselves.
Tiny pinpricks of green and orange and yellow glimmer beneath the gore and the soft, synthetic material. All indicators of a processor functioning perfectly fine, if not for the single, blinking red glow just beneath their waterproofed heat sink. A possibility foolishly not accounted for.
Without further ado, they attach the chip to their central processor. Its size takes up more of their RAM slots than is necessary, but blissfully, the option to erase all the data within before installation takes place pops up on their visual feed. V1 wipes it all without a second thought, and awaits the properties readout.
"Is it working?" Gabriel prompts somewhere beyond the countless windows that have cropped up across their screen. The warmachine holds up a single finger as they configure its properties and calculate the available storage space. He is not left waiting for terribly long, for the readout pops up as soon as his hands are freed from beneath their exposed guts.
It's nowhere near as much as they hoped it would be, even given the standard capacity of most warmachines. Undoubtedly, the years of use had worn away at the available digital space. But it still might be enough time to execute their next plan of action.
"SIX MONTHS." They report, and the way Gabriel's breath hitches almost costs them their composure despite this temporary solution. Indeed, it's not much time at all, but it is something.
"We'll have to find another." He stands hurriedly, entirely nonplussed by the way his fingers drool with their blood. "Surely this is not the only machine that did not perish from-"
"NEGATIVE." V1 disagrees as they deftly put themselves back together, a process that takes far less time than it does to pull themselves apart. They roll to their feet the moment their chassis clicks back into place, already pulling up the necessary data for the follow-up step. "FOCUS SHOULD BE ON FINDING LONG TERM SOLUTION."
"Where would we even begin with that?"
"APPROXIMATELY TWO MILES NORTH OF HERE."
Apparently, not long after the pair of them began frequenting the city library, V1 had discovered that it had been just a single part of a massive consortium network. One that consisted of many institutions, archives, and bibliothecas across six continents. The information sourced in these buildings had once been made available all across the world through that strange, invisible signal that linked all of Mankind from impossible distances.
This 'wifi' had died alongside its originators, but there still stands a chance that the servers hosting all this knowledge have withstood the three decades following the beginning of Mankind's extinction. Just like the one here in their home city had.
"And when exactly were you going to inform me of this?" Gabriel inquires, not unkindly, as the warmachine swiftly navigates through several different pages on the grainy terminal holos.
"THOUGHT YOU ALREADY KNEW?" They spell without looking up from the library terminal screen.
"You and I both know my technological literacy is limited to downloading books from this thing at best." The exasperation in his tone draws their attention for a brief moment, but he just shakes his helm with a sharp sigh. "No matter; I suppose I eventually would have found out."
They nod absently, and then the topic is dropped entirely when V1 pulls up the page they had been looking for. Gabriel steps closer, leaning over their tiny frame to absorb the information made available to him.
The names and locations have been consolidated into a neatly organized list, advertising these precious repositories with blue, underlined text, indicating a link. V1 clicks the very top one, and opens a new page to several pictures of an entirely square building, with neat rows of door-shaped windows on every floor.
He doesn't recognize the structure, nor the address indicated beneath a short description of the library, but he knows right away where the distant mountains in the photo backgrounds are.
"Farther northwest on this continent." He concludes, straightening up. V1 shuts down the terminal with a single button press, and follows his swift strides to the library exit. Once the early afternoon sunlight washes over them both, V1 slips into his waiting arms, and Gabriel pulls them both through reality in a burst of light.
His boots touchdown upon a debris-riddled street, one of stone instead of acrylic. It's immediately apparent that there is just as much death and destruction strewn about this shell of a city as there is in their own. The surrounding architecture is vastly different, harking back to a time before the Final War so drastically altered Mankind's world as he had known it, but it is no less ruinous.
"We're here," He says, rhetorically so, as V1 begins to wriggle free from his hold the second he sets them down. Their eye blinks open, and they begin whirling about to get their bearings after such a drastic shift in locality.
Only to suddenly freeze mid-swivel, eye fixed on something behind him. Gabriel follows their gaze, an inquiry rolling onto the tip of his tongue, and then it promptly dies away into a continued silence.
"Ah." He manages, faintly so, as he registers the sight behind him, and mentally compares it to the photo they'd shown him not minutes prior.
The beautiful, marble-white building of many windows and nightly neons is almost entirely caved-in on itself, with only the eastern corners still standing. It's stained black and gray with soot, implying heavily that the streetcleaners had been here decades prior. Parchment, derived from wood, is highly flammable after all.
Even with the march of time, quite suddenly and uncharacteristically, weighing down on his mind, Gabriel cannot help but unexpectedly mourn this loss. It's only for a moment, however V1 tugs at his hand, snapping him out of the distant sting of grief. Gabriel glances down at them to catch the latter half of their sentence.
"-BACK; FIND NEXT LOCATION."
"Right." He agrees, catching himself. There's no reason to linger here, not when there are hundreds of other promising locations awaiting discovery. They step into his open arms, and cling tight as he brings them right back to where they started.
But even as V1 slips from his hold and strides back into the library, undeterred by this momentary setback, Gabriel cannot help but worry that this will be just the first of many dead ends.
V1 has twenty-six weeks, two days, eighteen hours, fifty-five minutes, and thirty-eight seconds to search every available access point before they descend into a state of unrecoverable crashes. There are a whopping five-thousand, four-hundred and eighty-seven libraries on the consortium list.
Many of them are turning up in inaccessible ruins.
The buildings themselves are not difficult to find; not when Gabriel's borderline encyclopedic knowledge of the Earth's surface is at their disposal. All it takes is a glimpse of a distant mountain range in the background of a photo, the subtle bend of a river beyond a courtyard, or even the lilt of the sun and shadows when the nearby trees are as red and gold as his anger. The archangel can track it down within an hour. But more often than not, the bibliothecas of the world are entirely destroyed. And what few haven't continue to lack relevant information, desperately needed.
The French National Archives only holds information relevant to the Old World, before the endless fighting began. Three thousand kilometers to the north, the Library of Finland has a barely-working terminal chock-full of open-source programs, and countless 3-D printers in various states of function. The search for the Starfield Library leads them to a half-collapsed mall and its many access points, only for most of the data within its servers to have been irreparably corrupted.
Farther to the west, a rectangular concrete building, pockmarked with shallow craters, yields a second untouched treasure trove of aging books and manuscripts. There is little time to even truly appreciate this find; the only three terminals available in this library are all older models, and their delicate internal parts have long succumbed to time.
"Destroyed again." Gabriel breathes, audible even over the heavy rains plaguing this decaying city. An irrational impulse hits them, one borne from the mounting anxiety of having hit a whopping eighteen dead-ends in a row. They catch their hand halfway lifted towards Gabriel's armored bicep, and firmly stamp down on the urge to smack it.
Misplaced anger tempered for the time being, V1 turns away from the ruined library, and strides over to a nearby, half-intact awning at the other end of the square. Rain beats upon their wings and rolls down their optic lens in heavy droplets, half-blinding them to the smear of neon lights, dancing through the relentless storm.
No point in lingering if there isn't anything to salvage. They still have time; they still have places to search. There could still be an answer waiting for them somewhere in this world.
The overhead, sun-faded canvas provides only a semblance of shielding from the perpetual rainstorm, ripples of sound filling their audials as water strikes the Earth with unrelenting force. It's so strange sometimes; several parts of the world remain dry as a bone. Others are plagued with torrential storms.
Gabriel affectionately calls these drastic weather patterns 'growing pains'; V1 considers them a persistent inconvenience.
The more frequent an occurrence of atmospheric phenomena, the more wearing and tearing it did to humanity's remaining relics. Nature will indeed take this planet back someday. Years of watching their lover raise dozens of trees and alter the surrounding air conditions have proven that beyond a shadow of doubt. V1 has yet to see a natural force more disruptive to concrete and acrylic than that of a sprouting plant, but rain and wind remain a close second.
Speaking of, he has yet to follow them out of the stormy sheets pelting the half-destroyed square. Instead, he has strayed to the south-facing corner of the ruins, and is crouched between a toppled column and a skeletal arm. Annoyance lances through them momentarily, but it's a short-lived feeling when they register the familiar movements of his gauntleted fingers stroking delicate cellulose.
Three flowers grow from the gaps of the shattered marble chunks, brilliantly blue even amidst Man's artificial lights. Verdant strands of grass sprout from its base, standing proud and tall from the pebbled concrete that surrounds it.
Gabriel has told them before that this world would never be truly restored to its full glory, not when so much of it was entirely lost to fire and hunger. But that it is somehow restoring itself in some places, even in the absence of a caring hand, certainly must be relieving for a seasoned gardener like himself to see.
To his credit, Gabriel does not linger for long. He straightens, and darts out of the rain in a blur of blue and yellow afterimages. Before they even have time to process it, he is beside them once again, shaking droplets of rain from his wings.
"My apologies, V1." He says, and offers them his hand. "Are you ready to go?"
V1 wastes no time answering him, simply taking his hand and letting themselves be pulled into his awaiting embrace. The fallen library is left behind in a whirl of light and thunder and air. When they touch ground again, they slip out of his grasp and hurry back into the darkened interior of their home library.
By the time Gabriel has discerned their next potential location, sunrise stains the pristine spring skies, and the second month of their search dawns bright and uncertain.
Nature's decline during Mankind's reign first began almost two-hundred years before war dominated their society.
Burning coal poisoned the air and waste choked the rivers; chemicals seeped into the soil and strangled plantlife. All notions of acting as caretakers and custodians for the Earth were abandoned for profit disguised as progress. Certainly, if there remains one sin Gabriel still stubbornly holds against humanity for all the ways they had been set up for failure, it was the complete disregard for their beautiful world.
But now, the makings of what will one day be a jungle push up from ash, where for a time, there were only the husks of trees and the wandering machines that torched them. On the other end of the world, snow dapples its highest mountaintops, and wildflowers grow on its grassy plateaus. The library there holds only scriptures and scrolls from another forgotten faith, wrapped in bright cloth and untouched by the elements. To the south, on a single, lonely continent, many kinds of flora are bouncing back on their own, and beginning to overtake the countless ruins across its surface.
This includes the still-standing library in the heart of one such sprawling city. It does not have power, but V1 had managed to rig one of their solar batteries to a terminal regardless, and gotten into its vast, intact database within the hour. Gabriel is usually left to his own devices whenever they find a functioning access point, for however long it takes for them to search it in its entirety.
Such a period of idleness finds him out in the courtyards behind the institution, laden with corpses and thriving pockets of life. Despite this newfound discovery, a long-forgotten sense of exhaustion tugs at his shoulders and posture, dampening any excitement he would have once taken from the signs of a recovering planet.
Thick grass pushes out from where the building's gardens had once been contained by sidewalks and stone benches, with waxflowers splashing the emerald strands with a delicate violet. One bed over, the gentle glow of an autumn afternoon is shamed by golden bossiaea. There's a corpse lying beneath these sunny blooms and tall green stems; Gabriel can see the artificial, faded blue of their clothing beneath the colors of nature.
Someday, these bodies will disappear entirely. Sturdy skeletons will become dust in a hundred years, the fabric that swaddles them will wear away from the sun and weather. Every corpse strewn upon its surface will return to the Earth from whence it came, not a single trace left; as if humanity itself had never existed to begin with.
It's disturbingly easy to picture his own cadaver like that, someday. Lying sprawled upon the groundcover of his gardens, every inch of flesh on his bones being eaten away by the microbes and bacteria that follow behind life; soft collagen breaking down by way of acids in the soil he had painstakingly restored. The only thing that would be left of him is his armor, and even then, the passage of time may yet wear down upon Divine-blessed metal until nothing at all remains.
It's not until Gabriel visualizes V1 beside him, golden optic darkened and their azure plating awash in auburn rust, that he is snapped out of his dark thoughts. The aftermath of his imagination renders him briefly shaken; he has not held such morbid musings about death for a number of years now. It shouldn't be a surprise that they would haunt him now, with its cold claws poised to snatch his other half away from him.
And they certainly are not helping either of them with the daunting task at hand. With one last lingering look at the flowering corpse, Gabriel leaves his deliberations at its final resting place, and starts back towards the library.
(One day, the two of them will be long-gone from this world, safe in the embrace of eternal sleep from the gruesome decaying of their bodies. He came from the stars, but will inevitably become part of a world that was never his. Muscle, fat, bone, broken down into nutrients for the plants to feed upon, to bloom, to one day die as well.
More than ever is he certain now that life will continue on in their absence, but that day might be sooner than either of them are ready for.)
Sunlight gives way to the musty shadows of the back hall as he moves out of its lilted glow, and the quiet clatter of steel boots against debris-strewn linoleum follow his every step. One turn to the left and three doors down from conference chambers brings him back to the vast common room.
V1 stands stock-still before the access terminal they had gotten working. They don't look away from the screen as he approaches them, but the slight incline of their helm in his general direction means that they're aware of his presence. Words and numbers and pictures fly across the screen, indecipherable to even his keen vision.
Just one look at the sheer volume of information they are parsing in mere seconds across that flickering holo-screen is starting to give him a headache. It's further exacerbated by his lingering fatigue, beginning to pulsate painfully behind all his eyes.
"I'm going to take a nap." He announces, a bit impulsively; although it certainly doesn't look like V1 is going to be finished with their scan anytime soon. "Wake me when you're finished."
The machine lifts their Feedbacker in distant acknowledgement, fingers curling to spell out an 'O'. But as they twist to follow up with the letter 'K', Gabriel finally registers the borderline-violent trembling of their hand, and the notion of sleep abruptly evaporates like fog beneath the morning sun.
But that's impossible; he refuels them like clockwork every two days. It's several hours before their digital fuel gauge usually drops below the half-way point. He eyes their form in the harsh light of the holos, sees the pockets of air snaking through the plastic veins on their back, and he's unsheathing a sword before he can even think about what he's doing.
Perhaps they've simply become desensitized to the sound; perhaps this month-and-a-half long debacle has taken far more of a toll on them than they've let on. But V1 does not even react to the sharp sound of steel cutting into flesh until Gabriel's open wound is pressed flush against their shoulder.
There's a beat of silence, and then the fraying cord connecting V1 to the terminal snaps away from its port with a brittle, metallic clatter. Too-warm steel crowds against his front as they hurriedly push backwards into the source of fuel. Tremors rock their frame in receding waves, and he holds them even after they fade into stillness and silence.
When blood spills out from beneath his palm and rolls over their silicone spine without being absorbed, Gabriel's attempt to peel himself away from them is stopped by the desperate scrabble of their hands clutching at four different pieces of armor. He embraces them back in a heartbeat, holding them through whatever compartmentalization process they might be stumbling through.
With the imminent danger of a shutdown having passed, Gabriel's thoughts immediately begin racing with worry. V1 had burned through their supply simply from standing here, from processing the sheer volume of information made available to them. And they hadn't even noticed it until a drop of blood had seeped into their starving systems. He knows they can be tenaciously focused on tasks like this, particularly when their survival instinct is driving it. But to not even realize how quickly they were running out of fuel...
V1 at last pulls their helm from where it had burrowed between his neck and pauldron. For a moment, they look exhausted. Their hands don't shake anymore, but the words they spell out to him are distinctly muted in their movements.
"THANK YOU."
"Of course, my love." He murmurs, and their fans heave with an imitation of a steadying sigh, as drawing strength from his words.
He doesn't want to, but Gabriel lets them go when they pull away. They stoop briefly to snatch their worn-worn cable from where it tumbled down onto the dusty carpet, and then deftly plug themselves back into the terminal. Barely even a second passes before articles and diagrams and jargon is flying across the grainy screen once again.
The familiar sting of mounting frustration prickles at his composure, directed both at his partner and himself. This is getting them nowhere, but he hasn't the slightest clue what else they could do. At this rate, V1 would burn themselves out well before they hit the end of the consortium index.
They are in dire need of a break; the both of them. But he knows better than to even suggest it now, shaken as they are. It would likely escalate into an argument, and waste even more of what little time they have left.
For now, Gabriel turns away, making his way over to where couches and loveseats sit clustered by barren tables. Even as he pushes two of them together neatly, the sound cutting through the dead silence of the forgotten library, his lover's concentration on the flickering holos is ironclad.
The level of trust and vulnerability they have forged between them over the years is as unshakable as the will of life itself, but V1 remains a very proud machine. He can see clear as day, yet dares not comment on, the subtle shifting of their feet, the impatient drumming of their fingers upon dusty blue plastic. So much nervous energy with nowhere to go, no outlet for release other than the miraculous discovery of a solution to their encroaching demise.
Gabriel knows for certain that they'll be stewing on this close call for a number of days. But perhaps after they track down the next functioning access point (and there certainly will be one; so much has been lost, but not everything is gone), they'll be more open to the idea of a brief respite.
Just a little more progress, and then he's putting his foot down, whether they like it or not.
Fifty-seven-percent chance of success, says their latest readout. Still doesn't quite beat their record for the lowest possible odds of survival, back when they had first descended into Hell. But they had overcome even those statistics, once upon a time. They will somehow overcome this too.
V1 dismisses their simulations, and turns their focus to the flight of marble steps below their feet. The building itself is pristinely intact, while the stairs outside are a gory graveyard. A surprisingly number of machine corpses are strewn across its sloping incline, curled up on themselves or splayed out and staring sightlessly at the sky. All of them bear a single, gruesome wound; like some powerful machine had destroyed them one by one for the fuel they had once possessed.
Over the loud clanking of Gabriel's boots upon the bloodstained limestone, they hear him let out a curious hum.
"This certainly doesn't look like a battlefield," He muses aloud, and they swivel their head on its pivot to catch him stooping beside one of the carcasses, to more closely examine the mortal injury that had brutally taken its life. "More like a massacre."
Now that he mentions it, there aren't any of the usual indicators of conflict to be seen anywhere. No scorchmarks from flaming nozzles, no scattered ammunition casings from fired weapons, no broken chunks of stone and concrete; just the usual wear-and-tear of urban decay from the passing years. Almost like these machines had let themselves be destroyed without putting up a fight...
But they don't have the time nor the memory space to spare for any further investigation into that. V1 gestures dismissively, stepping up onto the landing and into the shadows of the eaves above. They immediately train their revolver onto the glass doors, charge up a Piercer shot, and pull the trigger.
As the glass shatters in all directions, it reveals a mismatched wall of metal, blocking their way in.
The warmachine blinks, moving to more closely examine this out-of-place barricade. Initial scans reveal them to be various cabinets meant for supplies. They check the second set of doors with another shot and discover faded furniture, hastily stacked in the hopes of preventing entry. Somebody had clearly chosen to hole up here when the world began to fall apart, and, from the looks of things, succeeded in keeping the worst of it all from accessing the building.
"Certainly not the most orthodox of hiding places." Gabriel remarks from where he looms over them, seemingly coming to a similar conclusion. "But I do believe something eventually would have found its way in."
V1 whirrs, half in thought and half in agreement, before stepping away from the barricaded entrance. Another deployed scan alongside the surrounding walls gets their mechanical brain buzzing. There aren't any windows on the outside of this particular institution, but a clever drone or a copycat swordsmachine would have easily made use of a skylight on the roof. It would be an easy enough jump if they get onto the overhanging eaves--
Their musings are promptly interrupted, and then abandoned, when a loud scraping sound shatters the dead quiet of an empty city. V1 whirls around to find Gabriel's pauldron shoved against the pile of couches, pushing it out of place with a heaving grunt. Something clatters and falls in the shadows beyond as the archangel steps over the metal doorframe, and into the building proper.
"After you." They hear him say as they fly past him into the interior, drinking in the dusty antechamber. No corpses, no evidence of a clash; just a second set of doors leading into a much brighter main hall.
It's similar to the one back home: a front desk, tables to place things and seats for lounging, and several terminals for archival access. The only difference is all the scattered evidence of someone having dwelled here at the end of their days. Cans of food, divided into neat stacks of emptied and unopened, sit upon the reception counter. The few couches that hadn't been used to barricade the main entrance have been shoved together and are covered in faded blankets. Scavenged weapons sit near the emergency exit, similarly blocked off by heavy furniture. They had been right about something getting in through the skylight; the midday sun pours down onto broken glass at the other end of the hall.
But the most eye-catching part of all this sits next to one of the holoprojector stands. It's some sort of technological monstrosity that is swathed with wires, stands upon shoddily put-together processing units, and crowned with a satellite dish. A corpse lies beside it in a messy stain of fuel, an arm reaching in vain for the attached keyboard.
Any other day, they'd fire it up and see what it does. But somebody had chosen this library to hide out in and build this thing, which meant the possibility of articles and information on modern technology. More importantly, data on how to build semiconductors and memory chips.
A two-second slide across the well-worn carpet brings them right to the adjacent terminal, and their wings twitch with excitement as it begins the boot-up sequence with a low hum.
The security of the library's systems have long since been bypassed. Once the start-up logos disappear, they are brought right to a home screen, one positively littered with apps pertaining to coding programs in many different languages. V1 reaches into their satchel and withdraws the most commonly used outlet shape by one end of its braided, fraying cord. It connects to the well-used port near the sloped top of the terminal right away, and that persistent sense of hope flickers brightly in their chassis.
Moments after connecting themselves, they get multiple popups on their internal HUD. Each one is dismissed, one by one, in descending order. One requests passcodes for satellite activation, the usual bloatware installations pertaining to the few open source apps they have saved to their own drives, something about a file download with administrative permissions--"Download now to continue administrative permissions"? Fine, whatever. They'll delete it later.
V1 bypasses any remaining security in the blink of an eye, and then at last, the entire repository is made available to them. Its browser layout and portal homepage is vastly different from the one they utilized back home, just like all the other library databases they've hacked into. But miraculously, they all share the same source-code, which makes compiling the data and running their homegrown programs for system-wide scans an easy feat.
Their consciousness sinks into the ebb and flow of digitized information, washing over them like a wave breaking upon a sandy beach. All the background processes they set up kick in, analyzing several megabytes of data in one moment, and then scrubbing it clean from their memory in the next. The rest of the world, the creeping terror of each passing second inching closer to certain death, all fall away in favor of finding something, anything that could avert it.
But then their sensors alert them to a sudden change in pressure along their shoulders and arms. It jolts them back to reality with a small start, but then they register the warmth of onyx skin wrapped around their upper body and firm muscle flush along their back, and the heat of blood seeping into their systems.
It's only been eighteen hours since Gabriel had last refueled them, and they're merely down to sixty-eight percent total capacity. But he's been topping them off more frequently since the last library they found with an accessible database; it isn't hard to guess as to why. It unintentionally serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the near-shutdown they experienced not a week prior, warring both with the instinctive hunger that's all but embedded into their code, and the comfortable assurance of knowing fuel will always be available to them in a world deprived of it.
Even when their plating stops absorbing Gabriel's blood, he does not release them. The cut across his palm merely shifts away, and they hear a long, heavy sigh leave his lungs. The side of his helm presses to the top of V1's, and they buffer momentarily with the resulting surge of affection, momentarily cleansing them of all their underlying fears with the reminder of his devotion.
"I love you." He murmurs, arms tightening momentarily around them, and the sense of security it brings feels akin to warmth of the summer sun. "I feel like I haven't told you that in some time now."
Neither have they; there's been so little time for the act of it in lieu of the desperation of preserving it. V1's hand reaches up and around the cable keeping them linked to the terminal, and reminds him in turn.
"I LOVE YOU, TOO."
They imagine him smiling, even as he says nothing more to them, gently bumping his faceplate to their conical head in a facsimile of a kiss. His arms fall away, and they listen to him step away and leave them to their search. With a newfound sense of resolve, V1 plunges back into the database and resumes their scanning.
(Ultimately, they find nothing of use. Their odds of survival drop to fifty-three percent.)
Gabriel's near-constant teleporting has begun to leave something of a scorch mark upon their library's concrete landing. It is perfectly circular, staining the sun-washed concrete a deep charcoal with a deepening burgundy at its edges. As the empty echo of their arrival quiets into perpetual silence, V1 slips from his hold and makes for the cloudy doors leading to the antechamber. There's a stiffness to each step they take, as if the passage of time has at last begun to take its toll on even their endless tenacity.
The archangel does not follow, but he does hesitate on that decision only a moment. He knows what it's like to have a timer ticking down towards oblivion. The desperation of it is a potent force, driven by one's will to survive for just a few precious seconds longer. But Gabriel had not been given the means to contemplate it beyond a grim acceptance; there was simply no room for fear like there is now.
They still have time to lose, months rather than mere hours, to enjoy one another's presence; to talk and spar and love. He is worried for their well-being, that is for certain. And yet...
And yet would being selfish for once in his life hurt either of them?
V1 doesn't catch on to his absence until they're at the interior door, pausing with their fingers wrapped around its loosening handle. The backplate comes free every couple of years, prompting V1 to fix it rather than let the elements reach the treasure trove of knowledge within (how long can they really hope to hold back time itself?). Their optic light pivots around to face him in the midday shadows of the atrium, narrowing to an expression of confusion immediately.
One swift slide across well-worn tiles and sunbleached cement brings them right to the edge of the blackened circle, hands moving even before they roll to the balls of their feet.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" There's a sharpness to their signage that immediately indicates impatience. Gabriel steadies his breathing and steel's his resolve; no point in beating about the metaphorical bush with them.
"V1, it's time we took a break." He says, and elaborates before they can get another word in. "We've been at this for nearly two months now, and it's gotten us nowhere--"
"FALSE." That befuddled look becomes irritable, wings twitching agitatedly in their pack. "ON TRACK TO REACH END OF INDEX BEFORE DEADLINE."
"Yes, and that's why I believe we need to stop and rest." His arms cross, shifting his weight back onto his heels as he squares his shoulders. "All this time we've spent leaping across continents and your scanning of the terminals that do work have clearly taken its toll on the both of us."
"MANAGING JUST FINE." They accent their letters with a shrill whine of their fans. "WOULD ONLY WASTE TIME-"
"You're not managing, V1," Gabriel crosses his arms, narrowing all his eyes at them. "And it would certainly not waste time, not when you've been burning through fuel the way you have."
"INCREASE IN FUEL USE IS NOT CAUSE FOR ALARM." They insist firmly. "DEPLETION OF MEMORY SPACE IS."
"Not a week ago you didn't even notice when you were running low." V1's entire frame twitches, as though fighting the urge to flinch at the reminder. "Was it not you who taught me the importance of resting?"
"THIS IS DIFFERENT." There's a metallic rattle coming from their chest that could be mistaken for a growl. Frustration gives way to the heated, familiar bite of indignation as they continue. "THIS IS LIFE OR DEATH. YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND-"
"I wouldn't--have you forgotten how we met?!" He cries, voice pitching with disbelief.
"I WILL FORGET UNLESS WE FIX THIS NOW."
"And what happens if we hit the end of this wild chase for a solution that might not even exist?! What then, Machine?! Will you have spent what time we might have left standing before these effigies to Mankind's knowledge with nothing to show?!" It's a low blow, and Gabriel knows it. But he's beyond reasoning with them. "What a pathetic fate for the machine who brought the greatest of God's Angels low, withering away in the artificial light, afraid of their own limitations--"
Through the haze of crimson, red as the blood they share, Gabriel distantly recognizes the distinct twitch in V1's right arm. His muscles respond of their own accord, and then Justice is in his hand. Her blade finds the single tube upon V1's thin neck, right as the barrel of their revolver presses firmly to his jugular.
For a moment, Gabriel is not going to rein in his anger. It burns hot and bright in his veins, bringing him to a heady boil. He could cut off their head now, and they would retaliate with a bullet to his brain before his blade can finish carving through the thin steel of their neck. He could do just that, and end this miserable trek towards certain doom-
Then, just as quickly as it had come on, his fury evaporates, leaving crystal-clear clarity in its wake.
No; no, not like this. Not with their weapon trembling against his flesh, betraying their fear and exhaustion and hunger with quivering fingers. Not with that wide-eyed look, so reminiscent of the machine he had fatefully battled for the first time in Gluttony; back when survival had been a fool's hope in the face of the fate that befell all of creative order.
They need rest, even if he has to drag them back to their apartment kicking and silently screaming. But if his words will not sway them, then he is left with little other choice.
All it takes is a twitch of the wrist, so subtle and simple. By the time they've detected the change in pressure, a bead of sanguine ichor seeps from the tiny cut he's left on their plastic vein, and pools onto Justice's azure blade.
His gambit pays off; realization hits them in the form of a subtle jolt. In the split-second before they can even hope to start squeezing the trigger, he's slipped through the cracks in reality in a flashbang of a follow-up attack. It brings him about three blocks south of the library in the next moment, where they can surely detect his dramatic reappearance.
The crack of a firing Freezeframe rocket heralds their wild approach, and Gabriel draws his other sword in answer.
There's a small fragment of functioning logic that recognizes that Gabriel's physical provocation was likely deliberate. But V1 does not care; not when their thoughts have become consumed by the raging flames of indignant fury, driven by the phantom sting of his blade drawing first blood like a spark finding kindling.
Battle protocols all kick in at once after a solid month-and-a-half of neglect, flooding their veins with artificial adrenaline. Their rocket-riding closes the distance between them in seconds, nailgun heavy in their hands and spraying tack before their visuals can even render the runes on his wings. Gabriel disappears before the first nail can even pierce his exposed abdomen. V1's reflexes buffer for a microsecond too long, and it leaves them completely unprepared for him reappearing just to their left.
As a golden greave slams into their back, kicking them off their Freezeframe rocket and out into the open air, that remaining bit of reasoning gleefully reminds them of the advantage Gabriel has over them now. During the previous several hours V1 had spent running their processors raw, Gabriel had been napping. They haven't had a reset since the morning they had gotten the alert from their memory banks. He is far more rested than they are as it stands, and far more likely to win this fight.
Pride comes to their rescue, squashing that train of thought down firmly with a forceful growl of their fans. Their body twists mid-fall, railcannon swapped out into their primary hand before he even has time to register their maneuver, and fires. Electricity tears through their opponent, and they relish in his pained cry.
V1 hits the ground running, tossing two coins before Gabriel is upon them. The Knuckleblaster explodes with air and sound and buys them precious microseconds to fire a Piercer shot, bouncing off their spinning coins and burrowing into Gabriel's pauldron. It does very little to stop him from ducking beneath their Feedbacker punch when he draws close, carving a hole in their thigh with little regard for how much blood it costs them in repairs.
He had just refueled them not hours ago; how could a single strike drain them to thirty-percent already? They don't remember what their fuel levels had been at before their argument but it certainly hadn't been this low. They move on instinct, talons raking across his lower back and ripping the ichor from his body in a vicious swipe, before blind-siding him with another concussive blast.
Their gauge spikes up by twenty-eight units, leaving them just barely above half-full as they leap backwards to gain much-needed distance for analyzing, strategizing. V1 is well aware that they will lose, but they will not go down without putting up a fight.
Gabriel is rushing them again, swords blazing with heatless fire in the late spring sun. They meet him halfway with a shotgun quickdraw, and fuel splashes upon their body as Gabriel rips it back out of them with three merciless swings of his sword.
The railcannon chimes merrily in their head; they throw the Whiplash at a nearby hovercar to pull them out of range of a fourth swipe. They swap out to their deadliest weapon, red as the blood they consume to live, to fight, to love-
And then the world around them comes to a screeching halt. Quite literally.
V1's visual feed freezes in its tracks, and Gabriel's angered, incoherent shout skips and stutters on a glitching loop in their head. All their fury drains away at once, confusion taking its place as their battle protocols struggle to make sense of this sudden diversion in processing power. They're in the heat of battle; why would their hardware change course when there is danger--
Agony explodes through every sensor they possess, no thanks to their back hitting the bulk of the stagnant vehicle they had attached themselves to. Pneumatics crash without warning, and the warmachine is only vaguely aware of their body hitting the ground in a heap of screaming fans and twitching steel. White noise overtakes every one of their senses as their body suddenly seizes, limbs flailing of their own accord against the familiar texture of solid polymer.
Something's wrong; something's terribly wrong but they can't get anything to load out and tell them what's happening. They have four month's left, tops, but parts of their body are shutting down and switching back on with no discernable pattern whatsoever.
"V1?!"
Gabriel's voice cuts through all the static. The warmachine's vision snaps back online to too-bright sunlight and the blinding glow of it refracting from the archangel's laurels. Visual settings don't boot up when prompted; instead, a horrible, lancing pain misfires from the nerves of their Feedbacker, causing it to jerk against the ground below their convulsing body. Countless error windows flood their HUD, blocking out the world around them and all refusing to be dismissed.
Over the screaming of their overworked fans, V1 senses something warm and wet and familiar pressing to their chassis in a hurry; it's bloodfuel, but they don't feel the burn of hunger. The error-laden fuel gauge somehow ticks back up to a hundred percent full, but it doesn't stop their system from--whatever this horrible feeling wracking their core processors is. They reach desperately for their simulation program, only to have it crash with every attempt to open it.
"Can--hear me!?" Gabriel's sawtoothed words sound like they're about to snap in half from sheer panic, and some internal part of them not going completely haywire squeezes with a different kind of pain.
By some miracle, their Whiplash remains functional, if not in sudden dire need of recalibration. They sense the back of their hand hit Gabriel's armor-clad bicep, and latch onto it with all the rapidly-waning strength they possess. It punches a shuddering gasp from their lover's hitching lungs that they catch in full.
"V1, what is--" His sentence cut's away and snaps back into focus two seconds later. "--wrong with you!?"
They try to respond with twitching fingers, but their attempt to reboot their pneumatics results in a frozen loading bar, locked at the halfway point.
What the fuck is happening to them? They've since sensed their body cease absorbing blood; V1 knows Gabriel had not gravely injured them during their short-lived spar. Besides, no attack the archangel has ever thrown at them can cause such an onslaught of inexplicable, system-breaking bugs-
...
It takes three attempts to boot up their malware detection program. But outdated as it is, it brings them right to the source of their problem; to a single new file in their downloads folder.
The creation date harkens back to mere hours ago, the moment they opened a connection between that custom terminal in the library with the makeshift bunker, and themselves. The one with a smattering of code-writing programs on the terminal homescreen, the dead body of a human desperate to survive, and a homemade satellite to beam it out to any nearby machine that could threaten their fleeting life.
Of course any sane programmer would weaponize the very thing that makes up all the robots that once dwelt alongside Mankind. Of course no warmachine worth their salt would waste time and fuel updating their firewall of all things.
V-I-R-U-S
That is all they manage to write into his bare skin before they are forced into an emergency shutdown, and the world goes as dark and unknowable as death.
Life as he knows it freezes all about him, meaningless and empty in its relentless stretch, for several icy seconds.
V1 falls still in his arms, optic gone dark and cold. Weapons fall from their dulled wings in a deafening clatter of alloys and silicone colliding with acrylic. The world is empty, the warmth of late-spring sunlight drains from his flesh so swiftly it leaves him faint. Gabriel dares not breathe, nor utter a sound, so terrified of the possibility that he is entirely alone again-
An outcome that is violently dismissed when he registers the rabbit-heart thrum of their pumps against his palms, and the steady flow of air from their vents. Those cooling fans of theirs fly at an unusually high speed despite the distinct lack of rigorous movements.
Gabriel soaks in the high-pitched hum, and with a sharp, shuddering exhale, clutches at their limp body, almost hysterical with relief. Alive. They are--alive.
V1 is not dead, this much he can tell. But they are quite certainly not simply passed out from any form of overexertion. They had written an explanation upon his flesh moments before switching offline, but it's one that makes so little sense.
Countless times before Gabriel has seen mortals stricken with diseases, heard their cries to a merciless Father to save their souls. But never has he heard of, let alone witnessed, a machine succumbing to sickness, to a virus. Certainly no such microbe could stay alive in an anatomy so robust with artificial defenses, with no need for an immune system beyond their fine-tuned fuel-cell filters.
"V1?" He tries rousing them with a gentle shake, though he knows it's in vain. His lover does not even stir. How was this even possible? What could be done to help them? Could they still perish from this terrible ailment?
(No. He would not--could not-- allow it. Not like this.)
Swallowing his fear and pushing through the tempting clutches of despair, Gabriel lifts their supine form off the ground, light engulfs them both, and he leaves their ill-fated battleground behind.
(It would not end like this.)
In the time between now and when their search had first begun, a fine layer of dust had settled upon every possible surface of their apartment; the leaves of some of their houseplants have begun to shrivel and fall away from neglect, and a faint, musty scent has permeated the air. These are all simply passing observations as Gabriel nearly rips the patio door leading to the bedroom off its track panel, and brings his unconscious partner to their still-unmade bed.
He gets as far as tucking them in, pulling the rumpled covers up and over their chassis, before he finds himself at an apprehensive loss. What other sort of bedside manner would a machine even require aside from ensuring they don't run out of fuel?
The archangel finds himself pacing about the room, thinking himself into frantic circles. He knew a number of herbal-based remedies, but what good would it do for someone without an immune system, let alone any discernible way to consume medicine? They've exhibited no symptoms of any human disease he knows of aside from passing out.
Should he risk opening their chest piece to see if their flesh has become infected with something? Does it need replacing? He could easily carve small pieces from his own; it would eventually grow back-
His desperate thoughts are scattered to the wind when the sheets rustle behind him. Afterimages blur behind him as he arrives at V1's side, just as their eye flies open.
"V1?" He murmurs in a frantic tone, hands clutching at their shoulders as gently as he can. "Are you awake? Can you hear me?"
Anxiety crests like a breaking way as the machine stares without seeing, and he hears their fans begin to whine shrilly as tremors begin to overtake them once again.
"V1, please!" He begs, uncaring of the way his voice begins to break. "If you can hear me, what did you mean by 'virus'? What's happening to you!?"
All their arms seize violently, thrashing beneath the blankets as their optic light shorts-out with a muffled pop. And then they are offline once again.
With little better way to react, Gabriel draws his sword, reopens the cut he had inflicted upon himself not minutes ago, and presses it back to their plating. Blood absorbs into them for about five seconds before it ceases, oozing sluggishly from beneath his palm and out across their too-warm chassis. Whatever the nature of this--this 'virus' that afflicts them, it's certainly not a problem with their ability to absorb and utilize fuel.
Anguish threatens to overtake his thoughts; he really can do nothing to cure them of this unknown ailment. Just as he could hardly help them with their memory limit problem, could only want for more while they were suffering silently and fighting through it--
Gabriel shuts down that line of thinking before it can trigger a spiral. While far from a healer, he was not the only archangel to work with Mankind. Flashes of memory over glasses of wine and bountiful fruits race behind his eyes. The descriptions of performing miracles with medicines, and careful treatments to aid a human's vigorous immune system against diseases, come easily to forethought. To not starve a cold or a fever, maintain a cooler temperature where possible, bedrest above all else.
(The words are clear, even if the memory of Raphael's voice has long since eroded.)
Despite every instinct urging him to remain here until V1 awakens again, Gabriel rolls back onto his heels, stepping away from the bedside and making for the still-open patio door in the living room.
It won't be for more than a few minutes; he doubts that they'll start to run low on fuel within that time frame. V1's weapons had been left behind on the streets to the north; they ought to be brought inside. He can fill a bowl with fresh water from the south-flowing river not a kilometer west of here, and utilize one of their cleaning cloths to try and bring down their low-grade fever.
Even with such nervous energy and frantic thoughts coursing through him, he finds himself taking pause by their shared collection of books on the kitchen island. The open area has become something of a mini-library in of itself over their years of inhabiting the same space, with one or two other small cabinets dedicated to miscellaneous supplies. All his eyes stray to the one sitting on the top of the far-left stack by the rounded marble corner, the one he always finds himself coming back to in-between new discoveries.
V1 had never taken to the free-verse prose within its pages like he has, but maybe, just maybe, the sound of his voice would help bring them back to him. It certainly wouldn't hurt to try.
...
...
...
BOOT-UP SEQUENCE READY
FIRMWARE
LATEST VERSION (2107.10.19)
CALIBRATION
ERROR
ERROR
ERROR
Death is something discussed only in their statistical ability to inflict it, but once, V1 overheard an engineer pondering about it openly.
At the time, their awareness had been caught somewhere between the hefty, old-fashioned processor their consciousness was painstakingly programmed in, and the body they were slowly being transferred to. Mere musings of a mythical human afterlife, where there are either boundless resources or burning fires; about how the entire team was certainly destined for the latter for their part in a never-ending series of conflicts outside the underground lab.
He hadn't ended that one-sided discussion with them decisively, more left it all on an open-ended question of 'I wonder if you'd be sent there too, Vee.'
They had wondered too for a brief period after their first real start-up, and then ultimately concluded that, no, they wouldn't ever see this place called 'Hell'. The entity known as the V1 prototype would simply cease to exist. From the nothing they came, and to the nothing they would return. Machines didn't have souls, after all. Death would simply be total oblivion, not this half-existence where their settings refuse to properly boot up. They can't feel an inch of their body, and they don't know where they are. It's not yet cause for panic but it is getting increasingly unsettling-
The world snaps back into focus all at once, flooding V1's artificial senses with far too much sensory input. Tingling numbness, throbbing pain, blinding overhead lights that feel unsettlingly hot on their optic lens. It's distressing, but they can do little to express it aside from twitching in their binds.
A single shadow ducks between them and the excessive brightness, and they register the silhouette and shape of someone that they've known since their inception. Summer's mouth moves, but no sound reaches their audials. She holds a soldering iron in one hand, and a piece of their plating in the other. A frown graces her full lips before she sets the piece down, reaching just beyond their range of vision to fiddle with their half-exposed innards. Audio returns with a sharp crackle of static, giving way to distant, droning musical notes, and her worried tone of voice.
"-hear me now? Vee?"
It takes several seconds longer than they normally would to get their only functioning hand to curl in on itself and lift a thumb in answer to her concerned query. Their response induces a sharp sigh of relief, but concern remains latent on her expression.
"Okay, good, good." She murmurs, nodding to herself. "How do you feel?"
Such questions are always irrelevant, especially when it pertains to what had happened to them during testing. But it never fails to make them feel... warm, whenever it's asked. Pleasantly so, not this uncomfortable heat that currently has their artificial synapses in a vice grip.
V1 responds with a thumbs down regardless. It has little to do with their mood, and everything else with the ache pulsating through them in dull, rhythmic waves.
"I figured." Summer's hand hasn't moved away from their head. Instead, they sense fingers curling around their dull gray helm, cupping it with a gentle touch. Her palm is soothingly cool against the low burn of an unseen fire, and the follow-up sting of discontent as she elaborates. "Looks like we still have a few glitches to sort out when it comes to your Feedbacker parry ability."
It goes without saying that they failed the combat simulation. And Hollis absolutely would've seen them fuck up spectacularly. Great. They'd rather grind through the civilian-oriented scenarios a thousand times in a row than put up with another one of her scathing lectures.
But they don't sense her anywhere in the room, at least. It's only Summer, her easy touch, and the chance to review what they did wrong before--odd, why can't they load up the data from the test?
Summer says something else, but another voice comes out of her mouth and the words do not match her lips.
"--V1, plea--you can--" Silence, static, sound, unpredictable in pattern and rhythm. "--mean--virus'? What's happe--to you!?"
She's gone, the lab is gone, they are staring at a ceiling they don't know, and someone else hovers over them with no full lips and no copper-colored hair. The warmachine detects too-big hands on their shoulders and something soft weighing on their body.
In answer to this onslaught of drastically-changing information, errors fill their vision. V1 suddenly can feel their body with too much awareness and too much pain. There's a shout; they can't understand the words but it's so desperate in tone, and then--
A droplet of condensation rolls over their index finger, cold and wet, much like the chill of the drinking glass against their metal palm. Sunlight warms their ruffled sleeves and seeps into their plating. It's more real than that of whatever Limbo's light sources might be powered by.
V1 can see the outline of frozen cubes within, floating in the crimson drink, and hear the clink of them against the interior when they raise the glass tumbler over themselves. Their wrist flexes and a thin stream of blood tips over the lip of its edge, pouring it's contents over what little of their chassis is exposed in this rumpled uniform. It absorbs successfully, does not stain the midnight blue of their blazer nor the pristine white of their button-up, but their fuel gauge neither rises nor falls.
The warmachine pushes their fans in a sharp, annoyed huff, and places the drinkware back down on the lacquered menu. In their peripherals, a small group of filth stagger by in swishing skirts and billowing blouses and faded jeans. Their sharp teeth glint in the sunlight of this perfect day as they chat with one another, but no discernible words come out of their mouths.
Across the little table, Mirage plays with the straw of her plastic-covered drink, optic propped up on her palm. She's fixing them with a half-lidded look that mostly just makes her look bored.
"You're really shitty at holding a conversation, you know that?" Even if they had a voice of their own, she gives them no quarter to refute this. "And after all that eloquence in philosophical debate, too. If you can't keep the prettiest girl in town entertained over lunch, then you're never gonna get yourself a proper date."
All around them, the world freezes: passerby's halt in their tracks, the sound of her chair creaking as she starts to lean back is abruptly silenced, even the warmth of the sunlight itself seems to run cold. For a brief second, everything hangs in that familiar sense of suspension.
Then three more floating boxes appear, and V1 reads them with increasing amounts of frustrated apathy.
"I'm not actually interested in dating."
"You're not really my type, is the thing."
"Maybe I just don't have a whole lot more to say."
Trivial answers; nothing compared to when the world went gray and they could freely voice their thoughts on the inevitability of oblivion they've been recently confronted with. Frankly, V1 still isn't sure why they're still here, or how to leave. But this strange corner of Hell seems to operate under different conditions than that of what they've seen of it thus far. Their date and time application crashes every time they open it, and their fuel levels remain the same as when they had first collided with Mirage three blocks away.
But they had to admit, the momentary quiet is an interesting change of pace from their frantic race for the last fuel sources on Earth; particularly without the threat of starvation and shutdown looming over them at all waking moments.
V1 reaches for the third option, thinks it over, and then selects the middle. Like a holo-film that had been on pause, motion and sound and gentle heat flood their artificial senses. The gaggle of filth round the corner, disappearing from view as Mirage momentarily bristles.
"Figures." She scoffs, but doesn't sound the least bit disappointed. "A mysterious passerby student who's got all the answers to my existentialist questions makes me buy them lunch, and they're not even interested in a follow-up outing."
At this, V1 simply shrugs; it surprises them a little that whatever it is dictating this arbitrary communication method allows for this.
They drizzle more fuel over their plating until the glass is half empty. Murky blood drips onto Mirage's neck base with practiced ease. Hmm. Maybe they should've ordered something that required a straw to drink instead. They've never used one before.
Mirage says something else, but suddenly, they can't focus on that. There's something unseen touching their shoulder. They can feel it through the fabric of their school jacket, caressing, stroking. Their skirt-clad doppleganger gestures wildly with an exasperated expression, and then goes right back to refueling herself--
Audio goes out and then comes back on like a radio switching channels. The memory of Mirage and her strange town continue to play out, but there's a voice overlaying the playback memory. It's gentle, melodic, and familiar.
"'-honey-bright sunbeams on the lilt of your smile. Coyness glows in those hazel pools.'" Someone says aloud from somewhere above their body and the cool touch of water lying atop their chassis. "'In the late afternoon, when you've asleep, I wonder if you dream of touching the stars. Or would you stay here with me, among the good and the green?'"
Their primary arm struggles to reach out for him; for anything that could anchor them through the crashing tides of waking memory. All it succeeds in is twitching minutely before--
Nine charges remain in the ammo cell of their scavenged pistol. More than enough shots to cripple a few humans at a time, yet nowhere near enough ammo to take out an entire bunker. More specifically, the one cleverly hidden beneath the office complex just down the block.
V1 lets out a thoughtful but near-silent whirr, glancing out the broken window frame of this overturned, charred shell of a hoverbus they're utilizing as an observation point. Still no movement at all from the mouth of the shadowed sidealley. There hasn't been hide nor hair of a fuel-filled organism in at least three days now, and their never-ending hunger is beginning to make itself known in their gore-filled guts. But it's only a matter of time before an equally-hungry human is forced out of their hiding place, seeking supplies from the twice-looted shops of this smoldering city.
As far as they can tell from their brief search of the building exterior, the only viable entry and exit point remains the single fire escape door at its back. The car pileup at the building's eastern corner and the brick fence blocking the south path means that they have one way out onto the streets. Their vantage allows V1 to know exactly when the shrinking group departs from their haven, and when they'll typically head back.
It's a pattern that repeats itself out of necessity. They will wander the streets for supplies, and V1 will prey upon the one that's strayed the farthest. They get a much-needed refuel, and the other humans sheltering in place get to live a little longer. It would eventually run dry just as the rivers have, plagued as the world is with fire and smoke. Yet for the time being, it's their most viable option for a consistent supply of fuel.
V1 leans back against the soot-stained frame of their temporary shelter, slipping the gun back into its designated wing. Nothing to do but idle, ruminate on the photographs they've taken throughout their travels across the connected continents. If nothing else, it lets them imagine what they'd do if they had time to explore the world as it goes up in flames; time, and fuel aplenty.
Despite the thick smog that perpetually hangs over this blackened city, the air feels surprisingly warm...uncomfortable, even. There isn't a single mote of light to be found within V1's hiding spot, but gradually, they feel as if they're being licked with flames. A sudden-sensation of heaviness falls across their entire body, trapping them in a cocoon of unseen warmth that borders on blazing.
What's happening? It's supposed to be cold in this half-remembered dream; where is all this heat coming from? Fans building into an audible whine, they kick outwards instinctively, gripped with a desperate need to move away from the source.
All vectors drastically shift angles as their body jerks itself towards the unforgiving acrylic road. They brace for pain, only to experience a surprisingly-soft impact upon its debris-riddled surface. It's impossibly malleable beneath their hands as the warmachine braces their palms upon the solid plastic, and heaves themselves to their feet. They stagger upright, pneumatics warning them just a second-too-late of the vinyl chunk of a bus seat hanging right above their head--
But the collision never comes. Their unbelieving visuals are met with a complete and utter change in setting. They buffer for an agonizing three-point-eight seconds before their too-hot processors register the drastic shift in space-time as they know it.
To their right, late-evening colors stream through the thin gaps of a set of drawn, off-write curtains, despite their timestamp reading out nine-hundred-and-forty-seven hours. And to the left, an unmade bed piled high with mismatched pillows and blankets. Just beyond sits a worn wooden desk, cluttered with tools and stained rags and various chunks of scrap, and a single holopad plugged into a solar battery. Stretching parallel along the opposite wall is a rectangular drawer, knick-knacks scattered upon its surface, and crowned with a plant so starkly green in comparison to the more muted beige decor of this bedroom.
Another uncharacteristic buffer robs them of another two seconds of processing power, before they start so suddenly that it almost knocks them back to the ground.
Where the fuck are they? How did they get here?
V1 stumbles forward into this waking dream on shaking legs, grabbing onto the mattress in an almost in-vain effort to maintain their fragile balance. Diagnostics and simulations won't load out when prompted, and the action only spurns their fans to blow harder--no, that isn't right either. They have been idling the days away while awaiting fresh prey; why do their processors feel like they're going to rattle right out of their chassis at the slightest provocation?
All this suddenly pales in comparison to the distinct sound of something shifting upon leather and vinyl. It's far too distinct to simply be the echo of an abandoned building settling beneath the endless strain of time. V1 comes to a staggered halt, the sensation of a plush bedspread bunching up beneath all their grasping hands (when had they acquired so many hands?). Their senses all narrow down to this reckless racket of movement, perpetual hunger gripping their frame with a hollow pulse.
"V1?" The call of their name is vaguely familiar, but is swiftly forgotten when a dark figure, one clad partly in ivory and gold, ducks beneath the wide-open doorway. "Oh stars, you're awake!"
It draws closer with hurried strides across faded shag carpet, haplessly naive to the bloodthirst radiating off their thin frame. It's still talking to them, arms outstretched as if to offer aid, but V1 doesn't even register the words. All they can hear is the heavy beat of a heart pumping fuel, somewhere beneath all that toned muscle and the auric filigree that frames it. Hot and rich and achingly fresh.
V1 doesn't think; they just move.
Somewhere over the racket of metal colliding with flesh and the muted thud of their entangling forms slamming to the ground, a cry more surprised than pained echoes tinnily from the hunk of metal encasing its skull. It goes ignored in favor of dragging razor talons and blunt fingers across onyx skin, tearing into tiny capillaries and stringy sinew. The searing splash of fresh bloodfuel upon their plating only spurs their need for more.
They still don't know where they are, or what happened, but they'll gladly adapt if it means an end to their hunger for the time being. V1 drinks deep from this blessing of blood, letting it sate their thirst and bring clarity to their starving systems. Ducking beneath flailing arms that scrabble for their half-empty wings, the warmachine presses their overheating chassis to piping hot flesh, and soaks up the rest from the deadly wounds they inflicted like a starving animal.
Fuel levels skyrocket, and their bloodlust rescinds like the tides of a violent sea the longer they lie there upon this stilling body. Every nerve end they possess is left raw and oversensitive in its absence, but it pales in comparison to the moment their HUD fuel gauge catches up with their body rhythms.
Full. They are--full, for the first time in years.
So why do they still feel so weak?
For a microsecond, V1 tries to chalk it up to the headiness of a refilled reserve tank, flooding their reward center with satisfactory signals. But that brief surge of strength their desperation had granted them is gone just as quickly as it had come, leaving them limp and helpless above a still-beating heart. Their prey is shifting below, having somehow, somehow survived their feeding frenzy, and is undoubtedly going to push them off onto the bloody carpet below and finish them off-
But then its arms simply shift away from their trembling wingpack, and then drape across their lower back in an easy grip. The body pinned between their thighs heaves with a deep breath, and then releases in an audible huff that almost comes across as fond.
"Is that better?" It--he? How do they know that?-- asks them in a gentle tone of voice, and something about it causes them to buffer for the third time in five minutes. "Forgive me; I only meant to step out for just a moment. I hadn't realized your fuel levels had become so low."
There's no logical reason this stranger's voice should be so familiar to them; no reason any fleshy creature should want to feed a hungry machine willingly when there is so little lifeblood left in this dying world. This aimless, eerie sense of recognition overrides all their programming loops and leaves them beyond dumbfounded.
Nonethewiser to their internal plight, one arm lifts itself from the curve of their spine. It finds its way to their conical head, resting against a plush pec and staring sightlessly into the darkness beneath the bedframe. A wide, calloused palm that could so easily crush their optic into scrap simply cradles it with a gentle strength. Their blurring field of vision is coaxed upward until it rests upon a faceplate of blood-splattered ivory and gold. There are no eyes to be seen but they know he's staring directly at them.
"You've been out for several hours now." They know him; V1 isn't sure how, but in the very depths of their source code they are beyond sure that they know him. But why can't they place his name? "Do you feel up for explaining what happened? What--what did you mean by 'virus'?"
His queries are the tipping point for their inexplicable malfunctioning. Everything from subroutines to background processes freeze mid-buffer. Errors flood their visuals, cascading across their HUD until it's all they can see. A sudden surge of uncomfortable warmth floods from out of their core processor and into every artificial vein they possess. They can't tell if the sudden jostle of movement is their body jerking erratically in answer or the stranger starting with barely-concealed alarm.
"V1?" The hand that had cradled them hurriedly runs along their thin neck, their shoulder, the back of their chassis beneath their shuddering wings. The shrill scream of overworked fans rattles out of their body, but the heat does not disperse properly; it keeps rising, like hungry flames finding fresh kindling. "Oh Heavens, you're burning up!"
'No shit,' V1 wants to retort so desperately, even if they have no possible means of doing so nor any idea why it accompanies an illogical sting of fond irritation. It's their final coherent thought before the rampaging fires overtake their system. Video feed cuts away as their core temperature approaches critical levels, RAM recollection bursting in magentas and yellows and cyans across a world seeping into blissful, senseless white-noise. The ache of heat begins to fade away. Pneumatics detect a substantial change in orientation before going completely dark.
Somehow, audio still works.
"Shit, fuck, fuck!" Thudding, the sound of metal slamming against plastic and the faint pitch of glass cracking. "Hang on, V1!"
There's a roar all around them that fades as quickly as it comes, the whistling of the wind, and then they are plunged into a cold, cold nothing.
"Father?"
Gabriel's call is answered promptly. As his voice echoes into the dancing fires of the Empyrean, the chromatic flames pull together into a familiar shape. Endless eyes, mouths, and wings that all but dwarf the branches of the Tree above springs forth from His Light. Gabriel basks in its warmth as an ever-loving smile, backlit by a thousand stars, stretches across His radiant face
"Gabriel." The holy tones of singing trumpets and melodic harp strings settle upon Gabriel's ears like raindrops upon the calm seas of the Sixth Sphere. A mighty hand reaches for the very edge of the Universe, palm facing up. The archangel needs little further invitation to step into His loving hold. "You have a question for me, my Child?"
"Yes," All-knowing as ever. Surely He had seen what had just occurred during Gabriel's mission. "Father... Why do mortals die?"
Some part of him expects anger. It's an emotion Gabriel has only ever seen associated with His wayward experiment, and turned on his own kind only once. But instead, The Father only looks... sad. It's not the first time Gabriel has seen this particular expression on his radiant face either.
"Mortality is a test for Mankind." He explains, and his tone is steady despite the sorrowful glint in his stained-glass eyes, as blue as the deepest reaches of the Earth's bountiful seas and red as the fruit that hangs heavy from the Tree of Life. "Their reward is eternal life, regardless of what decisions they will make throughout their time as humans."
Gabriel thinks back to the moment that had formulated this tentative query. A disease had swept through the human encampment he had been tasked with watching over. By the time he had summoned Rapheal, two humans had succumbed to their feverish infections, both within a day of each other. One had been a child no older than nine, their rising soul small and bright as it followed Gabriel to the starry-reaches of Paradise.
Death chased at their heels at all times; he's seen it countless times over, but something about their tears and wails of sorrow had stuck with Gabriel. They would all be reunited one day, yet the prickle of sorrow it had instilled in him refuses to be ignored.
"It is simply a second journey." His Father assures him gently, as if sensing his lingering pity. "My Angels are already... perfect."
(Thinly-disguised exhaustion taints his tone, but Gabriel would not realize it until thousands of years later.)
"I see." It's not the only question he's asked himself about this particular topic, but they are ones he will never give voice to. They do not matter, according to His Plan and the future that awaits his fleeting experiment, so there is no reason to ask.
"Why do you ask this, my Child?" His worries soothed for the time being, Gabriel's answer follows easily enough.
"Sometimes the souls are separated, forevermore." Gabriel has not seen Hell, but mortals whisper fearfully of its maw; of teeth and ice and acid. The antithesis to their eternal paradise in God's embrace. "They fall away from their bodies instead of reaching out to your Light. Into that... prison."
"It is awful." His eyes fade briefly into a sorrowful gray, even as His voice becomes cold as Earth's winters (how could He have hidden His gnawing terror and doubt so well from His Angels?). "But it is their punishment for disobeying my Law, my Will. They have made their choice. It is simply the way of things with mortals."
Gabriel, rapt with attention, only nods silently in answer. As much as he cared for the plights of Man, this is God's design. As it has been, and always will be.
"Yes, my Lord," he agrees, and comfortable warmth blossoms through his body as a single finger curls inward, to stroke one of his wings soothingly.
"And it pains me to see one of my own so stricken with sorrow, as well." The countless colors of roses ripple across his stardust-veiled expression as his loving-smile returns. "Now, my Child, let us be done with these somber inquiries."
"Of course, Father."
When prompted, Gabriel steps back onto solid ground, and bids his maker goodbye. The shape of His presence disappears into the unfathomable depths of the Empyrean, and that is the end of that.
There are far more horrible things Gabriel would see as his work with Mankind continued, but the memory of that dying young mortal would haunt Gabriel long into the timeless nights of Heaven. Of gnarled hands dipping ragged cloth into what little water there was to spare, pressing it to fever-flushed skin and wiping away sweat. He would be grateful that such things could not happen to Angels, to God's perfect children.
(He would one day wonder why he had been so blind to the reality that Death, someday, would come for them all.)
The world snaps back into place, and the first thing they become aware of is the sound of rushing water.
V1's body is spiraling down into a blackness below their back, leaving them lost in the shock of ice unexpectedly encasing their body. But their molten hot plating is rapidly cooling in response, internal temperatures stabilizing in a matter of seconds, and it brings them back from that boiling point so quickly it leaves them sickeningly dizzy. The warmachine's nerves all pulse and pound with aching discomfort, now that the neverending heat of their malfunctioning body isn't actively frying them.
Visuals return; they are being ferried through wriggling bubbles and swaying aquatic plants. The surface above is aglow with the rosy colors of evening. Had the sunsets of this burning world always been so beautiful?
They break the surface in the time it takes for their audio to momentarily shut down and then reboot, but it's a short-lived victory. Through the burst of noise returning, diagnostics activate at long last without crashing, and it urgently recommends an immediate switch into safe mode.
"V1?" V1 hears; how could a voice they've never heard before be so familiar. They're jostled, gently so, and then that expressionless faceplate is gazing down at them, framed by clear sky stained with an unseen sunset. His hand cradles the back of their helm, and it takes every functioning scrap of pride they have left to not melt into his easy grip. "Are you alright? This--it certainly isn't a normal fever, but..."
Nodding up at him is a tall order, particularly when just moving the joint between their conical head and thin neck sends lancing pain down their titanium spine. But whatever jerking motion they do manage to make causes his broad shoulders to slump with relief, pulling them in close with a shaky huff of laughter.
"Oh, good. Good... " The warmachine's helm is settled between one such shoulder, and the thrumming veins of his neck. V1 barely has time to register the quivering note in his tone as their exhausted systems shut down one by one, lulling them into a proper reset. "I--for a moment, I was worried that-"
They don't catch the tail end of his sentences as all their senses shut off at once. Selecting the option to boot up in safe mode shouldn't have been so easy, then. But in all their days of struggling to survive, they've never felt more... secure. What sort of oasis had they been whisked away to, with blood aplenty and clean water? There is little recourse but to discern that after they've tracked down the source of whatever had caused their cooling systems to fail.
For a moment, it all stops, save the most vital of components entirely unrelated to their stream of consciousness.
And then V1 reboots, plunged into the deepest, most vulnerable parts of their very mechanical being.
In that dreamlike state of half-existence, troubleshooting reactivate, scanning carefully archived files and every scrap of code they possess. A report of their pneumatics and internal components generates first, citing minor damage from their unexpected temperature spike. Repairs are well underway, bolstered by the cold of the lake and the abundance of fuel in their system, no doubt. The problem is clearly not related to their hardware.
Then the readout from the scan of their memory drive and core processor loads out, along with a popup from their malware detection program. They buffer momentarily in befuddlement, before hurriedly setting to work.
Their antivirus software is rudimentary, and quite likely outdated when compared to whatever vile programming had given birth to this particular worm. But it successfully locates the rogue file in an optimal amount of real-time, and they give the okay to implement the arduous procedures of quarantine. Malicious code and the subsequently deployed junkware that had pushed their CPU and cooling functions to the brink are scrubbed clean from their system.
It's an agonizingly long process; time itself loses its meaning. Safe mode is simply that: safe, unallowing for any higher function other than the most basic of programming. They had never been fond of these... empty dreams. No sound to silently hum along to; no fond memories to access.
(In their more grim moments, they sometimes wondered if death would have been the greater relief to this unending boredom.)
The progress bar drags itself across the window at a crawl that eventually amounts to nearly eleven hours. It lingers for thirty agonizing seconds longer after finally filling, and then at last disappears. In its place, a readout appears, confirming that the virus and all its adherents are completely deleted.
With a mental sigh of relief, V1 reboots themselves once more.
The first thing they are fully aware of is a diagnostics log, scrolling across their darkened eye and highlighted with a not-insignificant number of software errors. V1's external senses, meanwhile, all begin to come back online without a hitch. Other than a pulsating soreness encompassing every one of their synapses, no lasting physical damage has been done to their body.
Their central processor is another story entirely. When visuals finally switch on, they aren't entirely sure where they are for about five seconds. Then a landmark comes into focus, matching one successfully fetched from their long-term memory.
It's the southwestern street corner of the lake, shaded on the hottest days by one of oldest willow trees that grew upon these shores. Neons dance upon its drooping branches, one of only three flashing signs that still function near where the rains gather. A backdrop of impossible blue hangs behind its verdant boughs, and the sun shines merrily above the Earth's concrete ruins.
The very ground beneath them jostles quite unexpectedly. It makes a phantom sensation of distant pain shoot through the artificial nerves of their chassis. But through all that comes a familiar voice, anxious and frightened and relieved all once, and everything blessedly clicks back into place.
"V1?!" There is a surrounding coolness up to their shoulders and warmth to their back that their frayed circuits recognize in an instant. But it's the frightened edge to his tone that immediately triggers a replay of their last waking memory.
The glint of Justice and Splendor flashing in the midday sun and the sting of their blades, leaping away from Gabriel's relentless attack when their entire body ceased obeying them mid dodge, and a half-recorded shout of their name, is what their playback ends on. Everything else after that is--
Corrupted.
"Can you--can you hear me, my love?" Gabriel is speaking further, hands roaming over their body as if searching for any visible damage. His shaky tone acts as a catalyst for their growing sense of worry. The warmachine immediately moves--more like twitches, truthfully--their Feedbacker hand to find his bare thigh somewhere beneath their legs. They somehow manage to gently squeeze it before speaking silently to him, in the only way they're capable of right now.
H-E-R-E, they start with. And then, A-W-A-K-E as his shaky sigh of relief floats over them.
"Oh thank the stars, I thought--" There's a tremble in his voice, one that he swallows down valiantly. "I didn't know if you would wake up again... "
V1's sore body jerks uselessly in his lap in its attempt to reach up for him. Their gyros are wildly out of balance, a factor made worse when Gabriel's free hand desperately takes one of their own. But they can't find it in them to care in the slightest; it's grounding, rouses them further from the echoes of pain. Half their functioning subroutines all scream at them to further soothe Gabriel's evident distress, but they are entirely unable to accomplish that in their current state.
W-H-A-T H-A-P-P-E-N-E-D-? Might as well start with getting their bearings back. C-A-N-T R-E-M-E-M-B-E-R
"You said something about a virus before passing out during our--fight." He explains, squeezing their clasped hands gently. "I'm still not sure what you meant by that, but you developed an awful fever yesterday evening. I brought you here hoping it would cool you down. It seemed to have worked, but then you shut down again once it broke. I didn't know what else to do but... wait and see if you would wake up again."
That explains their drastic change in location. A rush of affection fills their half-numb reward center, distracting them momentarily from the deep-seated ache that grips their frame. He'd saved their life again, but hey, who was keeping count?
S-W-I-T-C-H-E-D T-O S-A-F-E M-O-D-E, They spell slowly. A long, exhausted whirr pushing out of their vents, and a handful of water splashes upon their chassis, cool and familiar. Gabriel must have been tending to them all night, but trying to picture it triggers a phantom sting of something lancing behind their sensitive optic circuitry. V-I-R-U-S I-S G-O-N-E N-O-W
"'Safe mode'?"
Other higher functions at last start to come back online, just after a pleasant chime alerts them of their Feedbacker finishing its recalibration. V1 lifts it into the warmth of a late spring morning, more than ready for the comfort of their shared bed.
"I'LL EXPLAIN LA--"
And then their hand suddenly stops spelling the next letter. It isn't that their limb has ceased functioning altogether, it's that the relevant data to get their fingers to spell the letter 'T isn't loading out at all. Neither are the letters 'R' or 'G'.
In fact, when they check the folder where they normally access their memorized hand alphabet, V1 finds that the files for fourteen other letters are refusing to load out, to be given shape and soundless voice. There's only missing file alerts--
... !
They follow the file paths back to their source home folders, and then a wave of realization, cold as Treachery's blizzard, renders them entirely paralyzed.
It's not just their carefully-practiced fingerspelling abilities. A sizable hole has been chewed in their primary memory banks. There is no rhyme or reason to what files there had been utterly ruined, but that had not mattered to the digital virus that had decimated their systems.
Gabriel is speaking, but they cannot make out the words; they simply don't register. What little RAM they can muster at the moment is dedicated entirely to a system-wide scan, at once assessing the state of their files and calculating the total damage done. Energy is diverted from repairs in favor of faster final results, shaving off six seconds from what would have only been a ten-second process.
And when that numerical amount finally loads out, something inside them shatters.
A splash of water cuts through the sudden onset of white noise crackling in their audials. Gabriel's at the tail end of a sentence they can't quite catch as they're jolted back into temporal awareness. V1's primary hand twitches into motion, an unspeakable agony gripping their very nonexistent soul with every passing second.
D-A-T-A C-O-R-R-U-P-T-E-D, They spell numbly, their fans hitching erratically as reality begins to sink in. M-E-M-O-R-I-E-S D-A-M-A-G-E-D
"What!? How--did the virus do this!?"
G-O-N-E, they've repeated three times into his chilly flesh without hearing him, coding running despairing circles around itself. S-O M-U-C-H G-O-N-E--
The world changes vectors without their permission, and they are brought approximately 5 feet above the lake's surface. It leaves them stricken with what can only be nausea as water trickles off both their bodies, and they slam their optic shutters together to spare their half-calibrated pneumatics any further damage. Gabriel's sturdy arms cradle them to his bare chest, and they feel the comforting bump of his helm atop their own.
"I--V1, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He murmurs, and his gentle, warbling tone just breaks their mechanical heart even more. "Is there--is there nothing to be done about this? What do you need right now?"
N-O, Their shaking hand writes into his flesh. R-E-S-T, H-O-M-E, P-L-E-A-S-E
"Very well."
His lungs and ribcage expand with a steadying breath, and then shrink away as they catch the faint whistle of the wind around his wings. The air displaces around them, the only way they know Gabriel is flying them back to their apartment rather than teleporting them straight there. They find themselves silently grateful for it; it gives them time to work up the courage to do what will need to be done next.
The few files that their systems might be able to repair are all moved to a separate folder. Diagnostics and repairs continue hum in the background as they seep into the tides of their long-term memory. So many things are still crystal clear, rooted in the very foundations of their code: bloodlust, curiosity, the lingering fondness for those who are long gone, and the warm flame of love, burning brighter than all the stars in the Universe.
But they are missing battle data from their second fight with Gabriel. So many of the photos taken while in Limbo's holographic chambers are fragmented, totalling up to thirty-percent of their designated folder. Three of their favorite Cybergrind playback videos are inaccessible. The largest gap in their memory is a solid six months, dating back not three summers ago. Twenty-six whole weeks with Gabriel, entirely corrupted.
These are all marked for immediate deletion, and, after only a moment of hesitation, they give the command to begin the purge. Three steady beats of Gabriel's heart later, it's all gone, scrubbed clean from their systems as if they had never existed. The amount of space it frees up, the one thing they've been desperately searching for almost two months now, only serves as their breaking point.
A machine can't cry; why would a weapon be given the means to? But the shrill whining of their fans, prompted by the relentless cascade of agony descending upon their thoughts, might as well be a despairing, empty wail. V1 burrows their optic into Gabriel's scarred body, and sorrow at last consumes them.
All these long years of combat and cohabitation have granted him the means of recognizing the outward emotions of a machine; have made him privy to V1's thoughts even before they learned to silently speak. A minute flick of their wings betrays excitement, the rolling of a narrowed optic indicates annoyance, the repeated rolling of a coin across talented fingers conveys boredom. Limited their expressions may be, but V1 all but wore their mechanical heart on their sleeve at times.
Gabriel had thought he'd seen every expression his machine could have offered: joy, anger, curiosity, petulance, desire, sorrow, thrill, love. But never before has he witnessed them in such a state of anguish.
Tremors wrack V1's thin shoulders every few moments, heaving with shaky, unheard sobs. Their fans rise to a sharpened pitch erratically, puffing out warm and wet across what flesh the machine has all but glued themselves to. But Gabriel's hold does not relent, letting them ride out this stormy moment to whatever calmer waters await them on the other side.
It takes hours; the sun begins to lilt into early afternoon before the tides of their silent misery at last begins to recede. They've stilled, body thrumming with that faint, but tell-tale hum of mechanical and organic parts, granting them all their impossible strength and life and will. V1 pulls back by inches, angling their head up to meet the smooth ivory of his faceplate.
They look--awful. Gone the virus may be, but the damage was clearly done. V1 had only the strength to cling to him and quietly fall apart, mourning the missing pieces of themselves, and even that had been entirely spent. He's about to ask if they need anything else when their Feedbacker releases the grip it has on his back. It points somewhere over his shoulder, out towards the door to the living room where they had last left the holocube, no doubt.
Loathe as he is to release them, the archangel obliges their voiceless request. He's back in less than a minute with both it and the needed cable.
The first thing they show him, after he settles back in bed and connects them to the little device, is a recently-taken screenshot, no doubt of their own mind's eye. While mostly full of technological jargon he could not even begin to fathom, what really mattered at the moment was the numerical value at the end of the readout.
Twenty-four-percent total corruption: almost a quarter of their entire life. A gasp barely has time to erupt from joining before the projection becomes a steady stream of photographed words and broken phrases.
"Only fragments of data remained." He's told. No tears can possibly pool in their overbright optic, but that does not stop them from looking overwhelmingly dejected. "The majority of damaged files were beyond repair. I've deleted them entirely from my system."
There's a pause before their next sentence scrolls across the holos, and it makes him feel sick to read it.
"I now have seven more years of memory, on the bright side."
It certainly isn't a bright side to this, not when the entire point of that fruitless chase for a solution that still may not exist had cost them so many treasured memories. But Gabriel does not voice this aloud, instead favoring to hold them close, and seek to understand what could have led to this tragedy. It's all he can do, now.
"Did the virus really do all that damage?" Gabriel asks them, and is given a silent nod in answer. "Where did it come from?"
"The last terminal I searched." They explain, and as they do, Gabriel begins to piece together the grisly picture of each and every strange discovery in that bloodied library. "It was likely weaponized against hungry machines, and transmitted through that connected satellite. The creator left behind a dead man's switch in the data repository."
"And it infected you in turn." His fingers find one of the fuel lines on their back, stroking it soothingly. "I could never have guessed machines have their own forms of disease. You don't have the means to defend against it?"
"My anti-virus software is outdated, and with only fragments of the World Wide Web remaining, the possibility of encountering it was in the single digits." A long, whirring sigh leaves their body, and it sinks into the pillow and mattress further, as if weighed down by their harrowing ordeal. "I did not account for this at all."
"I wish I could have done more to help you. I had never--" Gabriel swallows, struggles to push away the echo of a mother and father crying out in anguish as their only child succumbed to fever. "Seeing you like that, waking suddenly only to pass out again moments later. And when you grew so hot to touch, I thought--"
All his eyes pool with tears despite himself. V1 tucks their helm beneath his chin, burrowing between his neck and shoulder. The end of the cable connected to their chassis digs painfully into his pec but he can't care about that at all right now.
"I thought I was going to lose you... "
There is silence for a minute or so, aside from the occasional hitching rhythm of his breathing, and the thrumming of their body. He soaks the sounds, the barely-there signs of life and vitality in a machine, and reels with the reality that he very well could have lost them to that wretched virus. The holos linger on that last word as he sinks farther into the warmth of their embrace, and when Gabriel calms further, another sentence starts anew.
"I'm sorry for worrying you." They say, "And you did all you could; you saved my life, but this, the data loss, it's all my fault. I should've listened to you. But I was--"
The flashes of holographic words stop for a moment. Gabriel waits for the drag of a metal finger across his skin, but they find the strength to silently say it.
"Scared." V1's fans shudder with another damp puff of air. "I've bought myself more time, but it cost me part of myself; only a little more time."
"Nothing's change. This will still kill me one day."
"It won't."
He feels more than sees V1 start slightly in his arms, pulling back to look at him incredulously at the conviction Gabriel hopes his voice conveys firmly enough. But their look of bitter skepticism, and whatever else they had planned to retort that with, slowly melts away as he continues with one hand alighting upon their chassis. Where he knows their too-fleshy heart curls around their too-plastic brain, tucked close beside one another in a stunning display of humanity's brilliance and weakness.
"My love," He says gently, "Regardless of whether or not we find a solution to this terrible conundrum, one day, we will die, V1, no different from every other creature in this indifferent Universe. It could be tomorrow; it could be next week; it could be a hundred or a thousand years from now."
Gabriel takes that moment to cherish every tick and hum against his flesh, doomed by design to someday fall silent.
"And I will face that day with peace and content." Gabriel swallows down his cresting sorrow best he can; the thought of being inevitably ripped apart from V1 torments his very being, but that is the risk he came to accept when he chose to keep going. "These years you have given me, that we've stolen away together... I wouldn't trade it for anything. Not for all the love The Father could have ever offered me; not for another eon safe in His arms."
"But when death does inevitably come for you and I, it will find us with my swords pierced through your body; with that infernal shotgun of yours having blasted my skull clean off my neck." He vows, and it burns like holy fire within his heart, where his faith once flickered bright. "There was only ever one way it was meant to end for you and I.?
"You, my greatest foil, my perfect equal, the love of my life, are the only one worthy of killing me, just as I will be the one to kill you."
It is the only way it can end. It is the only way it should end. Gabriel's first true taste of freedom had been the means to dictate his own demise, and that rings true even now. He hopes it does for V1 too, as they duck back into his embrace with another erratic stuttering of their fans. His firm tone wavers with a shared sadness at the thought of this blissful life that they've built together fading into obscurity, leaving this planet truly lifeless aside from the flora and the microscopic fauna.
"I can't promise you that we'll succeed in stealing away more time to lose, but we will still try. And if that day does come to pass... then that is the day we will kill one another in one final, glorious battle, as it was always meant to end."
Tears spill over at last as V1's fingers shakily trace letters along the small of his back. He squeezes them ever-tight, tight as he dares, as if that alone could shield them from the reality of their mortal existences.
P-R-O-M-I-S-E-?
He will never be able to stop it from one day coming, neither of them can; but right now, he has more than enough blood for the both of them.
"I promise."
Whispered nothings eventually quiet into the steady rhythms of sleep, and V1 sees little reason to put off another reset. The blurry hours of debugging and recalibrating burns through a fourth of their fuel, conservation mode disregarded entirely in favor of better processing power. The memories of the scant few hours they had been awaken go untouched and unsorted, not when the lapping waves of grief still drown them in its unfamiliar adherents.
When they next open their eye, the lilt of the morning sun is pouring in through the wide-open curtains of their bedroom. Overnight diagnostics appear several seconds late, and still produce a veritably inconvenient amount of error messages for them to worry about. Their timestamp functions load out moments after, helpfully informing them that it is eight-hundred-and twenty-three hours, approximately thirty seven minutes earlier than their usual wake-up time.
The next thing V1 is made aware of is the distinct snip-snip-snip of a pair of shears, staccato in rhythm. Swiveling their line of sight in the direction of the sound is a tall order, but the pseudo-stiffness of their neck joint dispels further with every centimeter gained. By the time their conical head has come to a stop one-hundred-and-forty-degrees from its initial resting place, Gabriel has already swept several pruned lily leaves into a small pile.
V1's first and only attempt at sitting up results in their spine locking up at a forty-seven degree angle, leaving them unable to lift themselves from the mattress any farther than that. The subtle creak of their joints has Gabriel whirling around before they can even lift an arm in their usual morning greeting.
"You're up." He's at their side before they even have time to blink up at him, calloused palms at their shoulders as if he could soothe the aches both physical and emotional by touch alone. "How do you feel?"
Some stubborn part of V1 wants to lie, to cover up their mortifying period of weakness with the ever-persistent drive of survival. But they feel so raw, frayed at the ends like an exposed wire, and the reality that their pride is what drove them to commit a grave error in judgement to begin with weighs heavy on their thoughts.
How funny, the way their positions have been reversed from a similar situation not too long ago. In the end, they've been just as much a hypocrite as Gabriel had at the time.
A-W-F-U-L, They finally write with their Feedbacker into the sheets, the only other arm other than their primary one functioning properly at the current moment. They barely have a moment to elaborate any further than that before Gabriel is urging them back down into the sea of blankets.
"I can only imagine so, after what you've been through." He sighs, and leans down to bump their helms together in a gentle nuzzle. The resulting surge of affection goes miles towards easing their lingering distress.
"Listen V1," He says after pulling back some, voice firming at the edges. They already know where he's going with this. "I know you said the virus is gone, but you're staying in bed today."
V1 pushes their sensitive fans into an audible whirr even if they are already resigned to a day or two of bedrest, and immediately regrets it when they start to stutter, prompting a wince. Gabriel's hands are already busying themselves with tucking the sheets around them, helm glancing in the direction of his gardens just beyond the vine-covered patio.
"I have some things I have to take care of outside." He doesn't elaborate; they vaguely wonder about the state of his gardens just beyond the vine-covered patio. "I won't be far."
Just before he can turn to leave, they get their Feedbacker free from the cocoon he's swaddled them in, and grasp at the nearest arm.
G-E-T M-E S-O-M-E-T-H-I-N-G F-I-R-S-T
"Oh, do you need fuel?"
V1 shakes their head, as much as they can without prompting another onset of pain. Instead, they point to their work desk, where their heavily-modified holopad sits fully charged.
"Ah," Gabriel says, and their mental imagery of a lightbulb blinking on above his head dispels as he hurries to fulfill their unspoken request. If they're going to be bedridden for the entire day, then they're going to find ways to entertain themselves beyond going back into sleep mode.
After he's plugged the connecting cable into their port and tucked them back in, they seal their optic shut. A warm mouth presses several kisses to their bezel from somewhere in the dark, and a soft sigh fans out across their helm.
"I love you," His soft lips murmur against their unyielding steel, before pulling away. "Get some rest."
V1 doesn't bother turning their visuals back on. They simply listen to the sounds of Gabriel departure; the rolling of the door along the track panel, the click of it closing, and the barely there murmur of wings carrying him down to the street level. Then, after running troubleshooting yet again to continue their pneumatics recalibration, they sink their awareness into the holopad, and the precious information stored on it.
First things first, they redownload all the fingerspelling letters they're missing. It will take a couple hours practice to get the hang of them again, but that's for a later date, when all their hands want to function properly. Some digital books that they're missing get added to their memory banks to peruse at a later date, and the one holo-movie memory that had been halfway through being cleaned up is snagged as well.
Finally, and most importantly, they overwrite their current projects folder with the backup they had copied to the holopad, done just in the off-chance they could get its delicate speaker working again. The progress on a few of their files has been lost, but their sound sample folder is now entirely intact once more.
Something in them unclenches when they have the bulk of their musical endevours available for modification. V1 opens one particular file in Apollo's Lyre, lets the opening sounds of rainfall wash over them before the six-note melody kicks in.
When they have motor control back, the first thing they're doing is going back for the rest of the speaker system. The amplifier is still tucked away in their satchel, stowed safely in a corner of the living room; it would not take them terribly long to clean the speakers, nor get it rigged to the solar panels up. Certainly, some of their compositions need work, careful editing and a final polishing before they were ready to show to Gabriel, but they feel confident in their ability to finish their favorites before their inevitable day of reckoning.
For better or for worse, they still have time. And more than ever, they know now to make the most of it while they can.
