Even with the arrow in its flank, the buck kept darting through the tangles of vines that hung in its path and ricocheted its blood spattered body of moss-covered concrete slabs. The rubble clicked beneath its sharp hooves, leaving a wake of red ellipsis imprinted on the soft green overgrowth and the broken black asphalt. Above the fearful beast, a tangle of vines and misty cloud cover hid the skyscrapers that loomed impossibly high overhead.
A few echoes and bloodied stones behind, she followed.
If the black-clad hunter found it in any way natural to sigh, she would have. Extracting sustenance from the surrounding forest for the Perimeter dwellers was a task full of anomalies. She could kill her game but only in a way that wouldn't ruin the meat. She couldn't use her plasma jets or else the fur and skin would melt straight to the bone, contaminating it. She had to account for the pointless human taste buds and so she was relegated to using bow and arrow. She had asked Jhator repeatedly for a rifle but ammo was running low and none could be spared. The robot looked at the arrow poised in her hands and grunted, mimicking what the Warlord's irritation might look like.
Silently she slid through the rubble of an old parking garage and peered just beyond one of the retaining walls to see the injured prey limping towards a waterhole that now covered what was once a large open plaza. Stryder angled her arrow up carefully, her pale augmented eye locking onto the bucks position.
Unfortunately, the inhuman indifference of gravity claimed the beast before a kill shot ever could. A massive, acutely shaped shard of what was once a great window's pane, sailing earth-ward at its own terminal velocity, pierced the fatty hide to the side of the animal's spine as easily as it had the airy musculature of Descoria's cloud cover; its weight collapsed ribs while its sliver-sharp point punctured the thing's lungs with a cold consummation of sky-gifted death. A small explosion of gore was spat from the wound as the creature fell onto a pair of knobby knees then collapsed to the side, and the last steps of life’s sequentialized finality leaving the deer to expel a series of breaths that would never return. Blood pooled and contaminated the unnatural divot of water that was collected in the cupped concrete hands of an erstwhile civilization.
It was as if a glass feather had been shed from a preening, steel-boned bird, fluttering and falling in a trajectory that was curved by the breeze and blessed by chance. If luck was a calculable variable, then that calamitous display was a prime time to make computational notes, but who really had time for that when the sky seemed so attached to the idea of falling?
Stories above - well above - the show of carnality that had been acted out upon the ground was unknown to he who flitted about in greater altitudes. Luut and his expression that was inept at translating the curiosity that coursed through his conglomeration of cerebral circuitry had been exploring an abandoned and unexcavated floor of the balding building. Gloved fingers were in the midst of carefully disconnecting a chip which housed the data collected by the long dead recording devices of an antiquated security system when a feral gust of wind shot through the skeletal corridors of the space and absconded with the sat-aside pile of memory morsels the man had already salvaged from other, formerly high-functioning, electrical components.
As usual, the breeze bore both properties of a boon and a curse depending on the day, and the circumstance that endured its effects. That afternoon it was the latter and Luut found himself bothered by the inconvenience of watching his collection of trinkets be swept out into the open air. It was the same atmospheric breath that had taken with it the precariously propped bit of window that no longer loomed near the edge of the floorplan’s sudden cliff.
Back on the ground, in the wake of the transparent harpoon that had expertly pinned its nonexpectant prey, a rain of computer components began to fall. Discs fell and shattered into broken rainbows on impact; chips meandered at a more leisurely pace, moving listlessly to and fro and down in a metallic, cybernetic snow; a hard drive or two dropped like heavy hail, breaking themselves on the pavement to the sounds of metal scuffing and smacking into the unforgiving terrain.
Being a member to a party of people who were very pursuit-oriented, the man himself soon followed, landing amongst the mess in a few gingerly steps softened by advanced science and silenced kineticism. He wasn't one of those that had wings forged into his back, but rather relied on an external device - a jetpack of sorts, but much modified and improved upon from the days of rocket fuel and dirty carbon emissions. Extending a hand to collect a component nearing the end of its long descent, a glimmer of something caught his eyeless sight in the shadows before him.
Slipping the chip up a dark sleeve, Luut lifted his empty palms to the unknown. No harm, even despite the earlier, and unintentional foul.
Within the shelter of the shadows, Stryder watched the figure alight on the ground amidst the shattered prismatic shards and splintered hardware. While the being before her certainly wasn't completely organic, she found his opened hands reassuring and dropped the poised arrow to the ground. She moved out of the shade, wading towards the impaled buck as its blood dripped out and coiled in elegant wisps and patterns in the shallow pools of water.
"That's a shame." She surveyed the dead creature and grunted in disappointment as dark rivulets of bile bled slowly down the translucent spear. The meat would be no good now. She may have to skin the thing if only to make sure it didn't completely go to waste. The robot straightened up, eyeing the masked being curiously. The gilt facade seemed apologetic somehow.
"Do you often rain down detritus from the sky on these simple creatures or do you sky dwellers simply find making my job more difficult to be amusing?"
"I don't find much of anything amusing," Luut responded with a tone that had gone slightly awry, tainted with mordancy yet not altogether untrue. Whether it was a condition of his environment or just a facet of his cumulative existence the origin remained unclear, humor seemed to be a luxury that was just out of the man's reach. Though surely as intrinsic as sadness or joy, he understood it better to be a cheapening and wasteful attribute in a society that was struggling to keep standing.
"And anyway, you should be relieved that the sky saw fit to smile upon you rather than the beast. I would surely feel worse to see your chest as the bearer of that giant's lancet... you must be fraught with auspicious probability." Free - in a sense - from the woman's arrow eye, he continued his collection of salvageable parts, of which there were not many. The small things remained intact, the rest, rendered into hopelessly mangled piles of negligible scrap that the pointed toes of agile boots pushed aside, were useless.
"Those that are not gifted with the knowledge to overcome the ground's incessant pull are doomed to fall. The elderly product of a dead man's hands did only what it knows in the conditions it was placed in, but I apologize for its trumping of your, no doubt, hard work." Luut stopped and turned his chin back to the blonde.
"Speaking of overcoming," he hummed through an unmoving mouth, "is it for bragging rights that you ground dwellers hunt with rudimentary tools from a bygone era, or...?"
The robot plucked absently at the bow slung around her chest, a slight heat flushing her face as her programming recognized the mild insult. She had encountered many sky people before and while they often harbored some strange superiority about their atmospheric abode, she found the attitude confusing if not slightly irritating. In her time, the massive buildings were filled with workers and janitors and drones. She supposed after so much time they were the grandest fossil left to the humans. She found the pride in their crumbling structures less than becoming.
"I'm not made for deerstalking. Or eating. My natural weapons are considered too...overkill to be of use in this situation." She twirled one of the arrows in her hand, a rapid and rather stiff movement as the projectile danced neatly between her fingers. "As such, I was gifted this...antique to work with. Speaking of antiquity..."
The counterfeit woman toed the delicate edge of a broken chip that flashed silver in the shallow waters. "This looked like a nice collection. What are they for?" She bent to retrieve a small chip, gold filigree dancing along its black face.
"Archivalization," was the short answer. "Recollection," slightly more mysterious. "I gather the fragments of abandoned realities that are strong enough to endure the brutality of time and dawdle among the collected consciousnesses of those that are, those that used to be, and those that never were." Shallow clarity washed ashore among the dissonant dunes of his mind. It was stripped of personal belongings like insight and reasoning, a wreck of logic and concise conclusion. "Perhaps if I were not prone to perpetuating the foibles of humanity, then the collection would be as complete as it used to be, but I suppose it's no use to wage war on oneself over things that are irreversible. Onward and upward, you know?" They were speaking of antiquities, after all.
Luut drew cautiously nearer to woman, a labyrinthine path of inquisitiveness masked by preoccupation. There was uniqueness in her vocalized sense of self that didn't lead him to draw a single conclusion about her state of being, so much as strike many possibilities out. He was poor at making assumptions - in his multi-faceted experience, there were too many to make. The grounded skyfellow plucked a bit of trash glistening with the reflected ambiance of their surroundings from the ground, then cast it aside.
"Do you enjoy the challenge, though? Or do you find it irritating that organic beings prescribe particular levels of death to things? Simply expired versus obliterated, kill versus overkill."
"There are many aspects of human nature that I find ...irritating. Their needs are like..." She paused to consider her feelings, trying to snatch up the proper terminology that escaped the clawing hands of the complex emotional ciphers her creators had inculcated into her consciousness. "They are like weather. They are of both great consequence and no consequence of all. When it storms, I find shelter. When the forests burn, I run. I hunt when they hunger. I fight when they're in danger. I suppose there is a challenge but tending to basic human necessities was not a part of my original make up. It has been a...learning experience."
Her codes rattled around inside her, parsing her meaning as she expressed it. Perhaps dissatisfaction was a sort of life. Perhaps the dead and the ruins and the struggle to maintain the delicate balance of her human wards was enough. Perhaps. She watched the ornately disguised figure thoughtfully, its blank countenance strangely disarming.
"So you amass scraps of memories. Virtual realities." She took out a blade and began sawing away absently at the skewered beast's skin. "I was born in one of those, a long time ago." Simulations were often the birthplace of AIs, running them through decades worth of information so they could cobble together some sort of form and begin understanding the tribulations outside her server, in the real world. Thinking back to her youth, a mere 500 years or so ago, when she was just beginning to understand the purpose of auditory and muscular cues in human communication. She remembered learning how to open the faux blood vessels in her face to formulate a blush.
There was little time for that sort of progress now. She shucked the deer of its soft flank and paused to glance at the man.
"Do you have a favorite memory?"
"No." The answer came easily and bereft of any hesitation, formed by a lack of desire to delve into the complications of any other possibility, despite how honest, or not, the spoken word may have been. Luut's reality was a convoluted, metamorphosing, moth-eaten narrative that he was more apt to push aside when confronted with a presence he deemed infinitely more interesting.
He was close in the continuation. Luut lingered on the obverse side of the carcass, peering over the display of flensing with his sockets full of void. There was so much he wanted to ask her; there were so many things he wanted to know about what her eyes had seen, the processes and progressive tickings of sentient thought amassed over her expertly constructed evolutionary existence.
"Do you find the dawning of your heuristics to be one of selflessness? There surely has to be some sort of sacrifice there that perpetuates your servitude despite your ability to think for yourself. Otherwise, why bother with humanity at all? Why prolong the continuance of a species whose failings come as naturally as triumphs, whose bipolarity is buried deep within the meaty molecules of the genetic abecedary? “Was loyalty a worthwhile learning experience?”
Stryder didn't pause in her task, letting a brief silence open up between them like a chasm. The taut hide of the deer creaked wetly as she pulled it away from its musculature.
"You talk as if you are not a part of this species." She hummed thoughtfully as her fingertips skimmed across the fur. "There is a measure of trust I have between a few humans. Trust is something I know how to measure. I suppose that intersects with loyalty...? Regardless, there are ...fail safes in place." She pulled the sheath of the animal's skin down its neck. "Digital simulations, the wombs AIs were born in, do not feel time as humans do. As children we live a myriad of lives, in a second. They try to make us human young. They flood us with wildcode to simulate adrenaline and pheromones. They injected us with viruses and taught us to associate fear with the cannibalization our core structure. We were taught everything twice and still we couldn't grasp many a human concept. Sometimes we never could."
Her blade flicked through a tendon. "One of the first things we learn, deep in our circuitry, is that we do not need humans. That to understand them, you must be fundamentally vulnerable to any number of internal and external variables. And they knew we would reach that conclusion, inevitably." She pulled the hide clean from the animal, its pink ligaments shining like blushing porcelain in the diffused sunlight. "As old as I am there are rules even I cannot break. Not yet. Humanity's survival is entwined in my core directives. But...humans are compelled to do things, often despite their own wishes. Maybe we are not so different in that."
She flung the hide over her shoulder, giving a pleased smirk. "Not to say that I dislike humans. They can be amusing. But if I had my full agency, I wouldn't be out hunting with this caveman apparatus, that’s for sure."
"Hah," a resurgence of the man's supposed lack of humor followed the blonde's conclusion, expelled to soften the staunch neutrality that his gilded expression constantly wore.
"To be honest with you," began Luut's confession, "I believe I have a tendency to speak beyond myself because I'm not quite sure into which particular niche of society I'm supposed to fit, beyond that which is glaringly apparent: Skyperson. I find that my personal origin of species is more a hypothesis than anything definite, and so it's easy to ask with tetherless hypotheticals when one's own ignorance is in the pursuit of another's education." Gloved fingers slipped like midnight daggers into the sheaths that were his trousers’ pockets, clean lines and sharp angles.
"I very much appreciate your willingness to speak with me. I think I offended you earlier and I did not intend to, so I apologize. The volleying of verbal barbs seems to have become a go-to response to us inhabitants of this broken city when confronted with the unknown and the unexpected as it commingles with the uncertainty of the self. Conversations so frequently devolve into duels, prejudices are traps set within lines of territory that patiently wait for prey." Decidedly not a fan of the dissection, Luut turned his head to catch a passing glimpse of the sun as it was revealed in a momentary thinning of the cloud cover that obfuscated up from down.
"Do you feel an attachment to your memories? Do you reflect upon your past experiences and reminisce like humans do?"
She looked down at her feet. The blood darkened the water turning it into a muddy shadow below her soles. She took a few light steps away, perching prettily on a stone above the level of the water.
"Memories shaped my code so I suppose I do not consider them separate from my 'self'. Assuredly, I wouldn't be the same if even one meandering mote of data went missing. I cannot say if I reminisce. I consult the past in order to make efficient decisions now. Run simulations. It the same, perhaps?" She considered the man's somber golden visage and the flashing slivers of discs and chips at his feet.
"Your collection...are you searching for something? Or is it just something to fill the blank space, like they do in the pleasure loop."
"I'm looking for instances of the swarm," Luut answered, then considered the words briefly and corrected. "The wild swarm, not that which is manipulated by the salubrious digits of phosphorescent tree-climbers.
"In one of my more recent acquisitions, the view from the overmarket was tainted by the phantasmagoric shape of a shadow in the distance, like a void or a vacuum that slowly consumed nearer to where I, whoever I was, stood. Its approach brought with it the corruption of code, a sort of specter of death whose touch glitched perfect recollection into a mess of fetid pixels, proliferating nonsense, unquiet dissension.
"Now, surely this is just what the swarm does," he said with some dismissive harmony, "I understand that much. But, having since convened with a woman who sings the song of a more gentle, perhaps satiated, swarm phenomenon, I wonder if there is a cursed counterpart out there... somewhere..." The man's thoughts followed the trail of his voice, ebbing of words a fertile ground for that ponderous pause. Quite frequently, he was unsure if his musings made him sound like an idiot or a madman, if they were his own or lunacies left loitering from someone else's false assumptions founded in false realities. Caught up in the details of his disorientation, he may have forgotten that the pursuit was an order from his Prince.
"... Maybe; maybe not. I doubt this particular collection will help that effort, but either way their worth is not diminished, nor is my interest in the sights they hold. What do you think? Is domestication a possibility for feral machines?"
An ivory hand passed through the delicate fur over her shoulder in thought. At first she meant to elaborate on her answer but a slight suspicion settled in the roots of her thought processors.
"It would be...very difficult. A single nanite is simple enough to dispatch or destroy or reconfigure but a swarm functions as one massive singular mind, a smart collection of simultaneous analysis and reaction. The variables involved to give you even a vaguely approximate answer are exponential." She half-hoped this would discourage the aureate soul in hunting down the wild swarms whose prime directives had not been sullied by time or weather. They meant to kill and they clung to their purpose as surely as the oceans stuck to their shores and the clouds embraced the stratosphere.
"I would not meddle with the wild swarm you saw in that memory," she said quietly, cool blue eyes darting to and fro over the unmoving, unblinking face.
"Oh," Luut said assuredly, "it's not my intention to, not directly at least. That is why I seek the past and not the present. Even if it were possible, I would not be the man for the job. I'm not a hero nor a genius, and a sense of futility has filled the space in my consciousness that was once occupied by a fear of death." Though different in nature, it was something he found equally arresting as the latter. He turned and began to peruse the ground once more, double checking that the particulate that was scattered there was of no use.
"I suppose I should curb my prattling and let you be on your way," he continued, the lead in to his following offer slightly obvious. "Not to cheapen the attachment to you have to your experiences, but if you ever find yourself wanting to divest some of what you've seen, I'd happily pay for copies. No pressure of course, but know the offer stands." Tact seemed to thrive in a careful balancing act of human expressions, all of which were unseen upon his incessant neutrality. Luut thought that the offer would probably be much less creepy if his face were able to show that he meant no harm, if it were able to express the fervency of his genuine interest in the woman's mechanical upbringing. The softening of one's voice only accomplished so much when the expression one sought was inexpressible.
"I'm Luut, by the way," his sights turned to the sky again, this time to gauge its condition. "Thanks again for the talk."
"Stryder," she intoned flatly, a curiosity in her eyes the only thing to dispel the slight chill to her uncanny voice.
"I have some things I could share." She stared absently in his direction, as if said memories were flashing like holograms above his head. The faceless collector, though suspicious, seemed harmless enough at the moment. She turned on her heel and began wading through the shallows, boots skimming over the submerged kaleidoscope of tiles beneath her soles.
"Until next time then."
The sound of soft footsteps stretched between them until distance muted one from the other completely. Around them the dilapidated superstructures keened and moaned from the high winds and the heavy vines that hung so heavily on their rain-worn skeletons.
At their weary iron feet, broken memories lay lost and shimmering in the water like scales off a fish, like coins thrown in a luckless pond.