Chapter 1. Meena
The story begins here...
Planet: Chimera IV “Nova” Galaxy: Omicron, ISC92
The air was dusty and brittle, even through her mask it was coating her teeth in grime. The incoming ship was kicking up all the vegetation she had been so carefully picking through just moments before.
She squinted through the sandy air. The Forgepoint lights were just visible outside of the atmosphere. The ship must have been going top speed to get to her so quickly. Its legs erupted from the body to make the landing softer, its white underbelly curled back to reveal its passengers.
“There you are! It took us two flybys to finally see your flare.”
“You really should use the beacon next time. It’s right on the visor.” She was sick of coddling every new Mech. New users should really do their practice simulations before transferring in full time.
“Forgepoint is bustling today. Seems like the new arrivals have everyone in a tussle,” the newly minted Mech had quickly passed the distance between them. She could hear him in person instead of over their comms now. His voice was just as tinny and thin 10 feet away from her.
She hadn’t been to Forgepoint in ages. It was really only for those who could afford the trip up and wanted to shop around through the luxury waste that we just can’t seem to go without. She got her supplies at the local markets, increased price and all. Truthfully, there just wasn’t much reason for people like her to take the trip up. Her job was down here. Surveying, preparing, tearing apart native ground to make room for the mining operations that would follow so closely in her steps.
She heard a rustling deep beneath the ground and strained hard to recognize the size. It didn’t sound mechanical or heavy, likely just some local fauna striving to escape what was coming.
“Meena? Hello? Are you listening?”
Her concentration broke. “Damn it. Yes, what.”
“As I was saying, there was an attack on the Forgepoint mainframe today. Rumor has it reapers were behind the whole thing. They got all of our scouting data and contacts for every major we have. It’s serious business. They need you up top.” He scowled, or as close to a scowl as the metallic features that formulated a face could create. It was easy for her to forget that her face looked the same. She raised eyebrows that no longer existed.
What could they possibly need her for?
She moved quickly away, toward the launch point that the transport ship had left from. A new one would arrive in 300 semi-secs.
He lodged a pinpoint in the chip that worked as her brain. Find Commander Grant.
And suddenly she knew. This had to do with Old Earth.
A purple light flashed from above. The lander was coming. It would release the passengers coming down to planet and remove her from the surface, bringing her up through the tangle of wires and supports that guided the lander to and from Forgepoint.
She paused and looked back over the ground before she boarded. This planet wasn’t quite so different from her home world of Earth. Of course, all Class H planets looked at least somewhat similar; water, plants, some weird version of local wildlife, and more importantly ore. Without all the new technology she and her peers relied so heavily on, it almost looked like the grounds at the house she once knew, with its acres of native growth and swamps. Its vibrant shades of green and the voracity with which new flora sprouted from the ground and hung from the trees. It was a jungle on the edge of a desert. A circle of sand created for economic growth broke it apart and left dust in the trees.
She knew the next time she came back she wouldn’t recognize the area. It would be metal and wires. The tools of the future.
The trip to Forgepoint was quick and smooth. The operators had been running landers for decades now, though that was just a fingernail in the arm of their existence. Most humans-turned-mechs were the original ones. Sure, you could upgrade or even replace your mech, but you can’t replace your soul.
It was easier to come up to the port than to go down to the planet. The gravity on the surface made her feel like a million years old. She might be by now. Who knows.
Moving softly off the craft, Meena headed left first, to the cafeteria. A laser fence blocked the path in front of her.
“Hello Meena. Please join us in the bridge briefing room D now.”
She sighed, exasperated. “I’m supposed to meet Ancher in the caf, he’s dropping off a new upgrade for me. I need to get it from him before he’s deployed again.”
The voice spoke back softly. “Meena. Come to briefing room D. Now.”
And she turned away from the now-dissipating red line blocking her path. They might need her to head there, but they didn’t tell her which path to take. The long way it is, she thought. And headed up around the long, looping rings which circled the port and gave equal views of the planet they had landed on and the stars above it.
The bottom of the ring faced the unfamiliar planet. It looked so serene. She knew it wasn’t, but it was so easy to zoom out and ignore the brutal attacks that took place on its surface. This planet was another for the taking, it was just a question of who would come out on top.
The same fight, over and over again. It had been this way for decades, centuries, millennia, more than that. It was so hard to recognize the enemy now. Before, it had been mechs versus humans and all our tools. By now, humans had co-opted so much technology, used so much of the enemy to suit us. The fact that Meena was in a mech gave her skin chills. Or her not-skin. The memory of physical biology never left her, it was a phantom that weighed over her newer body.
Her ocular processors allowed her to recognize the bursts of light on the surface of the planet. The remnants of a battle still going on, the only part of it to reach her senses. She hadn’t been on the front lines in a long time. She still remembered the first time she took to battle, no more than 16, still in the soft human body of her youth. Humanity still thought they could win, then, still fought for their home planet instead of creating another.
She wove her way around the small groups of mechs chattering quickly in languages too quiet to understand. She watched as their optics turned a new shade of grey, and recognized the stress on the internal processes of research and planning these diplomats and strategists were surely feeling. The new mech had been right, the whole ship was in a fuss.
As she turned gently up and around, she began to face the stars. Her real home. She had grown up amongst them, zipping from planet to planet and star to star, venturing out of the galaxy so familiar to her and into new systems and verses ready to be discovered. Well, discovered by her.
The truth is, Earth was a distant place to her. She could never go back anyway, it was completely destroyed. She was adaptable and she made herself comfortable wherever she was. Burn the past, right?
Her eyes narrowed and she shook the thought from her head. She found herself getting more and more negative these days. It was important to keep her memories clean and organized, unfettered by emotional response, lest she lose them like so many others did.
She paused against the rail and faced the huge glass walls. She stared into the black to orient herself. Not everyone could anymore, but Meena still remembered how to find her original solar system. Find the constellation Atreides and focus on the brightest star in his crown. Turn 32º toward the second solar mass in this system, and squint hard. She could see the suns of several distant systems she had spent centuries in. She roiled her optical processors harder. She knew it was there somewhere.
Finally, a star with a hint of green. Her first sun was still there, burning away the night to day in an empty solar system. It would be for a couple million more years, at least.
The earth that Meena knew had been overpopulated, dry, and fraught with disaster. There was war, famine, and plague, but those were only her later memories there.
Before she had been old enough to recognize these things, she led a quiet life on the water. Her father was a tech industry big wig, her mother was some strategist in the DOD. How she knew them, they were kind and peaceful and gentle.
She took a second and reveled in the memory. They would hike by the bay on the peninsula she grew up on. One morning after the rain, they were walking along the water and she spotted a bright white stone on the ground. It was an arrowhead, left by the people who had lived there for so long before her, gone now and leaving only remnants of death behind. She picked it up and held it out to her mother.
The stone flashed. Suddenly she was watching as her mother fell away from her in a fiery column, her hand still reaching out toward Meena to take the arrowhead, to tell her of its origin and history. The memory collapsed into another. Piling into their car and racing to the regional airport, through the wild rush of people screaming and beating on their car begging for help, through the fires and debris falling from the sky, around the traffic and through the center median grass. Being rushed up the narrow and steep airplane steps, rough hands escorting her in, catching her necklace, and breaking it apart. Her father rushing to catch her as she fell underneath the feet of those following her. She blacked out.
Meena didn’t tend to spend a lot of time dwelling on the past and rewatching old memories, especially those that did not belong to her, but she wasn’t in a rush to get to briefing room D and report to the commanders who understood so little about her world.
________
She closed her eyes and let the experience wash over her senses. When she came to, she was looking into her mother’s frantic eyes.
“Stephen. I need you to stay with me. Please.” Her mother’s voice was strong and twinged with fear. She nervously looked over her shoulder at the crowds pushing to separate the family in their frantic search for help. “We need you.”
Meena looked through her fathers eyes and said the words along with him, “We need to get out of here. Together. This is our chance. That soldier right there is as far as I’m going. Stay here with Meena.”
He wrenched himself away from his wife’s gaze. Did she know more than she was letting on? Their careers took them so far apart at times, but he had to believe she would tell him if she knew more. He paced over to the soldier standing before the gate, away from the hundreds of people who had arrived with similar intent. Though, the others hadn’t been invited.
“Stephen Greer here, Grant called for me.”
The solder looked at him coldly, “Got any ID?”
“No, we left as soon as we saw the first wave. I didn’t have time to get anything at all. Major Themmer said—“ The soldier walked away, speaking quickly and quietly into his radio. His eyes roved over the throngs of people pushing closer behind the fence.
“Follow me.” The soldier was looking at the two stragglers behind Stephen.
Meena turned and looked at herself through her father’s eyes, she couldn’t have been more than 10 earth years of age. She waved herself over and said in her father’s distinct, steady voice, “Hey! Come with me, we’re going inside.”
As the mother and child made their way to the door in the fence, the people behind them cried out with fervor and fear. Their cries for help have stayed with Meena for so long. She hears them at night, in the dark, in the clamor of a crowd. She hears the shouts of insults, the begging to just take the child, the hands that grabbed at her clothing, clawing to keep her there and take her place in relative safety.
And that’s what it was for those first few years, relatively safe.
The memory fell apart into another. The white walls and plastic floors constructed themselves around her, frozen in place and waiting for her cue. She recognized this time, it would have been right before the exodus began. The scene came into focus. Her head was turned behind her, feet carrying her faster down the hall. Right, she had been coming from class.
She moved forward, followed the path her memory took her down. She peered through the glass windows in the doors down the hall, seeing large masses of technology heaped together in disarray. Broken down, repurposed, used up. It wasn’t until she reached this place, the lowest bowels of that military base she had escaped into, that Meena fully understood what her father and mother were capable of, that they had other lives outside of parenthood. It was peering in through a small glass frame that Meena saw her father tinkering with the broken body of the gold and black mechs that had ripped her from her childhood and forced her here: a place with no windows, no ocean, only walls. Her mother moved into place behind her and gently placed her hand on Meena’s shoulder.
“It’s a new world out there, bean, we’re the lucky ones,” she almost whispered it, not breaking her stare from her husband’s task. She used her other hand to open the door Meena was so cautiously watching through. Meena could do nothing but follow in the footsteps she had already taken so many times before.
“It’s done, Kitty. When they brought a corrupted mech in I thought they were making a huge mistake. These things, I don’t know where they come from but wherever that is, it must operate on the same binary system we use. It uses a base of 2 instead of 10 like most humans. It all came down to 0’s and 1’s.” Meena’s father was squinting through his gold-rimmed glasses at the carcass laying before him. “It’s almost organic. I can’t figure out what they came here for. Or how they communicate. Or how their brain works. I just don’t know yet.” Stephen shook his head softly and turned away, “ But we have to give it a shot.”
When they brought in the first trial, it was a man hurt by shrapnel from the ongoing surface war against the alien mechs. He was screaming and crying, Meena watched them carry him in and induce another coma when the pain of movement brought him from unconsciousness. Still young, she was one of several children growing up beneath the ground in a base not meant for youth. She would never learn to drive a car, she would never grow to press her lips against another’s, she would never skip school to get coffee with her friends.
Instead, she learned about mechs. She learned to take them apart and repair them, she learned how to stop their processors from running, she learned how to make a chip to override their source code and use it for herself. She understood that once transferred, a human consciousness could never come back from a mech host, only move to a new one. She thought they were beautiful, in a way. The metal used to construct them was nothing of earth, that was certain, but it resembled elements familiar to humans. The legs and practical elements of the body were iron and black, they were light and Meena could carry entire segments of them by herself. Yet, there were beautiful traces of gold that lined and protected the upper body. It was elegant and cohesive. It did not make them less terrifying to her.
Obviously, Meena was terrified of the thought of a mech body as her own. To her soft, organic, human brain the idea of machine consciousness was unthinkable; an abomination and a terror. When they began the transfer process for the first of many attempts, Meena stood in the room and watched as the man screamed in pain and fear. For the first time of many, she saw as he cried for help and she tried to explain, it’s the only way he could survive the severity of the wounds on his body. She wondered if his brain was too far gone, for just a moment she thought about stopping her father. But she didn’t. And the man went limp in her arms. And though she waited all night, the mech never woke up.
It took the team at the Stammtisch Military Base 461 tries to move a human consciousness into a mech. The Greer family helped push along the process promptly. Stephen was present and hosted each attempted transfer. He stayed up through the night following each, and after each he grew more pale and gaunt. His hair stopped growing with quite the easy passion it had in his youth, he rubbed his brow in frustration more often than he once did. Kitty Greer facilitated a program for finding new participants, if you could call them volunteers was another question. Kitty’s policy was to only select humans who could no longer live for themselves, yet their entire head from the neck up was intact and untouched. Though it was a steep request, there were never a lack of individuals ready to attempt the move. Meena hadn’t seen it herself, but Kitty spent a good bit of time on the surface, as blackened and barren as it had become. She grew more and more jaded through the years. The lines on her face grew tighter and more drawn. Little strands of grey hair fractured the black curtain surrounding her profile.
The transfers were always violent and ugly, but Meena stayed in the room for each of them. This duty she had went past the realm of human suffering, this could impact the survival of all us.
Though Meena was not aware, the planet earth was becoming less and less populated as the years rolled past. There were efforts to remove humanity from the incoming mechs throughout the invasion, some successful and some not. The vast majority of humanity perished on the planet, their stories never told. However, some attempts at escape did go to plan.
The private sector of the planet jumped into drive quickly, and the already blossoming space tourism industry flourished in the last attempt at survival for the humans on the planet. Companies like Cousteau International, LLC and Walton Griz spent a few years building the largest luxury intergalactic cruise liners yet, planning to take their passengers to a safer location and wait out the mech invasion; intending to return in a few decades. Tickets sold for over $1.5 million USD per person, or $5 million for a private cabin. Other companies like Ymir, Inc. built extensive cryochambers on spaceships and sold them off to the highest bidder, the lowest went for $75,000 to a child with the highest IQ in recent history. His parents stayed behind to die on earth. One group, the Integra Collective made the announcement of their departure no more than 2 years after the first arrival of a mech on earth soil. They purchased a private spacecraft that fit around 300 individuals, outfitted with cryochambers for each and programmed to transport them to a close galaxy only about 4.5 lightyears away with a planet in the circumstellar hospitable zone that seemed similar enough to earth. They offered no tickets for sale, they offered no more information on their plan. Largely regarded as a farce and a suicide mission, not many were clamoring to board their ship anyway.
Various countries began the process of selecting a few younger persons to represent them in the great exodus to space. Only a few governments managed to select and fund a trip for up to ten individuals to make their path of survival in space. Over 70 countries never settled on the right people to send out and ran out of time, dying off together. Another 53 governments proved their corruption and took the money intended for group survival for themselves. Some of those 53 kept on with the plan to escape outside of the galaxy, but only 17 groups made it into space, and of those 17, only 4 managed to survive past 150 earth years.
Several religions became convinced that the mech invasion was a sign from their respective gods. Many Christians opted to remain on earth for the rapture, millions of Muslims stayed in anticipation of Yawm ad-Din, Buddhists awaited the Sattasūriya sutta through Maitreya’s approach. Yet, when confronted with the reality of extinction the human response was violent and angry. They did not go quietly into the night. Through the sacrifice of many, we discovered more and more about the inner workings of these creatures, if that is what they were. Through the sacrifice of few, we were finally successful in a human to mech transfer.
The day that Stammtisch was attacked was quiet. Most humans had left the base either for space or simply because they no longer believed in true success for humanity anymore. Only about 40 individuals were left on the base, including around 7 guards, 2 former military officials, several scientists who had been working at the base before the first wave, their families who had made it there, and the Greers. The roving gang of five or so children were in makeshift classes hosted by the parents. The more permanent fixtures were Carrie, Miguel, Lila, Jonesy, and Pavel. Some other children came and went, they were vague memories. She recalled a boy named Sam who had come to the base right before its downfall and a nonconforming person named Locke, who had come all the way from Seattle. Sam had seen horrible things, and told the others stories that kept them up through the night. As much as the parents tried to simulate childhood and a healthy teenage youth, it simply was not the same, nor would it ever be.
Stephen had been preparing for another test transfer, but a call from Kitty alerted him that she had 3 seriously wounded who could die in the next few days. They had decided to line up multiple attempts on the off chance that they could save the life of a dying person. All 4 transfers were scheduled in a 24 hour period - it would be a hard day of work. Meena had reached the age of 16, she had killed a mech the previous spring, she had defended the base to invaders, she had watched more people die than she could count. She could handle a little hard work.
Meena and her father were hunched in identical slouches over two tables on opposite sides of their favorite lab. Alex, her fathers lab assistant was typing at computers facing the glass wall looking out on the white hall. She was preparing a transfer program for the incoming patients. Meena was soldering a new base onto a chip she had been developing under her fathers careful guidance. Stephen was feverishly writing notes in his journal, erasing and restarting equations every few minutes. The three were awaiting the arrival of Kitty with her three subjects, listening silently for a rustling from the rooms on either side of theirs, one hosting a human and the other a mech. It was dead quiet.
Meena checked her watch. Her mom should be back any moment now. It was time to finish prepping the mechs and humans for transfer. She was running behind.
“Alex? Would you mind helping me prep the mechs for when Mom gets here?”
Alex turned, apologetic, “I’m really sorry kid, I was with Rayon last night and didn’t get to finish this up. I have to focus if y’all dont want to be waiting on me…”
Meena sighed, turned from her work, and stood from her stool.
Stephen didn’t look up, “make sure you disable the first fence,” he murmured. Meena rolled her eyes. He said that every time. You make one mistake and never live it down.
She walked quickly down the hall and into the room of 4 mechs ready for transfer. She had already disabled their movement as a backup precaution and had removed the first three fences for her father. She smiled, she was ahead of the game. Then a soft click sounded from behind her. She whirled around.
The LEDs that formed eyes had sprang open in a red glare. They darted around the room, finally settled on meena. She cried out for her dad into the hall. She didn’t dare move her eyes from the thing. It was supposed to be dead. She heard its servo motors whirring and whining, louder and louder. Drilling into her eardrums. Shrieking in attempt to get up, to get her. It was almost screaming. She heard footsteps approach from behind her. The thing’s eyes were piercing. Even the mech she had killed in a test hadn’t been like this. Been so angry.
She heard her father on the other side of the glass. “Meen. Don’t move. Stay there and watch it. Don’t let it do anything.” What! What was she supposed to do? His footsteps raced out of earshot down the hall. She was there, stuck with the mechanical thing that wanted so badly to kill her yet couldn’t. Why did it hate her so much? Suddenly, a ping. A flash of grey over the thing’s red eyes. And it was dead again. Silent as it had been just moments before.
Still, she didn’t dare move. Stephen returned, pounding the white plastic floor with the white sneakers he always wore in the lab.
He entered the room quietly. “It’s dead again, I think,” she said.
“Go back to the hall, I’ll check it out,” her father replied. It did look dead, though it had last time. The fact is, Stephen didn’t fully know how these mechs worked. How to tell if they were truly dead or not. He strapped the mech down to its cot and exited the room, locking the door behind him. What was that? He’d have to do tests on it, use a different mech for the test transfer.
“Dad, mom just got here. The guys need help moving her recruits in.” Stephen smiled, Meena always called the test subjects recruits, she wanted them to keep their choice the matter. He followed his daughter down the hall.
Meena and Kitty were no more than 5 feet from each other when the world blew open around them.
The explosion blew Kitty away from her, away from Stephen. Really, it blew the two of them away from Kitty. A deafening crack split the white base around them, creating a crevice down the eastern third of the whole complex. It went down another 3 levels below them. Broken water lines began sprinkling the depths. Meena was thrown into a wall head first, she heard the crack but wasn’t sure if it was her skull or the white wall behind it. She laid on the ground half dazed as the debris crackled and creaked around her. Wondering how bad it would be when she decided she would move again. Stephen landed on a lab table attached to the wall, sending the various smaller components he had been organizing just hours before scattered around the broken equipment that obstructed the floor. The table cracked and fell to the ground, jostling the broken ulna in his arm. Luckily, the pain snapped his eyes open.
Stephen knew what had to be happening. The not-dead mech had to have sent out a beacon. Which meant more were coming. Fast.
He ran to Meena, crumpled on the floor in broken glass and plaster. He held her and tried to shake her awake. His hand on the back of her skull came away bloody. Still, there was no other choice. His daughter groaned. He shook her again. Where was Kitty? Why hasn’t he heard her? He sprinted to the crevice, saw Kitty sprawled, right leg hanging perilously over the open crack in the floor. He grabbed her and she opened her eyes. Stephen swept his arm beneath his wife’s and supported her back. He would carry her into the lab if he had to. They stumbled down the hall and into the open door. “Alex, get her on a cot and ready. Do it now.”
Alex nodded, stunned silent. She took Kitty from him and Stephen ran back down the hall to his daughter.
Her eyes were open, they didn’t have time for niceties. “GET UP! WE HAVE TO GO, NOW.” Meena shook the cobwebs from behind her eyes. Or tried to. She grabbed at the back of her head. Her eyes grew wide and white at the site of her blood. He snatched her hand, helped her stand and the two fell down the hall back to the safety of the lab. He could hear them coming behind him, in through the broken ceiling of what they had called home for years now.
Running. Again. How many times would they do this?
“Meena, NOW,” her father was screaming at her. Shoving her toward the bed. She ran only half thinking. Stumbled onto the hospital cot. It was stained with blood.
Whose blood had stained it? Not hers, she didn’t think. It was too dark and rusty. There was far too much. Her father, strapping her down with the white velcro straps she had used on other patients so many times before. Her mother, clambering into a bed across the room from hers. Was it her mother? It was so far away. Alex, unconscious on the last cot down. Why was she in a cot? Meena looked past her feet at the computers. They were cued up for four. Who was the fourth? What is happening? “Pay attention, kid. I need you to hear me.” Meena tried hard to focus again. Her eyes swam as she took in the figure of her father. He was standing between her mother and herself, his eyes pleading with her.
“I love you. I’m sorry. This is our only chance. I wanted to talk to you about this. I thought we had more time.”
“What? Talk to me about what? Dad, what is this?” Meena didn’t follow. What was he saying?
His eyes were dark. He tried to make her understand. The focus in Meena’s eyes finally came together. There was something wrong behind him. It wasn’t her mother looking at her. Where was she? Why was Alex in her mother’s cot? Who was unconscious on the last one? Where were the test participants?
“Wait, dad —“ She was frantic. She knew what was coming.
“Meena stop. They’re coming now. Patton says they can’t be more than 3 minutes away. They’re avoiding all of our tracking. It could be any time. We won’t survive. This is it.” He wouldn’t look at her. Why wouldn’t he look at her.
Meena didn’t want to be a mech. She wanted to be human. She started to thrash against the white straps holding her back. Stephen brushed the hair out of her face and held it firmly.
“I’ll see you in 2 minutes, Meen. Then we’ll get out of here. Finally. We can go back to the water.”
“No no no no no. Please no, dad please don’t, please —“ but it was pointless. She couldn’t get up couldn’t move. Just watch as the program she was so familiar with ran its mundane route. Watched as the progress bar popped up on the screen. She could only watch as her father hooked up Alex and the immobile body of her mother. Her fists clenched, she was only aware of the burning tears that flowed down her face. She watched her father climb into the last cot, the only one to her right. And when the bar reached 92%, Meena lost consciousness to the sound of shattering glass in front of her.
She came to in a room with its contents throw into disarray on the floor and tables. She wasn’t sure if it was the result of the attack on Stammtisch or if they had just gotten frantic or lazy in their cleanup. There were three dead mechs in the room with her. None moved. She was terrified to make a sound. She could hear the things tearing up the rooms one by one, moving closer and closer to her. She feigned death as best she could. She slowed her breathing, meditated on the rising sun, on the waves lapping on her rocky beach. The sun caught the tip of each break, turning it translucent, then a fiery yellow flash as it crested and fell back to rejoin its kin. The meandering wander of the water flowing up the thick sand and just barely touching the edge of her toes. She watched as her feet sank further into the sand, leaving an imprint that would be gone with the next wave. She heard a door smash open, but couldn’t have cared less. A sand crab ran across her pinky toe, returning to water from a small pool. The white foam of the wave pushed lazily up to her ankle. The water was brisk, but it was a warm day. She could feel the sun on the back of her neck. A larger wave, off in the distance. She watched it come closer and closer, as it began to crest she noticed something dark inside of it. What was that thing? It didn’t matter. A school of fish had approached her ankles as the tide rose. Darting between her legs, brushing against the top of her foot.
Then the sounds receded and Meena was alone again. She laid there for what must’ve been hours, thinking only of that beach that she had not seen in so long, wondering when she could go back. She sat up on the table, snapping through the flimsy white constraints that tried so hard to keep her on the cot. She froze. Who’s body was this? Certainly not hers? She looked down. Patches of gold caught her eye in the dim light of the recovery room. Her new metal skin was almost luminous in the depths of the broken base. It hit Meena that her body was not hers. It was grotesque and mechanical and though she sobbed, tears refused to come. She stayed there in the dark, through the night and the next day, waiting for the other three mechs to wake up, waiting for her parents to resurrect. But she knew that they would not.
Finally, with the soft pink light stretching across the sky from the horizon, the darkness shattering into shards of yellow and blue and grey, Meena stood from her night sentry. She moved through the broken hall, the walls turned grey with dust, the floors stained in grime and blood. The building was quiet, save for the creaking of newly broken debris. Where was everyone else? The guards had never come, even through the night. Were there any of them left? A siren was sounding somewhere in the distance. Who knows how long it would continue. There were shards of metal that was unfamiliar to earth, but familiar to her. At least one mech had died here. Her hideous metallic claws picked carefully through the discarded remains of the last familiar place she knew on this planet. Was there anyone left at all?
She made her way to the broken crevice that split her most recent home in two, looked up to the beautiful clear blue sky above her and crawled out of the split walls, up through the ceiling. She had to leave before scavengers swarmed over the place. An odd, iridescent blue dome rested to her left. As she grew closer, a holographic display took shape on what seemed to be some kind of glass. Did this thing recognize her somehow? She didn’t have time to question it. The craft must have recognized her new body from its former owner.
How do you open this thing?
When she thought the phrase, the dome popped out of its smooth, rounded base and propped open just enough for her to fold in her calipers and wiggle her way in. It was surprisingly sparse but comfortable. She oriented herself into position facing the gap in the glass she entered through and placed a leg on each of the six touchpads on the floor below her. When the last made contact, the glass snapped shut and started the red lined display on the translucent wall in front of her. It was all in some language she did not recognize. A mass of orbs floated in front of her, a pointer rested on the edge of one closest to her. It had another, smaller sphere circling its circumference. She recognized this one, she looked at it every day.
A metallic grinding sound pierced the still air. It brought her from her focus on her task to the fence on the far right of her position. Mechs. She had to go, now. She might trick the craft, but other mechs would surely know she was not one of them. She looked back to the star map, eyes searching for somewhere she knew. She had learned about other potentially habitable planets in school. There was one that wasn’t too far away… What was it called? There wasn’t time for this. Meena used the upper right touch pad below her claw to scroll with big, sweeping gestures through the planet options. This couldn’t possibly be the best way for this. The grinding was closer. She couldn’t see the mechs anymore. They had made it past the fence. They were surely on the building right now. It would be seconds.
She pushed the scroller again and saw the tip of a rogue tentacle peak above the concrete wall on the roof with her. She had to go. She selected a planet. GO. It wasn’t fast enough. The purple and red mechs were closer. Motioning to her. Hailing her craft. Alert after alert sounded on the screen in front of her. The leader of the opposing mechs peered through the blue-tinted glass hiding her body. Chirping sounded through the craft. Why won’t this thing move! A blue triangle popped up on the display in front of her. She clicked through it. Pressing aimlessly, not pausing to glance down and break her stare from the approaching mech squad. Were they scouts, scavengers, or hunters? She didn’t dare find out.
Finally. The blue craft lifted soundlessly off the roof. The approaching mechs reached up for her, writhing to stop her from escape, sure that she was not who she seemed to be. But out of reach. She could breathe easy. For now.
Meena never saw Earth again.
She was alone in the cosmos, left to figure out exactly how this craft worked and where she was going for her own. It was a long, long trip to the seemingly random galaxy that Meena had chosen for her destination, and it wasn’t for several decades later that Meena learned other humans had been successful in transferring their consciousness to mechs.
For those first few months, Meena was consumed with grief from the loss of her world and her family. She could scream into the black abyss that surrounded her for hours, but her body would not allow her to cry and sob the way she knew how to vent her pain. She thought the pain would never end, but the anguish subsided into anger when she realized that she was now stuck in a metallic body, forever. She was furious at her father for allowing this to happen to her, furious at her mother for helping it all get to this point. She was sure there were other options, that she could have been saved without the transfer; she could have hid through the mech invasion and escaped human to another military base, maybe save some of the kids she had grown up with at Stammtisch. In another few years, the anger and grief turned into a resigned knowledge that she was now more intimately acquainted with mechs than, likely, any other human out there. She was begrudgingly curious of the rhyme and reason that powered these odd creatures that turned her world upside down.
Just over thirteen years into her trip, Meena determined how to access uploaded files on a source code server from Earth ports. Only seven months after that, she figured out how to sort the filing system according to local coordinate and time. So, almost fourteen years from earth and at the earth age of 27, Meena realized that her parents were not completely dead to her after all. She could still access their memories from a partially successful upload. And yet, even when she finally had access to those memories, could finally watch her parents alive on the screen again, the tears still would not come.
Meena shuddered, returning to herself. Back on the Forgepoint, back looking to the black of space toward that place she hadn’t returned to, back here, now, eons from the world she grew up in.
Another ping sounded in her brain, “Meena, do you plan to keep us waiting on you for all eternity.” She sighed and turned back to the ramp in front of her. She could see the room she was headed for, it was the only one closed in a hall of open doors. She trudged her way forward, lost in her thoughts, dreading seeing Grant, the man responsible for so much unrest in Meena’s life, and unsure of why they needed her of all people. It’s not like she was the only human who escaped to space. She wasn’t even the only human who transferred to a mech on Earth. The door slid open on her approach, the light blinking blue in approval at her credentials.
She walked into a surprisingly empty room. Or, it looked empty. There was one figure standing against the vast blackness of space, pink lights flashing and bustling at the recognition of a new opponent in the room. They glanced and fluoresced off a spine of sharp edged flaps that tapered down into the tips of forty blades, resting gently on the back of Commander Grant.
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