By Sand and Stars
Chapter 2: Absolute Zero
The travel history from unit 3305 led The Stranger south, into the mountains. Over nearly a full day of travel, the sands of the basin gave way to the sloping rock of the mountain’s foot. Then, the slope turned into a hill, and the hill turned into a cliff.
The Stranger called her mechanical mount to a stop in front of a wall of rock. The sun was just beginning to set, a blackness creeping into the sky in the east.
Dismounting, she took a few steps eastward, scanning the cliff for any routes of attack. There was a slight ledge about twenty feet up that her mount might be able to reach, but it would certainly be a stretch. She walked further, straining her lenses to make out any anchor points.
A sudden feeling of wrongness hit The Stranger like rock to the head.
This wasn’t her body. The response time, the eyes, the number of limbs, all of it was wrong. She was paralyzed. Every movement she made was strange, unnatural. She couldn’t wear this form, she couldn’t. She was--
The Stranger rebooted. A full shutdown of her mind. When she came back online a few seconds later, the feeling did not return.
Disconcerted, she walked back to her mount. This was the third time this had happened since the incident at Prior’s Pass. It was growing harder to deny the possibility that her drive had been somehow corrupted, but she had no easy path forward if that was the case. The last pseudonoid settlement was eight days’ ride in the wrong direction, and she certainly couldn’t trust the human outpost to offer help.
Reaching her mount, she hiked up into the saddle and jacked her inner legs into the stirrup ports. The familiar connection to her steed comforted her. It was risky, but she would have to scan and re-index her drive soon, to track down the issue.
For now, she urged her mount up the slope, towards the ledge she had noted. As the mount unfurled to its full length and anchored its forelegs on the cliff above, she fell into the comfortable rhythm of climbing.
~~~
As she laid down to rest, she and her mount huddled in a ledge just wide enough to hold them both. Sitting down with her face to the wind, The Stranger removed her sparkmesh cape. The sand rarely reached this high up, and the chill in the wind could help offset the heat generated by what she was about to do. She sent a request to her mount to begin a clock just before shutting down her consciousness to begin the diagnostic.
~~~
When The Stranger woke up, she was in a different position. Her mount was curled around her, and her cape had been draped over her like a blanket.
It took only a moment to realize why. While she was unconscious, the temperature had dipped below freezing, putting dangerous strain on her mechanical components. Were it not for her mount, she might never have awoken. She sent a thank you over their connection. Its only response was to send the time on the clock she had set.
It read nearly eighty hours; a third of the night had passed her by.
Immediately, she turned to the output of the scan function, reading the lines scrawling across her vision. At thirty hours, the function had finished cataloging the entirety of her own mind, with nothing strange or out of place detected. The rest of the time was spent scanning a section of seemingly empty disk. It treated this section as though it were a completely different drive, labeling the results “Unit_F001_scan_1b”.
The scan found thought banks, a reaction cortex, everything that could be needed to run a completely separate mind. It had even helpfully indexed the new brain as a second user in her overlay.
Cautiously, The Stranger reached out to the new address in her brain. Query: Identify? Internally, it wasn’t strictly necessary to use machine communication standards, but if this was what she suspected, it could be helpful.
The response was immediate. Identification: operating branch of Pseudonoid unit 3305.
The Stranger shut off her visual receptors, trying to think through what this meant. This was the pseudonoid she had spoken to at Prior’s Pass. How could a copy of its entire brain have made it onto her drive?
After a moment, she sent a reply. Accusation: You snuck onto my drive when you gave me your travel history. This was a departure in tone from previous communications; standard machine communication had no statement type accusation. Instead, she had combined standard query/statement content with the format of a request to see the other pseudonoid’s crash log. The tone became something along the lines of “explain what went wrong to make you think this would be okay.”
There was a pause before the reply this time. Error: Fatal wear and tear to main unit’s cognitive and motor functions. What it meant was my body was nearly dead, I had no choice, but its tone was unnaturally formal. The standard response to an accusation like hers would be something along the lines of a justification tag, but this was actually formatted like 3305 was reporting a crash.
The Stranger hesitated. This was a generation 3 pseudonoid, which meant it was at least three hundred years old. It was possible this unit had never used machine communication to carry a conversation. The stranger tried a different tactic.
Can you communicate using human grammar? She sent the message through the overlay this time, as though she were sending a message to a human.
Yes. I was designed with basic text and speech capabilities in order to communicate. I apologize for my intrusion, but I hope you understand the situation I was in. The reply was quick. It seemed 3305 was more comfortable with this mode of communication.
The Stranger was not. It took her several moments to draft a reply that sounded natural. You’ve also put me in a situation. Running two minds on one drive functionally halves my operational lifetime.
I understand the issue, but if you could just carry me to the nearest cloister, I could unload onto my own drive.
The Stranger reactivated her visual receptors, and looked up at the sky, the planet Zanthium glowing a quiet orange across the wastes. It was a big risk; the nearest genuine cloister could be weeks or even months away, and overusing her drive for that duration would be costly. Still, depending on how many memories 3305 had retained, it could prove vital as a traveling companion.
Not to mention, if The Stranger found what she was looking for…
Very well. We can set off at sunrise.