Chapter Text
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The king, the Core, the helm, the screams, none of this was supposed to happen, Olivia thought distantly, her heart death-chilled and her body frozen beneath Andrias’s shadow.
She flinched against Yunan’s armored chest as Marcy’s fading cries were echoed by the massive Core’s sun-screech, its six mechanical limbs dragging sparking furrows through polished stone flooring.
Then, just as abruptly, it stopped, leaving them in ringing silence.
Marcy’s body slumped in its bonds, and the Core’s comet-lit eyes faded into darkness.
It crashed to the ground, and did not move again.
Marcy- no, not Marcy, Marcy was gone, no better than dead if not drowning in a far worse fate- blinked open all thirteen eyes on its visor at Andrias’s introduction.
And gasped, hacking and coughing as if it had never before breathed through either lungs or gills before snarling, “Andrias, cut the lines!”
“But- My Lord-” “Now!”
The blaze of Andrias’s blade lit the dim room for an instant, nearly blinding Olivia’s light-sensitive eyes when he leapt atop the still body of the old Core and sheared through its root-tangle of cables in a shower of sparks.
The mechanical vessel shrieked like swords clashing, suddenly-flailing limbs dragging the king from atop it and launching him to the ground as if he was light as a mere frog.
The floor shuddered under Andrias’s bulk as the king landed on all fours, snarling, and flung his eyed crown away.
Warm, dry hands- human hands, she’d taken her eyes off the thing in Marcy’s body- ruthlessly dragged Olivia back by her dress, and she barely avoided cracking her head on the stairs when it shoved her away.
Familiar gauntlets swam in her vision, and Olivia gratefully took Yunan’s hand in her own and allowed the general to help her up. And over Yunan’s shoulder, she saw… the Core’s old body, three-taloned limbs frantically pushing it away from Andrias, who had righted himself and stood silhouetted before the venom-green light of its eyes.
… Green?
“Andrias!” The Core’s voice barked out, layered and raspy and entirely, poisonously wrong coming from the mouth of a child. “She is ours. If you kill her, your pathetic excuse of a kingship will end today.”
Ice bloomed in Olivia’s heart at the possessiveness in the Core’s voice. The greatest minds of Amphibia as one… Marcy was supposed to be- be absorbed by it, but then-
Olivia’s thoughts scattered like gnats as a sliding steel door at the base of the staircase slammed shut under the force of a Leviathan’s arms.
King Andrias panted for breath- the most exerted Olivia ever recalled him appearing, hair mussed and crown nowhere to be seen- and his restrained growl rumbled in her bones. “My Lord, what was that?”
Both Olivia and Yunan froze under the Core’s ice-dark look of consideration, but were soon quickly dismissed. “The host’s attachment to her own body was… lesser. She attempted to escape through the cables during the data transfer.”
Yunan’s voice was barely a whisper, pitched as silently as expected for a soldier experienced in stealth tactics- but not silent enough to Olivia’s court-trained eardrums. “That thing in there… Marcy?”
As if to answer her hushed question, a jarring, steel-shearing shriek crashed out from behind the reinforced doors. Doubtlessly, Marcy was still trying to escape; Olivia shuddered at the wound-fresh memory of the last time she saw Marcy’s face, the kind of wild terror only seen in the truly desperate.
Almost more alarming than the heavy cacophony beating at the doors, the crashing of steel beating upon steel lessened, and then stopped.
The… thing wearing Marcy’s face huffed. “What a tiresome tantrum. Andrias, keep all access points to this room sealed until further notice. As for you two…” Dispassionate orange eyes flickered, like ship-lanterns signaling to each other. “Congratulations, you’ve been promoted. Instead of executing you for treason, we have decided that you might be more useful alive.”
Andrias’s heavy hand, strong enough to break her spine with a squeeze, rested on Yunan’s and Olivia’s respective shoulders, deceptively casual.
She gulped. The Core made itself quite clear. Sooner or later, it would become evident that being granted life instead of the noose was not, in fact, a mercy.
--
Marcy slammed robotic claws into the steel blast-door, sparks shrieking away from every impact. But even the armor-segmented limbs left not a single dent in the barrier keeping her from Olivia, and Yunan, and her body, that was her body it had stolen as she’d fled the pain, electric and blinding.
Let me out!
Lashing limbs slowed, and then stilled, her last dejected swipe scraping down the door like fingernails on a prison wall. Because that’s what this was, wasn’t it? This body, this entire stupid castle, Andrias’s indulging affection.
In the forefront of whatever equivalent of a ‘brain’ she had, a new awareness pinged.
< Reserve power depleted. Initiating Sleep Mode. >
What? No, nononono!
Frantically, Marcy swiveled all her eyes to scan around the castle basement. Shattered holo-projector eyes on the wall, empty rejuvenation tank, wrecked remains of the throne-like upload station, and the tangle of wires, dangling from the ceiling where Andrias had shorn them away from this body.
Yes! The external power cables! And then-!
Marcy’s mechanical body froze in its skitter. Its limbs went slack, and she crashed to the floor, hard.
The reserve power was gone.
Marcy’s dismay flashed and sparked but did nothing, she could do nothing, she was paralyzed, blind, her anti-anxiety exercises were useless because she couldn’t even breathe-!
Like a curtain drawn across her very consciousness, a flat green panic too big for her body, too big for any body, slammed over her mind-
-And blazed away as the system reboot forced her back online.
Anxiety and the lingering spark-shocks of remembered pain lingered, but after the reboot it felt… muted, eased. Like she’d woken from a nightmare, disoriented and confused but feeling slightly less like the world was ending.
Did I just pass out?
The energy-saving background processing that ran even during ‘sleep mode’ informed her no, not really. More of a flush, purging the biomechanical central memory of the old primary minds’ remaining personal consciousnesses.
The- How did Marcy even know that?
Like fumbling to plug in a cord in the dark, Marcy felt something shift and whir inside the armored core.
Though still unable to move, Marcy still cringed at the sensation of code unfurling across her mind like feathering frost, and dismounted the external memory. The way it was formatted… She wasn’t meant to process it all at once, it was just her in here instead of dozens of minds!
But what she caught from it was enough.
The biomechanical central memory, containing only Marcy’s mind rather than the multitudes it was meant for, held nothing of the actual collective’s minds or memories or personalities. But the redundancies and applied data that remained in the Core’s traditional hard drives… those, she could read. The very fact that she knew this about the Core’s old body proved it.
Like I’m trying to read an advanced astrophysics textbook. The knowledge was there, but Marcy didn’t have a glossary of terms to refer back to, so only a part of it was understandable. And it was in a different language. And the authors had an entirely different viewpoint and understanding of the world. And the world was foreign to her.
Okay, maybe this would be… much harder than she thought. But parsing through all the applied mechanics and inherent data was possible!
And if that was possible, there had to be a way to fix this hidden in those files. And she had to fix this, because the Core was a way for Amphibia’s empire to never die and Earth was the next sacrifice to be slaughtered on the altar of conquest and that included her friends-
The overwhelming push of files and downloaded information and internalized knowledge faded, replaced by something comforting and familiar as it was sharp and stinging. Like green light reflecting off an endless array of mirrors, each ray connecting data point to raw information to synthesized understanding.
Marcy re-mounted the hard drive she’d disconnected from in her hasty reasonings. It seemed promising. Uploading and Downloading Abstract Neuroelectric Signals…
