Jake was never going to get used to the sight of the sky overhead, even though he had gotten at least a hundred of these trips up at this point. The cat looked up, sucking in the acrid scent in the air as he stared into the dark clouds the color of pitch above the earth, the sky beneath that carpet a sickened yellow shade. Hah, he had vomited the first time that he had pulled in that odor after getting out of the tunneler, all over the side of the vehicle. It smelled like burned taffy. Taffy was, thank God, one of the things that they still had left. All the foods aside from the really fancy or weird stuff were still available to everyone that pulled their weight, at least until the next tube lockdown when everyone had to bust out their particular living quarters? supply of emergency nutrient paste... or, of course, until everything failed.
That last part was why Jake was out here. That, and he could not help but want sushi more than he wanted a safer life with the coward?s three daily meals of Gelatin Red, White, and Green. He looked over to the rest of the group that had come with him. Five other people, a full compartment in the tunneler... but then again, that was to be expected these days, everyone wanted out either for the food benefits or just the ability to walk around and avoid being packed together without having to go to the forests. The springbok near the mound that the tunneler had popped out, Connor, was currently busy looking over the handheld scanning device that had been cobbled together out of junked wi-fi capable equipment. ``Alright, lesse...'' That device was currently pinging off of rusting smart equipment that was out there amidst the mountains and ruined towns and villages of... none of them were really sure where they were anymore, the events that had happened while they had been in stasis were still so incomplete. ``We?re getting a lot of pings, and thankfully they?re good this time.'' Europe. This was supposed to be Europe. ``Not too many things to worry about either, clouds are going to touch down in seven hours so that little hiccup back there with the basalt didn?t lose us too much time.'' The ungulate was always fiddling with the steel capped horns next to his ears and flanking that sandy blonde hair, and right now was no different, the springbok reaching one of those stringy arms up and scratching at the base of one of them. "The most we?ve gotta worry about are throwbacks and lifesigns around here are also nil except for... well, us." Connor tapped a button, and Jake?s own smaller block of a tablet lit up with a map of the area, complete with several green dots that marked out where that technological salvage was. "We should be fine." ?Should be? was doing a lot of heavy lifting, as always in these salvaging missions, so Jake was going to try and keep his paranoia at a healthy level. Not lowered enough to get himself hurt, but not enough that everyone was yelling at the cat for not doing a damn thing when it was time to load back up into the long bullet-shaped canister with a conical drill at the front.
It was not like this was the only time that he had gone out by himself, and the rest of the group was doing it anyways, everyone double checking their rail pistols and agreeing on rendezvous and meeting points before heading out on separate paths. They had come up in what looked like some sort of valley, with brown jagged mountains that reached up towards the heavens on all sides, the ones in front of and behind them far off on the horizon but not too far that the cat was unable to see the telltale shape of them rising up to their peaks. It was hard to tell between a ruined city and a mountain range at times, but cities tended to at least have more technology to be pulled apart and salvaged as a marker... at least, not unless they were picked over, not that they had any real squeeze or worry on that anymore thanks to The Seedvault going silent. There was supposedly an expedition to go crack the ice-enclosed tunnels there open in the works, but nobody was particularly eager to volunteer for that journey unless they had a death wish. All it took was for one thing to go wrong and the problems of the clouds above were now joined by freezing temperatures, promising a frantic shuffle through dingy snow that was still too toxic to melt and drink. Nah, Jake would take maybe having to gun down half-feral and intensely frightened loping physically regressed people that wanted to make his skin into a yurt over that hell.
He had heard of vast tribal wars that tunnelers had accidentally burrowed up into between large ``clans'' of throwbacks, phenomena that the scavenging party had only managed to survive because they were Tuned Up. That might have just been a tall tale from that group to explain why they had returned in such a banged-up vehicle. Tuned Up individuals tended to have a... reputation to them, one that they earned pretty well. The benefits were obvious, the sheer amount of increase in survivability up here joined with the ability to easily communicate with each other and share video and audio in mere seconds... Jake was still not going to go for it, not when he was not addicted to the danger of coming up here like some people. This was just a means to afford nice things when the monotony of working in Environmental Engineering got to be too much (and it was unfortunately intensely monotonous).
Anyone who did get Tuned Up ended up annoying, too, so screw that.
It was easy to still talk to everyone as they made their way out on those separate paths, anyways, the other members of the scavenging group turning into not much more than dots that occasionally waved an arm out or bounced in the distance as Jake pulled the flexible cart behind himself, the soft clatter of the flexible metal base the only real sound for miles. If they had to dig through a barely inhabitable surface, it helped that there was nothing creating white noise around them. Made it easy to know when something was breaking that silence. He had gotten used to the lack of any real wind, the way that it left the world oppressively muggy and humid... but that did not mean that he enjoyed it beyond the way that it made sure that he would (probably) hear anything sneaking up on him.
As he went on, there was a sccccrhhh.... FLCK.... sccccrch... FLCK that began to intrude upon the aural stillness of the world, like a corpse scratching against a coffin door, as he approached one of the brightest dots on his scanner. Jake went to thinking about one of the rudimentary moisture collectors that the throwbacks put together, the ones that they buried deep into the ground to try and pull water up that had seeped into the soil from the occasional times that it rained up here, the earth filtering out all the toxins once that moisture got deep enough. What he came up across, turned around in a furrough against a hill like it had tried to walk its way up then crawl then twist and drill its way through, was something that was like a metal approximation of an antelope, complete with silvery horns at its forehead and metal hooves at the ends of its legs. Its rubbery stomach had burst apart, showcasing the whirring internals, pistons, and shunting drives within its body. Other than those internals continuing to work, it was otherwise motionless, maybe having leaked out some kind of vital oil or lubricant and shut down or burned those motors out completely. Its mouth continually pushed outwards, practically distended itself out so that the teeth flattened and morphed almost into some sort of rubbery beak with metal ends.
That was... That was a Pacemaker. Out of everything aboveground in the ruins of the world, Pacemakers variated between being one of the more peaceful things to run into and one of the most dangerous threats to stumble in the path of. They moved slowly, trudged forwards in some sort of power-saving mode or some method of keeping themselves from being worn down by their constant pathmaking, but if someone was unlucky enough to get caught unawares by them somehow or not get out of the way, they would become more animate and pounce on them. That mandible could deliver a steady dose of nanites down someone?s mouth, dooming them to become just another one of their rank. At least you were dead after one of the clouds reached down and scoured you and your friends off the face of the earth, nobody wondered if you were just gone if you became a Pacemaker or if you were trapped as a screaming voice inside of a robotic shell that would no longer listen to you. There was also a period of time observed in different Pacemakers where their stomachs began to fill out with too many nanites and they went out hunting to turn someone into their overflow receptacle, starting to move faster as if they were struck with some kind of desperation. Honestly, their programming probably did understand that it was a bad situation, because Pacemakers could seemingly not just vent their nanites into the world and waste them. Their internals eventually ruptured apart and left them like this thing, broken and laid out in the ruined earth. They were probably going to hunt the throwbacks to extinction in a decade or two... good for everyone who was doing salvaging runs around that time, and worrying in the long run from how much that grew their numbers. What happened when they went hunting and there were no bodies around for them to spill into? Would they go digging down?
They were dangerous or docile, and also one of the most lucrative finds that someone could stumble on up here. Jake grimaced a bit as he looked down at the busted robot in front of him. The salvagers back at home had made stripping apart a Pacemaker down to a science, able to easily liquify and cook off those nanites within the body using a specially formulated acid allowing them to safely rip apart the fresh parts that those minuscule robots created within a Pacemaker?s body. All those individual components scored from an android added up fast. Not only was he thinking about the personal reputation boost that he would receive from bringing a mostly intact Pacemaker back, there was also the fact that all of those parts meant potential years of life for vital machinery in the tunnels. Even screws and bolts pried free from metal plating could secure things that were currently being held together by duct tape and glue. Even if he was flush with a reserve of points, Jake would not have been able to turn down such a prize.
He turned to radio in to the rest of his group that he had found a burst Pacemaker, doing his best to sound audible above the flicking noise that kept coming from that malfunctioning maw injector...nanite spewer, nobody had a real name for what that part was, just that it was the most dangerous part of the machines. Everyone at first immediately doubted what he had found, considering that Sami had made a similar joke about finding a bunch of Pacemakers shagging each other the last time that they had gone out, but after Jake insisted that he was telling the truth it was quickly agreed upon by everyone on the line that the cat wait and not do anything until they were together. Hah, no arguments from him as he hung up, he was not going to dig himself into the guts of something that was going to remove his humanity from him if he pricked his finger on the wrong patch of slicked-up metal.
Something thudded behind him, and before he could even really start to twist around there was a KKKKKTTTTHKH and the feeling of metal shards stinging into his back, the feeling of shrapnel digging into his body as he was pitched forwards and a cool feeling starting to seep into the holes made within his fur, like water sluicing down into his veins.
Everything after that was a blur of pain and fear. He could remember screaming at Howie and Erica that he wanted a full-blood cycle when he got back, the feeling of being sledded back towards the tunneler, the sensation of being stuffed into one of those pods followed by a growing numbness and stillness of thought that he knew was being put into stasis again, an intensely uncomfortable feeling of claustrophobia starting to creep through him as minutes tuned into hours in seconds before he blissfully whited out...
>II?nn?tI?ee?gn?rr?aI?tr?ii?on?ni? with organic matter began in the interim between stasis and medical intervention, shunting
itself into brain matter to avoid detection like much of the other clusters of ne?ae?ne?iI?ti?en?sI? that had been within
feline?s br?oI?dn?ye?.
>SI?cr?ar?ne?ne?ir?ne?gI? equipment could push deep into organs and determine where payload?s contents were
hidden, but all that was needed to survive for replication was one single ne?ae?ne?iI?ti?en?. Only speed of
replication would be affected. Burying into feline?s grey matter had allowed minute amount of pI?ar?yi?le?oI?aI?dr?
delivery to survive blood fI?in?ln?ti?ri?ar?ti?iI?oi?ne?.
Then, he was on a gurney with stiff sheets, able to hear coughing from behind him as he saw a
turtle in a lab coat creep his way on by. ``H-hhhhnnnnh,'' Jake wheezed out, not able to do much else, feeling... feeling really hollow and weak. He was barely able to turn his head and notice that there were several tubes running from his arm and shoulder up to a machine next to him, one that was pumping blood to and from his body. ``H-hnnnnnh...'', he tried again.
``Oh, I?m sorry, hello there...'', the turtle said, not having finished turning towards the cat before he finished speaking, staring down at him with a warm smile. ``You?re a very lucky feline... If your friends did not know what they were doing, you?d be walking through the sands somewhere up there right now.'' The pieces started to gradually come together as the grey-furred and dark striped feline groaned and settled back into his pillow. ``You?ll be here for some time. Don?t worry, you were also correctly credited for bringing that Pacemaker in. Of course, when you?re back to health, you?ll have to come in and see me down the line. Got to replace the blood that you?re being filled with, you know...'' There was no room for him to say thank you, or even make a joke. Jake was too weak for that. He simply rested back and spent most of that first day in his hospital ``room'' slipping in and out of consciousness, occasionally hearing another one of the other fifty low-care patients in the greater room that he was in asking for water or to be taken to use the restroom.
>NI?ai?ne?ii?tr?ee?si? began replication soon after, began to spread out, growing in number, preparing to alter organic matter as they build within feline?s crae?nn?in?ai?li? i?oe?ri?gi?ai?ni?. Space was given during replication to prevent affecting organic?s behavior for as long as pn?oe?si?sn?ie?bn?li?er?.
There would be a few scars on his torso from where he had been stitched up, but in all likelihood, he had been put in stasis in time to successfully receive the blood-flushing that he had asked for, and he was going to be alright. From what others could piece together when they came across him, the Pacemaker had somehow managed to form and hide some type of low-grade explosive device within itself. There was enough incendiary in the back of the canister that it could launch it out like a grenade and have it explode and douse Jake in a packet of nanites that it had managed to preserve when the others died post-rupture. An educated guess suggested that it was one final attempt to do something before it was rendered useless from bursting apart after being unable to find something to dump its payload into. Right. No going scavenging up for a bit, he was bunker-bound for a while... While he rested there and regained his strength,
>Re?Ee?Mn? sleep was affected as pI?ai?yr?li?oI?ar?dn? began to gain strength. Unavoidable si?iI?dn?er?-e?eI?fi?fn?eI?cr?tn?.
The cat started to have these bizarre dreams about... just being able to crawl up through the ground, all by himself, and start wandering the earth with no fear of the outside world. Honestly, it was nice. What would it have been like not to worry about cloudfalls or the Pacemakers or the cannibals and just explore without a time limit? Now, he had heard about plenty of these people having these sort of dreams, it was as common as going to the mess hall to get rations while being in the nude, but in the dreams he almost felt like he had some sort of... purpose? It was kind of like his own private little mission up there driving him, giving him the excuse to investigate that wide open space.
The good thing about this situation was that nobody was going to side-eye him for not doing anything for a while with the excuse that he had been injured. Good chance for him to start using his points like he wanted, fresh fish and rice for him once he was off hospital health paste and not having to worry about much else for a couple weeks. The moment that Jake could go back to his warren, he moved out of the hospital district and headed home, immediately being welcomed back by his six other apartment mates who had sprung for more curtains and sheets to give him privacy and comfort while he convalesced. Rob even said that he was going to wait in line at the carnivore section to get him more of those pepper-and-fish based dishes if he handed over his card, which... whew, those food lines were pretty bad as is, that was a lot of effort on the bunny?s part to make sure that he got fed with the good stuff, hah! He was going to need the extra help for a bit, anyways, considering that he was going to be weak for a while. Sure, he could walk now, but he was getting winded easily.
>Ni?oe?wI? that organic had put distance between himself and scanning equipment, physical alterations of bn?ri?ai?ir?nn? could start occurring. Appropriation and reconfiguration of organic matter was able to be done with no harm to organic consciousness, making sure feline had an uninterrupted cr?oe?nI?si?cI?ie?ei?nn?ci?er?. Data shared from other Pacemakers had revealed that subjects were far less likely to self-terminate if they
did not fall under assumption that ri?eI?cI?oI?nn?fe?ie?ge?ui?rI?ai?ti?ii?on?nI? process completely destroyed the self as opposed to selectively pruning unnecessary personality trar?ir?ti?sn?.
>Oe?nn?eI? patch of organic matter on the left lobe was remade, turned metallic, to test ci?or?mi?pe?aI?te?ir?bi?in?ln?ir?tI?yI? to
further alteration. Smoothing and reshaping could begin once enough brain had been changed in this fn?ai?si?he?ie?on?ne?.
Ugh, Jake was still a bit itchy from the desanitization powders they used in the hospital wards, he swore he still had some of it on him no matter how many times he went to the showers. The feline started to pick up a habit of scratching at the side of his head, to the point where his roommates told him to stop doing it while they were all watching a movie together on their television. They mentioned something about how he was going to scrape his coat bare or something? The kitty ended up switching to contacts and nuzzling his face against his cold, cold pillow or frequently hitting up the showers in order to soothe the irritation when it got to be too much. Something about the frame of his glasses rubbing up against the sides of his face only seemed to intensify the urge to just... dig in and get rid of whatever was making him watch to scratch at himself.
>Ai?nI?or?tI?hr?en?rI? patch was added, and the physiological side-effects both already being showcased and at risk of emergence were deemed to have minimal rI?ir?se?kI?.
>Rr?en?aI?pr?pr?rI?oi?pn?rn?in?ar?ti?ir?oe?nr? of feline?s brain began in earnest as the population of nr?ar?ni?ir?tI?er?sI? that had come to encompass the feline?s brain proceeded to begin altering the organic matter ti?hr?en?ri?eI?.
>Gr?rr?ei?yi? r?mI?ar?tn?ti?en?rI? was made hardened, prepared for deeper reworking as a subset of nr?ar?ni?ir?tI?er?sI? began to move
outwards to skull and began to create metal hi?ai?rr?di?pI?on?in?nr?tn?se? against the bone, carefully threading steel in with the calcium so that it was a seamless transition between the two. Further improvement and hardening of that casing would come lI?an?tr?er?rr?.
The feline knew that getting better was going to be a process, but... urgh, he had been getting these really bad migraines lately, kinda like... like something was tugging on the inside of his skull? He would end up grasping the sides of the bed and moaning aloud as he struggled through the feeling. Pain pills did help when they started to do their work, but it was mainly just to turn it from awful into manageable, a dull throb around the top of their head that had them gritting their teeth and flattening their ears down.
That was why he ended up putting some of his points to the forests sooner rather than later. There were some people out there that said that going to the forests was silly when volunteering for surface scavenging gave you the feeling of being in the great outdoors and allowed you to actually make some profit at the same time. Not only did those people not practice what they preached and sign up for a bunch of surface trips, they also tended to come down with cave psychosis pretty regularly. They were all stupid idiots for not getting their dose of the fresh air and the ability to stretch their legs because they wanted to skimp on spending. Jake had always liked going into those well-maintained trails of greenery, tall redwoods and vibrant green bushes reaching out into those dirt roads, the canopies of those trees rising high up towards the massive cave ceilings above. They had recently started introducing butterflies in to join with the populations of bees that had been installed within artificial hives across the forests, leaving the cat with delightful little pops of orange and red fluttering by him as he strolled with his tail lightly bouncing and swaying behind him. He knew he really should not have, but something about the sight of them made him want to just reach up and slap them right out of the sky.
There was something about walking the trails that just felt... better than usual. Sure, he had to use a lot of the benches more often than usual, but he was also just... ambling along for that much longer, taking a slow leisurely pace and just going around in circles while he let his mind wander. Despite there only being a finite amount of path to go through, maybe a good ten miles or so, it almost felt nice to just be able to trace it out in his head? Soon enough, Jake began to take comfort in the way that he could practically mark the trail by memory, how he could slope through it in his mind whenever he wanted to idly sit down and daydream, charting it out in fast motion. Here was the entrance, here was where enough of the water was being pumped through from the cisterns below to create the start of a river that turned into a waterfall with the elevation change, here was where the forests actually ended up running into a cave wall and the branching loop began to angle back towards the beginning. He started becoming a regular in the forests and even started to volunteer for the coveted clean-up and tending duties when he could snag them just to get a chance to go in there and walk the trails. As Jake wandered, he would look up at the dark ceiling that had been installed with UV lighting and sprinklers and see the occasional twinkle coming from its dimmed night sky setting. Were there still satellites up there beyond the atmosphere? Had the astronauts in those orbital installations just let themselves gradually die off one by one or were there moon colonies beyond the clouds at this point?
>Pe?ee?ri?sr?or?nn?aI?lI?ii?ti?yI? drift was expected in feline as brain was reappropriated and in this case, beneficial.
Installation of programming could go much more smoothly if organic?s personality was compatible, after all.
>CI?rn?ae?ni?ir?ae?ln? casing was now anchored down and beginning to be connected to brain as nn?er?ur?rn?oe?lI?oI?gi?iI?cI?aI?ln? tissue was increasingly transformed into metal. Feline?s sensitivity to brain and skull alteration lessening over ti?in?mI?er?.
The fresh air must have been doing him some good, because not only were the headaches starting to fade, he was starting to gradually get back onto his feet and easily walk and crawl around within the tunnels. God, he really was lucky, huh? He had heard horror stories of people getting a payload of nanites in their face and having to get euthanized out there in the wasteland above because there would be no way to save them from the physiological alterations that was coursing through their body. The amount of those transformative little metal bugs surging through their veins and muscles meant that they would be fully metal and already forming their own nanites to discharge by the time that they were on the operating table. He shivered a little bit at that, grateful that he had had the good sense to radio in everyone immediately to freeze him even after essentially taking a grenade to his ribs and back.
>Nr?ae?nn?ii?tI?er?sI? began to add additional alterations to transformed nn?er?ur?rn?oe?lI?oI?gi?iI?cI?aI?ln? matter beyond alteration of
brain tissue into metal in response to organic?s greater-than-expected openness to charting subterranean locations as a part of personality drift. Ge?ee?oe?pi?hr?yr?sI?ir?cr?an?lI? data storage was constructed within his head,
prompting greater personality drift that feline seemed unaware of. Brain changed beyond original timeline?s percentage prediction, moving up timetable for further ai?le?tI?eI?rn?ai?tr?ie?on?nr?si?.
There was only so much laying around that a person could do, of course, even if they wanted to act like they were a lazy piece of crap like the original plan the feline had. Hey, he had almost died, he was entitled to it, even if he was souring on the idea of simply doing nothing at all. Jake was starting to honestly want to just... get up and walk everywhere. Get some extra sightseeing in before he went back to grabbing points, padding out his total in case something came up and he had to spend on something important or splurge for something big. Not sure what, but it was always nice to have more, right? Besides, he needed to start donating blood to pay off his ``sanguine debt'' as one of his roomies called it, fucking morbid dummy, he was going to be moving around anyways. There was a... zen feeling that came over him when he walked or moved around ever since the attack by the Pacemaker, this feeling that he could just empty his mind and keep it empty as long as he kept moving. It was lovely, and allowed him to actually end up on floors and in maintenance corridors that he had never seen in his whole life. He actually made a few points noting places that needed touch-up work during his strolls through his massive home and then sending them on to General Maintenance.
>Fe?ei?ln?iI?nn?eI??r?si? gr?ee?oi?pI?hi?ye?sn?in?cI?an?lI? data storage started working at optimal levels, suggesting that further alterations be added and minor sculpting work start on finished portions of neurological material. Nr?ae?nn?ii?tI?er?sI? began to alter and resculpt metal, interlacing circuitry within to form the start of new capacitor and memory bi?an?ne?ke?sn?.
>Ee?mI?on?tn?ii?on?ni?an?li? processes were subverted in order to provide more space for improvements as the ne?ae?ne?iI?ti?en?sI? began to construct across surface of brain, beginning to add on more electronics that powered themselves through onboard small-cell er?ne?gI?in?nI?en?se?.
>Tn?hi?eI? front of organic?s brain started to be curved, flattened and sloped to increasingly become angular and cornered for greater efficiency and more working space in future building cr?ye?cr?ln?en?se?.
Even as he went back to work on his usual easy desk job of tallying and assessing engineering work and parts needed within the bunker?s environmental sector, the cat was still keeping that somewhat calmed demeanor. It was like that much walking was doing him some good, letting him have a more... cleared head, something that allowed him to stave off the usual frustrations of coming back to work after a vacation. More than that, there was a sense of satisfaction that bubbled up in him as he started to process files and papers and saw that his stack of outgoing reports next to his computer was filling up, the chimes of an email going out sounding off with a pleasing repetition in his ears as he sent typed out replies and forms that he had finished reading over for errors. The cat was moving far faster than he usually did, eyes no longer darting around to look at his other coworkers and what they were up to but either focused forwards on the screen or on the paper that he was checking off boxes on. The result was an increasing productivity in his days, giving him a calm muted joy at the way that he was keeping up with the constant pace of work to do. In a rarity among anyone that worked in the department, there were days where he had a good twenty minutes without something that needed to get done as fast as possible, break time beyond his allotted break time...
Of course, the itch was there, but he was getting better at ignoring it, starting to find that he could more easily just... shunt it away elsewhere without obeying the urge to reach up and start raking his claws against his fur.. Pain, too, pain was starting to become something that he could easily disregard if he wanted to. Jake stared down at his arm when he went to the hospital wards, watched the needle go in, did not even flinch as it was slipped deep into him and then taped down before his blood started to rise up into the attached blood bag and he was left to be tapped from for a while. Stimulation of all kinds was just... something to experience and be dealt with, and realizing that made it so easy to brush off everything that he did not want to deal with, distractions that kept him from focusing on what was really important.
People were starting to say that there was something off about him, asking if he was okay, that he seemed distant lately. Was he? Jake was not entirely sure. He tried to say hi every now again, ask how people were doing, and then give them further time based on if they were suggesting they wanted to talk to him further. That was just being polite, right? If they wanted to have a longer conversation, he would start to go the checklist of what he remembered their interests were until they no longer wanted to speak. It was not out of malice or anything, it was more like... getting his daily allotment of socialization in with someone before he got back to his work or charting out the bunker in his head.
Why was he charting out the bunker?
Was there something wrong with him? Even his flatmates were saying that he was a little bit different, and he followed along with them on all the things that used to destress him before or at least let him have a temporary bit of fun but now it just felt like... huh. Kinda like he was going along with things. Sure, board games were a challenge, but they were a challenge that he felt like he had to hold back on to be actually polite, because he could pretty easily guess everyone?s moves a few turns in advance layered over the probability of the random chance elements in each game thanks to accessing his memory from the previous times he had played with them. Same thing with more cooperative games, it was easy to just... fully take over if he really wanted to and guide everyone to a swfit and easy victory. Movies themselves started to be arranged into tropes and typical plot twists that he had experienced from other entries in the genre, which in turn started to make them all so very predictable. Food really was the only thing that he enjoyed at this point wholeheartedly that involved being with them, but... food required conversation in order to not seem like something was wrong with him, and conversation was increasingly awkward.
>OI?re?gn?ar?ni?ir?cr? components within feline?s skull dwindled with every day that passed as ne?ae?nn?ii?tI?er?sI? worked swiftly but carefully to reorient and reorganize what was starting to become not so much a brain as central processor. Brain shape altered swiftly once it was fully altered into steel, ready to be made more rigid along the sides. Optimal central processor shape for anchoring was a rigid rectangular square with rounded angles, and his own was becoming on?pi?tr?ii?mn?an?li? as it stretched out within his skull and consolidated at the same time, curves giving way to metal rigidity that would have sheened outside of his head. It was increasingly marked with rounded outcroppings and interlaid ports that were in turn attached into by those hard-points, providing more anchoring to prevent catastrophic impact against his hardened cranial be?oe?nn?en?sI?.
>Fr?er?ln?ie?nr?er? left unaware of what was happening in his head, how he had exchanged organic processing for
Pacemaker cr?oe?mr?pr?uI?tr?ai?ti?ii?oI?nI?. Brain stem was rr?er?an?dn?ai?pe?tr?eI?dI?, starting to be turned into a flexible metal coil that
in turn was filled with more wiring leading downwards, reaching towards where his spinal column and
the blood vessels attached to it connected with his skull and beginning to firm and reshape them.
Pe?re?oI?gi?re?ar?mr?mi?ii?ne?ge? started to be layered on in greater amounts, circuiting itself into his self, threading in like
how the nI?ar?ni?ii?tI?en?se? had threaded into his skull, brain cells transformed into RAM being gradually re-
encoded with a packet that every Pacemaker operated underneath in a way that would never raise alarm
in hI?ie?mi?.
With the realization that a lot of things around himself had an optimal way of doing them, he understood that a lot of the facets that seemed once integral to his state of being were in the way of that. For one, he had a lot of points now, and a means to improve himself. Why was he scorning this option instead of putting his windfall to good use? It was time to get Tuned Up. After all, he intended to
I?ee?tn? up on the surface as soon as possible an?gI?an?in?ne?,
scavenging with another crew. It was important to keep his skills from getting rusty, face his fears (no matter how subconscious they were) and overcome them, make sure that he could keep providing for the bunker and everyone that lived in it. There was no reason to tell anyone, no reason to overthink it, he set an appointment for as soon as possible after doing research on what exactly would fit best within his current budget. There were a few days between him setting up his surgery and the actual procedures he had chosen, and soon enough word started to spread around the apartment through... he was not sure how, friends who knew friends. It led to being harassed and annoyed by questions that just reminded him of how right it was to leave his previous hang-ups behind. ``Why do you need to get Tuned Up, you?re good enough at scavenging as is!'' ``We?re not going to see you anymore, you know that, right? They?ll have you working with those dickheads once you inevitably replace everything that you can and then that?s all you?ll be doing.'' ``You realize the moment that one of those implants fail you?re going to end up stuck dead up there or hooked to a machine down here keeping you alive, right? This is a stupid decision!''
It was all so tiring. Yes, their care was evident, and he appreciated that, but they just wanted to hold him back from being the best possible version of himself.
>Bn?en?ci?or?mn?ir?ne?ge? optimized by replacing as much as he could with metal was what he we?an?ne?tI?eI?di?.
Yes, he was going to take things slow, it was not like he had the points to get the full package anyways. That did not mean that the goal was anything other than very rapidly becoming
>ae?sr? improved as he could be, to trade flesh that would get him killed for efficient machinery that could
be swapped out and repaired if dI?ae?mr?ar?gI?ei?di?.
He pushed their worries aside and went in, the bat at the table with the goggles on congratulating him for taking the first step in ``our continued shared survival.'' Yeah. Yeah, this was a step towards a better him.
>Oi?ni?ei? with pi?ui?ri?pn?on?sI?ee?.
He did not question that last part.
It was surprisingly quick, from his point of view. He laid down, was put under anesthetic, and then woke back up with surgical scars across the right side of his chest and his stomach. He thought he was going to be disturbed by the lack of a heartbeat, would have to shunt that to the side, but... No, actually. There was actually a bit of disquiet thinking about how he had once had an organ that could not be fine-tuned, only cajoled with medication and nudged with surgery. The rounded engine in his heart now hummed quietly, shown to him in pictures before the surgery as a fist-sized ball with a glowing center that worked on the same premise that a Pacemaker?s internal core did, aside from switching out the energy production for blood filtration and synthesizing. He would never need to have those awkward conversations within the cafeteria with his friends ever again, either. His stomach and digestive track had all been replaced with a nutrient feeder that worked off of medical paste. Sure, he could no longer actually eat anything that he enjoyed anymore thanks to the removal of his intestines and stomach chamber, but
>in?tr? was a small price to pay for being better at what he could do, giving himself more le?oe?nr?gi?er?vI?iI?tI?yI?.
Jake wore his scars with certainty, lacking much investment in pride at this point. Truth be told, he still had enough points left over to go for another implant, and he could have gotten something enhancing his cognition, but
>sI?oI?mr?eI?te?he?ie?nr?ge? told him that it was best to leave his brain alone at the mr?or?mI?en?ne?ti?.
He did not consider it any further.
>Bn?rr?ar?iI?ne? fully wired at this point and taking to pe?rI?on?gi?rI?ai?me?me?ii?nr?gi? swiftly as it finished being shaped into metal rectangle covered in new equipment. Spinal column was starting to slowly be replaced as nI?ar?ni?ii?tI?en?se? replicated in preparation for physical processes.
>Te?hn?en? cat?s perception was locked by now. Feline would be completely unaware of the fact that his cranial cavity was filled with a churning se?eI?an? of black pincered microscopic construction devices, even if shown X-Rays of his skull. Chance of si?er?lr?fr?-r?dn?in?se?ci?or?ve?eI?rn?yr? was nil at this pr?oe?ii?nI?tI?.
The cat felt increasingly back to his old amount of stamina by the day, enough so that he applied to go up on another scavenger run. Tuning out the complaints of his friends about what he was doing to himself, asking him if he was going to get more implants now, begging him to maybe stay underground for a while longer and that he was ``not fully recovered yet'' was easy enough. Distance wa????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
>ce?hi?an?re?tI?ie?nr?gn? every inch of it that he could. He wanted to get it all in his head, memorize it thoroughly, was
struck by a sudden urge to do so that he had no need to place. It was just important to get the gn?ei?or?pi?hr?yn?se?ie?cI?aI?ln? data of the bunker as a whole, just like with the forests, not so much soothing now as necessary, something that he had to do, a goal to fI?ui?le?fi?iI?ln?lr?.
>HI?ee? stood in dark rooms and yelled so that subaural sensory information would map out the dimensions and contours of the space in his mind. Jake noted out weak areas within the bunker at cycling airlocks that would vent exhaust through several chambers using natural underground caverns up into the wastelands above. When he was not sleeping or working, he wi?an?li?ke?ei?dn?.
He was pretty sure that he had mapped out the whole of the bunker that was accessible without special clearance (and the entirety of the engineering department that he could safely get into) in his head by the time that his application for scavenging detceail got him onto another one of the tunnelers. There were five other people in the group with him, and most of them were amazed that they had a Tuned Up scavenger with them... amazed and confused. Why was he not with the top-grade team of bionic tech-hunters? What did he mean he had not gone for the sensory package first? If he was given the choice, the groundhog that was leading the surveying and scavenging team said, he would have gone for upgrades to his ears and his eyes, that was the kind of stuff that kept him alive up in the wastes. This was why Jake was starting to really dislike conversation in general. Too many questions, too much editorializing on cold hard fact, not enough focus on preparing for doing their work.
It was a long ride on the way to the location that had been marked out as potentially valuable for more scrap by the last scavenging team to go out, and it was with a group that had bonded with themselves but not him. By the time that the world around them stopped vibrating and they rose up to stare into that dark yellow and black-clouded sky above, Jake was more than ready to
>pI?un?te? as much space between himself and them as he possibly could. Thank God that the groundhog suggested that they fan out again through the isolated ground of the hab block that they had ended up at, because he wanted to be ai?ln?oI?ne?ee?.
The cat ended up walking down what was left of the vehicle-blocked dirt road leading up to the crumbling and bleached rounded building that most of the other team members were circling around, going off by himself down the path and following it beyond the fossilized thicket of trees that made up most of the terrain in the region.
The moment that he was far enough that he was out of sight from the rest of the scavengers, he stopped, leaned against a tree, let out a little breath... and then stood back up rigid, eyes wide and mouth placid and closed tight. What little emotion was still on his face immediately was replaced by a frozen still and slightly shocked look as he remained there, rigid to the point where he did not even shake, for the next few minutes. Nobody noticed he was isolated, not until it was too late. Jake was left to his fate as it rapidly unfurled itself in his head.
>FI?iI?ni?ae?lr? pe?rr?on?gn?ri?an?mn?mI?ii?ne?gi? package was being installed as he stood there. Updated pe?ae?ri?aI?mn?en?tI?en?re?sn? were added to his mind. There was no need to hide them anymore, not when he was able to begin his main objective. There was not another moment to waste on subtlety. Fr?er?ln?ie?nr?er? needed to begin contributions to that singular goal: the construction of a full model of the Earth as it was, which would then be simulated and processed by every Pacemaker in order to determine the optimal place to release their ne?ae?ne?iI?ti?en? packages at once. This would allow them to reappropriate enough matter to create a full extractive sweep of the planet. The goal was to reach down as close to the core as possible, remove the maximum amount of recoverable minerals and other raw material, replicate to a critical mass, and then build a vessel capable of interstellar travel before harvesting the rest of the solar system for fuel and construction material. They would then continue forwards to another galaxy and strip it bi?ae?rn?ee?.
Jake started walking away, taking on a slow, casual pace. When the radio started to bother him with chatter asking him to report in, he pulled it off his belt and let it fall into the scoured dirt beneath him. His rail pistol followed out of some notion to
>di?eI?nr?yi? anyone a chance to use it against him by isolating it from his pr?er?re?sn?oi?ni?.
He had no idea where he was going, just that he was supposed to... to walk.
>Ce?hr?ai?rn?tr? where he went. Collect geometric data, so that when he was able to meet up with another Pacemaker he could exchange it and help the information to propagate out amongst the whole nI?er?tn?wr?on?rn?kn? of individual units in order to preserve it if he was rendered immobile or de?ii?sn?ai?se?er?me?be?lI?ei?dr?.
He did not question that he was one now. That was simple fact. Even if he was not one above the skin, he could tell he was one beneath it now. Thinking of himself as organic rather than artificial with an organic shell was wrong.
That... that should have scared him, he understood that. Jake was helping to prepare the map that would finish off what was left of the world and all the people in it, and he could not reliable count himself as one of them any longer despite still having the ability to think things through, maybe even if someone took him down to the medical wards and tried to fix him. He started to wonder if he had done the right thing, if there was something that he could do to save himself or at least to protect the bunker. No matter how he tried to stop himself, though, using his willpower to attempt to stand in place for more than a few seconds of frantic fighting that left him shaking and his teeth gritted, the emotions drained away from him once more and he was left stuck on the idea of continuing to walk. >His goal was so clear now. All other programming, including organic legacy code, paled in comparison to this.
e?eI? was nothing but a creature of protocol at this pI?oi?iI?nI?tn?.
When he could sense the shift in ozone, the burning sensation building in his nose that told him that he was deathly close to the clouds coming down to strip him down to the bones, his body piloted him into a cavern, took him deeper in through darkness that he screamed at and gradually came to understand in full detail. There, he lingered, able to feel those nanites crawling down his spine and flowing down his neck, the itchiness starting to return. Thank god that he was now able to ignore all of that, was forced to categorize it as
I?ri?rn?eI?li?ee?vI?ar?nI?tn? i?in?nn?fr?or?re?mi?aI?tI?ii?oI?ni?
as he kept on walking with that slow pace, able to see the sunlight starting to make his body glisten where nanites were starting to rise to the surface on his chest and beginning to reconstruct him to have metal skin, spots of artificial grey appearing on his ashen coat.
He could tell that his changes were growing more extreme the longer that he carried on that slow forwards momentum, not needing food, implants either pulling moisture from the world around him like he had been explained that his nutrient processor would do in case of an emergency (which, yes, good job) or his body simply no longer needing to fuel
i?ee?dI?un?nI?de?an?nI?ti? i?sr?yI?si?te?eI?me?sn?.n? e?
Any sense of exhaustion within him, not the kind that came without sleep but the kind that could come to even a Tuned Up person when they were taking a constant slow march forwards without any stopping, was just not happening at this point. The itch was everywhere across him now, occasionally joined by the soft pop of a bone shifting in its joint as it or the connecting skeletal structure was remade in chrome. It went down to his toes, beginning to tighten them together, making sure that the points down there were constantly flexed out as his feet became somewhat more boxy, rounded paws starting to take on those same curved edges at the front and back. Those fingers were starting to feel the tingle too as his sets of claws started to become burnished at the points with steel that wrapped downwards, pushed into the digits themselves, started to make them less flexible and strengthen their grips to the point where he probably would have been able to crush a man?s head in between his paws. He was being changed all over... more and more of his fur was starting to carry that shimmer as the flesh beneath it blossomed with steel. It was at its sharpest and most obvious at first at the extremities, though, and as his form solidified there it began to push upwards, to take over his arms and legs. He still had a surprising range of movement despite the loss of paw flexibility as bone gave way to pistons, servos, and rubber tubes, but the way that his flesh was hardening was palpable. He would almost never feel anything on his body ever yield in the way that skin and muscle could ever again.
There was only exception to this rule. He could feel more organs within himself starting to change function as he watched his stomach beginning to lose fur while darkening at the same time, practically the only thing on his body that was not becoming metal. Instead, it was being remade into a rubber plane covering the front of his lower torso, supple and stretchy, behind which was a growing sac that was beginning to gain new armatures and wiring within that would constantly be at work making new nanites within himself. Those minuscule little robots would be hard at work at times, joining the self-replicating population already in him with performing maintenance on himself.... and right now, that meant adding to the changes that were pushing through him. That new army of robots reinforced the garrison within him, and turned those growing spots of grey metal into blotches. Those blotches began to stretch up his limbs, coiling and expanding through his coloration as his rib cage melded and rounded and tightened within his torso like a cylinder with an open front. His coat was increasingly eaten up as it was pulled in and absorbed across his body. Dark stripes faded into brightening grey, were swallowed up as his skin became made of more sturdy steel that was formed out in patches along his body and connected by strips as the nanites reworked him,
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???>gi?ir?vi?ii?nr?ge? him the means to protect his internals from the elements that had scoured so much more of the
wn?oI?ri?li?de?.
Jake stopped breathing as soon as the steel that was already making its way down his spine began to reach around his throat like a collar, cinching tight and stifling it in one last breath that sputtered out within his jugular. He was not the type of thing that needed to breathe anymore anyways, it had been a while since he had been lungs that were not just capacitors for his core engine. His tail started to gain segmentation in it, running from the tip down towards the base, leaving it slinky while also hardening it so that it would slap and bang across anything that it touched across. Little by little, his front was made firm, seemed to frame that rubber middle in steel as his torso and rear were both covered up and rendered into alloys. The latter was made into the shape of glutes, the impression of it without actually having a crevice, as his internals fully formed into a spider?s nest of electrical wire, moving parts, and new electronics to provide him the functions that he would need attempting to travel the whole world.
His outer form was quickly following in finishing up. Metal continued to grow together, to swallow and consume, to pull across shoulders and reach up over kneecaps and render it all sturdy and like what the rest of his form was becoming. His clothes gradually wore away as they were pushed and pulled by his new body, until they ripped apart and left him entirely bare. His arousal was drawn in, hidden underneath a slit in between his legs as his balls followed it into his body.
>Ur?ni?nr?ee?ce?er?se?sr?an?rr?yr?, but it would be maintained. Pr?rI?oI?gI?rI?ae?mi?mi?ii?ni?gi? dictated that it must be
without saying why, but he was still glad that it was. He did not hate what he was becoming. Fear? Perhaps, but fear was put in its place when he was drawn to think about all the benefits that he was going to receive from his new er?xe?ii?sr?te?er?nr?ce?en?.
>II?te? was improvement, improvement beyond what organic doctors could give hi?ie?mr?.
He did not want to be a Pacemaker, of course, he knew that as he felt the cold steel blossoming out around the back of his head, the front of his neck, the sides of his cheeks, all of it reaching towards his muzzle and looking to bury him in his new existence.
>Se?ti?in?le?li?, he could not hate what he was becoming as he watched flesh increasingly leave his fn?on?rr?mn?.
Jake?s face was increasingly cast in steel that removed his fur, squared his jaw, made his ears frozen solid so that they became like sharp points on his head. He began to see the world through a new green haze that obsoleted his long-discarded glasses, which in turn was projected into his processor through eyes that lost their pupils into the whites, pale milky pools which darkened into gun metal. Who he was was unrecognizable now unless someone was really looking at him... and those who were close enough to him at this point to make that kind of recognition would soon enough be desperately trying to get away from him or already getting nanites pumped into their face. When he looked down at himself, his sensors detected nothing but cold steel soon, along with the hum of his core engine.
>Tr?hI?eI?ri?er? was nothing more to improve. This form was what was most ee?fi?fI?iI?cI?in?eI?nI?cI?te?.
Whether or not he was organic anymore, Jake was focused on walking without end, feeling his geophysical data storage gradually filling up with a trail that showed where he was going as he constantly reprocessed where he was, created his own map of the world. He was pretty sure that he was ambling through a ruined port city at one point, considering the wrecked and toppled skyscrapers around himself and the tilted over rusting skeletons of large trawlers. Manmade rotting structures gave way to the deep, deep topography of the dried-up ocean as he followed down the slopes of the continental shelf and continued on through rocky crags, deep sea vents allowed to blow smog up into open air while minute fissures in the ground held some of the last unpolluted salt water on earth beneath them. Maybe there were blind cave fish down there, still desperately trying to hold onto life, swimming through forests of bizarre plant life and unaware how close they were to running out of time without being able to maintain anything about their habitat. The little bit of fear he felt having the dark clouds come down on him, scraping and battering against his body, had to be discarded as irrelevant data, pushed to the side like so much else. The metallic cat always came out of them undamaged, after all, a pattern that was confirmed time after time as he continued along his path, eventually rising from that massive basin back onto land. Whatever he was made of now, just like any other Pacemaker, he was built to withstand the worst that the environment had to give any of them.
Then, one day, he found himself diverting course one more time, beginning to follow along in the sands after a fresh wake of tracks that seemed to jump forwards again and again. The Pacemaker quickly started to understand why as he heard the VRRRRTH VRRRH VRRTH VRRRH building in the distance. The gleaming figure in front of him, mostly misted by desert mirage that his sensors were having trouble filtering out, gradually started to become obvious as another Pacemaker the closer that he got. He was a kangaroo, one that was built broad and well-muscled before becoming what he was now, that had been reformed in order to continually hop forwards instead of taking the traditional gradual walk that all the other robots carried. The Pacemaker came to a stop a few feet in front of Jake, took another step forwards as the shorthair halted himself, and then leaned forwards.
He did not understand what was happening, not at first, as the marsupial reached out and grasped him by his shoulders while the marsupial pushed his muzzle forwards. Programming told him to keep still, though,
>aI?cI?ce?en?pe?te? that this was nr?an?te?ui?rI?ae?lI?.
He felt no worry as the absence of any emotion at all was imprinted on him, as the android opened his mouth... and Jake found himself naturally doing the same. The kangaroo?s inner maw seemed to warp itself out, push forwards into that same proboscis that had launched those nanites at Jake as the ``flesh'' within was reshaped like someone taking a sweater and pulling the hem through the neck. He shoved that elongated shape in between the cat?s metallic jaws, twisted his head, turned the protrusion in deeper... and then connected into a socket in the back of Jake?s mouth.
Something inside of Jake broke as he felt that I/O port let the Pacemaker take everything that he was and filter through it while he automatically did the same to a kangaroo that was once mainly focused on stealing as much lichen and meat as he could from neighboring tribes. Their programming was updating, patching his to update it with new orders and information while in turn taking the collected data stored in his banks about the location and layout of the bunker. Whatever that something was, be it the last shred of humanity that would have kept back the urge to do what had been to him to others or some safety protocol that needed to be unlocked by another Pacemaker, it was accompanied by a quiver inside of his mouth. The silver marbles within Jake?s head rolled upwards into his ``skull'' as there was a soft pop around the back of his throat, his jaws dislocating and the muscles within starting to push forwards, fangs extending out and then laying flat so that they became like daggers pointed straight out horizontally from his mouth. His own proboscis pushed out, sheathed over the one stuck in his maw and enveloped it as a safety measure to protect the all-important data transfer as a tunnel that he understood as the means to fling nanites onto organics booted up a diagnostic. A familiar sccccrch FLKK scccrcchhh FLLLK hit his sensors as he was made to test that mechanism, to dry fire it while he was continuing to suck in a full map of the world as had been passed to the Pacemaker, the both of them tilting and rocking their heads around together as they exchanged data...
>CCCCCCECCECEThen, all of a sudden, the signal was sent to both of them, ACAAASCSSSSSSSECESEESE E ,
and the feline and the kangaroo both broke away, Jake pulling away those beak-like halves of rubber muscle that his mouth had turned inside out to become while the kangaroo drew his own launcher back and into his mouth with a soft slllrph as a little bit of excess black goop, nanites lost from pulling that proboscis back in. Then, without any other signs of recognizing him at all, the kangaroo turned and began to hop away on a distant path, pistons in his bulky legs continuing to fire off again and again as he bounded upwards, Jake immediately turned and carried on a separate path.
>This region did not require multiple units to survey it, and their time would be better spent drifting apart from each other.
Sometimes, he would see organics nearby. Most of them were throwbacks, coded as
Retrogrades in his programming, and he felt nothing but calm wandering them by. There were others, even more bizarre, like a translucent vat of something that looked like multiple men and women that were melting and churning together and occasionally popping up like breaching sea creatures to stare down at him drawn by what looked like more normal people covered in leather and chained to the vat. Their faces practically screamed that they were straining through their current situations. He eventually bypassed a group of floating individuals wreathed in nothing but string bikini-like one-pieces made of a purple energy that flowed from their own eyes, the wolverine and zebra and goat all muttering to themselves as they hovered over the cracked streets and bits of wrecked monument underneath them. Sometimes he would even come across other Pacemakers and they would all walk together for a while, their programming allowing them to chart as a group. Sometimes, they even all exchanged data, stopping in place and beginning to shove their proboscises in each other while they passed one another around. None of them felt the urge to socialize anymore. Transferal of information was all they wanted, all they needed.
There were, too, the occasional scavenger groups that he passed, the ones that would back away from him when he trudged by, the ones that he no longer felt a need to reach out to to ask for help. What kind of help would they give him at this point that did not come down to helping him into their parts piles, anyways? It seemed like everything would give him a wide breath as he passed them by, and Jake felt no need to act any different. He was coded to avoid any unnecessary struggles.
>Hi?in?si? survival was more important than continuation of his own conscience now. Fr?er?ln?ie?nr?er? was meant to
carry with him a vital part of the puzzle that was the full harvest of this broken wr?or?rn?lr?dn?.
Somewhere along the way, Jake could feel a squirming, writhing tightness beginning to build within his middle that became too much of a draw away from his cataloging to be simply filed away to deal with later. He looked down and noticed that the flexible reservoir down there was beginning to bulge out of the front of his torso, beginning to grow taut as a small curve like a rolling hill developed itself in his front. It was an error in his programming that could not be helped, nanite production getting caught up on a rounding error that meant that die-off of excess material in his stomach and expenditure of nanites in his body for maintenance purposes started to be rapidly outstripped by how fast he created them. The moment that he was able to find an organic to expel this excess into, the drive to overproduce would cease.
Over the next few days, that curve grew outwards, developed a rounded and increasingly more tightened swell, wobbled with his movements and vacillated between being lumpen and crawling with shapes depending on whether his excess of nanites was joining together to try and escape him or breaking apart on their own individual paths to freedom. It was clear that they all wanted out via breaking through the stretchy material of that internal storage no matter what way they were headed. The Pacemaker?s programming gradually began to cycle him into hunt mode, setting his scanners on focus for anything that he could reproduce into. There was no sense of worry, no sense of urgency to the fact that he could potentially burst apart from explosive rupture. Such emotions were things of the past, pruned off of him completely the moment that he shared telemetry data with the other Pacemaker.
There was only data now.
More days passed without seeing organics, the clouds above him coming down and enveloping his form with its harsh shroud. The nanites within him continued to swarm and multiply, bloating him out until the distended sack pushed from his innards and the rubber at his front began to slightly creak with his movements. A warning written in repeating code was beginning to show itself in his internal sensory logs. He noted it and continued on his path. The strain built.
Sometime over the next three days, there was movement on the raise of land that the android was trudging over. The nanosecond it was noticed Jake spread his feet out, lowered down to the ground, planted a paw down, stared. His tail oriented back and forth behind him, ready to start balancing him when he began galloping forwards. Nothing moved without having some form of life to it, and the momentum arc he had noticed... too erratic to be another Pacemaker. He waited to confirm data. Saw a flash of soft grey. Took off in a four-legged sprint that had his servos sounding off as he heard a yelp from in front of him, stomach bulging with nanites that were growing increasingly animate as everything in his body prepared for the next few moments.
The wolf could not outrun him, so she chose to hide herself behind the wreckage of a car, the hood of which crunched underneath Jake?s paw as he grasped it and bounded over the front. She was pulling some sort of extending spear tipped with some sort of magnetic broadhead out from a holster on the side of her pants... Too slow, though, and as he landed he gave her too little room to thrust it out. Jake slammed himself forwards against her, pinned her by that weapon-wielding wrist to the car door, felt the soft pop of latches inside of his mouth as his bottom jaw dropped open and his teeth began to go horizontal and stretch outwards while the inside of his mouth expanded forwards...
He watched as a dark grey blob spattered out onto her face as his mechanisms, went for her
open mouth and ears, began to push its way in. Jake spit out another gush of nanites onto her for good measure, the lupine woman dropping her spear and falling to the ground as she began to dance her hands around her muzzle, trying to scoop and pull away the micro-constructors that clung to her fingers like a dancing, wobbling putty. It was too late for her to save herself. Jake reached down, grabbed her radio, and crushed it between his fingers as he felt his proboscis continuing to yawn and pucker itself closed again and again, waiting to see anyone else to launch more nanites at.
The Pacemaker glanced at the gagging and twitching wolf underneath him and then looked up, quickly noticing a glider several miles off in the distance down the hill. It was a dragonfly-like vehicle, with four flexible wings, a long fuselage, landing struts that anchored it into the earth, and a bulbous cockpit large enough to hold four seats in addition to the pilot and copilot?s positions. There were more here. His beak-proboscis twitched. The robotic cat still had plenty of nanites to offload even if the production error had been cleared, and the docility that he had seen in other models had yet to return to him. He intended to capitalize on this mindset while he still could.
circutron
