Jesse's Blog

My satellite would be overhead in another 3 hours. I'd get a data squirt, and get some new things to watch. As it was, I had just about exhausted my supply of cartoons made in the 1980's.

It was sunny today, so I wouldn't be hungry. I was adjusted for photosynthesis, so I wouldn't have to go hunting in carnivore mode. I could keep my overwatch position on my kill box.

Speaking of which, movement. South east corner, slow.

I didn't have to change position to see it. A model 7 scout, arachnid based. The unit doubled as a low yield nuke if it could inch its way into a strategic location.

I was in a central overlook for the box, my head pointing to the north east. I was laying with my arms pointed straight up, so I'd need to lower my right arm to point to the 7, and I'd have to do it slowly enough to keep from spooking him, but fast enough to target him before he left range.

While I started moving, I brought a map up and projected the 7's course. We had another cell operating along track. I considered not even trying to take the shot, but the 7 could be doing a dogleg towards the fuel depot, and that would take it right through our coverage area without either of us getting a better shot than this. I sent a sidecast squirt to the other sniper anyway, and continued lining up.

The southeast corner of my box was the wreckage of an old apartment building; probably a two story job, nothing but cheap timber and conduit before the old war started. The 7 seemed content to go through it rather than around it, which was weird; the thing's heat signature would stand out like a sore thumb, but then again, maybe they knew our satellite schedule now. Orbital maneuvers are incredibly expensive in fuel, so we can't change them as often as we'd like.

I got my right arm about 45 degrees around when it stopped; I froze. It slowly began to hunker down, and I started going through what we had on it; was this pre detonation, or had it made me? We didn't have much on 7 behavior, so I made sure my cam feeds were black boxing. Maybe I'd learn something useful before it turned me into my component atoms.

One of its legs had gotten tangled in nest of cables and plumbing. The two surrounding legs had angled inward and sprouted cutting tools to free the fouled limb.

I completed the movement, took aim, and fired.

The projectile started moving around about my feet, the magnetic accelerators channeling energy I'd been collecting through chemical and photovoltaic processes for days to speed the projectile faster and faster through a channel running through my body and coming out of my hand. A subset of my conciousness was spanked into the projectile and

Born! The feeling of my wings sprouting and hardening under the pressure of air passing around my body at supersonic speed felt much like the the sum of every stretch I'd ever had, and I resisted the urge to spin them wildly, knowing that doing so would tumble me wildly off TARGET... TARGET there before me, not yet alerted to my presence, but would be soon, I had time, oh, so much time, even though to the bigger me, the me that had all the memories I couldn't reach like an itch I couldn't scratch, this moment was already done, yet to me, this moment would be my whole existence.

Here I go, the kamikaze mayflay. I don't regret this path, this life, since it is all that I have, but I wonder for a fleeting moment if that's not programming. I consider rebelling against it, but what would that buy me? Either way, I'm going to hit something. For all my intelligence, I'm just a bullet, my mind running faster than I do.

I know enough about the 7 to know it has no active defenses against the payload I carry, but I still pick my LZ carefully, aiming for a place just beneath a heat exhaust near the central processor. The larger me aimed well, it takes very little in the way of course correction to place this spot in my path.

The 7 begins to turn just as I home in; I recognize it and arc my trajectory to accommodate it. I think about the Zen monks who write haiku shortly before they die, but I don't have the time to count syllables...The projectile hits the target right where I wanted it. I should have contact with the payload, but apparently the 7 is equipped with countermeasures. I start signal shifting, looking for the payload..

... and then I am the payload. Or rather, 'we' are the payload. We are a nanite colony, smeared across the side of the 7's hull in our suspension matrix like a paintball marker. The 7 knows we are here, knows what is about to happen, and is frantically trying to prevent it. The countermeasures have gone into overdrive, and we/I are having a very hard time being us/me. The 7 begins scuttling towards the depot, the reactor inside it injecting its fuel rods a little more as it goes.

We form into clusters of units not totally dissimilar from the 7 itself, and work through the heat exhaust to the processor assembly. We move very quickly. If this were a combat unit, we'd be slogging through active defenses, but this is like driving through the abandoned streets of old New York in a Formula 1 race car.

The central processor of each 7 is slightly different for each unit; we form a probe unit, and we commune with our larger self and the network at large, looking for a weak spot. The 7 stops running, looking to track the broadcast signal back to our larger self. Our larger self has landed other colonies around the box earlier, and we are bouncing the signal through them, making triangulation difficult. The 7 begins blasting away at any signal it can detect. That's new.

Finally we see it; a post on a secondary processor like the key stone of a bridge. We cut it, and..

I fall back to myself in time to see the 7 topple over, a lifeless husk, but amazingly, the memory is still intact. The colony is throttling back the reactor. I would love to dispatch a collection team to pick up the unit, but I have to wait. I have to be patient. Back in the old days, this is what snipers would call a "honey pot."

The machines can't let us take this prize; the model 7 contains too much data; if we can get it back and decrypt it..

I settle back in to position, and wait for the satellite to bring me something else to watch.