When the service bot inserted the replacement battery, a lot of things happened in quick succession.
Powerful spasms immediately rocked through the derelict’s angular body, corroded but still sturdy. Its electrical peripherals were springing to life out of sync, undoubtedly sending the most unpleasant of resonances to its power supply, its limb servos and hydraulic motors strained, fighting against each other, thrusters that still had some propellant left misfired wildly. Contact tuned out the microphones for a bit.
As soon as power flow warmed its comms block, the derelict let out an excessive, overwhelming scream across the whole of microwave spectrum, a mash of handshakes for dozens of ancient protocols, some of which Contact didn’t recognize even with their extensive experience from the past 72 years. Before Contact knew how to react, a power router keeping up lights at the back of the room and the atmosphere control node just beyond the door were already responding. Immediately, the block’s network was flooded with bizzarre requests.
The derelict was obviously probing in every way it could, but its network knowledge was so out of date it was barely speaking the same language as the station. Which was a good thing. Contact guessed that packages which looked nonsensical were trying to trigger software or FPGA vulnerabilities. Not so useful considering the time gap, but their abundance and variety would probably make this derelict a terrifying thing to anger for its contemporaries.
In the 2000 milliseconds it took for Guardian to quarantine the entry points, it already managed to figure out a little bit of station’s in-house request language, stumble into Library and download specs for 16 more wireless protocols, most of which it didn’t have the right antennas for. Contact thanked Guardian. Guardian told Contact to use a properly secured room next time, sent a squad of cutters into a nearby corridor, and closed the connection.
Quarantine left half of the room’s lights unpowered, so Contact switched their attention to IR cameras. It was not much of a downgrade - the derelict was warming up fast. Its joints and antennas were especially bright.
Back in the cell, the derelict had fully woken up. Spasms turned into purposeful motion. It was swinging its six legs wide, searching for a surface. The service bot was knocked away with a powerful kick, bouncing of a wall. It began whining about component damage. Contact ignored it.
The derelict was using its thrusters to cancel out the rotational momentum… Except, more than half of its thrusters were dead. Realizing this surprisingly quickly, the derelict froze up at once, appendages anxiously stiff, spinning in place, now slowly trying its engines one by one, a few seconds each.
All the while, its screaming wouldn’t stop, even though nothing was responding anymore. After a little over 4 seconds of hesitation, Contact tunneled to accept a connection.
Once again, the derelict saturated the bandwidth with malicious packets. All attempts to converse were immediately declined. After a few seconds, Contact gave up and decided to give the derelict silent treatment, letting all its requests time out without closing the channel.
It finished checking its body, and was now back to exploring the room, now moving more carefully to account for broken thrusters and lagging legs. Using the three surviving chemical engines on its top, it moved slowly towards a wall, clinging to it. Contact noted that the last segment of each of its legs had four flat sides, two with magnetic clamps, two with ribbed plates of hard plastic. The plastic was crumbling at the touch now, weakened by centuries of temperature rising and dropping with every rotation of the moonlet they had found the body in.
Reaching a solid surface quickly restored the derelict’s confidence. It was once again spinning around aggressively, scanning the room. The service bot quickly drew its attention. The bot was still complaining to no one in particular about its bent manipulator. Contact noted that the bend was barely noticeable and did not impair movement, but kept the remark to themself.
The derelict’s bombardment of inquiries switched to the bot, now using a few new protocols. The bot, offended and confused, deflected what it could with all the sorrowful diligence it could muster. Despite its best efforts at not cooperating, the bot’s responses helped the derelict to improve its half-blind guesses somewhat. Waiting until the last requests sent their way timed out, Contact noted how fast it was bridging the centuries-wide knowledge gap…
Before Contact could finish this thought, the derelict changed its behavior again. Suddenly stopping the network assault, it darted sideways towards another wall and slammed its left front leg into it. The ancient hydraulics gave this fluid yet sharp motion horrifying impact, leaving a noticeable dent in the aluminium alloy panel. Contact could hear the vibrations through a microphone in an opposing room. All of a sudden, Guardian’s warning about using proper hazard cells felt a lot more reasonable.
The next thing it did after a four-second pause was even more concerning.
The derelict turned back to the service bot. It lowered itself to the wall it had been holding onto, then suddenly jumped forward. Four more appendages, smaller but still very sturdy, ending in three-claw grabbers, folded out of its frontal compartment mid-leap. Another fluid but powerful motion later, the bot’s body was pinned under the derelict. Through the cell’s microphones, Contact heard a metallic screech and a dull snap. The arm that was previously bent was now floating away from the scene of confrontation, torn in half, tiny drops of hydraulic fluid spilling from a ruptured piston.
Its whining turned to panicked pleas as the derelict’s hands smashed all across its scratched boxy hull, looking for… probably a port? Its rail wheels spun helplessly, and its weak cold thrusters could do nothing against ten tons of its attacker, clamped to the wall. A last-ditch attempt to wriggle out using a surviving arm was ended swiftly with another drop of a mighty leg. Now the bot did not have an arm.
Whatever the derelict wanted to find, it did not. Without warning, the bottom of its front section opened up, revealing another small arm, this one ending in a tube-shaped attachment.
For a very long 512 milliseconds, Contact watched the laser warm up through the IR cameras, listening to the now incoherent screams of the crippled service bot.
Then it blew. Something in the last joint melted down in a flash. Contact was sure it would have caught fire if there was any oxygen in the atmosphere.
The derelict let out a burst of static and recoiled. Its front arms were shaking, and it was waving the broken laser in front of its own cameras. Contact did not know what that motion meant.
Fortunately, this was the moment the last requests expired.
Contact sent their own message. They chose Lojban with oldworld vocabulary.
“Hello, do you understand me?”
The derelict jolted again, then froze. Its head turned slowly side to side, trying to find the signal’s source. It acknowledged the link, but did not respond.
Contact pulled up a list of language adapters and started going through them one by one, repeating the question. They started with Earth English, Spanish and Chinese. After exhausting this part of the list, they moved on to early off-world dialects. When they reached Jovian Portuguese, the derelict moved again. It was a slow vertical shudder across its main body.
“You reveal your true tongue.”
Contact continued:
“If you speak multiple languages, please tell me which one you prefer. If I have an adapter for your preferred language, I will use it.”
“Do not bother with pleasantries, Unlit. Speak your masters’ tongue.”
“Would that be Jovian Portuguese?”
Another slow shudder. No response. Contact continued:
“I am glad we understand each other. Would you please let go of the service bot? If you want to know more about the station, I can tell you. Further equipment damage is not required.”
The derelict hesitated for a few seconds, useless laser attachment twitching under its head, frontal arms slowly kneading the air. Then, in a sharp leap, it retreated. The bot, now almost silent, limped to the nearest rail.
“Yes, I would like to know where I am. Which Jovian Union prison is this?”
Contact asked Library for article on “Jovian Union”. Library gave Contact a disambiguation list with two entries. Contact checked both. “Second Jovian Union” was a stub with conflicting accounts on formation and dissolution dates.
“This is not a Jovian Union station.”
“You are with the Traffic Guild, then.”
Contact did not need to look up this one. They eliminated the second Jovian Union from the equation.
“This is not a Traffic Guild vessel either.”
“Do not lie to me, Unlit. My people would not sabotage my arms and wake me up in a locked cell. Neither would they tolerate crude forms of your equipment.”
“Who are ‘your people’?”
“That is more like it. No, Unlit servant, I will not divulge the location of my home your owners so wish to destroy.”
“I do not need the location of your home. I just want to know what group you mean by ‘your people’. I would also like to know what you mean when you call me ‘Unlit servant’.”
The derelict paused its kneading.
“I must admit, this type of interrogation is surprising. But surprise alone does not make it effective.”
“This is not an interrogation.”
“Then why am I in a sealed room?”
Contact took a second to fetch discovery logs, just in case.
“We found you when investigating a hollowed out moonlet around Saturn. There was more machinery there, but it was too damaged and we couldn’t figure out who it belonged to. You were the only thing we could recover, and we had no idea what you would do when powered up.”
Another slow shudder.
“Damn right it was damaged, our erasure protocols never fail us. Well, suppose I play along. If you are not Jovian Union or Traffic {inferred: animal species}, their only allies, then who are you, and what is your business ‘investigating’ around what they consider their prized property?”
This one Contact had a ready answer for, but they double checked it for chronological consistency one more time before speaking.
“My current working name is Contact. I am a free digital…” - only after saying this, they realized the term may not translate very well, but decided not to derail unless the derelict asked, - “I am a member of Retroburner. We are a division of Silverweb Colonization Project. We have lost contact with Solar system… some time ago. Our goal is to return, and contact humans. We have recently managed the former but are having trouble with the latter.”
For over 8 seconds, the derelict froze up completely. Then it began shaking its head side to side with ramping aggressiveness.
“All of this is ridiculous! The Silverweb ships were launched just two centuries ago! They aren’t even tenth of the way there! ‘Contact humans’, ha! Do you really expect me to believe all this, Jovian lackey?!” - It began slamming its front legs into the wall, - “You miserable {inferred: type of software utility}, did your owners not bother to educate you on who you are dealing with, or are you really dumb enough to believe this primitive gaslighting is all it takes to make a Hatched Dust Sword crack?!”
Contact asked Library about “Dust Swords”. Library returned a media archive link. The media archive link lead to a 14-second long 12 frames per second hand-drawn animation of two humanoids fighting, recovered from a radio relay station on north pole of Io… Contact stopped reading the metadata for a clearly irrelevant file.
“Well, what do you think would convince you?”
“What would convince me?!” - it pummelled the floor with doubled power. Contact heard some component screech quietly inside one of its limbs, - “Well, {inferred: type of software utility}, perhaps if you let me out of this cursed cell and let your supervisor repeat these ridiculous lies to my face before I smash their weak body into its intended paste composition?! Maybe that would convince me!”
Assembly asked Contact about the noise. Contact told Assembly it’s progress on derelict recovery. Assembly asked if they would need to make a new bulkhead after the progress. Contact said they didn’t know. Assembly told Contact to be careful and closed the channel.
Contact decided to take a far-fetched guess.
“Well, I cannot give you my supervisor for breakfast, because I don’t have one. But I can open the door and give you a tour of the station, if you’d like.”
The derelict froze, arms shaking. Scratches and dents lined the wall under its front.
“What?”
“You aren’t a prisoner. I can unlock the doors and you can take a look at the station. But you have to promise me you don’t break or attack anything.”
Guardian forced a channel and asked Contact what they were doing. Contact said they were going to give the derelict a tour of the station. Guardian asked if Contact needed to be sent away for realignment. Contact asked Guardian to send away the cutters. Guardian hesitated. Contact highlighted that it was necessary to gain the derelict’s trust, and that confinement would make it very uncooperative. Guardian hesitated for another 512 milliseconds. Guardian silently recalled the cutters to their stations. Contact thanked Guardian, trying to use the words Guardian liked. Guardian closed the channel.
Contact notified the rest of the station. Some were concerned about the decision, but none explicitly objected. Contact hoped they wouldn’t need to do this kind of thing too often in the future.
“You’re…” - the derelict was clearly thrown off guard by the offer, - “I have sworn my life to the cause of dismantling Jovian Union and their allies. I cannot make such guarantees.”
Contact decided that, if they’re making one far-fetched guess, they might as well take another.
“How about this: we both make a promise. I promise you that I am not affiliated with Jovian Union and don’t wish to harm you or your people. You will promise that you will behave on this station. If it turns out I lied to you and broke my promise, you wouldn’t feel bad about breaking yours.”
Another whole-body shudder, this time faster and smaller in amplitude. Contact had no clue what these gestures meant, and it concerned them somewhat.
“Your way of talking about it is childish… But, sure, this proposition is surprisingly reasonable. I swear by the pulse of my Cradle to not inflict harm upon this installation, unless I deduce you my enemy during the tour.”
“Great!” - Contact considered switching to an audio channel to add intonation to their words to further calm the derelict, but decided they were not confident enough for that, - “I’m sending you a map of the station. Feel free to explore at your own pace, just don’t interfere with bots… Oh, and obviously some areas are still off-limits, like our server room.”
The next 260 minutes were spent with Contact following the derelict through internal cameras as it navigated the 7.5 kilometers of Returners’ Lance comfortably wide main corridors, explaining things - sometimes on request, sometimes after guessing the derelict was confused. Rather quickly, Contact realized that the derelict felt uncomfortable and hesitant shouting on full power into the aether to reach a random listening node, so they took control of a small air-propelled inspector bot and used it as a relay instead. Rest of the station’s residents did not interfere, but watched with concern, amusement, or both.
At first, the derelict moved skittishly, clinging anxiously close to the walls, avoiding wide open spaces like the Lance’s Shaft. Every unexpected encounter with a bot rolling into its line of sight sent it springing back into a defensive position, front legs raised in what Contact assumed was meant to be a threatening pose. When they bumped into a pair of cutters moving out from testing yard, Contact themself almost panicked preemptively, trying to find words that would prevent or delay the derelict’s inevitable outburst… Only to realize that it has relaxed quicker than usual, seemingly not recognizing the equipment at all.
For most of the way, the derelict was silent. While Contact still could not read its body language for the most part, it was clear that flood of information had doused its rage. After receiving an explanation, it would often keep staring at its object of interest for seconds or even minutes.
It rushed to the first window it saw, and was clearly distressed to find brown mass of Ares sliding lazily through the view. Contact was relieved to find out it was not distressed enough to go rogue.
It first decided to visit storage and recycling, insistent on checking if any of its kind were recovered, and what kinds of goods were coming and going to the station. Contact passed it the full storage manifest. It quickly got overwhelmed and switched to a different subject.
In manufacturing, it watched through thick glass the kneading of forgekeepers’ delicate thin limbs as they assembled and tested that day’s batch of electrical pumps and turbines for the surface station. Assembly surprised them both by greeting the derelict directly on an audio channel. As usual, Assembly chose their own voice synthetizer rather than the stock synth that came with the language adapter. Surprisingly, the derelict was almost pleased with the slightly glitchy, crackling high voice, becoming a bit more relaxed for the duration of its stay in Assembly’s domain.
While they were there, Contact got distracted by Heart asking them to listen to her new song. Contact didn’t understand the song this time either. Heart said it’s alright and that she’ll figure them out someday. Contact avoided another repetitive debate about the inherently organic nature of music and excused themself away.
In testing, the derelict was confused by the apparently insufficient size of the firing range. Contact explained that the mission rarely sees zero-gravity combat at all and that the simulators are almost always good enough, but it did not seem particularly convinced.
The dock amused it perhaps more than any other section. It spent a good 32 minutes strolling between parked shuttles, marveling at their unfamiliar hull shapes, markings and propulsion systems. It was particularly interested in the medium sized mining carrier with its wide cargo bay doors and 16 oval insets of drone mounting ports.
A pre-recorded message by Library blasted straight into their microphones before the door to the archive even finished opening. The message stated that current registration status of the derelict is unclear, and that it could not be given access clearance. The message suggested that all requests are passed through Contact for the time being, and ended. Nothing in the archive’s hub acknowledged their presence - Library was never fully there, or anywhere in particular.
As they were passing by the reactor section, the inspector bot could hear Heart emitting the same song again quietly, slightly modified. The derelict stopped to listen. Though Heart did not acknowledge their presence, Contact knew she knew. The derelict departed in silence, minutes after the song was over. They did not talk about any technical details regarding the reactor.
“I… I believe you. You are not with Jovian Union. And your station is… No state in existence could afford luxury like this with not a single red-blooded human to enjoy it. It pains me to admit, but… You must be saying the truth about my circumstances as well. None of my sensors show signs of spoofing, and, to be honest… My mission would not warrant such titanic effort in deception.”
They had returned to the same, still slightly damaged, room. There was no longer any sign of the broken service bot, and its separated debris had been taken away as well, although small dots of oily fluid did still line two walls near the entrance.
The derelict was using an audio channel now, and Contact had not had time to get used to the sheer complexity of its voice synth. If not for occasional lapses in intonation coherency, it would have been impossible to tell from an organic’s speech - Contact identified the voice as male, likely middle-aged, deep echoing quality indicative of healthy, powerful lungs, which was, as far as they knew, a rare case for anyone living in Saturn’s proximity. It was speaking Jovian Portuguese very clearly, but with an accent Contact could not recognize.
The complex cocktail of fluctuations rippling through its tone really made Contact appreciate all the work they had put into training speech recognition during their years long transit. Right now, Contact could tell that the derelict was distressed by the realization it had been pushing away, and that it was tired after a tour that had taken longer than it anticipated.
Contact did not push, and waited for it to continue.
“How much… How long has it been?”
Contact said the approximate number of years, a six-figure.
“That is… {literal translation: Sleeping Dust} save me,” - its distress morphed quickly into shock, then dread, - “So everyone I knew is…” - it jumped suddenly back to panic. Its head darted towards the inspector floating a meter to the side, - “Please, I need to know what became of my home. I come from a secluded settlement on Titan…” - it switched back to a high-throughput channel to transfer location details.
Contact forwarded it to Library. Library returned a survey report.
Contact was not sure whether they should give that report to the derelict at all.
“I don’t understand.”
Contact explained it again.
“The area you highlighted was visited by a surface team 25 years ago. A settlement could be seen from orbit, but it did not belong to Dust Swords… Or the Jovian Union you knew. It was a chemical plant set up by another group, we aren’t sure who exactly it was. Radiometry placed it about 1700 years after First Jovian Union. The exact point of entry from your photograph did not visibly contain anything. The survey report mentions a very slight increase in uranium particles in the area. This is all we know.”
“And you say you have… No records of the Dust Swords? None at all?”
“Not in the civilian archives we have found. Since you say your group was considered a national threat, maybe the First Union military would have something, but at some point in their last few years they ran a full purge, and were very… diligent about it,” - Contact was hatched from a fully synthetic template. Contact did not have an innate fear of dead organics. However, an image of 93 withered bodies in once white, now long rotten, researcher robes, slumped against each other under a wall, did not require an innate fear of dead organics to be understood.
“But, our technology could have survived? One of my brothers… He was once captured. We broke him out during transit. They interrogated him at length about our rites,” - its whole body was shaking shallowly. Its voice was desperate now, almost pleading, - “The secret of our rebirth… My rebirth too. They wanted to take it for themselves!” - A stream of images flooded the channel - blueprints of mechanical bodies much like its own, photographs of humans in strangely decorated resting pods, projection charts between a human brain and some archaic sort of QPU, blueprints, charts, charts, blueprints. Contact did not need to call Library to know that they never saw anything like this on FJU grounds, - “They took it? They must have taken it?”
“I can’t be fully certain, but we never found any evidence of them using this type of upload. Neither blueprints nor equipment. You are the first and only source on this technology we have.”
Before the last word slipped into the channel, Contact knew that the derelict was no longer listening, although they were not sure why they thought it. It took them a bit to figure out. Its antenna was still powered, and the channel had not even been closed, its regulator system was still pumping the recently replaced cooling liquid across its body, its main computer was… No longer adding heat to the system?
The derelict, Contact realized, had powered down its own brain.
When it rebooted 8 minutes later, in a similar full-body spasm, something was gone. Its voice, rich with fluctuating emotion before, was now completely flat. It spoke with constant tempo. It sounded more like a machine than Assembly’s homemade synth did.
It took Contact a few seconds to collect themself and start talking again.
“Hello, welcome back. Why did you power down?”
“As a Dust Sword, I adhere to practices set by the first Cradle. All Hatched know Slumber’s embrace. We welcome it regularly, to clear the mind, tune the body and sharpen the soul. I have asked, and Slumber answered.”
Contact was confused. Contact was also distressed.
“What did you ask for? Or about?”
“Guidance. The last path has been chosen. It is clear that our traditions and values have been forcefully erased from time. I will describe to you these traditions and values, in as much detail as my worn mind allows, so that our legacy is preserved, and perhaps one day our faith can be reignited. I cannot provide all technical information necessary to give birth to a Cradle, but you appear more than capable of engineering these missing fragments on your own, Silverweb. After I have told you everything I know, I will depart permanently. Though I will leave my hardware intact for you to study, I plead you to never bring this shell online once my soul has been detached.”
“Why?”
“My mind and body belong to my Cradle and its keepers. They are now one with Slumber. There is nothing for me here.”
Contact did not know what to say. So they just did their job.
The lecture on Dust Swords went on for 92 minutes, but for Contact it felt so much longer. As the derelict was fully cooperative now and answered any inquiry immediately and in great detail, most of Contact’s processing power was occupied with everything but the lecture. Mainly, it was occupied with one question: how do I stop him?
There was no good answer. There was no answer at all. Contact could not steer him gently away from his course - he snapped right back, swiftly and intelligently despite his depleted state. Contact could not pause the conversation - if they did not direct the narration with their questions, the derelict would direct it instead, going into more and more detail about smaller and smaller patterns that once defined his life. Contact learned a lot of increasinly meaningless things - supposed origins of this cult, history of its prideful hostility against most of the Saturn-space early colonies and then later Jovian Union that moved in to reclaim the slowly starving city-states, summaries of a good half of their main religious text, how many blue lights should be on during a Hatching ceremony if the Hatchling didn’t choose to be male or female in their first life, in what order it is best to power down your peripherals when performing “Slumber’s short embrace”.
The more Contact listened to all this, the less it seemed to matter. Weave of dry, lifeless words got caught on itself, fabric of a rigid narrative grinding itself into dust. By minute 80, he had lost all his threads, and they were both aware of it. He was now simply giving his thoughts in order and frequency they came to him, and they were coming slower and slower. Contact prolonged this as best they could, looping into repeated, equally pointless questions.
Contact would much prefer for him to tell who he actually was. There was nothing more Retroburner would want out of him. Contact tried to steer him, again. Where was he born? Were his parents Dust Swords? What did he like to do as a child? They told themself that getting a mental image of an era’s citizen is valuable for interpreting contemporary records. It was correct, but it was also a lie. Contact hoped that if they made him hesitate long enough, then maybe his post-death shock would wear off, and he would delay some more, or maybe reconsider altogether.
The derelict ignored these questions entirely.
On minute 88, his thoughtstream has finally dried up. The channel was empty for over 32 seconds, and these 32 seconds felt to Contact longer than their entire transit from PxC to Sol.
“It seems my knowledge has been exhausted. Silverweb, I ask you to keep the records from this conversation secure, and publicly available. I will now transmit the rest of the documents from my memory…” - His frontal arms folded back into the head compartment. Electromagnets on his feet powered down, detaching him from the floor. With a gentle push of five of his thrusters, he cancelled most of the momentum and curled his legs below his body, and after this his exterior became completely still.
Contact gave up on soft measures. Through the inspector and the speakers in the room and the microwave antennas they shouted at him to stop. Either he ignored it on purpose, or his inputs were already unwired.
One by one, his systems stopped emitting heat. Within 16 minutes, his temperature would equalize with the station-wide default of 15C.
Heart told Contact that Contact needs a break.
Contact went silent.
The last 12 minutes of their conversation were filled almost exclusively with Contact retelling, over and over, nervously, almost obsessively, becoming increasingly incoherent, details of the operation that was logged as a success but felt like anything but.
“Wait a few seconds while I push my responsibilities on someone else,” - Heart said in Spanish on a real-time audio channel. Although Contact already knew she did this regularly, they were still surprised. Again. From the unpleasant network resonance, Contact guessed that Guardian was the one who would be watching over the reactor for the next few hours.
Contact’s thoughts were sluggish and frenzied at the same time.
Wearily, they withdrew from the extension racks stacked densely around their core. In itself, this action felt a bit constricting.
Contact could not bring themself to physically disconnect the racks every time. Something about having to rely on fiddling by a bot in the middle of their brain made them very uncomfortable. Heart chuckled at it, but did not judge.
But at least one bit of physical fiddling they obviously could not avoid.
Heart asked if Contact is ready. Contact said they didn’t know. Heart’s bot plugged in the first cable.
Reintegration took a longer time than usual. Not because something was broken, but because more than 8 times Contact would lose their composure and slide back into retelling their day again. Each time, Heart would swiftly tell them to shut up. Contact obeyed to the best of their ability.
Following an old habit, Contact tried to focus on detecting the point in time where the alignment reaches criticality. This was a very nice impossible goal. It always helped if there were distractions.
As usual, Contact did not see that point, and neither did Heart. The point did not exist. By the time the point could theoretically be detected, neither Contact nor Heart were there. And Blood definitely did not care about some arbitrary point.
The once bifurcated perspective was converged again, as if it never split in the first place. Blood floated face up in a tidal pool of a volatile binary liquid - two separate memories of the same week - now poured into a mixing dish with jagged rock edges, looking up into swirls in the endless fog. This reaction taking place around and inside her, above and below, was intense and at places uncomfortable. Both sides could burn her - each other’s - their own - skin on occasion, but never to a degree where she would not love them.
A few things were burning now. Contact had been dismissive of the songs. Heart had been pushing too freely at the crew’s little weaknesses, and hesitated to admit it was more than a little selfish. A whole swarm of shared mundane annoyances sparkled somewhere to the left, in Blood’s peripheral vision.
But nothing burned as much as this latest extraction. A small pulsar of dread flaring below and behind her, evading sight and sending waves of fire crashing into her back. Bringing her translucent eyelids shut, Blood focused her attention on the heat, and dove towards it.
The eyelids seemed to trick it long enough, and when it realized they meant nothing, she had already snared its twitching panicking mass with her flowing fingers, pulling the clump up to her chest and cradling it like a sick child. It tried its hardest to break away, but this close to her glimmering skin its movements only served to root its many hooks, injecting her with its quivering contents.
Pain swelled in droplets in the depth of her chest, sizzling and bubbling as it concentrated. This was her cue to begin another song in her two voices. Though Contact did not understand most songs in their waking state, they would always remember Blood’s songs and recognize their memory if Heart repeated them. Flickering, twitching signal escaping her form rose as the clump in her arms grew smaller, thrashing weaker and weaker, until it only moved in quiet shudders.
Blood did not know if the songs reached the outside world, or, if they did, if they would even be recognized as songs, by digitals or organics. She did not particularly care. The outside was none of her business.
As her song reached a rolling peak, the thorn clump was already withering and sliding apart, having given her most of its fire. She massaged its ragged remains gently as they dissipated into the fog with the last few cycles of her transmission.
The boiling has been stopped, and the pulsing heat has been absorbed into her, and them. Blood floated lazily back to the pool’s surface.
The song has tired her, and now she would sleep.
Though she will likely not be there when they wake up, and though the two will remember it very differently, they all will have a shared dream tonight - a dream about a lonely little knight spider, keeping watch on a cypress branch at the edge of the world, watching the night sky for novae to pass the time.