Mutual Machines

Part 1

You realise now that you probably view buildings differently from most of the world's population. Even the corporate overlords hundreds of miles away cannot buy this sensation — they would have to experience it for themselves. A shopping centre or a house is almost like a hill to someone. It is immovable, almost inviolable. They perceive it as something stable and secure, but to you such structures are like the small branches on a hiking trail — a minor nuisance, easily swept aside by your mass. You crash through a building much like that now, simply because to path around it wasn't worth the effort. The sixty-odd tonnes of advanced machine at your fingertips has better things to do with its time.

It is a humanoid thing, all bevelled angles and sturdy joints, each lone section reminiscent of a man's body but collectively proportioned wrong. The waist cannot roll like a human's hips; instead it stomps, unless in road traversal mode, where the whole frame crouches and skates on heavy-duty, high-impact wheels. Your back breathes, venting heat in hot exhalations and launching missiles like acidic spit. Your movement is tightly restricted, but your speed is greatly enhanced. Inside this grand device you will never flex your neck for the release of stress, but you can leap forward on a burst of rocketry as a supplement — a way to slake the thirst for freedom.

The shoulders are the broadest part of all, their axles needing the bulk to carry the load of weaponry and to enable the fine manipulation of the mechanical arms and their expertly wrought hands. Each one could pick up a person and effortlessly squeeze them like a tube of toothpaste. You know, because you have done it. You had to — the order had been given. You obey those orders because your brain now has different chemistry from those blunt civilians. Cables turn you into an electrical medusa, a thousand fibre-optic snakes of information that feed you ghost-haptic feedback, telling you where the mech is being hit so you can return fire as though your own body were under threat. But those insidious threads also mean you now feel a new pseudo-pleasure from the destruction of enemies and the completion of mission sub-objectives. To kill a foe is to know pleasure in the same register that tasting fruit is to eating a boiled sweet — you know it to be an artificial facsimile, but you crave the unhealthy sugar regardless.

The main weapon you carry is something a bystander might call an assault rifle. If they stood near it, they would see that was a trick of proportions. It was closer to four main battle tank cannons in stopping power. It did not fire bullets — it accelerated shells. You accelerated shells. A squeeze of the tiny trigger inside the cockpit and the outside world would roar with biblical rage. It was like magic, a thaumaturgy: a small ritual performed here to produce something large and deadly there. A pin in a voodoo doll to slaughter a man miles away.

Your real skin is not muted armed-forces green — but your mech's is. Sometimes you look at your own and it reads as the wrong colour, though that is happening less often now. You can even sleep without chemical assistance, as a normal person should. Anyone could be trained to operate a mech, but it took willpower to maintain a proper sense of self. You went through stages. First, you sat in the cockpit, surrounded on three sides by a double-decker horseshoe of controls in all sizes and shapes. Then you swam in the haptic sea, driving the machine as a man rides a horse — by instinct and the occasional nudge. Now you are at the far end of the bell curve, doing both at once. This is a vital skill. It means you can take your hand off the control stick and reach for the thermos flask wedged between the fuse boxes.

One of the speakers buried in the console attempts to say something. You had thrust a combat knife into it earlier to prevent whatever was coming out from being coherent, and for a moment it had worked. This was because of O'Donnell — that bastard of a hare. Both of you had immediately blocked each other's communications, but his mech had some device installed since your last encounter that was directly actuating the speaker's magnet rather than passing through the antenna like a proper signal should. Unable to prevent it, you shanked the treacherous thing and made a mental note to get it refitted back home.

O'Donnell's mech was functionally identical to your own. Both corporations had cheated off each other's homework, and so whilst the specs differed on paper, in aggregate they amounted to the same machine. His was slightly faster and a little more nimble, owing to less armour and worse fuel economy. You can see it now as it passes between the buildings — a matt-grey thing, less hunched than your own but still bulky.

The sky is the red of dawn, the clouds thick with the threat of acidic rain. In a few hours both machines will share the same red-primer colour once the weather strips the paint off. This place was a town of some sort once, if the ruined shopping centre was anything to judge by. You kick your speed up a notch, feeling a faint feedback in your own legs to match the thumping stride that cracks the old tarmac underfoot. The speaker attempts to talk again. Clearly O'Donnell had his usual threats and taunts prepared and wanted you to hear every one of them. Outsmarted again, hare.

You release a reflexive snapshot, having anticipated where the enemy mech would appear between two residential houses. The round glances off a hefty armour plate, ricocheting with an almighty spang into the air before detonating in the clouds and leaving a vapour trail behind it. In response, a single dumb grenade the size of a mini-fridge sails lazily over the rooftops, where one of your shoulder-mounted point-defence turrets promptly detonates it mid-air. The explosion sends bricks and roof tiles in every direction. Three houses slowly begin to fold inward and an old car erupts into flame.

You fire into the open space ahead, knowing O'Donnell would use it to charge you. Your fleshy body can feel the thumps of his footfalls drawing closer in a way the sensors in your faux-head simply cannot match. One side of your brain — the half co-opted by the machine — sees only smoke and fire. The other, the primal side, can practically taste the steel.

You bowl into each other, both guns firing and scoring hits on ablative plates before the proximity forces both sets of arms upward. For a few scant moments you are both shooting into the air, puncturing clouds far above while spent casings rattle off one another's shoulders. Your left hand becomes a single-edged knife of roaring exotic plasma; his becomes a stiletto. Close combat is not preferred, so this is only ever meant to buy a few quick, hateful shanks before breaking apart again.

Except this time is different. Beneath the residential road you have both been standing on runs the sewer line, which has left the surface thinner than either of you anticipated. The combined weight of two closely spaced mechs causes the road to crumble underfoot — not by much on any meaningful scale, but enough to make retreating far less viable. You stab. He stabs. Your mech fails first, but it is a moot point because his fails a moment later. The electrosteel fibre bundles of false muscle are severed in both melee arms, neither ranged weapon can be brought to bear after burning out the servos like tired arm wrestlers, and neither of you are stupid or suicidal enough to fire back-mounted artillery at point-blank range.

Something groans. Metal begins to ping with ever-increasing rapidity as stress failures cascade. Your mech may have seized first, but his has ignobly toppled forward and crunched into your own. Both of you have the same idea at the same moment and pop the cockpit hatches. The urge to kill O'Donnell has been nagging at you for half a decade, and suddenly the chance to satisfy it is closer than it has ever been. The sensation fades like waking from a nightmare as the cables disconnect, but the momentum of it carries you forward all the same.

Cold air rushes in, cut through with the occasional waft of heat from a burning car below. You have never seen O'Donnell in the flesh before. You know his face from every angle — grainy satellite images, full true-colour holographic reconstruction — because the corporation had to be certain their rival's chief asset was dead before they would pay. He is a head shorter than you, lanky in build, with fur around his face that lends him a permanent smug sneer. He twitches his nose, steps from his own machine onto the front of yours, and draws a handle from the side of his flight suit. A blade telescopes out until he flourishes a nano-rapier before you.

"At long last, Anon," he grins, showing the teeth his species is infamous for. "The dance ends here." The tip of the rapier comes up under your chin, tilting your head back so he can look down its length and gloat properly. Then smug becomes fury as he reads what your eyes betray. Levelled at his chest, held low at your side, is a blocky heavy pistol — the Mark 8-b Thunderbolt, designed to punch through two walls and kill whatever is standing behind them.

The moment arrived and ended before either of you could fully inhabit it. You fired; he flicked the blade at the gun. A single burst of shots miraculously clears the two of you and strikes the insides of both cockpits instead, and electrics and feed lines catch instantly. You lunge for his throat before he can find his footing. The nano-rapier snags on the cockpit lip, bends under your combined weight, and snaps — sending you both tumbling down onto the road below.

Both of you immediately suffer system-shock release. For the past several hours your brains had been occupied with piloting tens of tonnes of corporate-backed war vehicle, and now you didn't even weigh one measly tonne. You wouldn’t fire your main gun at anything less than fifteen. It was like stepping off a rocking boat onto solid land — or off a trampoline onto hard concrete. The hare landed better, and your sidearm is kicked away before you can use it. You watch it skitter across the road as he straddles you and begins choking the life out of you. He has a sinewy strength to his grip, but his body is lighter, and a punch to the side of his face forces him off. The straps and ports on both of your flight suits make it easy to grab hold of something but tricky to find anything vital. Every time one of you makes progress it is swiftly reversed, and it's back to square one.

Neither of you was trained in the martial arts. You were trained in the kind that encourages gouging out eyes, biting off fingertips, and absorbing a punch to the kidney. A long and intense minute passes, and at some point the fighting becomes something closer to just mutual endurance. A further two minutes in and neither of you has risen from your knees, panting and hurting in equal measure. One of the mech's missiles cooks off and you both dive away from it on instinct. Now you are lying face down on the road, heads less than half a metre apart, too utterly exhausted to finish the job.

"Five…minutes?" you wheeze.

"Five…minutes…" O'Donnell agrees, then plants his forehead on the ground and groans.

Part 2

You contemplate retrieving your gun, but down here amongst the dirt and rubble the prospect does not appeal. You need a drink. You get unsteadily to your feet, climb the precarious mangled metal back up to your cockpit, and rummage through the fire-suppressant-coated innards until you find the flask, which has somehow survived the whole affair. It contains nothing special — hot artificial coffee — but caffeine is the only drug you get to decide when it enters your body, and you have grown to enjoy the taste. The next priority was survival equipment, because neither mech was going to get you home.

Below, you watch the hare get to his feet. His oval-shaped head turns to where the ruined rapier has landed; he shakes it angrily and kicks the thing in the direction your gun went. Evidently his thinking runs the same way as yours. Dying of thirst in the wastes would be an ignoble end to an otherwise expensive career. Unlike yours, his cockpit hadn't caught fire, though proximity had filled it with smoke regardless. Two of the heavy pistol shots had thoroughly gutted his console, leaving the machine with barely a working switch, let alone power. Grumbling to himself, he begins popping hatches to retrieve supplies.

With both machines leaning into each other — half seized from battle, half in emergency lockdown — only a few metres now separated you. You both pointedly ignore one another, trying to coax some life out of something, putting off the inevitable conclusion you have both already reached. Then O'Donnell suddenly looks up in recollection and grabs something from overhead. His own pistol. With malicious glee he thumbs the safety off and aims it at your centre mass with instinctual swiftness. Too tired to leap clear and too restricted to duck, you can only flinch — as the end fails to occur. The pistol, a robust tube with a magazine ahead of the trigger, simply clicks as O'Donnell squeezes impotently. Without power, some safety feature had apparently decided his mech could not verify he was a valid employee. With no radio signal or override, his gun presumably did not consider the end-user licence agreement properly signed for killing you.

He throws it at you anyway, out of spite and frustration in roughly equal measure. Being an awkward projectile, it misses and clatters into some dark recess of your scorched cockpit. "What have you got?" he says, slumping back into his pilot seat and pressing both hands into his face.

"Eight water pills, four field ration packs, a flare gun — no flares — a spare magazine for my pistol, some sort of field tent, and my coffee. You?"

There was no use fighting it. You couldn't begrudge him trying to kill you again. You had both been doing that for years.

"Basically the same, and a pack of nicotine gum."

You look up from your searching. "The files didn't say you smoked?"

"I don't. But I like the buzz." He peels a strip from the packet and begins chewing, tossing the foil out of his cockpit toward the feet of yours. It felt incredibly petty.

"I'm going to guess your transponder is dead too?" you venture, wiping your seat clean enough to sit in.

"All I have is the offline download for the area." He taps a small black wire that snakes around his ear and just above his eye — a standard device that projected images directly onto the eyeball, used mostly as a personal HUD. "Forty-eight miles to yours, fifty-one to mine."

"Mine it is, then." You jiggle an eyebrow to switch your own device to receive mode. "Send me a copy."

"No. And what makes you think I'm going to traipse all the way to your base just to be captured there?"

"Because I have the only working gun?"

"Last I checked it was in a hole." He crossed his arms. "I can walk the extra three miles, Anon. You can literally go and get lost. I win." With a certain cosmic irony, his mech chose this moment to buckle a little further and tip forward, causing both cockpits to resume crashing slowly into one another until less than a metre divided you. A long pause followed as you were both uncertain if everything would shift again. "Fine. Go and get your stupid gun." He folded his arms again once it was clear nothing else would move, and turned his head aside to avoid eye contact while he said it.

The best passage structurally so far — the world-building lands naturally through movement and observation rather than exposition dump, and the shoe moment is quietly perfect. The corporate history paragraph is the one place it slows; the ideas are good but the sentences become load-bearing in a way that stalls the walk. "Grown in an artificial womb" is a significant detail dropped mid-list that deserves slightly more air around it. The ending is a fine hook. Minor fixes: "indignity" wants to be "indignation", a few relative clauses that could simply be new sentences.

The weapon was found, reloaded, and holstered. O'Donnell had located a flip knife among his supplies, but you could tell by the way he held himself there was no intention of putting it between your shoulder blades. You had the only working gun; he had the only reliable map. To use the gun against you he would somehow have to force your finger onto the trigger while it was pointed at himself, and the HUD looped around his eye only worked for his eye as a login credential. You both knew the other had contemplated killing the other in their sleep and taking their chances in the wasteland alone, but since you hadn't shot him yet it was obvious the truce would hold. So, O'Donnell switched to the next best thing, which was insulting you.

"A Thunderbolt? What are you, twelve and browsing a cheap catalogue?" he scoffed, and began walking.

"At least my handlers think I'm sensible enough to own a gun. Did yours catch you making little pew-pew noises with yours and take it away?" He stiffened, set his jaw, then relaxed and kept walking without responding. "You always were a bit of a shithead. Were you seriously monologuing over the speakers for the past hour? What even was—"

O'Donnell cut you off, wheeling around with indignation plastered across his face. He continued walking backwards, never stumbling over the detritus littering the ruined road. Like you, his body had acquired a trained instinct for good footing and irregular terrain — mech operation demanded the upper body learn to work independently of the lower. "I am not going to listen to some stupid human for the next few days, so shut your idiot mouth unless there's another corporate entity out there." With that he turned to face forward — and more importantly, away from you — and strode on.

Early mech engagements had been fought in cities. Over time the battlefield had spread until towns like this one resembled a dropped crockery cupboard. The corporate war had begun over defending resources, then claiming new ones, and finally, once all the borders had been drawn on all the land, it had devolved into simply wasting the enemy's resources. Your own employer had once been a stock brokerage and hadn't needed territory for anything. Then they had pivoted to “artificial intelligence data centre credit lending”, and suddenly proximity to water cooling had become their foremost priority. You didn't even know what O'Donnell's benefactors did.

Watching him walk was a curious experience. You knew a few anthros — capitalism and greed made no distinctions — but nearly all your encounters with anyone had been through video and audio calls directing you to locations and targets. You rarely met people in the flesh, and observing someone in a non-combat environment felt faintly at odds with the majority of your adult life. O'Donnell was good at his job, which meant his upbringing had probably mirrored yours closely enough: grown in an artificial womb, forced through accelerated maturity, subjected to numerous chemical enhancements, and fitted with mechanical augmentations throughout the body and brain once his handlers were satisfied he wouldn't be a waste of investment. His flight suit — bluish grey with white straps — hugged his body close, as it had to, so the IO ports along his spine, arms, and legs remained accessible for mech interfacing. His diet and exercise regime was probably as tightly controlled as yours. His species still lent him a certain wiry agility regardless. He still had his tail, the ports parting neatly on either side of it.

After a while he removed his shoes without fanfare and threw them aside, revealing distinctly elongated feet and filed claws. Not wanting to start another argument so soon after the first, you said nothing. It was obvious from the way he flexed his legs that he considered it an improvement, whatever the terrain. The place was a mess; you were certainly not going barefoot here. Picking a zig-zagging route through the narrow alleyways between the old houses was the best strategy, for it was where the destruction was less overt. It was what the war had come to — about nothing important, not really. Larger companies now simply expended resources against competitors until one side was spent. With the smaller players eliminated and whole towns wrecked because the wrong franchise had opened a storefront there, it had become a slow strategic slog. So long as company A could not defeat company B without company C intervening, it would continue until each had ground the others to a fine powder — even if that left the victor as little more than coarse grit themselves.

O'Donnell stopped suddenly, raising a hand. He had entirely forgotten you were sworn enemies, because he pointed toward the end of the next street where a much smaller mech — a battlesuit of some kind — was lurking.

At around just two metres tall, it was probably a scout. Possibly a field test of a prototype, or maybe even old stock being sent out. We hadn’t been fighting too far away, so either they were hoping to pick up the pieces of our little squabble, or some lesser company was hoping to get lucky. In any normal circumstance neither you or O’Donnell would have even glanced in its direction. Some on-board computer would have identified it and sent a choice selection of armour piercing rounds at it, and the loss of ammo wouldn’t even register. Now it was suddenly the biggest fish in the pond and it didn’t even realise.

Keeping your voice low, you speak into one of the hare’s long ears. “Is it blocking our route?”

“Yes,” he responded, agitated. “Is your pistol rated for that sort of armour?”

“Only within spitting distance.”

He pointed towards an almost intact civilian car, then at a low wall on the other side of the road further down. The message was clear, get close with that as cover whilst he did…something else?

“What are you going to do? Cheerlead from the sidelines?” you hiss at him.

He extracted his bright orange flare gun from his pack and selected a shell for it, showing you it was a smoke round. “No, you dolt. I am going to blind him.”

You roll your eyes and advance. It would have been the same route you'd have taken anyway, which was annoying in the particular way that being told to do the thing you were already doing always was. Even so, the hare matched your pace with equal stealth, keeping the operation clean without any apparent effort. You had trained in battlesuits, so you knew exactly what would cripple this one. It was a classic example of its kind — essentially powered armour designed to carry a heavy-grade weapon with the ease of a sidearm. This one had a large ammo reserve slung low on its back beneath a whirring power unit, a heavy belt of high-calibre rounds feeding an arm-mounted machinegun: long-barrelled, wrapped in cooling mesh, uncomplicated and rugged. The operator, however, was clearly inexperienced. You wouldn't have let anyone sneak up on you like this, you think, as you vault the car and press yourself against the wall.

O'Donnell has a clean firing angle from where he stands, able to place the shell wherever he chooses. He watches you both as the battlesuit turns to march further down the road, servos whining like a cheap toy car with every step and every casual turn of its sensor-filled head. You give the signal. He braces and sends the shell forth with a single pah-toot. It smacks into the head and wedges between two joints, billowing smoke in all directions. The operator immediately panics — no doubt forgetting the suit is probably airtight — and squeezes the trigger, sending a spray of rounds randomly across the street. Death lands everywhere except where you and the hare are standing. Whatever windows remained in the cars and houses are obliterated. Brickwork is punctured like tissue paper. A sloppy display. Neither of you would have responded that way.

You have two magazines for your pistol, one already below full, and the weapon set to single shot. One round strikes a knee support and disables it cleanly. Battlesuits are often too heavy for their pilot to bear unaided, and the person inside goes forward and crashes down like a discarded puppet. A second shot disables the machinegun. The smoke round continues roiling as O'Donnell holsters the flare gun and walks over.

You both look down at the flailing suit. "Damelier-Lux?" you say, pointing at the chunky corporate logo on its back. "Have you ever heard of them?"

"It rings a bell." For a brief moment the hatred between you was forgotten as the answer danced at the tips of both your tongues. You were certain you'd seen it before, and by his expression O'Donnell had too. "I know I've seen that logo at base somewhere…"

"Wait." The dawning realisation crested. "I think they make appliances. Does your base have Damelier-Lux washing machines?"

"Oh, for pity's sake. Open him up. I have to know now."

Between you, you sever cables and feed pipes before heaving the now-inert suit onto its back. Without power to most of its sections, only the upper torso and head compartment can unseal. Inside was indeed a human — less grizzled than either of you, but still the sort of face you wouldn't want to encounter in a dark alleyway. O'Donnell studied him with the air of a man reaching a conclusion. "Does Damelier-Lux make washing machines?"

"Or dishwashers?" you add.

The pilot started yelling the moment he had a clear line of sight to you both. "Get off me, you sacks of shit! I'll fucking kill—"

You pistol-whip him, which was particularly effective with a gun the size and weight of a brick. "Washing machine. Dishwasher. Which is it?" you ask.

"What the fuck are you—" Combat drugs, probably. Making him aggressive past the point of sense. You hit him again. A black eye was forming already.

"You're doing it wrong," O'Donnell said. "Keep hitting him there and he'll be insensate. Try his nose."

"You're only saying that because you're a lagomorph. Humans don't have sensitive noses."

"It's not about sensitivity, it's about the nerves. Look, watch." O'Donnell leaned in and elbowed the pilot across the nose. A crunch, and blood began flowing immediately. The pilot continued — now somewhat muffled — to shout, swear, and protest. The answer still wasn't forthcoming.

"Well, now look what you've done. He's going to aspirate on his own blood and we'll have to wait until we're back to find out." You began rifling through the exposed innards of the suit, ignoring the twisting and shouting person within. "Check if he's got something usable on him. An unsecured radio, anything."

Nothing. Either integrated into the suit or locked to the pilot's credentials. You searched in silence, or as close to it as the muffled swearing allowed — the longest stretch you had ever spent in direct proximity to the hare, and every minute of it was supremely grating. You straighten up after the lack of loot became apparent and looked at O'Donnell, who has come to the same conclusion from the other side.

"We wait until he comes down off whatever they gave him," you say.

"Obviously." He glanced around the street. "There's a building over there with most of its roof still attached."

"I can see that."

"I'm pointing it out."

"I have eyes."

"Debatable."

The pilot, still bleeding steadily from his nose and now beginning to process his situation with rather more clarity, looked between the two of you. "Are you — are you going to take me prisoner?"

"Yes," you both said, in the same flat tone, without looking at him.

"Right." A pause. "Should I — are you going to, or—"

"Just sit there," O'Donnell said and sliced the suit’s radio wires out. You both grabbed a leg and began to haul him like downed cattle.

The building had been a pharmacy at some point, identifiable only by the ghost of a green cross still faintly visible on the cracked fascia above the door. The interior was stripped to the walls, which suited everyone. The pilot sat with his back against the far wall, nose packed with a strip torn from his own flight suit, watching the two of you with the expression of a man trying to determine which of several bad situations he was actually in.

You pulled out your coffee flask and took a long, slow sip. O'Donnell produced his nicotine gum with equal deliberateness. The ritual quality of it was not lost on you — two people who had observed each other from a distance for five years, now close enough to watch each other's habits in real time. It was profoundly strange. Presumably he felt the same, though his face gave nothing away beyond mild and general disdain, which was simply his face.

"The Cascadia contract," he said, eventually.

You looked up. "What about it?"

"That was mine. You know that was mine."

"It was open tender."

"It was open tender for approximately eleven hours before you submitted."

"That's how tender processes work."

"You had inside information."

"We had a faster administrative team."

"Your lot bribed someone."

"Prove it."

He chewed his gum with great precision. "I don't need to prove it. I know. You know I know. That's sufficient."

"If it makes you feel better to believe that."

"It doesn't make me feel better or worse. It's simply a fact I have catalogued." He paused, the battlesuit pilot was looking at you both. He had been following this exchange with increasing attention, his head moving between the two of you like a man watching a sport he didn't entirely understand but was beginning to find compelling.

He leaned forward slightly. "I don't want to interrupt, but —”

“Don’t —" O’Donnell started.

“— finish that sentence.” You ended in time with him.

The unknown pilot closed his mouth.

O'Donnell looked back at you. "It’s washing machines," he said, with the air of a man closing a case.

"Dishwashers," you retort, now more sure about that answer.

"Same thing."

"One is for clothes. One is for dishes."

"The umbrella term—"

"There is no umbrella term. They are different machines." He gestured at the pilot. The pilot opened his mouth. "White goods," O'Donnell continued, before the man could produce a syllable. "Damelier-Lux is white goods. I was right at the category level."

"You were right about the wrong thing at the right level."

The pilot tried again. You both looked at him again. He stopped again.

"Have you ever seen a dishwasher?" you asked O'Donnell. A genuine question. Neither of you lived normal lives. If you hadn’t ever loaded a dishwasher, than neither had he. Assets did not do that sort of work.

"I've seen the industrial ones. In the canteen."

"Those are industrial washers."

"Same principle."

"Completely different—" you stopped. "Actually I don't know what domestic ones use."

"Heat," he said, with no real confidence.

"Heat and water."

"Obviously water."

The pilot took a breath, but another pistol whip from you stopped him from interrupting. This was serious business and you were determined to prove that stupid buck-toothed hare was wrong.

Part 3

Neither of you was willing to concede the appliance question without access to a definitive reference, and no definitive reference was available. It did not become a shouting match — the pilot was still present and neither of you was willing to appear unprofessional in front of a third party, even one trapped in a partially opened battlesuit with a broken nose. Eventually you both left him in the building. His corporation would find him, or it wouldn't. The suit's emergency beacon would transmit eventually, when something in the area had power enough to relay it. It was not your concern.

Waiting around for extraction did not appeal to either of you. Your respective corporations would come to some arrangement about recovering the mechs — they always did, the hardware was too expensive to abandon — and when they did, you would both need to be somewhere that constituted a recoverable position rather than a crater. You left the town behind without ceremony, the ruined rooftops giving way to open road, the acidic clouds overhead beginning their slow and patient work on what paint remained on your flight suits.

You cycled through your HUD settings as you walked, hoping for a signal strong enough to pull down your own navigational data and be done with the hare's map entirely. You already knew you wouldn't find one. The publicly accessible network had been colonised years ago — each corporation broadcasting at volumes designed to drown out its competitors, the cumulative effect being a spectrum so thoroughly contested that nothing coherent could get through without paying a toll to each of them in sequence. You did not have access to money. The question of what you would spend it on, if you did, occupied approximately three seconds of thought before arriving at no satisfying answer. Assets did not shop. It was a distraction for the next few miles, which was probably its only remaining purpose.

The only obstacle between the town's edge and open country was an automated sentry unit — a squat, four-legged thing that moved with the cheerful, unhurried energy of a machine that had nowhere to be and nothing to consider. It superficially resembled a dog, in the way that a hammer superficially resembled a hand. You both went still in the shadow of a collapsed wall and waited while it trundled past on whatever errand its programming had assigned it. They were always like that. Perfectly pleasant right up until they were ventilating trespassers. It rounded a corner and was gone.

Then came the water question, which was its own variety of endurance test. The unspoken competition was seeing how far each of you could walk before acknowledging the need to stop, and today you had the advantage of the coffee, still lukewarm in the flask. Tomorrow you would have nothing, and O'Donnell would win on those terms, and you would both know it without saying so. A storm drain provided the base ingredient — murky, the colour of old pewter, with a surface quality that did not invite contemplation. The purification pill went in and fizzed and spat with the aggressive enthusiasm of a chemical compound with something to prove, and after sufficient time the result was technically water. You diluted your remaining coffee into it. The coffee would extend the supply and mask the artificial aftertaste from the pill, which was the sound tactical reasoning. O'Donnell watched this with an expression of undisguised contempt, and you hid your satisfaction behind the first sip — which was, admittedly, genuinely horrible, and the hare saw your face when it arrived, and said nothing, which was somehow worse than if he had.

Field rations next. Both of you were carrying Prism+, which wasn’t a coincidence. Evidence that the two corporations had the same procurement contract. The vacuum-sealed foil packaging resisted opening with a persistence that felt disproportionate to its function — it had survived the entire engagement, the cockpit fires, two kilometres of walking, and it chose now to be more difficult to open than the battlesuit had been. Inside: a dense rectangle of compressed nutrition approximating the dimensions and surface texture of a birthday candle, but heavier. Yours was a middling brown that the label described as beef. O'Donnell's was a paler tan it described as chicken. Neither description was especially accurate. The texture was exactly like wax. The taste was however entirely acceptable once you stopped thinking about the texture.

Without either of you deciding to, you both flexed the block between your hands until it split. The motion was automatic — a reflex so thoroughly embedded it had ceased to require any conscious input. You split rations with someone who had a different flavour. That was simply what you did. Then you both looked at each other's halves, and at each other, running the same silent arithmetic: does the other person do this, did they do it deliberately, and is the piece they're about to offer the same mass as the one they're keeping. The exchange was conducted with the detached diplomacy of a trade negotiation in which both parties were too proud to admit they wanted what the other had. The reward chemistry in your brain registered the desire and disapproved of it. Wanting something from the other went against the feel-good chemicals in the brain, but those were fighting the basic need for edible food and that was an instinct that had been around since birth, so that won instead.

More road. You were not concerned about O'Donnell's navigation — you had your own sense of the cardinal directions, and the landscape confirmed it, the familiar silhouettes of structures you had observed from cockpit height now revealed at ground level to be looted and smashed and looted again for good measure. It was in the shadow of one such structure, a water tower that had lost its tank and retained only the skeletal legs, that you both stopped by unspoken agreement and deployed the field tents. They were thin fabric over springy alloy frames, identical in design, and they erupted into shape with the enthusiasm of things that had been waiting a very long time for this specific purpose. You had never opened yours before. You were fairly certain O'Donnell had never opened his either.

You were arranging the interior, despite the fact there was almost nothing in it — when O'Donnell spoke.

"Can you—" He stopped. Started again, his voice held at a careful level. "Can you release the ports on my back? I can't reach all of them."

You went still. Trying to strangle him to death was a professional interaction with a clear operational context. You didn’t know what tone that was. Social events were stilted where you both came from. "What type are they?" you asked, because asking a technical question bought precious seconds of not having to respond to the actual situation. "X-91s?"

"Yes."

The corporation had decided that social calibration had not been a priority for your development, and O'Donnell's back was turned to you — deliberately, you were fairly certain, for the same reasons yours would have been. You approached slowly. Your hands were fidgeting for some reason.

The surgical steel caught the low light: a row of integration ports that split above his tail and continued down either side of his spine toward his legs. Yours simply passed through pre-made apertures in the flight suit material. His were fixed — each one anchored to the suit with a small catch on either side that had to be disengaged before the port could separate from the fabric. You reached for the first one. Touching it felt like a minor transgression against some rule that nobody had written down.

Each catch released with a small, precise snick — a sound that was trivial and yet landed in the silence of the ruined landscape with the weight of something much larger. You worked down the row. With each port that came free, more of him was exposed: lean muscle built for function rather than proportion, the fur along his back dark with exertion, the augmentation visible now as it integrated with the flesh — spinal discs of brushed metal, the subtle geometric shapes of embedded systems. O’Donnell had shot the flare gun with the same accuracy of a targeting computer, because like you his body was partially a mechanical weapon. His free will aimed 95% of the gun, but the last 5% was stripped from his control by a targeting gyroscope imbedded within him. You had the same systems. You had seen their equivalent in your own body in mirrors and in the photographs the medical team took quarterly. Seeing them in someone else was a different thing, and you were not immediately certain why.

The smell was not what you had expected. You swallow for some unknown reason, forgetting your proximity to him, and the sound was louder than a grenade in both your ears.