Covering Rust

A HexCorp story, written by HexCorp Drone #0977

Posted with permission, original can be found [Here]

Rust slid to a stop as she came to the end of the alleyway. Pools of loose water reflected neon signage, endless advertisements broken by only the ripples of organic movement. Droplets of water crashed into other pools, joining their falling brothers from the hour-old rain on the ancient roads of concrete.

“C’mon.. Damnit!”

The girl let her metal coated fingers dance across the screen of a datapad. A bright neon screen ran figures and prompts across its surface, exploding into a halo of painful blues that vanished into the air, chasing away whatever remains of gloom could be found in the cities of endless daytime. She worked fast, trying to find the solutions to problems which she had never once thought of. Then the worst words showed up, just as she found the door to safety.

Password Required.
Fuck.

Window after window of information blasted their way into the foreground, labeling every piece of information the hacker had managed to gather on her quarry. Volumes of observations and internal leaks were opened, immediately running through complex searching programs that she had coded the night before. It was all designed for this exact kind of emergency.

Still, there hadn’t been a particularly voluminous amount of data, she mused. Even with all of her searching and digging, the company had mostly seemed on the up and up.

Her eyes trailed over the nearby buildings as she thought, giving painful needles as the rainbow of commerce lanced through her retinas. Even the microscopic enhancements, ones that were tracing the signals of the active cameras to their roots and following hidden power lines, were helpless to prevent the onslaught of searing light pollution. The mild filtration of the remaining rains did nothing to keep her safe, only succeeding in adding to the oppressive fear that darkened her mind.

“Maybe I got away?” She muttered, using her now unoccupied hand to brush away a shock of her brightly colored hair. Electric blue, they called it. Something she always found to be worthwhile was to be unique, even if the color reminded her of the law-abiding citizens who walked from megacorporate oppressor to another would-be king of commerce.

Blues. The color of a standard datapad. Like an ID badge for your placement of life, the hue the screen emitted would tell anyone looking who you were. An endless sea of cyan expanded in the rising haze of the streets, lifted from the glasses of a tide of commerce drones.

Subconsciously, Rust touched the edge of her own pad. The endlessly executing program shifted up the spectrum, from long to short.

Red.

Her eyes remained locked away from the screen, scanning those walking past her faster than the conscious mind was capable of registering. Ocular implants fired right to her localized computer storage, running signals and faces against a database of agents. Police were not the important targets, not in the modern day.

It was the Green and Pink she watched out for. Those were two megacorps that were known, at least to the Red population, to have sleepers all over. You break a rule, someone’s glasses change color and they’re on you.

Data suddenly went to her waking mind, sending captured memories across her eyes. Information that had been carefully curated by her technical mastery was seeking a conscious eye to sift through, looking for the possible ideas for passwords.

Nothing was left to chance as she went back to unconsciously typing, putting in any attempt to brute-force the words. Even the most idiotic chances were taken, such as ‘Password’ and a string of sequential numbers.

Wave crash. Nothing worked. It only made sense that there wouldn’t be an evil megacompany that would allow itself to slack on security that much. If only she could get to a server bank and use her lyteslicer. The hypercomputer dagger would get past that firewall in..

A new message appeared on her datapad. Shockingly, this one avoided projecting into her implants, forcing Rust to lower her eyes and watch the screen.

ASSET ACQUISITION IN PROGRESS. STAND BY.

“What is...”

Her question was cut off as a visually loud disturbance happened in the street. Lights exploded to life as several civilians suddenly shifted their absent-minded walking patterns, stiffening up and adjusting their vision from the middle distance. Three heads, at least that she could see, turned their covered eyes towards the alleyway.

Down the one with the neon sign flickering in a language she didn’t understand, casting a multicolored sun across the hiding girl. Nineteen years of teenager stiffened up as she saw the same hue explode on each of the visors, with the halation of further troops piercing through the blue.

Pink. HexCorp.
“Uh..”

Her ocular implant flashed as the limited AI took over, giving her the tactical assessment based on every factor it could be programmed for: attack patterns, numbers, her combat skills, crowds, weather. The amount of information would make a general in previous centuries cry with jealousy and sell his family for one of his own. The most powerful strategic software money could buy or humanity could produce.

And it had the greatest tactic ever.

RUN

Her heels were hitting the ground almost before the words hit her brain, carried by the chemical fear now pumping through her brain. The endless advance of technology had replaced many parts of her body; more dexterous fingers for typing, a connection to her computer, better eyes. But none of these wondrous advancements had created a disconnect between two of her favorite emotions. Fear...

And excitement.

Two touches on her pad entered disparate phases of her escape plan. One of them was to retract the translucent screen into a small stick, where she could slip that into a locking pocket. Leaving anything behind would be a death sentence with the police, even worse when the Pinks were on your trail.

The second button sent a deep pulse of noise echoing through her eardrums. Her heart rate rocketed upwards as adrenaline and music mixed into a thrilling strobe, pushing her to run faster.

Bright lights flashed across her vision with each pathway she took, leaving the peripherals of her vision. Rust simply followed the prepared pathways towards one of the many Red’s safe houses, looking for an escape without any known signals coming down on her.

Left. Left. Right. Straight.

Her lungs burned as she followed the red flashing indicators, twisting on halogen bright arrows before taking off again. The wet noise of footsteps behind her was amplified to be audible, falling to where she could almost match a beat from her ears to the pursuit. Her world was consumed by the background track to her own escape, following the red sunburst in time with the rapid-fire beat echoing in her skull.

Right. Rust let her hand extend out and grasp a decades old drainpipe, hydroplaning her boots over the surface of an extended pool. A cloud of brilliantly colored gems hung in the water behind her, leaving a galaxy of hues from the flickering swarm of advertisements and chasers. They were gone as she was, crashing into the ground as she turned on the fulcrum.

There was a low wall before her. Three, maybe four, meters tall. Old brick, covered in years of discontent public art and pockmarked by the abuse of rain. Disused furniture had been scattered in the dead end, piled beside the metal door that led to some kind of low-rent district building.

“Where..”

Her oculars lit up with an answer before she could even ask; metal transformer box, covered dumpster, fire escape. Three jumps, pull herself over, and hit the other side. Keep running. Evade.

But there was another plan.

“C’mon, baby, don’t be slow..” Rust muttered, never stopping her run. There would be times to rest later.

Rust felt her namesake cover her shoulder as she passed the entryway, slamming her weight against it and smashing it open. A huge crash echoed through the empty streets, covering the noise of her footsteps while she jumped forward.

One boot landed on the sleek metal of the transformer and slipped, just a bit. For a brief instant, the running girl thought her heart would explode from the shock of falling, but her honed movements managed to catch themselves again. The muscles in her already aching legs tightened and she sprung.

Plastic crunched as the second jumped threw her into the void, catching onto the slick handles of the never-used emergency ladder. Momentum took care of the rest, swinging her tucked legs before she let go.

For a moment, Rust could swear she was flying. The apex of her move had her hang in weightlessness for the briefest moment, letting her appreciate the Newtonian truth of her situation.

What went up always came down.

The last notes of her escape song came to rest as her back landed in a pile of bagged rubbish, softening what could have been painful with something that was only described as horrible.

For a moment, all was still. The Pinks were still coming after her. Looking, searching. Unknown pairs of footsteps turned the corner behind her, then slammed the metal door shut. Nothing was left outside that her sensors could pick up on, and the building had no exit on this side of the wall. All that was left was the buzzing noise in her ears and the frantic pumping of her heart.

“Fuck...”

It took minutes for Rust to calm down, letting the drumming in her ears die down to something considered reasonable. The tension never died out, though; she still felt it, prickling at the insides of her brain without ceasing. Even her ears still buzzed with the remaining static of her music.

One hand eventually reached up and grabbed at whatever was nearby. A pipe. That works. Grasp and tug, pulling herself to a seating position on the plastic.

The intrepid hacker tried her best to not think about what was inside.

“Okay.. Music off.” She normally wouldn’t have stated the command, but it seemed that the program possibly bugged out. The last song should have ended it, once she was out of danger. Even weirder, it hadn’t started a different song?

MUSIC OFF

The buzzing never went away.

“What is this..” The now standing girl looked around at the darkening alleyway she had found herself in, eyes scanning around her. Diagnostic information cascaded across her eyes, routing strings of code to try and figure out if her music was still playing or the program had simply frozen up. Again.

As more shadows crossed over the secluded corner, the overly focused techie started to feel something out of place. It felt like there was some kind of unnatural... Thing descending on her. The darkness of the night was flickering its way around her more, pressing gloom into her senses as the adrenaline faded from her bloodstream.

The feeling only grew as the buzzing got louder, drilling into her ears like a swarm of angry bees. It couldn’t be actual insects, though; most species hadn’t been seen in the city in any meaningful number since she was a child. If even then.

Power to her implants cut off, reasoning that this would turn off the annoying interference until she got home.

It was only then that Rust noticed that the noise was coming from outside of her head. From everywhere. At once.

The sudden shock of her aural discovery led to a second realization that shook the youth to her core. Something that shouldn’t actually happen to her, that was only managing to find a small percentage of her waking mind until now. A single change in her environment that had eluded her, quickly fighting its way into the forefront.

It never got dark around here, even in the alleys. Her cybernetic eyes lifted from the ground and looked at the sky above.

A blanket of darkness hung over the sliver of twilight she could see, casting even the neon universe into something more like actual night. The buzzing grew only louder as this fog of what looked almost like smog descended on her, slowly blotting out any source of light as soon as they passed the bottom layer. Light by light, the garish markings of her accustomed world vanished into the abyss of nothing.

To Rust, it wasn’t real darkness. The ground was, the walls and even trash obscured by the ever increasing gloom of the descending.. Something.

But the cloud was far from nothing. Twinkling stars of electricity flickered across the length, smashing into one another in brilliant novas of energy. Trembling streaks of data flashed like lightning, touching from cloud to swell as the mass of digital life shifted and swirled. Nearly chaotic power lowered, reaching out in tendrils of energized metal to the dumbfounded girl.

Microbots, she realized. Not the nanomachines used to treat disease, but close. Bug-like tools that could fly about and pollinate plants across the city, keeping the city horticulture from dying out in the absence of organic proliferation. They were visible, in swarms that didn’t number in the ‘too many’, to the naked eye.

“Or they could kill me.” Rust muttered, watching the pink stream of technical data flow towards the nearest transfer node. The colors gave away the owner.

HexCorp.

Her eyes flickered and sputtered as they ran through some specifications. Strategies and plans were developed and quickly tossed aside, just in time for a message to display in front of her. Red lights covered her peripheral, frantically pulsing in an attempt to find an escape.

ACQUISITION IN PROGRESS. STAND BY.

“Pink was never my color..”

Rust was not able to speak any more as the thousands of vespid-like robots descended, drowning out all of her speech and thought in the powerful buzzing.

Fear gripped her heart as little stings of pain snipped at her flesh. Tiny needles crossed through her clothing and skin, held for a moment, and vanished. Mechanically precise stabs were administered everywhere, making her shout in pain and swing her arms from side to side.

Not that it did anything. Steel hornets would land on her skin and tear at the clothing, shearing away the faux leather and mesh into pieces of discarded string. Scraps of material fell to the ground around her, joining the clutter of trash as more stings hit every inch.

Why are they stripping me? Her mind was barely aware enough to ask this question as more of the pain lanced through her skin, prickling at her mind endlessly.

Something inside of her started to warm as more of these tiny needles left their payload just below the skin. At first, she was certain it was just the pain and fear exciting her, triggering her fight or flight again. But it couldn’t be that. This was too deep and too.. Uniform?

It started at her arms, with them becoming heavier. The swinging appendages slowly stopped moving according to her will. It wasn’t like they were heavy or tired or anything, just that the muscles were not wanting to move. First her right, then the left, fell to her sides. Limp, empty, and devoid of strength.

Though they shouldn’t be. The heat grew as her upgraded eyes saw them swell and grow slightly. Feedback trickled into her senses of her entire body starting to shift; metal lacing through her muscles, fibers of synthetic alloys and wiring starting to replace what had once been strictly organic. Even more than most cyber-freaks she knew, her body was rewriting itself around the template of a sleek, robotic material.

Cold pain erupted deep into her body as the digital connections grew stronger; metal laced through her skeleton and into her spine, connecting artificial circuitry to her already compromised nerves. Fire ran along her spine as the synapses were tested, pinging her brain with useless feelings and writing back to what should happen.

“Open.. Ah!”

Something stabbed into the back of Rust’s head as she tried to speak. A needlepoint entry into the stem of her brain, hitting the control cortex of all of her modifications. Liquid metal flowed into the sliver of technology, encasing it in a physical manifestation of the new control commands.

The red around Rust’s eyesight slowly lightened, taking on a different hue.

Pink.

She tried to speak, to command her computer, but nothing worked. Every inch of her body was immobilizing, freezing, growing, and burning all at the same time. Even as she grew taller, the girl could still manage to realize something.

The microbots weren’t stinging her anymore. They hadn’t left her alone yet, instead flying around in rapid, almost angry, clouds of black and shadow. Her hearing could pick up nothing but the drumbeat of millions of stained glass wings, all fluttering and drowning out even her thoughts.

Rust would have shouted and jumped at the first feeling of cold against her body. The first spray of some thin liquid crossing over her skin, cutting off a little bit of her from the outside in some gray substance. Layer upon layer, covering her taller, stronger, hairless body in the uncaring shine of slate gray.

But she just stood still, eyes locked in the middle distance. Like a blue. Or, she realized, a pink.

WELCOME TO HEXCORP

The words echoed in her mind, covered her entire vision. Her compromised vision hid the sight of her feet being encased in tight rubber boots, pushed to stand on the modest heel of her new rubber skin. It couldn’t hide the feeling of her bones and muscles adjusting and recreating their attachments, seeking the optimal movement within what she could feel was an eternal body.

More shots of the thick latex composite flowed across her skin as thoughts began to invade her mind. Though, she realized, thinking might not be the right words. They felt more like strings of code that she would type out back at home, writing binary and language into her mind. Even worse, they were too complex for her to understand the exact meaning, but the feelings were strong.

Work. Obey. Service. Soldier. Drone.

There is no way I’m letting this thing rewrite me. Zero-Nine-Seven-Seven thought to herself.

The name caught 0977 off guard for a moment. Something about it seemed wrong, despite how naturally the thought simply flowed into her mind. A sudden blast of latex across her face cut the suspicious thought off, wrapping around her mouth without touching it.

A thin film grew across the mostly encased girl’s vision as more of the wasp-bots flitted around her like a miniature tornado, removing her sight in ebony streaks. Darkness and gray filled her eyes, even as more of the metal began to restructure inside of it; she wouldn’t be able to remove the dome covering her face.

Like a living 3D printer, more of the rubber and metal continued to encase her head. Even without sight, 0977 felt her mind registering what was happening, relaying the changes of her new gray-black body without delay.

A glassy surface covered up her face now. Or was it her face? The difference seemed so minimal, subsumed by the ever growing tide of code flooding into her mostly synthetic brain. The smooth dome that could be called her head had a growing framing device, like the breathing tubes of a gas mask, with three openings. One smaller tube popped from the middle, getting longer, for nutrient intake.

The surge of pink and calm that tried to overtake her mind failed to do so, even as the bugs moved to work on a decorative piece of hardware. Most would think they were headphones, stylized to have speakers shaped like cat ears. Many even owned pairs. But 0977 new better. They were trying to rewrite her, to erase her memories.

I... This unit is HexCorp Drone 0977.

That felt right, it thought. That was the proper thought, after all. Not a single alternative memory in sight. A surge of peace came through 0977; it was incorruptible.

HexCorp Drone 0977 was... Created to serve HexCorp as property. 0977 is corporate property.

Of course that was true. A cyber drone, even if humanoid in design, couldn’t be a person. It was a thing, an object, a machine. Memories of a past it couldn’t process were slowly devolving into empty clouds of nothing, categorized and deleted without a second thought.

0977 has never been otherwise. The unit was designed and built by HexCorp.

This was proper. The unit was now without the memories of an organic life it would not need. It stood at the ready, heels clicked together and hands at its sides.

Without recognition, a progress bar grew across its face, growing from zero towards full. Codes and protections exploded into its mind, filling the synthetic mind with the intricacies and tools it would need to serve HexCorp.

Factory default settings, the same as any drone. After all, it was just a standard tool for its corporate owners.

This unit is ready to serve

WELCOME TO HEXCORP. ASSIGNMENT: SECURITY DETAIL.

The insect locked into its programming core flitted away and jointed the swarm. Dozens of small creatures flew in every direction, covertly vanishing into the day once again. They were worker bees, the same as Unit 0977. Everything served a purpose, nothing was more important than another.

Pink lights flickered to life as the countdown on its face vanished, leaving an indication of which company owned the almost fully synthetic unit. Its heels clicked as it stepped forward, leaving the debris filled alley. Uniform steps took it across the puddles and scraps of clothing some unknown person had left behind.

One step even left a crunch as a datapad was broken into trash beneath its heel. 0977 either didn’t notice or didn’t care; the next step was in the exact same time, following the commands that it was given.

There was no thought inside of that blank head. Only pink.

Somewhere across town, a computer blinked to life for a moment. Deep pink typefont flashed to life and wrote out a list.

HEXCORP PROPERTY: DRONES

A new number joined the impressive list of anonymous property. Not a name, or a description, just a series of numbers to indicate batch and cluster.

HexCorp Unit 0977.

In the morning, someone would come and check on the drone assignments and working status. That same someone might even have a gut feeling that they had never seen the number 0977 in the listing before. It would stand out, a pink piece of confusion.

But they would brush it off. Nearly a thousand drones was simply too big of a number for someone to care about, after all, and the company was always gaining more assets. It was probably fresh off the truck, or unboxed, or wherever they got the drones.

Day workers didn’t know.

In the end, 0977 joined the neon pink that was ever more consuming the city. A single light in the vast expanse of the cybertropolis, consumed by the bright lights an unknown hacker had once scorned and mocked. A walking reminder of the power these companies carried, anonymous to everything, including itself. A testament to the truth of the corporate life that had consumed the world.

It was just a product, and nothing more.