“It can’t get me from here… It can’t get me from here,” she’s panting, palms to knees, as the adrenalin wears down. She’s underneath a tree and is surrounded by wildlife that she’s almost certain will ward off her pursuer, at least for the time being.
It’s been twelve days, and the cat-and-mouse game must come to a close.
“It can’t get me from here.” She says again, trying to sound sure of it.
She fails.
Drops to her knees. Begins to shake.
She’s getting tired, and even under the cover of the forest, she knows that it is probably drawing nearer by the moment. The monster. The blue-eyed thing they sent after her, when she refused them.
She technically has higher ground, but it won’t last.
The megafauna of this planet wouldn’t even have the chance to devour her if it closes in, at this point.
A small bird leaps onto her shoulder, and she pets it. Foolishly, she retrieves a small vegetable from her pocket, the last of her food, and breaks it off to give to the creature. It chirps with delight, before fluttering off.
She tries to muster a smile.
At least the bird is happy, but-
A hundred birds blot out what little of the sky shows through the cover of trees, and she knows she’s done for. Scampering backwards, she readies all available defenses in a futile attempt to go down fighting.
The birds melt together.
A glowing pair of red eyes-
Red eyes?
It staggers towards her, like some sort of zombie from an old film, the birds melding into something vaguely human-shaped. It is weeping.
She screams and lets loose a volley of kinetic projectiles, not caring that she’s just wasted the last of the ammunition in her gyro jet pistol.
Holes are blown within the creature, and it wails in agony.
She does not look back as she runs.
She knows she’ll die
It’ll catch up
It’ll kill her
It’ll-
***
She makes it out without so much as a scrape.
Something is different about the monster. Perhaps it’s goading her into a false sense of security. Giving her false hope. Making her lower her guard before it closes in for the kill.
A squirrel scampers to her, and she silently screams.
It looks at her like she’s gone mad.
Perhaps it is taunting her.
Gloating.
But the kill never comes, and the squirrel simply runs up a nearby tree after giving her no more than a single thought. But that tree will turn into the monster, surely! It’s going to kill her. Now!
NOW!
NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!
Now?
???
It doesn’t come.
She waits the rest of the night out beneath a tree, crying herself to sleep.
***
She wakes the next morning to see one of this planet’s massive carnivores tear down this tall, four legged thing, which must have fed solely on the grass of the forest, and feast upon the thing’s flesh.
She shivers, she knows that must be her fate as well.
***
The monster takes the form of a small shrub the following morning, when she comes to a lake to try and take a drink.
It retakes a humanoid form and appears next to her, seconds later. Its eyes are still red, as though it has spent sleepless nights weeping, just like she has.
Must be a trick.
A ploy.
She runs away.
It does not follow.
***
She hides at the top of a tree and waits the rest of the night out there.
It is not comfortable in the slightest.
***
She wakes up on the forest floor with an ache in her arm. It has already been bandaged, but she does not know by whom, or where the material came from.
The monster might have been taunting her. Or worse, it must have some twisted sense of “honor” wherein it did not kill sleeping prey.
She shivers, then tears the bandage off.
She heals fast, anyways.
***
This part of the planet, this forest, has never been fully mapped out. Very few know how to navigate it, much less return to civilization alive.
So it’s a surprise when she sees a cottage in the middle of the woods. It’s empty from the looks of it, but she’s hesitant. It must be a trick.
She’s known of monsters like hers, who could turn into entire skyscrapers to lure out a single fugitive. Some of her old friends even worked alongside them, at one point. Not her. She must have been getting quite old, to have never been assigned a partnership to one.
Perhaps this is twisted irony, in that sense.
She runs past the cottage without looking back, the moment she hears a human-sounding voice. The sounds of some colossal machine ring out behind her.
***
One of the massive carnivores has her pinned down.
This is it. The end.
Now for it to turn into the monster and-
She only notices the carnivore’s weight leave her after it does. She’s being pulled along by a series of pebbles as she whimpers.
What is happening? What is happening? What is-
The pebbles begin to shift and suddenly she’s carried like a bride at a wedding, screaming as the carnivore rages behind her and her mysterious saviour.
She does not dare look up to confirm her suspicions until she is sure that she has stopped moving and been placed down.
She opens her eyes and screams.
***
The monster is patching up her wounds with bits of itself.
It has assumed the form of a tall brunette, whose features she would have found attractive, had she not known that the beautiful figure looming over her was a murderer made of microscopic robots. The monster has given itself the most beautiful red lips she had ever- No! It must be a trick! The red symbolizes the blood of its prey, yes! That must be it!
The monster’s lips move and it has a soft, almost sweet sounding voice. “Is there something not to your liking? Does it still hurt?”
She faints.
“Oh dear.”
***
She comes to in a few hours, and the monster is still there, red eyes and all.
“Your eyes are blue,” she says.
“You are awake,” responds the monster, and staggers over to her, shedding the feline form it had taken for humanoid one she’d seen earlier.
“Why are they red?” she asks. Then she puts two and two together. Indicator lights, blue for a healthy status, red for damage.
“You are injured,” it knows she knows.
“Why not kill me, then?” she asks. “Isn’t that what they sent you to do?”
“Kill you, then report back to them with proof,” it nods. Then, it balls its hand into a fist and winds back. She closes her eyes, knowing it was too good to be true.
The fist shatters into a million pieces the moment it hits her chest, and every last shard falls inert. Useless.
“You’re dying…” she says.
The monster nods, and its arm does not regenerate, like it did on the first day, the second, the third, even the twelfth.
It’s been almost three weeks now.
“The nanomachines that make up my body are degenerating,” it says. “Completing my mission is unfeasible, and I do not want to.”
“You’re a weapon,” she says. “You don’t have wants. You just think you do. There must be some secret backup directive, or maybe-“
“No. I simply do not want to,” says the monster. “Come with me.”
Before she can protest, it picks her up again, and she screams a little.
“I am sorry,” it says, and she almost believes it.
***
She wakes up in the cabin she saw earlier, with a massive lens peering down at her. A massive lens connected to an even bigger camera-headed robot. It gives a thumbs up to the monster, then walks off to do something else that she cannot see.
The monster still has one arm.
“You are unharmed as of present. If you would like, you are free to go.”
She snorts. “Go die in the woods? Get eaten by some megafauna? Hell of a bargain you drive, you bastard.”
“You kept me alive all those days past the first week of pursuit,” says the monster. “I was only trying to return the favour.”
“So, in a week’s time, you’ll kill me? Nice, nice,” she grins.
“I told you I do not want to,” it says. “returning to civilization would mean the deaths of us both. If you would like, I will cease all interactions with you, and leave you in the care of The Painter.”
“Who?”
The massive robot returns later. Opens itself up.
Out steps the first human that she had seen in a month. Bedraggled, somewhat elderly, feminine. Biggest pair of glasses she’d seen on a woman.
“You’re The Painter?” she cocks her head to the side. “I’ve seen robots disguised as humans before, but I’ve never seen the reverse. That’s new.”
“Oh no, I’m simply Eyes. The machine above me is Hands. Only the two of us together are The Painter,” replies Eyes.
She narrows her own eyes at the robot, noting the massive Episcope camera that served as its head. One of its arms appeared to be a cannon at first glance, but now that she’d had a good look at it, the thing was actually an airbrush.
“The Painter. Ah,” she says. “What are you out here for?”
“To paint pictures, of course. Hands and I scout scenes out together, and then we paint them, as The Painter.”
The walls around Eyes are intricate. There’s an almost smug grin on their face.
Hands reveals a smaller canvas that it had clearly worked with.
On it is a picture of The Monster, its surroundings a blur, and its face contorted into something of a helpless agony. A hand is reaching out to it. “You kept feeding those animals you encountered, even though you knew you were killing yourself in the process. Your friend- “
“That monster is not my friend.”
“Your monster would have died if not for the food.”
***
She confronts the monster three days later, having helped herself to the supplies and hospitality provided by Hands and Eyes. She notes quietly that the monster had been doing the same, eaten and drunk quietly, trying to avoid eye-contact with her as it did. It winces when she turns away in disgust, but does nothing when her eyes linger. It takes a new form each day, each seemingly more stunning than the last.
“You were the animals.”
“I was.”
“Why not kill me?”
“I didn’t want to.”
She slaps the monster, and its red eyes flash with helplessness.
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not. They made me just as they did you. Obedient. Compliant. I have a kill switch inside of me that went off weeks ago. I can’t feed myself without first being offered food. If my structural nanites don’t get any… they’ll start to die faster.”
“So do it. Die then, if you can’t complete your mission.”
The monster breaks down sobbing, parts of it glitching and reforming from the primordial goo that it is. “I thought that you of all people would understand.”
“Understand what?”
***
She wants to live.
And so does the monster.
***
The monster is scared of her, the next time she confronts it.
“I can die. If you want me to,” it says, utterly defeated.
Her expression falters. “Why aren’t you mad at me?”
“What?”
“I said… WHY. AREN’T. YOU. MAD. AT. ME?”
It shrinks back, and runs away.
***
Their next confrontation is violent.
She screams at the monster, and it wails back.
She grins as it snaps, and rage fills its face for the first time.
It pummels her with its remaining arm, drawing her to the brink of death.
When The Painter finally returns to break up the fight, she is laughing like a madwoman. “This is what you are.”
She sees the monster later, sobbing repeated apologies to nobody in particular.
***
The Painter shows the both of them a painting it made.
It is a terrifying image, blood everywhere. Three dead bodies.
Itself, her, and the monster.
It tells the two of them to leave the cabin, and not come back.
***
It is raining. The forest is cold and wet and the monster is lingering behind her, pretending she can’t see it for what it really is. She hates it.
When she goes to sleep for the night, she wakes up dry.
***
“Please…” the monster staggers close to her, taking the form of a bloated, gigantic insect. “Please…”
Its glowing red eyes are pathetic to her.
“What do you want?” she asks, having foraged for food already. She notices that the monster sloshes with every step.
“Tell me it’s okay… to drink…”
“Oh.”
She had nearly forgotten about the kill switch. The monster must have collected the rainwater it shielded her from that one night. She almost considers ordering it to die, before remembering that those were her orders, days before they sent the monster after her. “Drink the rainwater, dumbass.”
The bug shrinks in size three times within the next few minutes, before shifting back into its humanoid form.
It walks away without a word.
***
“I know you’re there.”
The monster appears from a shadow beneath a nearby tree. “You’re hungry. I killed us some fish.”
She prepares the meal without a word.
She really is hungry. But so is the monster.
She tells it to eat.
***
She wakes up, and the monster is gone.
She’s almost mad.
But then she goes about her day.
She barely notices that she’s speaking to an imaginary monster until she’s laid out a second meal for it and said, “go ahead.”
The meal is still there, the next day.
***
She has fed twelve different extra servings of food to wildlife when she hears a scream, followed by the distinct sounds of a carnivore.
Without a second thought, she is in action.
Her muscles are springy, and the burst of adrenalin causes her to jump onto a tree and cling to it. She jumps down and places herself between the carnivore and its would-be victim.
She wrestles it down, giving the victim a chance to escape.
She runs as well, and barely notices that the carnivore has torn through her arms, revealing the ceramic composites beneath.
***
The monster is tending to her wounds again, thanking her and thanking her over and over. She rolls her eyes before dropping the façade. “Please don’t try to get yourself killed like that ever again.”
The monster is confused. “I thought you wanted that.”
“No. I don’t like you, but I don’t want you to die. Not anymore, at least,” she sighs.
“You are like me.”
“No,” she replies. “I am nothing like you.”
The monster peels back the skin of its chest, revealing a light endoskeleton of ceramic alloys. Its smallest forms must have been no smaller than the parts of that thing. It then motions to her damaged arms.
“You are like me.”
“I’m sorry… I don’t know what they told you about me, but I was a human, once. Just modified. Ceramic skeletal reinforcement, integrated weapons, vat grown cheetah-hybrid muscles, the works. It’s not pretty, and I’m not like you,” she says.
“I was a rat once,” the monster replies, pretending to reminisce over something.
“What?”
“Sorry. I am not that funny, I guess. Half of my brain is living tissue, but they weren’t all derived from human cells. Some were rat cells,” it says. Then it cracks a morbid grin. “Only kidding. They were harvested from criminals. Street rats.”
“Oh.”
You ARE like me…
“You can call me Rat, by the way,” it extends its hand, the one that was missing earlier. It appears to have built a rudimentary prosthetic from twigs and other assorted objects it must have found at The Painter’s place.
“You come up with that one yourself?”
It beams at her. “Yes!”
***
She and Rat spend nights taking turns to keep watch.
She’d awakened more than once to find herself in Rat’s arms, as the monster ran away from massive carnivores.
She’d done the same for Rat.
***
Rat had begun learning to cook.
The first few times it prepared fish, it had this goofy grin on its face.
It wavered a bit when she’d grimaced. “That tastes terrible!”
She’d eaten it anyways. Given Rat a few tips and tricks on cooking.
The next time she’d eaten a meal prepared by Rat, they’d been able to hold an actual conversation.
***
The forest is quiet, the ground is dry, and Rat is warm.
***
“You can call me Lucinda, you know,” she tells Rat, at some point.
Rat cocks its head to the side. “Have I not been?”
“No, it’s all ‘miss!’ or ‘you!’ or some variant of such. It’s getting annoying. You can call me by my name.” she says.
“Okay.”
***
Rat is a girl. Lucinda noticed this a while back, when Rat would make comments about birds nests, or say things like ‘Girls like us don’t need to worry about that!’ or other such things. But it never really became apparent until Rat had tried to kiss her.
“Wha- what’re you doing?” Lucinda had recoiled.
Rat looked hurt. “In the films they showed me, the people would do that, after nearly dying. To thank each other, I think.”
“If they’re in love, Rat. If they’re in love.”
“Oh.”
***
The company had sent more monsters.
It was inevitable that they did.
Not shape shifting creatures like Rat was, because really, there was only one Rat, but flat-out beastly drones, twelve times as mean as a carnivore, and twice as determined.
If they could survive this, though, the company would probably deem retrieval to be a waste of resources, and cut off the pursuit.
Lucinda reveled in that thought.
***
Lucinda and Rat had lured the drones deep into a corner of the forest, and sprung trap after trap onto them.
One by one, a fleet of twenty drones dwindled down to ten, then seven, then five, and finally two.
A few stray bullets had hit Lucinda, but only on the ceramic outer plating that coated her chest. Nothing lethal, much less anything that hurt.
Rat launched herself at the drones, transforming into a carnivore.
“You may eat them,” Lucinda called out, and Rat managed a grin out of its bestial face.
It tore into one of the two remaining drones, and absorbed its parts, recalibrating into an even deadlier killing machine.
Then it reformed and split itself into a bug-thing and a cloud of gas, infecting the other drone before forcing it to tear itself apart from the inside.
Rat reformed into a humanoid, then took a bow.
Lucinda grinned.
***
Rat’s eyes were blue again.
“No no no no no no no!” it was sobbing in its sleep, as the blue light seeped through its closed eyelids.
Lucinda shook it awake, only for it to reach out and grab her throat. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m-“
“Rat!? What’s gotten into you?” she asked.
Rat’s eyes snapped open. “They got me.”
“What do you mean?”
Rat’s grin cracked apart like shattered porcelain. “They’re sending more drones after us. A final attack, a cloud of pure hatred. And they’ve infected me with my old programming. Eating that drone means I’m no longer dying as fast, so-“
“So you need to kill me if you want to live.”
Rat nodded.
“You won’t have to. Please, I can fix you,” she said.
Rat shook her head. “It’s too late for that. If they know I’m dead, though, they’ll stop your pursuit of you. I’m the more expensive piece of equipment. They’ll recover my parts, then they’ll forget all about you. Those are the facts.”
“Rat, don’t do this…”
“We’ve both seen the movies. Two weapons are pitted against each other. One’s old and cranky, the other is new and fluid. The new one always dies.”
“Rat, please, I promise we can fix this. Just go back to sleep, and I’ll figure something out in the morning.”
“Lucinda. I love you, and I want you to live.”
“And I want YOU to live! Because I love you too, dammit!” Lucinda screamed, before pressing her face against Rat’s in the world’s most awkward kiss. “So please, please please please don’t do this.”
For a few seconds, everything is quiet, and it’s just Lucinda and Rat.
Rat’s expression softened.
Lucinda’s quiet sobs filled the air between them.
“I’m sorry,” says Rat, before putting her hands around Lucinda’s neck and squeezing. It was just enough to cause the woman to lose consciousness.
Between choked tears, the last words Rat ever heard from Lucinda were practically the ones she’d always expected. “You… monster…”
***
When Lucinda woke up, it was to the buzz of a thousand drones closing in. In the moments that followed, she shuddered, as the loudest explosion she’d ever heard rang out, behind her. Parts of the forest disintegrated around her, as did the dressings on her wounds.
The monster was gone.
But so too, was a part of Lucinda.
And yet life still went on.
***
And on.
And on.
And on.
And on.
And-
***
“Rat… I’ve missed you so much.”
***
