Prompt 1 response
“Head down,” the voice said. Mindwipe obeyed, implicitly, tilting his chin down toward his chassis. He felt cool air strike the back of his neck as the impact frame was removed, giving access to the back of his helm. “What am I doing?” the voice prompted.
“You’re…,” pause. A subroutine popped up. “Maintenance on the faraday plasma.”
“Yes.” Hands gently traced the seams of his helm access panel.
Mindwipe relaxed, marginally. He got something right. Not that he was often wrong-that he remembered. Just soothing to have his memory work at all. Well, if the patched together series of workarounds counted as a real memory.
“I have your permission to proceed?”
“Proceed with…? Oh. Right. Yes.” He…partially remembered. It looked like he was in a repair bay. Had he gotten injured? His HUD showed no redline alarms. No injuries. Surely there’d be a trace. But if it were important, he’d know. …wouldn’t he?
The hands stilled, hesitated. Mindwipe got a strange feeling that this was unusual. Mechs did not touch you and then just stop. He turned his head.
The hands tightened. “It is important you don’t move.”
“Oh. Of course.” Mindwipe turned his head back, looking at the floor in front of him. Why was he doing this? The…voice told him to.
“My name is Flatline,” the voice said, quietly, chalkily. “You came in to have your plasma looked at.”
“Yes,” Mindwipe said.
The hands moved. Flatline came around to the front of the exam frame. Mindwipe obediently kept his face turned to the floor. Why? Someone had told him to. “Mindwipe,” the mech said. “Look up.”
Mindwipe raised his face. Reflexively, some programming deeper than memory, he tucked his arms behind his back, blocking the solenoids with his frame. The mech’s face-Flatline, his ID logger fed him-met his, red and silver. The mouth was downturned.
“It’s getting worse. You realize that.”
“Yes,” he said. And he felt some surprise that he knew what Flatline meant. The memory degradation. Something he must have been coded long ago to monitor. “I’m…sorry?”
A semi-patient sigh. “It’s not your fault.” The hands, the larger set, Mindwipe realized, touched his shoulders.
Mindwipe hesitated from asking a question, recalling dimly that he most likely would forget what he asked by the time he got an answer. “I-I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
The silver dentae quirked into a grin. “We all are, eventually.” Putting him off. Delaying him. Trying to push long enough that he would forget.
“Please don’t,” he said.
A definitely frustrated sigh. “The memory degradation is spreading. It’s likely you’ll start losing peripheral memory, new name logging, and sensory detail recall.”
“How is that not the same as dying?” How could it be getting worse? This was the longest-that Mindwipe could remember-he had held the thread of a conversation.
One hand curled over the armor. “In a way it’s the same. Losing who you have been.”
Mindwipe’s systems seemed to run chilled. “Thank you for telling me,” he whispered.
“You have a right to know. As long as you can know.”
Mindwipe blinked, his processing fuzzy. “Know…what?” Flatline’s face was close to his. Something almost like anger flicked across it. “I’m sorry,” Mindwipe blurted.
Flatline dropped his hands from Mindwipe’s shoulders. “Lie back,” he said. “Let’s do the plasma drain.”
Mindwipe nodded, settling back against the frame. Flatline dropped to one knee, reaching under the frame, working with blind but skilled fingers to unfasten the drainage cap. Mindwipe found himself staring at the ceiling, the long racks of equipment, devices he didn’t even know, folded up, quiescent along their tracks. He felt the odd sensation-was it odd? He felt like he’d never felt it before, but knew that wasn’t any indicator of the truth-of fluid draining from around his cortex, heard a thick syrupy trickle as it fell into some catch basin.
Trust. Just…trust, he told himself. You know nothing. You remember…nothing. You’re here because you have a reason to be here-you just…can’t remember it. From somewhere, the thought, the question, bubbled up, insistent. “I’m going to die?” Who was he asking? The ceiling?
He heard the noise of a mech moving. Flatline, his ID logger fed him. That felt…familiar. Like he’d just done that. “No,” the mech said. His smaller hands began crawling over one of Mindwipe’s arms. “I am going to temporarily disconnect one of the solenoids.”
“Why?”
A shrug. “To see what happens.”
Oh. Okay. Trust. He flipped his arm over, allowing the smaller hands better access to the solenoid’s power coupling. His arm went numb, something blanking off his monitoring feed.
“Who am I?”
“Flatline.”
“Where are you?”
A twinge of worry. His memory tagger did a quick search. The most recent response to the query. “Nemesis. Repair bay.”
A nod. “Reason you’re here?”
Another flit of worry. Another query. “Faraday plasma.”
“Yes. What did I just do?”
Do? The worry flamed higher. And then. “Disconnected the dextral solenoid.” He blinked behind his visor. How did he know that?
Another nod, an odd smile. “Good.”
Something swum up, like surfacing from muddy depths. “Memory degradation.”
“Yes.” Flatline’s optics were suddenly very absorbed in the tracing the solenoid’s connections.
“Getting worse.”
“Also yes.” Flatline reached for a small drum, and stooped. A moment of tinkering while he attached a pneumatic pump to it. Another odd sensation-fluid, pushing, sloshing, in his helm.
“I’m going to lose who I am. Who I was.”
The silver teeth gritted. Set. “No. We’ll find a way.”
Mindwipe sighed. An unfamiliar sensation. “Another workaround. ANOTHER one.” Frustration, an unfamiliar darkness, occluding his sensibilities.
“We’ll do it. We’ll come up with…something.” Another dip, and a turning pressure on the back of his helm as Flatline re-attached the cap. He pulled Mindwipe up to a sitting position with strangely careful hands. Mindwipe blinked, feeling the faraday plasma slosh and localize, and then begin to stir with current.
“I…don’t want to die,” Mindwipe said, quietly. “Not…that way. I don’t want to not remember that I can’t even remember. This is…bad enough.” His hands clutched at the frame, as if clinging on to life, memory. His optics flicked down to Flatline.
“You won’t die. Not that way.” Flatline’s face was grim. “I will not let that happen.” He flicked on the solenoid’s power connection again. And the last thing Mindwipe remembered-before he forgot-was that Flatline seemed more defiant than sure.