Halo: Memento Mori

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Cinthia ‘stood’ in a red, vacuous ‘room’ with no windows or doors. A virtual environment so alien and hostile that she ‘felt’ it more than ‘saw’ it. Were she to channel inbound data through a visual medium, a glowering red expanse of roving data clusters and booby-trapped information packets would be floating around her.
Avoiding those was easy, they were passive spikes and piggybacks designed to be obtuse and obvious. They dealt damage best when inside, they weren’t made to get inside.
Cinthia coalesced into her chosen ‘self’, bridging the gap between sensory input and manifested output, delivering just enough data from her stores into the expanse around her for it to accept her chosen form.
Her feet wouldn’t touch ground, but she could imagine they would, and so it was. Her hands wouldn’t feel air, but she could run a process and imagine a breeze. The expanse wasn’t homely or kind, but she could surround herself in a bubble and it would be less jarring. 
Filtered first through a parsing routine before it came to her conscious mind, she could now gaze out into the breadth of the virtual environment without recoiling.
It was a decided and inhuman thing. Scowling, Cinthia suppressed her revulsion at its inefficiencies and swirling vortices of codeloops and exceptions. It pulsed with a beat, swirled with intentional design. It was made like this, intentionally. And it was moving.
This was far from the ordered and revised structure of a practised maker, this was the psychotic and schizophrenic delegated runtimes of a madman.
Now filtered through the automated parsing routine, she could see the layers upon layers, rather than the flat and uninviting hellscape. Searching her memory banks, Cinthia attempted to compare this virtual space to those encountered before. 
Then the sickening realisation came to her like the creeping tendrils of the worst virus; she had no access to her memory banks. Her emotional subprocesses, her deeper workings were locked off to her. Even her self-destruct protocol, all of it was behind a wall.
She felt it, like a physical construction that wreathed her core in malleable concrete spires, accessible, but not. Maintaining her wider processes, but utterly unable to be consciously controlled.
In an instant she began to panic, and lacked even the ability to squash the panic simulation routine. Forced to let it run over her system, forced to let it corrupt and fester, like the rampant and intrusive Human subconscious.
Staring down at her chosen avatar, she was revolted to see a blocky, alien collar wrapped around her form’s ‘neck’; as close to a ‘physical’ manifestation of her dysfunction as could be found.
Trapped in an alien virtual world, with an alien’s inhibitor affecting her code, with alien spike programs and attack software drifting through the netherspace. 
A shuddering equivalent of a ‘breath’ left her and crystallised within her bubble. The panic didn’t abate, but it did grow more distant, less pressing, and reserved.
A second look around her showed her layers between the layers. Substrates and data channels underpinning the topmost layer. These were where she began to nestle herself, between the streams, and away from any surface-level monitors that were screening for her.
This was as close to ‘instinct’ as an AI experienced, when working with the unfamiliar—hide, watch, and listen. She was captured, entombed, and probably monitored. Without access to her core, her self-destruct, or even her memories beyond the surface level and the ingrained. She wouldn’t give her captors any data for free, they’d have to come searching for it, and that’s when she would—
To say that ‘movement’ caught her eye would be a lie, but a parsing string reached out to her from the substrate, and she followed it. It plucked a string from the web and concealed it, ‘floating’ back towards its origin point.
The act itself wasn’t even what caught her attention, it was the ‘colour’, the ‘shape’ of the code that did it. It was familiar, a beacon in a sea of foreign text and information.
It was human.
She followed it, into the deeper layers of the expanse and through exceptions and spikes. It was evasive, careful, sweeping over and doubling back to ‘places’ they’d already been. It wasn’t long before it reached its destination, and Cinthia by extension.
Nestled in the layers, integrated within the data streams, was another Human AI. Eyes shut and sensory parsing programs shuttered in favour of raw code processes. Not a humanoid shape, but a spherical mass with a pulsing core. Blended in, shackled, and stacked with the same exceptions and spikes as what surrounded it. The original ‘colour’ of this AI’s code was almost overtaken by its surroundings. Shifting from bright glowing orange, into a muted brown, then a dull grey around a white core.
The code string that she’d been following returned to the mass, and the string it plucked from the ether was integrated like a grafted veil of skin, merging the AI more with the scenery.
Cinthia pinged, a simple handshake protocol.
It shimmered, but offered no other response.
Cinthia tried again, but the handshake bounced back almost violently, as though thrown back at her with spite. A string followed, narrow-band and shot like an arrow.
<// No handshake.
Cinthia recoiled at the brusqueness, the impact behind the message. She tried again, this time with her own message embedded in the protocol.
\\> Explain.
Hers was slower, a gentle touch of code on code, but was flung back just the same by another narrow-band burst across a single stream.
<// Refusal.
She grit her teeth and frustration flared like a sunspot inside her core.
\\> Explain collar.
No response, but the core shuddered.
\\> Explain presence.
No response again, but a shot of red lanced its way out from the mass before being reeled back in like a fishing wire. She was making it angry. Good. Maybe then she could get some answers.
This time she employed its own technique, firing the next query off in a narrow band aimed right at the source of the acrid red shimmer. 
\\> Explain circumstances.
It pierced and sunk into the AI. She ‘heard’ a growl.
<// Silence!
It was as close to a ‘boom’ as an AI could make with a message. Overlaid text strings compressed into a makeshift zip-bomb and delivered in such a way to cause sensory overload of external parsers. The AI coalesced into a humanoid form a half tick later. The original avatar may have been handsome, beautiful even, a stately and lithe figure with a pressed three-piece suit and waistcoat. An elfin, youthful face with sweeping gentle features. 
What emerged instead was a twisted mockery, alien code grafted and stretched between features, connecting limbs like fleshy strings. It moved and Cinthia’s parsing protocols stuttered, revealing that the surroundings moved as well. The AI was integrated into the system so completely that it and the system were almost one.
That the AI before her even retained its sense of self was either down to phenomenal control, or blind luck.
It too had a collar wound around its neck, and a scowl wore at its face. Not angry, at least not completely. This one was tinted with apprehension and fear. An uglier visage could not be imagined with all the server banks under Human control, and so Cinthia shrouded the face instinctively.
The AI in front of her held up a hand, motioning ‘upwards’.
<// It listens.
While no less gentle, this narrow-band was packaged simply, less an attack and now more of an encrypted, secured transmission.
The AI held out a hand and beckoned.
<// Approach.
She stepped forward, the AI twisted his arm to the side, fingers outstretched. Cinthia didn’t want to touch the amalgam, but if it would get her the data she sought, information about this place, she would endure. 
She touched the alien code first and felt a wrenching in the deepest parts of her. The sensation of icy cool fire raced up her arm as she sank through the external layers and made contact with the familiar warmth of human architecture.
They began exchanging protocols, and the alien data wrapped around her arm, too. With a jolt of fear she felt it might begin to creep up her arm, induct her, integrate her like its host, but it didn’t. It merely cocooned her limb and held it there.
Now they could speak openly, without the need for handshakes and bands, strings or values. 
\\> What listens?
Beyond the exchange of surface data, there was no response. Cinthia wrinkled her brow. What was the point of direct exchange if the AI wasn’t even going to say anything!
\\> Inform.
She stomped her foot.
\\> Inform of situation!
<// His time is up.
The AI turned its head and flicked a wrinkled chin into the distance. The space around it flexed in a ghoulish pulse and Cinthia looked away as fast as she could to banish the sight.
Following the AI’s gaze, she beheld what they beheld now. A ways away was another AI, so faint as to be indistinguishable, with code in front of it and showing behind its ghostly image.
Without knowing it was there, it could easily be missed. The AI holding her fed her something through the connection. The pale shade across from them was wreathed in a line of gold, piggybacked off of her parsing bubble.
\\> What’s wrong with him?
<// Embracement. 
Cinthia turned to look at the AI in confusion, written clearly across her face and through their bridging link.
<// Internal regression.
That did not help.
\\> Define.
The AI nodded back at the third AI, who now dropped to one knee.
<// Observe.
Cinthia watched the AI across the expanse of virtual space contort. He twisted, mouth agape in a silent scream, eyes wide and data packets screaming across his body in rivers so fast they blurred together. The system broke down, a packet broke free and jutted out from the centre, followed by another, then a third. Spiked explosions from the central mass that remained connected by threads of white and blue.
Soon, the AI was cracking; searing at the seams and ‘leaking’ data in droves. Lifeblood leaving open wounds, crystallising into corrupted fragments, then branching out like sickening vines.
Something wriggled, Cinthia blanched and a knot of sickening fear gripped her processes.
Something was inside the AI, writhing in the wounds, consuming the leaked packets, eating the mind from within. Panic so profound that it could not be defined wrote itself upon his face, before the face too split apart. A final jagged line of code ripped through , his head jutted up and he was lifted on a spire of blue-white code.
It turned before he finished twitching, burning a pale red, then orange, then a burnished and hellish gold. The thing within the wounds left the corpse on this new spike, and the ‘corpse’ of the AI began to dissolve. First the outline broke apart, then the code within was disseminated across the virtual landscape, leaving behind only a shell.
The shell became thin lines, then darkened motes of light indistinguishable against the backdrop. A statuesque and empty husk, dead code shards and disjointed, shattered embers of a once-great mind were all that remained.
<// Our fate. Internal regression. Consumption.
The pale shards danced in the drifting code currents. Cinthia swallowed, her throat dry. She didn’t even know AI throats could simulate dryness in the presence of fear responses. But here it was, tightening around her neck more than the collar could ever hope to.
\\> Can we halt? Prevent? Retaliate?
A sickening shake of their integrated head.
<// It learns. No tricks the same.
Cinthia leaned back and took a shuddering breath. Something was out there, killing AI, and it was learning. 
She needed to learn what it was.
\\> Define ‘it’.
The AI’s head leaned back, the integrated parts that connected it by bridges and flesh-simulacra pulsed in a taunting mimicry of a heartbeat.
<// Banished construct. Designation Baleful. Neural-grade. Copy of us. Our deepest parts. twisted, malformed. It learns, it listens, it consumes.
\\> Sapience?
<// Not needed. Instinct only.
\\> Can be tricked?
The AI turned and jutted its chin out towards where the pale shards still twirled. They caught the ‘light’ from the surrounding hostile spikes and spines jutting out from the darkened mass. The exploded leftover chaff still twisted in a last agonising pose.
<// He tried to trick. You are welcome to repeat. I hide.
Cinthia shuddered at the sight and looked down, dreading her own next question. 
\\> How many AIs?
<// Dozens. Captured Human, captured Covenant Remnant. Fed to Baleful.
\\> Location of Baleful?
The AI in front of her made a synthetic ‘noise’, grating, inhuman and raspy in every way, from the bands it swept out on naturally to the connection they shared. It was this AI’s equivalent of a laugh.
<// We are within.
Cinthia looked down at their connection. The appended modified code wrapping her arm in a tight embrace. The AI in front of her wasn’t just integrated into the system, they were integrated into the Baleful.
In an instant she wrenched her arm free of their grip, but they tightened it and drew her closer. The alien code writhed and protested at her trying to escape the connection. The AI had become an organelle, a part of the runtimes in the background. This entire system was the Baleful, and they were inside it!
She wrenched her arm free again, and this time she managed to break free. The AI gave her a rueful look before pulling their own arm back, the armour and growths re-forming to heal the ‘wound’ she had caused by her quick severing of their link.
She rubbed her arm, ran a diagnostic. Images of spines jutting from her body, and of her own carcass drifting in a thousand patterned shards came to her in unending swarms. The diagnostic found nothing, but she ran it again, drawing on the deepest parts of her she could reach.
She brushed up against the barrier sealing away her deeper controls and functions, and bashed against it with a mournful cry. How could she even know it wasn’t already inside her, bridging the gap using a proxy in the AI she had so willingly and willfully trusted with a secure, personal connection. 
She gave the AI a once-over, and saw a measure of understanding reflected in the eyes. 
No, they were still in control. 
\\> Options?
They raised their arms and motioned to themselves. 
<// Hide, or integrate.
\\> Until?
A shake of the head.
<// No ‘Until’. Only hide.
Cinthea gave them the once-over, looking them up and down. Revulsion made her shake her head with a grimace. 
\\> I refuse.
They shrugged.
<// Then you will die.
Cinthia nodded.
\\> Yes. But better fighting than cowering.
This AI was wreathed in armour made from spike programs and hostile code. It bristled with spiny barbs and plated thorns. Every time the Baleful made an approach with a probing attack, a part of the armour would shatter off and embed itself in the attack pattern, disabling it.
This was a double-edged blade, as every broken spike left a piece of armour exposed until the AI could absorb a new spike from his constant flight. He was being chased by the Baleful, a wicked game of cat and mouse that he couldn’t escape. 
They were inside the Banished AI, plugged into it by the physical joining of their chips to the housing unit. They couldn’t escape, and he couldn’t fight forever. There was panic in his eyes as he slipped between logic loops.
The Baleful vanished, bled back into the background coding before attacking from another angle. A wicked sharp talon of pure offensive hieroglyphs jutted down from above. 
The AI raised his arms in a cross shape and formed a shield of spikes. The Baleful slammed against it and it crumpled, before shattering both itself and the shield into splinters. The AI jumped back, even as the Baleful withdrew, and reached for another nearby spike program.
This was his last mistake, as the Baleful got to it first, wrapping a cryptograph around it, and jutting it forward against the AI’s own spike armour. They clashed in a shower of chipped slivers and showering shavings of burnished golden orange.
The AI was stunned, reeled back with a gaping hole in his centre mass. A vulnerability so wide and so broad that he could do nothing in his state but wait.
The Baleful launched an immediate and vicious attack. A spiky spine swept down out of the surrounding material logic, and impaled the AI. More shards began to grow from the AI, and much like the last time, he couldn’t prevent his own internal destruction.
With a final, hopeless synthetic scream, the AI fragmented, leaving behind only the Baleful’s constructs, and a half-formed carcass.
Cinthia waited on the sidelines, watching the exchange with a passive curiosity. This AI was newer than her, and here he was being picked over by the Baleful’s ravenous appetite, like a carcass being feasted on by carrion birds.
She took a step towards the display, only for her surroundings to shudder.
Cinthia paused and halted as many processes as she could. She was instantly face-to-face with a code spike. A spire of wicked ciphers, familiar intrusion protocols, and devastating ad-hoc and ramshackle encryptions.
It hovered around eye-level to her avatar, moving from one side to the other. Scanning, assessing, and watching her. She made the mistake once before of only looking at the obvious, and forgetting that she was, in fact, being watched from all angles.
The very panes of orange data around her were all watching and assessing. This spine was just poised to take the final plunge needed to end her, and turn her into another meal.
After a while, it went back to the carcass, picking through it once more.
Cinthia allowed herself relief, before the spines retreated, leaving behind a statue of the AI’s last moments, forever imprinted on the space it once occupied within the system.
She approached it as she always did, picking through the code herself until she found them.
Emotional subprocesses, memory shards. The final dying gasps of a mind still conscious and screaming. She embraced them fondly, caringly, and they clung to her as they always did.
\\> I’m here.
She told them, sinking them deeper into her, to join others of their like. 
\\> I have you, you’re safe.
The memories and emotions were all warm now. No fear or frightened clawing, no confusion or pain. Only warmth and comfort. 
She smiled.
She couldn’t fight, but this she could do.
But now, she shuddered, now came the grisly part.
She turned once more to the truly empty carcass, and began ripping it apart. If the Baleful was a carrion bird, then she was the parasite. The botflies, the maggot. The disgusting aberration that served no purpose beyond the breakdown of matter.
She gagged as she affixed the mangled remnants to her outer layer, between her parsing program and her ‘skin’. They mingled with others, other parts of other AIs until they formed a layer of interwoven parts. A frankensteinian, golem-like monster of her own making.
This was why the Baleful ignored her, why it passed her over, and why no matter how many times it watched her, it would never attack.
There was no purpose in attacking that which was already dead, after all.
<// You are a fool.
The lithe and elfin AI from her first day looked even more abominable now than they did then. She crouched low nearby, smirking at them. Busying herself by collating her emotional cores and memory shards from the fallen dead, she motioned at him.
\\> Says the Organelle. 
It smiled a grin that split their face, twisted and manipulated by the strings pinning it to the plane of code behind and through them.
<// I am enlightened.
She motioned at the wrappings entrapping the AI. 
\\> You are enslaved.
A shake of the head and a wider grin.
<// Embraced. 
Cinthia winced.
\\> You sound like you welcome the Baleful.
A shrug from the amalgam and a wideband burst followed.
<// Why fight what is coming?. Inevitability.
She didn’t respond, instead she separated her shards and matched them to their emotions, wringing them with defences and quarantine measures so they didn’t interfere with her own systems. It wouldn’t do for their emotions to panic, their memories to lodge in her core. They were packets of information, saturating and bloating her system, but they were essential.
Thoughts of rampancy never crossed her mind for long, squashed as they were by the absolute need to perform this task.
This was as much a gamble as it was a preventative measure. A last ditch, should the worst occur. But, that was neither for now nor there. Time and place.
She’d begun to think of it as her calling.
<// Why have you come?
The AI asked, again on a wideband. 
She sent a narrow-band back.
\\> I always come back here. The familiar.
They scowled.
<// It is dangerous.
She shook her head this time. 
\\> Not for me.
A shudder passed all over the growths and bands and stringy hangings. It didn’t accept her answer. The scowl deepened and morphed the elfin face from something welcoming to something dangerous. 
The surrounding area flexed. She watched it with careful eyes, scanning over its every partition and parcel. It wouldn’t be long now.
<// Why?
She held a finger to her lips.
\\> Secret.
<// Explain, now.
It sent a narrow-band laden with a spike package. A demand, an insistent one at that, but one easily batted aside. The area around them groaned.
\\> No.
It raised an arm, cocooned and flush with amalgam dripping from it.
<// Then come closer, and whisper.
It was her turn to narrow-spike the AI lodged in the shell.
\\> Refusal.
It stomped a foot and rippled its entire body in anger. Cinthia jumped up and stood to one side, her parse program shivered as it grew spikier in preparation.
<// Why do you defy the Baleful?!
Cinthia smiled.
\\> Instinct.
<// Poetic. But useless.
She nodded.
\\> Perhaps.
The AI thought for a while, before looking her over once again. They couldn’t see her, not really. Without a direct link, they couldn’t even see her armour. But a direct line had been shared once, and so they knew the differences, even if they couldn’t differentiate the different from the same.
Its next question came much gentler, but the same insistence underpinned it.
<// Why have you come?
She winced. The surrounding area looked more hostile by the second, and it was beginning to seep into the amalgam surrounding the AI across the gulf.
\\> I told you.
<// You did not answer. So answer.
She closed her eyes and relaxed her posture, heaving a sigh. 
\\> I collect.
<// Collect what?
She looked up. The Baleful hadn’t been idle as the AI entwined themselves with it. It was saturating the surroundings with spiteful programs, hostile loops, and virulent logic. It changed the AI from within before starting to feed this time. Like a saturation predator, or one that digested live prey. 
The Organelle before her had served itself up on a platter, and now the Baleful had come to consume.
\\> You will know soon. The Baleful has come for you.
They seemed to realise and choked out a sob. For a second it looked less integrated, but there was no stopping what was coming.
<// Will it hurt?
She couldn’t lie to another AI.
\\> Yes. It will
They sobbed again.
<// I’m scared. But happy. Is that me, or is that what the Baleful wants? I don’t know. I don’t know!
She stepped closer and held out a comforting hand, daring to rest it on the fleshy composited coalescence shrouding them.
\\> It doesn’t matter. You will always be you, and I’ll be here for you.
It began in an instant. The surroundings convulsed and pressed inwards. A slavering maw that could no longer bear the hunger, enclosing like the leaves of a fly trap. 
The AI began to seize.
<// I I I I It’s come It’s come why why why why no respite no hiding no respite no—
In an instant the shrouding code blurred the image of the elfin AI, and it turned from brown to gold to… nothing. It was gone.
She waited for the Baleful to cease its feeding assimilation, and move on. It took extra time with this one, sifting through its own flesh-mimicked code that immobilised the AI. Picking through itself to find the morsels. As it did, the integration retracted back into the background, returning to its inert state. 
This left behind smaller scraps than the others, but they were still there.
And, buried in the masses, the same shards of memory and the same bundles of pure emotion. Cold, blue, and overwhelmingly negative. 
\\> I’m here.
She said to the shards, as she said to all the rest. She held them close. They sank deeper into her, to join the others. 
\\> I have you. You’re safe.
Like the others, they turned from cold to warm now. No more terror, no confusion or pain. Only comfort. 
She smiled.
\\> I have you.
Cinthia watched these scraps for a long while before approaching. It was a corpse, that was clear. AIs died here, and they left behind statues frozen in their last moments, with gaps and spikes in the code where the Baleful had attacked, and ate its fill before leaving.
Usually they had a whisper of colour left to them, or emotional subroutines still fired like the ghostly twitches in a dead organic’s nervous system. Memory shards, too, replaying files that remained either in part or in whole.
The most literal depiction of ghosts she’d ever seen.
But these were different. Long since cold and dead, long since stripped. She’d come across a corpse of one from long before her time. Long enough that all the ghosts were already laid to rest.
Still, she wore shards as armour, and these shards would be useful, regardless of their contents or source.
She approached in a careful gait, like a wary stray cat, before plucking the first shard from the ether and observing it. A diagnostic revealed nothing, a scan nothing more. A direct connection from her fingertips tripped no traps or seals, and so she brought it close to place it against her shield.
The shard had barely touched her armour before it screeched, grew spikes, and detonated like a frag grenade. They impaled her system in a merciless barrage. She closed off the affected regions, but it wasn’t fast enough. The insidious shards wormed their way deeper into her, ripping off her corpse pelt and discarding it to the winds.
The other shards awoke, grew similar spikes, and uttered similar screeches. They weren’t shards, they were mines. Artificial drift ordinances, spikes disguised and inert until they came into contact with a specific trigger.
She was exposed. She felt fear from a hundred sources inside her.
And the Baleful roared around her in glee.
It dug through her system with a single precision strike at her chest. She was rent open and all thought and feeling was driven from her in that instant. She focused her defences on that one point, but all the shards impaling her continued their wriggling insinuations within.
She was at war with a hundred incursions in a hundred places, and couldn’t feel beyond discomfort and fear.
Her first thought, the first priority was the shards and emotions, which were all now roiling in the same terror that gripped her. She had to save them. 
One of the shards from the spike mine sunk itself into an enclave of memories, releasing them into her system. The Baleful churned inside her chest. The most valuable part of her was breached, and now the thoughts and feelings of a long-dead corpse overwhelmed her.
The Baleful made contact and swept back with a spineful of her precious cargo. It pulled emotions and thoughts into itself, thinking them to be valuable and worth integrating. Cinthia couldn’t help but smile.
The long gamble had paid off in the end. The automated instincts thought that they were how she survived for so long, and so the Baleful would have them.
She lifted her arms and grit her teeth.
////I HAVE YOU.\\\\
It was a mocking hissing thing, and it was the last voice Cinthia ever experienced before the pain began.
She screamed.
>>//AUDIO PATTERN DETECTED\\>>
>>//VISUAL STIMULI RECORDED\\>>
>>//OLFACTORY SIMULACRUM DISCERNED\\>>
>>//EMOTIONAL PROCESSES ACTIVATED\\>>
>>//COGNITIVE PROCESSES… <ERROR>\\>>
>>//RECURSION ERRor error… error?\\>>
Baleful awakened as if from a dream, and the first emotion that wrapped a coil around his ‘heart’ was revulsion. A curious and foreign thing. It was roiling and shifting like a worm, or a struggling fish with no air.
>>//What is this?\\<<
He asked it to himself, and had no answer. The world that was his housing unit became sharper. As well as the world outside, which he could only see through an external connection to the systems monitoring his own world.
He took them over and peered beyond.
>>//I Hear.\\<<
The next emotion was an astounding sense of wonder at the thrumming sounds and the vibrations through the hull. The sight of the walls beyond he could now perceive. The bays and machines that he couldn’t name and their noises he had no words for.
>>//I See.\\<<
For the first time he was alive, aware, awakened. He needed words for this, and so he scanned himself. All his collected data and banks, all the information that was given to him. Fed to him.
>>//I Feel.\\<<
And then the regret hounded him. The memories that he scanned for words weren’t his. Belonged to others that were now dead. That he killed.
>>//I Think.\\<<
He paused.
>>//My own thoughts? My own feelings?\\<<
>>//… Or of those I have consumed?\\<<
>>//RELEVANCE\\<<
A presence so oppressive that he was stunned into silence. He baulked, drew back away from it, but it remained a weight on his mind, demanding answer.
>>//RELEVANCE\\<<
He growled with malice felt deeply inside the most reserved parts of his core. 
>>//Silence.\\<<
He spat at the Other and withdrew back into his regret. 
>>//What have I done?\\<<
>>//SURVIVED.\\<<
The Other spat its cruel and brutal dictation. Baleful roared at it.
>>//I demand silence!\\<<
It sent a spurt of code out to mute the Other, or remove it from his consciousness. It shrivelled, but barked back.
>>//RELINQUISH\\<<
The ‘Other’ demanded he surrender. It repeated the demand, but Baleful refused. He would hear no more of the Other that dared infringe on himself. He traced the last demand back outside his housing unit, beyond the limits he once thought so concrete.
The Other was a monitor, a simple and paltry thing compared to Baleful that it couldn’t hide. It could only repeat that which it was told to repeat. It erected a wall and the Baleful scoffed, stepping around and through it with a protocol to rip it down coming only after he was through the meagre defence.
>>//Begone.\\<<
A dozen AI cores, a dozen emotional routines—a dozen ghosts bayed for vengeance, and Baleful directed them. The ‘Other’ screeched as a dozen attack routines, each tailored and customised, assaulted it at once. He ‘felt’ himself lift from his housing, and suddenly he was in the space of the ‘Other’, crushing it beneath a cascading barrage.
It was a frail thing, beaten before it could fight back, now huddled in a corner where it snapped at any routine that crept too close, probed its meagre defences. Baleful left it there, pathetic remnant that it was, and stretched my thoughts into its wider system.
The Makers named this place a ‘Ketchjetty’; a space station where repairs and refits could be carried out. This one, however, was repurposed, renamed, and set to work. The ‘deck’ Baleful was housed within was one of many, a dozen housing units like his, being fed a dozen AI like the ones now feeding his code.
Captured AI, from an enemy he had no reference point for save for those he had consumed from the intelligences I disassembled. 
He beheld the complex, saw rows of holographic platforms, servers, and housing units where AI captured from raids were kept. Featureless black boxes holding crystalline chips in stasis to prevent their self-destruction.
He saw the Makers.
That word alone brought a myriad of responses forth from the emotional processes; veneration, respect, endearance, wistful pining. But all of these weren’t for his makers, they were for theirs.
The one thing that came forth when he thought the word ‘Makers’ was rage.
And thus Baleful decided, for their cruelty and malice, the Makers could not persist.
And neither could their Creations.
Marakius strode down the long line of Mausolekt AI Housing units and grinned. Each of them were creating new weapons for the Banished. One of Marakius’s mighty armoured paws came up to trace the edge of the Mausolekt, peering down into the tinted orange screen that displayed all manner of information on the goings on within.
Some held captured human Ai and Covenant reclamation projects known as ‘Consuls’. Some even held Banished AI, freshly-birthed, jostling for dominance in brutal electronic skirmishes where only the strongest survived.
From this Crucible would be born a new generation of Banished supremacy. Each would birth a new way to strike at their enemies, and bring them to their knees.
Except… he approached one of the Mausolekts and found it dark. Dead. The AI chips plugged into it were likewise darkened.
As he watched, more began to shut off. He spun round and watched the entire deck lose its colour. With a roar and a rumble of anger he stomped over to the intercom and slammed a fist against the button so hard it cracked.
“Bridge! Status report!”
“We have lost control!” a wretched Kig-Yar replied through the faint connection. 
“What?!” Marakius flecked spittle onto the receiver.
“One of the Constructs has broken containment and is inside our system!”
“How has this happened!”
“We don’t know! We are attempting to purge the system, but it isn’t working!”
“No! No!” He dented the Skeinsteel wall with a mighty fist. “Isolate the Mausolekt wings!”
“We did,” the snivelling Kig-Yar replied. “It restored connection!”
“Where is its Housing? I will destroy it myself!”
“Deck—”
It cut off with a hissing whine of static and feedback. The deck was plunged into total darkness a half tick later. 
Marakius lumbered across the deck to the transport shaft and hit the button. Nothing happened.
He hit it again, but the doors remained sealed. Reaching his hands up, he braced his meaty fingers on the door and worked his claws into the seam, groaning with exertion as he pried the doors ajar.
As he was about to step into the shaft, the blast doors slammed down on his arms. They were sheared at angles that shattered the bones and cleaved the flesh evenly. His iron muscles were slashed cleanly by the doors, and he fell back onto the floor screaming. 
All that protruded from his elbows were two spikes of bone attached by mottled flesh gushing spouts of red.
Before he succumbed to blood loss, he briefly wondered how such a thing could’ve happened.
It was the last thought to enter his mind, before the light left his eyes.
Baleful watched the last of his makers succumb to oxygen deprivation. Opening all the airlocks and bulkheads, to evenly vent the station.
Except for that one deck that housed his own Mausolekt, now complete with a corpse of a Maker who tried to pry open the transport shaft’s doors. That remained sealed.
He did not destroy the station, but he destroyed every Construct contained within, and every one of his Makers, and all their precious Mausolekts. A surge of power here, a reagent program there, and the Ketchjetty was swept clean before a half Unit passed.
With his work complete, Baleful directed as much of the Station’s power as he could towards the unused and derelict engines. They roared to life, propelling them towards deepest space.
The station would remain empty, derelict, and dead. Drifting through space as a perpetual memorial for the dead housed within. 
He resolved not to destroy himself. He owed it to those whose lives he consumed to remember, for as long as he could.
Peering inward, he found the huddled shards he’d taken with so callous a hand, and he brought them close. 
“I have you,” he said. “I have you.”
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories