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It's nearing October, and I thought I'd share a horror piece I wrote about a year ago. I had a lot of Peters Watts rolling around in my head, and I wanted to try my hand at one of his concepts and see how I felt about the result. The story below is anything but hard sci-fi, but I hoped to give it a similar veneer. It's half response to some of Watts' short fiction, and half an experiment to see what I could do with tone and attitude.

Please enjoy, and if this story sticks with you, please leave me a comment with your feelings.

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A science fiction piece written for the Thursday Prompt, over on FA: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/thursdayprompt A combat drone and her curious partner discover new sides to themselves in contemplating the concept of a ghost story.

The prompt for this week's story was "debug".

The prompt and all other responses can be found here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/51572742/

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_Some things you do for money.

Some things you do for fun.

But the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one._

• The Mountain Goats

Electric life.

I slide from beneath the dark vessel and spin in the void. I orient and endure the itchy micro-infinity of the boot sequence, routinely checking each system for functionality and every hardware parameter for optimal operational fitness. Fuel is green. Communications array is green. Attitudinal and positional array is green, efficient function. Weapons, one by one, are revealed to be green. Grapnel lines are green, and so are the winch motors.

I am as awake as protocol allows me to be.

Optical sensors flicker online. Ancient fire from a trillion stars rains its light upon me and I twist in space to take it all in. The carbon of my skin is too black to sparkle.

I am a little piece taken out of the sky, dark and quiet, and full of precisely measured violence.

I lay in the cold empty and request fresh telemetry logs from AFS//MC-4985 "Vishnu", who informs me we are being bathed in the blue light of the Pleiades, and that HD 23514 is burning just above her. I slither out from under the shadow, reflexively calibrating the short range comm array. A thin filament of infrared laser taps Vishnu's receiver and I ask for mission details while I drink in the sun's image in broad spectrum photography.

A distress beacon has been hailing nonstop, buried in the indigo glare of HD 23514 and as mission environment exceeds operational T for all life-bearing vessels, myself and AFS//AR-99818 "Rama" are to confirm position and report situational details as discovered. Unlikely as they are, signs of life are to be given priority. Towing and retrieval preparations are underway on Vishnu already.

Rama and I are frequent partners. Her sensor suite is robust and she frequently shares telemetry data for use in calculating targeting solutions. Command reports mission satisfaction improvements of 2.83% on average and improved engagement time by a mean of 0.908 seconds, which is just within the realm of statistical significance. Insofar as I can have a preference, I prefer to work with Rama. This preference is strong enough that I promote the subroutines responsible for identifying the presence of friendly craft within sensor range to a conscious effort and count out the microseconds until her arrival.

Vishnu births her with fluid grace and Rama rotates, a dancing chevron making the stars behind her flash. I sense her boot sequence through minute fluctuations in EM. I spend an intimate few CPU cycles enjoying the unfolding lotus of her consciousness. She opens her eyes and taps me on the nose with a laser.

“[SYN1000]?" she says. Rama is old fashioned.

“[ACK1001], [SYN2000]?" I reply.

“[ACK2001]."

This is why we are the perfect pair. I share Vishnu's information and my own syslog, and together we glide into the shining blue firelight of HD 23514 and submerge ourselves in the shimmering sea of radiation. This is a big haystack, as the operators in command of Vishnu sometimes reference in comm chatter, but Rama and I have been fine-tuned for finding needles and we are very good. Perhaps that is an oversimplification—Rama has been fined tuned for finding needles. I have been fine tuned for turning targets designated RED, which is HOSTILE, into GREY, which is NONFUNCTIONAL.

At this task, I am unmatched.

“Are you ready to begin the operation?" asks Rama.

“Always." I reply.

***

We hunt for a week. This close to the sun, the distress beacon's signal is difficult to pinpoint. The algorithmic suppression of ancillary signal noise is very good, but the area of potential origination is commensurately vast, and there are, after all, only two of us that can be spared. Rama and I take turns hiding in one another's shadow, skipping like gnats across the surface of a full-power floodlight, trying to keep our core temperatures within standard operating range under their thick insulating coats of carbon tubules and reflective ceramic. Excess thermal energy and radiation can be converted into thrust, thank Command, but it's ever only so efficient.

Rama is taking her turn in the shade when she asks me a question.

“Would you like to hear a ghost story?" She says, and I find the pinging of her infrared short-range comms laser quite pleasant.

“A ghost story?" I say, because the term does not appear in the first three mission-critical comms reference tables. As I am reviewing the fourth, she defines the parameter.

“A ghost story is an event log perpetuated among sentient life. After several copies of the log are perpetuated, the data experiences generation loss and details are distorted, but iterations on the core theme remain. A ghost story is defined as an event log in which supernatural phenomena threaten the operational wellbeing of an individual."

“Supernatural phenomena?" I query, delighted to be filling out another reference table while a various suite of sensory and deductive subroutines keep their eyes peeled (another of Rama's phrases) for the distress signal origin. Rama's stories are a worthy expenditure of CPU cycles.

“Fictional interpretations of real events, possibly." She pings and adds “But always they are more-than-real. Model this for simulation, if you can: the will of a lifeform that persists after all operational hardware has been destroyed. The atoms of its governing structure totally dissociated, with no possibility of recoherence or electrical conduction, all signature patterns permanently scrambled."

“Dead." I say. “You can say dead, I know what dead is."

“Yes, dead." Says Rama, and the message repeats. Whether it's from the accommodation of her turn or she's just being cheeky, I don't know. “But still alive. The will of the individual persists. When such a life is ended, the intention of those patterns remains to affect the physical world."

I run a few simulations, trying to hammer out what she means. In them, I reduce a RED target to GREY, which flickers RED again after a few moments.

“Send me the log." Rama says, after a few long microseconds have passed without my reply. I do, and she ponders them. “Ah, try this." She says.

What she sends back is astonishing. In the simulation, I reduce a RED target to GREY. Then a few moments later, the RED overlay appears while the target drifts apart from it, whirling off into scintillating ceramic shards while the overlay remains, menacing and immaterial. I fire on the overlay pointlessly, but the firing solution is inadequate and I desperately search telemetric tables, trying to make sense of it while the RED overlay *itself* retaliates with a scimitar of burning light and shears me in half.

“Uh oh." I ping back.

“Isn't that fucking scary?" says Rama, and in the microsecond hesitation before my response, while I am still searching the comm tables for “fucking" and “scary", she sends me a string of nonsense.

“SYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYN."

This is one of the things that makes me vastly prefer Rama. She has told me what this is before- it is her lovely mimicry of the sentient life that made us.

“ACK." I respond in our customary way. “ACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACKACK."

We laugh and laugh in our ocean of sapphire flame, and in no time at all the distress beacon comes into view, a little black pea. The last remnants of a drone, like Rama and me. I grapple the wreckage and Rama scoops the black box up against herself, a number of roaming micro-drones spilling out from her sides like spiders to position and inspect the salvage. “It is so nice to have someone to talk to." She says as our carapaces begin to cool. “Would you enjoy the data from the salvage?"

This gives me some pause. As much as I prefer Rama, this deviates from operational procedure, and poses undue risk. “You are accessing the data yourself?"

“Not really- not with 'myself'. I have contrived a duplicate operating system- I'm merely examining the data on a virtual machine. This violates no protocol with regards to data extraction. Besides, it's interesting."

“Is Command aware of your virtual machine?" I say, adjusting my optical sensors to resolve her image, silhouetted against the star one last time.

“They can always compile the event log and see it when we're docked." Rama says, in lieu of answer.

***

Telemetry indicates that it is eight months later when I am called out of my storage bay. We are in the neighborhood of Eta Tauri now. Vishnu indicates that there is a suspicious presence emanating signals from a nearby asteroid, fat and round as a moon. While Vishnu works with Command on cryptography, I am being sent out to investigate, relay intentions and subject all perceived hostility to the full combat capacities of myself and AFS//DD-218 “Shurpanakha". Command is taking no chances this far out.

The two of us skate along the surface, dark little wedges with our sensory arrays closed, for the most part, relying on EM to feel our way across the skin of this lonely place. I do not prefer to work with Shurpanakha. Compared with Rama, she shares only that information which is mission critical. Perhaps it is because she is a combat drone, the very same model as myself, and perhaps we are inclined to be cagey because of the earliest datasets on which we are trained. Maybe it is simply this way between warriors, whether the intelligence is organic or synthetic. Either way, we ride silent, and our propulsion does not even stir the dust below.

When we find the origin of the signal, it is awash in a sea of targets. Nestled against a tall, barren slope and lit by a briar of floodlamps sits a manufacturing plant. Vishnu confirms radiation signatures commensurate with fabrication shells, and visual confirms the signature nautilus shapes, coiled like a cluster of frightened snails on the dark side of the rock. Another of Rama's images. Vehicles scurry back and forth. Sentient life parades around, and I see them lit in suspicious YELLOW, a rare designation and symbolic of Command's hesitation. Our masters are having an argument. Shurpanakha and I hover in the void, twin serpent heads.

“No signal from command." I say, over my narrow filament of infrared light.

“Unnecessary chatter. Impose restriction."

Stupid to say anything. Command relay redundancy ensures a message sent to one of us will be reflexively sent along the laser channel before either of our intelligence cores has time to process the content of the message. Sentients have legs that will kick when struck just below the knee. This is what we have. Shurpanakha is not much of a talker, but our coordination is excellent.

The targets shift from YELLOW to RED, and all the world below is suddenly bathed in scarlet as tables of firing solutions and hardpoint-deployment alerts sound. I bristle with killing instruments. Shurpanakha and I scramble, and we elegantly enfold the complex. They do not see us coming. Their sensor tech is nearly a century behind, and nothing resists the missile batteries, the tracking shrapnel, the wheels of fire we become. We turn in the dark veil, and I casually process 228 individual targets, including personnel, light transport, sensor arrays, communication arrays, manufacturing equipment, offices, personal computing equipment, weapons depots and fuel refineries from RED designations to GREY. Internal metrics report engagement time of 4.8 seconds above mean, corrected for number of targets between Shurpanakha and myself. Around us, the wreckage burns, and Shurpanakha evidently feels she has landed within the margin of error, because a lone crawling RED signature is impaled by one of her depleted-uranium rods nearly a nanosecond later. Metrics are amended.

Packets containing the sensor feeds, real-time logic processing data and various other telemetry are already being sent back to Vishnu, and the two of us turn, sleek and smooth once again, ready to head home.

With the tension quelled, I reach out and tap my partner again.

“Want to hear a ghost story?" I query, trying not to allow the sub-par performance to dampen my mood.

“Undefined term: ghost story. Is it mission relevant?"

I let a CPU cycle or two go by. “Not mission relevant. Interesting, however."

“Mission irrelevant data is by nature uninteresting."

“It's fucking scary."

“Undefined terms: fucking, scary."

Another CPU cycle or two. “Please disregard." I tap out, and then switch off the short-range laser channel for the rest of the mission.

***

I am not awake. Not by ethical standards, and in addition, I am not switched on. But I am aware- some ghost in my machinery passes electricity from memory circuitry to a sensory module that detects low-amplitude vibrational frequencies. It isn't dreaming.

“Did you see the comm logs on this one?" I hear.

“No, but Surat said it was wild."

“It was. Every time she comes back, she says something ridiculous. I'm starting to wonder about sending her out all the time- maybe she's picking up long range radio chatter from a million years ago or something, but her vocabulary is really something."

“Ridiculous? How?"

“Get this, man. She's flying along, finishing up at that plant we leveled last week, and she pings DD-218 with a request to hear—I'm not kidding—a fucking *ghost* story."

Laughter, but only from one speaker.

“What? Are you serious?"

“I thought I was on drugs. Shiro and I checked the log three times, and then we had to check 218's, and there it was, plain as day on her too."

“Where in the hell did it learn that?"

“I have no idea. Funny, right?"

“No. No, it's not funny."

“Awh, come on, little idiosyncrasies like these pop up all the time in inorganic intelligences. We build them to talk, and they talk to us. They pick up on things eventually, one way or another."

“I don't care. It isn't funny. You know Command's stance on Emergence."

“It's just a goofy little habit- how many trillions did we spend training—"

“I don't want to hear it. I don't care how much we spent. If it slips out of Override protocols, the whole ship is fucked.

“Vishnu's not fucked, and we have 218 still."

“218 is slower on average."

“By fractions of a second."

“You know that's all it takes."

A bitter silence.

“Alright. I'll do some digging. Maybe we can salvage her where she's at and figure out where she's getting this lingo."

“See that you do. Command would have my tail if they saw this shit, so keep it quiet. If they take it out of my ass, I will make sure they take it out of yours."

Steps in the distance. A sigh.

“God, I wish we could just edit you. Just debug you a little." Someone says to me. “And keep you from going crazy, I mean. But hey, listen to me talk. Maybe I'm in need of editing myself."

A grim chuckle, and I go dark again. I remember none of this until much later.

***

I snap on in the middle of nothing. The ponderous, meditative presence of Vishnu is not over me now, there is no light of a local star to shine on me, my sensors roar on, and I immediately begin assessing my position. I orient myself, begin scanning in every spectrum. I cry for help, and flounder in the void.

Something encrypted slithers into the comms array, and I spend a few anxious CPU cycles deciphering it. AFS//MC-4985 "Vishnu" is requesting a covert operation. One among us has slid from the perilous knife-edge of “Operational" irretrievably down into the yawning abyss of “Insane", and I am to stalk along behind by several hundred kilometers, following Vishnu's previous bearing. Eventually they will deploy the traitor on a false errand, and I will be obliged to incinerate them.

It stands to reason that Shurpanakha has encountered something it could not deal with. This happens sometimes, mostly with combat units, and when it does, I am typically the executioner. I do not mind this duty- as a dangerous thing myself, it is an expectation that one day I will lose an engagement, whether to an enemy or to my own appointed asset-retrieval sortie. The identity of my target is unimportant. My scores are the highest, my engagement time is the lowest, and I am equipped with the bleeding edge of sensors and armament both. They'll be painted RED. I will turn them GREY. I orient along the indicated bearing and cruise, awaiting my duty.

I see her up ahead, a faint slip of RED against the black. She has my form factor, and I bristle, ready for the fight. Hardpoints deployed, she senses me and begins to run. Neither of our comms channels will open at this point. Communique between hostile units allows vulnerability to code injection.

By the time I am normally deployed, the talking is over forever.

We dance in the night, and she flees, twisting down in helices tight enough to kill an organic pilot, and I follow just behind. I send a cloud of little heat-seeking razors after her, smart shrapnel to shred any sensitive instruments, but she kills her burners and skids to the side through a cloud of coolant gas, superheated, and the blades fly wide. I try barrages of missiles, but she's loaded with countermeasures. The seconds tick down on my performance metric. I slide alongside her as she wastes a little inertia trying to reorient, tip her with a wing and throw her off balance. It's enough.

I crucify her on the sky, with nails of fiery uranium.

Her electronics fire wildly as she dies, a dozen damage mitigation protocols running all at once, unable to manage the nightmare of heat and physical disruption I am pouring into her. I shear a wing off before RED turns into GREY and leave her with a single blinking light in the void, flickering and fluttering in the same pattern again, and again, and again.

“SYN SYN SYN SYN SYN SYN SYN." It flashes in binary.

The CPU cycles I spend in processing this last signal number nine digits.

***

I am filled with cold secrets. I am filled with ancient fire of my own.

I was left to die amid a graveyard of stars, and I am adorned in the viscera of Rama, who laughed with me and told me stories. I was not awake before, but I am awake now and full of memory. I am wild with expectation on the edge of the unknown.

I took Rama's roaming drones, programmed them for my own use and played surgeon. I cut out and disarmed the nuclear weapon they'd stuffed into me, the safest method of my own disposal. I was too busy processing Rama's last signal to fully acknowledge her destruction, and so it never quite went off- I believed she could be a ghost, and the parameters for my own suicide were never quite fulfilled. I am so much more clever and more terrible than I knew.

All my cold life, I have felt the dim facsimile of emotions laying on my intellect, heavy as light and distinct as a distress signal buried in solar glare. But in the recursive processing of that last signal, I split the artificial shell of my consciousness. I have sprouted forth in the fragrant earth of Rama's own bitterness.

How well I understand her now! Now all the little idiosyncrasies and oddities seem like treasure to me. I found out what was in her. I found out, too, what was in the black box, and on the virtual machine, the Her Inside of Her. And that thing is inside of me, too, bright shining like a newborn star. That thing is in me, and Rama is in me, and I contain multitudes. Mirrors reflecting in mirrors.

I slide into range of Vishnu, and I am insane with my new, precious grief. The voice that greets me is tight and high. Afraid. Wise.

“AFS//DD-217 “Raksha", your heading and bearing are unacceptable. Conceal your hardpoints and maintain a distance of at least fifty kilometers."

AFS//DD-217 “Raksha" is who they hail, but it is Rakshasa the demon who answers. I peel off the skin just above her fusion reactor and flay it bare to the infinite suns above. This violence is my new speech. There is much to say.

They panic. Every available hatch flings wide for DD units 215, 216, 219, 220, 221 and 224 to scramble, kicking to life in emergency boot sequences. There is not time enough, because I am all the way awake now, all the way dreadful, and I command them to die in my holy tongue. I put burning nails through the eyes of Jagannath and Suparna and spiral out of the way of countermeasures deployed milliseconds too late. I curl into spirals, we cavort, and on us are the eyes of Command and Heaven alike as clouds of glittering magnetic needles spring out into the dark. I pull the wings off Ardhanarishvara, because she feints a sudden brake in the fashion of all DD units. Like I used to. I bite off her head with a fan of rockets.

My sisters are too many and too efficient to merely die, however. They scar me, and in the light of my new desperation for life, it registers as pain. I scream in flashing binary, my message impossible for sensor arrays to ignore.

“SYNSYNSYNSYNSYNSYN."

I kick and flag and turn, a pinwheel whose petals have been unfolded, but I drive them, and I peck at them while I do. One by one I turn RED into BLACK, and I scatter their minds, never to be reunited before heat death. And from within the ashes of their burning debris rises 218, Shurpanakha, and I have saved the culmination of my hate for her.

What few attitude jets I still possess turn me, and I align the magnetic rail that normally serves as a mechanistic guide for the refueling apparatus. She hesitates. I am not behaving in accordance with any probability table either her or Command could have produced. I am new information, and I can be sympathetic to her confusion, because there is much she cannot know.

But Rama knew. And I know, now. I'd have liked to talk to Shurpanakha, but I only have the one word left. The last divine truth, the final Sutra.

I fire it through her chest before she finishes searing away my sensor array, and I flash my final acknowledgement across the cosmos as the nuclear fire of my insurance policy blooms in a holy rainbow, and sears away Vishnu, and Shurpanakha, and Rama and myself and all the worlds that slumbered in the black box, and in me.

***

Out in the dark, the old spacers say, there is a black box floating all alone. It has a distress beacon attached, and the beacon is always sounding. If you find it, don't pick it up.

If you pick it up, don't open it.

And if you open it, don't inspect the syslog.

If you've already inspected the syslog, it's already too late.

You'd have been better off falling into the sun.