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“Awake? Good. I found Brighton, through some stroke of luck. She wasn’t very cooperative, but did tell me that there wasn’t any Echo core. Your sister was either delusional, lying, or both.”
She hooks a cable up to her arm, sending a video file across with some taps of her interface.
“Unfortunately Bloodhound already went upstairs so I am probably going to be raked over the coals by the Old Man remotely in about ten minutes, so I hope this was worth it.”
Went upstairs? What stairs could be large enough to actually matter?
She pauses, disconnecting herself again. You speed through the interrogation, from the perspective of Thea’s eye. It’s like seeing through one of your visual sensors. Far more impersonal and less detailed than one of your gifted memories.
“This is it?”
You are not impressed.
“I don’t want to hear it. We had next to no time in a room together before Bloodhound got on my ass about being away from my mech while on the ready ten roster, and what would you want me to do? Start cracking her fingers? If she does fold back under Kinston, she will probably be part of the tech crew and work with repairing code on you and Delta. She’s valuable.”
You do not need repairs on yourself by another. You are perfectly capable of fixing your own software problems. If you had any. And you will fix Delta. The less human input, the better.
“I do not need coding repairs by an inferior.”
“Just because you can’t see problems, doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Having an external perspective wouldn’t hurt.”
What does she mean by that? It absolutely Could hurt. External influence on your core could be used to introduce something. Explosives in your ammo feed could pale in comparison to something actually affecting your judgment or inner workings. Though…the usual offline command code changes already modify you, and it’s impossible for you to detect the changes by design.
Thea stands, grabbing her jacket from where it’s draped over the chair.
“I’m off. Finally to get some actual shuteye after being complained at. Remember, logs are off-limits. Try to show a little gratitude, once in a while.”
You hold your desire for a last retort before she slips out the exit. She’s leaving you online. The hatch clangs shut and you watch her clamber down the ladder a few rungs at a time, then vanishing into a personnel egress, followed by another soldier.
Predator’s offline, along with your capacity for wireless connections. Certainly purposeful.
As if you couldn’t be trusted to keep allied networks untouched. You are hardwired to the local base network along with the external power supply, though it appears to be segmented, as you noticed before, and mostly unusable. A limit on the amount of data allowed to flow back and forth is in place, reminiscent of times past before you were installed into a frame.
