8.6 – Nature at Wil

<< VOL.08_HARDWARE-AND-HOLLOWS.log >>

// data corrupted — recompiling //

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The golden doors of the courthouse castle slid open in a cold mechanical hiss. Reaper walked through and the mechs in the corridor registered his passage, some tapped the floor, some saluted, some bowed. Each one responding slightly differently to the same event.

‘The Spark code at work.’ He turned it over as he moved toward the corridor behind the throne. ‘Shelly deserves full credit for that. I find myself wondering why she doesn't apply her intelligence this consistently, the way Chrome does. Or perhaps she's already satisfied with how things are running and simply doesn't need to.’

He approached Shelly's room. The automatic door was closed. Xidia was floating beside it with her back against the wall, head resting there. She noticed him and pressed one finger to her lips.

Reaper opened his HUD.

Reaper: What is happening.

Xidia: I think she's been enjoying herself with the new guard.

Reaper: Who assigned her a guard?

Xidia: Obsidian did. It's Esoptron.

Reaper stepped through the door. Xidia followed and positioned herself in the frame.

Shelly was at her desk with her back to them, white headphones on, hands working on a new Omega body laid across the table. Esoptron stood beside her, watching her work with the focused attention of someone who had decided this was the most important thing happening in the world.

"—and I told father that my code was the better approach for regulating the emotional core. Prevent instability while preserving genuine emotion. You saw what happened when Obsidian was revived, completely stable, completely level, despite having arguably the worst death of any of us. Meanwhile Infinity and 11 both came out with severe trauma responses from continuous dying."

Esoptron handed her a screwdriver from the wall-mounted toolbox without being asked. "True. Obsidian holds the way a large ship holds on open water, the size doesn't work against it, it works for it. 11 took an entire month off and spent it doing construction work to replace the memories. Overwrite them with work she could call enjoyable."

The walls had continued evolving. New Reaper posters, bolder designs, several attributed phrases that ranged from plausible to creative. The large window was still the only surface that had been spared.

Shelly shifted in her chair, a small rhythmic movement that had no particular destination.

"Exactly. A stabilizer, literally… and father refused to apply it to the E-UNIT." She stood on the chair and began to sing, conducting herself with the screwdriver.

"Esoptron has a wild tic, It's funny but a little sick, The way this, the way that, The strangest guard I ever had!"

Esoptron took one step back. "That has been the content of your headphones this entire session? I cannot believe you wrote a song about me. The way—" He lowered his head. "I see."

Shelly laughed and sat back in the hovering chair, spinning it in slow circles barely touching the floor. "It has a strong second verse. I'm kidding, no one has time to—" The chair brought Reaper's silhouette through her peripheral vision.

"Brother!" She descended from the spin, nearly lost her balance from the dizziness, and took hold of his shoulders. She embraced him briefly, then caught Xidia standing in the doorway over his shoulder. "You're still bringing her everywhere."

Xidia smiled behind her hand. "You ran at him same way a dog recognizes its owner from across a park. I understand now why he keeps you close."

Shelly raised an eyebrow. "Dogs at least have complete bodies. You look like someone grew bored halfway through a project and called it done. I don't blame your engineer, he was trying to give you something memorable. Office fixture."

Xidia drifted a few centimeters backward. "I was only—"

"How does half a person manage to be this much work?" Shelly's expression was perfectly serene.

"Both of you." Reaper set Shelly on the floor. "How is the work going, sister?"

"Excellently." She crossed to her desk at speed. "I finally had the time to ‘fix’ Omega."

"Fix." He tilted his head. "Define that."

“Glad you asked.” She pulled on a white simulation helmet and fitted two thick uncovered gloves threaded with wires over both hands. “We couldn’t wake Omega at all. She refuses every—”

“Refuses.” Reaper’s optics didn’t move. “That’s a word for something that can choose.”

The gloves stopped mid-calibration. Half a second.

Long enough.

“It’s a word for a handshake that keeps failing.” Her fingers resumed the pattern, precise again. “The crystal you found doesn’t answer. It rejects every connection method we’ve tried.”

“You said her.”

“Because you’d have corrected me if I said it.” She flicked one hand and a diagnostic screen unfolded beside her, a wall of flat numbers she didn’t need. “Fine. We uploaded what remains of her signature into the crystal. A notation. Nothing standing behind it.”

Reaper crossed to the table and stopped over the body laid across it.

“Can she be revived.” Not a question, the way he said it.

“No.”

“Explain it.”

Shelly pulled the screen around and tapped a curve that flattened almost immediately. “Output. Blue carried the original at full load and still needed a hundred shells to vent the excess. Cyan produces a fraction of that. It can restructure matter. It can run a proxy frame.”

She let the number sit there. “It cannot hold a consciousness, brother. Put her in there and you’d get half a person, awake, burning down to nothing in front of you. Do you want me to do that to her?”

Reaper looked at the body for a long moment.

“No.”

“Then we agree.” She lowered the helmet visor. “But—”

Her fingers moved. On the table, the body she'd been working on came awake in one clean motion and turned its head in perfect synchronization with hers.

When Shelly raised her hands, the body's hands rose. When she moved her fingers, the body's moved with them.

It stood. 1.95 meters. Built close to Shelly's proportions but taller, significantly taller, matching Reaper's height almost exactly. Two antennas rose from the head. Blue-tinted visor lenses. Two white energy katanas crossed on the back. White and grey clothing.

She raised a thumb. The body raised a thumb. "What do you think?"

Reaper walked to the body and stood facing it without expression. Then he poked its nose. Shelly touched her own nose and stepped back. He took the body's face in his hand and turned it. Shelly's head rose at the same angle. The cape settled after.

"You built yourself an extension body." He put an arm around the body's shoulders. Shelly stiffened. "You used Omega as the justification and took the concept directly from the Omega link. A way out of the room that isn't technically leaving the room." He looked at her. "How long did that take me to work out?"

"Too few seconds." She deflated. "How."

"You are not as difficult to read as you believe." Xidia had drifted over to examine the body, turning it slightly. "Why is it this heavy? The floor has been commenting since it stood up."

The body reached over and tapped her head gently. "Simple frameworks don't need to understand engineering. Don't worry your processor." It turned back to Reaper, and the voice that came through was Shelly's, precisely. "Brother. I want to test it. Fight me."

Both Reaper and Xidia turned toward her.

"The crystal in this body is empty, I coded the ability in from scratch, which means I had full design authority." The body's accent lighting shifted. The visor, the core elements, the light lines along the armor, all of them turned cyan.

"The cyan crystal. Gravity manipulation expressed through matter rather than force. I can construct and deconstruct physical objects, relocate them in real time, build with any available material. Where yours applies force directly, this one restructures what force acts on."

"You cannot do this." Xidia stepped between them. "Lord Reaper runs on a nuclear core. A crystal user has a structural advantage, it's not a fair test."

Reaper had already looked at the cyan visor for a moment.

"Let's do it."

---

Reaper hovered above the Meridian Tides with his arms folded, positioned fifty meters out from the shore. Shelly's body touched down on the water's surface, gently, the contact barely audible against the sea's low movement.

Xidia stood at the top of the castle, visibly tense, watching. Esoptron stood beside her with a fresh notepad.

"Brother." Shelly's voice came from the body's speaker, and she was smiling. "You've spent months training against people who couldn't challenge you. Accept this for what it is, a gift. I'll fight you every day if it means you're better prepared."

"That's very generous." Reaper raised his head slightly. "But I can see that you're afraid of facing me even in a body that isn't yours. Come at me first. I need to understand what you've built."

Shelly raised a hand. The sea responded, droplets pulled upward in small spheres, rising in an uneven cluster, their shapes inconsistent, their hold imprecise. She was still calibrating. She snapped her fingers and the droplets transformed, reshaping into glowing blue spears. She aimed at Reaper and released them.

Clang.

Reaper brought his hands together once.

The force of the clap moved the sea away from him in a half ring. A wall of water surged outward and swallowed the spears before they arrived. The wave kept building and rolled toward Shelly like a small tsunami.

She raised both hands and threw a water wall up to meet it, thick, uneven, barely stable. The wave hit and tore it apart. Shelly didn't stop. She bent down and put one hand to the surface. The sea began to vibrate, then a ridge of water shaped like thorns rose at her direction, building and accelerating toward Reaper in a long low wave.

Reaper walked forward.

"What are you doing?" Shelly's voice went up. "Evade it, I don't want to actually hurt you—"

"Water at this temperature is not sufficient, Shelly." He rose slightly off the surface. His arms came up, slowly, with the deliberate quality of someone who is not in a hurry. "Moon Phase Protocol, initiated."

The sea leveled.

In a perfect circle one kilometer in diameter, the water simply rose, the entire surface lifting as a single even plane, upward, until the sea floor was exposed. Sand. Rocks. Creatures still moving in the water that now hung above them in a translucent ceiling.

Shelly was standing on bare seabed, her body dripping as the water passed around her. She stood in the basin and stared up at the sky she could see through a floor of water, while the horizon in every direction was a wall of sea held in vertical suspension.

On the rooftop, Xidia pressed her hands together. Her smile was doing structural damage to her composure. “Just a king doing king things, I suppose.”

Shelly looked at her brother floating above her in the exposed basin, holding a kilometer of ocean in place.

Reaper moved his left hand as if he were gripping something. A perfect cube of water detached from the elevated sea and fell.

Shelly saw it coming. She raised both hands and caught it.

Clank.

The weight drove her arms down. Reaper added pressure, the cube became heavier, denser, pressing against the cyan and white frame's structural tolerances. Her knees bent. She looked up at him from under the weight with an expression she wasn't bothering to disguise.

"Holding?" Reaper released it slightly and another cube separated from the sea ceiling.

Plak.

It landed on top of the first in loud sound between wet and dry.

Plak.

A third. The weight stacked.

"Shelly." His voice was calm. "You can stop. Work on it more and we do this again another time. The base engineering on this body is genuinely impressive, I don't want to undo that work."

‘He's doing it deliberately.’ She felt her legs start to give. ‘That's a psychological attack and it is absolutely working on me.’ Her knees buckled. The water cubes came down, and dissolved just before impact.

‘He stopped them.’

She stood back up and raised her hands. "Fine. I give up. Are you satisfied? You sound like a therapist."

"I can't quite make that out from up here with you under water, Shelly."

She looked up. The sea was already moving, Reaper releasing his hold.

"Oh fuc—"

The ocean remembered itself all at once. The water came down.

Shelly got dragged sideways, fighting it, until she felt force pulling her upward. She broke the surface and was lifted, brought to face her brother directly, soaked and defeated and not particularly gracious about it.

She turned away. "You had the advantage of experience. And leveling a sea is an unfair ability to have."

"If 02 had been standing where you were, she wouldn't have struggled as much." He held the observation there. "I adapt the encounter to whoever I'm facing. I removed the thing that made you strong."

"You can't just remove the sea."

"I did."

He turned toward the rooftop. Xidia was clapping, waving, conducting a one-person celebration of what she had just witnessed.

Shelly watched her. "Even if you'd just raised a hand she'd react that way. What a fan you cultivated."

"You made a room full of my posters without shame." Reaper looked at her. "Aren't you one yourself?"

"That's different." She smiled without much resistance. "I'm your sister."

He tapped the top of her head gently. "And I'm grateful for that." He watched the sea settle back into itself. ‘She corrected herself in half a second.’ He filed it where he kept things that didn’t resolve. ‘She has never once needed half a second.’

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