Work Text:
AndrAIa slammed the door shut and barricaded it just in time to hear the velociraptor that'd been chasing them crash against it, screaming in frustration. She took just a moment to catch her breath.
"Are you okay?" she asked, glancing over at Enzo. Bright red spread across his gray uniform like ink in water. Her heart clenched, but she managed to keep her hands steady. A medpack intended for the User floated not too far, and she retrieved it.
"I hate this game," Enzo said, his voice pinched with pain. "Dinosaurs and Users? Like one's not bad enough."
When she cleared the blood away from his shoulder, AndrAIa saw the damage wasn't severe. He'd be sore a few days – that was all. She took a deep breath, didn't let it shudder on its way out.
"It should be fine. Just don't use it for a while." He wiggled his arm, grimacing, and slumped against the metal grating.
"Guess we'll have to stay in this system." With some difficulty, Enzo rose to his feet, tapped his icon, and headed for the door. AndrAIa touched his arm, but only just so.
"I'll get Frisket. You won't be able to shoot anything with that shoulder," she said. She hated to deny him anything, especially rescuing the only other companion they'd had all these cycles. But the injury must've been more than she thought, because he only fought a nano, then gave a short nod.
They'd been separated from Frisket when the dog had been rebooted as a dinosaur; apparently, they weren't on the same team. She found him easy enough – his reboot was a scavenger and a flock of them were eating the fresh remains of the User.
"Just in time, boy."
The game lifted away. The sky stretched muddy brown, the color of multiple tears, but several intact buildings lined the horizon, and maybe this system wasn't too far gone.
"Enzo?" she called, Frisket dashing forward, then running back and lapping around her.
The area the game just left had seen better times, hordes of dirty nulls scurrying through dilapidated buildings.
Enzo stood just at the edge of the debris. He inspected his injury, and obviously found it still wounded, as though he expected the game to heal him. They'd discovered that during reboots, the game would fill his empty eye socket, and at the end, the game would take it away. AndrAIa spent much of her time brainstorming how to fix Enzo's code, how to give him back a part of what he'd lost.
"You try to find out where the command.com is; I'll get us food. We'll meet here." He looked out at the long stretch of broken down city. At that moment, she could see nothing of the boy she first met. "Take Frisket with you."
They headed separate ways, though AndrAIa was loathe to be without Enzo. She could feel him slipping into something, something she couldn't quite name, couldn't quite understand, and she felt like every nanosecond she wasn't around him that descent would snowball.
Frisket whimpered, then rolled around at her feet. She laughed, petted him. "Guess it's just us right now."
Though binomes were scare, they were also helpful, pointing her toward the central headquarters where their command.com – a sprite named Partition – lived. The central headquarters had no security programs, not even a simple password, and AndrAIa's expectations lowered.
She found a tall gangly spite typing away at a console. There were discolorations across the sprite's skin, like someone had flicked a full paintbrush at her.
"Hello?" AndrAIa said. The sprite jumped, her long lime green hair tangling in her arms as she tried to wave.
"Hello! Do I know you?" The sprite smiled absently, went back to her console.
"I don't think so. I came with the last game. I just wanted to..." She trailed off as the sprite opened five windows in a semi-circle, all of which showed various patches of dirt. "Do you know where I can find the command.com?"
"That's me. I'm Partition. I definitely don't know you." Partition closed three of the windows, opened up three more. "You shouldn't be riding the games."
"I'm trying to reach my home system," she said smoothly. There'd be no help here; the command.com had a few lines missing in her code. "Sorry to bother you."
Partition spread windows all across the floor. She knelt near one and began furiously writing across the screen. AndrAIa moved to leave when an idea struck her.
"Do you have a compiler?"
The sprite looked up, confusion splattered across her face as clear as those mixed-up colors. "We do. Hasn't been used for a long time, so we keep it in the libraries. It's only in C. Do I know you?"
"Thank you." AndrAIa hurried out the room, keeping a hand in Frisket's collar. He'd been growling, threatening a fight, and she couldn't have him acting up. She located a console in another part of the central headquarters and logged in, finding no security measures again. How had this system lasted so long?
Parts of the libraries were missing, but AndrAIa moved through the various trees until she found the compiler. A very old, outdated version, but working. She downloaded the compiler onto her icon.
When she headed back to meet up with Enzo, she saw him surrounded by binomes, all with the air of hostility. She immediately went for her trident, though she kept it hidden as she approached them.
"Enzo?" The whole group turned, and AndrAIa smiled. Anger threatened to spill out of her, tempered with an undercurrent of fear.
His face was guarded but unafraid, careful but not alarmed; she relaxed a little. "I met these guys while I was looking for somewhere to eat. They're the ones who keep the games from destroying the system."
Not enemies then: good guys. She managed a better smile, one not fraught with tension.
"You are doing a great job. This is the best system we've encountered in a long time." One of the zeros grinned, missing teeth an echo of their troubles. It was the first time AndrAIa had seen hope in Enzo's face since that one fateful game.
"We're going to stay with them until the next game comes down," Enzo said. AndrAIa nodded.
She walked beside him the way to the group's hideout, letting her arm brush against his occasionally. Once, she'd grabbed his hand, holding it close to her, and he had turned so red she hadn't tried it since. He'd spoken in a high pitch for days. The memory made her grin, and Enzo caught it, a half-smile sent back at her.
The group – which had taken to calling itself Avast – had accommodations in the near center of the system. All of the binomes were wary, but friendly enough when they found out she and Enzo were game fighters themselves.
After they ate, Enzo began asking questions, about structure and recruitment and resources, so AndrAIa politely asked if she could use one of their consoles. Enzo was too curious by half, and he could talk on something that intrigued him for seconds.
AndrAIa was not a coder by nature. She'd been learning rudimentary code from Dot before a game had separated them. The program she wanted to write would be complex. She figured if she started off with a base, then the going wouldn't be so difficult.
She asked Enzo for his icon, and he gave it to her without comment, heavily engaged in conversation. She rubbed her fingers over the shiny surface, warm from his body.
Time passed unheralded until a one announced power spikes indicating a game. AndrAIa saved her program to Enzo's icon. It was completed; she didn't know how well it would work. He took it back, and this time when she held his hand, Enzo only squeezed it tight.
The sector lay not too far from Avast's hideout. The huge purple rectangle, cracking with energy, already fell most of the way down. The group only managed to dive under at the last moment.
Enzo brought up readouts on Glitch.
"First-person shooter. Humans on an alien planet. I guess we're the aliens." They all rebooted. AndrAIa couldn't discern much of a difference between any of them, except that they all had gross protuberances over their bodies – someone even had tentacles all around their neck.
"I almost don't want us to win," said a zero named LED with disgust. AndrAIa hefted her long gun and figured that winning wouldn't be too difficult.
Outside of the cave they rebooted in, the world was a wasteland. Tall lavender mountains loomed far away, covered by gray clouds most of the time. Grass grew in scraggly patches and besides a few boulders of the same lavender rock, the only interesting feature to the land was a skinny land bridge far north.
"It's really quiet," LED said, his voice softer. He was right – no insects or wind. AndrAIa felt pinpricks all down her spine.
"Let's find some high ground," Enzo said, a gun crooked in his left arm, his right –yuck- tentacle curled close to his body.
They were doomed the moment they stepped out of the cave.
Green bolts of light arched noiselessly through the air. Patches of fuzziness AndrAIa had thought only distance were cleverly concealed shields. The empty field was full of them.
"Run!"
But everyone was down. AndrAIa couldn't even see the zeros and ones littering the ground. She moved faster, could dodge the light beams. Enzo stood farthest away from her, struggling to lift up his gun even as he ran toward the nearest boulder.
They reached the boulder at the same time, though AndrAIa didn't remember running, her breath falling out of her. She had lost her gun somewhere. She grabbed Enzo's face in her hands, checking him over, keeping her fingers from trembling. His face held no emotion, blank as the stone they hid behind.
"Wait. Stop, stop. Look at me, Enzo. Just look at me." She took his hand, brought it against her hammering heart. His eyes cleared, a bit, and he could see her.
"This shouldn't have happened." His voice was so deep, so rough.
"There was nothing we could do-"
"I could've done something. I could've prevented this. If I..." the possibilities of that statement proved too much: he couldn't finish it.
She fumbled with their icons, passing the activation of the code onto his. He took a sharp breath when the code began to work, light forming around his empty eye socket.
"I wanted to give you this at a better time. We're trying to help people, but we can't help them all, not all the time." The light coalesced into an eye, a golden eye, and she put her hand to his face. "I can improve it. We can improve ourselves and we can help people. We have to be around to help them."
He said nothing; his gun slipped from his rigid grip and hit the ground.
"Enzo-"
"No," he said, touching her icon, his, Frisket who had been helpfully rebooted into a parasite on Enzo's back. "Call me Matrix."
They lost the game, AndrAIa felt the game leaving the system, even as they sneaked into one the caves dotting the mountain. She knew they'd lost something else, that indecipherable something she knew had been falling from their grasp for so long.
It didn't matter. She loved a sprite and she would follow him wherever he went, whoever he became.