Chương 102: Robots go Meow

We sat Dennis down on a chair in what was purportedly his own lab. Addy stood to the side and left of him, a hand on her katana should he try anything. The whole interrogation-vibe was not conducive to happy emotions, but then again, neither was shooting a Custodian in the head. We could've all been sitting at a table, us champions. Remember that. Dennis wilted under my six-eyed stare.

"You're not D."

"I am," he protested. Addy didn't complain. The zone of truth was working, and that had not been a lie.

"You are D." I suppose it's a more mysterious moniker than 'Dennis'.

"But why don't I believe you?"

"Gap moe?" Becca burst out laughing. She cackled and snorted in a way that I didn't know robotic bodies could. Her body was the opposite of D.' s works, a self-crafted marvel, an artpiece, a masterwork blending robotics, magic, and mimic-ness. [Rebecca Polluck, Mimic Queen, Lvl 75] It was little wonder that she was higher level than me. The amount of kaijus she had to deal with over the years were in the double digits, and those things gave hella experience and soulcoins.

Mobility was always an issue for her, as was recreating magical materials, hence why her body was mostly mundane graphene, titanium, and steel. For that reason, she didn't deploy against lizards or teddybears. The nature of her body made her resistant to physical attacks, but incredibly vulnerable to ones that involved electricity or that attacked the soul directly, both of which the lizards and bears respectively favored. A murderbot titan or a giant mimic factory?

She could eat those from the inside like an amoeba consuming your brain. Come to think of it, in her mimic form she would probably be the ideal counter to Genesis. I cleared my throat, and made it clear to Dennis that despite my happy-go-lucky attitude, this was a serious affair.

"We'll call that your freebie answer. No more jokes after this please. You are D, but you're not the D I've texted with. I'm not mad, Dennis, just very, very disappointed." He cringed a bit.

"I don't know who you're talking about—""Lie," Addy noted.

"I… dammit. Fuck!" <<Sam, he's scared as fuck. Give him a nudge. >> I blinked Addy's message away, put two arms on the chair's armrests, two on the headrests, and leaned forward until our faces were inches apart.

"Well. That is unfortunate." But that's not the problem, is it?

"You can't talk about who I'm thinking of?" He didn't move.

"You signed a devil contract, didn't you?" Still no movement.

"We're not getting any of the terms out of you either, are we?" I eased off.

"You wouldn't mind if we took a look around your house?"

"I am obligated to, er, prevent that," he said in a small voice.

"Nonlethally, I hope."

"Er…" I noticed the maid robot extend a small grabby arm. Attached to it was a taser.

"Security mode activated. En-garde, trespasser!" The Flight of the Valkyries played for all of two seconds before Becca kicked the rug at it, getting it caught in its wheels and causing it to fall over. The taser exploded with the sound of a blowing transformer, of electricity ripping the air apart, which wasn't a thing tasers did. Despite commercial models delivering ten to twenty watts at fifty-thousand volts, they didn't have the battery capacity to flat out explode like that.

All three of us stared at the burning carpet and the melted maid-bot chassis in shock. Becca raised her hand.

"I volunteer to keep an eye on our prisoner." A reasonable decision, given how that much electricity could probably outright kill her. Or any of us, really. Becca just didn't have the quick reactions or defenses Addy and I did. The downside of having your build determined for you.

"Uh, alright." I turned to the vending machine.

"Creationator, you're not gonna betray us and stab Becca in the back, are you?"

"Fuck the proletariat!"

"I'll take that as a no." Which left Addy and I exploring the mansion of the guy who created exotic weaponry for a living. Fun times. As we walked out of the basement, a roomba ambushed us with a jade sword roiling with tiny tortured faces taped to its top. The roomba was quickly disabled, and the tortured faces were, as it turns out, just an illusory effect. The sword was wicked sharp though, and had some sort of quick-acting corrosion effect. [Market Value: 1200 Soulcoins]"Hm."

Addy compared it to Hocchi before feeding the former to the latter, her size-changing sword shining for a moment, after which the corrosion sword was gone.

"I can't believe you'd steal his stuff," I said.

"He tried to attack us."

"That doesn't give us looting rights. It's not very magical girly of you either." She rolled her eyes.

"Fine, I'll pay him a fair market price later." We searched the mansion high and low, coming under attack by flying drones with laser pistols that turned its targets into water, another maidbot with a short-range liquid shotgun shooting potions of forgetfulness, and the classic roomba with a claymore attached to it. The mine, not another giant sword. Eventually, we found what looked like his office.

It was on the second floor, a wide window revealing a beautiful vista of palms, pools, and the dormant volcano behind a panorama window. The coffered beige ceiling reminded me of renaissance-era mansions, interrupted only by an out-of-place ceiling fan. The stuffed-to-full ornate bookcases spoke of a pseudo-intellectual trying to impress with a broad selection of unread philosophy books.

A single fan hung idly from the ceiling, and the floor was made of dark wood so smooth I was tempted to take off my shoes and socks just to feel it on my skin. No taste, no sense of a cogent style, but damn didn't each of these individual things scream unnecessary luxury. The solid desk opened up to reveal a robot arm holding a spacy-looking gun — aaand, Addy already cut it apart.

"So far, the 'evil tinkerer lair' vibes are on point."" Sense Trade," Addy muttered, likely trading for more Body.

"You know, I've had this thought. He didn't make his guns, he's not the real D. Maybe he isn't even the owner of this property."

"You don't think?"

"Someone wanted us to come away with a neat story.

'D's an insane tinkerer and a fraud, someone broke into his lab and used his machine to build a weapon that can kill a high-level Custodian'."

"They didn't expect any of us to cast a [Zone of Truth]." I turned to Addy.

"Good job — wait, what is with that look?"

"Nothing." She blinked slowly.

"You're going to tell me that my interrogation was hot, aren't you?" Addy gave a short nod.

"You're so beautiful." I noticed a dart stuck in her thigh, a dart with a small heart symbol on its side.

"Um." [One Moment] triggered. Time turned lazy as out of Addy's blindspot, a second dart languidly sailed towards my body. It shifted in flight, fraying its contours while seemingly becoming see-through, all without making a single sound. In exchange, the dart was moving quite slow, slow enough for me to grab out of the air, and triangulate where it had been fired from. …

which turned out to be a humanoid figure glued to the ceiling, completely invisible not because their skin could adapt the color of the renaissance-style coffered ceiling, but because their body could fold to look exactly like a giant ceiling fan. In hindsight, that was a bit out of place, even when compared to the rest of the garish office design. The mechanical figure shot at me twice more while fan blades turned into thin scissor-like limbs, the rest of its body resolving into a slim humanoid design.

I ducked, turned my bubble shield on, then ducked again as the darts sailed right past me, going slow enough that my bubble shield didn't register them as a threat. Meanwhile, what was clearly a robot finished unfolding, two radiators settling on its chest, black-and-white cloth unfurling from internal pockets to drape off of its hip, a face screwing and fusing itself together in a stylized representation of…

"A robot maid?" Two triangles folded out above its head, one clearly an antenna, the other a loudspeaker.

"Oh my god. A robot catgirl maid."

"Meow." It said with an impassive voice and face as it jumped me, two blade-like arms twirling like razor blades.

"Mrrr. Mrow." Pushing an enraptured Addy behind the solid mahogany desk, I met the whirling blades with twin bone daggers I'd kept from my visit to Bugsrest. Radiators hissed on its back, bathing the room in a warm orange glow. That's not all heat. Orange… it runs on anticipation? The arm blades split down the middle General-Grievous-style. So, I grabbed two more knives, and the duel of the fates was on. The sound of metal on bone rang out, bone on metal a well-practiced response.

Addy would've been so impressed by my efficient movements, were she not lying on the floor, drooling in my general direction. Okay, so these are definitely love darts. Which is all kinds of screwed up, morally, and logically. Love isn't an emotion, not in a way I can use for casting. It could be a mix of multiple emotions. Or maybe, this isn't love, but simply one emotion taken to the extreme. Or it's just a chemical cocktail, in which case how did it get past Addy's Body so easily?

A slight shift in the maid catgirl robot's stance had me preemptively jump back. It responded by pulling various throwing daggers and shuriken from a receptacle underneath its ribcage, forcing me to duck haphazardly, and distracting me from the real threat. Its face clacked open, another dart aimed at my center of mass while I was mid-air. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. No thanks.

I tugged myself towards the ceiling on a string of silk, then jumped down to wrap said silk around the robot. In the moment it took it to cut through the lines, it failed to notice the body double I'd kept glued to the ceiling. She fell gracefully behind the robot, pricked it with the dart I'd caught previously, and was quickly bisected as it turned its whole torso 360 degrees. C'mon, I don't want to break you, that'd be a dick move. Please work. The robot seized up. It turned to Addy.

Then it turned to desktop PC next to her, grabbing it in a hug. It started purring. Its eyes were in the shapes of two hearts.

"Alright, uh, maybe it is a love dart." Or a trust dart, or anticipation, or… what mattered was that it worked as intended instead of shorting out and blowing the thing up sky-high. I had a hunch that this wasn't a murderbot which was confirmed when I tapped it for the system to identify. [C. A. T. N. A. P. - Companion Assistant for Tidying, Nurtering, & Apartment Protection] What can a person desire more than a servant, a soldier, a friend, a lover? The answer is all at once! Featuring the C. A. T. N. A. P.

, a proprietary, future-of-the-art robot designed to meet desire — or induce it, should you wish to let him or her take the lead. Apathy, boredom, or home intruders are a thing of the past with this meowseuse. C. A. T. N. A. P., pre-order now. * *Due to worldwide constraints in CPU and RAM supply, the first production run, our Steelsilver Edition, will only encompass 100 units. It didn't even show the price until I did some more digging.

Price: 25, 000, 000$, alternative payment in soulcoins available at a rate of 1: 1, 000 Holy money, this thing costs 25, 000 soulcoins. … I am suddenly extra glad I didn't break it. Not because I feel bad for billionaires, but because the system might need to reimburse him for collateral damage, and I really don't want to pressure the already stressed system with that. Also, it looks cute as heck, even if its maid dress seems less made for cleaning, and more for activities that cause messes. Combat.

And other things. I kinda want one.

"C'mon Addy," I said, grabbing her by her arm and pulling her up.

"You… do not look okay."

"I'm fine. I'm sooo fine. I've got you. You're sooo fine."

"Uh-huh." I gulped and tried not to look into those ravenous eyes. The air was perfectly controlled in temperature, moisture level, and smell, the gentle vanilla scent hugging me like a blanket. There was never a place more relaxing than here.

"We've, er, got a date slot coming up, just the two of us. How about we do something nice then?" She gave me another intense stare and a short nod.

"Alrighto. Time to check out what this maid bot was protecting so much." Something was likely stored on the computer it was hugging. I sat down on the chair — real rhinoceros leather, wow, fuck this D. Addy sat down on my lap.

"You're right." I took a deep breath, tried not to listen to the spider and vampire instincts both telling me to bite her nape, and booted the PC up. And of course, it was password protected. <<Becca, can you hack a desktop PC from where you are? >> <<Uh, no. I learned a bit about data security these past few years, but the best I can do is exploit obvious vulnerabilities, like a machine in a network that isn't password protected, or public wifi. >> Frustrating.

"Why don't you just ask your envoy?" Addy asked, leaning back into me with a sigh.

"I… thought you wouldn't like that, me getting further involved with them." She giggled. Addy didn't giggle, normally. I would've recorded all of this if it weren't the result of a drug she did not consent to having injected.

"You're too considerate. Why worry at all? Someone is hunting Trust, but if Trust falls away, or is distracted, that gives us a better chance at winning."

"Because I won't let a magical girl die, or fight the world alone." I sighed and stared at the coffered ceiling.

"Mochi, c'mere, I need your help for a bit." A dumbo-eared mochi materialized in midair.

"What is up, my awesome arachnid ally? My feminine fr-fr-friend? My coolest champion? Are you finally inviting me on your adventures like I as-as-asked you to?" I blinked at it.

"You wanted that all along?"

"Of course silly, I've been looking forward to the day you asked for so long. Remember, I told you back in… huh." Mochi crossed its arms. The left side of its face glitched a bit.

"I can't find the log f-f-files for that. Weird."

"Can you hack into this computer?" I asked it, masterfully sidestepping that particular request.

"Sure can! Watch!" The screen glitched out, reflected in Mochi's eyes. A book's worth of code zipped across them in moments.

"I can't! I… why!?" The pc had booted up and jumped straight to the desktop though.

"I mean, it looks functional?" After all the disappointment, Dennis turned out as the kind of person who saved every document and every photo he ever needed to his desktop, like a savage, which made appreciating the watercolor painting of his C. A. T. N. A. P. lounging on a lounge chair harder, but finding some of his socials rather easy. A quick search through his socials and I discovered a group called 'Dees guys & gals'. It was a group chat filled with 14 separate people, all tinkerers with the moniker of D.

Either D. is some sort of public pseudonym, or someone was really trying to obfuscate their trail. In the background, Mochi was raving about data security, network architecture, and other arcane wizardry no living human knew a thing about, since the people who understood the loadbearing architecture enough to maintain it had all died off over the past couple years. Addy, who'd started to shake off the love dart's effects, suddenly perked up.

"Wait. Repeat that?"

"The part about MongoDB or the part about triply nested dockers?"

"No, the part where you, Mochi, an envoy with a current share of…"

"... 25. 43% of the system's total capacity, including computing, magical energy storing, spell channeling, and related resources," Mochi helpfully explained.

"... a good quarter of the total processing power of a system covering all of Earth and part of the moon can't crack the encryption on this desktop pc?"

"I'm especially proud of that moon part. The moonbase was my idea! It's right next to the afterlife of sadness, which has a natural cooling effect. Such a good idea indeed. The best." The happy blank stare Mochi gave us afterwards was more than a little bit unnerving, frozen in place as if all its processes had suddenly seized.

"What about the rest of that question?" Mochi disappeared for a brief moment, appearing again halfway across the office room.

"Oh! That's because — wait, why am I over here?" The envoy floated back in front of me, squeezing down into the mahogany table's cup holder with a snug expression.

"Anywaaays, I can't access some super secret files. Idle processing time always exists in pockets across our system-systems, but the method of encryption used here is so tight that, without the right hash key, the only option is to brute force it. Currently, I only have the power of… two-and-a-half El-Capitans on hand, which is not enough, nope, not one bit." A quick search via the system told me that Mochi was talking about a decade-old supercomputer in Livermore, US, with roughly eleven million CPU cores.

"Who could make an encryption like this?" Addy asked.

"Oh, probably another envoy." Addy and I stared at Mochi. The moment stretched on until not saying anything became pure torture.

"You knew! You knew it all along, you must have!" Addy got up, halfway between lunging at Mochi and tearing her own hair out.

"Why didn't you tell us that another champion was trying to kill Trust, kill us?" Mochi retreated further into the cup holder.

"I didn't, um, I don't quite know… this is all news to me. I-I don't follow your adventures as closely anymore, ever since Sam asked to be left alone."

"Did I really ask that?"

"I don't know. I don't know and that is… scary?'" Addy took a step back. I peered into the cupholder.

"Holy shit, Mochi. Are you crying?"

"Um, uh, maybe? I designed my body with all biological capabilities in mind." The yellow bean seemed confused.

"I just don't remember why." The holes in Mochi's memory were concerning, but more than that, what shook me to the core was something I'd thought impossible. The envoy of happiness could cry. It could feel an emotion that wasn't the joy it was made of. It could feel fear, sadness, maybe more. For a being that ran on a single type of magic, this might be the worst diagnosis yet. After all, the system was part technology, part living spell.

And when you charged a spell with an incompatible emotion, it backfired, sometimes catastrophically. That explains the glitches, the random teleporting, the memory loss. I've been so focused on people who need help on Earth. I completely forgot that there are people in space who need me just as much.

"Hey, Mochi." I offered a hand for my envoy to climb onto.

"It's alright. We'll figure something out together."

"I don't know if we will." Mochi made no move to emerge from its hiding spot.

"You said you don't care about winning. And I care about winning. I care so, so much. It's all I was ever meant to do. I'd die if it meant mission success. Maybe mission success is me dying. Maybe once I'm done, and the world is saved, or maybe when I realize that it's all futile, I'll just… stop. Because for all their foresight, my creators never once bothered to address the issue of what comes after I'm done with my task." I massaged the little Mochi ball until it stopped giving off blue puffs of sadness.

"Trying your best is never bad. But the way things are set up, winning is just another way to say 'making someone else lose'. We have the means to cooperate, and the common goal, and in part, the will. Can I trust you to communicate that to the other envoys for me?" Two round eyes poked out from between my fingers.

"I gambled on your life so many times, just to get more system stake. Why are you trusting me now?"

"Everyone deserves a chance to do better. And you can do better." I bopped its nose.

"Can you promise me that you'll try?"

"Sam, we cannot trust it," Addy noted, though she didn't seem so sure herself anymore.

"Mochi has proven again and again—""I will." Mochi rose up.

"I shall call a conclave of all the envoys right now — even though it'll cost me a percent of system share, to prevent abuse of this function — and tell them all about your cool new plan for everyone to work together on the big, great, best idea ever for cooperation that'll make everyone happy, guaranteed. You have one of those, right?"

"Uuuh…"

"What am I saying, of course you do. You're the smartest, happiest, bestest arachnid I know." Mochi expanded its arms, twirling in place. A couple of sun rays fell through an open window, highlighting a face of utter ecstasy frozen in time. We waited for a couple seconds for Mochi to move. Addy poked it. Mochi was literally frozen.

"Did you crash a quarter of the system?" she asked.

"I sure hope I didn't. Maybe Mochi's just buffering?" Suddenly, Mochi screamed. Addy and I jumped back.

"Oh no. Oh no nono, not now. Why now?" Mochi bit the tips of its ear-hands.

"We're out of time. I don't — you two, check the news, doesn't matter which channel, I gotta go, now." With that ominous warning, Mochi disappeared with a puff of smoke and displaced air. The room was filled with the sound of mechanical purring.

"That went better than expected," Addy stated as we left the cat maid robot to its hyperfixation.

"Except for that last part. Are you checking the news?"

"Yeah. Nothing weird so far." I swished a few reports to the side as we skipped down the stairs.

"Convergence events, fraudulent elections, a new heretofore thought impossible object is now for sale. It's just news, for now."

"Huh." Addy paused.

"You know, you're wrong about one thing. The problem with the great game of the envoys isn't that someone has to lose. The problem is that if nobody wins, if no solution is found and agreed on, then everybody loses." +++ We found Becca lying on the floor in Dennis' lab in a pool of the tinkerer's blood. His throat had been slit. The air was heavy with the smell of burnt metal and ozone.

"Holy shit," I swore as Addy checked his pulse.

"No pulse. His brain hasn't had oxygen for over ten minutes. In this heat… no chance. He's dead." I wanted to puke.

"No sign of struggle," I managed to blurt out after checking the bindings and finding that there was no sign of rope burn.

"What're the chances that Becca slit his throat and then fried her own systems to cover her tracks?"

"Zero." Addy shot me a look.

"We can ask her what happened when she respawns. There's slagged metal running out of her freaking ears."

"Oh, she isn't dead." I kneeled down and, with some effort, flipped Becca onto her chest. Under pressure at the right points, a near-invisible panel popped open on her back. Within a recess there was a red flip, like the emergency brakes on a train. I grabbed it, flipped it. Within seconds, the Becca that ran on electricity and code turned into a thick goopy liquid. Machine Becca could be turned off, her silicate brain even critically disrupted, but you could only kill her by obliterating her biomass.

The Becca that ran on copying shapes and biomass wobbled in place in confusion before slowly reforming her robotic body over the course of a minute. She looked to the left, where Dennis' body sagged in his chair, then to the right, where the talking machine that made weapons looked as if it had its computational components torn straight out the side by a ravenous beast hungry for RAM.

"Fuck," was all she could say to that.

"Did you see who did you in?" Addy asked. Becca shook her head.

"They came from behind. Which is impossible, because there's a wall right there!" We checked the wall, really checked it. Addy even tore some of it open, but it was just stone and sediment. All the while, I felt the past few weeks running back through me in a single moment. You're playing emotional support for one third of the system. The more stake Mochi gains, the higher likelihood we get of getting one single plan that might save Earth's butt, instead of eight plans that will individually do squat.

Would talking even work, this late in the game? Feels like we're turning ourselves into monsters for a bunch of thankless folks. They are world enders. She's always been a cantankerous nihilist.

"Disgust." All eyes turned to me.

"It's Zeb, champion of Disgust. That traitorous little… she can connect to areas in space by unzipping surfaces she's touched before. Zeb is the only person that combines being able to get to this island and leave without being seen, having an envoy on their side, and benefiting from other champions dying."

"Well shit," Addy said.

"Wihtout Zeb and Trust, looks like teamwork is out the window." I sat down, feeling suddenly very heavy, heavy and tired.

"It is, isn't it?" It only took one person to destroy the chance at peace. One single ego. Could I buy Zeb's loyalty? No. It has to be conviction. She wants to win. Or… she doesn't want anyone else to win. Maybe she doesn't want anyone to win. I rubbed my face, feeling tears of frustration welling up. A distraction, I needed a distraction.

"Any news about the… news?" Becca was the first to find what Mochi had likely been talking about, given that she could interface with and navigate through the system much faster than us plebeian meat-brains. She found an ongoing report and flipped the holographic browser so we could both read the caption. Aasvex stage coup in North Korea, Somalia, clear out militants in first-ever magic-powered peacekeeping operation.