Chương 2: Slot It Anyway

I made it two junctions before the corridor ran out. The warren I'd ducked into was a dead loop, a maintenance spur that fed back on itself. It made sense to whoever drew the map. It made no sense to anyone running down it with a piece of a dead Enforcer cooling in her fist. I came round the bend already knowing there was no way through. A pressure wall, a capped pipe, and me. Behind me, unhurried, the cull found the spur. This one was smaller than the warden from the reclaimer.

Lighter, faster, built to chase whatever the big units flushed out. I heard it before I saw it, a quick double-tick, something that didn't have to cycle to fire. The box came round the corner ahead of me. [Compliance Enforcer. Non-compliant asset cornered. Processing.]"Cornered," I read.

"Not wrong." The core sat dead in my hand. Dark ceramic, faintly warm. A piece of someone else's clearance, and dead weight to me, to anyone. The System made it for bodies that mattered. I wasn't one. The voice I'd spent twenty minutes deciding was real said:"You're going to install it."

"I don't know how."

"You absolutely don't. You also don't have a second option, and the chaser's four seconds out, so this'll be the fastest apprenticeship in the history of bad ideas. Open your hand." I opened my hand. The core sat there looking like what it was: too good for me.

"Now read it. Don't look at the part you'd strip for scrap. Look at the part underneath. What does it want?" And here's what I've never been able to explain to anyone who didn't grow up with their arms inside machinery: I could. The same as reading the warden's rushed clamp, a bad weld, a fastener turned three-quarters. Except I turned the reading inward, onto the place where the core ended and I started, and read what it needed to run. Power it would never get from a Registered body.

A clearance handshake it would keep asking for and never get. A host built to its shape, which I wasn't. So I'd have to be.

"There she is." Almost warm under the dry.

"You see it. The thing the System would call impossible. It is. For everyone but you. Which is the only reason this isn't a suicide note." The chaser cleared the bend. Three seconds. [Enforcer core fragment. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 61%.]"Sixty-one." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Fifty-nine. I rounded up so you'd take it seriously. You're going to do it anyway."

"Obviously," I said, and pressed the core to the inside of my forearm, where the skin's thin over the old work scars, and let it find me.

"Let it find me" is putting it kindly. It went in like a fight. The core didn't want a Registered host. It had been built for something cleaner, higher up, and it spent the first half-second saying so in the only language it had: pain. My arm tried to lock up. Somewhere down the spur, the chaser's grip whined up.

"Don't fight the rejection." Fast, even, a surgeon reading a chart while the room burned.

"You can't out-muscle a clearance protocol. You out- read it. The handshake it wants. Give it a worse one. Lie lower than the System's own floor. You're unclassed. Be unclassed at it." I stopped trying to make the core accept me as something it would respect. I made myself the one thing it had no rule to refuse: a fault. A glitch. A host so far below spec its checks had no box to fail me into. The core stopped arguing. It didn't agree. It ran out of objections. Then it seated, and something gave way to make room.

I felt it go, not a bone, nothing a splint would fix. Something quieter: a piece of my arm stopped being only mine. The box came up in the same breath, the System adding up the little of me it could see. [LOADOUT — 1 component: Enforcer core (kinetic discharge). Host instability: persistent — grip compromised.] One part in. The first slot filled, in a body the System had no slots for. The chaser reached me. I didn't decide to use the core. It decided for both of us.

The power fired before I'd finished knowing I had it, a kinetic punch through the chaser's thin plating that no Registered hand could throw. The recoil lit up every nerve the install had just rearranged. The chaser came apart at a seam I hadn't even known I'd read. A second box surfaced as the discharge bled out of my arm, the price of doing something the System couldn't ignore. [Anomaly profile: 5/100. Unsanctioned tech signature logged.]"Five," I read.

"It was two when I still had a corridor."

"And it climbs every time you do something the System can't ignore. Running a core built for its betters is very much that." A beat.

"Around twenty, it starts paying attention. Past thirty-five, it sends something with your name on it. Enjoy your single digits." I flexed the hand. It didn't quite close.

"It'll do that," the voice said.

"The noise, the heat, the hand that won't close. Every time, a little, forever. That's the price. I'd love to tell you it gets cheaper."

"Does it."

"No." I should tell you I felt sick. The honest version: I stood in a dead-end spur, an unclassed nobody who'd just run a piece of the System's own enforcement through a body that was never built to hold it. The wrongness, the shaking, the cull still working the levels overhead. And under all of it, what I mostly felt was that I'd found the door. There was no way out. The Stack was a kill-grid and I was a fault marked for deletion. Down meant dying small. Up meant getting processed in line.

So I picked the way it didn't expect: straight through. Through its machines, into myself, one kill at a time, building a body out of the things that wanted me gone. The loadout said one. It wouldn't stay one.

"You're going to tell me this is a terrible idea," I said.

"I'd never. I'm a piece of the same terrible idea. Which reminds me, at some point, when we're not actively dying, you'll have to call me something.

'The voice' is undignified, and I've little dignity left to lose."

"Later."

"Later," she agreed.

"Left spur. The chaser was loud, and the System files loud. Walk like you've somewhere to be that isn't a corner." I closed my fist as far as it went, which wasn't all the way. I was already getting used to that. Then I went left, into the warrens, toward the next thing I'd take apart to keep going, and for the first time since the lights turned blue, I wasn't running from anything. I was choosing where to start.