This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/KyleKKent on 2026-02-19 21:36:50+00:00.
The Dauntless
“Hey, uh... who’s Catherine Kabewm Lugnut?” Rikki asks the Private Stream next to him.
“... There are about two hundred people with that exact name around Centris. Can I have more details?” Private Stream asks.
“A Phosa woman, a reporter? I think?” Rikki asks and Private Stream’s eyes widen.
“Oh... no she’s not real. That’s a fake. In fact it’s a fake we’re looking for. Who’s near her?”
“Winston, Arden and Dire.” Rikki says.
“Cool, one second.” Private Stream says before turning and drawing in a breath as he faces the small army of Sorcerers, Security, Princesses and Private Streams. “HEY ASTRAL FOREST! MAKE SURE DIRE KNOWS THAT THE LUGNUT WOMAN NEAR HIM IS A FAKE AND WE NEED HER DATA CORES IF NOT INTACT!”
“They in trouble?” Rikki asks.
“Depends how good a jump they can get on her.” Private Stream says and Rikki looks considerate before smiling. “I know that look...”
“Be back soon!” Rikki says before vanishing.
“Shit.” Private Stream mutters.
•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Goroni Spire, Level 100, Centris)•-•-•
“Alright miss uh... Lugnut was it... just to confirm, I’ve gotten some weird uh... sensations around you in the Axiom. Are you a high quality Synth? Like full sheathe, indistinguishable from an organic?” Dire asks and the Phosa’s eyes widen in perfect synchronicity with the tilting of her ears.
“How did you know that?”
“I’m a mechanic and an Adept. I have ways of telling. But the biggest is that I...” Dire answers before muttering.
“What was that?’ She asks and he gestures for her to lean down as if embarressed about something. She does. And takes a mech fist to the chin.
“GOTCHA AI! THINK I’M DUMB YOU...” Dire begins shouting before a blast of spores herald the arrival of someone else.
“MONKEY STICK!” Rikki cries out as he slams a completely solid mushroom with a stem so long it works as a staff into the head of the Phosa. There is the distinct sound of metal smacking into metal and while standing on a large mushroom the little monkey boy starts smacking the synthetic Phosa over and over again with his mushroom staff as if he’s trying to drive a nail in.
“Okay, calm down we’re starting to look like complete lunatics.” Arden’Karm says as he catches the staff and Rikki immediately drops it to run up the pole and jump onto Arden and start climbing around him to get a feel of the grassy cloak he’s wearing and poking around all the vines and leaves clinging to his rifle. Arden makes a point of slapping Rikki’s hands away from both the trigger and the safety.
Rikki gets really grabby for the gun and Arden simply tosses it into his Forest. Then Rikki crawls around him and vanishes into his cloak to emerge with the gun again and Arden takes it from him and holds Rikki at arm’s length by the back of his shirt. Rikki wraps around his arm and starts messing with him immediately.
“What the hell are you all doing!? Why are you attacking that woman and what the hell is going on!?” A Police Officer demands.
“Call in one of the Officers. I need to focus here. These high end synth bodies are tricky.” Dire says.
“I’ll get one!” Rikki says before vanishing.
“Officer? Get your knife away from that...”
“Josephine Urath, Centris Defence and Investigation. This... holy shit this looks horrible.” An Officer with a Rikki as the literal monkey on her back stares at the new angle of Dire slicing open the stomach of the Phosa as he keeps a hand wreathing with power around her neck and is getting ever more splattered with thick orange lubricant.
“Hang on, I’m nearly in.”
“He’s fucking dissecting her!”
“She’s not an actual person.” Dire dismisses.
“Synths are people!”
“This isn’t a synth.” Arden’Karm says. “This is a dangerous, subverted AI that we’re trying to get information out of.
“Got the backup memory!” Dire says before letting go of the Phosa. She instantly snaps back to life but before she can do anything Arden is holding his communicator in her face.
“Dolly. Shut down immediately.” Troy’s image states and the Phosa goes limp and the glowing yellow markings on her being dull.
“What just happened?!”
“We have a shutdown for the AI.” Dire answers.
“Why didn’t you just use that earlier?”
“Because there’s no telling what additional treats might have been added to it in the meantime so we need to get an untainted copy. Which I now have.” Dire says as he holds up the lubricant splattered backup core. The mists wafting off him manifest an arm and it snatches the core from him. “And now it’s seconds away from being pulled apart by it’s original maker so we can understand it inside and out.”
“We also have the other lead of where the tracking beacon was outright destroyed, and it was just before we were hit by the sniper with the follow up AI investigation. If we’re being attacked, then we’re on the right track.” Arden’Karm says and the civilian woman stares at him. “What?”
“... Aren’t you that background chanter mystic man for the Five Flyz?”
“... No?”
“What are you doing on Centris with a coilgun as long as you’re tall?”
“... Shooting things on Centris.”
“You’ve hit bedrock, stop digging.” Josephine states.
“No no, let the man work. I want to see if he can get to magma.” Dire says with a grin as he cleans off his gunk covered hands with a rag he pulled out of nowhere.
“Magma nothing I’m going for the magnetic core.” Arden’Karm says before taking a deep breath and then slapping on a DEMENTED looking grin. He turns to the civilian and Josephine grabs him around the face and turns him away.
“No. No. No. Do not. I can tell you’ve reached the point where you don’t care anymore but I still very much care and am going to stop you if I have to.”
“Fine. I’ll just listen to some music. If I’m not going to have fun then the world is too loud and I need to be somewhere else.” He says before moving his headphones back into position. “Smack me if you need me.”
He slips on the headphones and puts his music on before walking back to the still damaged Aircar that Dire flew in and sitting down on the rear engine portion.
“Something is wrong with that man.”
“Something’s wrong with all of us.” Winston says.
“Not me, I’m perfectly sane, sober and flawlessly put together.” Dire says.
“You just ripped out a synths memory core with your bare hands in public.”
“see? Perfectly sane and sober.”
•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Undaunted Laboratory, Isolated R&D Building, Centris)•-•-•
“Well damn woman, you really did make this thing idiot simple.” The programmer says as Troy scans through the logic trees and priorities at a lightning pace.
“What did that crazy bitch do to my Dolly?” Troy demands as she looks it up and down.
“Well?”
“... She has Dolly stealing backup Synth bodies, extras and bits and bobs from here and there. She also has Dolly using her behavioural algorithm to create a varied sample of the local population. Non-Violent Criminal. Office Worker. Wealthy Business owner. Wealthy Heiress... the third wealthy target was going to be a male apparently, probably why it got close enough to that private stream to be sensed and shot down. It was seeing if he was a viable target.”
“Anything in there for why Miss Von’Crazypants is having your girl conduct these experiments?”
“... No, I can’t see anything related to a why. Which is mixed news. It shows she’s taking care of the Dolly AI as making her question or justify the why’s of things will accelerate an AI self destructing. But at the same time... this instance needs to shut down.”
“What about the pattern? Can we get ahead or perhaps bait out the next bit of blood metal nonsense?”
“I don’t think we’re going to need to wait on that.” The programmer says.’
“Why not?” Troy asks.
“We’ve already got teams dropping onto the transport that likely has this mess.”
“How do you know it’s the right one?”
“Because it fried it’s beacon and immediately after the AI sent attack drones and then an investigator directly at the team that bugged it. It’s where we got this data-core.” The Programmer says.
“And you kept... of course you kept track of it. There are so many cameras on Centris there’s no where anything that size can go without being tracked.”
“That’s right.”
“Then why bother with the beacons to begin with?’
“Guess.”
Troy turns it over in her head then her eyes widen.
“It wasn’t about tracking them. It was about provoking a response and using THAT to confirm things.”
“Bingo.”
“What’s bingo?”
•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Passing by Molina Spire, Centris)•-•-•
There is nothing suspicious about the aircar whatsoever. Nothing at all.
It is after all flying like it does NOT have equipment pointed straight down at the large transport directly below it.
Purple seats are not standard, but not even odd. And having things in the back seat is of course completely normal. Maybe a little unsafe in the unlikely event of a sudden stop. But that’s only if the inertial dampeners fail catastrophically.
What is unusual is when one of the boxes suddenly vanishes.
It reappears just below a vent as a single tiny spore had worked it’s way through the ventilation system, somehow phased through the walls to avoid numerous barriers and now had sprouted a tiny patina of mould in the shadow of a large data-bank.
The bespeckled eyes of Koga the younger scrunch together a bit. It was getting faster and faster to switch from Forest to Forest, but doing so with speed induced severe vertigo. Those wh...
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