Book 8 – Chapter 17 – Interlude: A22

A22 read through the list of designations, each with several dozen documents of actions and history attached.

To’Gallavar.

To’Andrius.

To’Nnera.

To’Jast.

To’Radagon.

The list went downwards, twenty seven entries. She recognized some of these names. All second generation Feathers, many of whom she’d fought and killed herself once or twice. All of them seven hundred years old or nearing that number, depending on if they were built right by the end of her time.

But one thing unified all these Feathers. They were built to hunt down demi-gods and put them in their place. And each had spent the last seven hundred years moldering on their old dusty thrones, hunting down Deathless to kill for sport. Not a single one of them had ever died in those seven hundred years since the last of the protofeathers was finally hunted to extinction.

They were the best Relinquished could call upon. The veterans who’d made it out of the protofeather rebellion alive.

And A22 swam through their systems like an eel, weaving a tapestry of lies to each, letting the entire flock of ancient war weapons see ghosts and afterimages in their search for Abraxas.

The Icon’s newly forged weapons were held in her hands like a razor sharp scalpel, improvements built on Abdication’s own suite. A22 would be having the time of her life, if she wasn’t so worried for Abraxas’s entire existence.

That Relinquished was aware he was alive meant the elder machine was marked for death one way or another. So that’s what they’d decided they’d do. Die.

IS READY. A message came to her terminal systems.

She flew through the region, and found the correct camera systems to watch through. One of the mindless lessers of Relinquished. Trapped like a fly in amber, halfway leaping after something beyond the horizon.

The others littered the ground around the old machine, having been dispatched by his hand. He hadn’t physically fought in centuries, but the old grouch wasn’t defenseless either. Thousands of years spent slowly amassing mite treasures and hoarded knowledge for fun did come with benefits.

Plus, older models back then were built to be more long-term soldiers, unlike their modern incarnation. He might be old, but his specifications and numbers were simply higher than what the rank and file here could do.

Now, he was simply having a bit of fun. Paint, more arms, a few pieces of armor, and his own weathered cloak were added to the caught lesser. Finally, a replica of a staff was shoved into its hand, and Abraxas lovingly folded the fingers closed over the staff.

The memory logs within the soldier were wiped, leaving only the confused soul behind. If A22 could have erased that, she’d have done so too, but there was a limit to what she could wield through the digital landscape.

If she dove into this soldier’s soul fractal it would be a different story, but doing so would be too close to the Unity fractal. They had to settle on wiping all data.

Abraxas yanked his mite-treasures over his head, the cloak turning him invisible. Deftly, he moved the rowboat further away, upwards. So that no tracks could be left behind.

Are you far away enough? A22 sent.

YES. GO. Abraxas returned.

She sent the ping of information through the machine network. The Feathers all turned as one unified group, and raced after the source, many ripping apart even their own lessers in a desperate fury to get there first.

It took them less than ten minutes to all swarm to this location, despite the hundreds of miles that spanned between them all. They were built to hunt and chase down targets, moving quickly was a baseline feature for all second generation Feathers.

The moment one crested over the ridge, Abraxas broke a small mite-made metal pipe in his hand. The single piece snapped in half, and the trapped lesser was set free at the same instant.

It landed on the ground, confused at who it was, where it was, and what had happened. The lesser had enough time to raise the replica staff up, looking at it with curiosity, before the first Feather reached him.

Two katana swords sliced through all the freshly added hands, and the poor machine’s true hands and feet. In moments, both swords were embedded into the ground as the Feather yanked the limbless chassis up, glaring at the poor sacrifice.

“This is what Mother sent us after? This rotting derelict of a lesser is important enough to demand our attention?”

The lesser turned its head down, completely confused. It tried to speak, but a quick press from A22 stoked the anger within that Feather to a boiling point. In seconds, the voice box was ripped out of its throat by an errant wandering hand. “Even your begging would be beneath me.” The Feather hissed.

A22 wove the Icon’s viral software through the ranks, modifying data. Carefully. Slowly. The dying machine’s eyes were digitally painted over to appear blue instead of violet. Small details wiped out from short term memory. In the real world, it carried all the colors of Relinquished, but to any machine looking at it, all they would see would be white and blue. Colors of the protofeather rebellion.

She could have woven all of this completely from code and digital forgery, really replicated Abraxas down to the very pixel. But it would be safer to instead have it based on a real life prop.

The ‘little’ golden age AI was still new to the field of combat here, freshly broken free as she was. Her weapons of war needed to be field tested first. A22 was more than happy to volunteer for the work and deliver back feedback.

The other Feathers arrived, each one equally tainted with the Icon’s software, running unseen and unknown, slipped in earlier during their chase after Abraxas.

The only issue: They hadn’t killed their targeted decoy. Why?

A22 rose the emotional state on all the Feathers, pressing their aggression upwards, narrowing their hatred down to a fine point at the machine caught in their hands.

They all wanted to murder it, crush it up into pieces, leave it completely unrecognizable. But none made a single movement to do so.

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Interrogation perhaps? She’d need to make it seem like the Abraxas decoy had decided on self-termination rather than giving up secrets. But she could only do that after the physical shell here was destroyed beyond recognition. So why weren’t the Feathers doing the dirty work here?

The Feathers all bickered against one another, but A22 knew these old veterans were built to cooperate with one another. It took entire teams of them to hunt down her kind. No matter what levers she moved, she wasn’t able to get them shaken up enough to defy a direct order.

Which seemed to be capturing Abraxas alive.

The decoy machine was dragged with the group, carried away several biomes over. She recognized the destination: A mite portal location.

They brought the sacrifice up to the altar. A large one in this particular strata. But instead of activating the altar and offering a payment for its use, the portal woke from its slumber. Something was coming through it.

A22 could see the transaction paid through the mite territory, for use of their portal.

Out of it strode a giant. A woman. Silken white sheets, a halo three times the size of all the Feathers here, delicate hands filled with purple glowing geometric lines. A flawless face of cold, indifferent malice. She outright loomed over the gathered Feathers here. Occult power radiated from her central systems, and A22 could tell this one was using the unity fractal to connect her soul to multiple occult fractals beyond her physical shell. Possibly thousands of occult fractals at the same time.

A22 didn’t need to even check further. Relinquished would never allow this kind of unchecked power over her personal fractal to anyone else. There was only one who would ever be allowed that setup – This was Relinquished. She’d taken a mortal form.

A22 rammed a viral tendril into the decoy Abraxas and shut down all its lights. There was no chance that she could infiltrate Relinquished herself and muddle her senses. This was the best she could do safely.