"Carbine? You okay? Your eyes look a little pixelated, man." Carbine recognized the voice; it belonged to Rio, one of the systechs that maintained his cybernetics in combat-ready order. He could even picture her in his head-a short, sinewy woman in a grease-stained olive-green jumpsuit, with bubble-gum-pink hair that fell in long curls over the input jack in her temple and eyes that were entirely black except for a blinking '12:00' in the center of each eyeball (some sort of ancient systech running gag, apparently). But...
But he couldn't see her. The place where her voice was coming from kept glitching out, the image nothing but a garbled mass of colors with jagged, rectangular edges. That worried Carbine just a little, because his visual displays were linked to his IFF systems. If Rio was glitching, it meant that his IFF couldn't quite decide whether he needed to see her or not. That was bad. Normally friendlies didn't get grayed out unless it was a combat situation and he needed to focus his attention on enemy combatants, but he was back at base and reporting for post-combat refits and maintenance. And normally base systechs wouldn't be flagged as enemies at all. So either his AI piggybrain couldn't decide whether he was in a firefight or not, or it couldn't decide whether Rio was a threat or not.
Or possibly both, which would be really bad. "Uh, yeah, hi, yeah, um...Rio?" he asked, directing his attention to the patch of glitchy space where he thought she was probably standing. The whole situation felt massively disorienting, and he struggled to keep his focus. "Um, yeah, I think something might be wrong with my visuals. Some of my combat protocols aren't disengaging properly. Could you maybe plug in and take a look?" He tapped his input jack before unsealing it with a mental command, and looked meaningfully at the collection of pixels that he assumed represented his systech.
"Yeah," Rio said slowly, her head contorting in an eye-wrenching display of static that Carbine assumed was a frown. "I don't think that's such a good idea right now, Carbine. You caught a packet of malware from that burst transmission that took out Delta formation-not as bad as they did, or you'd be speaking Portuguese right now and swearing loyalty to the Estado Perfeito, but you're head's pretty futzed up. I'm not jacking in there direct for love nor money."
"I...how did you know that?" Carbine remembered the battle; he remembered the metal sphere shooting up into the air from a concealed launcher five clicks east of Madrid, and he remembered putting up his firewalls just as the transmitter blasted out a wave of data designed to corrupt his computer-augmented brain into changing loyalties. He remembered blasting the databomb out of the sky and firing off an emergency shutdown beacon that prevented Delta from attacking their own flank-he even remembered hoping for a medal. But he didn't remember the malware getting through.
Rio's face suddenly resolved into focus as she said, "Because you told me. You sent me a message telling you that your self-diagnostics were lighting up all over the place, that you had a worm you couldn't quarantine and it was corrupting your higher critical thinking subroutines." It was amazing how crystal clear the image suddenly became as she spoke. Carbine didn't know how he could possibly have had trouble seeing her before. The visuals were so sharp now that he could practically zoom right in on her vital areas. "You said you were going to report to me for debugging."
Carbine furrowed his brow in confusion. "Did I?" Of course he did, he could access his memories with perfect clarity and see the moment in his own timeline, but...but it didn't seem important. The entire sequence of events, everything from getting the self-diagnostic alert message to realizing his thought processes were affected to contacting Rio, it had all been flagged with such a low priority by his piggybrain that he couldn't keep it in his head unless he was directly viewing it. None of the information he was seeing mattered, not next to the important things his augments were telling him to do; and his meatbrain had been wired to listen to his piggybrain. Hell, half the reason that a soldier got a computer piggybacked onto his neural cortex was to keep him from getting distracted with irrelevancies in the middle of a crisis. He didn't need to know about everything he was doing. Piggy would keep track of it.
But Rio was right there, big as life and twice as clear in his sights. Sight. Vision. Whatever. She clearly wasn't going to just go away, not without at least a little reassurance that he was fine now. Which he was. He was sure of it, a confidence solidified by the computer in his skull into a solid certainty. "I ran my self-diagnostics, full scan," he said, his face smoothing into a plastic smile. "Everything is fine now." That didn't sound quite right-his memory files showed him shutting down his self-diagnostics, not running them-but that was another low priority event sequence. He had more important things he had to do. They were very important, vital to the war effort. He just couldn't let himself think about what they were right now.
Rio nodded in response, but she didn't exactly seem convinced. "Okay, Carbine," she said slowly, like she was an orderly talking to a dangerous mental patient. "That sounds fine. I'm just going to ask you to take a moment and really concentrate on what you're doing right now. Even if it doesn't seem important. Just...take stock of the situation, okay?" She slowly raised her hands up and put them on top of her head. It seemed decidedly strange, under the circumstances.
Still, he figured he'd better humor her. A good systech was worth their weight in palladium to a cyborg, and she clearly wasn't going to stop bothering him until he convinced her that he was thinking clearly. It was either that or hide her body inside the fuselage of one of the VTOL jets and falsify the security footage to eliminate any evidence that she came into the hangar bay, right? After sabotaging the reactor to go critical when examined? And setting off a chain reaction that would take out the entire hangar bay and as many pilots and crew as possible? He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. The completely clear, meticulously detailed absurdity, complete with reactor schematics and a target profile for Rio's vital organs.
A thought struck him. "Um, Rio?" he said, his voice perplexed. "I'm holding a gun on you, aren't I?"
Rio nodded slowly. She seemed to be doing everything slowly, like she was aware that all of his combat systems were fully engaged and he was far more likely to gun her down without warning if she made any sudden or threatening moves. "You are," she said, keeping her tones smooth and even. Like she was soothing a baby, if babies went around carrying loaded fully automatic carbine rifles loaded with explosive rounds. "And you're in a restricted underbay maintenance area. And when I came in you were just standing there staring at a suite of tools with a blank look on your face."
