Chapter 5 #2
Sighing, he rubbed a hand over his face.
"That is the only one that will work, is it not?
Look at the location. Look at the others.
That facility was at the core of everything else.
It should have been built in the safest place for it.
No other station will bring the entire network online.
We will be fixing facility after facility rather than utilizing the droids to do so.
You're asking me to fix something that will take not just years, but perhaps even centuries.
It is impossible without this central building being fixed. "
"Sanctuary," Pilot murmured. "They called it Sanctuary."
He knew the little droid said that with the intent to make his heart squeeze. But it didn't. He cared very little what the humans had called it, or what the reasoning behind all of that was. Perhaps this was the last known bastion of humanity before they succumbed to their own folly. He cared not.
It was going to be the place where humanity started again, if he had his hands on it. But he would need to make sure that it was suitable for such a thing.
"I don't care what they called it, Pilot. All I care about is that it is fixable. Find the last known logs from that facility and tell me exactly what went wrong."
"The logs are unreadable. They must have been destroyed in some kind of solar storm. Even the backups are damaged beyond repair. The only way to know what went on there is to go and discover it for ourselves."
"That's not good enough," he snarled.
But then he froze when he heard the faint sound of feet hitting the floor. Snarling, he turned to see that the woman had frozen where she had gotten out of her pod. She held onto the edge of the metal tube, her eyes wide as she stared at him as if he were going to attack her at any moment.
"Where do you think you're going?" he asked, his voice deep and echoing in the chamber. "You are to stay where I put you."
She lifted a hand slowly, pointing toward the screens. "You missed something."
"We didn't miss anything. I have a droid. They do not make mistakes."
"They try to do their best not to make mistakes, but even artificial intelligence is wrong sometimes." She straightened. Her body seemed to unfurl itself. She was tall for a woman, softer than most he had dealt with in his life.
Proteus was used to warriors who would battle until their last breath, but she was rounded at the hips and breasts, clearly designed to do so by the hand of a man.
He'd never understand their obsession with hourglass shapes, but Proteus rarely had any intent to find anything attractive. He wasn't built to do so.
But as she slipped by, he was startled by the scent of her. Underneath all the chemicals that had kept her alive for such a long time in that pod, he could smell flowers.
It had been centuries since he'd smelled those, and even then, he wasn't given the opportunity often.
Suddenly he remembered a scientist who had brought flowers into the lab and showed them to him.
She'd laughed, saying she hadn't thought he would ever get the chance to see them.
She'd loved the scent of daisies and wildflowers, so she brought them for him to experience.
This woman flustered him. She smelled like flowers and approached his droid with a hesitancy that made him want to snap her neck and get it over with. Already she was an odd beast that he wasn't used to.
"Here," she said quietly, pointing out a line of binary code that meant nothing to him. "This means that the droids created a separate file backup on an outside server, doesn't it?"
Pilot tapped its feet on the console a few times, not hitting buttons but almost... angrily. "I don't know how I missed that. I ran it through my language module multiple times."
"They wrote it so that another droid wouldn't notice it," she murmured. "This was meant for a human to read."
"Why would they do that?"
Proteus wanted to know the answer to the same question. "Are you suggesting the droids in that facility were hiding something from their own kind?"
"Or they were ordered to do so."
He stared at her reflection on the screens, but she wasn't looking at him. She was staring deeply into the codes as though they held the answers to the universe within those two numbers. She wanted to help, he supposed. Perhaps she thought this was an opportunity to prove her worth.
He would allow it. If she knew how to read what Pilot did not, then that would get them further in this plan of his. So be it. He'd trust her for now, because he had no reason not to trust her.
But he lifted a clawed hand and pointed it at her. "If you lie to me, or try to escape, then I will pull you apart. I'll start with your finger joints and remove pieces of your body at every junction, keeping you alive until I give you permission to die."
Why did she look so serene at his threat? She nodded and replied, "I understand. Allow me to read through these old messages, and hopefully I can provide you with a better picture of what occurred."
"Do that."
Proteus slunk to the back corner and leaned against it, unfurling his tail along the perimeter of the room to stretch it out. He'd see what this woman was made of, but he wasn't going to leave just yet.