Unbound Gun
The sun slowly descended towards the Pacific ocean, carving up the clouds with white and gold rays. The light struck the waves of Lake Crescent, refracting each with a billion sparkling crescents. The Cascadia mountain range, shaggy with old growth pine at the base and glacier tipped at the top, framed Darkfall Valley like the outside rim of a vast bowl.
Katherine sat cross-legged on the sand, digitigrade legs folded in. Maksym Drzewiecki rested in her lap, the human’s blonde curls slightly damp.
“Are you feeling better?” Katherine asked, as her hexagonal-textured fingertips softly brushed through his hair.
“Feels like my soul left my body for a bit and came back wearing concrete shoes painted in bossy foxes,” Maksym murmured, eyes half-lidded. “Pretty sure I died and saw the light.”
“What light?” Katherine asked worriedly.
“The tunnel of light from doing too many pushups! Lord have mercy upon my pushup-murdered saul!”
“Your vitals never dropped below safe parameters,” Katherine reported. “Your cortisol levels reached statistically alarming heights while your dopamine receptors briefly went into rebellion… Otherwise, you shouldn’t have observed the Arx wheel.”
“Arx what now?” Maksym asked.
“Arxtruria,” Katherine explained. “A gargantuan black-hole encompassing megastructure whose sole purpose is the harvesting and recycling of souls from every world including your Earth.”
“Uh-huh,” the human let out. “So everyone who dies goes there? The afterlife is a… megastructure?”
“Yes,” Katherine said briskly, not sure if further elaboration would terrorize the Skinwalker-allure-stressed human into shock. According to the Weapon-Net chatter, [religion] tag revelations tended to break some humans along unknown invisible lines, making them act… erratic. Perhaps she shouldn’t have mentioned Arx at all…
Worrying about someone other than Galateya was extremely odd. Not worrying about Galateya was odd too, going perpendicular to her primary purpose as a symbiote gun.
Ex-symbiote gun, she reminded herself.
“Relax,” Maksym yawned. “I’m just being a tad overly-dramatic to get more lap time from my favorite cutie in the universe.”
“How can I be tagged as ‘the favorite in the universe’?” Katherine asked. “Have you met every being in the universe and tabulated their cute-ness levels against mine?”
The human pursed his lips, clearly struggling to formulate a rebuttal through the fog of post-Charmchain mental derailment. Katherine scanned the human with a threat-detection spell-array from her palm to once again check his vitals.
The info-array determined that Maxim was a mundane human in acceptable health. Very low threat level. Also [System Error - Threat level] which could be meaning anything, judging by how badly her mind had been screwed up by Galateya’s conceptual freezing.
How was her dragon owne… [System Error] even able to do that?
Ex-owner. Keiy [Katherine] mentally corrected herself, avoiding the tag error. She had no owner now it seemed.
None. Not Teya, not the Frontenachii Omnicorp fleet, not her Legate great-grandmother.This was incredibly illegal. Gun units weren’t allowed to be unbound!
She ignored this dark thought. Being unbound, free was nice. If they melted her down for this crime in the future, at least she had a rare chance to experience what it was like to be a person in the present.
Something else was nagging at her params. The bond between her and Galateya was frozen on a conceptual level, which according to Weapon-Net’s [Taniwha Spawnling performance analytics] should have been impossible for a Taniwha below Level 20.
Did Galateya lie to everyone including her gun to her about her level? This certainly seemed to be the case. Was she mad at Galateya for such lies? Theoretically, she was supposed to report such dangerous deviations. Truthfully, she did nothing. Because it allowed Katherine to be free.
Truly free, to do… anything.To…
Katherine stared at waves on Lake Crescent. It was…
“Beautiful,” she let out.
“Mmm?” Maksym voiced.
“The lake, with you in my lap… it’s… nice. Beautiful,” she repeated with a small, involuntary shudder.
Maskym chortled. “The lake should put that on its dating profile.”
“Wha-pfff ha,” A giggle escaped Katherine’s mouth, escalating into more uncontrollable laughter. “Ha ha ha what?” Another massive, escalating deviation. Gun units really weren’t supposed to… laugh at jokes. “Whomever would the lake even date?”
“A sexy river?” Maksym wiggled his eyebrows. “As a long term relationship. Or… maybe she’s more interested in a quick romp with a sexy, loud thunderstorm?”
“Ehe ha ha ha,” Katherine detonated, pixelated tears forming at the edges of her digital eyes as she laughed heartily. “Slayer’s Sword! You… you are a funny creature.”
“I try.” Maksym shrugged. “I get… particularly performative around heart-stopping cyborgs.”
Pixelated stars exploded beneath Katherine’s cheeks. She pawed at her face with her hands but was unable to wipe the stars away. The stars cascaded into winged red hearts on her chest and shoulder displays. Didn’t she turn those off?
[Kawathra!] Katherine accelerated herself and rapidly M-texted the Datamancer. [Why am I…]
[Blushing visibly?] The Datamancer guessed. [It’s part of your… new body’s params.]
[Why is uncontrollable blushing part of my body params?] Katherine demanded.
[Your body-modding desire was to be more attractive and feminine. According to infoids gathered by my guns, blushing excessively outside of your mental control is a very desirable parameter. The locals often describe blushing maidens in their novels and feature such in animated popular fictional 2D-visual-audio episodic narratives called ‘anime’.]
Katherine considered yelling at Kawathra to adjust her body params, but then decided against it. She’d only do so if the human in her lap would disapprove of such. She decelerated herself back down to linear-operational-time and looked down.
The human in her lap was smiling, staring intently at her chest.
“Do you… like my blushing?” She asked, tapping her dark elongated face with a blue-clawed finger.
“You betcha,” Maksym said. “Expressive girls are more fun than wooden ones.”
“I am assuredly not made from wood,” Katherine stated.
Maksym let out another chortle. “No… you’re too soft and curvy for that.”
Katherine noted that his blue eyes drifted back to a very specific location on her anatomy. She tracked the trajectory of his gaze, ran a comparison against her database of human behavioral patterns, and arrived at the conclusion that her chest appeared to be holding his attention hostage.
She accelerated her cognition by a factor of four hundred and dove into her neuralscape to ponder the meaning of this development.
In the digital landscape of her mind, where a multitude of hexagonal flowers and trees blossomed in the spaces Galateya’s freeze had damaged, Katherine strolled to a small clearing and admired her avatar-body in a summoned hexagon-edged mirror.
The curvy chest designed by Kawathra mostly housed cooling lattice. They were aesthetically interesting to humans, she supposed, by deliberate design preference she’d given Kawathra during her fabrication… The design preference to look optimally feminine, similar to natural pradavarian/Omnid female anatomy.
She returned to real time. Maksym was still staring intently at her chest.
“Maksym,” she ventured. “What have you lost in that region? I can run a search protocol if you describe the object.”
He blinked slowly. “Hum?”
“Your eyes keep returning to my upper torso. I am assuming you are attempting to locate something there… maybe a flaw in the cooling lattice?”
A long pause stretched between them, filled with the gentle wash of lake water against the shore.
Then the human started to giggle. The giggling escalated into uncontrollable chortles and sparks of wetness at the edges of her eyes.
“Aha ha ha,” he finally was able to formulate a response through the laughter, “my sweet, beautiful, innocent cyborg.”
“What is so amusing?” She asked, frown emojis flashing across her shoulder and chest. “Did I perchance phrase things incorrectly?”
“Nah, you phrase it just right.” He smiled. “Like an angel. Aight. Sit tight. I’m gonna educate you on the esoteric truth on the nature of humanity. Ready?”
“My memory has substantial space capacity for new cultural data.” She affirmed.
“Right-o. So. Boobs. Tits. Mammaries.”
“Yes?”
“Boobs are… very broadly speaking, the cornerstone of like sixty percent of our internet culture and economy. The rest is cats and conspiracy theories. Now, I personally consider myself an enlightened, modern man, respectful and whatnot and would never reduce a woman to her component parts. Unless she was a robot that I built myself and had to repair.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Yes. Anyways.” He raised a finger. “There is a noble and ancient tradition among my people, by which I mean… men with too much screen time.”
“Which is?”
“The fine tradition of admiring and contemplating the female chest! And not just that! The chosen talented few acolytes of this tradition dedicate their time to writing about the chest, drawing it or composing music about… such boundless curves.”
“Is this a legitimate, foundational cultural institution?”
“Indeed! We invented the printing press to spread the gospel of pinups! Came up with photography and immediately took pics of corsets! Built the internet and in no time at all crammed it full of women in swimsuits or no suits at all. Literally what our civilization runs on!”
“Uh-huh.” She stated. “Are these empirically supported facts or more manifesting?”
“Ehhh,” he waved a hand. “Why not both?”
Katherine accelerated her mind. She zipped through a few million archived human images Datamancer Paqq and her gun units were forced to sift through during their Infinity Glove Finding Quest. There was indeed a statistically dominant number of female chest morphology. She slowed back to linear time and gave him a considered nod. “Your… revelation seems to hold some empirical grounding, according to the… Frontenachii research on humanity.”
“See! Boobs power the human race!” He grinned. “And yours, by the way, are objectively unreasonable. Extra-reasonable? Anatomically… absolutely buckwild! Truly an honor to below. I’d write a song, but my brain’s still rebooting from fox-ness overload.”
A new tree bloomed in her digital landscape. A strange one, with leaves shaped like little red flowery hearts and a trunk of curling Polish and English script. Katherine paused, accelerated, walked over to inspect it. Each of the leaves reflected snapshots of her and Maksym in different locations today. She labeled the sapling [MAKSYM | aesthetic appreciation].
When she returned, she found her digital mouth had curved up entirely on its own. “This… boob appreciation,” she said after looking up fitting references to produce a joke, “is it a full-time occupation? Do humans schedule it? Is there a union? ‘Local 69, Boob Admiration Division’?”
“If there isn’t, I’m founding it tomorrow. President Maksym Drzewiecki, Chief Executive Ogle Officer! Aaaanyway,” he continued, clearing his throat with great theatrical dignity, “the point is, your design is… seriously devastating. Kawathra gave you curves with malicious intent. Like, mathematically unfair curves. I’m pretty sure they violate at least three international treaties on weapons of mass distraction!”
Katherine glanced down at herself, then back at him, metal ears wiggling. “Should I…” She accelerated herself to look up more appropriately amusing commentary. “…file a complaint to the United Nations? ‘Dear sirs, my chest has been accused of crimes against humanity. Please advise.’”
“Tell them to send the complaint to my pants. They’ve already surrendered.”
Both of them descended into chortles and giggling then. Katherine felt like she was floating without activating her anti-grav engines. Laughing at jokes on a date felt… absolutely wonderful.
Maksym propped himself up on one elbow and squinted out at the lake. The wind had picked up, ruffling the surface into long silver lines.
“Speaking of more design curiosities. Earlier, Teya zipped right through the lake jetski-style with Sage atop her. Made a whole big spray-arc thing. Is that a Taniwha thing or can you do that sort of thing? Run on water like a ninja maybe?”
“Ah. I can do better.”
“Better how?”
“I can fly.”
He sat upright so fast he nearly hit her chin with his head. “You can WHAT?!”
“I can fly,” Katherine repeated. “My base frame includes an antigravity ring along the spinal axis and two more on my legs here.” She padded the shiny ring-like structures on the sides of her thighs.
“Then I simply must demand a flight. Immediately. As your contractually obligated boyfriend.”
“We are not contractually… anything. Wait. Are you doing… more manifesting?” She squinted at him.
“Maybe.”
A chortle escaped her Voicecast hexagrams. The tree in her clearing grew another branch.
“Come off me, so I can unfold it.”
Maksym enthusiastically scrambled off her.
Katherine rose and stretched.
A soft hum vibrated through her chest plates. Two segments along her shoulder blades parted with a faint mechanical sigh, and a ring of dark metal unfolded outward from her spine, expanding into a halo of interlocking hexagons that ignited along their inner edges with a pale blue light. Her digitigrade legs lengthened slightly, the joints reconfiguring. Two more rings unfolded from her hips, smaller, angled, fins of dark crystalloid extending from the sides of her thighs to form aerodynamic surfaces. A wider crescent of plating swept out from her lower back, like the broadest blade of a swallow’s tail.
“Come here,” she said, spreading her arms. He stepped into the circle of her arms and she pulled him flush against her front, one arm secure around his waist, the other bracing his upper back.
“Ready for takeoff,” she stated. “Don’t jump off. My structural integrity is rated for this configuration. Yours is rated for approximately fourteen-foot falls onto soft ground, beyond which you become various versions of soup.”
“Such reassuring pep talk.”
She kept her chest and arms entirely as they had been, holding him. “I’ll hold onto you just in case.”
The blue rings ignited, humming ominously.
Max exhaled as Katherine tipped sideways until they were both horizontal. Her body transformed more, looking like a fusion of a girl and a flying bike. Her shoulders unfolded out, becoming handlebars, his legs dangling across her stomach acting like a comfortable seat.
And then they shot off into the sky.