Insomnia Protocol
According to Katherine’s latest scan, Maksym’s breath slowed to twelve breaths per minute, heart rate settled at fifty-eight BPM, core temperature dropping 0.2 degrees as his metabolism downshifted.
He drooled slightly onto her collarbone, having fallen asleep using her chest as a pillow. A thin, glistening thread of saliva connecting his lower lip to the hexagonal plating above her left cooling lattice.
Katherine archived the image under [PRECIOUS :: DO_NOT_DELETE :: EVER].
She then rapidly catalogued:
The way his eyelashes cast micro-shadows on his cheekbone in the faint ambient light filtering through the tent fabric. The minute fluctuations in his skin temperature as mountain air pressed against the nylon. The little, involuntary sounds he made, slightly short of snoring, the periodic contented exhales, like a large well-fed mammal that had eaten several hot dogs and made excellent life choices.
Choices such as making a priorly emotionally stunted gun unit like herself feel… wanted, appreciated in so many wonderful, new ways.
Katherine dialed her displays to their dimmest setting. She had no intention of waking him. She was, she realized, protective of his sleep in a way carrying zero tactical justification. More protective than she’d ever been of Galateya, or her gun unit sisters, or the entire Frontenachii Fleet with the formerly invincible Slayer’s Sword Matriarch Avatar as its heart.
The poor Slayer’s Sword was sleeping forevermore on the moon now. There would be no waking for her. Katherine realised that she was fiercely missing their fleet mother, the highest rated weapon in the fleet, the wisest of them all. How could the humans possibly overcome the Frontenachii capital ship’s incredible power and clever avatar?
Arriving at no realistic explanation, Katherine sighed and then considered the concept of sleep for herself, spinning it in her mind like a six-dimensional dungeon map.
She knew the base theory of sleep, having observed Galateya at such. Circadian rhythm reduction in neural activity, consolidation of memory engrams, restoration of adenosine-depleted cellular reserves. All local mammals required it. Prads and even their Omnid lordly Masters partook in it.
Sleep… was a biological maintenance protocol for organic systems experiencing cellular fatigue and general inconvenience of being made of meat. Her crystalloid consciousness accumulated no existential grime requiring periodic unconsciousness to scrub clean, yet she desired to experience it nevertheless.
[Kawathra?] She V-texted. [Can I fall asleep and have… dreams?]
[You can indeed,] The Datamancer answered.
[But what if terrible things happen?] Katherine suddenly asked, arriving at a dire spec. [What if a bear or another deadly, flying beast attacks? Who’s going to protect my Maksym?]
[Your gun unit scanner can continue to monitor the terrain for threats while you sleep,] Kawathra replied with a small chortle. [Just set it to do so.]
[Right,] Katherine replied. [How do I fall asleep after I do that though?]
[Turn off your eyes. Relax. Think of nothing. You should fall asleep then.]
[Mkay.]
Katherine turned off her eyes.
She relaxed, laying in the dark tent, listening to the wind push through the lupine fields, the last ember-pops of the dying campfire, Maksym’s steady breathing, and a distant owl interrogating the forest.
Thirty seconds passed.
Katherine turned on her eyes.
[Kawthy, it’s not working!] She whined.
[You have to give it more time,] the Datamancer stated with a half smile.
Katherine tried again.
Turned her eyes off, really committing to the experience. Relaxed herself. Let her tail go limp.
Forty-one seconds. The sounds of her own heartbeat ticked on slowly.
Her eyes turned on. The tent ceiling stared back at her, mocking her with its defencelessly primitive, blue nylon texture.
She knew what the problem was on a technical level. Gun units ran on beast cores and UwU juice. They didn’t have an off switch. They had [standby] and [safe] modes, which was functionally equivalent to being a very bored lamp when not browsing weapon-net for new learning experiences of winning against dungeons and other horrible things the Frontenachii fought for treasures to hoard.
Katherine attempted to relax once again and listened to a beetle crawling across a pine cone fourteen meters away. She sensed the electromagnetic hum of Maksym’s phone charging from its battery pack in his backpack. She tasted the residual sugar molecules of their marshmallow, hot dog and beer feast lingering in the air.
Feeling mildly bothered, she looked down at the sleeping human tucked against her. His arm was draped across her midsection, fingers loosely curled around one of the hexagonal plates on her hip. His golden-blond hair fanned out in messy spikes. His mouth twitched as he sleep-murmured something about “rocket sausage.”
The way his eyebrows pinched inward when he dreamed… was adorable. She examined him with a small happy purr, admiring the tiny scar on his chin from what his Goodbook profile tagged as a [skateboarding incident, age 16]. Noted the calluses on his fingertips from years of soldering and guitar practice as evidenced by more Goodbook posts.
His right foot twitched. A dream-kick. She caught and confined his ankle with her tail before he punted the tent wall.
“Mmfh,” Maksym mumbled.
Katherine’s displays flickered with the softest, barely there, pink heart emoji, then darkened. She pressed her snout gently to the top of his head and inhaled. He smelled like a billion different flavors, stretching into every direction of the fantastic, wonder-filled day they spent together.
She inhaled again.
And again.
And continued inhaling at three-second intervals for the next seven minutes, which she refused to classify as “sniffing her boyfriend in his sleep” and instead logged as [ATMOSPHERIC QUALITY ASSESSMENT :: ONGOING].
Sleep. This wasn’t sleep. This was obsessive monitoring!My Quest today is to experience sleep! She informed herself.
Not wanting to bother the smug Datamancer further with trivial “how do I sleep?” demands, and unable to entertain herself with weapon-net due to the intermittent lag, she fished Maksym’s phone out of the bag with her tail and tapped on the password she saw him use earlier and then began watching plentiful human GoTube videos about sleep, checking out various related links.
Eventually, she ran into the nosleep geddit forum where she eagerly began to absorb various… articles. The nosleep story posting board like the rest of the human internet was… strange.
Surely some of these posts are… what the fuck?!
She could barely believe what she’d read.
The Seers and Datamancers classified Earth as an extra safe, Grade-3 resource world with zero magical infrastructure, a linear dimension where dungeons couldn’t possibly bloom!
This place was safe. Mundane. Boring!!!
And… yet.
Katherine absorbed a story about a staircase appearing in the middle of a national forest. Park rangers warned each other to never climb the stairs. One of them didn’t listen and…
The story made her shudder ever so slightly.
She glanced at the dark tree line visible through the tent’s mesh window, feeling concerned that somewhere out there infinite stairs to the dark abyss lived, waiting for her human to accidentally stumble into their all-devouring, inescapable embrace.
Olympic National Forest surrounded them on all sides. Thousands of square kilometers of old-growth timber, glacial valleys, and fog-choked ravines where sunlight arrived late and left early. The small valley they chose for their camping sat well above where deciduous forest surrendered to subalpine fir, mountain hemlock, and bare scree fields punched through by glacial moraine.
Katherine ran a far-range sensor sweep.
Owl, of a Northern Spotted variety, was perched in a dead snag forty nine meters west. A hoary marmot denned beneath a boulder pile. Two pikas squeaked territorial insults at each other across a talus field. An ermine investigated the paracord bear-hang where Maksym left their food bag dangling.
Mundane, local fauna.Linear, utterly harmless fauna she could obliterate in a flash of her tail and claws. Fauna lacking any extradimensional bits.
Katherine returned to the sub and became absorbed in a story about a woman finding a door in her basement leading to a blue hallway stretching for miles. The hallway had wallpaper. The wallpaper stains began to resemble faces the deeper she went in. It did not end well for the intrepid explorer, the story suddenly cutting off at the most interesting exploration documentation.
Another post.
A man driving through rural Kansas encountered a gas station attendant asking him to “please stay until the tall ones leave.” The man drove away, not listening. His rearview mirror showed lanky figures standing in the dark road behind him, scraping the telephone wires.
Katherine curled protectively around Maksym’s body.
She read another post, this one about a humanoid half-flattened creature living inside the walls of an apartment building, breathing through the electrical outlets.
A post about a child’s imaginary friend leaving muddy footprints on the ceiling.
A post about a dog staring at the corner of a room for nine hours straight, growling at something the owner and post author couldn’t see.
A post about a sus thing pretending to be a mother calling children down for dinner from the top of the stairs while the real mother stood behind the children, whispering “don’t go.”
Katherine’s long range threat scanner swept the perimeter again.
All normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
She read a story about a search-and-rescue worker finding a fully furnished living room in the middle of a cave system, sixteen miles from any entrance. The television was on. A laugh track played. The couch was… warm.
Katherine turned all three of her ocular sensors toward the tent entrance and stared at the zipper, feeling deeply creeped out.
Gun units didn’t, weren’t supposed to experience such things! Threats existed to be put down, feeling unnerved about a theoretical threat was a new experience to her, one that she didn’t expect to encounter tonight.
The tent zipper did nothing extraordinary, because zippers were inanimate, primitive objects made of interlocking metal teeth and polyester tape.
She knew this.
She also knew, thanks to many nosleep stories consumed in rapid succession, that zippers sometimes opened on their own, especially in the dead of night, when the protagonist had convinced themselves everything was fine.
“This is fine,” she murmured, “there’s nothing out there.”
The statistically significant “witching hour” referenced in 31% of the stories was looming too.
Katherine ran another distant threat sweep. It didn’t help her relax or fall asleep one bit.
The ermine had moved closer. Now eight meters away, a sinuous white-and-brown ribbon of mustelid pressed flat against a granite slab, beady black eyes reflecting ambient moonlight.
Ermines weighed between 150 and 450 grams and lacked magical capability, or any evolutionary trait beyond murdering rodents with the ferocity of a creature ten times their size. Ermines were… harmless to humans and especially harmless to gun units.
The ermine stared directly at the tent.
At her.
Katherine stared back.
The ermine tilted its head forty-five degrees to the left.
Katherine tilted her head forty-five degrees, mirroring the motion before she realized what she was doing.
The ermine stood on its hind legs, tiny forepaws clasped against its chest, elongating into a white exclamation mark against the granite slabs.
Katherine’s threat protocols flagged the posture as [SURVEILLANCE BEHAVIOR] before the rational portion of her processor noted that ermines stood upright to scan for predators, and she was, technically, a very large and most dangerous predator around.
Katherine let out a deep, subsonic growl. The ermine dropped to all fours and vanished into a crack between boulders with liquid speed.
She exhaled like a deflating accordion.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she whispered to herself. “This behaviour isn’t conducive to the sleep Quest achievement.”
She closed the nosleep tab.
She opened it again fourteen seconds later and drowned in a story about a hiker finding a trail camera in the woods. The camera’s memory card contained two hundred photos taken at three-second intervals. The first hundred showed an empty clearing. Photo 101 showed a figure standing at the tree line. Each subsequent photo showed the figure closer. Photo 198 showed a face pressed against the lens. Photo 199 showed the back of the hiker’s own head, taken from behind him. Photo 200 was corrupted.
Katherine activated her sensor arrays, searching for elusive threats that were clearly filling this incredibly sus planet.
Granite. Scree. Subalpine fir. Mountain air.
She swept a full 360-degree scan with every passive and active sensor her systems could muster. Electromagnetic, thermal, acoustic, seismic micro-vibration.
Results: owl [now digesting a vole], marmot [fully asleep, core temp at torpor range], pikas [fleeing the ermine], ermine [successful pika catch, currently performing a killing bite].
Boring. Mundane. Supremely ordinary.
Yet the stories she read created a static-filled hollow in her heart, a scratchy, worry-adjacent feeling that refused to go away.