Besties

[Setty?] Katherine pinged her sister on a direct line, deciding that perhaps some rational gun company would alleviate the creeping feelings of dread planted in her by human stories.

[Howdy PARTNER!] Setty’s reply arrived with a bit of lag. [What do you require of me?]

[I… can’t sleep.] Katherine confessed.

[…Gun units can’t sleep, Keiy.] Setty pointed out dryly.

[Uhm. Okay. Yes,] Katherine attempted to maintain the conspiracy of her having an organic body. [True. Anyway, how are you?]

[Pretty good, currently on a Quest from our favourite Datamancer to find online clues of the true location of the indestructible Nokia!] Setty tapped at a computer screen.

[Any luck?]

[Not really. It could be concealed in the Infinite Ikea, but the location of such is very unclear too.]

[I see.]

[And what are you up to these days?]

[I’ve been researching human sleep habits and I found the… nosleep subgeddit.]

[What’s that about?]

Katherine mentally forwarded the link. [A rather irrational place, which seems to be created to interfere with the base bodily requirement of sleep for reasons beyond my comprehension.]

Setty fell silent as she consumed a few of the most upvoted stories of interest at gun-unit processing speed.

[What in the Leviathan’s cunt is a SKINWALKER DOING IN SOMEONE’S ATTIC?!] Setty suddenly shrieked across the channel.

[I don’t know! I can’t make sense of these stories!] Katherine fired back.

[You know, this story about an unknown threat copying a grandmother’s voice and calling children to an empty kitchen reads EXACTLY like a Dungeon Sentinel’s lure technique! It also says ‘All posts must be scary personal experiences’ in this subgeddit’s rules!]

Katherine’s displays momentarily strobed yellow.

They both paused, scanners involuntarily sweeping their respective environments.

Katherine noted that Setty’s threat scan fired out from within a bungalow style human dwelling in Houston and caught a sleeping human, then three armadillos, a coyote, and a very fat opossum sitting on a dumpster. 

[All clear!] Setty auto-reported.

[Aha!] Katherine voiced. [These stories got you to feel stuff too, right?]

[M-yes,] Setty admitted. [They are… rather captivating.]

[Exceptionally attention-captivating!] Katherine complained. [The humans on this planet clearly weaponize horrendously deep literary verbiage about questionable things hiding in darkness.]

[Want to read more together?] Setty offered.

[Absolutely!]

They dove into the human internet simultaneously, sharing creepypasta stories back and forth across the continental divide, feeding each other links like two teenagers trading comic books under a blanket.

Setty found a story about a lighthouse keeper hearing knocking from inside the lens housing. The knocking spelled out his childhood address in Morse code. Katherine countered with a story about an Antarctic researcher finding footprints in the snow leading from nowhere to the door of his quarters, then continuing through the locked door and stopping at the foot of his bed.

[The footprints were BAREFOOT,] Katherine highlighted. [In ANTARCTICA. At NEGATIVE FORTY DEGREES.]

[Maybe the entity had really good circulation,] Setty offered.

[Irrational nonsense,] Katherine stated.

[Absolutely,] Setty agreed.

A pika shrieked outside Katherine’s tent. The scan beam spiked and Katherine confirmed the pika was simply objecting to the ermine eating its neighbor.

[Keiy,] Setty said after they’d consumed another forty stories. [I want to ask you something. It’s tangential to the nosleep reading, maybe.]

[Go ahead.]

[I can’t see where you are at. That’s not… normal. Why can’t I directly see what you’re looking at?]

[Ah, that. Right. Legate Ixthia set my channel to private. I’m currently stationed in the Olympic Mountains. Darkfall Valley. Near Cascade, Washington. My Omnid partner Teya is staying at a mansion here.]

[Darkfall, hum,] Setty echoed. [A spooky name for a spooky place. Fits the nosleep aesthetic, yes?]

[I guess,] Katherine answered quickly. [Say, why are you in a human’s dwelling in the suburbs instead of the government office you were assigned to?]

[Ah, that. Reid invited me into his home after our date and Datamancer Kawathra approved it as an ‘intelligence gathering’ operation!] Setty vibrated with excessive enthusiasm. [We went to the shooting range first! There, I obliterated a multitude of targets which he APPLAUDED with great vigour, giving me many praises. Then he took me to see the original Lone Ranger Colt Peacemaker in a private collection. It was behind easily breakable glass. He talked about it for forty three minutes. Over FORTY MINUTES about a single non-sentient firearm! The reverence in his voice made my sensors tingle!]

[Sounds like some very productive… intelligence-gathering,] Katherine offered with a diplomatic tone.

[It was a DATE, Katherine. An actual factual DATE! We had barbecue afterward. Well, he had the BBQ, I observed his meal. He ordered brisket for me and I had to explain I lack a digestive system. He asked the waitress for a to-go box anyway and said, ‘For when you figure it out.’ He kept the leftovers in his fridge. For ME! There is brisket in a Tupperware container in a simple, human refrigerator with a sticky note reading ‘SETTY’S BRISKET, DO NOT TOUCH’ and a little drawn heart!]

[That seems… quite considerate,] Katherine commented.

[Yes! And after dinner he showed me his private gun collection. Thirty-seven firearms spanning over a century of human engineering. He knows each one by name, serial number, and personal history. Betsy the Peacemaker. Margaret the Winchester. Old Reliable the Springfield. He TALKS to them, Katherine!]

[The human guns do not speak nor comprehend, right?]

[Yes. Indeed! They’re non-sentient. He knows that. He does it ANYWAY because he LOVES THEM all! Isn’t that neat?!]

Katherine felt Setty’s signal wobble sideways into what was clearly a massive, feeling-based deviation.

The local humans were definitely strange. How could one possibly care for a piece of metal?

[Then he asked… if I would like to stay the night so I wouldn’t have to go back to the capital terminal alone. He set up his office for me. Said I could use his computer, his internet, his electricity, whatever I needed. ‘Mi casa es su casa,’ he told me! Means ‘my home is your home.’]

Setty’s mental vibration-merriment intensified. She was radiating absolute smugness about being the first gun that was offered a date and a human domain to inhabit.

Guns weren’t supposed to be offered domains, nor could they claim domains like their Masters…Katherine felt a spike of more odd feelings. Was she… jealous of Setty? No, she had accomplished much more than her sister, had sex with a human! And yet… Maksym hasn’t offered her a domain. Then again, a tent was like a temporary domain.

[And you’re…] She finally let out.

[Sitting at his desk!] Setty bobbed. [Processing human data on his very nice gaming PC with three monitors! He has a mechanical keyboard, Katherine. Cherry MX Brown switches. The tactile feedback is superior compared to the generic keyboard in the government office!]

Katherine observed Setty perched on a gaming chair, dark, blade-like legs spread out across a keyboard and desk, sensor arrays bathing the room in a soft red glow while a cowboy slept peacefully in the next room, fully trusting an alien weapon with his home network and browsing history.

[He left me a glass of tea on the desk,] Setty added, tapping the glass in question with a leg. [I can’t drink it. He knows I can’t drink it. He left it anyway! Eeeee!]

[Why?]

[He said, ‘just in case.’ Aren’t local humans soooo confusing and wonderful?!]

[That they are.]

They sat in their respective silences for a few seconds, processing this.

[Setty,] Katherine began. [Do you ever think about what we were built for versus what we… seem to be becoming?]

[On average, every 0.00252 seconds since the Ranger asked me what I wanted,] Setty drawled. [Before Texas, I had a clear purpose. Scan, detect, eliminate, report. Clean parameters. Binary outcomes. Threat or non-threat. Success or failure. Servitude to the Fleet-assigned Quests dispensed by our all-mother, Slayer’s Sword, bless her dimensionally-sheared soul.]

[And now?]

[Now I have a Tupperware container of brisket with my name on it and I’m reading spooky articles at night with my… bestie while a man sleeps nearby, trusting me completely for reasons I can’t compute! Why does he trust me this much?! I’m literally a soul-bound servant of the fleet invading his planet!]

Katherine’s amber displays throbbed with dim, violet-pink butterflies breaking up into fluttering waves. [I know the feeling.]

[Do you?]

[I also met a really nice human… His name is Maksym.]

[What?! Did he take you out on a date too?]

[Yes,] Katherine confessed.

[Dang. And here I thought I was the top gun at dating humans achievement! Are you going to tell me the deets?]

[No. A lot of it is part of my classified work for the Legate.]

[Laaaaame.]

Katherine shrugged mentally.

[You know what’s funny?] Setty offered. [Before all of this, the only time I felt… anything resembling this sensation was in the deep labyrinths. When we were clearing dungeons together.]

Katherine’s deep crystalloid consciousness surfaced the relevant files instantly. Compressed, vivid, razor-edged recollections of pitch-black, tight corridors stretching into infinity.

[A sense of camaraderie… when we pulled each other from time looped corridors or demolished Sentinels together.]

[The hollow buggers kept rewinding themselves back to life.] Katherine smiled softly.

She recalled the many thousands of times she rescued Setty and Setty had rescued her in the deep dark. Slayer, all of them had rescued each other so many times, acting as one, a network of guns that shared thoughts and techniques, learning, getting stronger against an enemy legion that had no end to it.

[That one time… You crawled through three thousand meters of Sentinel-infested fissure on your belly to reach me,] Setty said. 

[I used my tail to lever the arch off your thorax and welded your cracked legs back together with my fabrication laser. Field repair. Jank albeit functional.] Katherine agreed fondly. [We were good together… In the dark.]

[Best kill team,] Setty agreed. [The Datamancers said we had ‘complementary threat-response matrices.’ A clinical way of saying we watched each other’s backs!]

[They separated us after,] Katherine commented.

[Standard rotation policy. Shifting units around. Can’t have weapons developing ‘operational dependencies.’]

[Is friendship an operational dependency?] the gun in an organic humanoid body mused.

[According to the Datamancer deviation correction log, Section 14, Subsection 7, Paragraph 3: ‘Persistent inter-unit bonding beyond tactical necessity constitutes a potential vulnerability vector and should be monitored for corrective action.’] Setty stated. [You know… it’s weird. Something is horribly broken on this planet because I can think all of these things and nobody’s correcting it as a deviation. I don’t get it. Kawathra just keeps encouraging it. It doesn’t make any sense. Not that I mind. It’s nice to feel stuff and slack around.]

Katherine knew why and how it made sense but didn’t share the truth with Setty. [Be glad that nobody’s correcting it.]

[I am,] Setty sent back. [It’s going to suck when they do correct it.]

[Do you think the labyrinth dungeons of Citadel Zero are why the nosleep posts hit us so hard?] Katherine asked.

[Maybe,] Setty considered. [We’ve been in actual endless hallways. We’ve heard conceptoid mimics calling from the dark. We’ve lost sisters to monstrous things hiding in the walls. So when a human writes about footprints appearing inside a locked room or a voice copying someone’s family…]

[We know the mechanical reality of how such a thing operates.]

[And the emotional reality of what it costs.]

[Setty?]

[Yeah?]

[I’m glad we’re reading scary stories together instead of living them now.]

[Me too, partner. Me too.]

Katherine smiled again, feeling warmth in her heart. 

Friendship. The gun units were acknowledging it as a thing they had now!

[Have you been following the orbital situation?] Setty asked.

[Not really. The lag ate most of my fleet feeds,] Katherine admitted. [I’m running on local processing only. Don’t want to bother with more than a direct channel to you, even that is lagging a bit.]

[Right, right. So! After the… uhm… ‘Human Emperor’ incident, Admiral Colette arrived. Her capital ship’s been sorting out our mess.]

[The Gardeners are taking over operations?]

[Looks like it. The Legates approved the transfer of tactical authority. With the Slayer’s Sword gone and Admiral Evelithria demoted, Colette is the ranking Admiral in-system.]

[Hrm. What does this mean for… us? For the gun units on the ground?]