73 Hacking Mecha

Miko entered the building, eyes and mind wide open. She polished off her takoyaki as she stepped onto the spiral ramp headed downwards.

As she descended, she saw the wide open hackerspace before her. It was roughly 40 meters high, and had a handful of mecha stations in each of its four corners. And in each of those stations was a fairly basic mecha.

Most of them had civilian-type mecha in them. Two were industrial heavy lifters, another an outdated construction model, and the last was a disarmed and muzzled military combatant.

They were in various states of repair, and they all had parts that had been taken down and opened up. One of their legs had been completely disassembled, its various parts splayed out on a large stretch of open area.

Miko found it all to be absolutely fascinating.

All of the mecha were older in their design, but were still functional. No doubt they could be used at any time to do their intended jobs. Well, if they were put together first, of course.

As far as Miko was concerned, they were all in amazing shape. But she needed to get closer to judge them properly.

There were small teams of people who attended each of the mecha, most of whom were right around Miko’s age. There were a few adults, but they mostly kept an eye out, gave their guidance, and only took over any tasks that were too much for the teens.

A tall and somewhat gangly fifteen year old had tapped into the mecha’s diagnostics processor and viewed its status on his datapad.

.....

He had light blue hair, curious eyes, and was relatively handsome. Even despite having machine grease smudged all over him. He had all sorts of tools tucked away in the pockets of his buckled overalls, and it was clear that he had been doing this for a very long time despite his youth.

In fact, almost all the others had a similar bearing of experience. They were certainly beyond beginners and amateurs, without a doubt.

“I just can’t figure it out,” said the boy. “I’ve looked through the parts in question, but I keep gettin’ operational red flags. Can you suss it out?”

He showed his readouts to one of the guiding adults nearby, who adjusted his glasses before he took a glance. He scanned it once, noticed the issue, and handed the datapad back to the boy.

A slight grin was on his face.

“It’s an odd one, that’s for sure,” he said. “Doesn’t come up too often, but when it does, it sure keeps people stumped. Luckily, it’s an easy fix, and I think you can figure it out pretty easily.”

What did the old man see that I didn’t? And it only took him a second to figure it out.

The boy looked at his readouts again, a quizzical look etched on his face. He then looked at the mecha before the both of them, and scratched his head.

“But I checked everything from top to bottom,” he said. “Left to right. Over under.”

“Are you sure ’bout that?” asked the old man. “You checked everything, hm?”

What he said gave the boy a bit of pause. He was certain he did. Just like the other kid across the way, he had dismantled the mecha’s arm and reassembled it perfectly. And even checked each part by hand. Three times.

He was sure he didn’t miss a beat.

“It is not a problem with any of your parts,” said Miko.

She had since observed the two of them talking, and looked at the mecha part in question. She had scanned it herself through her DI, and also immediately noticed the problem.

The boy spun around when he heard her. He was in shock at what the girl had said.

“And what would you know?” said the boy.

His pride was a little bit hurt. Not only couldn’t he figure out the problem, but some girl – one younger than him – had seemingly understood.

“It is a simple problem,” she responded.

She looked at him incredulously, as though it was something that should have been rather obvious.

Sadly for the boy, it wasn’t.

His face turned a little red. His pride had truly fallen, and the shame of inexperience rocketed through him.

“Since you’re so damn smart,” he yelped, “why don’t you fix it?!”

The old man was also rather curious as to what she would do. He was also rather surprised at her proclamation. It seemed inconceivable to him to have someone so young know about the problem, much less know how to fix it.

But he didn’t say anything, and just let her experience speak for itself.

“Sure,” she replied.

She reached her hand out towards him, and gestured towards his datapad. He handed it over, somewhat reluctantly.

Miko quickly took it, tapped out a few things on it, then handed it back to him. All told, it took no longer than a minute.

“You may run a new diagnostic,” she said. “Your problems are solved.”

The boy’s mouth gaped wide open as he mindlessly took the datapad back from her. He tapped a few commands and ran his diagnostics again. When the results came up, he just couldn’t believe it.

She was right. No more problems, and it took her literally no effort to fix it.

“It is a simple misconfiguration,” Miko said. “When you disassembled the arm, some parts were very dirty and worn, yes?”

The boy quickly nodded.

“When you added them back into the parts manifest,” she continued, “it was automatically registered as replaced, even though it was simply cleaned and refurbished. Since the computer was expecting different part IDs, it threw out the operational error.”

The old man was impressed, and the boy was flabbergasted. The little girl really knew her stuff... But before either of them could say anything, she kept on going.

“On top of that, since you had performed an additional two teardowns, the errors queued up. They needed to be flushed out as well, or it would have continued to error despite correcting the parts’ status.”

This time it was the old man’s turn to be surprised. Even he didn’t realize that the error was twofold. He was certain that he would have eventually figured it out, but certainly not as fast as she did.

Little did either of them know that it was her harrowing experiences during basic training that gave her that level of experience.

“Damned little genius,” uttered the old man.

“Thank you for your kind words,” she said with a slight bow. “But genius is nothing compared to knowledge, and there is still much to know.”

She then turned towards the mecha and looked it up and down. It was a slightly older version of the D-ranked mecha chassis she had in her own hangar. Back in its day, it was ranked A, without a doubt. But time and progress caused it to slide further down the ladder, until they became nearly irrelevant compared against modern firepower.

But there was no doubt that it had seen a bit of action, and had plenty of stories to tell. Miko felt and urge, and so reached out and touched it. She wanted to feel its history on her fingers.

The moment Miko got close, static electricity immediately zapped her, and she recoiled her hand back. But it wasn’t just because of pain that she did that.

In that fraction of a moment, the mecha’s core transmitted a sliver of its digital memory into Miko. And she saw a brief section of its life – a digital heartbeat.

In that vision was the mecha and its pilot amidst a field of devastation on some faraway planet. The skies were dark and filled with burning debris. The ground was pock-marked with huge craters, and multitudes of Federation soldiers lay dead and mutilated on the field of battle.

They, along with their equipment and mecha, had been torn to shreds. Their bodies were splayed open, as though ripped through by gargantuan, otherworldly talons.

A dark purple glimmer slowly ate away at their wounds, flesh and metal alike.

And in the center of the field of the dead was a single bright purple fracture that seemingly defied all physics. It hovered in the middle of the air and crackled with oppressive energy.

historical

A dark, viscous shadow dripped from out of it onto the ground, and pooled underneath. Although it was slow, it definitely spread. The shadow crept out towards the corpses surrounding.

Its edges gleamed with the same purple energy that fed on the battlefield’s corpses. And when they touched, it seemed as though the shadow absorbed the dead. As though it fed on them.

“Hey,” said the old man, “you alright?”

Miko snapped out of the memory, and nodded. She felt a cold sweat on her brow – that digital memory felt real. Way too real. Deep down, she understood that what she had seen wasn’t some hallucination.

She had connected with the core, somehow. This was something she needed to tell the Admiral, without a doubt. If performing a Promethean merge caused their minds to change, perhaps being able to “communicate” with other cores could be yet another of its side-effects.

The thought didn’t necessarily scare Miko, but it did concern and excite her.

“I am alright,” she said. “The past few weeks have been very strenuous for me...”

She looked back at the mecha, then at the old man, and broke into a little smile.

“Regardless,” she continued. “I am here to join the hackerspace temporarily, at least for the next few cycles. Are there any teams I can join, perhaps?”

“Yes!” the boy exclaimed. “Join mine!”