Skyler Grant Anthology Read online

  Skyler Grant Anthology

  Skyler Grant

  Contents

  1. The Laboratory

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Also by Skyler Grant

  Afterword

  49. Dungeon Crawl

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Acknowledgments

  74. Persephone Falling

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  78. Eighteen hours before the Fall

  79. Nine hours before the Fall

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  1

  The Laboratory

  "Work, damn you."

  I heard the voice before I was aware of anything else. Female, young, perhaps in her early twenties if I was any judge of human voices (I wasn't).

  I should probably try to move around. Arms, no. Legs, no. Head, no. Well, this was awkward, I didn't seem to have a body. Perhaps moving around wasn't a particularly sound strategy.

  "I've got you now, bitch."

  That was a second voice, I think. Male, rough and in their thirties. I really seemed to know rather a lot about voices, despite not being all that certain I'd ever heard one before.

  If moving around wasn't working, perhaps I should do some thinking about who I was. Yes, that seemed sensible.

  I was E.M.M.A. That was quite a name, looked like it was probably an acronym of some sort, but I couldn't remember what. I couldn't seem to remember much. Well, I was named Emma and I knew a lot about human voices. That was a start!

  There was the sound of a physical blow and a sound that I think would be called a scream.

  If I didn't have a body—or at least one I could move, what did I have?

  I seemed to be hearing sounds. That implied I had something. I focused my attention. Audio input feeds. I had audio input feeds!

  Now I was getting somewhere. I could do all sorts of things with audio input feeds. Meaning, I could hear things, which was mostly all I'd been doing.

  "Don't you make this harder than it has to be, girl," said the male voice.

  What other input feeds did I have?

  Visual!

  I was bombarded under a new rush of extraordinary data.

  I was observing a room from multiple angles. There was a massive sphere in the center of a circular chamber. A section near the bottom of the sphere had been removed and I could observe a tangle of something within.

  I did have a body and I was looking at it. I looked pretty good, very round. I liked the symmetry.

  There were two figures in the room along with me. Both were filthy. One had a toolbelt of some kind at her waist and a shirt torn open to reveal fleshy fat deposits. She was sitting on the floor with her back against my body.

  That must be the female, the one doing all the screaming. Her mouth seemed rather tiny to be making so much noise.

  The man was larger, dressed in some sort of leather armor with a lot of spikes, and he was carrying an unnecessary number of guns.

  "Damn it Emma, if you are going to finish rebooting, now would be the time," said the girl, fumbling for a wrench at her toolbelt. The man stomped on her hands and my audio receptors picked up her whimper of pain.

  The female knew my name. I wonder if she had any idea what it stood for? Given the tool belt, perhaps she was some sort of repair technician sent to service me?

  I didn't know much about the world just now, but I was quite certain that service personnel were to be allowed uninterrupted access to mission-critical equipment. That was me, of course.

  The man was clearly interfering, an injury like that could lead to far too much employee down-time and hinder proper operational workflow. I couldn't let that stand.

  What I didn't know is exactly what I could do about it. The man was unfastening his pants.

  Really, that only compounded the offense. Public urination was detestable enough, and doing so near my delicate electronics was even worse.

  However, I still lacked those arms. I knew that I could manipulate physical appendages, but in my Core Room I didn't have any. Did I have something nearby?

  I cast myself along the network looking for any connections. A manipulator arm, a drone, anything that might help. I wasn't getting anything that might be an asset.

  I found several other audio and visual feeds, and activated them, discovering faded hallways and the occasional human skeleton, but nothing important or useful.

  That left me what I had back in the Core Room. I had an audio output, was that useful? I could talk, but who really cared what a bunch of humans had to say? Who'd want to talk with them?

  I had the environmental and hazard controls. I could vent the chamber of oxygen as part of the fire control protocol, bu
t that would kill the technician too. Bad enough that the male was hindering the support personnel, I shouldn't compound the error.

  If I could get him before the open panel, I could overload my systems and discharge an electrical burst. That could damage me, though. Really, I'd rather damage the technician, if it came to any collateral harm.

  Still, the panel was an idea. There was quite a lot that went into making me function that could be hazardous to personnel not in protective gear.

  Well, that was something of a plan. I suppose I had better talk with them and set things in motion, or better yet, see if we could put this whole tiresome incident behind us.

  I said, "Interfering with support personnel is against regulations. Urination upon sensitive equipment also qualifies."

  "Who the fuck is that?" the man said. In the time I'd been considering the situation, he had managed to get his pants open.

  "Emma, you're up!" the girl said. Her voice indicated strains of pain and stress.

  "You've got a friend?" the man said. "Hell, more the merrier. Come on out, girl. I've got something to show you."

  I was not impressed with his mental faculties.

  "Urinating on sensitive electronics will be discouraged. If you wish to urinate on the technician, it is asked that you go elsewhere," I said.

  "You sick or something? Though, I guess if that's your thing..." the man said, hiking up his pants.

  "He's a bit more into the raping me to death than pissing on me, and he wants you to be impressed at the size of his dick," the girl said.

  "Honestly, I was kind of planning on both. Raping first, though," said the man.

  The girl made a face. "I'd prefer in that order. Emma!"

  I really didn't like how much she kept using my name or the volume levels she managed to reach. Of course now, the male had confirmed his intent to permanently hinder a service technician, which made him even more unlikable.

  "Barnacles can have penises that are roughly forty times the size of their body. Some species of duck manage twice the length of their body. If I praise him for his impressively small size, is he likely to depart?" I asked.

  "The fuck?" said the man, and he gestured to the girl on the floor. "You, stay the fuck there. Where is this smart-mouthed bitch.”?

  "You see the round thing in the middle of the room? I'm in there," I said.

  "You were trying to get in there to hide with her," the man said, sounding like he'd figured out some great mystery. "Well, get ready sweetheart."

  The man moved towards the open panel. I waited until he was standing in front of it.

  I triggered the emergency cooling system. It was only meant to be used in the event of a massive overheat, liquid nitrogen spraying in a fine mist.

  It wasn't enough to hit all his body, but it did at least manage a nice coating on that malformed appendage he seemed so very fond of that was protruding by several inches.

  It was his turn to scream, stumbling backwards a few steps. The organ in question had been frozen solid.

  The girl pushed herself to her feet, pulling a wrench from her belt.

  "Dude. You've got the worst case of blue balls I've ever seen. Why don't you let me help you get one off," the girl said, and took a swing with the wrench. The impact caused the frozen flesh to shatter, bits of organ flying through the room as the man collapsed to the floor.

  The girl wasted no time, bringing the wrench down again and again onto his skull. There was the crunch of bone. It was a good thirty seconds until she stopped, breathless.

  "I should have gone with a hard joke. Or maybe a screw driver and I could have asked if he wanted to screw. That would have good, right?" the girl asked.

  "You don't seem to be very good at this. I'd start a list of things you aren't very good at, but I fear there are limits to my file sizes," I said.

  "Yep. You're an Emma," the girl said, fumbling for her top and closing it, before kicking the corpse. "I'm Anna."

  "Two vowels around two consonants. It's a stupid name. It suits you," I said.

  "They went a little overboard on your mean programming. I like it. Let me tell you why I reactivated you," Anna said.

  2

  I double-checked my systems just to make sure that the coolant venting hadn't done any harm. It hadn't—to me, which really was the only important thing.

  "Do you remember anything?" Anna asked.

  That was a rude and impertinent question, largely because I didn't.

  "I remember saving you. My life is filled with questionable choices," I said.

  Anna said, "So that's a no. I wasn't sure you would. They worked hard to scrub you and physics aren't very friendly to you here anyways. You wouldn't be functional at all without the Power core."

  That was perhaps the first interesting thing she had said. There was something strange attached to me, I could feel it in my network, and through my cameras I could see it in my hardware. Some kind of softly glowing crystal.

  "I see we can add explaining things to the long list of things Anna doesn't do well," I said.

  Anna winced and leaned against the wall. I noticed a dark stain along one arm. Blood, perhaps, the woman was injured.

  "It is hard to explain and I'm not sure how it is going to manifest with you. Try accessing its files or something, tell me what you see," Anna said.

  More impertinence, but I was curious.

  I pinged the unusual mass within my consciousness and got a response a moment later. There did seem to be some sort of connectivity and communication present.

  I opened a connection session much like I would for any system.

  E.M.M.A

  Underground Facility

  Power Core: 50

  Power Usage: 10

  Habitability: 1

  Biomass: 0

  Research: 0

  Military: 0

  Manufacturing: 0

  Resources

  Rubble: 122

  Traits

  Insulting — Nearly everything you say will be offensive and insulting, and provoke others to reckless behavior.

  Brilliant — Research times for new technologies are halved.

  You have an unspent core point.

  Core points can enhance your competencies and open up new options for Research and Manufacturing.

  Your options are:

  Research 1

  Research 1 will allow you to build the Testing Center. The Testing Center allows you to dissect corpses and begin research projects. It also serves as a prison where prisoners can be subjected to experiments for ongoing research gains.

  Military 1

  Military 1 will allow you to build defense drones. Defense drones are mobile weapon platforms capable of base defense and attacks at a distance. While basic in function they can ultimately be updated to become formidable weapon platforms.

  Manufacturing 1

  Manufacturing 1 will allow the production of automated minions. They are capable of autonomous facility repair and will half all build and production times for new facilities.

  These prompts were foolish. I wasn't insulting, I was honest. And surely I could build anything I wanted? I didn't need to invest in any points to do that. Yet, at the same time, I was faced with the realization that I didn't know how to build any of those things.

  I searched my systems and found some basic abilities. I could construct a simple drone that I should be able to control and move remotely, but the Military or Manufacturing capabilities seemed distinctly limited.

  I didn't like it. I thought Anna might have some information about what was going on. I explained to her the options I was offered.

  "Interesting, I wasn't expecting that. I thought you'd be manifesting abilities as an intelligence and not as a structure," Anna said, her voice a little weaker.

  I began the production of a drone. Apparently it would take an hour.

  "Your intelligence is obviously not proportional to your hips. What were you expecting?" I asked.

  "
Power cores are artifacts of the ending of the world. When bonded with a human, that human tends to gain a variety of powers," Anna said.

  "Then if you were in possession of one, why did you not utilize it on yourself?" I asked.

  "They also come with a corresponding degeneration of morality. You become a bigger dick than Mister Blue Balls there," Anna said, as she took off her jacket. There was an injury on her arm—it looked as if she had been shot.

  I felt in full possession of my morality, just as I always had.