"Alright took your time" nick mentioned before look other chat
Sigh.
Tack. Tack. Tack.
The terminal was half-dead, two of its input relays fried beyond salvage, but Tosho's fingers found the gaps instinctively — the way a tongue finds a missing tooth. The manual interface crawled. C.Y.L.A.M crawled with it, her floating chassis drifting through the debris field outside, her scanner eyes dark and patient.
[Uploading "Wire Strings" >>>> C.Y.L.A.M]
Gravity bullets had done a number on this stretch of the ship. Beams bent outward like ribs, chunks of hull rotating slow and silent in the vacuum beyond the breach. Tosho didn't look up. She'd been threading her own Wire Strings into C.Y.L.A.M's motor architecture for the last twenty minutes — no relay, no intermediary, just clean signal — and the work had a rhythm to it that she didn't want to break.
[Overwriting Parameters....]
Her patched-up legs sat at wrong angles beneath the console. She'd stopped noticing.
tap-tap-tap, tippity-tap—
[Input: Nanomachine >>> Intermediary: Bed Nuclei for Bio-Containment >>>....]
System: Patching @everyone....
[I]System: Updating....[/I]
[I]System: Target stopped moving... (Doc is now 10 meters closer)[/I]
[I]Probability of attacking 70% — exhaustion of ammunition before engaging is most prudent approach.[/I]
She read the last line twice. Then she sent the patch to the rest of them — she felt it go out, felt the faint glitch-stutter as two of the receivers hiccuped — and she switched channels.
Rrrringgg.... rrrrinnggg....
Ca-click.
"Codename A6. It's Tosho."
A pause. Then, with the particular flatness of someone choosing not to sound surprised:
"Heh. Right. That's what you go by now, huh?"
Tosho's jaw tightened. "Don't."
"I wasn't doing anything."
"Talia."
"You called me." A beat.
"How's the life of a fraud, Tomoyo?"
Thock. Thock. Thock. "It's catching up." She watched C.Y.L.A.M's coordinates tick closer on the secondary screen. "Doc's out there right now because of me. Rest of them too. They don't know the half of it and when this is over, they will."
"Yeah." Talia's voice held no particular sympathy.
"I said that would happen. Before you put the name on."
"I know what you said."
"You were good at what you did, Tomoyo. Archival work, data recovery — you were actually good at it. But you wanted the field posting, you wanted to be the person who mattered in the moment, and now you're—" a pause
"—what are you doing right now, exactly?"
"Multitasking."
"Right." Another pause.
"MANUS called me because apparently you requested a body delivered to your position. I assumed you were in a bad way, but you sound like you're typing."
"I am typing."
"Tomoyo."
"I have about three minutes before C.Y.L.A.M. reaches the hull breach and I need her parameters rewritten before she does, so—"
"Cy?" Talia went quiet.
"You got Cy working again."
The android's chassis slid through the ravaged cockpit opening, scanner eyes sweeping once across Tosho, cataloguing damage, then going still. A faint hum ringing throughout as it floats frozen like a doll.
"I thought she was scrap," Talia said, slower now.
"The OS was wrecked the last time anyone touched her. How did you—" Another pause. Longer.
"Oh."
[Nanomachine Process: START]
"Yeah," Tosho said.
"Are you out of your mind?"
"Probably." She hit ENTER.
She begins to attach more wires onto the android as her body begins to be lifted by the robot's floating orbs, starting to recreate the torn torso from her body.
"MANUS will tear you apart if they find out."
"They won't." She kept her eyes on the monitor, on the reconstruction progress, on Talia's face in the small corner feed — the girl watching the sequence with an expression Tosho couldn't quite read. "I have data on 'that guy' that no one else has. They need me mobile more than they need me compliant. And if it goes wrong—" she exhaled "—I have a full post-mortem redaction already written."
"That's not the reassuring thing you think it is."
"I know." The Wire Strings wound tighter, cocooning her and C.Y.L.A.M together. "I know."