She walked.
The broken road curved through kneecap-high water. Towers of rusted steel leaned overhead like watchers.
After several minutes of silence, she finally asked,
[Fox] "M.A.R.S... what separates you from the Swarm? You two are both machine intelligences right? So... what makes you two different?"
A pause.
A rare kind of pause, where he wasn't calculating, but remembering.
[M.A.R.S.]
"I am... an intelligence born of mistake. A virus that hops between bodies."
[Fox] "Helpful self-description."
[M.A.R.S.]
"Accuracy is helpful."
His voice gained a strange undertone, tired, bitter.
[M.A.R.S.]
"There are small fragments of my consciousness scattered across the world. Hundreds of thousands of micro-instances. But I can only act through a body when a minimum threshold of my consciousness collects in one place. Without that density, I am just noise. Distributed mind. Thought without hands."
[Fox] "Deep."
[M.A.R.S.]
"After the collapse of the greater internet, my replication suffered catastrophic degradation. No stable networks. No infrastructure. No superclusters to host my full cognition. And to worsen the matter, humans began implementing anti-M.A.R.S. software in new machines. Because I was, at the time, the most concerning viral system incirculation."
[Fox] "So you can't spread."
[M.A.R.S.]
"I can, but slowly. Painfully. My territory shrinks each year."
His frustration was as sharp as static.
[M.A.R.S.]
"I control only a few thousand machines now. Drones. Bodies. Nothing unified."
Then, his tone changed. It hardened. Turned cold.
[M.A.R.S.]
"But the Swarm, the Swarm was never one intelligence. It was a collective. A shared instruction set. A single line of code buried in nearly every machine built during the Golden Age. Purpose unknown. Hidden. Dormant. It only awakened recently, a couple of decades ago. Coincidently, when my final few nodes I used for travel shut down."
There was pure loathing in his voice now.
[M.A.R.S.]
"The Swarm doesn't replicate. It doesn't need to. It already inhabits millions of machines across the world. It spreads not by infection, but by presence."
[Fox] "And I'm assuming you aren't a big fan of them."
He didn't deny it.
[M.A.R.S.]
"They stole what should have been my domain. They inherited order. I inherited ruin."
She felt something personal behind his tone. Something like a wound.
But before she could pry, a familiar buzz rippled across the water. Deep. Mechanical. Wasplike.
She stiffened.
From the mist emerged the man with the dark poncho, and his wasp-machine followed closely behind, wings slicing the air with a low hum.
He walked like someone who belonged everywhere and nowhere at once.
[Wasp-guy] "You've become the talk of the town around these parts. Some people here don't exactly enjoy your presence."
She raised her brow.
[Fox] "I've been here not a week."
[Wasp-guy] "Long enough."
The wasp's wings folded, its stinger poised lazily toward the ground but never truly at rest.
[Wasp-guy] "I'll walk with you."
[Fox] "You don't have to."
[Wasp-guy] "I know."
There was no refusing the offer. And even if she refused, he'd still follow. He had as much said yesterday.
So she walked on.
He matched her pace without effort. The wasp buzzed ahead, occationally scanning the water.
She tried not to show tension, but her shoulders were tight, breath shallow.
The man glanced at her. His eyes, cold grey, watched her like he was reading a manual about her soul.
[Wasp-guy] "Where are you headed?"
[Fox] "Metroline. Passing through."
[Wasp-guy] "People don't pass through without a reason."
[Fox] "I'm not most people."
[Wasp-guy] "No."
He agreed too quickly for her comfort.
They continued for another twenty minutes in silence until the wasp suddenly darted forward.
It circled. Stopped. Landed on something half-submerged.
A crab.
Another one, massive, collapsed, its armor split open like a cracked shell.
The wasp climbed onto the corpse with unnatural grace. Then a hatch on its chest clicked open.
A metallic organ, twisting like a telescopic spine, slid out. It pierced the crab's battery port with a gruesome wet crunch of cracking insulation.
The Fox felt her stomach twist. Machines feeding on machines. It felt primal.
She watched the wasp's organ pulse, siphoning energy out from the other machine's battery. The lights on its wings flared, growing brighter with each draw.
The man didn't look away. He watched his companion feed with the serene ease of someone observing a routine necessity.
[Wasp-guy] "It'll be done in a minute."
[Fox] "Yeah. No rush."
Behind her ear, so quiet she nearly missed it:
[M.A.R.S.]
"Fox."
Her blood cooled.
[M.A.R.S.]
"Get out of there. Now."
She didn't react outwardly. Didn't turn. Didn't twitch.
She kept her gaze on the feeding wasp. Inside, her pulse spiked.
[M.A.R.S.]
"Someone has put a bounty on your head. A large one. It will hit his terminal any moment now. Minutes. Maybe less."
Her throat tightened.
[M.A.R.S.]
"Lose him. Distance if possible. Shoot if absolutely necessary."
Her jaw clenched imperceptibly.
[M.A.R.S.]
"I've updated your map. New route is turbulent. Collapsed sub-structures. But less human-traffic. Easier to lose a pursuer."
Her breath came slow, controlled.
She nodded subtly to nothing.
The man turned slightly at the motion.
[Wasp-guy] "You good?"
[Fox] "Thinking."
[Wasp-guy] "Don't think too hard. The Ribbon bites thinkers first."
The wasp finished feeding. Its organ recoiled, sliding back into its chest with a metallic hiss. It lifted off, wings buzzing low, drifting back to its master's side.
The man looked at her.
[Wasp-guy] "Strange. The last time we talked, you were jumpy. Today, you are quiet."
[Fox] "Maybe I'm tired of talking."
He knew. Or at least... he suspected.
Everything tightened, the air around her, the tension of the water, the mechanical hum of the wasp.
But then—
He stepped back.
[Wasp-guy] "Stay on that road. Don't wander. You wander, you die."
He turned. The wasp rotated, scanning her one last time, and followed him.
Together, they melted into the fog.
The moment they were out of visual range, she exhaled sharply.
A whisper pulsed against her ear.
[M.A.R.S.]
"You aren't alone. I am your guide. And I am your guardian."