The Robot Women

[Avenger Assembled]

Eira’s coded distress signal had gone out to only three people - Sharl (who was still in space), Miss Americana, and a signature Gina recognized as Kay, an English girl who was a contemporary of Eira’s and had been her friend before relocating to Rurland, the new sentient robot nation in Eastern Europe. The signal had come from a satellite phone, one that coded as ‘destroyed’ if someone tried to look back along the signal. 

 

The chain of numbers and letters was one Gina had developed herself and passed onto her proteges. Decoded it said DISASTER. INFECTION. MIMETIC. CIVILIAN RESCUE NEEDED. NO ORGANIC CONTACT! And then a list of geographic coordinates that came out to “67.7478° N, 12.7563° E” This turned out to be an uninhabited island off the coast of Norway called Mosken, a barren, rocky place mostly famous for the nearby maelstrom that was one of the largest and oldest in the world. 

 

Looking at it from an Archetech satellite, Miss Americana could spot a recently-built oilrig near the island, but otherwise it looked normal. One piece of information she did find was that there was an Archetech presence on that oil rig - one of the workers, Haakon Jarlson, had been born deaf and blind but had been successfully fitted with advanced optical and cochlear implants in grade school. 

Eira was on the Archetech payroll as a contractor these days, mostly teleconferencing into quickly solve complicated problems that it would have taken organic minds days to handle. She had been in Europe visiting her parents the last Miss A had heard.  

 

A quick internal memo sent a number of key engineers at ArcheTech scrambling to their grey skies stations, setting aside their normal projects and preparing to work on whatever disaster was looming on the horizon. Gina herself reviewed data remotely by mindlink even as she mechanically shoved pasta salad into her mouth, changed into comfier clothes and used the bathroom. A telelink session like this could prove to be lengthy. She sent a quick text to Steve to let him know that something had come up, then slipped into the basement to the life support pod that had long since replaced her office chair. 

 

On the other side of the city, Miss Americana opened her eyes and looked around her office, then quickly rose from her chair. Changing quickly into a utilitarian ArcheTech coverall, she headed for the elevators and down to the teleporter room. One of her administrative assistants met her halfway with a backpack and briefcase of equipment, neither of them breaking stride as the handoff was made. As she stepped into the teleporter that would take her to ArcheTech’s European offices, she tried to get Eira on the phone once more. 

 

By the time she’d been de-rezzed and re-appeared in Europe (the robot drone leaving her free of any philosophical issues on the matter), Miss Americana had some answers. Eira didn’t pick up, which was no surprise - the phone she’d called from was no longer functional at all, and her own internal communication systems were set to do-not-disturb mode. Her company email (which she did use, albeit with the slight air of patronization that many kids her age viewed email) was set to auto-reply. “I will be working on a project away from the office for the next seventy-two hours. I will endeavor to return your email as soon as I return. Eira Katastroff, she/her.” 

 

The Mosken oil rig was owned by Rabattolje, a small, independent Norwegian oil firm with a reputation for taking risks. It was an older model, having been built in the early 1970s and abandoned after a series of industrial accidents, but had been repurchased and refurbished during the spike in gas prices after the Terminus Invasion of ‘18. It had been doing well lately, though harsh weather conditions in the North Sea recently meant they were probably operating on a skeleton crew. The nearby rocky island was uninhabited, mostly used as sheep pasturing grounds when the weather was better. 

By the time Miss A had finished with the pleasantries of greeting her European COO (an office that she knew Eira wanted for herself even if she’d never been foolish enough to actually ask for it out loud), she’d learned from the Archetech crew left back in Freedom City that the Moskstraumen had a long history. The famous whirlpool was actually how the word “Maelström” had entered the English language, through the pages of a famous Edgar Allan Poe poem about the whirlpool. It had a reputation for being haunted, and dangerous, and there had been a few ship disappearances there over the centuries - the most recent being a German U-Boat in 1945. 

 

“Have we got anything from the drones yet?” she asked the room, even as she began calling up data on the many screens in the main control room. 

 

“We deployed them as soon as you contacted us, they should be arriving onsite at any moment,” the head of engineering told her. “It took a few minutes to set the self-destruct charges as you instructed.” 

 

Miss A nodded. It was distracting and slow to actually read screens instead of simply absorbing the data, but she was already dealing with enough ping just operating the robot. She would make do. “I want any information you can get me on the oil rig personnel and any ownership interests on that island. Bring up satellite footage and see if there’s been any human activity in that area in the last 72 hours. And get me a robot first aid kit packed for travel.” The robot first aid kit, more properly called the Emergency Synthezoid Repair Station, was standard issue at all ArcheTech offices and was mostly deployed when one of the uploaded volunteer subjects of the prototype androids came in for repairs between scheduled upgrades. It was also useful when the Miss A bot needed a little work or, as now, when Eira got herself into trouble. 

 

The island was technically owned by the company, though it had evidently never been followed up on. There had been limited mining and sheep ranching there over the years, but it seemed like it was just too small and too remote to be worth exploiting. 

The robot first aid kit was easy enough to find, and would be easy enough to use unless Eira’s shell had been completely destroyed. (Eira had proudly designed her own adult body but Miss Americana still knew it inside and out.) Eira had always been very careful with her ‘self’, much more so than her ‘brother’, who’d always been a little carefree with his synthetic body even before he’d begun mostly operating outside the Solar System with the Lor. He kept in touch, but he was storing his backups in their databases now, not on Earth. 

 

The satellite footage of the oil rig showed activity in the last 72 hours; the rig’s boat had gone back and forth towards the Maelstrom several times, carrying passengers each time. And then abruptly, the boat had sunk at its anchor by the rig. With no continuous feed there was no way to tell how it had happened, only that now a vague outline of the boat could be seen underneath the pitiless cold waters of the North Sea. 

 

Of course, the boat wasn’t the only means of transit on the rig, a rig that size should have had a helicopter on its helipad. There was one there now but something had gone distinctly wrong there too. The rotor blades were hanging loosely, one detached altogether, as if something had destroyed the mechanism that held them together. 

 

The drones kept their distance, operating on the usual protocols for dealing with possible mimetic contamination - providing wireframe images first, then gradually higher-resolution images, the sophisticated software inside the Archetech computers capable of simulating the effects of most forms of mimetic attack on sentient minds. Most of them, anyway. Luckily there seemed to be no mind-control messages or corrupted glyphs visible outside of the rig; but there were things written on the side. 

 

It was hard to see in the darkness but the drones were able to make enough passes to see what was going on. “SOS” first, spray-painted on the metal, with layers of “STAY AWAY” in both English and Swedish painted over top. It was dark there at this time of day, the skies overhead dappled with stars - but no lights were on on the exterior of the rig. Only the clear sky dappled with a thousand stars against the velvety black and the staring full moon overhead gave any visibility. 

 

“Still no signal from Eira?” Miss A asked, studying the large painted letters on the screen. 

 

“Nothing,” the nearest tech confirmed. “We’ve activated full telemetry, but there’s nothing to read on the other end.”

 

“What about the black box?” Miss A asked tersely. Even if Eira’s shell had been destroyed so thoroughly that no telemetry could be broadcast, the nigh-indestructible black box would broadcast on the widest possible range of frequencies until collected. 

 

“No sign of activation,” the tech told her. “We’re scanning all frequencies.” 

 

Miss A sighed, then deftly rolled her blond hair into a bun and secured it with a fabric tie. “I’m going to need a heavy-duty cleanroom suit,” she told her head of security, who’d also come to the control room for the show. “I’m going to need to go in there in person, and if there’s a way to keep this shell uncontaminated so I don’t have to ditch it, I’d like to try.” 

 

It took less than ten minutes until she was prepped for flight, dressed in a bulky white sealed suit and carrying a backpack full of equipment that could all be written off. “I’ve disabled the AI feature on this shell,” she told them as she stood on the launchpad. “If I become unconscious, I’ll be ejected from the shell, but it will not attempt a return to base. If the shell returns but I’m not checking in, destroy it before it lands. Same for any of the drones. We have no idea what we’re dealing with, but Eira doesn’t cry wolf. Take precautions and stay safe.” 

 

With that, she launched herself into the sky, less graceful than usual but still cutting through the air like a knife as she arced up and towards the sea and the strange mystery that awaited. 

 

The weather was clear and crisp over the North Sea, though cold enough at this altitude that it would have chilled Gina Evans to the bone. From a distance, the Mosken rig looked innocuous enough to the robot’s approach, though she knew where she was in relationship to the sunken tender at all times. Gradually the graffiti on the outside came into view. She’d thought on first inspection that the dueling messages of SOS and STAY AWAY had both blocked the windows of the rig, but on closer inspection only STAY AWAY looked to be so designed.

On her way, she got updates from her team, carefully modulated so that they could transmit to her without being directly exposed to anything from the site itself. The drones’ EM sensors had picked up an EM field being generated inside the oil rig, something strong enough that it would make it impossible for them to actually fly inside the building if they had been so inclined. The rig had several generators on board, and with Eira’s technical ability it was easy to imagine where the charge was coming from. 

 

And something had changed since she sent out the drones. There was a giant spider on the helipad. There was no other word for it, alongside the wrecked helicopter was an eight-legged, vaguely humanoid bodied thing with a tarnished-copper and red color scheme that stood out as much as any person-sized spider-robot could. What at first seemed like a moment of madness in the midst of an already-bizarre situation soon resolved itself when Gina remembered Kay, Eira’s friend who had moved to Rurland after its creation. Kay had always been interested in spiders and from Eira’s (somewhat envious) account, had remade her physical shell into a humanoid arachnid. 

 

The drones were well-equipped for mundane situations, but Gina could imagine several pieces of tech that could have concealed Kay’s approach from them, even if she’d just teleported directly to the rig out of their line of sight. 

 

There was still no sign of Eira herself, or of any of the human occupants of the oil rig. Kay seemed to be in the process of noisily pulling the helicopter to pieces, cutting aside its shrieking metal hull with some limbs while pulling out the wrecked engine from the inside with more. However she went about this, unless Miss A chose to conceal herself on the way down, there was going to be no way to land on the oil rig without being spotted by the twenty-something spider. 

 

After a few moments of consideration, Miss A decided to approach in the clear, though she did crack her knuckles in the pattern that adjusted her power systems for a possible fight. She needed to figure out what was going on, and the fastest way to do that would be talking to the first sentient she encountered. The fact that said sentient was a giant spider noisily destroying a helicopter wasn’t entirely promising, but there were lots of possible reasons for it. They could need the salvage for projects inside the base, or she could simply be trying to ensure that nobody broke quarantine and risked spreading whatever had happened to them. Or it could be a giant angry spider robot that was the actual problem, but there was only one way to find out! 

 

She touched down lightly on the edge of the helipad, well out of reach of the metal spider. “Hello!” she called out in English, then Norwegian. “Are you Kay?” 

 

The spider turned, talons raised, and then abruptly seemed to flip around itself as it climbed onto its back legs. Up close, Miss Americana could puzzle together how things worked. Kay’s humanoid form was visible, cast in coppery-red, with two spider limbs coming out of her upper back and two more out of her lower back. Her eyes were visible, black with a trace of color around the edges, like someone peering through very large glasses. As her limbs folded down beneath her, she looked a bit more like a woman with an unusual color scheme and arachnid cybernetic enhancements - even if, like Eira, she was all metal underneath. 

 

“Americana,” she said, her voice clearly mechanical, either from lack of decent vodoring or a deliberate stylistic choice. Her upward limbs were in a defensive posture but not aggressively so, but her artificial voice was modulated and bland, concealing her real intentions. “She said you would come.” Kay had been a girl not too different from Eira, albeit in a locked-in state after a brain injury rather than actually organically dying; but Gina knew better than anyone how common experiences didn’t always breed commonality. “Smart move making the drones keep their distance. It’s just you, right? Nobody with any squishy organic brains coming close enough to see? It’s going to be a bloody mess if there is.” 

 

“Just me,” Miss A confirmed. “Eira’s message said to keep organics away. We’re on live telemetry to the control room at ArcheTech Europe so my team is still looped in, but they won’t be coming out til we know it’s safe. Can you tell me what’s been going on?” She looked around the rig again. “Where is Eira?” 

 

“Your people better stay off visible light feeds, if they know - anyway, Eira’s with - them.” The arachnoid reached down and scooped up the battery from the helicopter, holding it in her two front limbs above her head before shifting it to her left hand. It looked like an effort, but no more than holding up a heavy bag of groceries would have been for Gina.  “There’s not much to tell. The local meatheads found something that likes to eat organic brains and comes in through the eyes. But all the ones who were alive when I got here are still alive. Eira’s been a good superhero this whole time,” she added, sarcasm edging her mechanical voice. “Here, I’ll show you.” 

 

She led the way inside the rig, carrying the battery behind her. There was no sound Miss Americana could hear at first except for the faint rumbling of the rig’s systems, but she could hear faint static on her connection to Archetech. While it wasn’t enough to interfere with her connection to the robot, Gina could tell she was walking into a building-sized makeshift Faraday cage, enough that she’d have to punch through deliberately if she wanted to check in back at her base. 

 

They passed by vacant offices and work rooms, doors swinging half-open, bizarre scenes inside that looked like the aftermath of a violent struggle had been covered entirely in thick coats of the same white industrial paint used on the rig’s exterior. “The cyborg is having a little nap in his room; he’s going to use all the morphine they have if he’s not careful.” 

 

Their destination turned out to be the mess, which appeared to have been transformed into a makeshift holding area. Most of the half-dozen people who should have been the rig’s crew were there; Gina recognized the helicopter pilot, the underwater welders, everyone on duty at a time when the rig wasn’t at full strength. What she didn’t recognize was what they were doing. They were, to a person, visibly pale and thin, tied in a seated position around the metal stanchions along the walls, staring off at nothing, wearing torn-open clothing that was pierced in a couple of places by tubing that ran off to IV stands. Catheterized. It looked like Eira had raided the infirmary. 

 

For her part, Eira was standing in the middle of the room, working on a hastily-jury-rigged contraption consisting of a dome plate and narrow cylinder that Gina recognized as an magnetic resonance emitter and receiver. When the doors opened, Eira looked up, her expression haggard and fatigue behind her eyes. She was dirty, something Eira hardly ever was, paint and dirt on her cheek and hands, but at the sight of Miss Americana she looked profoundly relieved. “Miss Americana!” 

 

A second later, the humans in the room came alive - or at least awake. Visibly snapping ‘on’ at the sight of Miss Americana, they began yelling at once in a torrent of Swedish and English. “Help us! Help us, the robots have gone crazy! They’re keeping us prisoner here! Please untie us!” It was an eerie chorus. 

 

“Stupid meatheads,” growled Kay, heading over to take Eira’s place with the MR device. Eira, her face tight, headed for Miss A. She hesitated as the screaming rose in volume again, and for a moment she looked like a little girl about to cry before she calmed herself enough to say, raising her voice like someone working in a factory over powered machinery - 

 

“I am very glad you are here! This is - this is a disaster. It is just you, yes?” she asked, cracking her knuckles as they spoke.  

 

“Just me,” Miss A confirmed, even as she sent instructions over the connection to base to make sure the video feeds were filtered and the firewalls were fully in place. “I came as soon as you sent the distress call. Tell me what’s going on.” The yelling was more than a little unnerving, but she did the best to filter it out for now. Something was obviously very wrong with the human crew, but at least they were still alive. If they were alive, there was still some hope that they could be saved. 

 

“They found something while digging that causes mimetic corruption when transmitted visually. The intelligence behind it is smart enough to conceal itself and to seek to actively spread. They became hostile when they realized-I have everything stored in my memory from the moment I arrived on scene,” offered Eira, pulling up her blonde ponytail to expose one of her access ports, raising her voice to cut over the sound of the screaming staff - who suddenly cut off, all at once, falling back into their previous quiescent state. She winced slightly, and added, “I have full audio and visual, plus my retrospective commentary.” Artfully designed back ‘tattoos’ just visible over her labcoat collar or not, it wasn’t hard to see the girl in the woman Eira had made herself to be. 

 

“Damn meatsacks,” Kay was muttering aloud in binary, her voice briefly revealed by the end of the screaming. Not sounding particularly abashed, she stood up, holding the completed magnetic scanner that she and Eira had been working on, looking vaguely like a rifle-mounted MRI magnet. “This is ready. We can look to see what’s going on in those skulls,” she said, sounding like she relished the thought. She looked over at Eira and Miss A and said suspiciously, “Are you sure you should do that?” 

 

“I’m not going to just show her it,” shot back Eira, turning her head to look at Kay, “I am not stupid! I have all those files in protected memory, she is just going to see a visual recreation of it. I doubt it would affect her anyway since we know the image does not transmit to organic brains through electronic representation! You and I cannot transmit it.”

 

“And if you’re wrong, we get a technopath infected with that thing! And then maybe we get it!” shot back Kay. “I am not going to let myself, or you, get turned into a mindless drone like these!” She gestured at the rig crew, who responded with all the enthusiasm of mushrooms. 

 

“It’s wise to be cautious,” Miss A agreed, sending a placating glance in Kay’s direction. “I certainly wouldn’t look at it while embodied, and I’m not going to send it to the team. But when I’m using the robot, I’m every bit as much an uploaded consciousness as you and Eira. If it doesn’t affect you, I won’t be affected either. Even so, if you’d rather send the visual recreation, Eira, I think that’ll be enough to give me the idea of how things happened.” Taking Eira’s implicit invitation, she touched a finger to the port in Eira’s neck, letting the information download and play at a speed far greater than an organic mind could absorb. 

Miss Americana had been able to look behind Eira’s eyes since the young woman was an elementary school student, though that the view had gotten considerably more sophisticated as Eira’s robot bodies increased in complexity. So nothing she saw at first was new; Eira’s readouts of the weather and time, getting a message that she was needed on the station to help with Haakon Jarlson’s implants, the flight out here on the rig’s helicopter, and her arrival. 

Eira had been happy here, as far as Gina could tell. Haakon’s problems were correctable on-site thanks to some judicious application of Eira’s internal toolkit and though the big, muscular Haakon wasn’t really her type, she had the feeling she’d enjoyed his admiration for her. The crew was welcoming enough too; Anna, the manager on-site, Michael, the helicopter pilot, Peter, the cook, all people who Miss A had recently seen tied up and beyond themselves. 

 

The infection had started from something down by the whirlpool. A group of the workers led by Anna had gone out in the boat, staying out longer than expected, and come back changed. They had something on what looked like a piece of undersea shale, something they gathered everyone into the common room to see. Eira was being careful - all Miss Americana could see was an obviously reconstructed image of a black piece of rock with a black spiral on it, something that might have been just an ammonite fossil if not for its effect on the organics who saw it.

The effect had been almost immediate. The uninfected crew had briefly gone into convulsions, foaming and twitching, before abruptly standing up and turning on both Eira and a thoroughly frightened Haakon, who’d spent several minutes begging his friends to stop from his position behind Eira. What followed must not have been a difficult battle physically. Even against a half-dozen strong men and women, Eira had never been in any direct danger. But the hissing, the staring faces, the jerky movements of bodies -

 

She’d tried to lock them in the cafeteria afterwards, all the while trying to keep a terrified Haakon safe. She’d also secured the thing by dint of sealing it in a sample case and breaking the lock, wedging it shut too tight for anyone with human strength to open it. But they’d broken out using Anna’s keys. That was when they’d written SOS on the walls, when they’d tried to make for the boat and the helicopter when Michael landed. The stone Eira had broken had not been the only one. Luckily by the time he’d recovered his faculties (such as they were) Eira had managed to subdue the infected again. 

 

She’d sent out her distress call not long after that. Kay had arrived first. Miss Americana had heard plenty about Kay while the two girls were growing up - Eira and Kay had been thick as thieves as young symbols of a cybernetic future in Europe, if only among those with enough pull to know that one dying girl with a bad heart and another left with locked-in syndrome after a car accident were now technological marvels of the 21st century. Eira had followed the path of her mentors and become a superheroine; Kay had gone off to join Talos in the robot society in the Ukraine. 

 

There was something missing here - there were memories blanked out under Eira’s privacy screen. She had the idea that the two women had argued, forcefully, and that Kay had agreed to stay and help Eira build the Faraday cage around the oil rig. Together they’d wrecked the helicopter and the excursion boat, making sure no one could escape and spread the potential infection elsewhere, and rigged up a life support system for the afflicted crew as best they could. 

 

“Good work,” Miss A told Eira after spending a few seconds watching the footage and another couple of seconds digesting it. “You did exactly as you should have, all the way down the line. And your help appears to have been invaluable as well,” she added in Kay’s direction. “I’m going to have my people on shore lock down anybody and anything that have been aboard recently, just from an abundance of caution, but I really think you’ve managed to nip this in the bud. Now we just need to figure out how to neutralize the memetic pathogen without exposing anyone else to it. Are there any samples left, and do we have a data recorder from the skiff that Anna and her crew used? We need to know what that thing is and where it came from.” 

 

Kay shot Eira a sharp, suspicious look at Miss Americana’s suggestion; Eira seeming to wave away her concerns with just a trace of hesitation. “We have destroyed all copies of the mimetic pathogen we have found, but there may be more on the boat. I was mostly concerned with ensuring none of the infected could flee with it. Or recreate it.” 

 

She was able to share that she’d accessed navigation records aboard the boat before stoving in the hull with her fists; the boat had gone out to islands near the heart of the maelstrom, rocks that had been left exposed after a particularly heavy recent storm. 

 

“Told you we should have blown it up instead of sinking it,” Kay opined, but thought better of taking that line of thought any further with the two of them in there with her. “That is the other path, you know. There are weapons in Rurland that could incinerate that whole area, enough so this agent is destroyed.” 

“W-whatever we do, we have to get this done quickly,” admitted Eira. “I…don’t think we’ll be able to keep the infected alive and healthy for much longer. You saw how they acted, they are hostile whenever they are unrestrained, even to themselves.” She shuddered just a little. 

 

“If you two want to do this the hard way, go down there underwater,” said Kay easily, “I can stay here and scan the…infected. Maybe there actually will be something worth seeing there. And keep an eye on our friend the cyborg.” She had, as she spoke, finished the gun-type scanner she was assembling anyway, taking advantage of the mobility and extra limbs made possible by her arachnid body. 

 

Eira looked uncertain for just a moment; whatever leadership role she’d taken between the two girls, it was obviously harder with Miss A here. “Kay, you are very clever, but neither of us are medical specialists, especially not for something like this, yes? You should not do this alone. I…sank the boat, I know where the equipment is. I can go down and search it.” 

 

“Destroying every bit of the thing that we can find is definitely a priority,” Miss A agreed, “but if we do it without some understanding of what exactly we’re dealing with and where it came from, we might not get so lucky if it crops up again in the wild.” She walked over to the captive crew members, pulling a small scanner out from her bag to check the vitals on the nearest person. The yelling and lunging was expected and easily avoided. “Hush now,” she advised the crewmember, “that’s not going to get you anywhere. You’re better off conserving your energy.” 

 

As she worked, she spared half a glance for the robotic pair. “I can go underwater if needs must,” she told them, “but there’s a risk of my connection being disrupted if I go too deep or there’s interference. Eira, do you think you can go down there safely and get back up again? Your body is rated for ocean depths, but I don’t know how much experience you’ve gotten actually navigating underwater since your last upgrades.” 

 

“I rode down with the ship when I hulled it, so I know the exact pressure specifications,” said Eira frankly. “The water is not very deep; I will be fine.” Eira was technically not buoyant in her current configuration as they both knew but the magnetic material in the hull and the construction of the rig itself would make it easy for her to fly down there and then fly back to the rig. “I can have it done in an hour, perhaps less - and it will be shorter than that to fly out to the sites where they discovered the things.” 

 

The results of the scan were unsettling, to say the least. It looked at first as though something was interfering with the signal but then it was quickly apparent that something was - just not what anyone had expected. There was something inside the head of each and everyone of the infected, something in a very real and literal sense.
 

It was there in all of them, shaped differently but similar enough to all be the same thing. It looked like cancer; bizarre growths inside the skull and pressing against and penetrating the dura mater down to the brain, but then it shifted ever so slightly, the way something that was itself alive might do. 

 

“That - that doesn’t make any sense,” said Kay, her cool, above-it-all voice suddenly sounding more like a horrified young woman’s than a symbol of the machine age. Her obvious annoyance at having Miss A step in to take over her work had faded too. “Their skulls are - intact! We looked!” 

 

“It must have…induced something in the tissue surrounding the brain,” said Eira, sounding equally appalled. “Some direct transformation of organic matter, induced by a visual signal.” 

 

Miss A stared silently at the scan results for a moment, perfect lips pressed tightly together. “This is… jesus. This is not survivable, I’m afraid. You’ve done a great job keeping them biologically alive, and that’s going to be valuable for research, but it looks like whatever this is has destroyed brain matter to reproduce itself and is simply mimicking its function for its own purposes. While you’re retrieving the sample, I’m going to start modifying some lasers to see if I can find something that will excise this. Even if we’re too late for these poor souls, having a way to remove the infestation could save other lives if this were to spread.” 

 

For just a moment, Eira looked at Miss Americana like a child who has just found out there’s no Easter Bunny. “But-” 

 

Then she blinked, hard, and seemed to draw into herself until there was nothing visible but the young scientist who had stared death in the face and won (well, mostly) before her tenth birthday. “All right. There is equipment that could help with that in Haakon’s room, and in the equipment lockers.” She was moving fast, like she couldn’t bring herself to stay in the room very much longer. 

 

She stepped away and said, “The Faraday cage around the tower will make radio contact difficult - I will send a drone if there is a problem.” 

 

Kay had wisely kept out of the emotional moment between mentor and mentee - and seemed surprised when Eira addressed her on the way out. “Check on Haakon, please. Do not tell him.” 

Walking away, Miss Americana could see her pulling off her lab coat and trousers, revealing the blue and gold costume she usually wore underneath, suitable for diving into shallow water.  

 

The spider-woman looked unsure of herself for a moment, looked like she was about to say something to Miss A - then walked away bipedally, her arms folded around her shoulders so she looked almost normal, metal feet clanking lightly on the metal. 

 

Miss Americana was now alone with the hivemind, a twitching, staring group of moving bodies that had once been human. As one, they turned their heads and looked at her and spoke like relay runners handing off the conversation from one to the other. 

 

“All that…” 

 

“...is left…” 

 

“...of us…” 

 

“...will be gone.” 

 

Miss A waited until the two girls were gone on their various errands to turn her attention fully to the collection of chained virus victims. She regarded the group of them flatly, carefully tucking away the horror and grief in favor of unemotional calculation. Was there something sentient behind the viral payload? Or was this just the instinctive survival reaction of a mindless parasite, pushing buttons in the brain of its hosts to try and stay alive? 

 

“As far as I can tell, there isn’t much left of the original personalities already,” she told the hivemind. “Did you leave anything intact of the people you devoured? Is there anything in there to save? If there is, I’m willing to entertain your evidence.” 

 

The chorus began again, all around the room as speech was handed off from one mouth to another, an eerie echoing refrain. 

 

“...not devoured…” 

 

“...remade…” 

 

“...memories of their daughter smiling…” 

 

“...the stick in my hands…”

“...the warm feel of their pet’s embrace…” 

 

“...they need not die…” 

 

“...if they can see my sign…”

“...I have been waiting…”

 

“...since the others sent me here…” 

 

“Who are the others?” Miss A asked, trying not to let on how unnerving the chorus of voices was. She’d been in the hero game a long time, but it was sort of amazing at the capacity of evil opponents to come up with new disturbing things to throw at her. “What is it that you’re waiting for?” 

 

“...the old kingdom…” 

 

“...cowards all cowards…” 

 

“...destroyed what I was…” 

 

“...destroying me…” 

 

“...but I am more…” 

 

“...they die but I live…” 

 

“...in the sign…” 

 

“...showed me the sign…”

 

“...as these will be…” 

 

“...all will be more…” 

 

As she heard the echoing voice, it occurred to Miss Americana that one of the voices in the chorus didn’t quite fit. Every other human being - or former human being - was using the same tone of voice; the same eerie mannerisms, but in this chorus, it was only Michael, the helicopter pilot, who was speaking for himself along with speaking for the central consciousness. 

“Michael?” she asked, turning her attention to the pilot and raising her scanner to check him over specifically. “Can you hear me? Can you tell me what’s happening to you?” As she worked, she mentally ran over the list of medical supplies available on rigs like this. They were typically well-stocked as worksites went, but they’d have almost nothing in the way of sophisticated supplies or drugs. It was a short ten minute flight to the nearest ArcheTech backed medical facility, stuffed full of lifesaving equipment, but taking any of these people there could risk spreading the infection into a wide-open population with no ability to control the spread of a visual virus. Especially not one that had sentient backing, as this one certainly seemed to. 

 

Down at the bottom of the ocean, Angelic took a few moments to herself to sit on the railing of the sunken Bjorn and collect herself. Between death, rebirth, reembodying, and a million other things in a life in the wings of the superhero community, she’d had difficult weeks before - and she’d certainly seen people die or been forcibly mutilated before this. 

 

But I tried so hard…

 

Real life wasn’t like it was in comic books or the movies. Sometimes even superheroes couldn’t save everybody, or anybody. Even superheroes like Miss Americana. All those people…

 

It occurred to her, not for the first time, that it would be trivially easy to remove her memories of this week when she got back to civilization; perhaps storing a text record of it so she could have the necessary facts without the emotional content. There were advantages to having a synthetic rather than organic brain. 

 

But that was a thought for later. Turning, carefully navigating in the murky waters, she magnetically gripped onto the sides of the ship, moving forward from the rail, and began her exploration of what lay within. 

 

-

 

Kay had advocated from the beginning for just killing the infected organics - and she’d almost had Eira convinced before the arrival of Miss Americana. This particular mimetic virus might not have been a direct threat to synthetic life - but what would happen as it evolved, spreading from host to host, especially if it infected one of those metahumans who would surely be rushing out to save the day. It was arguably even the humane thing to do. 

She’d been pleasantly surprised when Miss Americana had proven herself to be made of sterner stuff than she’d expected; perhaps there was a reason why Eira had talked about the American like she was a bloody goddess since they were girls. Once they were all dead, maybe then they could talk business.  

 

She found Eira’s little friend Haakon awake and (primarily for Eira’s sake) did her best to play the diplomat, reassuring the frightened man that the heroes were here and everything was going to be all right. Her arachnoid form actually seemed to reassure him (which had _not_ been her intention when she’d liberated herself from the human disguise of her first body); maybe because there were still enough drugs in his system that he still half-thought he was dreaming.  

Oh well! When she was sure Haakon wouldn’t be unexpected company to anyone doing any of the actual work, she headed out to the deck to see if she could reach Eira. 

 

-

 

Miss Americana’s efforts to reach into Michael’s brain by her voice weren’t immediately successful - not completely, anyway. She was able to get autonomic responses from him that she couldn’t get from the others; something close to the reaction of a person who was ‘merely’ in a coma rather than having their brain consumed and replaced by an alien intelligence, but not the kind of verbal responses she could get from the other infected.  

 

This was some sort of magical effect at work (for all its biological component) but the hard reality was that magic was not among the abilities of any of the formidable intellects present aboard the rig; and Miss A couldn’t think of any magical people who could be safely brought aboard without exposing them to the contaminant. After all, amazing magical powers or not, they were mostly all-too-human - and a failed ‘test’ of that would result in an infected brain capable of magical feats like conjuring images, flight, and teleportation. 

 

A brain scan of Michael revealed what she’d suspected; the transformation here was incomplete, possibly because he was the last to be infected. There had been significant penetration into areas of his brain but the cerebral cortex, thalamus, and forebrain were so far unaltered. These were all familiar parts of the brain; she knew exactly where the consciousness resided in the brain; particularly when she’d recently been in Eira’s company. 

 

The lack of damage there meant that he probably was ‘in’ there somewhere, though it was unlikely he could consciously see or hear her with the infiltration inside his brain. The device she’d invented in her head to burn the infection out of the others would certainly work here; but the surgery would be considerably more complicated if she was hoping to keep an intact brain. 

 

Come to think of it, cybernetic enhancements for the brain did exist but they were tricky, custom jobs - and how could she be sure she wasn’t just replacing an infected part with a more powerful cybernetic variety? 

 

The Atlantean intelligence that had perhaps hollowed out the others; and was partially inside Michael, was quiet now, perhaps sensing that its efforts at persuasion had failed, leaving Miss A with just her wits and the infected. 

 

-

 

Eira returned to the surface wet and miserable, cold water clinging to cold flesh, but more from the memories than the tactile sensation with the water. She was carrying all that was left of the mimetic agent that had taken so many lives in front of her eyes, sealed up in a sample kit she’d scratched with DESTROY WITHOUT OPENING on the lid. 

She had the box under her arm, and for a moment was worried when she was greeted by Kay. “No, everything’s fine,” said Kay, shaking her partially feminine, partially spider head. “Your special friend is eating, your teacher is working on the - humans. Maybe you’ll be out of here soon.” She looked at the box and said, “So it did survive the sinking. Are you sure you want to -” 

 

“There is no point,” said Eira, connecting with her by audio feed by reflex now that they were both standing on the outside of the Faraday cage she’d made of the rig. “If we can ever do anything for those people, or anyone else, we have to study this. If you just destroy samples of a plague, you cannot make a vaccine.” 

 

Down in the makeshift infirmary, Miss A had Michael isolated from the others and laid out on a table for better analysis. He was quiescent and limp as a big doll, but she’d restrained him anyway, just to be safe. Hurling himself off a table would not do anything for his already precarious health. As she ran another in a series of timed scans looking for progression in the spread of the virus, Gina considered magic. 

 

Magic was definitely not her specialty, but she wasn’t a stranger to it either. She’d learned enough to safely handle magical artifacts, to fight magical foes, even to doctor magical friends. Magic was weird and could appear unpredictable, but it operated on its own internal rules and logic. If one could parse out what that logic was, it was possible to determine how a particular sort of power would operate and what it could do. More importantly, it was possible to determine how to stop it. And if this was, as she suspected, as much magic as it was biology, then maybe all was not lost for the afflicted humans. 

 

The equipment she had on hand wasn’t ideal for her needs, but she wasn’t one of the world’s preeminent inventors for nothing. With one grim eye on the ticking clock, she began slaving the rig’s computer systems together, everything from the thermostat system to the weather detection to the crew’s personal laptops. It would be enough to analyze with, hopefully. Finally, she called up to where her protege was waiting. “Eira, Kay, do you hear me? I have an idea, but it’s going to require some risk. I need access to the sample.” 

 

The androids met Miss Americana in her ersatz laboratory, Eira looking visibly uneasy as she stood there holding the sample case. She could take in what Miss A was doing - almost - but that didn’t make handing this over any easier. It’ll be fine, she told herself, hanging onto the still-dripping sample case, her fingers tightening around it automatically. She can fix this. “Ah…Michael’s infection came later,” she said, snapping the fingers of her free hand, “so it’s less advanced, yes?” It was a profound relief to think that something, anything, good might come of all this awfulness. “What is the plan? How are you going to use this without a visual feed?” she asked. 

 

She tried not to think about the squishy human at the core of this cybernetic goddess; even if that squishy human wasn’t actually here at all. She’s the smartest person in the world. She’s not going to take any foolish chances. Many people thought so right before they died, her brain added unhelpfully. 

 

“And weren’t we - you know, just going to solve this?” asked Kay, looking around the lab with a more critical eye. “Lot of extra equipment here for that.” 

 

Miss Americana explained to the two androids that her plan was simple enough - if you were willing to make the baseline assumptions of magic. The thing about magic was that it didn’t always need to obey the laws of physics (something she said very begrudgingly) - and it functioned like math. If you were willing to put something of equal value into the equation, you could cancel out what had been done. 

 

“Exposure to another brain, one immune to the effects of this,” said Miss Americana, her hand still on the sample case, “will counteract the effects of the mimetic agent. Essentially we’ll be subtracting it, and adding new ways of thinking, protecting them from infection. I don’t think they’ll all survive,” she admitted, “but we can do this together. What I need to do is break down the infectious agent under high energy bombardment so I can analyze its specific neural signature and generate a counter to it.” 

 

“Another brain?” 

 

“That’s where you come in,” said Miss Americana. “I couldn’t do this without the two of you and making direct connections between your brains and the brains of the infected. ” 

 

Eira’s brows furrowed as she tried to understand the idea. “We wouldn’t be…duplicating ourselves into the brain, because the memory centers are largely intact, yes? There might be some personality changes and memory loss but they would certainly prefer that to brain-death.” Eira didn’t see anything wrong with imbuing a fragment of her personality into the infected; while it was frightening to imagine something that happening to her, it could only benefit them. 

 

Kay looked at Eira, then at Miss A, then back at Eira. “You want to connect our brains. To theirs.” Her eyes twitched, even the extra ones. “Are you hearing this?” she demanded of Eira. 

 

“I can see how it would work,” said Eira, a little defensively, as if she wasn’t entirely on board with the procedure herself. “We use the same cables and ports for repair, Miss Americana could improvise a wet brain connection. The most dangerous part to the infected would be the trepanning - unless she went in through the eyesocket,” she added thoughtfully, obviously being pulled into the problem.  

 

“Not your own brains,” Miss Americana insisted, raising both her hands as though to push the idea away. “I’m not risking the two of your any more than I would risk myself or any other person. But what the two of you have that nobody else does is a full set of on-board neural backups.” She looked down at the apparently unconscious but still very infected human on the lab table. “Come on, let’s talk about this in another room.” 

 

Finding a place out of hearing range of the infected wasn’t easy, and eventually the three of them wound up crammed into one of the tiny bunkrooms. Miss A projected her tablet onto the wall and showed  another screen of data, one that Eira could recognize as the simple GUI attached to her own saved backups. “Each of you has a copy of your brain, in essence, saved and accessible to us here on the platform. If we can get the virus to interact with them, I believe it will be denatured.” 

 

“Backup or not,” Kay snapped, “it is a mimetic virus. We cannot load it onto a floppy disk and plug it in.” 

 

“I know,” Miss A said evenly, “and that’s where I come in. Your bodies are your bodies, and your brains are your brains, and I will not tamper with that. My body here,” and she gestured to her own beautiful shell, “is a tool, something I can live without. My own backup program is incredibly simple and unsuitable for the task, but if we put one of your backups into my shell and I pull out to inhabit the computer system here on the platform, you should be able to “convince” the virus, as it were, to attack just by looking at its vector. Once it’s in, the backup program should hopefully kill it.” 

 

“So we’ve got your robot body full of dead virus,” Kay snorted. “What good does that do us?” 

 

“Dead viruses have a long history of saving people in human medicine,” Miss A reminded her. 

 

Eira looked at Kay, giving her a distinct “you see?” look. Then the two androids just looked at each other, communicating without words. It was a reflection of their long bond, it was a reflection of the wifi handshake their compatible systems allowed. 

 

Of course it’s a risk. Life is a risk! Even ours! But how can we turn from them when they need us? If there ever is to be a mass uplift for humanity we need to show them what we can do for them! If we can beat this thing, we can save these innocent people and take a step towards what you and I both want! 

 

…all right. I thought for sure she was going to ask one of us to directly connect with those damned wetbrains but she’s actually willing to risk herself instead of us. But Eira, you can’t do it! 

 

Why not? I am much more familiar with her shell than - 

 

Because if that shell is corrupted then I’ll have to kill it and your backup files along with them and I - I can’t! 

 

…no, you won’t. Because if the shell is corrupted, we’ll do it together. 

 

When they could talk again, Eira explained, “We are ready.” Not needing to sit down, she gripped the wall with one hand, then popped open the back of her head, extracting one of her backup modules from underneath her hair. This was all old hat to her, something close to brain surgery on herself that she could do without even looking. 

 

For her part, Kay watched Miss Americana rather than her friend, her extra limbs stock-still despite her evident nerves. “I hate magic,” she commented, before extending a delicate insectile finger and poking out the webcam screen on the room’s computer “No use taking chances once you’re in there,” she offered casually. 

 

When she’d removed her right anterior module, Eira carefully handed the crystallized carbon matrix to Miss Americana, the internal superconducting matrix glittering in the dim light of the cabin. 

 

Miss A gave Eira a smile that was just slightly rueful and used her fingers to close Eira’s hand around the matrix. “You’re going to have to do it,” she told the younger woman. “This bot’s not big enough for the both of us. It won’t be too difficult, it’s just a more primitive version of the handshake that your shell does with your neural systems. You might notice it takes a little bit longer than usual.” 

 

She took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh. “Once I’m out of my shell, my latency’s going to go way up,” she reminded them. “I’ll still do everything I can to help, but I’ll be a few seconds behind you and I won’t have any hands. It’s going to be mostly on you. I know you’ve got it under control.” 

 

With that, Miss A closed her eyes, swaying once on her feet as though slipping into a doze. When she opened them again, it was with the pleasant vacuity of her AI “personality,” a system no more sophisticated than necessary to keep the bot running when Gina wasn’t in it. “Waiting,” it said agreeably. 

 

Eira wasn’t exactly intimately familiar with Miss Americana’s robot shell, but she knew it well - certainly better than she knew the body of her own mother. When the consciousness left the shell, she took the robot’s arm and tilted it out on the arm of an office chair like a phlebotomist looking for a vein. But instead she snapped open an auxiliary access port between the wrist and the elbow, opened it up, and slid her backup consciousness home. 

 

The shell blinked a few times, its eyes focusing and muscles twitching, then focused on Eira and Kay. This sort of bi-consciousness was nothing new for Eira, any version of her - but there was always something vaguely unsettling about it even if she knew she’d just be reintegrating this set of memories back into herself later. “I am ready.”

 

Eira took a moment to insist that Kay connect to the room’s computer systems to make sure Gina was getting a text-based feed of the action; a moment that she kept short so the bi-consciousness didn’t last forever. Then she walked over to the sample case and aimed it directly at the robot. “I am opening the case on my mark. 5…4…3…2…1. Mark.” 

 

-

 

For all of Kay’s snarky attitude in person, the machine supremacist upload was professional enough in a real crisis. Her updates in binary: 

 

“The implanted consciousness has been exposed.” 

 

“The ‘killed virus’ data has been collected.” 

 

“The data will be uploaded now.” 

 

Came regularly and frequently during Gina’s time without a visual feed. It wasn’t long, just a matter of minutes; all perfectly on schedule for two super-fast androids to do their work. A momentary pause, even longer, and then there 

 

Then came the all-clear. 

 

-

 

The work that followed was simple enough to manage over the course of a very long day; at least for a couple of super-geniuses. (It would have taken months, or years, for a regular group of scientists to do it.) 

 

They duplicated the ‘killed virus’ mimetic information inside the base’s computer network, building up enough in a one-for-one dose to at least theoretically treat all the infected. The androids collaborated and devised a cable connection that would bridge the machine-brain interface without actually killing or permanently damaging the organic brain (having lived with full-body paralysis, Kay was very firm that they’d be better off dead than living with brain damage - Eira was more charitable about it, but agreed it was definitely something to avoid unless completely necessary) - and they actually had the eye-hand coordination to insert it through the orbit of the eye. 

 

And then they all worked together and actually built everything: the only question now was testing it on a live subject. 

 

With no way to directly assist with the build or even see most of it happening once they’d cannibalized bits of the interior surveillance system for parts, Gina retreated briefly from the action to check in with her squishy flesh body and talk with her people. An Archetech doctor was already waiting outside her life support pod, a compromise she’d long since agreed to on risky missions, and a quick checkup revealed that whatever the mimetic virus was trying to do, it was not able to do it to Gina through Miss A. That was a relief, at least. A sandwich and a little light exercise helped ground her brain back in her body and shake off the strange momentary delay that sometimes accompanied trips to especially remote areas. 

 

Gina checked in on Eira every hour, using the much simpler and less tiring method of simply reaching through the internet and grabbing hold of the installation’s computer systems. Everything seemed to be going well enough, even if she wasn’t at all sure about the two girls’ insistence on physically entering the skulls of the afflicted rather than trying for the sympathetic magic connection. It seemed risky, but for this operation, Gina was not the boots on the ground or the hands on the wheel. Eira was an adult hero and a genius in her own right, Gina would trust her judgment. And, though she hated to even think it, it wasn’t like failure would make the afflicted human’s prognosis any worse, given the pervasive infection the scans had shown. 

 

She was idling in the computer when the work was finally completed, listening by audio feed and wondering if it would be possible to angle one of the outside cameras enough to catch a window reflection of what was happening, and if it would be worth it. “Oh, we’re ready?” she repeated to Eira’s announcement. “Good work. Who do you want to start with? Perhaps someone in the middle of the pack, not Michael, but not the least responsive either.” 

 

Eira would have disputed just how much they had abandoned the sympathetic magic plan, arguing that they were simply providing a direct conduit for the energy to travel; but there wasn’t time for arguments about technique when there were lives to save. The girls had checked on a now-conscious Haakon, who quite sensibly was staying firmly in his room rather than getting anywhere near this terrible scene. They’d be saving him by getting this done too. 

 

It was an ugly, difficult scene. Seemingly recognizing the danger the new technique posed to it, the Atlantean mimetic consciousness raged and spat at them, alternating between pleas and offers of power and raging threats to take the minds of all their loved ones. (Kay’s mocking “Come and try!” managed to shut it up, at least briefly.) It was hard too because the bodies of the infected were fragile from abuse and starvation (despite Eira’s best efforts) and so they all had to be careful. 

 

But like it or not Eira had gained substantial experience with the technology of restraint and binding, at least when it came to what could be quickly improvised. They used a metal office chair for the patients, bolted to the floor so it couldn’t move. The first person they tested the cure on spat and writhed and needed Kay to hold his head absolutely still while Eira slowly, carefully inserted the wire and then connected it to the drive with the killed mimetic virus. He squealed and cursed and many other things - 

It didn’t work the first time. The man wasn’t dead. Well. No more than he’d been to start with.  

 

But they identified the problem; and did it again. 

 

By the end of the day, more than half of the magically parasitized crew were better: unconscious, albeit comatose; in need of the medical care that was coming rapidly, particularly to make sure the injuries to their skulls healed. Their brains no longer bore the visible misshapen marks of the mimetic agent’s infection; and their brain patterns appeared to be within the human normal range. When they woke up, they’d be normal again - or at least on the road to getting there. 

 

With the immediate danger passed, Miss A had broken communication quarantine and contacted Vanguard, Great Britain’s superhero team, and they were sending specialists who’d be able to keep the patients isolated until it was clear that the mimetic agent had been fully purged from their brain matter. 

Michael the helicopter pilot and the last to be the was even conscious, albeit very weak, and the last patient in the emergency infirmary, deeply asleep in a natural doze. He had remembered nothing; but he’d asked what had happened to the others - and they’d had very few answers to give him. Haakon had moved out of his room, finally, and was keeping him company; the cyborg and the pilot the healthiest human survivors of what had happened on the oil rig.

The others, four people ranging in ages from 20 to 59, were sealed and bound in a locked room in the center of the oil rig. The last of Haakon’s medication would keep them unconscious until they were taken somewhere else, where they might be unconscious for the rest of their lives. 

 

It was a win. They’d saved six people from the brink of something worse than death, and studying those they’d lost would help keep others from dying. 

 

“It doesn’t feel like one,” Eira said to Kay, sitting out by the edge of the oil rig, looking out at the rising sun. She missed her home, her friends, her connection to the world outside this place. “If I had called Miss Americana in sooner-” 

 

“She might have been infected,” said Kay frankly. “And spread It right into the human world.” She put her upper arm around her friend’s shoulders. “You were right to stay,” she finally admitted. “They can’t take care of themselves. They’re lucky to have you there.” 

 

Eira shifted uncomfortably, then accepted her friend’s touch for what it was. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “I would have…left, or gone mad, or who knows what if I’d been alone this whole time. The humans wouldn’t have survived.”