TANGO Heavy - Chapter 16 (Patreon)

Tango walks down towards the tunnel that they had entered from, his heavy steps ringing out against the stones as he looks at the place around them. What happened here while he was gone? While he was gone…? He repeats the question in his mind.

The giant looks at his hands as he walks forward, the hydro-mechanical pistons in the joints of his body hissing with each step that he takes. No. He was never really gone, he was asleep. But they were gone now. All of them. Everyone. Everyone he had ever known was lost to time immemorial. All that remained of them were some ruins and the memories that couldn’t even flash before his mind’s eye anymore. He had no such thing as this construction. It was sacrificed. But he knows what they looked like. What they sounded like. What they smelt like. Even if he can’t visualize or ‘manifest’ any of those senses, he knows that he knew them.

The wind howls louder now, as they approach the cylindrical tunnel, the lights shining from the front of his body towards the pristinely smooth stone-walls. A plasma weapon did this. He was sure of that. From something giant. It wasn’t one of theirs, it couldn’t have been. They never had anything this powerful. Well… No, that wasn’t entirely true. He knew that. But they never had anything this precise. He steps out into the cylindrical tunnel and looks towards the left, towards the direction opposite from the one they had entered from before.

Zooming in his vision in a little further, to look beyond the darkness he saw it. As the snow storm dissipated for only a brief second and the light of the bright moon above bounded off of the white world outside, his gaze followed it all the way down. The tunnel, the hole. It didn’t just go through this mountain cliff. It went through the next precipice, a full rocky range over, and then through the one behind that as well. Like the lance of an arch-angel, it pierced for as far as his vision can see. The storm pulls back in, drawing the curtain shut.

What happened while he was asleep? Did they lose? They must have. Everyone he knew died and all the while he was asleep. He wants to feel angry about that. But it won’t let him. The hard-wiring.

Could he have stopped it? His gaze returns to the giant scarring wound that they stand inside of; the clean blast that must have emerged from nothing less than a leviathan. Some distant horror of the far-gone past. No. No he couldn’t have stopped it then. If he could have, then any of the others could have as well. But… somehow, even if they lost, people survived. Somehow they seem to have retaken the surface from the reavers. The heavy-encroacher that was down there with him must have been there since his own time, walking over the corpses in their shared tomb. The only facility left, if his scanner was any indication. That meant he was the last one. The last of his kind.

How many of the reavers were left? Surely there couldn’t be that many if there were villages of people, if there were cities. If humans had reclaimed the land. Should he still go? Should they? Did any of this even need to happen?

What about the girl? She’s clearly some kind of hybrid. Some… mutant. Nothing like that existed in his day, he was sure enough of that. But it wasn’t too shocking for him either, that he could accept the fact of her existence. After all, the first drawings of human-animal mixtures were already done in the pre-neolithic times. Was it some kind of mutation? The rad-fragments did damage genetic material, not too badly if you only passed them by. But how many had been scattered throughout the world? Hundreds of thousands, millions more likely. They must have gone everywhere. Everything on the planet must have been exposed to a constant stream of radiation. Apparently some wires got crossed. He bet the Internet would have gone wild. Well, they’re all dead now. Was the world better off? Hard to say. Probably though.

He looks down the passage again. That way was north. He looks down the way they had come in from. That was south. He needs to go south. He needs to go to Sarajevo.

Doesn’t he?

That’s what this body is for, after all. That was the whole spiel. He’s the last one left. Isn’t it his job? His responsibility? His duty?

Everyone is dead except for him. Was there even a point then? Or is it just the hard-wiring of the body that was messing with his mind? It’s still there, waiting for him. The sensors told him that it was still active after all these years. Floating there in Sarajevo, waiting for anyone to come and to call for it. Waiting for him.

The wind blows the standard issue jacket, that is still hanging from his shoulder, around and it catches his attention, as he looks at the fabric flowing around him.

They had been here. They tried to take it back. They tried to get to him. It was his duty to honor that sacrifice, no matter how long ago it has been. He was here now. He would do it. It was waiting for him.

And the girl? The ‘dress’ blows around as well, as the wind coats his body. He listens to the sounds of her quiet breathing through the audio sensors that were still available to him, occasionally she would twitch in her sleep and kick the walls. That was a familiar sound that made him nostalgic, but the feeling of warmth didn’t come with it as it should have. He needs her. Time had worn the TANGO unit down to a dangerous level. It was more than a miracle that it still worked at all. How many years had been since then? Since he was told to sleep for routine maintenance by that kind face? Decades? Centuries? More? The internal clock stopped working a long time ago. It was nothing short of a miracle of heaven itself. God bless those Swiss engineers, wherever their souls now rest. All those years of working on clocks really paid off in the end, he supposes.

He can’t waste that. That sacrifice.

He needs the girl to keep him running. She seems desperate. He can use that. He isn’t sure if she is incredibly spoiled or just close to feral and very naive, he assumes the latter, given her appearance. Was everyone like that these days? Or is she an exception? It doesn’t matter. He needs her. He would never make it there otherwise. Besides, she was young, small, impressionable. She was willing to listen to him and she was willing to get hurt, he could use that too. Her body would withstand the cabin’s radiation for a long time, especially since it was everywhere here anyways, assuming he got her pepped up a little. It was an odd feeling though, she reminds him of someone who was dead now. The sensation is a little conflicting. But the hard-wiring of the bot’s core-purpose supersedes any emotions like that, overwriting any parts of him that it doesn’t need. Anything that hinders the mission.

The city, huh? He wonders what cities were like these days. He had always hated the city, it was always so noisy there. Air pollution was a big problem too. He turns to the north and begins walking. He needs time to get her ready, he needs time to get the critical systems repaired and so, she has to learn how to do that and how to pilot the suit. That was the final safety net. The Sarajevo protocol wouldn’t complete without a pilot inside. And the world was fresh out of those, so he would have to make one himself.

The storm howls. It would still be a while, he stands at the precipice, watching the world fly by outside. His mind and body disconnected from each other in more senses than one, as Pen, in her sleep, kicks inside of him.

He ponders if this is how his wife had felt back then, when she was with child. It was strange, having something inside of you, moving around. Freudian. Or was Gigeresque the word? He doesn’t know, he wasn’t a psychologist. He was never supposed to be here to begin with. Though he supposes those weren’t things anymore, those words both belonged to the old world. To the dead people. Things were just strange now. Though perhaps they always had been. It was what it was.