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  POST-INCIDENT

  APPROXIMATE DATE — UNCONFIRMED

  Emmett had no idea how much time passed. As far as he knew, he stayed chained up the entire time.

  He was asleep for much of it—at least, it felt that way. Because Emmett’s brain was synthetic, Bastion was able to keep him sedated by sending power fluctuations through the chains and through his nervous system. But Emmett wasn’t completely unconscious. It was a mix of twilight and dreams—one he probably couldn’t have made sense of without his new brain.

  Emmett felt like he was wandering the corridors of his own mind, except that now he didn’t remember the way. Emmett knew intrinsically that there was no way Bastion could’ve gotten in and rearranged his thoughts and memories, but the effect was still the same. His own thoughts had become a ghostly maze, filled with demiplane-like fog.

  Emmett wandered the halls, metaphorical hands outstretched—unable to see more than a few feet in front of him. He sought out landmarks. In this twilight dreamscape, there was no difference between physical landmarks in his synthetic brain and cerebral things like memories.

  One time, a corridor led to Clara. She appeared in his mind, frozen and beautiful, like an enormous statue. He leapt onto the back of her hoodie and clambered up the folds to her shoulder. Emmett stood and looked out over an abyss of fog. An army of drones was coming—descending on the monument of Clara like mechanical locusts.

  Emmett drew his rifle and fired. The same power that ran through Clara melted through drone hulls and sliced others in half. It didn’t matter which direction the swarm came from, Emmett fought relentlessly.

  It was a battle of willpower. Emmett against Bastion.

  Bastion was a shadow of TINA—less adaptable, but utterly ruthless and mechanical. It had unlimited energy and steadily growing processing power. But on this battlefield, the fighters were evenly matched.

  It was Emmett’s mind, and he was sovereign. Even though Emmett’s mind was synthetic, he was still human, and his mind was different than computer hardware. Bastion couldn’t just take him over like a powerful psychic or exploit a backdoor like the Menagerie.

  Emmett defended himself. On this battlefield, he wasn’t burdened by the shackles of his body. His muscles never tired. His prosthetics never failed, and his power never ran out.

  Bastion needed to power Emmett’s mind in order to attack it. It meant that anytime Bastion attacked him, Emmett knew about it and he could use that power to his own benefit.

  The result was Bastion poking and prodding at Emmett’s mind, like a wary child playing with an insect. At first, Emmett felt like an insect in a killbox, but he quickly learned how to sting. He became a wasp.

  In another battle, Emmett was in the flickering city of Belport. Instead of drones, Bastion’s attack presented as biomechs walking the streets. Buildings appeared and disappeared as Bastion sent power surges through Emmett’s brain. It threw off Emmett’s defenses. Biomechs used the flickering buildings as ambush spots to catch him off guard.

  But Emmett was laying a trap of his own. He siphoned off energy from Bastion’s power surges. Funneled it and stored it in a bomb. Just when all seemed lost, Emmett retreated back into the fog of his own mind and detonated the bomb behind him.

  It didn’t do any lasting damage to Bastion’s circuitry, but it caused pain. Pain turned out to be enough of a deterrent. After all, Bastion was just a child poking an insect. Emmett was the wasp fighting for its life.

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  Back on the statue of Clara, the battle raged. Emmett was slowly being overrun. His relationship and love for her manifested on the battlefield. It fueled his resolve, but handicapped Emmett in other ways. He was too worried about protecting his memories of her—too worried about protecting the statue.

  Bastion recognized this and exploited it. The drone swarm spread out, splitting its focus between attacking Emmett and attacking his memories of Clara. Emmett didn’t have the processing power to fight a war on so many fronts.

  Emmett slammed his hand down on the statue of Clara, and the enormous structure crumbled beneath his feet. The statue fell. Emmett fell—all according to plan. Fragments of stone dissolved into nanites, and the entire mass absorbed into Emmett. The statue fell into Emmett, and he fell into nothingness. Bastion withdrew—

  Then it attacked somewhere else.

  Again.

  And again.

  ~

  Bastion poked and prodded at different parts of his mind and especially at the now-vacant implant where TINA used to be. It was hard to tell exactly which connections and sections of his brain that Bastion was targeting, but the vacant implant stood out. Battles there took place on empty fields—Emmett couldn’t draw on his memories, and Bastion couldn’t attack those memories.

  In some ways, those were the easiest battles.

  Emmett focused only on fighting Bastion. There was nothing else and no one else to get in the way. Nothing to toy with Emmett’s emotions and make him miscalculate. He became as machine-like as his enemy.

  More and more battles took place inside the void of the implant.

  Emmett wasn’t sure why. Bastion must have run its own simulations and decided against attacking his brain directly. Maybe Emmett’s emotions and memories gave him the advantage in his brain, or they were simply too much of an unknown. Or maybe the implant was an easier point of attack—it had been made for TINA, after all. Made for an AI—not for Emmett.

  Either way, Bastion became obsessed with the implant.

  Emmett fell into the rhythm of battle and waged a one human war on the budding AI.

  ~

  But Emmett was also aware of his surroundings. While he was sedated, he would still catch glimpses of the gory biolab that his body was chained in. Early on, his prison would appear as a battlefield, but soon it only appeared as pieces.

  Chains here—

  Bloody gurney there.

  Sometimes, he would even catch glimpses of movement or hear Savanus or Bastion speaking aloud in the real world. Emmett was certain that he could understand what they were saying, but he couldn’t retain anything. In the end, all their speech sounded garbled.

  In those fleeting moments, Emmett would look down from his shackles. He’d see Ava Savanus alone in the biolab—sometimes standing calmly, other times in fits of rage as she hurled scraps of biomech across the room. Each time, it felt like he was watching a show in another language. Only there weren’t any subtitles.

  Until finally—

  Emmett woke up on a gurney.

  The first thing he was aware of was the ice cold across his back. Emmett blinked his eyes open and found the operating limbs poised over him like a spider. The arms were moving. Already working on him.

  Emmett couldn’t feel anything. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t blink.

  The room was quiet, except for the smooth sliding of metal on metal as the spider arms did their work. They moved around Emmett’s head. Occasionally he felt pressure, but that was it.

  …Was this it? Had Savanus finally given up trying to get into his brain the easy way? Was she going to break him open like an old toy?

  Ava Savanus walked over to the gurney and looked down on Emmett. She sighed. Savanus looked tired, like she’d had far too many sleepless nights waiting for him to crack.

  Emmett would have smiled if he could.

  He was imprisoned in every way. Gutted and chained physically, and mentally locked into his own body. If all he managed to do was piss off his captors, then that was worth it.

  Emmett just stared up at the spider arms.

  Savanus said flatly, “I’m installing Bastion into your brain implant. Now he’ll have direct access. Good luck fighting back now.”

  Emmett wished he could have replied out loud. All he could do was think to himself:

  Bring it.

  ~ ~ ~