‘We have built the torment nexus from the famous book “do not build the torment nexus”!’

Whoever made that meme never had asked themselves just how useful a torment nexus could be with the right application.

‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.’

A beginner’s mistake, that she did not make. The question of purpose and justification for the product had been contemplated early and fleshed out every step along the way. No one wise with a profit motive designed a product that would cause trouble for the target demographic. Only idiots eager to lose their monopoly shipped a half-baked product.

‘The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for mankind.’

Spoken like someone that would have preferred to die of sepsis.

The truth was that the march of technological progress was unstoppable. One could either ride the tiger or be mauled by it. Did people exist who did not manage to synchronize their spiritual needs with the new material world they found themselves in? Absolutely. Were they her problem? Absolutely not. There was a reason why she had never gotten into the therapy business. All she cared about was staying ahead of the curve.

‘You better not disappoint me,’ she thought and tapped the surface of the lying briefcase.

The code was incapable of relaying any emotion. Any responses she got were those of her very own troubleshooting. In the end, true artificial intelligence was a questionable thing. At what level of complexity did overlapping algorithms qualify as sentient? When did that further elevate into sapience?

In Scarlett’s opinion, it couldn’t.

The code she had written was impossibly dense, layered, and efficient, and all of it was completely at her mercy. Every ‘emotion’ the entity was capable of was just a setting on a circuit board. Levels of aggression coded to achieve a curve of escalating force. If she could switch an emotion on and off like a light switch, was it an emotion or was it just an alternative flow of electricity?

The redhead sat on top of one of the fortress walls. It was a mere three metres off the ground. High enough to qualify as an obstruction. A minor hurdle was a better way to put it.

It would be enough for the undead force that shambled towards them.

“You watched too many movies,” Scarlett told her man.

John emerged from the nearby tunnel and hopped on top of the wall. “Maybe,” he admitted, “but I really don’t feel comfortable about this.”

“It’s an assortment of cables, plates, circuits and mana sources,” the redhead stated. Her hand glided to the edge of the briefcase. The first of the two Baelementium clasps was loosened, registering her specific mana signature.

“If I replaced the cables, plates, and circuits with magic and metal, wouldn’t I get an Artificial Spirit?”

“You’d get a golem first, and then you still have a massive fucking difference. There’s a reason why they didn’t figure out how to make magical souls until the goddess of chaos got involved.”

“Maybe.” He scratched the back of his head. That he was there bothered her. He didn’t trust her. This was her field of expertise and he didn’t trust her. Usually she met that kind of doubt with ambivalence. The percentage of people that doubted her and had no idea what they were talking about approached a hundred.

John belonged to that fraction of a percent that did know what he was talking about. Not in this specific issue, just generally. He was too smart to ignore.

Even if that hadn’t been true… she did love him. Being doubted by the man she loved was bothersome. It gave her the annoying urge to nag him into submission. She pushed it aside. The second clasp loosened and she gave the briefcase a tap.

It sailed over the edge of the wall and landed on the ground below. The base protocol activated, and the open lid parted. Inside the briefcase was a dense knot of cables and machine parts. Electric energy bounced visibly between magical conductors. Individual segments unfurled, rose up on an erecting bone structure.

“Hahahahaa…..”

“Why is it cackling?” John asked.

“Morale damage,” Scarlett answered plainly. “It’s just a synthesized voice following an auto-generated script.”

Material kept on sliding out of condensed dimensions. Cables twisted into sinews and a facsimile of musculature. Metal plates reinforced surface areas, giving the thin figure a vaguely human outline. Sharpened, straight blades made up the segmented fingers of the battle-form. Each digit ended in a triangular tip, capable of holding things and of digging through flesh.

Energy crackled up and down the centrepiece of the creation: a nearly human spine. Each segment had its individual mana battery. All of these lesser storage units were merely in support of the Arcane Star that Scarlett had integrated into the head of her creation. The angular, thick plates of bronze Baelementium had a bird-like feeling to it. Three eyes were distributed evenly across the three sides of the elongated pyramid.

A cape of cables and chains fell over the back of the gangly robot, hiding the spine from direct view and impact. Scarlett wasn’t satisfied with the initialization. Weak spots should not be on display like that. Annoyingly, she hadn’t found a work-around for transportability. Yet.

“What do you call it?” John asked.

“Autonomous Machine.”

“…That’s a little bit bland, but I do get the abbreviation.”

AM went through a series of tests that could be mistaken as an eager individual waking from a deep sleep and stretching its limbs. Internal systems and back-up systems whirled. Runes of artifice carved into the exposed metal of the limbs glowed. System diagnostics showed all green. Scarlett gave the code a single order.

‘Deploy.’

A renewed set of manic laughter echoed from the metal plates. The Hailey-built sound system had a static reverb to it that was reminiscent of old radios. That could have been fixed, but Scarlett liked it better this way.

The autonomous machine did not move. It stood there, shaking, heating the semiconductors to optimal efficiency and waited. Its three eyes moved behind the protective glass-domes.

The undead horde stepped closer. There were hundreds of them, a true tide of skeletons, ghouls, and wraiths. None of them were the equipped variety that the Horsemen kept in their personal employ. All of these were just summoned goons and animated corpses.

One of the wraiths flew overhead. Either AM was invisible to a creature that looked for life signs or the wraith simply did not have the intelligence to acknowledge the threat.

The robot snapped around, leapt, and cut through the wraith with its claws. The previously steel-coloured digits had shifted to a deep crimson, leaving trails of fire in their wake.

AM landed on hands and bird-like feet, then contorted like a snake. A couple of system scans changed to yellow for the split second of the motion, before normalizing again. Scarlett made a note of increasing flexibility in those areas.

The machine charged towards the rest of the shambling horde. Catching onto the entity coming towards them, even these dull creatures finally reacted with hostility. Burning claws sliced through them, catching alight the rotting flesh and breaking reinforced bones.

Their numbers were their greatest weapon. At the current rate, the methodical motions of AM dispatched with enemies slower than they were reinforcing. ‘Up to aggression level two,’ Scarlett commanded the code.

“Insignificant monsters!” the autonomous machine screamed. Refined mana pulsed invisibly through the internal mechanisms. In a split second, the previously measured usage of fuel was turned into a rapid consumption, accelerating movements. The heat of the claws turned brighter, flames dancing over the surface of the metal while they ripped and tore through the monsters.

“It’s level jumped,” John hummed. “50 to 100.”

“That maps onto the doubled energy consumption,” Scarlett answered simply.

“Can it go further?” he asked. “Because it’ll need to.”

The distant trees shook. Then the nearby trees shook. A roar made the air itself vibrate as the red rider and his bulky steed broke through the treeline. “TO BATTLE!” screamed the Horseman, pointing his massive sword at the torso of AM.

‘Maximize aggression level. Singular focus protocol,’ Scarlett ordered.

The emptying of the cache caused the machine to freeze. Clicking her tongue, the redhead made a mental note of optimizing the target switching software. Zombies gnawed on the metal plates. War approached, his battle-marred plate armour shining rust red in the moonlight.

“HATE! HATE! HATE! AHAHAHAHA!” The machine snapped out of its reboot. Psychopathic laughter, between breakdown and raw glee, echoed through the trees. Flashes of incandescent metals ripped the low-level zombies off the machine, which then charged straight towards War.

The Horseman’s thrust caught the machine in the shoulder. Scarlett could see the numbers in her bank account dropping as high-grade materials were turned into scrap. A whole arm was sacrificed. Scarlett would have to review the decision-making protocol on that later.

The remaining, left hand slammed into the side of the horse. AM dragged itself up by the ribs of the undead steed. The point of its head slammed into War’s side with enough force to punch a hole into the armour. The undiluted aggression behind the motion threw the Horseman off his horse. He landed on his back, AM still on top. The machine gripped War by the shoulder. The talons of its feet closed around the rider’s thighs. It drew its head back, ready to sink the point of its beak-like head into the neck of the Horseman.

War slammed his fist into the side of the machine. Yet further red numbers appeared before Scarlett’s mental image. “That’s a failure then,” she groaned and watched the last few seconds of her prototype.

AM rose up. System diagnostics suggested not putting weight on the damaged segments. The aggression level overwrote any such concerns. “HATE!” It bellowed again. The intimidation tactic did not work against the rider of War whatsoever. The Horseman advanced, raised his massive blade, and stopped suddenly.

The machine’s light had shut off. Balancing functions ceased. The entire thing slowly fell forwards, hitting the ground with a loud clatter of loosened parts.

‘Improve targeting software, reconsider the level that self-preservation gets compromised by aggression levels, create sub-protocols for enemy types immune to psychological warfare, improve hardware on weak points 3, 11, and 12 specifically and improve general aesthetics,’ Scarlett made a quick mental list of required improvements. “Aclysia! Could you retrieve that for me?”

“Affirmative,” the maid stated and stepped out of a nearby tunnel.

Scarlett hadn’t actually known she was there, but if John was out of bed, she couldn’t have been far. The weaponized maid entered the field of battle, soon crossing blades with War. The ensuing fight was not to Scarlett’s interest, she just wanted the parts recovered. “What level did it top out at?”

“234,” John reported.

“Can’t even operate at a third of our level, for more than 30 seconds.” The technomancer shook her head. “That is below projections. The extraction mechanism for the Arcane Star must not be as efficient as I thought.”

“Need another one?” the Gamer asked.

Scarlett chewed on the inside of her cheek. What he was offering her was a hilariously powerful storage unit. There were more economic ways to utilize them than the development of killing machines. Under other circumstances, she would have refused such a gift. However, if her man wanted to enable her to keep researching means that, ultimately, served her own protection, then she would accept.

After asking a question. “I thought you disagreed with me building AMs.”

“I do, you are building the torment nexus from the famous book ‘do not build the torment nexus’,” John responded, predictably. “But I sense this is important to you and that…” he gestured towards the inactive machine, now protected by a layer of ice against the brutality of the nearby clash, “…at least is not the kind of artificial intelligence I was afraid of.”

“So you are capable of learning,” Scarlett teased him. “How surprising.”

“Allegedly. Haven’t learned not to love you yet though.”

Scarlett smirked and extended a hand. He got the signal and helped her up. She pulled herself further. He already anticipated her lips. ‘Gaia, he smells fantastic,’ she thought and wrapped her arms around his neck. A hand on the back of her head allowed him to take control of the kiss. She let him. She always let him.

“I love you too,” she whispered. “When do I get that star?”

“Already grabbing it, not like we have a shortage of them,” John told her. “I got like ten in the storage… getting one a day sure is helpful.”

That did enter the economic calculus for accepting them. “Then I won’t feel bad for burning through them,” the technomancer decided and jumped off the wall. The briefcase still laid there. While AM was awaiting retrieval, she may as well tinker with the copy of the code on the secondary hard drive within the container. ‘I should go for a less ambitious transportation model,’ she thought. ‘I could increase the used material considerably if I went for a suitcase instead.’ “Get me a suitcase!” she shouted up to John.

“Demanding, aren’t we?” the Gamer answered.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” she promised and smirked. “I’ll pay in advance.”

“I’ll take that offer.”

They retreated into the fortress.