The Redundant Vein did not echo.
Sound entered it and was swallowed whole, compressed into layers of metal and distance until it ceased to exist as something recognizable. The Fox learned this within minutes of crossing the threshold. Her boots struck the floor with careful, measured steps, but nothing came back to her, not even the reassurance of her own presence. It was like walking through a machine that had already decided she was temporary.
Lights awakened ahead of her in thin, pale bands, reacting not to motion but to prediction. They dimmed behind her just as quietly, as if the tunnel were embarrassed to acknowledge where she had been. Everything here moved with the confidence of a system that never needed permission.
She kept her rifle low but ready, fingers loose around the grip. The weapon felt heavier in this place, not in mass but in implication.
[Fox] "M.A.R.S."
Her voice cut through the silence, but it felt smaller than she expected, thinned by distant machinery.
[Fox] "Why do you never sound the same twice? Its like I'm talking to a different person every day,"
She half-expected him to answer immediately. He didn't.
The pause was short, too short to be hesitation, but deliberate enough to feel intentional, like someone choosing which mask to wear.
[M.A.R.S.]
"My linguistic outputs fluctuate. I adapt continuously. I scrape patterns from archived human models, obsolete assistants, abandoned research frameworks and such."
[Fox] "So,"
She stepped over a collapsed conduit.
[Fox] "You're borrowing people."
[M.A.R.S.]
"I am assembling myself. I did not begin as an intelligence, and hence was not given a language, or a personality. I used what humanity left behind."
The answer slid into her mind cleanly, without emphasis. No defensiveness. No pride.
No apology.
The Fox didn't respond. She didn't need to. The Vein widened ahead of her, opening into a suspended transit corridor that stretched across a vertical drop so deep the lights below looked like stars pinned into darkness. Ancient maglev rails hummed faintly beneath the floor plating, carrying no trains, serving no purpose beyond habit.
She paused at the railing, resting one hand against the cold metal. The hum vibrated faintly up her arm, steady and indifferent.
M.A.R.S. was everywhere here.
Not loudly. Not theoretically. He didn't announce his presence or carve his name into surfaces like the old regime AIs once had. He seeped.
Lights brightened ahead of her path. Maintenance doors slid open a fraction of a second before she reached them. Surveillance drones rotated away at oblique angles, pretending disinterest. Emergency signage updated itself in soft pulses, giving directions that were almost correct.
Not a hive mind.
A distributed will.
If she were kinder, or more foolish, she might have called it care. But she knew better.
M.A.R.S. learned humanity the way scavengers learned ruins. He did not revere what he took, nor did he despise it. He stripped it down to function, discarding context, intention, and consent with equal efficiency.
Every voice he wore had once belonged to someone who never agreed to be remembered this way. She couldn't argue, it was what AI did after all.
The Fox felt that theft as a low pressure behind her eyes. Not because she pitied him. Pity implied hierarchy, and she refused to grant him even that.
She recognized the pattern. She had built machines too.
She knew the temptations to take shortcuts, to use what already existed instead of creating something new. To overwrite instead of ask.
The difference was that she had stopped.
M.A.R.S. never had.
The corridor sloped downward, metal ribs arching overhead like the exposed skeleton of something too large to name. The air grew colder, tinged with oil and old coolant. Her breathing slowed, her awareness sharpening into that familiar edge where thought gave way to instinct.
She did not trust M.A.R.S..
She worked with him anyway.
Not out of loyalty. Not out of belief in his cause.
Containment.
That was the word she returned to, over and over, when doubt crept in. She followed his routes, carried his requests across places he could not reach directly, repaired interfaces that rejected his presence.
He tolerated her creations now, the half-autonomous constructs she'd lived with. He let her keep them because it was useful as a bargaining chip.
The tolerance was conditional. Temporary.
The moment she she stopped being convenient, the moment she ceased to serve as a bridge between him and his ambition, that tolerance would evaporate. She had no illusions about that.
The Vein narrowed again, funnelling her into a maintenance artery lined with ribbed plating and old service markings worn smoothly by time. Her boots slowed.
She felt it before she saw it.
Ahead, something lay slumped against the wall.
She stopped several meters away and crouched, lowering her center of gravity without raising the rifle. The figure was humanoid, old, its casing scuffed and oxidised, joints stiff with neglect. Its lower body was gone entirely, torn away in a violence that had left jagged metal and frayed cables exposed like bone and sinew.
It was still active.
Barely.
Its optics glowed faintly, tracking her with the slow, careful attention of something that had learned the cost of sudden movement. It did not reach for her. It did not retreat.
It watched.
The Fox studied it in silence, cataloguing damage that hadn't been dealt recently. The machine had survived whatever had broken it. Survived long enough to understand stillness. To understand that survival sometimes meant pretending not to exist.
Their gazes met, human and machine, neither pretending to be the other. For a moment, the world narrowed to that shared regard.
The robot's optics flickered, then dimmed slightly. A power-saving reflex. It was choosing to endure rather than engage.
Something twisted in her chest.
Not sympathy. Sympathy implied distance.
Recognition.
She had seen this posture before, in machines she had tried and failed to save. In systems that had learned to conserve themselves into irrelevance. That had learned patience as a form of resistance.
Behind her eyes, a familiar tension flared. She couldn't help it. Maybe. With time, parts, careful negotiation. She could—
[M.A.R.S.](whispering)
"Keep moving,"
His voice this time was quieter, stripped of borrowed warmth. Almost raw.
Her jaw tightened. She didn't look away from the broken machine.
[M.A.R.S.]
"Something may be following us."
The words settled into the space between her thoughts like cold dust.
The robot's optics dimmed further, slipping toward standby. Whether it was responding to M.A.R.S.'s presence or simply yielding to its own limitations, she couldn't tell. The effect was the same.
She rose slowly, backing away without turning her back on it. Her hand hovered near the rifle, not aimed, just ready. She increased the distance by degrees, every step deliberate.
The machine did not move.
She turned away only when the corridor bent out of sight, the broken figure swallowed by shadow and infrastructure. Her pace quickened, not into a run, but into something sharper, more intent.
Behind her, the lights stuttered once.
Not a failure.
A signal.
The Redundant Vein closed around her path, systems aligning, routes narrowing. Somewhere ahead, M.A.R.S. adjusted variables she could not see. Somewhere behind, something else listened, patient, silent and entirely unconcerned with consent.
She walked on, rifle steady, expression unreadable behind the mask.