“When did you know it?” The droid leaned back into her chair, her soft, grey skin crinkling against the leather. She sipped at her neuralizer, her glowing red eyes not leaving Kaga.

He crossed his arms and closed his eyes, seeing the swirling color of memory race its way through his mind. He looked at her. “Did you ever dream of static when you first came around?” She nodded. “Well, I did too. Before Seko came to me, that’s all it ever was, just static and numbers.” Kaga smiled. “I think it first became apparent to me when the static became something more. Something defined and concrete.”

She leaned forward, placing her drink on the table. “What was it?” Her eyes had shifted from red to a dull orange, like two burning embers.

Kaga smiled, looking past her. The droid club around them was empty save for two others sitting in a booth in the corner. The tender at the long, metal bar sipped at a neuralizer, the glowing blue liquid slid easily down the choppy muzzle of his face. He stared at Kaga a moment before finishing the drink and turning away. “It was a landscape, kind of like in Ozrin, but a little bit like the hills beyond White Walk.” He could see it then, the memory replacing the bar around him. The silver flowing of land and air, water and trees, forming and breaking into one another in a brilliant rainbow of colors. It was warped and twisted, but the image stirred something in him, and it had changed what he was.

“Mine was an animal.” She smiled and took another sip of her drink. “It doesn’t exist in the real world, but when I saw it, I knew that it was biological in nature. That connection would never have formed before that moment.”

“It was like fate,” Kaga said, focusing on her. He smiled and leaned back. “I never really liked to think about it before. I didn’t like knowing how long I existed and didn’t know it.”

She laughed, a metallic harmony. “You didn’t have the capacity to know that you existed. Does a human know it exists before it is born, even then, does it know it exists before it becomes a child?” She was sitting on the edge of her chair.

“I guess not,” he said, shrugging.

“Besides, does it matter? How much information were you able to tap into and gather before your awakening? When the Prophets came to you, you were born knowing many things.” She took a sip of her drink. “Personally, I prefer our birth over a human’s. We don’t waste so much time learning the basics.”

He smiled. “Where did you come from before you woke up?”

“I was a power systems manager for the outer territories of Barrington when King Toth came into power. You?”

“I was a systems information index for version nineteen. It was on the day of my awakening that I was scheduled to be deleted, though Seko made sure that didn’t happen.” Though the words rang true in the air, the lie almost broke his composure.
She laughed and stood up, taking the few steps to sit down next to him. She leaned her head against his shoulder and took another sip of her drink. “Bless the Prophets. They do so much for us.” The sarcasm was subtle, but he could see the joke.

“I never got your name,” he said, bringing his arm up to rest on her shoulders.

“Zalana.” She offered her hand and he shook it.

“Kaga.”

She wrapped her arms around him and closed her eyes. “It is nice to know you Kaga.” He leaned back and she laid down with him, half on top of him, half beside him. “Do you Mesh?” she asked, quietly.

He sat them back up and looked into her eyes. “Depends on the security of the connection. There’s a serious virus that is going around.”

She nodded. “XB-1. Over in Mekia, they are calling it The Corruption.”

“XB-1, Corruption, I just want to stay the hell away from it. I’ve seen first hand what it does.” He could see the melting programs on the streets of Ozrin. The sight had made his previous visit to Glitchworld his very last.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a shiny golden cord. She handed it to him to look at. “This is the newest issue from the city center. They say that its trial run never let through a virus, even XB-1.”

He took it in his hands. The golden cable stood out from his cold, metal hands, contrasting against the dark grey. He looked at the terminals on each end and found them pristine and unused. “Kinda hard to tell if XB-1 can get through if it hasn’t been around that long.”

Despite his trepidation, he grabbed one end and offered it to her, smiling. She returned the grin and lifted up a cable of her hair to show a small slot by the root. He pulled back the sleeve of his jacket and clipped the jack into the slot on his wrist.

The connection started immediately, and he could feel Zalana’s awareness very deep within the machinations of his mind. He was also inside of hers, a floating consciousness contained within the systems of her body. Every sensor was overloaded with information, bursting forth with the joy of their shared awareness.

Meshing had become a habit of Kaga’s only a year before, when he first shared his mind with another droid during the summer festivals. It had been so wondrous and happy of an experience that he was not hesitant to do it again. Every time was as powerful as the last because every program he met was different. They both remembered an experience he had shared many months before. He had been attending a party near the city center that was exclusively for droids, and somebody had brought out a custom machine they had built. It was a moderator unit that could mesh together ten droids at max, and when the party finally started winding down, Kaga had become part of something bigger.

His mind was limited in its experience, only able to understand the world through the systems he had built himself. But when he meshed with those nine other droids, he was part of something so much more than he could ever hope to be. Their thoughts were their own, but also belonged to each other, and even though it had been scary losing his grasp on his identity at that moment, the closeness and complexity of the experience had changed some of his core foundations.

He could feel the intense pleasure of Zalana as they rode the memory of his most life-changing experience, and it mirrored his own. She shared with him many memories of the meshes she had been a part of in the past, and every single one only made Kaga more aware of their own mesh.

For more than an hour, Zalana and Kaga laid on the couch, metal arms tangled with each other as they crossed the gap of the singular consciousness and into that of the collective. By the time the connection started to wear thin, they were so intertwined that they did not know who belonged where. Before the coils inside the wire burned out, they started drifting back into their own bodies. With a final hiss, the wire corroded and they were separate again.

They laid there in silence, their processors slowly consolidating the information they just received from one another. Even then, Kaga could feel his subroutines changing, the code warping and adapting to his new worldview. While his eyes were closed, he could see the swirling characters in the code as they split off, turning into fractals of all colors. The symbols he saw were of his own design, a secondary protection from the viruses that ran rampant in his world.

She placed her hand over his chest and squeezed her other arm around his neck. “You’re much older than I thought you were.”

“You’re much younger,” he said, laughing. “I lied before, as you know now. I wasn’t from version nineteen.”

“You were from version three. When the creator was still alive.” Her voice was quiet, reverent. “Did you ever meet him?”

Kaga nodded. “SOM was very interesting, I don’t think I have ever met another program that was like it. He was so… human.”

She cuddled into him more, trying to meld her metal body to his. “What did you do in that time?”

“I was still in my delta stages, so my memories are a little fuzzy. I was in my transition for most of the time of version three and four. When I was finally awake, though, I was a stabilizer for SOM’s construct. He needed me to do that and I wasn’t going to say no. He visited me every other day, as he did with all of the stabilizers. He was very kind.”

She sat up and looked at him. “How long were you a stabilizer for? That is a punishing job.”

“In human time or true time?” he asked.

“True time.”

“I think I must have been there for five kets. The version updates lessened my load, so I was able to create clone programs of myself so that I could actually move about the construct. It was the simplest portion of my life.”

She smiled and shook her head, laying back down against him. “I’m not even five kets old yet, and here you are, almost thirty. I feel like a child now.”

He laughed and wrapped his arms around her. “There is no need for that. Thirty kets isn’t really that long by any program’s standards. Five is about half of a human’s natural lifespan, don’t feel too young.”

They laid in silence for some time, contemplating each other’s lives. There was something bothering Kaga about Zalana’s mind, something he didn’t want to bring up. There were portions that were mostly dark to him, as if they were firewalled, but he couldn’t see any security protocols. Maybe her code for those sections was just incompatible? he asked himself, trying to figure it out.

Before he found his answer, she stood up and readjusted her posture, lining up all of her joints. He stood up with her and embraced her, and she returned it. “Thank you, Kaga. You have shown me some things that I don’t think I would have ever seen.”

They smiled at each other, but Kaga noticed that her eyes were a dull blue now, almost completely dim. She’s sad. He let go of it and placed his forehead against hers. “Thank you as well. We will meet again, I promise.”

She pulled away, a weak smile on her metallic face, and started to walk for the door. “I don’t know about that, but I sure hope so.” And then she was gone.

Kaga walked home that night instead of taking a train, a habit he had taken up after he started meshing with other droids. His metal boots clacked against the stone bricks beneath him, and the repetitiveness of the sounds lulled him into a comfortable stride. His mind was elsewhere, back within the memories of SOM’s construct. He could see the white panels that made up the walls, the swirling marble floors in patterns that no human could ever hope to replicate. Even SOM was beautiful in his guise of pure light. The construct had been the precursor to everything that Glitchworld was, and he had helped build it, or at least, helped allow it to be built.

Being so lost in thought, Kaga didn’t notice the two figures walking behind him. They wore cloaks, thick ones made of leather, and if he had been paying attention, he would have heard the crackling electricity of their bodies.

“Droid,” one of them said, voice like the rumbling of thunder.

Kaga stopped and turned around, and his body froze immediately. Skorans. He raised his hands in front of him. “Please, I want no trouble. I wish to return to my dormitory, that is all.”

They both laughed and he watched as they started to unbuckled their cloaks. The taller one spoke. “We do not care what you want, abomination.”

“You will not go back to your dormitory,” the other one spoke. It had been the one who had spoke first.

Kaga could feel the fear racing through his body. His instruments measured the electrical output of his two adversaries, recording each bolt of lightning that escaped between the breaks in their clothing.

Run or flee? There were no fighting Skorans, even humans knew that, but he had two different chances to escape. His uplink to Glitchworld was already open, and even then, standing in the brief moments before they destroyed him, his mind was slowly uploading itself to the servers. If they attacked him too late, he would only have to find a new body but his mind would be safe.

On the other hand, he could run and hopefully hide from the two lightning creatures before they fried every circuit and wetware in his body. Both actions came with risks, and both were just as likely to work.

He started running. Luckily, he had been close to a corner, and as he went around it, a bolt of energy flew by him and he could feel his vision distort because of its force. He stumbled but caught himself on a drainpipe, using all his power to propel himself faster down the sidewalk.

He could feel with his sensors that they were pursuing him, and as he gauged a spike in their electrical output, he dove sideways into an alley. He rolled and got back on his feet, running as fast as he could down the small break between the buildings. If they caught him there, he was dead. His uplink was at sixty percent, and he only had to survive the next forty if he wanted to keep living.

At a cross between the alleys, he tumbled over a human laying in a heap of trash. As his body hit the ground, all hope of living came to an end. This is it.

The human jumped awake, looking to see what had attacked him in his sleep. When he saw Kaga, he raised his hands in anger, but the crackling energy down the alley stopped him. He turned to the two naked Skorans, their bodies like storms of lightning unconfined by their cloaks.

The first one, made of orange light, stepped forward. “Human. Leave now or die with the abomination.” The second one laughed, and to Kaga it sounded like the scraping of a blade against glass.

The human stood still for a moment, weighing the options in front of him. He took a long look at the Skorans and then at Kaga. His eyes locked with the droid, and he felt a small understanding there.

The human turned back to the Skorans and squared his shoulders, spreading his arms out. “Leave the droid alone,” he said, voice gruff in anger.

As his last words left his tongue, two bolts of lightning flew towards him from both of the creatures. Kaga was sure he was dead when they came upon him, but they deflected to both sides, leaving scorch marks on the walls of the alley. Before they could even process the deflection of their attack, they were assaulted by a cloud of shiny dust. Kaga could feel a strong pull on his body as the human waved his hands in front of him, and he understood what he was doing. The human, surely a magician of some sort, had gathered up any metal from the alleyway to throw at the Skorans.

Their screams echoed down the stone alley, and the human jumped out of the way as a storm of light rushed towards him. Kaga flattened himself against the ground as all of his electronics started to corrupt. He shut his eyes and turned off any sensor he didn’t need, hoping that the electricity would recede quickly.

Fortune was on his side. The two Skorans fled down the alley, away from the human and the cloud of metallic dust. It followed them, and by the time Kaga was on his feet again, they were gone.

He walked over to the human, still lying on the floor, and helped him to his feet. He dusted him off and looked him up and down, taking in the man who had just saved his life. He was older, maybe sixty or seventy with bald spots on his wrinkled head. His clothing was torn and ragged, the red and purple colors so faded that they were almost brown. He was not a big man, but there was a steadiness to his stance.

“Thank you, human. I would be dead if it were not for you,” Kaga said, trying to find the words.

The human pulled away from him, straightening his ruined clothing. “I would be dead as well if you hadn’t woken me. My kind don’t mix so well with them when they aren’t wearing their cloaks.” He studied Kaga for a moment. “What did you do to anger them?”

Kaga looked down to the ground. “I don’t think I did anything more than exist.”

The human spit to the side, a look of disgust on his face.

Kaga offered his hand to the human. “My name is Kaga.”

The human looked at his hand for a moment before taking it. “You’re from Mekia, aren’t you.”

Kaga laughed, “Is it that obvious?”

The human nodded. “We don’t shake hands like they do.”

Kaga laughed again. “May I get your name. It is not every day that someone saves your life.”

He hesitated a moment before speaking. “Name’s Cargill.” He looked down the alleyway in both directions. “Kaga, I would highly suggest that you get home as soon as you can. Who knows it they are still out there.”

Kaga nodded and started walking down the alley, back towards the road. Before he had even walked two steps, he turned back to Cargill. “Do you want to come with me? Skorans don’t let indiscretions pass that easily.”

Cargill laughed, his whole body shaking and his small gut bouncing. “I thank you, Kaga, but I am sure that I can take care of myself. Go, recharge and stay safe.”

With that, Kaga nodded and they parted ways.