Fifty Eight

Summer had turned quickly into fall, and the lushness that the valley held was replaced by shades of orange and red. The bones of the forest started to show through after the summer fat had been packed up and saved for the winter to come. Pumpkin colored leaves blew on a wind that held promises of morning frosts and woodsmoke. The clouds seemed to have resigned themselves to rest upon the mountaintops and soak up the sun, leaving dim scraps for the valley below.
At least that’s what Fyndraxis was thinking. Fall always put him in a poetic mood. His Hunters had reached the kinds of numbers that he could start doing stuff with and he decided to call them home. He could have done this with a simple order to drop what they were doing and come to his location. This would have taken a long time and it lacked the style that he liked to lend to all things that he did.
An individual hunter was extremely small. Asking it to trudge all the way back to him from god knows where in the Waste would take forever. It would be like a transcontinental journey for the poor little guys. If they didn’t die of dysentery along the way any number of things could happen to them.
He had outfitted them all with the latest version of Fyndrix. One of Fyndrix’s main features was a program that he had called Nanomancer. Nanomancer was a program that kept track of where an individual hunter was in space. Once this data was known, it would share it with all of its buddies on the network. All of this data would be aggregated and make a three dimensional map of what all the little hunters were doing.
Each hunter could be given instructions about where to go and be told to operate according to certain rules. Instructions like: hold hands with your buddy to the left of you and the dude in front of you, on an individual scale wouldn’t mean all that much, but if you got a few hundred thousand hunters all doing that you would have something akin to a sheet of fabric that was about a square meter in size.
On Fyndraxis’ computer in his workshop, he had created an entire software suite that could manipulate his hunters to do pretty much whatever he wanted them to. All he would have to do is throw together a 3D model of what he wanted and add some rules for how they were supposed to act and he would have an actual object in the real world.
What he had asked them to do today was marshal their forces on the top of the mountain above him and form into a sphere. Once the sphericity had been reached, they were to proceed downhill toward his location as fast as they could. Solomon must have rubbed off on him at least a little bit, because in this operation he was letting gravity do most of the work.
He and Bird went outside to watch the progress. At first they could see nothing. It was a foggy overcast day, and the peak of the mountain was shrouded in mist. Before long though, they began to see signs of progress.
Before the collapse of everything, the mountain where they were had been a ski resort. Trails had been cut into the forest to allow people to get from the peak to the base with very few obstructions. The G had maintained this tradition and added a few trails of their own. There weren’t any sort of regulatory bodies to dissuade them from doing this, so previously frowned upon forestry practices were fine to do. They could glade anything that they wanted, breeding habitats be damned.
The trail that the Hunters were supposed to take was underneath where the main lift for the resort used to be. The corpses of ancient lift towers leaned like drunks in line for the bathroom all the way to the peak. Fyndraxis had instructed them to do their best to slalom back and forth between the lift towers on their descent of the mountain. He had wanted to see what they were truly capable of, and it was also a pretty cool thing for them to do in his opinion.
They had spotted the sphere about halfway down the mountain. A tiny mote was moving at great speed and seemed to be dealing the trail a decent amount of damage. It left a trail of bare dirt and mud in the grass that formerly had a peaceful life upon the mountainside.
It took turns trying to slalom between the lift towers and was doing a pretty decent job. Every once in a while it would careen into one and barrel off into the forest taking out the odd tree or two. Then it would pop out of cover, and continue its growingly irresponsible descent down the hill.
The mountain wasn’t a perfect ramp. From their point of view a good deal of the terrain above them was obscured. So this sphere would disappear every once in a while and Bird would reflexively lift her chin to try to get a better view. Her eyes would widen as it shot over whatever obstruction was in its way. As it got closer to them it was spending about half of its time in the air completely out of control.
“This could have been a little less dramatic,” she observed as the ball of hunters came within about five hundred meters of them.
“The simulation went fine, it should be good,” he answered noncommittally.
“Even with all the airtime?” She questioned reasonably.
“I accounted for a reasonable amount of airtime,” he was beginning to doubt himself.
According to Nanomancer, his ball of hunters was cooking along at about 120 kilometers per hour. That was a pretty good clip. He had recovered about 120 kilograms of them, so he had to burn off a decent amount of momentum somehow. He was pretty sure that he had this covered though.
While the hunters were descending, their sphere was about as tall as Bird was. As it got closer to them the sphere would expand and get as large as it could. This expansion would slow down the rotation of the sphere and act as a natural brake. The added surface area would also act as a brake because of atmospheric drag. All the little hunters would also grab onto as much ground as they could, further adding to the braking action. On paper, it totally worked.
In the real world, it was starting to look like a pretty bad idea. Bird took Fyndraxis and fled out of the path of the oncoming sphere. It had grown to ten meters in size at this point, so it took a fair bit of time to get somewhere safe. In the end though, it came to a stop kissing distance from the yurt.
Bird just shook her head and chuckled as she walked them over to examine their new loot. Right now the hunters existed on one network. They were one object, namely, a giant sphere. They didn’t have to be though. They could be divided into sub networks. These sub networks would operate according to their own sets of rules. These would be individual objects. They would communicate with the larger network about where they were and what they were doing, but physically they could be independent things.
Fyndraxis fired up Nanomancer and shrank the sphere to a size that was not visible from space, and divided it in two. One of these groups would be for Bird, and one for him. For Bird, most of them would take the form of a cloak. This cloak would hang out on her back and pretend to be a normal cloak until she gave it a signal that was yet to be determined. Once it got this signal, the cloak would wrap around her body and become radiation proof(ish) armor. He still hadn’t figured out the whole eye problem. This armor was also impact resistant and very stylish. The Hunters were black so they could soak up as much sunlight as they could, so it also fit with Bird’s whole Smiths fan aesthetic.
Fyndraxis’ half of the Hunter swarm he made into his very own body. This was a simple affair that was also all black. It had hints of clothes so it didn’t look like he was running around in the nude. He placed himself inside the whole construction with his hilt inside the head so that he could see out of the eye slit. His cross guard was down around the shoulders and his blade inhabited the torso. Once he had donned it, he felt like a mech pilot, or like he was his very own Voltron. He would have even crafted lion hands, but in simulation they turned out to be less than useless.
He had his very own body. He had agency and onus in the world again. He was no longer a wall ornament or an unwilling accomplice to murder.