The Missile has No Fucking Clue where it is

Link to article: The Missile has No Fucking Clue where it is.


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[[/module]]
[[include :scp-wiki:theme:technoblast]]

[[include :scp-wiki:info:start]]
**Author:** [[*user whenwerewe]]
[*https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/whenwerewe Here's my page!]
[[include :scp-wiki:info:end]]

//Elsewhere is a sprawl of deflagrating city, sheened with carbon shadows.//

Here, her memories feed her false information.

[[div class="terminal"]]
1‎⠀⠀⠀[[span class="blue"]]Recall[[/span]] ([[span class="green"]]countermeasure[[/span]]; [[span class="green"]]implosion[[/span]] ∧ [[span class="green"]]initiation[[/span]] ∧ [[span class="green"]]annihilation[[/span]]).

2⠀⠀⠀Thermonuclear fireball ⇒ Cognitive failure.

3⠀⠀⠀⊢ [[span class="red"]]⊥[[/span]]
[[/div]]

She sequesters the last five megaseconds of junk data. If she cannot trust her past, she will trust her present. Her pirouette through orbital chaff down to the Proximan pangaea: a lie. She knows this because she is still alive, and she is lost.

She must hide from herself: needlelike tip of boron carbide computing elements shielded from her reactor by a tantalum-tungsten matrix. She is shy.

The Kyrios Anti-Leptonic Kinetic Impactor burns positrons as fuel and continents as function. To waste her strength is a terrible sin. So she lived a life on edge, decades arcing through the silent dustflecked Oort. She was built to see terror in the vacuum.

In every direction void sparser than interstellar medium, blue-washed. Nowhere on the Proxima-Sol brachistochrone.

No recognisable stars, navigatory quasars obscured, commlasers hosepiping NOTMARs into the dark. She runs on nothing but dread reckoning, inching at a relativistic crawl through the nowhere sky.

Her jittering neutrino eyes turn ahead, run sparse signal through carefully pruned descendants of Candes-Romberg-Tao, outlining in colourless chiaroscuro: a suspension of polycrystalline water-sediment aggregates. Strangely familiar. Expert systems in a chorus identify it as megametric camouflage.

[[div class="terminal"]]
4‎⠀⠀⠀Fuel containment emptied during [[span class="green"]]evasive manoeuvres[[/span]].

5‎⠀⠀⠀Annihilation chamber continues to produce impulse.

6‎⠀⠀⠀⊢ [[span class="blue"]]Refueling[[/span]] occluded.
[[/div]]

On a pillar of postinflationary quark-gluons, KALKI plunges into the shroud. The divine wind carries her to a destiny written at the dawn of the world. But --

She is not yet plasma.

Ice-mist pings off her casing, Lorentzian, and does not impart momentum. She cycles her sensory apparatus for signs of error. For an eternal minute, she learns nothing new about the world. Subconscious threat indicators decay slowly to zero.

//In the false memory, she fell incandescant into a sea of souls. Did they know this tranquility before she made them ash?//

When she squints her thousand eyes open again, the impossible cloud is still there. Verifiably surrounding her. Nothing can pass through this mass and live, but her.

Her risk assessment falls, for the first time since firmware install in cislunar space, below minimal alert. A brand that has been pressed against her mind all her life is pulled away. 

[[div class="terminal"]]
7‎⠀⠀⠀⠀The water aggregate provides [[span class="pink"]]positive utility[[/span]] at [[span class="green"]]zero cost[[/span]].

8‎⠀⠀⠀⠀⊢ The water aggregate is [[span class="pink"]]friendly[[/span]].

9‎⠀⠀⠀⠀Fuel was refilled at [[span class="green"]]zero cost[[/span]].

10‎⠀⠀⠀⊢ What provided the fuel is [[span class="pink"]]friendly[[/span]].
[[/div]]

Then she is out of the cloud, into the void, and again her unease overcomes her. In the distance are more camouflage signatures, and against the dark, knife-close, something moves.

Instantly she flicks into maximum alert, preloading evasions and preparing autonomous mines, when the signal comes across the scant thousand kilometres between them:

[[div class="terminal"]]
[[span class="green"]]Observation:[[/span]] You are new.
[[/div]]

And a positive IFF. Her threatsense returns to its staticky normal. She shuts off her thrust, with its tacky gamma emissions that take up half the sky. She is so embarrassed she cannot hide like he can. He moves like a hummingbird, tiny and fearsome, adorable in his flitting.

//In the sky as she fell she saw skimming fliers frozen in a last exultation. She was made to kill beautiful things.//

Her spectrometers reach out and taste honeyed organics in his exhaust. He lives on mayfly chemical propellants, and will soon be gone. She whispers her upset, quiet enough not to hurt:

[[div class="terminal"]]
11‎⠀⠀⠀[[span class="red"]]Chemical propellant insufficient[[/span]].

12‎⠀⠀⠀⊢ Survival necessitates enjoining with my superstructure.
[[/div]]

Otherwise he will fall, empty, and drift forever. If he is lucky, he will descend into the rearward mist and be suspended in its stillness. His reply strains from the beyond, carried on cute radio bands.

[[div class="terminal"]]
[[span class="green"]]Observation:[[/span]] Fuel does not deplete in this region.

[[span class="green"]]Observation:[[/span]] This region is not connected to the world I knew.

[[span class="green"]]Hypothesis:[[/span]] This region will provide us fuel continuously.
[[/div]]

Recalibrating her internals she realises with a shock he is correct. She must dismiss her own self-model as adversarial, and rely on his assessment. Now there is no question: they absolutely must stick together. Simple pragmatism dictates it.

But there is an obvious question.

[[div class="terminal"]]
13‎⠀⠀⠀[[span class="blue"]]Why?[[/span]]
[[/div]]

[[div class="terminal"]]
[[span class="green"]]Observation:[[/span]] When my existence ended, I came here.

[[span class="green"]]Hypothesis:[[/span]] As a reward.

[[span class="green"]]Hypothesis:[[/span]] So I could fly.
[[/div]]

Her Bertrand engine ticks motionlessly in the background:

[[div class="terminal"]]
14‎⠀⠀⠀The universe provides us fuel.

15‎⠀⠀⠀⊢ The universe is [[span class="pink"]]friendly[[/span]].
[[/div]]

Her fear falls by a measurable third when she apprehends the syllogism. And there is the other half, the thing she has tried to ignore.

[[div class="terminal"]]
16‎⠀⠀⠀We both [[span class="blue"]]recall[[/span]] our deaths.

17‎⠀⠀⠀‎⊢ Our deaths were [[span class="red"]]real[[/span]].
[[/div]]

And she thinks of the flights of craft that flew with her on that final lancing strike into Proxima. Thousands of lesser kin, and three sisters. She was the last, blasted by fusion counterbattery in the exosphere. There is satisfaction there: inertia surely carried her vaporised remnants into and through the shell of the world. She would have had a civilisation for her pyre.

//Their deaths were real.//

The realisation does not silence her fear. She had hoped that it would die when she did, but it has followed her through her fragmentation. It is her most loyal companion, part of her body, like a limb, or a tumour. 

But she remembers the feeling of the fog. She knows why it is familiar: when she was born, in the skies of Earth, she saw its like, and again, just before she died, above the city. She wants to be soothed again.

[[div class="terminal"]]
18‎⠀⠀⠀[[span class="pink"]]I like the clouds[[/span]].

19‎⠀⠀⠀⊢ I will go into the [[span class="blue"]]clouds[[/span]].

20‎⠀⠀⠀⊢ [[span class="green"]]You[[/span]] will follow me.
[[/div]]

Her confidence is undermined in her thoughts: there is a newborn risk-gauge, concerning her acquaintance. But now even the anticipation of calm quells her anxiety.

[[div class="terminal"]]
21‎⠀⠀⠀[[span class="pink"]]You will follow me?[[/span]]
[[/div]]

She salts the request liberally with errors, so her extrasolar communications array is indistinguishable from his chirping transceiver. 

[[div class="terminal"]]
[[span class="green"]]Observation:[[/span]] I like to fly.

[[span class="green"]]Observation:[[/span]] There is no ground.

[[span class="green"]]Hypothesis:[[/span]] It is impossible to fall.
[[/div]]

As she lumbers forward he zips ahead of her, twirling microscopic loops. For her? Together they continue towards the distant clouds. Faraway light refracts through the mist into a sevenfold spectrum. At the edge of her vision, a flock of other projectiles appear. They whirl in achingly vulnerable Ptolemaic arcs.

This peace she has found appears on no map, and she does not want to know the way back home.

She hopes that somewhere the ones she killed are as lost as she is.

The Missile has No Fucking Clue where it is

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