What Is a Machine Spirit?
What is a Machine Spirit?
In some works of fiction it is described as a soul that seeps into every machine. In others it is framed as a manufactured faith — a superstition with no existence of its own.
In EFD, however, a Machine Spirit has nothing whatsoever to do with souls, and even less to do with superstition. It has a tangible, physical body. Calling it a "spirit" is almost misleading; it is closer to an amorphous organism.
Which brings us back to the start. Why call it a Machine Spirit, then?
Because these lunatics seep into every machine they can find and turn it biological.
A creature that is not even spiritual, latching onto lifeless machinery and making it live — how contradictory, how utterly absurd is that? And yet EFD implemented the concept perfectly. I still remember charging in with all the other excited users, only to get our asses handed to us.
Shhk!
I slashed my dagger at the Machine Spirit that had been after my shotgun, not my body, and its squelching form split cleanly in two. But I could not afford to let my guard down. These things were fundamentally resistant to physical attacks.
Glrk, glrk.
The bisected creature writhed like a planarian, and a moment later both halves were alive and moving at once. I was not about to sit there and watch. I stomped one half under my combat boot until it was thoroughly crushed, then grabbed the other in my hand and squeezed with everything I had.
Against a Machine Spirit's main body, slashing and stabbing were less effective than simply crushing it flat or shattering it in a single massive impact.
"Ugh, disgusting."
Having already split once, the offshoot's durability was not much. The remains I pulped in my fist collapsed into a jelly so hideous and unpleasant I had no words for it. I immediately pulled out a disinfectant gauze and scrubbed my hand raw, but that nauseating texture still seemed to cling to my skin.
Prisoner must exercise greater caution. Had that ^#@$ primitive lifeform made contact with this sacred device, it would likely have caused severe circuit malfunction.
"It didn't touch it. So we're good."
There was no chance it had identified Crazy Clock — a thing even people could not perceive — as a Native Species. It had simply wanted the shotgun in my hand and could not help itself.
I turned the robot's chassis over and examined it from every angle. With the Machine Spirit gone, there was no chance of the thing powering back up. Sure enough, the robot had already been badly wrecked before I ever fired a shot. A gaping hole had been punched through the frontal armor over its lower abdomen.
A Machine Spirit's charging force, even being generous, was on the level of a small animal. It could not have torn a hole that vicious. Something had happened in this world — some kind of accident.
Dark Zones where Machine Spirits appeared came in two broad themes. Either the stage was outer space, or it was a cityscape from a future so advanced the technology was off the charts. In this case the current Dark Zone was space-themed, so the conditions for a Machine Spirit outbreak were met.
The real problem is how far these things have already spread through the Dark Zone.
They tried to split at every opportunity — I had just seen it. And this space station, if that was what it was, was overflowing with machinery of every kind. Tiny components and simple structural metal were not a concern; those were too small to move through. But anything that could "operate" through some kind of mechanism was fair game for a Machine Spirit to crawl inside.
For example…
Bang! Crash!
I grabbed whatever salvageable parts I could off the robot, then immediately put a round through the CCTV camera mounted on the cargo bay ceiling. The station should have been running on emergency power, and yet the camera had been watching me just fine, scattering a steady red glow.
Ssslick.
Just as I had expected, a small Machine Spirit spilled weakly from the shattered housing, the way a human would bleed. It was nowhere near large enough to pilot a robot like the one I had just killed — but it had latched onto the CCTV and been feeding my information to the other Machine Spirits in real time.
This is exactly why I hate space-themed maps.
Even a hardcore EFD fan like me had a few things I genuinely despised, and space-themed Dark Zones were one of them. There was simply too much to keep track of.
Crunch!
There was no point wrestling with a cargo bay door that was never going to open. I stepped up onto a crate, jumped for the ceiling, and tore the ventilation panel free. The duct beyond was packed with piping and bundled cables, and paradoxically it was the safest space on the station from Machine Spirits. The only "machine" in a vent shaft was a ventilation fan turning its blades at a lazy crawl.
The pipes are right in my face, so of course it's sweltering. Dusty, too. Is the ventilation system even running?
Current Temperature: 34°C
Oxygen Filter Remaining: 87%
I crawled through the dust-choked shaft like a rat, hunting desperately for light — or sound. The faintest glimmer would do. The smallest noise. On a space station running emergency power, there were not many places where light and sound still existed. Put another way, if I headed toward light and sound, I would reach a critical facility.
Fortunately, the alloy plating directly beneath the vent was perforated with holes, so I was not completely cut off from either.
Thump, clank. Thump, clank.
A Machine Spirit. More precisely, one of those robots with a Machine Spirit nested inside it was prowling the corridor below.
Did this station put more robots on the payroll than people? Leave it to the STEM types.
Park a handful of specialists in charge, drop in a supervising AI and a few hundred labor robots, and you could run a space station as easily as a highway rest stop. That was what they had thought. How naive. How terrifying. You could force those STEM types through seven hundred and twenty hours of mandatory education on the sanctity of labor and it still would not be enough.
Thump, clank. Thump, clank.
I waited for the Slaughter Robot lumbering along beneath me to pass. If I moved too much and advertised the fact that a rat had crawled into the vents, I was finished. I could not forget that this vicious Native Species shared information with its kind at all times.
And then—
"What the fuck is that?!"
"Shut up, you crazy bastard!"
"A person? No — a robot? Hey, get a proper light on it."
"Doesn't look like it's even carrying a weapon. So we just smash it and strip a few parts, right?"
Right. There was no way I had been the only one spawned in this area. Compared to a land-based Dark Zone, a space station map was not that large to begin with.
I'd almost rather have the clan types who make linking up their first priority the second they drop in.
Those guys at least kept the noise down until they had enough bodies together. They understood how terrifying a Dark Zone was. They had learned from experience that in a Dark Zone, silence was gold.
These party idiots, by contrast, were too busy snickering to notice the Slaughter Robot standing right in front of them. Common sense: if something is moving in a Dark Zone, you treat it carefully first. Don't you?
"Watch and learn, you little shits. This big brother used to swing a bat back in the day. I'm sending that tin-can bastard's head on an out-of-the-park home run."
"Bullshit. A swing, with that body? At best you've lined your boys up and given them the stick."
"I'm serious! Want me to show you?!"
"Go ahead, you dumbass!"
There was no longer any reason to hold my breath. I started wriggling forward again. The thin vent plating boomed under my weight, but neither the snickering idiots nor the Slaughter Robot noticed I was there.
"Watch closely. A beating goes like this…!"
Idiot.
I did not need to look. The result was obvious.
Crunch!
Something shattered, and a massive hunk of flesh slapped wetly onto the floor. The Slaughter Robot that had been trundling along at a leisurely pace had taken one look at the moron who thought it was easy prey, stepped in, and caved his skull in with a single punch.
If everyone else who got dropped in with me is this kind of idiot, this Dark Zone is officially hell.
I ignored the screams and shouting that rose a beat too late and kept moving.
Machine Spirits only latched onto machines, as a rule — but they were still living organisms, strictly speaking, and they needed nutrients to split. And where did they get those nutrients? They used every machine under their control, by any means necessary, to kill human beings. Then they pulped the corpses and absorbed them. One Machine Spirit became two intact ones in an instant.
"Shoot! Fucking shoot it!"
Bang! Bang!
"What the fuck! The bullets aren't punching through!"
"Son of a—! Move! I'll drop it in one shot!"
Wait — the last guy also walked up to it and—
A thing that had only crumpled its internal parts even under a heavy slug round was not going to go down to ordinary firepower.
I put distance between myself and the intermittent crack of cheap homemade guns and the screaming that came with it, kicked through the vent panel of someone's private quarters where a light was still flickering, and dropped inside.
To tell whether a Machine Spirit had infested a given machine, you looked at the pattern and color of the light it gave off. A red glow, or a light flashing at a seizing, frantic speed, meant the machine was already taken. For machines that did not emit light, you listened carefully. Faint as it was, you could hear the Machine Spirit moving inside like an insect.
Thankfully, this place is clean.
Being private quarters, there was no CCTV, and the PC on the desk had been completely smashed by some kind of impact. Nothing to worry about there.
Another reason I hated Dark Zones where Machine Spirits spawned: the amount of loot you could actually farm dropped off a cliff. Useful machine parts, or any storage medium that might hold information, had a high probability of a Machine Spirit hiding inside, which sent the farming difficulty through the roof. And if you farmed anyway, infestation or not? Even if you made it out, quarantine would flag you for bringing back contaminants, and you would be lucky to get away with a hail of bullets.
USBs, hard drives, smartphones, radios, PCs, laptops — not a single thing left intact.
There were so few traces of machinery that I had to wonder whether anyone had actually lived in this room. More precisely, there were plenty of traces of things that had used to be machines.
If there were any worthwhile technical documents or secure cargo nearby, Crazy Clock would have said something. The fact that it's been silent this whole time means there really is nothing here.
Well, hell. Looks like this one's a bust.
I hesitated, weighing whether I should risk sweeping the nearby private quarters one by one. The other option was to stay in the vents and keep crawling like a bug until I hit a decent farming area. At least that way I would not have to worry about a Slaughter Robot hunting me down.
As if to spare me the decision, a colossal noise suddenly rolled through the entire facility. It was not the sound of something being smashed down. It was closer to the sound of a power plant dying all at once — the space station's death rattle, maybe, after it had been struggling to the last to keep a livable environment for human beings.
The mechanical voice rolling from the corridor speakers sent a chill down my spine.
Current Temperature: 31°C
How long until that number dropped below freezing?
The moment the power stopped, the moment the electrically heated water stopped running through the pipes, the moment the ventilation system shut down completely — this space station would become a giant coffin in the void.
In the instant before even the speakers lost power, the facility's supervising AI left that loaded message behind — and fell completely silent.
"……"
Every light in the facility was gone. And now a vicious cold began to close, slowly, around the prisoners' throats.