Space Is Very Cold
Space is very cold.
That is not a metaphor. I mean it in the most literal, physical sense there is.
Without a sun nearby, the vacuum sits just shy of absolute zero, and there is essentially no way for a human being to survive out there for any meaningful stretch of time. Space stations, lunar bases — those are just science holding the void at bay by force. Which means a life-support failure, or some malicious bastard tampering with the systems, is the equivalent of stomping the zero-to-a-hundred death booster all the way to the floor.
And my one complaint right now is that the Dark Zone I have stepped into is already sliding, slowly and inexorably, toward that exact ending.
Internal temperature dropping rapidly. Current reading: 20°C.
"Damn it. It hasn't even been an hour and it's already dropped that far?"
The station interior that had been sweltering past thirty degrees had gone chilly in an instant, like a bank in midsummer with the air conditioning cranked to arctic. Slather the inner and outer hulls in as much insulation as you want — radiative heat loss is physics, and physics does not negotiate. The Machine Spirits that had already seized most of the station's systems were tightening the noose around our human necks with professional thoroughness.
I asked Crazy Clock how much time we had left.
Six hours remaining until operational capability is lost.
"Fuck. And that's the conservative estimate, right?"
Correct. In approximately one hour, internal temperature will enter sub-zero range. At the six-hour mark, it will approach −60°C.
That was about as cold as the coldest places on Earth. Breathe out without protective gear and your lungs, your bronchial tubes, and every exposed mucous membrane — eyes, nose — would freeze solid in seconds.
Thankfully I've got the specialized gas mask on, so that's not an issue. And I layered up enough this time that I can handle a decent amount of cold.
But enduring the cold and actually losing physical capability are two completely different problems. Expose a human being to savage cold and the muscles stop taking orders; eventually the nervous system itself goes haywire. Those stories about mountaineers who suddenly feel hot, strip naked on a winter peak, and freeze to death are famous for a reason.
So realistically, I had about a two-hour countdown. Once it dropped below minus ten or twenty, even someone with my physical specs couldn't guarantee they'd still be able to move properly.
"Set an alarm every thirty minutes."
Do you have a promising idea, Prisoner?
"Promising idea or not — I set foot in a Dark Zone. I've got a job to do, don't I?"
Farm items. Delete targets. Clear contracts. And while I'm at it, kill anything that looks like a threat. That framework was not going to change until the day I saw EFD's ending.
I stepped out into a corridor that had gone completely dark, the air itself growing colder by the minute. Crawling through those cramped vents any further would just bleed my body heat faster. Better to run on my own two feet.
Luckily, most of the Slaughter Robots possessed by Machine Spirits are structurally noisy as hell. I'll hear them coming from a long way off, so hiding or dodging won't be hard. The real problem is the ones hiding inside other machines...
Most of the power had been cut, but countless Machine Spirits would still be nested in the station's remaining machinery. Spot a passerby and they would either ping their buddies with the location or just jump you themselves. And picking out a shivering human stumbling through a pitch-black station interior? Child's play. If they scanned this way with thermal imaging, I would be cooked.
...Clunk.
A faint activation sound from far down the corridor. I raised the shotgun and pressed myself tight against the corner.
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
Machine Spirits take no damage whatsoever until the machine they are possessing is destroyed — so they were using this cold and this darkness beautifully. How? Like this.
Ziiiiing.
A red laser scan swept past on the other side of the wall. My guts went ice-cold. I held my breath as hard as I could.
So this is what John Connor felt like. Fuck.
Why didn't I have a Terminator bro coming back from the future to save my ass? Guess they never signed that 20th Century Fox TV crossover deal.
The idle thought lasted only a moment. The Slaughter Robot finished its scan and lumbered off elsewhere, and I immediately moved in the direction it had come from. They would be expanding their search pattern outward from the station's core, which meant it would take a good while before they circled back to a sector they had already swept.
They don't even need the Slaughter Robots to search every nook and cranny — they've got eyes and ears all over the station. So they figured they could spread the robots thin without worrying about getting flanked.
Native Species in Dark Zones operate on different behavioral logic and intelligence levels depending on the theme. Unless this was one of those AI-rebellion-against-humanity themed Dark Zones, I still had the advantage. Even if Machine Spirits could possess any machine they wanted, at their core they were still primitive life-forms that wanted to feed and divide — reproduce.
You think Han Seungho — same species and same nationality as the god of Go who took down AlphaGo — looks like an easy mark?
Judging by the direction the wiring and pipes run, and the color-coded zone labels on every corridor, this isn't a classified sector.
The label I had checked in the corridor was green. Green usually meant a safety rating, so even without extra text or insignia I could relax. Which also meant that to reach the station's core, I needed to leave the Green Label Zone behind.
Sure enough, after passing a string of what looked like crew cabins, lounges, and a communal mess, I came to an elevator and a stairwell. The elevator was dead — power cut — but the directory in front of it had a full spread of colors and redacted descriptions.
White at the top, then green. Those'll be the public and safe zones. Yellow and up would require some level of security clearance.
I figured out the station was divided into five zones total, including the Yellow, Red, and Black Label sectors. When I used to play EFD, they didn't use color labels to divide the map like this. They just told you, nice and friendly, that you needed a keycard matching the zone color to pass through. Probably part of the tenth-anniversary mega-update.
At least I don't need some ultra-rare color keycard. Small mercies.
Going up led to the fully public White Label Zone, so the correct move here was down. I gave a Glow Stick — an EFD-exclusive lore item no Native Species could ever detect — a light squeeze and tossed it down the stairs.
The soft fluorescent glow revealed several corpses sprawled on the steel steps below, presumably more victims. Every piece of mechanical equipment had been stripped off them.
They picked these guys clean.
A closer look and you would notice something that should have been there wasn't. Internal organs. Flesh. The bodies had been left as clean as if they had gone through a washing machine — nothing but bare bone. Not even a scrap of meat. The Machine Spirits had stripped them for biomass, converted it into energy for division, and left behind only what they couldn't eat: bones, clothes, leftover gear.
These ones do not appear to have been excessively damaged by obsolete slaughter toys.
"Yeah. Machine Spirits normally pulp a living thing into slurry and then absorb it at their leisure — but if they decide the skill gap is overwhelming, they take you alive and peel the meat off clean."
The convicts who had put up a real fight with their janky homemade guns and weapons would have been smashed to pieces. The ones who looked this weak, with no sign of resistance at all, got a much worse ending. Which is why if you were going up against Machine Spirits and you wanted to die easy, you didn't give up — you fought harder. That way they would put you down properly just to shut the rebellious prey up.
"Anyway, what I can take off these bodies is..."
I was about to approach the corpses when I suddenly took a closer look at the debris scattered around. Thanks to the Glow Stick's soft fluorescence, something in the dark was throwing back a particularly sharp reflection.
A motion sensor.
These disgusting bastards.
Machine Spirits don't touch a human corpse — a skeleton — once they have finished eating, so under normal circumstances there wouldn't be any of them lingering here. But now that they knew a large number of intruders had shown up? Wouldn't other humans try to loot the bodies that they themselves wouldn't touch? That was probably the idea — plant a motion sensor somewhere discreet in a corner full of corpses. And scattering human-only equipment they had no use for around the area, just to draw other humans in? That tracked even better.
I backed away carefully without touching the bodies and slipped through the half-open door to the floor below. The Machine Spirit in the motion sensor didn't have an acoustic detector, so it wouldn't have heard me moving.
Having nearly gotten backstabbed by Machine Spirits yet again, I let out a breath of relief and picked up the pace on my exploration of the lower levels.
From here on, it wasn't the Green Label Zone anymore. This was the Yellow Label Zone.
Except for bathrooms and supply closets, most of it was official workspace for the station crew. An archive packed with books and document files. A decontamination locker room for changing into work gear. Small labs and offices where the staff had done their jobs, one after another.
The problem was that not a single one of these places had been left intact. The bathroom had already been smashed apart, water still trickling — and that would freeze solid soon enough. The archive looked like someone had tried to burn it; most of the interior was charred black, and barely any intact documents remained. I had been hoping to grab a few that looked important. Shame.
And the labs and offices, the main event...
A massacre happened here.
Dark crimson fluid, dried and crusted — you didn't need to guess what it was. Unlike the fire damage, this sticky residue glued to the floor was the familiar evidence of Machine Spirits physically pulping humans and then feeding like gluttons. Electronic doors that should have required authentication had been ripped off their frames by something brutal. You could imagine just how desperate and dangerous it had been for the people who once worked here.
Naturally, there was almost nothing machine-like left in the area. What I could scavenge amounted to a few redacted documents and miscellaneous items the Machine Spirits hadn't cared about. I stuffed the items into my pack as I went, tossing Glow Sticks into every corner, hunting for traces of Machine Spirits.
A CCTV camera still blinking its red laser even though the power was dead. A spider-shaped Machine Spirit that had been hiding inside a smashed PC monitor, suddenly blasting maximum brightness and scuttling around. These little ones didn't have the power to kill a human, but they were snitches — they would blow my position. I didn't hesitate. I brought Pretty down on them or put a shotgun round through them.
THWACK! CRUNCH!
The instant the high-voltage current from Pretty fried a machine's internal circuitry, the Machine Spirit possessing it took the same damage. Dealing with them wasn't hard. Picking them off one by one was a pain in the ass, but it beat letting them go full broadcast mode — Hey, neighborhood Machine Spirits, come take a look! There's a human stooge over here!
Figuring there wasn't much else here, I was about to resume my stealthy search when I stopped. From far off came the sound of something metal being utterly, desperately smashed apart.
KRAANG! KRAANG!
BANG! BOOM! FZZZT!
"......"
Apparently the Machine Spirits had found prey far juicier than me. The whole neighborhood was announcing the opening of a village festival at the top of its lungs.
Wait. "Juicy" prey?
My inner Cyber Maitreya gave it a once-over with the old insight technique, and the reason the Machine Spirits had all swarmed that way was painfully simple. Either there were a bunch of humans over there with enough mass and headcount to qualify as energy bars, or there was a Suicide Squad making a hell of a lot of noise and drawing every eye in the sector.
From the Machine Spirits' perspective, as long as there was meat to strip, they were happy. From mine, as long as there were items to farm, I was happy.
"Time to normalize the Dark Zone."