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@ asyncmind
2025-02-07 21:08:22
The lithium mines ate men alive. Deep in the sludge pits, where the dust turned to acid in their lungs, two augers—Mire and Kade—worked the veins of rock, their exo-grafts dull and scarred from years of corrosion. The mine was a necessary death, a place where augs bled out their contracts to the Dominion, hoping their implants would outlast their debt.
But then something happened.
Mire felt it first, an anomaly in her neuro-loop, something not in the manuals, something her biomonitor AI flagged as biochemical fluctuation—undefined. A warmth in her chest that wasn't from the rebreather filtration failing. Kade turned toward her, his mech-iris lenses dilating, his dermal mesh flexing as if something under his skin shivered awake. He saw her differently now. The same scars, the same aug plates, but something changed.
His sub-AI locked out his motor functions, a failsafe against contamination. Hold state. Analyzing bloodwork.
The quarantine order hit instantly.
Dominion overwatch didn't hesitate. Their drones hissed down into the pits, lights slicing through the darkness. The sub-AIs had flagged it: Infatuation event detected. This was not protocol. This was not supposed to happen.
Two centuries since the last recorded outbreak. Two hundred years since the last biological human instinct was stripped, optimized, rewritten into something manageable.
The mines were locked down. Mire and Kade were ripped from their shifts, strapped into gurneys, their veins flooded with suppressant nanites. But the sub-AIs couldn't dampen it. Couldn't parse it. It was wild.
The Overwatch AI, cold and patient, parsed centuries of historical data, dredging up archive footage of pre-collapse humans, people who felt. It was inefficient. It was dangerous. But it had to be understood.
But the rebels had been waiting for this.
They came in hard and fast, militech augs with scavenged Dominion hardware, shrouded in static fields to scramble the AI's targeting subroutines. They punched through the quarantine zone with mag-rifles and burst charges, turning sterile walls into ruins. They didn't come for war.
They came for the anomaly.
Mire and Kade, ripped from the cold steel of Dominion custody, found themselves in the arms of the last remnants of free humanity—the Militech augers who still believed in something beyond Dominion optimization models. They fought for the unquantifiable. The immeasurable.
They fought for the thing the Overwatch AI had just now realized it had failed to kill:
Love.
And in the bleak corridors of the resistance, under the dim glow of scavenged halogen lamps, as respirators hissed and servos clicked, Mire and Kade stared at each other—trapped in something that had no vector, no code, no sterilization protocol.
Something alive.
And the war for the future began.