The Scrambled Field
The wind above Central C-D carried static.
Far above the hydraulic columns, Orion crouched against a shadowed wall between the island's plates. Steam rose in pale ribbons, catching the amber light from below. His human eyes blinked, filtering through layers of haze, tracking the movement of two figures far beneath—the subject and her injured partner.
His enhanced optical nerve flickered once, then failed. The augmented interface refused to render the scene—nothing but black and noise. He blinked, allowing his un augmented eyes take the lead, he saw her.
Jackie Cannon moved with strange precision, her entire frame bending and reforming with every breath. She wasn't just repairing a sector; she was commanding it—synchronizing hydraulic rhythm, heat balance, even micro-seam welds. She worked like an extension of the system itself.
Orion exhaled through synthetic lungs that hummed softly in his chest. His head tilted slightly, cables shifting along the transparent ports at his neck where electrolytes and plasma shimmered faintly in their conduits.
His mind marked the deviation.
"Nexus Directive classifies anomaly: null threat," the network whispered in static across his neural band.
"Maintain observation."
He muted the feed. His human brain thrummed with dissent.
"Null threat," he echoed under his breath. "Then why does she make the air change?"
Below, the hum of welding arcs flared, and his sight adjusted again, this time his optic nerve augmentation allowing his vision to zoom in. Through human eyes, he saw the shimmer along Jackie's right arm—micro-currents rippling over the synthetic epidermis. The metal beneath seemed to breathe, like something alive.
Then his focus narrowed.
Her cybernetically enhanced suit seemed to flow with motion as nanobots streamed from the right side of her body, glowing faintly as they expanded and enhanced her left arm. The suit bulged as muscle and sinew contracted beneath. It was then that she pulled back her left hand and plunged it into the thick metal of corridor wall and peeled it back.
Her cybernetic arm cleanly formed into her cannon as she worked, fingers plunging into ports along her chest. The double barreled cannon seemed to hiss has steam seeped out in wisps.
As soon as the wall was open her ocular implant found the correct trajectory, relayed this to the weapons system in a seamless instant.
She fired.
Three bursts of pressurized air slammed into the piston within the wall housing, realigning it with a deep mechanical thud.
Steam bled out through the rebalanced vents.
Orion watched the motion, the precision—how she switched seamlessly between repair and battle-readiness without external command.
"Observer Orion's system has been blocked," BDJ registered in quiet binary, deep within the scrambler field's pulse. However, secondary human observational systems cannot be hindered. Probability 86.957%: Operative Orion detects anomalous activity. Caution is advised.
Jackie ignored the alert, rerouting energy back into cooling Sura's weld. Her cannon close to the seam. Sura's hand a bit unsteady but sure, she finished the weld with little problem.
Jackie had just stabilized after BDJ under went a major upgrade. It was a cascading effect starting in her brain. The sensation was odd, but not painful. It was like static flowed through every system, like new electroplating applied to hot metal. Jackie had been shaken by the unexpected sensations. Her body trembled as microscopic internal pistons fired within her cybernetics, after BDJ politely whispered "full systems upgrade complete. New functions accessed across all operating systems: scrambler. Systems affected:
Location dynamics
Weapons
Ocular matrix.
Would you like to open your systems operational dashboard.
Jacki had blinked dumbfounded. 'Systems Operational Dashboard'?
But Jackie had no time for dashboards or contemplation, her eyes scanned the area. Smoke curled up from a burst conduit, and sparks rained down intermittently. Sura Tanith now stood by her side, her arm bound in place, tight, next to her body. She looked at Jackie, mind slightly numb, her shock palpable, as she continually tried to understand what she was clearly seeing.
Jackie placed a hand just above her injured arm, "you did well, can you keep going?" Sura nodded without hesitation, Jackie calmly watched her for a moment and nodded in satisfaction.
Her tone and affect were both flat, but something in her voice—something almost human—steadied Sura's breath.
Far above, Orion leaned closer over the railing. The sound of his metal boots resonated through the framework, echoing against the columns below.
"She's not just running off protocol," he murmured. "She's learning. Adapting. Teaching."
The thought unsettled him.
Then, a flicker—a blur in his peripheral vision.
The air rippled near the support beam to his left.
Kieran emerged from the distortion, his movement fluid, predatory. The mask he wore glimmered silver before melting into his skin. Where human flesh had been, seamless alloy took its place. The nanites crawled through his hair, coating each strand until it reflected dull metal sheen, shifting like mercury.
His face became unreadable—a mechanical sculpture of a man.
"Hmm," Kieran said, voice deepened by the mask's resonance. "The infamous Orion."
Orion's head turned, slow and deliberate. His eyes narrowed.
"You shouldn't be here," he said quietly.
"And yet I am," Kieran replied. The air around him distorted again as his systems stabilized. "Tell me, Nexus lapdog—how does it feel to see what your sensors can't?"
For a heartbeat, neither moved.
Steam hissed. Sparks from below floated upward in glittering fragments.
Kieran's eyes—now two sharp points of light—flashed red.
He vanished.
Orion pivoted instinctively, arm shifting, servos tightening, catching the faint shimmer of Kieran's movement just before impact.
Metal struck metal, the sound ringing out like thunder.
The shockwave traveled down the beams, scattering dust and ash through the air. Below, Jackie's head turned slightly—her auditory sensors catching the echo—but she continued working, recalibrating temperature balances.
The upper framework groaned.
Kieran's momentum carried both of them backward, crashing through a corroded platform that gave way beneath their weight. Metal screamed as it tore loose.
And then—
Both cyborgs fell.
Through the dense fog and falling debris, they plummeted toward the lower sector. The impact was drowned out by the roar of hydraulics. Jackie looked up just in time to see fragments of the platform spiral down like shards of glass.
She shielded Sura with her arm.
"BDJ," she said, voice calm. "Identify source."
"Unknown. Kinetic impact detected at coordinates—error. Signal interference active.
"Recommendation: maintain task priority until external variables confirmed.
Jackie exhaled. "Keep it logged."
---
Lyra's systems screamed with interference.
She stood at the threshold of the sector, hands pressed against her temples, as she ignored the heat of her ports as the worked over time with tons of indecipherable data.
Her ruby eyes flickered—streams of binary light flowing across the irises like molten code. She could barely make sense of it. The zeros and ones danced at normal speeds, but then began breaking formation as the scrambler pulse from Jackie's system distorted the signal field.
"Tally," she whispered, "reroute through sub-layer protocol—anything below eight terahertz."
"No clear path," Tally, her AI, and best friend replied, its voice fractured. "Interference saturation 93%. The signal originates from within the field you are approaching."
"So she's here," Lyra muttered. "The static... it's her."
She moved forward cautiously. The metallic floor hummed beneath her boots. Around her, columns of steam rose like ghosts. The data in her vision trembled, forming abstract outlines—two heat signatures, one faintly elevated with mechanical activity.
Lyra blinked hard, forcing focus. Her hacker instincts guided her more than her augmented sight now. Even half-blind, she understood data flow by feel—the rhythm of magnetic pulses, the pattern of interference.
She followed the distortion to its center.
Then she saw them—Jackie, kneeling beside Sura, the latter clutching a welding torch. The faint shimmer of BDJ's scrambling field wrapped around Jackie, bending the air itself. To Lyra's eyes, it looked like glass being warped by heat.
Jackie turned, sensing motion through her peripheral scanners. Her cannon-arm twitched upward, shifting partially out of rest mode.
Lyra froze.
"I'm not here to fight," she said quickly, raising her hands. "I'm—"
She hesitated, the word catching. She was almost a bit too honest, and caught between that honesty and fulfilling the mission given her. "I'm here to help."
Jackie's eyes flared faintly gold as BDJ's system parsed Lyra's biometrics.
"Unregistered presence detected. Scrambler radius breached.
Signal source carries non-hostile pattern, but probability of deception: 47.2%. Operative identified as Lyra Teon."
Jackie's reply came cool and distant. "Hello Lyra. How can I help you? I'm a bit busy at the moment."
Lyra exhaled, shoulders tensed, 'How does she know my name?'.
Tally naturally answered.
"88.62% probability that Jackie Cannon's systems can read your registered bio system designation."
Lyra's eyebrow rose subtly as she answered, Jackie's systems noted the motion.
"I'm just a systems analyst. Off-grid, and you seem like the safest place to be right now."
Her gaze flicked to the wall, the fractured piston, the still-glowing welds. She knew then—this was the interference hub, the core of everything the Resistance wanted her to find.
And yet standing in it, surrounded by Jackie's overwhelming data field, she felt... small. Like the code itself bent around this woman.
Her voice softened, a small smile bloomed across her lips. "You're the static I've been chasing."
Jackie blinked once, but said nothing. BDJ's reply slid through her cybernetic systems.
"Operative Lyra Teon: minimal threat. Suggestion: Continue with main threat and continue repairs."
---
High above, amid the mist and falling debris, two figures collided again—Kieran's fluid-metal body gleaming under the fractured light, Orion's eyes locked in measured calculation.
Below, Lyra took one cautious step closer. "If this sector collapses again," she said, "we'll both be buried under it. So... maybe we start with fixing that."
BDJ's voice hummed softly inside Jackie's head.
"Suggestion: temporary alliance beneficial. Probability of survival increases by 34.8%."
Jackie's lips barely moved. "Fine," she murmured.
Steam curled through the corridor as the three women—one resistance, one a loyalist, one a rapidly evolving freshly made cyborg —stood surrounded by noise and shifting light.
Somewhere beyond the mist, the city groaned, as if listening.