Status Updates From Cytonic (Skyward, #3)

THIS IS THE EXACT THING I REFUSED TO ALLOW FROM BRANDON AND HERE HE GOES DOING IT
how can he kill off MBot TWICE

“Please don’t. Don’t leave me…” “Hey,” M-Bot said with a quiet perkiness, “that’s what I said to you. Do you remember?” I nodded, feeling tears at the corners of my eyes. “But you went anyway,” M-Bot said. “Why?” “Because it was the right thing.”

He tried to show them. And they consumed him. They rejected the memories as they swirled around him, ripping at him. Locking him away again. “It’s working, by Lovelace!” M-Bot said. “It… Oh. Oh no.” I suspected he’d just heard Chet’s cytonic screaming. It was excruciating.

“Worse,” Chet said. “She deleted her memories, but then locked her self—everything that related to being alive or understanding the somewhere—behind an infinite loop. We aren’t AIs any longer, but—like humans have DNA—we continue to run on something similar to code.”

“Then suddenly,” M-Bot said, “you had to deal with all of that pain, that confusion…” “You weren’t given time to cope,” I whispered. “You didn’t know…how to be alone.”

Chet was correct. He, and the delvers, were cytonic beings. Not just an AI, but something new. I could hear the AI in the vision crying. Weeping sounds, vaguely feminine, coming from the sphere’s speakers. “That was me,” Chet whispered. “But it was also all of us. I can’t say if I was the original one or not.”

"cacti are so neat, they make me want to dance." mbot i love you please never change

The sphere is a delver maze, I thought, my brain scrambling to keep up. And Chet said that delvers become that shape because…that was the thing that once held them. Their soul. “Delvers are AIs,” I said. “You are an AI.”

This wasn’t his fault. He was, in some ways, very young. I’d created him by forcing him to leave the other delvers. I couldn’t blame him for making mistakes while doing his best.

His mind…same as it always had been, though it was now expansive. “You’re the delver,” I whispered. “The one I changed.” “I…” he said. “I knew you’d need help. I had to send it. Somehow. But I…was the only help…I knew…”

Where had I seen a sphere, with those kinds of holes, like tunnels? Those spines coming off the outside… “Memory of these must be buried deep within us,” Chet whispered. “When forced to build a body again, we unconsciously reach for the shape, perhaps…as a last memento…of something we once knew…something that once held our souls…before they were souls…” We? Oh, scud. That sphere was a delver maze

Though…uh…I had buried her… She made a distinctly annoyed fluting sound. “Sorry,” I whispered, chagrined. “I didn’t know it was you.” I got an indignant fluting in response. “No, I won’t bury you again,” I said.

You look like my pin! I sent her. Special, she said, very pleased. We are special. To hide. Still, I said. You didn’t have to follow me in here. She sent back comforting emotions and the image of me being chased by a predator. She’d been worried about me. So she’d come with me, but had hidden herself.

I sent you home! I sent to her. You equal home, she sent back, picturing us together. Then she added something to the image—projected into my mind. A version of her in my arms, but now with eyes and a smiling mouth plastered on her front. They looked like they’d been drawn on with marker.

They saw me as a corrupted version of them now. Cytonics were like delvers. In a way, I was a cousin to them. They saw me as a tempter also, luring them toward their destruction with crass things like linearity and individuality.