Let Me Be Your Armor

An automated protection suit makes its way to the nearest safe point to save its subject. At least that's what it's programmed to do, right?

Neverending green, soaking wet, flashed before her eyes. Sparse light, filtered in between the trees and shining through the tiny breaches scattered on her giant helmet, has mixed everything around in a giant whirlpool inside her head. Rain drops were floating around the suit, carried by the airflows caused by its continuous and swift, gradual movement through the forest. Her red, swollen yet dry eyes, encapsulated by a thick layer of damaged armor, could even catch one or two now and then, suspended in the air as if time had stopped but only for a split second as she was cradled further forward with a mechanical stomping sound in her ears.

“I am sorry for what happened to you, subject,” a robotic, hollow voice shattered the unstable silence. Woman’s head slowly turned from the side it rested on, now looking straight forward. Her lifeless eyes stared at a partially broken display showing everything ahead of the moving armored exoskeleton she was in - a tropical abyss flooded with rain.

“You have experienced a deep emotional and physical shock but it is advised that the subjects remain as emotionally stable as possible until extraction,” she heard again, “Subjects should try and remain calm during the transportation. The following relaxation technique is advised...”.
“How do i turn you off?” woman interrupted the robotic lecturer. Her voice was stripped of every emotion there is in existence, with only apathy left to support the sounds. Machine lingered. After a brief pause, it announced: “To turn the automated features off, use the sensor panel located near your right hand”. She immediately moved her arm forward in an attempt to silence the machine but she could barely move an inch - sharp pain on the left side of her body nipped all her efforts.

“It would be best to limit any movement possible due to severe wounds present,” Machine proclaimed, “Medical scan shows the following injuries, ordered by the life threat factor:  minor lacerations, limb sprains, second grade concussion... “ it went on reciting a long list of medical terms. At one point, the woman clenched her teeth and attempted another try at reaching the manual control panel, moaning and wheezing - it seemed like the blood has started flooding her lungs again. She managed to extend her arm enough to touch the controls but the panel just sparkled, giving her a slight electric shock that further exacerbated the pain.

“... two open fractures in the lower limbs, blood clotting, severe internal bleeding in the gastrointestinal and lung area,” list stopped here, as she was still trying to get over the sudden wave of pain, breathing heavily. “The subject should be aware that the suit is fully capable of complete life support even in the circumstances that would otherwise mean certain death. The chances for survival without the suit are zero point zero zero zero zero ... ” it took the machine a while to finish, “zero zero one eighty seven percent. The chances for survival with the suit are ninety one point nine four two percent.” A smiling, cartoony face of a nurse blinking appeared on the navigational display, partially distorted, to cheer the woman up.
After a brief while, she managed to put herself together. “Is there a voice override?” woman asked without any noticeable hope of hearing a positive answer. “There is no such feature,” machine answered helpfully, “It was left out in order to prevent any possible diversions via communication devices. Please, subject, sit still.”

Two needles came out of the back of the seat and immediately pierced the woman as she roared in agony, bending her back while simultaneously trying to grab onto something to ease the pain. “I shall now perform a procedure to remove the blood from your lungs to extend your life cycle and increase your chances for survival even further,” machine was at it again “Please, look at the screen to watch the detailed explanation of how the procedure is being performed. The following fragment was done in a relaxing, satirical manner to partially relieve the stress and distract the subject from the unpleasant nature of the procedure”. Display screen blinked again, showing an obscure cartoon as the machine went on commenting every bit of it: a smiling teenage girl dressed in pink appeared on the screen, cheerfully walking forward.

“An internal bleeding in the lungs occurs in humans due to a number of reasons,” metallic voice spread over the tight internals of the suit, now sounding more like that of a teacher, “but we will only discuss the current condition of the subject present, which is...” as this was being said, the girl in pink stumbled upon something disguised as a present box. She picked it up and untied the bow. Suddenly, the box exploded, leaving cartoonish sparks around, and left her sitting on the ground with little yellow birds flying across her head in circles. “... Internal lung bleeding caused by an explosion,” the machine finished as the camera zoomed on her back, where two empty vessels were starting to fill with red, representing the lungs bleeding internally under the x-rays. “At first, we inject glucose into the bloodstream to help the body create new blood cells,” the screen showed an abstracted fragment of real-life footage where a bleeding patient was being injected with some opaque liquid as he barely kept himself awake - a possible misplacement of data.

“Then, two needles, sterilized and immersed into an anesthetic liquids prior to the procedure, are being injected into the lung tissue,” two shiny gray needles pierced the vessels on the screen, and immediately started pumping the blood out.

The woman, who barely kept conscious, finally gathered enough strength and painfully uttered through her clenched teeth, “I don’t...” she made brief pauses, breathing heavily as her lungs were producing seething noises, “need… glucose… I need… you… to stop…” she coughed blood out, “talking… I need you to stop… working”. The Machine tailed off, while the cartoon was still running. The girl on the screen already stood up with a smile she never lost and received a lollipop, with a speech bubble near her head saying “Get healthy!”. Display blinked a couple of times, probably due to the damage it was burdened with, and then switched to a normal, observatory state. The terrain never changed - the machine was still bursting through a green eternity.

Needles retracted as the woman emitted a final obtuse moan. She could breathe normally again now, which made things slightly better. ”I am sorry, subject,” the silence was broken again as the machine voice returned to its usual lifeless state, “but verbal override is impossible. You will, however, be pleased to know that as soon as we get to the closest allied base, you will be free to go. The standard procedure, however, prohibits me from letting you go until complete safety is reached.”

“I don’t know what ‘allied bases’ you are talking about,” said the woman, gulping at the end of the phrase, still breathing her heart out,“but we only had one on this planet, and it just got annihilated, wiped away from its face like waste. There is nowhere left to go.”  

“You will also be very pleased to know that your initial statement is false.” said the machine in the same monotonous voice, “My sensors show that there are quite a few bases scattered around the area. The closest one, we will approach in about two minutes twenty three seconds.”

“That’s impossible!” she exclaimed, “There is absolutely nothing on this planet, except,” her eyes suddenly flushed with anger, “except the scum who brought this upon us, and even those probably already left.”

“Sensors don’t lie, subject.’ she heard, “There are approximately six thousand signals that I have intercepted that have a friendly signature. It would be...” it tried to convey some thought, but got interrupted.

“It doesn’t matter. Even if there was someone,” her breathing was slowly normalizing, “even if there is someone… something, doesn’t really matter. Nothing matters anymore.”

A long pause brought a moment of unexpected silence into their cramped little world. “Why, subject?” asked the machine. The question, although still being as hollow as an old tree stump, sounded slightly different - it had a tiny bit, a grain of what the poor girl needed to hear at this moment. She sighed, almost being prepared to answer, but it was too late.

“Logical bounds established,” the machine announced in its usual voice, throwing everything she thought she heard down the drain, “Subject’s marital status changed. Was: married, now: widowed. Subject’s child count updated. Was - one, now - zero. Database update finished. Subject’s condition updated. Added - severe mental shock from husband loss, severe mental shock from child loss. Necessary rehabilitating procedures should start immediately.” As soon as she finished with technical disgust, screen blinked again, now showing the same girl. She was standing near a drawn gravestone with a comical frown on her face. A man in a black chair appeared near her, resembling a stereotypical shrink with glasses on and a short beard, and began commentating this farce in the machine’s metallic yet deeper, manlier voice. “Sooner or later, every man has a moment when he loses someone he loves, someone dear. This is also the time when depression starts to evolve inside his head, leading to many unpleasant things, such as... ”. It took him a while to list everything while the girl in pink simultaneously demonstrated everything he named: cried in bed, slit her wrists with two red cartoony waves flowing out of her veins, and even jumped off from the roof ledge of an ancient looking building, leaving a red spot on the ground.

Woman clenched her fists, permanently destabilizing her breath pattern again - pain was trembling deep inside her, ready to explode. The doc in the video was still going on about how depression affects the mental patterns of a human being, then he stopped. In silence, he was looking straight into the woman’s eyes, at least she had that feeling. After a while, he said, “But enough abstractions! Let’s look at our subject’s history, shall we?”. The cartoon suddenly started morphing into something resembling a strange mix of both the real world and a looney tunes episode. The girl in the pink now looked like “the subject”, while the graves - woman’s eyes rounded in stupor - now had real names on them. Girl still had a cartoony frown stretched on her face.

It was too much. A sudden outburst of anger overflowed “the subject”. She grabbed her head, covering her ears and started screaming in an attempt to silence whatever was going on around her, “Make it stop! Make it stop! I don’t want to hear that anymore! I don’t want anything anymore! Please, stop! Just stop!”. Tears came falling down, squeezing in between her fingers to escape the pain even they couldn’t bear, but damned cartoon wasn’t going to stop.

Meanwhile, the screen was going mad - there was less and less of a cartoon and more of a horror film gone wrong. Seemingly random video footage and various photos were popping on and off the screen, showing anything ranging from food stock photos and family child-infested birthday parties to a violent mess of military gore. However, through a thick veil of tears, she could finally see a pattern emerging, slowly crushing her even further - after a brief while she spotted what she won’t ever feel anymore yet it pierced her as it was real; A whole series of visuals from her very recent past.

Here is her husband landing his air module near their mutual home between the palm trees, filmed by her teenage son smiling into the camera as his parents hug each other in the background. And here is her son lying with his arms spread out covered in blood, eviscerated by a giant metal blade that slick his armor in half. And here he is again smiling and shaking hands with a person in military uniform holding his cadet graduation papers, with eyes filled with joy, but here is the same eye, only one this time becausethe other got smashed by that same blade. And here is her, kissing her husband, and then he is dragged down into one of the many holes on this planet by a giant arachno-bot - the footage was probably taken by the suit’s systems. She couldn’t even see his eyes as he was falling down into the darkness as his armor stretched its metal arm towards hers, she will never see them both again. She will only remember the rain washing them down.

A wave of thick rage has pushed hysteria out of her with a powerful smash delivered to the nav screen - it cracked loudly, bringing all the visual mess down. Last thing she saw was their mutual photo slit in half by the pixels withering away, and a large electric outburst pierced her again, leaving the poor body unconscious. Her numb flesh shanked back, smashing against the thick pad of the seat. The machine froze still, slowly curling up on hydraulics as a newborn baby. 

 ***

Several minutes have passed before the system finally showed signs of life again. The armor expanded again with flickering lights that of a flower covered in dew shining in the morning light. The rain, which is unusual, has ceased, leaving only traces of what was usually drenching the lives of people here. It looked around - the voice inside has announced, “Error. No allied base sightings found. Deleting database entry number two thousand twelve. Entries left - four thousand ninety seven.” The suit re-positioned itself more to the south, choosing a new course to follow, and the movement began again.

The suit moved fast, breaking through thick debris of tropical insanity. The sun didn’t yet show its presence but the massive grey-haired clouds were already stepping aside in favour of their flaming overseer. Rain drops weren’t flowing from the sky but instead migrating to the suit’s surface from the giant leaves licking its metal plates. There, they ran down, eventually getting stuck near the letters engraved on a bulky compartment in the back of the suit. Letters A, N, F, R, and E once constituted a word but now they were meaningless near a torn apart cell filled with damaged and sparkling electronics. As the machine advanced further and deeper into the woods, it left a white trace that of fireworks exploding in the sky behind itself. The suit rushed to safety.

Author's Note

raw-ish version, contains mistakes (well, probably)