In Demiland, shit doesn't break like it should half the time.
Case and point: The Library Director's door.
After running through hallways with blaring alarms that people ignored, I battered myself against it for a hot minute before Briggs appeared. The man was still in black and white for fuck's sake.
Behind him, a small crowd of onlookers were actually following him, chatting excitedly.
What the hell was wrong with these people?
Don't try to answer that.
I figured it out just now.
Centuries without needing to survive killed whatever residual instinct these assholes had for it. Just like it turned dying into rebooting.
Death was practically a joke for them, and here I was, the arbiter of death. A comedian.
Fuck I hate thinking like this.
I smash at the door trying to stop a killer zombie. The only being in the universe, it feels like, who still appreciates death. Who still fears it, or at least doesn't want it.
"Fuck!" I yell, finally drawing the Excisor.
Tia chose that moment to make herself helpful.
"Should I open the door?" she asked. "As the former Library Director, I find I still have my access keys-"
"Yes!" I shout as the crowd gawps at her. Maybe they thought they were seeing a ghost. Maybe her voice sounded like free orgasms and candy. I had a job to do.
As soon as the door came open, I leveled the Excisor and fired straight down the center of the room.
"Shit," I said almost immediately. The thing had gotten huge again. Bloated on the Director's Exa. My shot had split it in half, and what looked like a pair of legs in too-white suit pants, linked to a corrupted blob, fell away.
"You pr-pppromised me a sh-sh-show," the zombie said, its head - which was half Atticus - twisted more than three hundred sixty degrees as it rotated. Eyes taking me in.
"The hell I did," I replied, more for the noise and to reassure myself that two bullets would be enough. It was probably saying something from the guy it just ate. Zombies did that sometimes.
The worst zombie I ever fought made gasping, sexual noises of both sexes as I shot it. It was the worst in terms of being memorable, because of the noise and the fact the couple it had eaten had their parts all over it. I may have shot it more times than was strictly necessary.
Here, now, I didn't have that luxury.
So I dodged.
Briggs, thank his cop ass, at least had the common decency to hold the people back as the corrupted slammed into the wall.
That meant the zombie had to choose which bit of exa it wanted to consume.
Now me, I have exactly one exa. No more, no less. I may have swapped around some subroutines to help delay the effects of overclocking. Also enhanced my offense and defense for close-quarters battle. Useless against zombies but plenty useful against people.
The Excisor though... ohoho... this baby is pretty much an exa vacuum. It hasn't reached capacity yet, and I've killed a lot of zombies.
See, each shot of the Excisor has two functions. The first is to rip out a chunk of data and "teleport" it inside itself. The second is to test a variety of subroutines that burn out five-seconds worth of data.
There's some old trope about assimilating cyborgs... I think they're called the Blorg? Something uncreative. Anyways, the burn subroutines are like reverse assimilators, adapting with little shifts every time the primary function of a shot detects some resistance.
What does it do with all the Exa it eats?
Hell if I really know. According to Demi, the answer is pretty much nothing. Just stores the data while some kind of subroutine analyzes and purges it.
At some point, Demi seems to want to release that Exa back into the wild, but that point hasn't come since I woke up. Does Demi bother to tell me about anything they learn? Nope.
But it means the Excisor makes for one helluva lure.
"Hey! Over here you brain-dead piece of shit!" I shout at the zombie, and it turns my way.
I've got the Excisor in my hand and I'm already turning and running.
Works like a charm.
I started tearing off and it started tearing after me. It took a half second when I had to stop to open a stairwell door to realize I wasn't alone.
"Tia?! Why the fuck did you follow me?"
"You ever get the feeling that you just had to be next to someone, and everything would be just... better?" she asked.
Great. Tia had discovered empathy! And of course that meant I would be her favorite person...
"Not a good time to be with me!" I reminded her, just in case she had a self-preservation protocol in there too.
I ran down the stairs just in time for the zombie to smash the door off behind me.
The library didn't have a convenient drop in the center of the stairwell. That meant spiraling down, having to go just slow enough to make sure the damn zombie didn't lose interest, but just fast enough to not get killed.
As I started passing the middle section, it finally occurred to me...
"Tia," I spoke shakily, my voice vibrating because I was trying to run, descend the stairs, and talk at the same time. "Do you know a narrow hallway I can use? Like, really, really narrow?"
"There are information conduction tubes that feed into the library central server. It's used to reclaim service and communication drones. Will that do?"
Above us, the zombie started picking up speed. I realized that it had learned to slither faster, which meant it was time to go fast or die.
"It'll do! Just lead me to one!" I shouted as I picked up the pace.
Moments later, I ran out of stairwell.
"Oh, we're here! You'll have your pick of information conduction-"
I slammed the door open, forcing Tia to follow if she wanted to finish her sentence.