The door was broken. Try as I might, I couldn’t move it.

Fortunately, the girl wasn’t broken. And she didn’t like the idea of letting the guy through.

I could tell by the way she stabbed at his arms, until he withdrew, yelling.

I marked her feral grin as she waved her knife at the door, daring him to return. I decided I liked this kid.

Shortly thereafter, a face peered through the door from a safe distance back. Another bald guy. Shorter than the last, but not by much. He withdrew as well, and I heard muttered gibberish as he and his buddy discussed matters.

It looked like sparing the girl had worked out after all, and saved us from the terrible twosome.

“We got lucky,” Argus said.

She'd gotten lucky, that we were in charge. Regardless, that had bought us some time. And now that I had time, I needed to address the multi-eyed elephant in the room.

“What? This room is free of pachyderms.” Argus glanced around.

Argus had said he’d stop reading my thoughts if I gave him permission to do whatever he’d done. He had, but here we were, and my thoughts were still his to see. This diminished my willingness to trust the little eyeguy.

“I… no, at no point did I promise that your thoughts would be private. There’s a way to make them so, but it’s dangerous, which is why I didn’t explain it. I’m just trying to get us through this, to complete our mission. I have your best interests in mind.”

I had the feeling that I’d heard that before. And it usually wasn’t true. I searched myself, and came to a couple of conclusions.

Whoever I was or had been, I was both a paranoid son-of-a-bitch, and stubborn enough that I wasn’t going to give any ground, when it came to the sanctity of my thoughts.

“Please! This isn’t the time for it,” Argus begged. “The enemies are literally at the gates! If they get inside, they can destroy you. If the one who is inside changes her mind, she can destroy you. We need to be focusing on a way through this.”

It was good advice but I didn’t take it. If he really had my best interests at heart, he’d help me get some privacy. And he’d do it quickly, so we could move on to dealing with the intruders.

“All right. All right. Look, the thing to understand is that if you tell me to ignore you completely then that’s it, I won’t have any way of knowing when you want me to pay attention to you again. And you’ll need me to do pretty much anything, so if you give me a bad command we’ll be stuck like that until we’re destroyed. Or eternity, if they get bored and wander off. That’s bad.”

It did sound bad.

“The general idea of it, and please don’t tell me anything until I finish, is that you can tell me to pay less attention to things than others. If you tell me to pay less attention to you, then I won’t get as clear a reading on your thoughts. At ten percent or less I’ll barely be listening. It’ll slow reaction time, you’ll have to ask me several times to do even simple things, but you COULD do that. But if you tell me to pay NO attention to you, then, well… we're stuck. Forever.”

I thought about it. Ten percent would still leave me compromised. But… what about speech?

“What about it?”

“I can speak,” I said to the room. The girl, who was watching the door like a hawk, jumped in surprise, glanced back at me, and said something incomprehensible. The guys outside shouted and hooted. “Can you hear me, Argus?”

“Well, yes.” Argus blinked. “Oh… that might work,” he said, reading my train of thought.

“Very well,” I told him. “What’s a good number for your attention?”

“Eighty. I’ll get almost everything you want me to hear and that will leave me plenty to monitor the rest of the situation.”

“Good. Pay eighty percent of your attention to my spoken words, and pay zero attention to my thoughts.”

“Affirmative. It is done.”

Good, now I could work on figuring out how to kill the little bastard.

He didn’t respond. Fair enough, I didn’t really want to kill him. That had been a test and he’d passed, for now anyway. I wasn’t a hundred percent sold, but I could work with this for the moment.

“Still with me?” I spoke again.

The girl ignored it this time, keeping a wary eye on the door, and her knife up.

Argus bobbed. “I’m still with you. Where else would I be?”

That was a weight off. I could turn my attention to the situation, and get a little time to think. For now my unlikely ally had things in a stalemate. The goons outside couldn’t rush the door, thanks to the tiny gap. If they wriggled through one at a time she’d hurt, maybe kill, the first one through the door.

How long would this stalemate go on?

At the moment they didn't seem to want her bad enough to risk serious injury. But the fact that they were still there, a couple of minutes later, seemed to indicate that they wouldn’t give up easily. Sooner or later, they’d try something. And given how the first goon had glared at my new body, I didn’t think I’d like any of their ideas.

So I needed ideas of my own. I looked around the room, taking stock now that I had some time to do so.

It was mostly a dump. Shattered monitors and broken chairs lined the walls. In between them, a few intact red emergency lights still flickered. The floor was covered with litter, bright wrappers for long-eaten foodstuffs, bits of circuitry and metal from broken machinery, and shattered glass from long-dead overhead lights.

Either a few grenades had gone off in here, or someone had tossed the place with a jackhammer. Or maybe both. There might be something to help my situation in the mess, but if so, it would be buried under the mess.

There was one exit out of this place. A pair of elevator doors, opened, with twisted and broken pry bars leaning to either side against the wall. Someone had forced them, and a cable hung forlornly in the open shaft. The walls of the shaft were crumbling concrete over bumpy natural stone. I was in a cave?

No. A bunker.

Yes, if you took away the trash, and imagined everything intact again, this place had the look of a facility that was built for serious business. Military business, or at the very least, security of a sort. At least it had been, before it got wrecked.

That did concern me. The hollow cylinders above and below me, and the round sphere I was occupying somehow… they were out of place in this broken room.

But… that was a mystery for later. I was on the clock, I reminded myself. “Argus,” I said. “Tell me my options, here.”

“Are you sure I can’t monitor your thoughts again? It would really save time.”

“I’m sure. Now tell me how to deal with Hekyll and Jekyll over there.”

“Who?”

Upon reflection, I found I didn’t know. The words had just come to me. “The goons. The male intruders outside the door.”

“Well, you’re going to have to find a way to kill them or drive them off. I highly doubt this will be settled peacefully, especially with a language barrier.”

“How do I do anything without a body?”

“You have a body. But it has to remain stationary within the containment field. Your primary mode of remote manipulation is through your nanoswarms.”

“I don’t know that word.”

“Clouds of tiny machines, that you can operate remotely. Well, sort of remotely. You have to devote circuits to the broadcast subroutine if you want to get the most out of them.”

“More words I don’t know.”

“Um. This would be easier if… yes. Think the words ‘ping status.’ Try to shout them in your thoughts, if that makes any sense.”

Three tries later, I finally got the hang of it. And if I’d had eyelids I would have blinked as a glowing screen full of letters popped up right in the middle of my viewpoint.

STATUS

Spoiler:

Master Designation: Wynne

Make/Model: Northwest Enginetics Bunker Core Nanohive 4L

Resonance Rate: 1/24:00

Bandwidth: 10 Feedstock: 20

Open Circuits: 10

Specialized Circuits

Floors: 1

Minions: 1 Autonomous Remote Guidance Universal System

Processes and Subroutines

Construction: Demolition, Infrastructure, Fabrication

Medical: Cybernetics, Pharmaceuticals, Recovery

Power: Broadcast, Efficiency, Redundancy

Research: Algorithms, Analysis, Databases

Security: Defensive, Drones, Offensive

Storage: Energy, Material, Organic

Improvements:

“I see it, but I’m not making much sense of it. I’m the Master, it looks like. Of this Bunker Core thing?”

“Yes! That’s you. You’re the primary guiding persona.”

“And you’re a minion.”

“…yes.” If a mass of eyeballs could grit its teeth, it would sound like Argus’ voice right now.

“How does the rest of this help me?”

“Most of it doesn’t. It’ll cease to matter after our departure from this core. Honestly, the rest of it wouldn’t matter… except the room’s way worse than Juno’s reports indicated. We should have just been able to shut the door and call it a day. Now we’ll have to improvise.”

“Juno.”

“She’s a conversation for another time.”

“All right, but she will be a conversation.”

“Um, okay. Look, basically you’re designed to be the primary intelligence of an underground facility. When things are working properly, you are the facility. So you don’t have a single body, you’re basically supposed to be the rooms and structures within a bunker. But you can jump into your minions, and control them. Which is how I think we should do this.”

“Where do you fit in this?” I mused. “You had some pretty firm ideas on how to handle the situation. Why did Juno send me with you?”

“You’re human. Or you were. Or… I don’t know your exact circumstances. You’re allowed to make decisions that fall outside normal safeguards. Me, I can’t kill people. Among other things, that make my sort of program a poor choice for situations like these. But I’m great at helping people! Speaking of which, I think the other two might be gone.”

Yeah? That would make my job simpler. I thought loud words at the screen until I found a way to close it, and stared over at the door. No sign of the goons. The girl was sitting down with her back against it, shaking. The aftermath of an adrenaline rush, I knew.

“Good kid. Good soldier,” I told her.

Damned if she didn’t give me a pissed-off look. She shushed me with a finger to her lips, and pointed at her ears.

So we COULD communicate. Sort of. In this case, the message was clear; she was trying to listen for her enemies.

I lowered the audio to a whisper. “Argus, still with me?”

“Yes. Volume makes no difference. I’m reading your words from the audio packets as they leave your processor.”

I filed that under things not to worry about right now, and called my status screen back. “So what’s useful to us right now?”

“May I look through your eyes?”

“For now. Until I close the screen.” He was like a djinn, or a captive demon, I knew. I’d have to watch what I said and make sure I didn’t leave any loopholes he could exploit if he was so inclined. Then I wondered what djinns and demons might be. More echoes of memories I couldn’t access? Seemed likely. And annoying.

But Argus was happy to comply. “All right. The useful things to us right now are your circuits. You’ve currently got about ten synapses worth. The circuits control your core capabilities. The more you devote to your subroutines, the more you can create.”

“Create? How?”

“That’s your main purpose. This bunker? It was made through the usage of the core you’re occupying. And probably run through it, until something went wrong, anyway. Basically you’re a nanohive. You create and control microscopic machines that go forth and do your bidding. They’re called builder swarms.”

“Sounds good. I’m guessing they’d be minions, though, and I’m not seeing any.”

“Yeah, normally you’d have a schema to create them. But… wow, all your subroutines are bare. That’s ah, that’s not good. So we’ll have to devote some circuits to them. Think of subroutines as specializations. The more circuits you have devoted to them, the higher the rating, and the more things you can do.”

“So what’s the catch?”

“There’s diminishing returns. The higher you go into a subroutine, the more circuits it takes to enhance them.”

“Is there a way to get more circuits?”

“Technically you don’t get more circuits, you enhance the efficiency of the ones you have… but uh, that’s where resonance comes in. Which isn’t a factor here. It’d take too long to give you more circuits.”

“This sounds a bit like a game.” I had another one of those teasing, not-memories tugging at me.

“It kind of is. The cores were designed for human intelligences controlling them, and the makers decided to go with a gamelike interface. A late twentieth-century development called tech trees.”

“Tech trees. Yes, that rings a bell.”

“I mean, technically you’re not rediscovering anything, it’s all embedded in your core anyway. The circuits are just the dedicated hardware and software you need to handle creating and using the things you ‘discover’. But you should be able to attempt to create anything you can imagine. Just think about what you want to create, and yell the thought ‘Create’, and then the name of it.”

“What happens then?”

“If you have the circuits in the proper subroutines, and enough feedstock, then you’ll create it. If not, then the interface will tell you what you need.”

Sounded good. I thought of a machine gun… no, I’d need something to fire it. No, wait. “How exactly do the things I order get created?”

Argus blinked in irritation. “I already told you, through the builder swarms.”

“Yes, those minions that I don’t have.”

“Oh. Right. Um. Try creating a swarm.”

It took a few minutes of back and forth whispering to get a good description from him. All through this, the girl listened at the door. She ignored us, waiting, breathing as shallowly as she could. Then she stirred, standing, calling out a warning or something of the sort.

Something was happening. The grace period was over, I’d have to work fast. I thought of the thing Argus had told me about, and thought Create Nanobuilder Swarm.

And instantly, new words popped up, temporarily overlaying my screen before fading.

Insufficient Subroutines to devote to this task!

Requirements: Demolition 1, Drones 1, Fabrication 1

“Wow, three circuits?” Argus said.

“Fine, we can spare those,” I said, moving the screen over a bit and eyeing the door. The girl was cutting a strip from one of her raggedy sleeves. As I watched, she spat on the fragment several times, then wrapped her face. Why?

A shimmering through the gap drew my attention. A glitch?

No.

Worse.

“Fire,” I realized, as the first tendrils of smoke seeped into the room. They’d definitely started a blaze out there, and thanks to all the red flashing lights, I hadn’t noticed the change until it was too late.

Or was it too late? Did I need to breathe? “They’re trying to smoke her out. Is this a problem for us?”

New words appeared before us.

Warning! Core Contamination 1%

“Oh yeah…” Argus whispered, as the 1% blinked a few times, and grew to 2%. “This is pretty bad."