The Manual had come about in the days and years after the fall of the Butchers. It had no single author, but was rather the amalgamation of a million texts, vids, and threads that sought to find some kind of method to the madness that had only recently ended. How and when the final, canonical version had been decided was a matter of scholarly debate even now, a nigh on impossible task that necessitated sorting through the billion strands that formed the cloth from which modern society was woven.

It consisted of a thousand commandments, innumerable parables, and countless lessons born out of a reaction to a time when humanity was at risk of losing its very heart. It spoke of what it was to be human, of what it was that separated flesh from cold, unfeeling alloy, and of how to guard against the time when humankind once more was threatened with the loss of itself. Every child knew it, was raised with its ideas and teachings threaded through all that they were told about science, about history, about the fundamental way in which the world worked. Every being on the planet was brought up in its ocean of words. The corps was the answer it provided, the road by which humanity could remain connected to its technology yet not a slave to it. You were taught this from practically your first breath.

And then you were expected to forget it.

Like any other uncared-for subject, unnecessary save to pass one test or another, it was natural to discard most of the facts and figures that permeated every moment of education. What was left was unconscious belief, a base upon which you stood but did not think about any more than you would the ground beneath your feet. You learnt the lessons, subsumed them into your personality, and forgot them.

There were labels for the two types of person who did not do this. The first were the analogues, those who rejected outright the corps and all it stood for. They were a varied bunch; a collection of beings whose only shared feature was that they saw the corps itself as a threat comparable to the augmentations of the Butchers. They were unimportant, a discarded and pitied minor section of society.

The second were the Purists, and they ran society.

It was the Purists who maintained the lock on technological advancement, who ensured that any position requiring decisions to be made was filled by a human, no matter how redundant.

It was a Purist that was currently trying to pulverise them into gravel.

Thank god[1] the machine was so slow, thought Keri as wrecked metal piping along with cracked and split stairwell tumbled down onto the spot she had just vacated. Sparks and gravel fell all around her, flicked high into the air and all across the floor.

They had split up, half by design but mainly through sheer terror. The two terrible wheels carved through the air in a thunderous cacophony that shook the teeth and drowned the senses, making each thought a struggle in itself. The machine wheeled and spun after them, only the mechanics of moving such a mass of machinery saving them from instant death.

Instead, this was a game of cat and mouse, except the mice were malnourished and the cat was a steroidal liger. The excavator wheels span so fast they were a blur as they bit into the rock, which disappeared in a cloud of vaporised dust that filled the air. Shards of the seabed that survived the pummeling whizzed past her at head height, and it was only dumb luck that saved her from a caved-in skull.

She was trying to get close to the central cab, though what she would do when she got there was anyone's guess. At the moment, though, even this seemed impossible. Despite the apparent lethargy of the old machine, the blades of the arms themselves were constantly swinging to block her, sending her scurrying off in a different direction.

Kilgore had to be using some kind of predictive software, she thought. There was no way he could be forecasting the paths of all four of them with the accuracy he was unaided.

With a shattering rumble a section of wall-face, pipes and gangways and all, came tumbling down along the opposite side of the bowl to where she was. She saw Anisa disappear beneath the avalanche, Andreas charging towards her but too slow to arrive in time.

The next second she was too busy trying to save herself again to see any more, a giant iron bar that was part of the arm swinging at her skull and forcing her to dive, sprawling, to the ground. The rough rock grated at her skin, tearing and cutting her hands and knees.

There was no time to recover. The bar came back, lower this time, and passed bare inches above her. She felt the wind of its passing blow over her.

Now the arm lifted, and somewhere behind her she knew the hinged section of its middle would be flexing, moving upwards so that the blades at its end could be brought to bear. She rolled sideways, dodging just in time as with a crash the excavator smashed down where she had been. More rocks and sparks.

Pushing herself to her feet, she sprinted for the cab. Kilgore had left himself open, momentarily distracted by Cassandra who had made it to within meters of the machine, forcing him to send the tracks on which it rested into a movement that span the base around and came very close to crushing his attacker.

She had made it, she realised, everything happening so fast that her conscious awareness needed some time to catch up. Her grip locked onto the bars that ran either side of the sloped base, and she swung herself up with a strength she had not known she had.

Keri found herself on smooth, bare metal, a thin strip of safety hemmed in on both sides by rapidly spinning treads that would take a stray limb off in a second should she put a foot wrong. It rattled beneath her feet, juddering and threatening to send her into and beneath the tracks at any moment.

She ran, sprinting up the base in long strides that carried her to the base of the cab. She was almost knocked off as it swung around, desperately flinging her hands out to grab at the ladder that led up the door of the unit as it flew past. The momentum wrenched at her arm sockets and sent her legs flying outwards but she held on, and the next instant was climbing up the ladder and towards the entrance.

It was a long, hard climb that she began to doubt she could make, but eventually she was there.

Now what?

She had not accounted for one small, but vital, point.

There was a lock on the door.

From the inside.

She stared at Kilgore through the wide, thick window. He had barely thrown her a glance, concentrating instead on the others. The jolting and roaring of the machine here was overwhelming.

And the machine really was rocking now. Kilgore was practically throwing himself into the levers, sending them and the machine into wild lurches that it was not designed to handle. Something cracked nearby, and a hiss and cloud of hydraulic steam passed over her, scolding hot for a second.

He was going to tear this thing apart, she thought to herself. The others must be giving him a hell of a runaround.

While I sit here like an obsolete hard-drive.

She took a moment to take in the locations of the others. There was Andreas, trying to head towards where Anisa had fallen whilst keeping as far from the machine as possible. Cassandra was now well clear of the machine too, keeping clear of the wildly veering tracks. She was looking up at Keri, shouting something between her hands and gesturing across the bowl.

Oddly, Kilgore didn't seem to be focusing on them at all. The arm closest to any of them stood still, carving at empty air, and the other was far off to one side, smashing and tearing at the rock close to where Cassandra was pointing...

Keri's blood ran cold.

The Butcher was coming, advancing on the cab like an angry demon. Though it did not move fast, it moved inexorably forward. Only when the arm of the machine threatened it did it suddenly blur, contorting into shapes no ordinary human could make and moving too fast to properly take in. The arms never hit their target.

A yell, half scream and half laughter, came from the cab and the speakers at the same time.

"Look at you!" said Kilgore, a mad cackle in his voice. "Glorious. I can't even scratch you..."

The wheel crashed down once more, not even close this time.

"But I will..." continued Kilgore. "I will. Because you gave yourself to the machine, and I am the master of machines. I use them, and you have damned yourself to be used."

Keri turned back to the cab for a brief second, all she could bear to take her eyes off the oncoming monster for, to see Kilgore scrambling around the cab with a big grin on his face and a wild look in his eye. He had something in there with him, a squat silver box on the face of which sat several buttons and dials she couldn't understand. He looked up suddenly, back at the Butcher, and so did she.

The Butcher was no longer advancing towards them. Instead, it was looking firmly at the cab where Kilgore crouched, and it was obvious he saw the man in the centre clearly though no ordinary eyes could.

This was the first time Keri had truly been able to see the creature's face, the face of a young man. Beautiful, in a way, even from here. Well-defined features on a youthful, symmetrical face gave him a look that the body-sculptors back in the city would have been proud to have created, and all framed around a pair of shining, silver eyes that glinted in the light. Not grey, as Kilgore's were, but completely silver, pupil-less and cold.

Those eyes did not leave Kilgore's as the Butcher unerringly stepped towards the nearest giant excavator arm, still ceaselessly tearing at the ground, and reached out a hard, dark limb.

One of the iron beams that composed the arm warped and bent under the Butcher's grip, a high-pitched whine starting up as the excavating wheel shifted off its axis and began to run against that which held it in place.

With a powerful yank the iron beam came off in his hand, along with a good deal of the supports around it. The whine grew louder and sparks erupted now not from where the wheel was digging, but from the friction between the wheel and where it was violently vibrating against its moorings. The sparks bloomed into the intensity of a fire in seconds, flame pouring out behind the arm.

Seconds more, and with a crash the entire wheel flew from its fixings, spinning at an incredible rate, the direction of its spin driving it back into the beams that had been holding it. A monstrous cacophony of metal smashing into metal followed, as the arm was torn apart and debris flew into the air.

None of the destruction touched the Butcher, who stood with his back to the carnage and eyes still firmly fixed on the central cab.

A wild cackle of glee from the speakers.

"Marvellous! Such compressed strength, such power. I look forward to making it my own."

Keri saw Kilgore adjusting the dials as he spoke, no longer looking at the Butcher, crouched down in the cab and adjusting the dials of the strange silver box. As his words came to an end, he stood up and looked directly at the Butcher, one arm rising and coming down upon the largest of the buttons with a triumphant slam.

The world turned an electric blue for Keri, the taste of electrons filling her mouth and her teeth shuddering as if being drilled. She could see nothing, hear nothing, and felt very little.

If she had to describe it, she would have said it was as if her mind were filled with the same static you saw on old-timey television sets, the ones with actual aerials designed for picking up now-defunct wavelengths. Analogue televisions, a passing phantom of knowledge told her before breaking like a wave upon rock. Her mind was a cloud of gas particles, molecules bouncing around free of connections and bonds.

When her senses returned to something resembling normalcy she found she was lying on the metal base of the cab, unable to move. She must have fallen the entire way.

Kilgore was standing over her, looking at something further away.

"Oh yes, that's right," he was saying loudly to someone. "You don’t have a corps, so weren’t affected. Well, that's alright..." he said, and as he spoke he dragged Keri's limp form up, holding her by the neck. "Come any closer and I'll snap your new friend's neck."

Her neck muscles refusing to work, she had only a glimpse of Cassandra standing some way away. Keri half-expected her to charge in anyway - she hardly thought the woman considered her a 'friend' - but after a second's hesitation she fell back.

She caught another glimpse of Andreas a moment later as her head lolled. He was digging frantically at the pile of rubble she had seen Anisa caught under, attention split between the debris and what was happening with Kilgore.

Keri felt her feet dragged along the ground as, arm tight around her neck, Kilgore strode over to where the Butcher lay, speaking as he did.

"Don't try to fight it," he said, and Keri wasn't sure if he was speaking to her or the fallen mechanical man. "You've been struck by a... an... well, let's call it an EMP, shall we? Not a real one, of course, more of an... information overload, but close enough. I've shorted out anything in this entire cavern not correctly shielded; including you, my fallen friend."

So he was talking to the Butcher, then.

"Oh, but you were magnificent. Tearing out that entire arm! Unbelievable! But I still do not understand how you found me..."

Kilgore jerked Keri's head back and fixed her with a malevolent gaze.

"How any of you found me," he said, eyes narrowing. "Still, you can tell me later, once I've secured my new toy..."

Kilgore jumped back suddenly, jarring Keri's spine as he dragged her with him.

The Butchers eyes had opened.

"But... that's impossible!" cried the incredulous modder. "Vista! The layers of redundancy it would need to remain active..."

The eyes were not the eyes Keri had seen just a short time ago. No, these were not the cold silver that had stared up at them in defiance. These were... human eyes.

They were brown, and older than the youthful face around them. They flickered from Kilgore to Keri and back again.

There was a whirr, almost imperceptible, and perhaps a sound on the edge of hearing that suggested power once more flowing, charge returning along lines briefly interrupted.

"No, you cannot..! There's no way...!"

The grip on her neck slackened, and Keri swung an elbow upwards and into the man's stomach with all the force she could muster. This wasn't much, it turned out, but it had the benefit of catching Kilgore unawares. His grip slackened further; released.

Keri forced herself to her feet and began staggering as fast as she could towards the others. Andreas had a very injured-looking Anisa slung by one arm over his shoulder and was leading her with as much haste as possible towards the elevator on which they had descended. Thankfully it was still in one piece, and by the time Keri got there Andreas had figured out the controls to make it rise. Cassandra jumped on at the same time as Keri did.

As they ascended they watched as the Butcher slowly rose to its feet in a manner no human ever could. It used none of its upper limbs, but sheer power in its metallic knee-joints lifted it straight up to face directly at his would-be controller. It took a step forward, and Kilgore fled with a scream, sprinting onto and struggling to climb a half-destroyed set of stairs that the excavator had torn to pieces.

The scene disappeared into the dark, Keri only now realising how many of the lights had been torn from the walls in the mad attacks of the excavator.

They waited in silence and gloom as the elevator hummed upwards and, somewhere far below, cries of fear and terror were followed by heavy, inhuman footsteps.

Keri's body was almost back to normal. She looked around at the others.

"As soon as this elevator stops, we run and keep running until we've got the hell out of this place," she said. "How's Anisa?"

Anisa was half-hanging from Andreas' shoulders, unkempt and matted hair hanging over a bloodied face. She managed to lift her face long enough to look directly at Keri as she said,

"I can make it."

"But we should go slow," said Andreas. "Anisa's badly hurt, and that thing seems to be going for Kilgore, not us."

"Uh, no..." said Cassandra, voice hesitant as she saw what Keri was holding in her hands. "I think we better run, like Keri says."

"What? Why..?"

Andreas' words trailed off as he saw what Keri was holding in her hands.

"I took it off him when he was looking at the Butcher. He hasn't noticed yet, but..."

The data-sphere lay in the palm of her hand.

They ran as the elevator came to a halt, and a scream of rage chased them up from the darkness.

[1] The word had lost most of its religious connotation generations ago, but 'thank an arbitrary series of developments and coincidences' just didn't have the same ring.