Okay, thanks to Carnivac’s reconnaissance I figured that I had about twelve hours or so until I would need to meet the Prince; potentially on the battlefield. Ratchet had gotten Ram’s new arms installed and had her torso open; busily replacing parts while another set of arms worked on dismantling her head. Rom had finished building and installing the new Blink Cannon into the CloudBurst armor, and I was working on getting the plasma containment functions of the PyroVibe hammer working properly.

I checked my health and I was up to 100/150, hopefully the rest would regenerate in time. I was just about to try generating some plasma to test the containment field when it dawned on me that I probably shouldn’t do that indoors, unless I was cool with burning down the workshop; which I wasn’t. I put all of the various unassembled parts of the hammer into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it out the shop and to The Range.

As I trundled the load around the building, I saw Elita sitting on the barrel in the middle of The Range. She had her knees pulled up to her chest and was watching the stars.

“Hey stranger,” I said as smoothly as I could.

“Prime,” she responded without looking at me. “I think something’s wrong with me.”

“How so?” I asked, putting my wheelbarrow down and getting the parts ready for testing.

“I have this... desire. This lust... to kill things. I can’t shake it. I keep hunting different things— bigger things— and the feeling goes away a little, but comes back stronger. I think I’m going mad.”

“Want me to take a look at what I can?” I set down the hammer parts and gave her my full attention.

“Please? I’m scared. I don’t like this,” she said, turning to finally look at me.

“[Developer Environment].”

Like before, I connected to Elita’s code base and started inspecting her memory core. When I compared the degradation to the snapshot that I’d stored, it looked like it was getting worse— and it had only been a couple of days. This time, I started looking at other areas of interest other than her memory core, and found her soul patch. Okay, look, I didn’t name it the soul patch, that’s what the code module is called in the code base. It acts like an API to connect the ethereal soul to the hardware.

Via the patch, I was able to take a rudimentary look at the connection to the soul. In my diagnostic tools, I had something like a bandwidth indicator where you could determine the “upload/download” speeds. From there, I sent a diagnostic ping and awaited a response. The response back took a lot longer than I would have expected, but then I didn’t have anything to gauge it by since every other Automata I’ve worked on, save Ravage, was already bonded to their soul core and I had no reason to inspect it.

The diagnostic return gave me a glimpse at the status of the connected soul, and this one was in tatters. Elita’s actual soul had been degrading, and for a long time, I’d guess. I ran a spectrum diffCheck against the current state of her memory core and it nearly lined up.

“Elita... I don’t know how to say this... It’s your soul. Your soul has been degrading for some time and with it, your memory,” I said somberly.

Elita nodded and looked back up at the sky. “I expected as much.”

“What, really?”

Again, she nodded. “Do you know much about ghosts? The undead?”

I shook my head.

“They say that when someone dies, if they don’t pass on, then their soul lingers in this world. For whatever reason, the person has decided not to leave. But they say that a soul can’t survive for long outside of a living body and starts to rot.”

“A soul is like leftover food?”

She shrugged. “I guess? Or maybe it’s like the food is fine when it’s in the oven. Then when you take it out you have some time before it starts to go bad.”

“Then what happens? When a soul rots, or goes bad?”

“Ghosts that have been around long enough turn into phantoms or if they can inhabit a dead body, then a zombie. Older still, and they might become a ghoul or a litch.”

“Okay. What’s that have to do with you?”

“They all have a compulsion for living, fresh souls. They seek out and kill the living in an attempt to fix themselves.”

“So you’re an undead?” I asked, sceptical.

She shrugged.

I was suddenly reminded of what Najii had told me about supplying Carnivac’s wolf fur with mana, and how it would only extend the life of the skin and fur for a couple of months at best. I took another look at the snapshot of her memory core degradation. Now that I had a vague idea of what might be happening, I was seeing a pattern.

“So this is just a theory...” I said, tapping my chin.

“Go on,” she encouraged.

“I think... Let’s use the food analogy again.”

“Okay...”

“Let’s say that you have food that you’ve finished cooking, but you know it will go bad if you leave it out on the counter.”

“Right...”

“How would you make that food last a bit longer?”

“Put it in a chill chest?”

“Right. But the chill chest won’t keep it fresh forever. It’ll still go bad, just not as quickly. Now is there a way to keep it longer still?”

“You’d freeze it, I guess. It would keep longer that way, but you’d have to thaw it out before you could use it again... but sometimes ice magic might damage the food for when you thaw it again.”

“Right. So hear me out. I think that your soul, or any soul rather, is like food. It’s been taken out of the oven and the cook wants to keep it fresh for longer. So they put your soul into an Automata body, which keeps things going with a constant stream of mana.”

“Okay, I get that so far...”

“Now to make the soul last even longer, you need to freeze it.”

“How do you freeze a soul?”

“You lock away all the memories, I think. As you collect more memories, they are transferred to your soul... which I think is what ages it, so to speak. Locking them away might freeze the process a bit... Maybe?” I was spit-balling, but the data seemed to line up.

“I see. And I’ve been frozen and thawed over and over again. So many times that I don’t even know what I was before my conversion. So, what’s going to happen to me?” She looked worried, and timid, and completely unlike the badass warrior I’d come to know.

“I... I don’t know... Sweet, merciful Unicron, Destroyer of Worlds, what have I done? By unlocking your memories, I’ve completely thawed you and time is rapidly catching up to you... and all the other Automata that I’ve unlocked... is this their fate?”

“Maybe. Though, you’ve given us all the choice. It was our own choice to unlock our memories,” she said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “No one is meant to live forever. Not even Automata. I guess if you think about it, we’re already living beyond what we should be.”

“I might be able to add something to [Defender.exe] that will help you know how far along the soul degradation is... I don’t... know what sort of threshold is too much though...”

“That would be useful. Then I can, again, make my own choice about what happens. But Prime, I can see where it’s leading and I don’t like it. When the time comes... Promise me, that you’ll take me out, if it comes to that.”

I nodded, weakly. She stood behind me and leaned over, putting her arms around my shoulders and leaned her head close to mine.

“You know,” she said, conversationally, “when you connected to my soul I got a new little part of a memory.”

“Oh?”

“Mmm,” she nodded. “A name. My name, I think. Maria.”

“Maria... Should I start calling you that?” I asked, hanging my hands on her forearms.

“No, I don’t know who that person is. I’m Elita the First; your best friend.”

“Truth.”

“You’ll have to add a disclaimer to the dialogue prompt, I suppose... WARNING: Unlocking past memory will degrade your soul and lead to eventual homicidal madness.”

“You’re so weird,” I chuckled.

“I know,” she said, giving me a wink.