Catalyst 2.0: Purity (pt3)

>You rested your scalp against the hallway wall.
“Just a few words.  That's all it'll need.”
>You tried to sell so many things to yourself, amidst the din of thought that would not clear.  Those pseudo ears offered you little in the way of favor, clarifying your voice in a way that made what had first been a heartfelt comfort to yourself into a filtered, perfect input.
>Why did it sound so oiled and sharp?  Were there ways to shut those sensations off?  You could shut those down, right?
>It was all code.  You didn't know the syntax, but perhaps if you had, you could have removed the emotion that had brought you such pause.  It was probably a subroutine.  Several at once, maybe.
“I didn't mean it like that.”
>You said it to yourself again, as if reciting to the daydreamed conference members could have presented any better outcome.
>You didn't understand why you had been depended upon as important.  You recognized what you were, what that could mean.  Why it mattered so deeply to all those other ponies, however...
>And the way they'd *looked* at you.
>You were just one creature.  Pony or no, you were only yourself.  That lone, familiar individual.
>Yet there they all were.  Even Twilight.  For them, you needed to be labeled.  Monitored.  Classified.
>That was where the resentment had grown tumorous, you realized.
>You tried to slam a hoof against the wall, yet it only came out as an anemic clap against the armoring resin.  The whole place had that hollow, soulless padding.  What was worse, with barely a coherent intent, it's chemical formula came up within your eyes.  No matter how tightly you shut your lids it would not leave.  Even the stars and cloudy illusions that formed as you ground your foreleg's ankle joint into your eye were quickly scrubbed, leaving you with a perfect vision of letters and hexagonal diagrams you did not understand.
>Hell, had you ever understood half the things you could even do?
>You finally fell back to the floor, watching one of the lights in the ceiling.  You ignored the sense of embarrassment as another one of the employees bounced by.  The scientist paused, went to say something of comfort to you. The words caught in her throat as you watched an AR screen pop up in the film over her eyes, and could make out a picture.  It was yours, and so it seemed, had with it a red flag beneath your photo for “lesser ponies” to be wary of.
>She vanished around the corner, without the aid your mind was screaming for.
>Right.  Fuck you too.
>With that, you ambled down the hall in a self-centered daze.  What had just happened was probably for the better, anyway.  It was you that needed to organize thoughts.  Not them.  They already had their conviction on what you were.
>You pinged the controls.  The fluid of extended thought, unintentionally perfected, was like a quick, fuzzy, and intelligent ooze under your control.  The node had felt like a tight, stiff metal box when you'd entered it, it's tiny memory banks cramped, it's actions simple and focused.
>Huh.  That was an idea.  Could you install yourself on an appliance?  A toaster could be kind of neat.  Coffee maker maybe.  That would give you a more reasonable, easier goal each day.
>Joking at your own expense with brand names about your own brand of cleaning bots helped pass the time of the elevator ride.  Perhaps thinking too hard about it was the wrong thing to do.  You didn't have the option of avoiding it, however.  After all, your body was beginning to feel rubbery with the need for sleep, and there was only one place you knew where to get that in Twilight Firmware's tower.
>The doors opened to the familiar penthouse hall.  The guards watched you pass, the glitter of an automated identity ping popping up in their visors much like it had for that nameless mare minutes before.  You could respect it then, with the attitudes their profession tempered.
>How could you explain your reply to the Princess to Sweet Heart?  She'd been without mommy or daddy for the better part of a day, knowing only something had happened through Pinkie Pie's warnings.  She was more frankly intelligent than any other child you could remember- you couldn't hope to lie, not that you had ever been good at that with any of the other ponies here.
>Telling her mommy's legs were twisted until snapping, her body bruised, her elegant face cracked beneath the hoof of a nameless brute...  The thought she might listen in on your memory while you rested, witnessing and experiencing it for herself, made you sick.  The thought she had already tampered with local nodes to inspect mommy's prognosis in the medical records made it worse.
>Rarity would never forgive you for that.  If she ever got past what you'd done to Twilight in that conference room anyway.
>You heard talking when the elevator doors opened.  Your breath caught, a lump in your throat swelled to choke you.  There was a beep from inside, the floaty chime of a doorbell, sounding off as the sensors picked you up.
>The voice had to be your imagination.  Reality would never be that cruel, even to you.  You waited, as you heard a shuffle approach the automated penthouse door.
>Her bedraggled, bed-flattened mane shook into knotted place.  Her sapphire eyes rested on you from behind thin lids, without the swell of injury you'd seen only perhaps hours before. The milky color of her hide drifted into a blue silk bathrobe, the front sleeves stained with tears.
>When Rarity saw you, her breath trembled.  She approached, hissing through teeth as pain funneled her into a hobble.  Horrified, you were locked in place as she drifted toward you like a hungry wraith.
>She said nothing.  She put her hooves beneath either side of your face, and looked up into your widening eyes.  As part of the bathrobe fell, the embrace turned sour.  She was not wearing any variant of her muscle suit.  You saw a nearly black bruise at the joints of those faux back legs, the skin smooth, shiny, and filled with murky boils that folded over themselves before melting away.
>You looked down toward it in shock.  All her wounds were nearly healed, when before, she'd barely managed to gather the strength for the sterile text messages.  There was only one thing you knew that could do that.  Your voice couldn't pass the tone of a diseased gurgle.
“Panacea?”
>She forced your view back up to her eyes, which were quickly filling with water at their already puffy rims.  Didn't she get it?  Hadn't she been aware of just what that shit had done?  What it represented now, especially to all those other p0nies?
>Rarity threw herself against you, and surprised you.  She still had such strength.  Enough to suffocate any protest, any words you could have ever cobbled together into a sentence.  The thought crossed your mind- though your explanation to her would be sudden, you didn't have to face what was coming.  You could shunt any where, into any thing, and vanish in an instant.  God, being a toaster would never feel so comforting.
>Instead, you stood there with her.  You stammered out apologies, holding her aloft to ease her attempts at an embrace.  She wouldn't hear any of it, seeming satisfied with only your presence and voice, no matter how you carried yourself or what you said.
>In rolling a cheek against her flash-healed jaw, the burnt taste of an idea rolled across your lips.  You were technology.  Code, compressed and glittering across some nanoscopic framework, fitted into a fake and utterly replaceable body.
>To her, though, all that mattered was one thing.  You, as you were, existed right there in front of her.  Real, and pure, while she held you as tightly as her weakened body could allow.  Goddamnit, Rarity.
>There came a ping.
>Red and bright, the familiar flash of a lockdown order was blinking in your AR.  That urge rose again inside you, the need to tend to it clawing from inside your chest.  Not now, you thought.  Who, or what, was coming again to the tower?  You went to open a link, and as you watched the firewalls twist and lock into place to secure the connection, your focus went past the rolling GUI's.
>It wasn't just you that had your ideas, either.  Rarity clutched at your cheeks, as the same red strobe blinked in her widening sapphire eyes.  She shook her head, just once, before the display melted into being.
>Moniker: Make this quick, I'm juggling seven other channels.  What do you need?
>That... That was a good question.
>You wanted to ask her for access to the chassis again.  You wanted to be right there in the thick of it, taking the brunt of absolutely everything that you could.  It was was always about you anyway, and maybe actually getting killed could remedy it.  But, was that ever what you needed to do?
>Was that the problem in the first place?
>Anonymous3: I need you to warn the cops, get me a gun, and seal off the penthouse floor.  I'm not going anywhere this time.  Above anything else, Twilight, I need you to stay out of whatever is happening.  I don't want this coming back to Rarity.
>Moniker: The gun I can do, and the penthouse is automated.  I'm not sure I have the capacity for that last part.
>Anonymous3: Why the hell not?
>Moniker: Gilda is chasing the attacker, and she's wearing the company colors.
>Anonymous3: Didn't you install failsafes in her chip? Can't you force a recall?
>Moniker: No.  It was paramount that she trusted me.  We needed her as much as we needed you.  As much as I want to, I don't think anything can be done until she's finished whatever rampage she's on.
>Rarity shook her head at you again.  Apparently, you hadn't kept your poker face.  She mouthed out words.  “Please, don't leave again.”
>You close your eyes.  Against every hungry, bloody urge to do what you could, you lower your head to nose at her.
>Doing nothing was proving to be the most difficult thing you could think of.
–
>The ground above, the moon below, Gilda gave a frustrated swipe toward the laughing cyan face.  Too distant, the smile flung backwards as Rainbow's body began an inverted plummet.  The gryphon could keep up, just enough, to get in lunges.
>With Rainbow, though, a simple and sudden attack was never enough.  Trying to hit her was like trying to chase wind.  It was, too, how Gilda had learned to never have her guard really down.  That was a saving grace, as Rainbow's fall was cut short.
>The blue pegasus wings flaring open, the gryphon only caught the air-brake as she slung through the immaterial glare of a holographic billboard.  The image left a silhouette, and Gilda knew just enough to curve her path.  Rainbow bucked backwards where Gilda would have been had she continued straight, the gryphon's own momentum pummeling her into those prepared hooves.  Their backs passed one another, and feathers of blue and white fluttered off one another as they clipped each others wings.
>Even through the rushing air, Gilda could hear her laughing.  The mare wasn't even winded yet.  She was also behind Gilda then, happy to take up a spot chasing her.
>Gilda cursed, and tucked her wings in for a burst of falling speed.  She couldn't spare the moment to look back, with that monster behind her.  The thought that her old friend may have had an afterburner pack frightened her, but she thought to herself:
>”She might catch me, but she as hell won't stop me.”
>Flechette's flew around her, super-heated and sizzling.  Windows were a blur behind the streaks of passing light from holograms.  Unable- or perhaps simply unwilling- to dodge floating aerial traffic bouy, she crossed her coat-armored forelegs in front of herself.  It smashed apart in a sparkle of searing circuitry and dented metal.
>Gilda unfurled her claws, taking a note from Rainbow's recent trap.  She opened her wings again, lifting her claws as she slowed, and caught only a glimpse.  She felt a set of flechettes burrow into the coat, heat draining into ablative plates below the cloth, and swiped as Rainbow passed.
>There was a scream that was mixed between vinyl and nails upon a chalkboard.  Blue sparks sputtered from what Gilda caught.  They both had to recover moments later- the ground was not one to play favorites.
>They landed almost simultaneously, meters apart.  Gilda compressed her body to absorb the impact, bouncing her belly off the transport pod highway.  As she stood, the clang of metal and a public alarm klaxon mingled.
>Rainbow slammed her hooves into the ground.  Though she was light, what she was wearing gave her a far better tolerance against the cruelty of physics.  Gilda watched as the myriad of plating, micro-servos, and custom made flesh rippled beneath Rainbow's coat.  Her impact had dislodged the prefabricated highway plate, tilting it, and the sound from her arrival was so loud it felt like a shockwave.
>Rainbow stood, and tossed her hair back.  She turned, her stance arrogant, yet remaining elegantly practiced.  She was still smiling.
>”I remember this.” she told Gilda.  The voice she was using was hers, modulated to soften those high-pitched cracks she always had.  It made her sound all the sweeter.  “All that sparring.  All the water marbles we'd plink off each other.” She grinned, her magenta eyes glowing with synthetic light.  “Amazing how far we've come, isn't it? Now we can use live ammo and a goddamn city instead of a warehouse and sorry excuses for paintballs.”
>”What are you here for?” Gilda crowed back.  She couldn't stop the feline piece of her, her throat rumbling like the growl of an idling engine block.
>Rainbow grinned.  One of the guns that had unsheathed swiveled on the mount, and fired a quick burst.  Gilda didn't turn, but heard the smash of a pedestrian crossing pole smash into the ground, cut from it's supports by gunfire.  “You know me.” Rainbow chuckled.  She raised a hoof. “Always the center of attention.”  Gilda squinted at her.  Then, she began to peer.
>Civilian p0nies had already gathered around them on the sidewalks.  Unarmed pegasi fluttered in the air.  Earth ponies glittered in designer clothing, and unicorn eyes were settled upon them through the din of AR windows in their eyes.  Faces watched from the sides, through windows, and from behind anything they could hide behind.  Whispers and the steady, beating drone of a public evacuation alarm were all that was left for those tense moments.
>”I had really, really hoped our little thing with the bike would have gotten more notice.  Twilight always was just a little too good at shelving things, though, huh?”
>Gilda inhaled sharply.
>”Especially things that shouldn't be put into some stuffy library or hard drive.  I mean, come on.  This is US we're talking about!  You and me!” She put a hoof to her chest.  “The ones that made history.” She lowered her head, and the guns trained on Gilda.  “Just like Anonymous did.” She laughed once more.  “We all deserve more respect than that.  Right?”
>Gilda's AR calculated firing lanes, the cones spilling from the tips of Rainbow's SMG's.  The light did not cast over her, like she had expected, but instead went to either side.  The mare perforated a pair of lines around the gryphon, while her only reaction was to remain still.
>”Right?!”
>The whine of police sirens began to clamor toward them.  Gilda narrowed her eyes.  “Not if this is how you act.”
>”Oh, sure.  Coming from you, that means a hell of a lot.”
>Gilda smoldered, the feathers on her neck ruffling outward.  She cast it off in a smile back toward Rainbow, trying to let it melt away.  Combat taunts- it was the only way Rainbow ever had been subtle, if such a term could be used for her.  “Please.  Just look at yourself.”
>”Trust me, Gilda.  I have been.”  One blue wing unfolded, then curled to brush the tip along her curve.  She extended her legs as if on display, a fluttery bow kept unceremonious from her consistent, cautious gaze.  “I got to watch myself on all the recordings from the Ebon Pegasi spire.  It was like a bad fucking alcohol blackout, put on a high def phone camera.” Both wings extended, she stood tall.  “But if there was one thing I learned from old friends, it's honesty.  I gotta say.  How I was, and with what's been done to me now...  I'm even more awesome than before.”
>”Only this time you're crazy, too.  All of it is going to your head.”
>”Is it?  Or is it that being on an entirely different level is just that goddamn scary, even when you are too?” She tilted her head to regard the arriving police with a snort.  Gilda saw her wings tense ever so slightly, and huddled up for what she knew was coming.  “We're not done yet, G.  Come on.”  When she lifted off, the force that erupted send out a wave of air.  It kicked loose bottles from the ground, and knocked p0nies from their hooves.
>The instant she knew it had passed, Gilda took to the sky herself.  The eyes of pigs and p0nies be damned, she was going to stop that bitch if it was the last thing she did.  P0nies with minds like that deserved to stay buried.
>They wove between buildings, lilting and swaying to graze corners and walls.  They continued to climb as Gilda shuffled the pistol away, impacting a pane of reinforced glass with her legs.  She pushed off an upwards, the blue and red gleam of chase lights not far behind.  She looked back only once- a trio of armed stallions was giving chase, without wings.  They wore a harness to which were attached small rings, the inner radius glowing- VTOL packs.
>When had the cops gotten any of those? Gilda thought.
>The static cry of volume-enhanced warnings jingled off the alloy and glass jungle.  Their words were meaningless.  Their presence, however, had Gilda distracted.
>Rainbow made an impossible turn into another city block.  Gilda tightened up and let herself fall- she would need the vertical distance, if Rainbow was trying her trick again.  To her surprise, the mare was.
>It was not meant for Gilda, however.
>As the officers rounded the corner in pursuit, Rainbow deftly hooked a foreleg around one of the passing VTOL rings.  She simply kept her grip as she altered the stallion's path, smashing him through the window and tearing free the ring.  She held it fast as the flying p0nies ambled back around, using it as a bludgeon against another one of the officers “wings.”  He bobbed as he started to fall, slowly, the dented ring flickering in and out of life.  Gilda's safety zone turned bitter, as she was forced to watch rainbow bounce the ring off the last officer's blue and white helmet.
>Rainbow caught him, and smashed the harness.  “This!” She cried out as Gilda rose to meet her.  She dangled the hapless officer, swinging him to and fro.  “This is just what I'm talking about!”
>Gilda sneered.  “Same here, Big Blue.” She said, reverting to that old nickname as Rainbow had with the gryphon.  “Are you even seeing what you're doing?”
>”You are so thick headed.”  Rainbow said.  She swung the pony up, holding him by the still attached harness as she flapped her wings.  “Look at this.  He's an earth pony.  Flying.  He's on a different level now- you think that doesn't scare some p0nies?”
>Gilda was stalled in her approach.  She peered at the struggling stallion.  She didn't care much for him- he was only in the way, but she couldn't bring herself to try and go through him, despite the opportunity.
>”Flying earth p0nies.  Pegasi with guns that shoot flame, like any combat spell caster can.  Any p0ny can open or close doors with a thought, just like unicorn telekenetics.”  Rainbow flapped over to the window she'd broken with the stallion's partner, and threw him inside near his friend.  The VTOL set up twisted, trapping him and his guns in a knot.
>”Every p0ny, regardless of gender, or species, or even birth defects- they can do anything another can with the tech now.  Even outrun death.  You think that wouldn't scare the matriarchy?  Terrify the ones that had their entire lives depend on magical ability?”
>Rainbow bounced in place as she saw the realization dawn in Gilda's face.  “Gryphon's, p0nies, changelings.”  She was mad with elation, and Gilda hissed back toward her with an open beak. “We're all on the same level, G.  The only thing that separates us is how we act.  How we do.”
>”Is that it? You did all this to tell me you haven't fucking changed?”
>Rainbow dove.  The two caught one another, spinning out as the impact pushed them end over end.  The world spun, and Gilda held fast against Rainbow's back leg.  She opened her free claw, jabbing and tearing at the mare's knee.  The razor-sharp talons tore through cloth, finding only armored plating to gouge.
>Rainbow recovered first, whipping her leg to sling Gilda off the nearest glass wall.  The gryphon bounced and fell, finding the softness of earth as she came to a very sudden and painful stop.  The only reason bones had not broken had been by virtue of whatever layer of impact gel had been injected into the coat.
>Gilda looked up to see those armored hooves in front of her.  “You know what the scariest part is?” Rainbow asked.  “Their reaction to all of it.  They're scared, but of ALL of it.”  Sirens, once again, started to grow louder.  “We're all being elevated to the level of gods, and they're scared to be that way.  Scared of the p0nies that got to that finish line first.  You.  Me.  And most especially HIM.”
>Gilda stood.  She was taller than Rainbow, by several inches, even in that upgraded chassis.  “Can you blame them? Look at how you acted.  Look at what happened with Chrysalis.  Look at what you did!”  Gilda lurched backwards from the buck, a web of cracks blooming within the glass she kissed.  It crumpled, latched together from some sort of thin plastic safety layer, and she threw it off like a crackling blanket.  It hadn't hurt as much as she thought it should have.
>”I did!  And not a single p0ny stopped to even ask- “She was under changeling control right?  Doesn't that mean she wasn't herself?  Doesn't that mean we could have saved her?  Does that mean that she wouldn't have tried to kill some of her best friends?””  Her head lowered, she dug a divot out of the cosmetic lawn with swiped forehoof.  “No, they just tried to fucking delete me because they hadn't caught up to me, and wouldn't know what to do if they could.”
>Gilda drew her PS-17, and fired.  The shot whined off into the distance, slapped aside by the emitters hidden in the coat.  “They did what they had to, with what they saw.  Just like I've been trying not to.”
>Rainbow shook her head.  “That's just what I'm getting at, G.  Even with every bit of cyber-garbage in you and on you, you're still you.” She pointed at the gun.  “Like how you kept that.  Thirtieth birthday present, right?  Smuggled straight from the supply drop on the alpha hive outskirt.”
>Gilda fired again, another ricochet off the shield.  The sight of the shield flickered, the battery weakening.  “You bet your flank it is.  Saved my life more times than I can count.”
>”I know, I know.  How couldn't I, if I wasn't who I am?”  She let out a mournful chortle.  “Riddle me this, G.  I know about that gun.  I know just how to beat your ass in every fight we've ever been in, fly harder and faster than you could. And even though I'm nothing more than a program now-”
>Gilda fired another round, the shield offering up a final protest before the gryphon watched the node burst in a shower of tiny white electrical ropes.  They licked along Rainbow's coat and vanished, the mare not even bothering to blink.
>”-and I know you won't kill me with the last gift I ever gave you.”  She tilted her head, and let out a shivering sigh.  “With all the purity of what those things meant to the both of us- who am I?”
>Gilda felt her grip on the weapon tightening.  As they were awash in blue and red lights, a swarm approached from either side of the horizontal street.  Spotlights lit them, and Gilda felt her her pupils squeeze shut beneath the glare.  “If we're all on the same level thanks to the tech, I can't say.” She replied.  “Anypony could get the math from the old tapes- learn how to fly like Rainbow.  If there's more to you than recorded memory in some code snippet though, I got an idea.”  She swallowed hard.  “Why don't we ask Scootaloo?”
>Rainbow let out a silent gasp.  Her jaw dropped, and her flank thumped to the ground.  She stared ahead toward the gryphon.  Even her weapons drooped, almost in synch with her ears.  “That was a low blow, Gilda.  Even for you.”
>Gilda, keeping the weapon trained, didn't pull the trigger that final time.  She instead smiled.  The mare's response had been all she'd needed to consider the chambered bullet a squalid and forsaken thing.  “Come on, Rainbow.  Is there any other way I was ever able to bring you down from on high?”
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