I stepped back from the window and watched as it began to pound on the door.

  “This bodes poorly...” I muttered.

  “We should get to the tower.”

  We looked around for clues.

  Unfortunately the first thing we saw was blood streaking the ground.

  “THAT bodes poorly.” I, once more, muttered.

  “I kind of wish we had weapons.” Carolina added.

  I paused and thought, hoping maybe my suit would pop up with 'deploy weapons system' since it had been so helpful in the past.

  Unfortunately no such luck.

  “I guess grab something heavy just in case.”

  We looked around, but all the chairs, set up in long rows in front of a kiosk beside the door we were next to appeared to be all welded together, and there didn't appear to be much in the way of debris.

  “Or... not...”

  I shrugged and started walking, ignoring the pounding on the glass from behind us. It was quite apparent by this point that the glass was either reinforced or the bot was quite weak, though judging from the blood probably not weak enough, so I figured on some kind of space age bullet proof glass.

  We stepped out into the space port proper, again, much like airports of my old world, and looked back and forth, attempting to find a way to lead us to the tower.

  There were signs all over the place, unfortunately in a language I couldn't read, but my HUD helpfully popped up translations for most of them as I walked around.

  The ones that weren't covered in blood that is.

  “The blood must mean some of those robots went berserk in here, doesn't it?” Carolina asked.

  “There's a lot of things it could be. Panicked mob, someone in said mob with a gun, or... crazy robot. No bodies though, that's strange.” I replied.

  She blinked.

  “Now that you mention it yeah. The bot outside was spouting canned responses and straight up trying to come in after us, but it wasn't trying to be clever. Hiding the bodies would be something clever and high functioning and the bot don't seem to be there.”

  “Having fought the virus itself I can say it's sophisticated, but I doubt it can give everything it's infected specific instructions to do things like hide bodies. I bet it just found the most dangerous thing a robot or whatever it had infected could do at any given time, told it to do that in repeat and removed all it's safeties.”

  Carolina paused.

  “You know, that's probably it. Most robots, at least the ones that get shipped around, come with some pretty strict software locks on what they can do to humans. Most cannot even touch humans unless it is to provide medical attention or extract them from a dangerous situation. I bet it told bots like that that all human's are in danger, and removed all safeties on it's grip strength and speed when leading a human somewhere...”

  “That makes sense, when I kill the virus we'll see if you were right.”

  A flash of light caught my eye. A kiosk off to the right selling what appeared to be snacks, drinks, and some kind of eyewear caught my eye, and I saw the flash again.

  I pointed. “Somethings up over there.”

  Carolina nodded, and followed as I crept over to it.

  I leaned over the counter of the kiosk to find the source of the of the flashing.

  Inside the kiosk was a dead body blood leaking down her chin. Her chest was... pulped.

  It was pulped because a one armed and one legged robot, it's empty limb socket sparking, was currently leaning up against the side of the kiosk, bracing itself, and giving the body CPR.

  CPR that had long since cracked all the woman's bones and punched through to the ground beneath.

  I backed away slowly, grabbing Carolina's hand before she could look over, and slowly shook my head no to her, as we backed away together.

  As I turned to leave my boot CRUNCHED into a packet that had fallen from the kiosk, and suddenly a voice form inside the kiosk blared out.

  “DO NOT PANIC! YOU REQUIRE MEDICAL ATTENTION! I AM HERE TO HELP! MEDICAL PERSONNEL WILL ARRIVE MOMENTARILY!”

  In the robot's defense, the tone of the voice actually sounded calming if it wasn't currently being blasted louder than a storm siren.

  We broke out running as the one armed, one limbed robot began clawing it's way up and out of the kiosk. It was disturbingly fast, like a spider that had lost all but two limbs and could still chase you across the house.

  “Fuckin run!” I shouted and pulled Carolina into a sprint.

  The two of us tore down the airport, heading in what I thought was the direction of the tower I had spotted on part of the building form outside.

  Thankfully the spidering robot behind us got one of it's limbs caught up on debris and had flipped itself, giving us time to expand our lead.

  “We need to find somewhere to hide, we're faster than it but it's not going to tire out.” Carolina said, overtaking me in our sprint. I was trying but with my bodies liabilities I was relying mostly on the suit to keep me upright, and it had a set maximum speed. I was doing the equivilant of a fast jog right now.

  I queried my hud for any way to increase speed and was met with a warning.

  WARNING: OVERRIDING SAFETIES MAY RESULT IN PERMANENT DAMAGE TO SUIT MOTORS AND/OR OCCUPANT! OVERRIDE Y/N?

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  I hit Y and surged forward, my suit easily catching up with Carolina, who had since gone ahead and was now furiously trying to open a door.

  I looked behind us and saw the robot had since righted itself and was spidering towards us on two legs.

  “Is it locked?”

  “I don't think so, the pad says unlocked, and the door opens a little, but I can't...” she interrupted herself by slamming her shoulder into the door.

  “Someone must have barricaded it from the other side. HEY! THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT HERE!?”

  I heard people speaking on the other side, muffled.

  “Let us in! The robot's have gone mad!”

  I heard movement from behind the door, the sound of objects being moved around.

  We kept pushing on the door, hoping to move it enough to get int, finally, after far too long, the door moved enough that Carolina could squeeze through. I pushed her towards the gap.

  Then I felt something clamp around my ankle.

  “Brayden!” Carolina shouted, and I fell to the floor.

  The robot had caught up with us and had pulled my leg out from under me.

  “THIS AREA IS DANGEROUS! STAY LOW TO THE GROUND AND AWAY FROM WINDOWS AND OTHER BREAKABLE OBJECTS! I AM HERE TO HELP”

  The robot blared from it's speakers as I was hurled by my ankle away from the door. I definitely heard a snap and the pain of the broken bone made me let out an involuntary scream before the adrenaline coursing through my body overrode the pain.

  In the moment the pain had stunned me the two limbed robot had scrambled over to me and had gotten on top of me. It grasped for my head, but my helmet was in the way.

  “NO CARDIOPULMONARY SIGNS DETECTED, BEGINING CPR, PLEASE STAND BACK AND ALLOW MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS ROOM TO DO THEIR WORK.” The robots speaker's shrieked out.

  It set up beside me and placed it's hand against my chest, presumably to do to me what it had done to the corpse we had previously spotted.

  I flailed at it,I grabbed it's arm and I could hear the servo's in my suit whirring against the robot's motor's.

  Thinking fast I grabbed the exposed motor on it's arm and ripped away the covering, revealing the casing around it and and the leads leading into the arm.

  I used my hud to tell my suit to extend all tools, and suddenly the end of my wrist was bristling with a multi-tools worth of screwdrivers, files, at least one plasma cutter, a spike, and a knife.

  Uncaring what tool I used, I held the bot's arm in place with one hand(well, 'held in place' is a misnomer, once I moved my other hand it slowly began approaching my chest.) and jammed the tools into the motor, trying to get one of them up inside to the components inside, or to sever it's link with the rest of the limb. I triggered the plasma cutter for good measure.

  The bot's hand was almost to my chest when I felt something give, the motor on it's arm sparked and lit on fire, and the limb collapsed like a wet noodle.

  The bot landed on top of me, and started moving like a snake.

  I held it's head in place with an arm, and that's when I saw it, a tiny little data port similar to the one on the keypad.

  I didn't waste any time, extending my little probe and jamming it into the robot's port.

  My hud rapidly populated with warning of viral attacks, and I immediately slipped into what I was thinking of my 'virtual combat mode' My suit connecting to my neck port and dropping into full synch and a higher reference frame.

  This time I knew what I was doing, and instead of turning on all of my anti-virus countermeasures at once, I probed, seeing what was most effective, watching my total resource usage as I went.

  The robot was significantly more sophisticated than the keypad, and so it was slow going, from my point of view anyway. It was strange, I knew I was doing things like enabling brute force attacks, throwing buffer overflow attempts at it, but it was like I was seeing a battlefield, like my implants were folding the individual cyber attacks into a more understandable medium for me to follow.

  I was able to break through the first layer of encryption, giving me a user account and minimal privileges, which let me get more of a feel for the design of the robot's internal architecture.

  It was, to put it mildly, a mess. The virus, presumably, had shredded loads of it's files and it was sending out error codes onto a network requesting emergency maintenance. This SHOULD have caused it to shut down and cease operating due to being a danger to everyone around it, but THOSE program files had also been in fact shredded.

  It did look like the virus was actively locked in a battle with some of the robot's core programming, bits that it hadn't been able to get to and alter, locked away behind... Huh... there didn't seem to be an access for it.

  I attempted to get myself admin access, but that was mostly a no-go, till I looked at the code that was still fighting the virus.

  It was an emergency shut-down code, in case the robot finds itself a danger to other living beings(with a priority given to humans) the bot was to shut down... It was a sliding scale of 'danger to humans' but the robot had passed that point a while ago. The virus was attempting to take that over and change the scale, but it seemed said scale was very difficult to alter, and then it tried to simply kill the whole program, but that hadn't worked either.

  I extended a link to the bit of code trying to shut down the robot, and felt myself flooded with shutdown codes and a whole bunch of anti-malware and delete commands.

  It actually deleted some of my own defenses and shut down some of my attacks before I pulled them back from backup. It bounced off my brain as with all the other malware attacks had, rendering me safe, but it did give me a thought.

  The shutdown codes that were being piped at me from the robot's holdout program were very high level, I wasn't an admin, but these were sent with admin privileges. I started using them to shut down all the resources the virus was using to make it's malware attacks, all the different storage spaces and runtimes it had infested, and keep itself from being shutdown , and as I watched the virus began losing against the holdout.

  It was actually very quick when it happened. One second the virus was defending itself against the robot's holdout code, preventing any of it from leaking out and shutting down the robot, the next, it was gone, and the robot blinked off, falling dead on top of me.

  I disengaged synchronization and just lay there for a moment, my ankle hurt,, and the robot was heavy on top of me.

  “Lil help?” I called out. I heard voices in the direction of the door, hushed but heated, and then the sound of something heavy scraping along the floor with a screech, and then feet pattering towards me.