The small A.I. jar occupying Bastilen's time had far stabilized since the work he had performed on it. He had, however, disconnected the wiring to the holographic projector. The formerly rampant A.I. system had begun to bend back towards control, and stopped creating false data in response to his attempts to fix the personality issues. Coding on this magnitude, though, was stressful if one couldn't find the errors. Luckily, most of the major things were obvious, but minor bits that could trip the system up and cause a crash were minute one-character errors. Searching through this kind of thing was his specialty.
Blits blits, blits blits!
His DataJockey began to signal a new message was avaiable. So he set down his tools and brought it up to check. He stared at the message for a moment, his face slowly bending inward into a frown. Yet, before he could really deny the message, he noticed the sender pull the small amount of rank she had on him. The urge to deny it even further went down, but the chemical treatment in his head fired his pistons in the other way. Before he knew it, he already had his response tacked down on the pad.
Code:
To: Lisa Simmons
From: Bastilen Wreno
Wilco, ETA 10 minutes, out.
The Tech Expert's mouth went a little flat. He killed people for a living, why did he need to practice that? It didn't matter. Orders were orders, and he needed to report. He began to clean up his work space, and set the A.I. offline so it couldn't manifest any problem coding while he was gone. Then, he went to his locker at the edge of armor bay and shucked most of the equipment inside. From that same container he tugged out his
.357 and his
loaded axe. He holstered the pistol and slide the axe handle into the sheath, making sure both safeties were on.
Then, with a bit of contempt poisoning the bottom of his heart, he began to trudge on to the gun range.