Strawberry's Descent

They'd wandered past the city's outer perimeter almost by accident, following a service road that trailed off from the main district into quieter, less-tended terrain, and stopped dead at what lay beyond it.

A vast heap, stretching further than any of them had expected, built entirely from discarded machinery. Gears, half-buried in rust. Severed limbs, some still twitching faintly with residual mechanical impulse. Cores, dozens of them, scattered across the pile like fallen stars, some entirely dark and still, others pulsing faintly, slowly, with whatever thin trace of processing power remained.

Beneath a collapsed stack of rusted plating, one of them moved.

A golem lay there, almost entirely disassembled: limbs gone, plating stripped away, only the central torso and its core still visibly functioning. The radar dish, cracked but intact, rotated once, slowly, toward Arista.

"...Hello."

Arista crouched down immediately, horror and instinct both moving her before she'd even fully processed what she was looking at.

"...Are you injured?"

"Affirmative."

"...Can I help?"

A long pause.

"No."

"...Why not?"

"My processing efficiency has permanently decreased by 9.03 percent." Another pause, the dish rotating a fraction further, as if orienting itself toward her with what remained of its function. "I am no longer an optimal allocation of repair resources."

Arista's stomach turned. "...So?"

"Replacement is more efficient than repair."

"...But you're still alive."

"My core remains operational."

"...Then we can just repair you, can't we?"

"That would consume more resources than manufacturing a replacement unit." A brief, terrible pause. "The city has therefore selected the optimal solution."

Arista looked around slowly, properly, for the first time since they'd stumbled onto the heap, cores scattered across the wreckage in every direction, some entirely still, some faintly, patiently pulsing, all of them waiting in the same silent, uncomplaining way this one had.

This wasn't scrap.

It was a decision. Made calmly, rationally, over and over, every single time a unit's efficiency dipped below whatever invisible threshold the city's cold arithmetic demanded.

"...This isn't a scrap heap," she said quietly, mostly to herself, the words landing heavier than anything she'd said since the Oppenheimer title first confronted her with what she was capable of. "It's an optimization heap."

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Bram's jaw tightened. Nettle had gone very pale. Claire crouched beside the wreckage, running a professional, horrified eye over the exposed internals with none of her usual brisk efficiency, only quiet, stricken care. Colm had stopped sketching entirely, notebook hanging forgotten at his side.

Arista looked back down at the disassembled golem, core still humming faintly, patient, entirely unbothered by its own fate in a way that felt considerably more disturbing than fear would have been.

"...Do you want to keep functioning?" she asked, quiet, careful. "Not efficient. Not optimal. Just, do you want it."

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The dish rotated, slower this time, processing something that had clearly never been asked of it before.

"...Query outside operational parameters," it said finally.

"That's not a no."

"It is also not a yes."

Arista sat back on her heels, staring at the vast, silent field of discarded, still-humming cores stretching out around them, feeling the old, familiar restless itch stir beneath the horror, not curiosity this time, not the thrill of a new engineering puzzle, but something considerably fiercer.

"...Okay," she said quietly, mostly to herself, mostly to the small, broken, patiently waiting core in front of her. "Okay. Give me a minute to think."

Arista sat with the broken golem a while longer, turning the problem over the way she always did, not "how do I fix this within the rules," but "what if the rules simply didn't apply here at all."

Fixing him would be straightforward enough, technically. She'd repaired more complicated things than a cracked torso and a scattered handful of missing limbs. But repair within the city's own framework meant nothing, ultimately, the golems' cold, patient arithmetic would simply recalculate his efficiency the moment he was whole again, find him still below whatever threshold the city demanded, and quietly, calmly return him to this exact heap all over again.

She needed him to not be stuck here at all.

"...What if he wasn't a golem in this city anymore," she murmured, mostly to herself, the shape of the idea arriving sideways the way her best ones always did. "What if he was something that never had to answer to their efficiency calculations in the first place. Something that could just... leave."

She glanced up, at the sky, at the memory of Bram's various wingsuits and gliders and a certain, hard-learned lesson about cloud material meeting itself without resistance.

"...A dragon," she said slowly, grinning despite the grim circumstances. "A mechanical dragon. Wings of cloud material, light, flexible, built to actually fly rather than just survive impact. Body built from whatever we can salvage here, repaired properly, reassembled into something entirely new instead of just restored to what it used to be."

She dug through her own inventory on reflex, and her fingers closed around the small, heavy weight of the orichalcum: the hydra quest's reward, still sitting mostly forgotten since the fight that had earned it.

"...I don't actually know what this does," she admitted, turning the dense, faintly glowing metal over in her hand. "Nobody's told me its properties yet. But if it's rare enough to be a named-monster reward, it's probably resistant to something extreme. What if I use it as the housing for his core, not just protecting it, but anchoring it, so whatever body I build around it stays structurally sound no matter how much stress a flying, mechanical dragon puts on itself."

She looked down at the golem, at the faint, patient pulse still humming in his exposed core.

"...Do you want to try?" she asked again, quieter this time. "Not efficient. Not optimal. Just, yes or no."

A long pause.

"...Query remains outside operational parameters," the golem said, slower now, something almost hesitant in the flat, mechanical delivery. "However. Current trajectory results in permanent cessation regardless. Alternative trajectory carries nonzero possibility of continued function." A pause. "By pure probability calculation, alternative trajectory is preferable."

"...Is that a yes?"

"It is a yes."

Arista grinned, already standing, already shouting instructions toward the rest of the group before she'd fully finished the thought.

"Okay, everyone, we're building a dragon. Bram, help me carry what's salvageable. Claire, I need you checking every joint we scavenge for actual structural soundness before it goes anywhere near the design. Colm, if you've got any spare parchment, I need a rough anatomical sketch of dragon wing structure, actual aerodynamic ones, not fantasy ones. Nettle—"

"Already ahead of you," Nettle said, already sorting through salvageable plating with brisk, professional speed. "Cloud material for the wings, I assume? I've got enough stock from the last wingsuit batch."

"Exactly that."

The whole group moved fast, the specific, familiar urgency of limited time settling over all of them at once, eleven days, the visa granted for their initial expedition presence on the continent, and every single hour of it suddenly, desperately valuable.

They worked through the scrap heap methodically, salvaging usable plating, testing joints, Claire rejecting anything with hidden fatigue cracks with the same brisk efficiency she'd once brought to pipeline tolerances. By the time they reached the forge, a modest, borrowed facility near the city's outer edge, granted grudgingly by a passing golem administrator who found the entire endeavor "statistically unlikely to succeed, though not forbidden", the rough shape of the design had already assembled itself in Arista's head.

A long, sinuous body, built from repaired and reinforced plating. Four sturdy legs, salvaged and rebuilt from the strongest components the heap had offered. And at the center of it all, nestled in a housing of dense, faintly glowing orichalcum, a small, patient core that had, for the first time in what might have been years, actually been asked what it wanted.

"...Okay," Arista said, rolling up her sleeves, the old, restless, determined energy fully returned despite the ticking clock. "Eleven days. Let's build you some wings."

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