Cave-In

[knux400]

You turn and look at Ortho again. This cave feels off, and you decide it would be best to bring him with you, even if you don't have any immediate use for most of his body. It's not the most ideal way to continue their life, but given the dire circumstances it's the best you can do.

First, you remove the flashlight attachment from their arm. Just like before, you carefully cut each wire and strip the ends of the rubber casing away, leaving the crystal fibers exposed. This time, however, you take careful note of where each wire starts and ends to determine its function- most Barebones use the same color-coding system for their wiring, but sometimes making repairs on the fly can force them to mislabel things. After everything's all cut, you turn your attention to yourself. It's generally considered unsafe to modify one's own head without supervision, since one wrong move could lead to a disconnected processor or a power loss- but your flashlight is acting up, and you feel that Ortho would want this- so you swallow your fear and pop the casing open.

You can't actually see what's in there since your eye is in the wrong spot, but with a combination of familiarity with your own design, working by touch, and some echolocating here and there, you're able to get a clear picture of things. Thankfully, it looks pretty much fine- some things have been jostled out of place slightly, but everything seems connected and functional- apart from your flashlight, which seems to be partially disconnected from the power cable. You quickly pop everything back into place. Now comes the hard part. You gently run your fingers across your main processor, searching for an open port. From there, you have to rely on your own familiarity with your inner workings to connect each wire to its proper spot. Once everything's secured, you route the wires through a hole and place Ortho's flashlight on the side of your head, right next to your original one. Having no way to attach the flashlight properly, you simply tape it on. You make a mental note to get it properly installed once you're out of here.

Both ORTHO'S FLASHLIGHT and your ORIGINAL FLASHLIGHT are now fully functional and ready to use. Ortho's flashlight is much more powerful than your own, but you can also feel it draining your battery considerably more. It's not an issue right now, but if you're down here for too long, you'll have to think about power management. Next comes gathering up everything you can't immediately use. It only takes some slight disassembly and rearranging to get Ortho's chassis into a sort of sled shape, with the leftover parts piled on top and most of the casing on the bottom for protection. Two beams protrude from it, forming a pair of handles. It's heavy and it's not smooth at all, but you can drag it along okay if you use your two back legs.

You can't help but think how gruesome this must be to most other Morbitians, but for you it's just a matter of doing what's necessary to preserve Ortho's life. Barebones philosophy states that the purpose of life, broadly speaking, is to make an impact on the world. What exactly that means is up to you- you could choose to help others, discover new things, or create art- but the basic idea is to make an impact. Even after death, Barebones still have the potential to change the world through the use- or reuse- of their constituent parts, and it's up to the people the Barebones trusts to make sure that happens. An eyepiece could be given to someone in need, or a limb could be repurposed into a support strut. Even if something is broken beyond repair, it can be recycled back into raw materials for the production of new parts.

This isn't ideal at all for Ortho. Not by a long shot. But it's the best you can do with where you are and what you have, and it's certainly better than just leaving them there. It makes you feel better having taken the time to do this for them.






You continue onwards. It's still an incredibly long walk, with almost no features to speak of. The caves twist and wind over and over, occasionally branching to the left or the right. It's dizzying trying to make sense of it in your head, and no matter how much you try and keep track of things, you just end up giving up and picking a direction at random. None of it seems to get you anywhere.

You're alone with your memories.

What do you reflect on?