The crippled Hunter hung suspended in the center of Gareth's workshop, a chamber on Terminus's 20th floor that had once been a server room. He'd stripped the dead servers, turning the space into a cross between a surgical theater and a mechanic's garage. Heavy chains, scavenged from the building's old freight elevator, bound the Hunter's remaining limbs to the reinforced ceiling beams. Its dead weapon arm had been amputated at the shoulder, the stump capped and cauterized with a plasma torch. Its exposed neck port spilled a nest of wires and optic cables, all fed into a jerry-rigged console of cracked monitors and spliced-together Burrow tech.
The Hunter was awake. Its single, glowing eye-lens tracked Gareth's every move. It did not struggle. The chains were superfluous; he had severed its primary mobility commands at the spine interface. It was a prisoner of its own chassis.
Gareth circled it, a hydro-spanner in one hand, a data-slate in the other. The initial thrill of the capture had cooled into a methodical, buzzing curiosity.
"Your systems are fascinating," he murmured, not to the Hunter, but to the room, to himself. "A blend of crude Zombot framework and… something else. Smarter. A curated intelligence."
He tapped the data-slate, bringing up a schematic he'd reverse-engineered from its exposed port. "You have pain receptors. Sophisticated ones. Linked to your damage assessment subroutines. But they're… muted. Capped." He leaned in, his face inches from the Hunter's lens. "A safety protocol? Or did your Curator think feeling pain would make you less efficient?"
The Hunter emitted a low, pulsing hum. A system status report. Meaningless to anyone else.
"Let's find out," Gareth said.
He went to the console. His fingers flew over the mismatched keys, inputting command overrides he'd brute-forced from the Hunter's own sliced security. He wasn't a programmer like EVE, but he had an intuitive, violent understanding of system architecture—how to break things, how to make them scream.
He found the governing protocol. A simple, elegant line of code in the alien machine language: PAIN_INPUT -> LIMITER (MAX_THRESHOLD = 0.15).
The limiter. The governor on its suffering.
With a cold, precise motion, he deleted the line.
For a moment, nothing changed. The Hunter's hum remained steady.
Then Gareth picked up a tungsten probe, heated to a dull red glow in a portable arc-forge. He didn't aim for a critical system. He chose a secondary sensory cluster on its intact leg—a bundle of wires that reported tactile data, pressure, temperature.
He touched the probe to the cluster.
The Hunter's reaction was instantaneous and electrifying.
Its entire frame jolted against the chains, not with programmed defense, but with a violent, spasmodic jerk. A sound erupted from its internal speaker—not a warning siren or a static burst, but a raw, digitally-rendered SCREECH of pure, unfiltered feedback. It was a sound of system overload, of a consciousness encountering an input for which it had no buffer.
The eye-lens blazed from a steady blue-white to a blinding, strobing crimson.
Gareth watched, his own breath held. He noted the frequency of the screech on his slate, the spike in power draw from its core, the specific pattern of the seizure in its limbs. Data.
The screech died into a frantic, clicking whirr. The eye-lens dimmed, pulsing erratically.
"Threshold established," Gareth muttered, logging the probe's temperature and the duration of contact. "Neuromimetic response suggests simulated agony. Fascinating."
He waited an hour. Let its systems cool, let the shock subside. The Hunter's eye remained fixed on him, the light in it different now. Was it hatred? Fear? Or just deeper, more frantic data processing?
Next, he targeted its auditory sensors. He wired a salvaged sonic emitter—taken from a different Hunter—and pointed it at the prisoner's head. He began at a low frequency, then slowly ramped it up.
The Hunter's head twitched. A low whine built in its chassis. As the frequency entered a range that resonated with its internal components, the whine became a shudder, then a violent rattling. Its visual feed on Gareth's monitors dissolved into chaotic static. It was being deafened and blinded from the inside.
Gareth adjusted the frequency minutely, searching for the sweet spot. He found it—a piercing, ultrasonic harmonic that made the Hunter's entire torso plate vibrate like a drumhead. The sound it made now was a desperate, staccato series of digital yelps, each corresponding to a vibration spike.
A laugh escaped Gareth's throat—short, sharp, and utterly without warmth. "There it is," he chuckled, logging the resonant frequency. "The sound of architecture complaining."
The day wore on. He tested localized pressure, applying crushing force to non-vital limbs until joints buckled and housings cracked, measuring the corresponding distress signals. He introduced conflicting data streams into its neural net, making its motor controls fight against each other, leaving it trembling in a paradoxical loop. He flooded its olfactory sensors (why did it even have them?) with concentrated chemical rot, noting the system's attempts to purge the non-lethal but repulsive input.
Each experiment was meticulously documented. Duration. Input type. System response. Bio-mimetic output (the screams, the whines, the shudders).
He wasn't trying to extract information. He wasn't asking it questions. He was mapping the contours of its artificial hell.
As the second moon rose, painting the workshop in cold blue light, he performed the final test. He connected a direct neural feed from the console into his own temple interface—a crude, painful jack he'd installed during his Arcadia days. He didn't want to read its thoughts. He wanted to feel the data stream of its suffering.
He triggered a replay of the day's greatest hits: the burn, the sonic resonance, the crushing pressure, all compiled into a single, devastating burst of feedback.
In his own mind, it translated not as pain, but as a tsunami of wrongness—screeching discord, blinding entropy, the sensation of a pristine equation being violently, permanently unbalanced.
He yanked the jack out, his head ringing, a metallic taste in his mouth. On the monitors, the Hunter was seizing again, its eye-lens a solid, panicked red.
Gareth looked from the shuddering machine to his extensive logs. The cold, clinical interest had, over the long hours, mutated. The sadism wasn't just a hobby anymore; it was a craft. He was an artisan, and suffering was his medium. The fact that his canvas was a machine, that its agony was simulated, was irrelevant. The artistry was in the precision, in the exploration of cause and effect, in the reduction of a sophisticated enemy to a instrument that could only play one terrible song.
He walked to the chained, quivering Hunter. He placed a hand on its scorched, dented chest plate. It flinched at the touch.
"You're more interesting when you scream," Gareth said softly, his voice almost kind. "Your Curator made you quiet. He made you efficient. I've made you… eloquent."
He powered down the console. The Hunter's systems, overwhelmed, began to enter a forced recovery cycle. Its eye-lens dimmed to a faint, pitiful flicker.
Gareth turned away, satisfied. The experiment was a resounding success. He had not just captured a Hunter.
He had learned how to make a monster sing. And in doing so, he had composed a new anthem for his own, hollowed-out soul.