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July 2015: El Paso
It's late at night, and the streets are quiet. The Kord Industries parking lot is brightly lit, offering a tempting shortcut on the way home.
Lights are on in the building: some hard-working scientist must be pulling an all-nighter.
«No.» It doesn't appear to have heard of rhetorical questions.
«My programming does not permit me to release a host once acquired, nor does it permit me to allow my own destruction.»
«The scarab unit has bonded to your spine and cannot be removed without causing your death,» it clarifies.
«If you attempt to destroy it, I must take direct control.»
«I am the control unit for the Blue Beetle armour.» It ignores her other question. «Your distress is illogical. The armour can be retracted when it is not in use, and should have no impact on your ability to live your life as before.»
"Oh yeah, just some weird-ass techbug irrevocably bonded to my spine. No cause for distress at all."
«Precisely.» The weird-ass alien techbug might possibly be incapable of detecting sarcasm.
«We should perform a test flight to assess function and mobility,» it announces.
"What's the Blue Beetle. Who created you. Why do you need to be on my spine. How are you talking to me."
«I—do not know,» it admits.
«There are gaps...my data banks have become corrupted. I was due for maintenance three thousand seven hundred of your years ago.»
"So not only are you invasive and disrespectful of personal autonomy, you're a useless dipshit."
«The Blue Beetle can perform a wide variety of functions!» it protests. «It can adapt its shape to suit any purpose.»
The armour around her right hand and forearm starts...growing? Expanding into a new shape, which looks like—is that a cannon? That looks suspiciously like a miniature cannon attached to her arm.
«A demonstration.»
«It will be destroyed.»
There's almost a hint of emotion in the words—satisfaction, maybe? Pride? It doesn't feel like a boast, though, simply a statement of fact.
The end of the arm-cannon starts to rotate, picking up speed before it emits a beam of crackling blue-tinged energy.
Energy beam, meet this innocent hunk of exploded building.
BOOM.
The bit of building is now a small cloud of dust, which settles into a tiny dust heap.
The scarab is so glad she asked!
It can fly, but she knew that already. It can make plasma cannons and sonic cannons. Bigger cannons than that one, for bigger booms, are possible but take more energy and therefore can't be used as often. Also, the same nanotechnology that makes the suit and the cannons can also make other things, including detachable objects. These can be shot as projectiles if the situation calls for it. This, again, isn't an unlimited ability, so if she wants to build a pyramid out of suit material it might take a few decades.
It can also create holograms and perform a variety of scans including the standard infrared, ultraviolet, electrical and radio waves. It can scan the life-signs of living creatures and analyse people's voice patterns to detect lies with 82.6% accuracy. Oh, and it can translate languages, including ones not spoken by anyone on Earth.
The suit and its weapons are nanotech. It can duplicate itself to make more material—such as bigger guns—and destroy itself just as easily as it destroys anything else.
«I am not of this planet. I speak the languages programmed into my databanks.»
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