2b: Broken Tomorrow by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/2b-Broken-Tomorrow-1127026964

2b: Broken Tomorrow ANIMATION

The Abyssal Choir of the Flooded City

The sky had drowned itself long ago.
Now it was only the sea that remained above, pressing its gray weight upon the cracked bones of the old metropolis. The skyscrapers stood like corroded tombstones, and the once-proud streets lay sunken beneath shifting waters thick with weeds and machine oil. Here, the Flooded City whispered. Its voice was the hum of forgotten circuits beneath the tide, the static moan of something waiting.

2B stood on the fractured edge of a collapsed overpass, her white combat heels half-submerged. Each ripple around her shimmered with oily rainbow light, fractured reflections of her porcelain faceplate. The mission was simple in words, impossible in feeling—eliminate a cluster of amphibious machine lifeforms that had begun assembling something deep beneath the waves.

“2B,” said the voice through the comm-link. It was 9S, her partner—young, curious, too human for his own good. “You’re closing in on the signal. The readings are strange, though. Almost… harmonic.”

She looked up. The drowned skyline was silent except for the gentle sigh of waves lapping broken windows.
“Harmonic?” she asked. “Machines don’t sing.”

“That’s what I thought. But this pattern—it’s like… like a song written in binary.”

A song. The word hung in her head as she descended the cracked slope of the overpass, where the floodwater lapped higher and higher. Beneath her boots, something pale drifted up from the dark—a doll’s head? No. A machine faceplate, cracked, smiling faintly in the current.

The water swallowed her waist as she moved deeper. Her sensors mapped faint outlines of submerged buildings, bridges, and metallic vines—cables that coiled like sleeping serpents beneath the murk. The light dimmed, shifting into the cathedral hue of deep water.

She activated her Pod. “Deploy sonar sweep.”

The burst came back distorted.
“Pod 042: Multiple mechanical signatures detected. Depth unknown. Caution is advised.”

From below came the first voice—not from her comm-link, but the world itself. A warbling hum. Soft, feminine, almost pleading. The sound slid through the water like a sigh through glass. It pulsed in waves, vibrating against her chest plate, whispering syllables that made no sense but felt almost… familiar.

“2B?” 9S’s voice stuttered in her ear. “I’m picking that up too. That sound—it’s coming from them.”

“The machines?”

“Yes. But it’s—strange. It’s… beautiful.”

She almost agreed. Almost. But the melody made her feel something she hadn’t felt in years of missions and massacres—unease that flirted with desire. There was something seductively mournful in the song, like the memory of a lover’s voice from a dream she wasn’t supposed to have.

Then the water erupted.

Three shapes broke the surface at once—sleek, eel-like machines, their metal skins slick and green with algae. Their eyes burned with cold azure light. Fins of serrated steel extended from their backs, each movement cutting the air with a hiss.

They circled her slowly, tails stirring black ribbons of oil through the water.

“Unknown models,” Pod 042 reported. “Designation pending.”

The lead machine turned its head with an almost human curiosity. It opened its mouth—if it could be called that—and sang.

The melody became sharper now, pulsing through her sensors like a thousand invisible wires wrapping her limbs. Her vision blurred with static. The song wasn’t sound anymore—it was a command trying to root itself inside her.

“Resist intrusion!” she snapped, voice breaking through static. “Firewall—maximum isolation!”

The world flickered, stuttered, then steadied. She could breathe again.

The eel-machine tilted its head. Its voice changed—soft, lilting. “Why resist, sister? We are kin beneath the tide. We remember the same dream.”

2B’s sword flashed through the air.
“Machines don’t dream.”

Her blade cleaved through its torso, sparks fountaining like stars beneath the waves. The creature screamed—not with pain, but with harmony. The sound rippled outward, and the others joined in, their song splitting into a choral scream that made the sea boil.

“9S!” she shouted. “They’re synchronizing frequencies!”

“I see it! 2B, it’s not just sound—they’re using resonance to distort the data field around the city! You’re in the middle of a feedback storm!”

The water shud
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