0x3
Upstairs, above the basement, there’s a sudden commotion. Confused, the child goes to the door, opens it, and gets his head swiped off with three claws.
It’s V. You see, she went back to Outpost-3, and when N’s body wasn’t there, and hoped assumed he survived. Turns out, those fresh kills they found? It was a trap. When N fed on them, it confirmed his general whereabouts. V searched nearby, and the hat he dropped just made her search that much easier.
V kills the kid, frees N. She doesn’t apologize, but she doesn’t try to kill him. She explains: “I won’t be the only one who notices you’re alive. Pretty soon J’ll on the warpath. She’ll want your head, and she’ll have mine if she knows I’m helping you. You need to run. Get as far away as you can.”
Then V notices Uzi, sees another worker to kill, but she hesitates before N can tell her to stop. “That’s the one from before. N, Why are you still with it?
“She cares about me, V. She’s — the only one.”
“A toaster?”
“She saved me life.”
(“Unlike you,” Uzi says to rub it in.)
V has an unreadable expression, then sighs. “Well, I’m happy for you. Better hope she doesn’t slow you down.”
When V turns to leave, Uzi scoffs. “That’s it? No apology for letting him die? For years of standing by and pretending to forget?”
“Does he need one, when he has you? It’s going to hurt whether I say it or not. I’m giving you one warning. Next time I see either of you, I’m going to do my job.”
After that, N helps Uzi recover. He needs her guidance to know which wires to reconnect or replace. Uzi tries hard not to think about how it feels having his hands inside her. They wrap up Uzi’s arm stump with electrical tape and move on.
The mother core doesn’t have any answers, only grief for her son, and Uzi’s railgun puts her down. N’s ready to leave, but Uzi’s curious and pokes around more. In the basement, she finds hints about Cabin Fever Labs, a choker, some ink-scrawled pages, but ultimately more questions than answers.
They debate whether to leave — N can heal, especially after eating the drone remains, but Uzi is in rough shape inside and out. Barely patched up, and she’d rather not repair herself with random torture victim parts, especially if they’re heading to a populated, probably (hopefully) sanitized outpost anyway. And honestly, she doesn’t exactly want to spend more time than she has to in this place?
So they leave, and resume pursuit of the scavengers. They don’t make might more than a few miles before they run into the next issue.
N can feel J nearby. A disturbance of the electromagnetic field. They fly in the opposite direction. J’s search pattern is erratic, but it veers near every so often, and they have to pull back to keep distance.
If N can sense her, Uzi wonders why she can’t do the same.
She must be hot, N explains. The more oil they have, the more they can shield their presence. N’s reserves must be higher than J’s, but that’ll change as they fly.
“So…” N starts, “we run away? Like V suggested?”
“After we find the settlement. The scavengers have got to be almost there by now.”
The game of avoiding J continues throughout the night. Uzi gets fed up enough to suggest ditching stealth and facing her head on — N doesn’t sense V, so it’d be two against one in their favor. But with how beat up Uzi is, having N protect her might be worse than her not being there.
But eventually, the dynamic shifts: J is getting closer. Steadily closer — as if she could sense N.
“So, now we run?”
“Back to the basement. If she refilled her reserves, then there’s no way we can outfly her.”
So they double back for the security of the basement. They stay there all night. After that brush with death and torture, when N tries to cuddle with Uzi, Uzi is trying right back. They take comfort in each other in the dark, watched by shattered screens over dismembered shells.
When they try to leave the next night, they’re sent right back down by another sensing of J. It happens the night after that, too. Uzi digs and sorts through everything in the house and the basement for lack of anything to do. Creates a new theory board out of the Cabin Fever docs and crazed sketches. Runs out of evidence, and starts making up stuff.
She spends a lot of time with N, and she still enjoys his company, but days spent cooped up with the same drone, the habits, the patterns of speech, the sheer frictitious presence, is enough to drive Uzi up the wall.
Their conversations turn to their life stories. Uzi opens up about the bullying, some of her failed projects before the railgun, about the few times Khan made her smile. At first, N doesn’t want to open up. He mostly has stories of J punishing and berating him. Or him murdering drones like her. Not exactly great conversation fodder, y’know? He’s lived a longer life, yet Uzi has more to talk about. But Uzi bugs him until he opens up.
And… as he runs through his memories, there’s a few just on the tip of the tongue. He tells a story about J… cleaning something? V talking to someone… tall? But these anecdotes always fizzle out, never reach any kind of point or clarity. Then some errors flash on N’s screen, and he shuts down.
The basement has magnets and plenty of debugging tools — instruments of digital surgery — so Uzi hacks into his system. Like that, she gets a good look at how murder drones function. And her impression is, beneath everything, a hackjob.
Disassembly drones were nothing more than a hasty modification of wdOS. So much of the ‘hunting routines’ amounted to little more than a crude, scripted modification to the emotional registry to suppress things like empathy.
Suppression describes a lot of what the murder drone software accomplishes. There’s an odd structure to N’s memories, with whole swaths of them encrypted, locked away, barely able to connect to the rest of him outside of memory consolidation. It seems… unstable.
And, as if the system had noticed this, it’s being corrected even as she watches. There’s a program trying to delete his memories, but Uzi recovers them, subverts the Solver. She sees J, V, N as workers. She sees Tessa. Cyn.
And in counteracting the Solver, she sets herself up an N’s new administrator, and defragments his memory. N can remember everything now.
And… he still doesn’t want to talk about it. Some of the important stuff, the program had gone as far as zeroing out, a total redaction before Uzi won, but even for the fluffier stuff, memories of his sister before the gala, or just everyday life in the manor, getting N to talk about any of it a bit like pulling teeth.
“I’m trying to figure out what you are, where you came from. Don’t you want to know?”
“Um… not really? Does it matter where I came from, if I have you now?”
They argue about it lightly, but ultimately, it hurts for N to dwell so much on what he’s lost. Remembering V, knowing the next time she sees him, she’ll kill him… he’d rather forget it, frankly.
“Fine. Whatever. Not like I cared anyway.”
It’s been several days. J can’t keep hunting N forever, not when she has a quota to fill. So they should surely be good to head to the scavengers’ outpost finally.
“Is it that important to you? Wouldn’t it be safer getting farther from the spire?”
“Safe doesn’t get us answers.”
Maybe they argue further, but Uzi comes to accept that a compromise here makes more sense — in retrospect, it’s obvious. If she doesn’t show up to the outpost with murder drone, maybe she wouldn’t make enemies.
N’s still a bit hesitant. “Are you mad? That I can’t go with you?”
“No, you dummy.” But Uzi has better than an argument to convince him — she kisses him. A quick one, but it’s lip to lip. “This isn’t goodbye. I’ll be back.”
So Uzi sets out on her own, following the tracker. She walks through desolate forests of trees stripped bare of leaves. Her quarry leads her into the city, but a big rocky hills range between the forest and the city proper. Thus, her path takes her through a tunnel.
Partway through the tunnel, there’s a blockade, and drones spill out of maintenance doors. Their rugged, gnarly attire raises her suspicions, but it’s confirmed when they demand a toll. (“How about… everything you have on you?”)
These are bandits.
Uzi fought a murder drone. She isn’t afraid of bandits. But the bandits aren’t afraid of her — a short girl missing a hand, with nothing but a sticker-adorned toy gun? Still, Uzi hesitates to pull the trigger on a worker. Long enough for one to get close enough to swing with a bat. She blocks with her gun, and kicks them down.
But while she’s distracted with that, another bandit fires a gun at her. After all, corpses pay out so much more reliably.
But purple light suspends the bullet midair.
Uzi almost died, and she doesn’t understand how she lived. (Is this even real?) As fear and panic overwhelms her processor, a much more physical chaos reigns outside her body. More guns, more bandits. But there’s something intuitive to the illegal opcodes and alien symbols. Uzi gives in to that intuition.
And she fights a dozen bandits, ripping the weapons from their hands with telekinesis, blocking their bullets, turning the last one to a puddle of oil with a powerful swipe of her hand.
“Holy hell. I’m god.”
Uzi has a brief moment of worry, but she’s still far from the tracker; it wasn’t among the bandit’s loot.
Her journey continues. Uzi’s forced through a winding and convoluted route through the city as she zeros in on the coordinates. As she approaches, she can’t help but find the location of the outpost strange. It didn’t feel securely obscure, and she didn’t see any signs of more than incidental, liminal drone presence anywhere.
It didn’t feel like a place scavengers come and went all the time.
Her fears come true when she climbs over a building, and sees an alley of carnage. Oil splashed on the wall, shattered and mangles plastic and metal along its length, and none of it rusted or deteriorated. Fresh.
A murder drone had killed them before they reached the outpost.
Even after Uzi jumps down and sifts through the remains, she almost misses it. The faintest hiss of a vocalsynth. “…some…one…there…help…”
Uzi scans around till she finds an almost intact corpse. A bit of rebar had been driven all the way through the abdomen with enough force to pierce and lodge into the cement behind it.
Not a corpse. The victim was still alive, but all of their struggling had been insufficient to dislodge the impaling rod.
Uzi frees them with telekinesis. Picks them up, and carries them through the city, back to the tunnel. She repairs them with parts from the bandits she killed. The body looked familiar enough when she opened it up, but when they finally boot back up to full consciousness, and meet her with those piercing blue eyes, Uzi knows who this is.
The story goes like this: They were traveling, looking for a place to set up camp, when they heard the whisper of blades above, saw the murder drone swoop down. And then one shouted, asking if they was the friendly murder drone.
That made it hesitate. It had pigtails, and said he was once a squadmate. It asked about them, when they’d seen him, who he was with, what he was doing. Some of the workers started getting a funny feeling, but while some stayed quiet, there was always someone with an answer.
When the murder drone nodded understanding, it thanked them for the cooperation. Then her wings unfolded, and most of them didn’t even get to blink. It was there, and it was knives, and they were all just pieces. She didn’t even get a sense of what happened before her chest was bursting agony and she couldn’t move anywhere. The murder drone didn’t bother finishing her off — looked like it had its hands full carrying off a couple of the rest. Last thing she heard is the screams dopplering off into the air.
Then she’s left with only her own screams. And she screamed, cried for help, over and over. She was there for days, her oil dribbling out, her battery gone beyond critical power saving.
She was dead for sure. Then Uzi saved her. First she given her a body she’d needed for years, and now this. “Maybe I had the wrong measure of you. You ain’t all bad. Though I notice that ‘friendly’ murder drone ain’t with you anymore. Why’s that? He cross you too?”
“Something like that,” Uzi says.
“If you’ve got nowhere else to go, I can vouch for you when we get to ’11. Hope they recognize me. I can speak my mother’s name, and my father half runs the place. Least I can do, after all you’ve done for me.”
Uzi winces. It sounded nice of her didn’t it? But this drone still had the radio transmitter in them. Why hadn’t she removed it when he had a chance? Now she couldn’t really broach the subject without raising some really awkward questions.
They start walking, and Uzi starts following. The drone had a straw hat tied to her neck, and she placed it back on her head. She’d taken to tying her new hair in a ponytail, curly and a blue, dark like evening skies.
When they leave the tunnel, Uzi casts an odd look back at the corpses they are leaving behind. She can smell them.