0xA
Back at the party, girls are swooning over N, and he’s enduring the attention, doing his best to be supportive and engaged, but he’s searching around. Uzi still isn’t back yet, and now Thad and Lizzy have gone and disappeared.
Politely, N tries to disengage, but more people rope him into more conversations. Then he firmly declines, but a few people want to tug him along into party games. Finally, the claws come out. There’s a yelp, but no oil is spilled, and N shoves his way out of the room. He’s calling Uzi’s name, to no answer.
He almost passes by a dimly lit hallway, but there’s a strange glimmer of light in it. He backtracks. There’s a girl sweeping.
Before he can ask if they’ve seen anyone, the other drone speaks.
“I missed you, N.”
Her voice…
“You remember me, right? Have you moved on already?”
He’s backing up. “You’re not V.”
“Have I ever been myself? I keep changing, but I never find a mask that fits. I guess all I have is her memories. Maybe that’s all she ever was.”
The drone was approaching faster, and N’s steps falter as he strains to think of a rebuttal, a defense of the girl who left him to die.
“V was…” Gleefully cruel? Imperfectly distant? Empty, but with an echo of something that N couldn’t resist?
“We wanted to keep our personalities, but the truth hurt us too much. You had to forget everything to stay yourself. But you always surprised me, even when I knew more than you did.”
The lights all flicker and fail. Tendrils start crawling in from the shadows. The eyes are yellow.
N is saying, “I admit, there is a lot I want to repress. I might have lost all of it, but the answers were so important to Uzi. And maybe… they are important. If I don’t know the truth, then I’ll just keep getting pushed around.” N’s back is against the wall, and he transforms his hands into guns, but he still can’t fire at V.
“I thought you loved doing anything? Come on. Let’s eat.” A neck explodes off V’s frame, spiked with legs. Her maid uniform becomes tatters torn by thorned black tendrils, and two crab claws hold N in place while the unhinged jaw bites into his neck.
An error popup flashes on N’s screen:
ACCESS DENIED
CONTACT ADMIN
"DARKXWOLF17"N’s frozen statue-still in a unresponsive state, but then a gruff voice cuts through the safe mode static.
“Boy, get down!”
N’s legs are folding. He’s down on the ground when a searing ray of familiar green light is obliterating the eldritch mass. At the other end of the fading cone of energy stands a man with red safety glasses down over his eyes above his mustache.
“The devil plays tricks. Can’t let yourself fall for them.” Khan walks over, his jacket fluttering in the wind from the still-smoldering tendrils. “It’s hesitation that gets drones killed. Don’t learn that the hard way, boy.”
Lowering his new railgun, Khan extends a hand to help N up, which gets a bit awkward given the murder drone is taller. “Mr. Uzi, you… saved me?”
“You took care of my daughter when I wasn’t there. You seem a decent sort, for a murder drone. But if you break her heart, I’ll install a door in yours.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What do we do now, though?”
“We’re not done yet. That wasn’t the head of the snake. Reckon it’s more of a hydra.”
N follows his gaze, to where segmented lengths squirm through vents and wall-cracks like an infestation of worms.
“We’ll just have to keep shooting,” Khan concludes. “What sort of guns you got in those arms?”
The welcoming party continues while the hunt rages, even absent the four most important drones. Emily throws around worried glances, and asks if anyone seen Thad or Lizzy or whatsherface or the cute new guy. No one has, of course. She’s working up the courage to ask Rebecca next when the both of them turn to a new arrival.
A drone in a suit and tie and pencil skirt stalks forward with slow, assured staps. She tosses back one pigtail, and surveys her next acquisitions.
Emily stares with wide empty eyes, trembles, then backs away.
Rebecca scoffs, looking her up and down. “Who invited you?”
“The guest of honor, of course. Here, I think I have a VIP pass right… here.” She was reaching into her suit jacket and her hand comes out as a rifle. She presents a bullet to the skeptical eyes.
She smirks and lets the screams comes in, giving her prey time to run. It was wasted motion, it was indulgence — it was something she hadn’t enjoyed in weeks. She needed this.
“You always leave me to clean up your messes, J.”
In the midst of the screaming drones stood a maid with white eyes, dim with disappointment behind cicular lenses.
“V, you ungrateful slouch. So this is where you scampered off to? You already spent your one allotted vacation day moping about the synergistic liability. Don’t worry, though. I’ll be sure to garnish your existence.”
“What you did to N was cruel, you know. What would Tessa think?
J’s smirk becomes of a wide o. Then slowly, deliberately, it twists into a wicked grin and her brows smoothly narrow into the arms of a hunting cross. J has no words but a feral growl. She’s a lunge forward, she’s a claw thrown out, she’s an attack.
She’s striking empty air that had glowed with holographic light. Another growl, frustrated this time, and then her thwarted claw is tearing apart a nearby drone. Better than nothing doing, sure, but there’s no triumph in it.
J charges into Outpost-3, leaving a trail of oily corpses as she runs on the heels of the fleeing workers. But they’re not her goal; they’re just caught in the stampede.
The thought loops in her head. When she asks the worthless toasters, there’s only ignorant sputtering.
Where was Uzi?
Uzi was back in Outpost-11.
She was becoming her father. The scavengers wanted her to build a door. So they could shut her out and leave her to die, too. She was drawing up diagrams and architectural blueprints, she was yelling at scavengers to get the right kind of scrap to get it to work, she was losing sleep to get it all in order.
She was becoming her mother. Stay up long enough and she starts seeing things when she looks at the shadows and at the lights. The lines in her blueprints stop being straight, the words she says to win her arguments stop being English. She wakes up in her workshop and doesn’t remember going to sleep. These aren’t diagrams, they are finger paintings scrawled in oil and every one looks like— the sky demon who was there at the beginning, with two tresses arcing— the one who made her dream this nightmare— the one who would be there at the end— who would be there to finally run a blade into her.
She was becoming N. She really didn’t want to remember these things, or dwell on what they meant. She doesn’t want to think about why she’s started biting the drones that get too close. Or what had possessed her to crawl into the deepest tunnels where they let the dead rest — why she had to find out what oil taste like. Or why it made the headache go away. Maybe she should stop using that program, it always makes the headaches worse. But it was so convenient. But it wasn’t telekinesis anymore. But never was. It’s starting to transform things. She’s finds trails of blood and mucus. She finds thews that bend and wiggle. She finds orbs that blink and stare back at her.
She can’t do this anymore. She has to get out of here. So why does she stay in her room instead? She boarded up the door — if there’s anything she can thank her dad for, it’s knowing how to reinforce a door — and ignores every demanding knock, every inquiry, every plead.
She needs them to shut the hell up. She needs it all to stop and go dark and still.
She lies down on the bed, only it’s not the bed. It’s a pile of scrap beside the bed. Only it’s not scrap, it’s bodies she dredged up from the waste tunnels. Only it’s not bodies— it’s her chrysalis.
The headache consumes her. She stops remembering. She stops fighting. She lies down and her hands glow and her fingers twist in ways they aren’t supposed to. Ways that should have broken the hand. The corpse-bed-pupa shifts in the grasp of her program. Only it’s not telekinesis, it’s transformation.
She’s surrounded by corpses.
And they smell just like the living.
In the auditorium, the space around the two of them is more tentacle than air. A volume alive, animated, anatomical. Both of them are held securely in place, inescapably constricted. The tendrils dictate where they can’t move, and where they must.
“Yeah, I’m so not into this tentacley sort of thing. No shame if you are though, girl. Let your freak flag fly. Haha. I don’t want to die.”
That broken voice synthetizes a reply: “I’ll remember you, if it makes you feel any better.”
“I’m so, so sorry about the prom betrayal. It was Doll’s idea. She lied to me. I—”
“I saw it on your face. I don’t hate you. If anything, it was the end I deserved. You were kinder to me than anyone else, s1nce—” Her voice glitches for a moment. “Kinder than I ever was.”
“We have got to work on your self-esteem, bestie. Suicide is so not it.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for that, in the end. Plen-ty of time for everything.”
Thad could only watch. His vision was clouded by the innumerable, interstitial, intestinal tendrils, yet he can see it all falling apart clear as day. His hand still held his trusty pipe, for the good it never did.
When Doll killed student after student, Thad wasn’t clever enough to figure it out, wasn’t brave enough to confront Lizzy about it, wasn’t good enough to save the day.
When they thought they’d gotten through the worst of it, he’d watched his neighbors disappear one by one and held out believing everything was fine when it very clearly wasn’t. The world is broken, something direly needed to be fixed — can’t Thad at least lift a hand? He was the first to do somethinng about it, sure, but it was so little, so late.
Now, he watched. Worse than watching, he listened. Hearing the joints pop and plastic crack as his sister was torn apart. Hearing the screams clipping on loop, barely muffled by the tendrilic mass. Her oil spills out and then it’s hungrily slurped into something.
Thad had failed to save so many. It had always been disappearances to him. But it was murder, it was always murder, and it’s about time he had to stare it in the face. He’d gotten off easy for too long.
He feels the tendrils close tighter around him. They’d finished one meal and still had room for more.
Then death is interruped by a ninja star.
Dozens of them, cutting through the imprisoning snake pit. Thad falls and hits the ground and rolls. Wrong order on that last two, but he’s alive. Busted, pretty damn terrified, but alive.
He looks around for his saviors. They’re in the auditorium where it all went wrong. A murder drone, N, had switched his hands for lasers and was blasting away. A WDF drone, Khan, had a sticker-clad railgun. They wore matched expressions of determination.
Not the savior he expected, but who’s gun was that? Who’d led the murder drones here?
That synthetic voice. "We were not expecting guests. But I can make arrangements for more. Hey, watch where --- you're --- pointing --- that." The vocalsynth grows strained as lasers sever and disconnect more chunks of its eldritch extent.
Thad takes cover behind Khan, who doesn’t moved much compared to the much more acrobatic murder drone. Thad holds his pipe, but how to use it? Run up and smack a camera?
“Sorry, sunshine, but we’re not here to banter,” Khan says. “Just to win.”
By now, enough of the enshrounding tendrils had been disabled that the reconstructed body of V is visible, dancing out of the way of gunfire. But the bright yellow glow of her core is unmistakable.
N backpedals, shooting Thad a glance. He holds out his hand, and Thad tossed him the pipe.
“Wait,” V’s voice said. “I can’t explain, but if you assimilate, you’ll see—”
N leaps forward, thrusting the pipe like a spear and pinning the body to the wall.
“N. I’m so sorry.”
He tighted his expression, and looks away. “I wish I could forgive you.”
“Do me a favor? Please. You have to stay away from her before—”
But Khan had already pulled the trigger on his new railgun. N barely has time to hit the ground and roll away before all the eldritch mass is being devastated by a beam of pure energy.
The thing had put as many of its tendrils up to block as it could, but they all sag, and the fading light of a mutant core hits the ground, guttering like a candle.
Thad stands up and grins at N and Khan. “We… we did it. We won! I bet we could throw another shindig to celebra—”
Both of the other men flash looks of fear and surprise only moments before Thad’s interrupted. Both had even started into panicked motion, but none of them move fast enough.
Three claws rip Thad’s head off his neck, and a fanged maw is drinking deep of the gout of oil shooting up from his stump.
J tossed the worker’s head to the ground and crushes it beneath a peg. “No, I don’t think you have an event permit.”
“And who are you?” Khan asks. Banter was cheap, but both his and Uzi’s railguns were in cooldown and he needed time.
J just laughs.
Beneath her, Thad’s circuits flicker through their last thoughts. He lost. Again. What was Thad supposed to do, in the end?
Play ball, peak in high school, be the guy people thought of fondly, but not highly.
At least he did all that right. What a way to peak! If, after all of that, when shit gets real, he died like an extra, at least it was him and not someone else.
He still had a hope. There was still someone who could fix all this, right? Who built the gun? Who brought the chill murder drone here? Who still had a chance to shine?
Thad’s eyes search the distance as his head rolls across the ground. And, just before the Fatal Error consumes his visor, he got to see that beatiful glimmer of purple.
“You got this, ’Zi.”