0x5
The first time J met Uzi, they both wore the oil of Outpost-11.
J had been searching for the traitor again. V was no help, still laying in the landing pod chair like she was chained to it. Sometimes, J swore, she’d look more alive if there was an error message on her visor.
She hadn’t expected a toaster of all things to be what gave her the lead she needed. She sensed an electromagnetic disturbance, a signal transmitter, that led her right to a pack of rusty scavengers. Too stupid to even be scared of her. They talked, and J navigated their simplistic dialogue trees while a plan formed on her inner whiteboard.
It was a good plan. These scavengers had encountered the traitor and the toaster that had corrupted him, and had had a big argument over whether to reveal the location of their colony to N. J was smart enough to figure out what happened next. Not taking no for an answer, N (no, who was she kidding? That purple toaster was clearly calling the shots) had resorted to espionage.
J could use that against them. She left one worker alive, killed half a dozen others. But not all of them. Why? She needed to stay one step ahead of that toaster.
If they didn’t trust the simpering fool, they certainly wouldn’t trust J’s ruthless cunning, so she didn’t even bother asking them where their outpost was.
But they told her in due time. She’d taken them back to the spire, gave them each their own room, and waited. Her acid made an excellent truth serum. Redundancy meant she knew who was lying.
Then she killed them all.
After letting the acid sit another day and diffuse through their systems, of course. Predigesting the plastic like that gave it a sharp, smokey flavor.
She offered one to V. They could have dinner together. V took it back to the pod and ate alone.
J wanted to scream, but she kept her composure.
On her patrols, she’d detected and chased down disassembler-like emission patterns, but they always flew away or hid themselves before J could even pin down approximate coordinates. It had been a few days now, and still no sign of them. She’d checked her trap a few times, and again, nothing. Had N truly disappeared? Would her shame have no end?
She didn’t give up, but she did… reprioritize. So it’s a surprise when she’s doing a regular sweep of the sector and spots fleeing workers from the location she’d marked down as the scavenger’s colony.
That’s when she notices something off. Rather, she doesn’t notice something, and hadn’t in some time. The purple toaster’s tracker wasn’t emitting anymore. How many days had it been?
J flew toward the colony. Was N actually doing his job now that he’d been laid off? J cuts down the fleeing workers — they’re so terrified of what they’re running from that she hardly even needs targeting algorithms to shoot them.
Once the exterior is clear and J ventures inside, she only needed to follow the screams and flashes of purple light.
When she first saw Uzi, her first thought was: for a deeply corrupted AI, she cleans up nice. Not in terms of her appearance. Rather, her body was impressive. Well, the disgusting flesh augmentation was disgusting, but J’s stimulated by the prospect of being able to report a new datapoint, to be able flag her relay transmission as important. And it’s undeniably commendable how much work this one is saving J. Not that J would ever slack, or ever need the help, or couldn’t do better herself. But—
Her spate of bullets is caught in the anomalous holographic light responsible for so much of this strange worker’s effectiveness. Fine, J would just have to close to melee. J charges forward, but the winged worker is already skittering forth.
J’s claws are larger, her limbs are longer, her tail is nanite acid: The disassembly drone has the advantage. The only thing the worker boasts the telekinesis program. She flings rocks and pipes and sundered limbs. Improvised weapons could never match up against her highly optimized presets, but they just. keep. coming.
But even when J drives a sword through the worker’s hand, or holds one within her own to prevent execution, the worker is just relentless. Surging, bucking, scrambling. She laughs and snarls and growls. She’s like an animal.
A worker shouldn’t be able to keep up with a disassembly drone. Maybe she was something more. There’s so much force behind her blows, so much inventive creativity to how she fights, so much of her, that J is running at 100% CPU usage just trying to keep up. She’s never had to push that hard.
She has to fall back on instinctive responses, cache her attack patterns and gamble on invest in risky approaches. It becomes less a fight than a dance. The worker keeps laughing, and it’s only because the disassembler is drawing so deep on instinct that she doesn’t fight the smile that creeps onto her face.
Even with all this, even as J gives all that she has, the worker overwhelms her. She frees a hand and heals enough to levitate a massive slab of concrete. J’s knocked off her feet, and she can recover, but those few moments, and the ensuing scramble to stay balanced on her pegs, means that J has lost the leading rhythm, and she’s fighting to keep up. The worker presses forward, closer and closer, and J is backing up. She backed against the wall.
J swipes and the worker catches it, rips off one of her claws and drives it into in her chest. J screams from two pains. The mad flailing of her limbs is easy to counter, even for prey. The worker mashes her hip against J’s and holds down both of her arms.
J is running on instinct, autopilot, cached instructions. And yet still, she can’t tell you what instinct inspired her next attack — if you ask, she was just drawn by the smell of oil.
J snarls and lunges, teeth forward. It meets the worker’s mouth.
Two sets of blush marks bloom bright.
Uzi flinches back with speed even pain couldn’t provoke. J is released. The purple symbol falters and glitches, tearing into round eyelights. Uzi takes a step back, another, staring at the murder drone unreadably. Then she turns and runs away.
“Wait, don’t… go.”
J fell to the ground, and her eyes are pricked with yellow tears, and her core gapes with a new, inarticulable wound.
Alone, rejected, her chassis is starving for someone to touch it — even with the point of a knife.
The second time J met Uzi, the murder drone might’ve done anything the worker asked. That’s why she tried to kill her.
The spire isn’t meant to be this empty. Not for days at a time. The space, the silence, the sorrow, it crushes J — enough to elicit a physical gasp. She shudders with sobs more like a reaction to a physical blow.
J stifles the sound, and keeps her visor clear and neutral. No one wants to see tears in the workplace. It doesn’t matter that no one was around to witness it. She has a job to do.
She’s going through the motions, perching longer than usual on the rooves of buildings as she surveys her domain. She shouldn’t dally, not when she had to do the work of three drones, but… why bother?
Then she feels the familiar tickle on her electromagnetic senses. The transmitter. It was turned on again?
Thinking through whatever corruption or internal sabotage had clogged her thoughts meant J is slower on the uptake than usual, but perching there, that persistent annoyance of a radio transmitter, J figures it out.
Just like J had seen the transmitter and intuited the purple toaster’s plan, the toaster must have noted J’s presence and intuited her machinations. J had turned the toaster’s own tracker into bait, planning to lure the toaster back, find the worker J left and follow it to the outpost. Now the toaster had turned the tables once again, using the transmitter to lure J in turn.
This had to be a trap, right?
But she was Serial Designation J. She could face any toaster head on. She wouldn’t be daunted.
So what did she feel quickening her core and dilating her time perception. More corruption?
The worker is leaning against the wall on the roof of a hotel, wings folded, tail placid. There are two poles which some manner of signage once hung between. The sign had fallen but the poles remained, some lingering wiring spilling out.
“Sup,” says the worker.
J opens with machine gun fire. But the anomalous light is still present. There goes her element of surprise. J wasn’t in top form today, was she?
When J dives for the worker, purple eyes roll, and once she’s a few feet away from pouncing, a net surges upward, wires wrapping around her. When it’s all pulled taut, J hangs bound in a tight bundle hanging between the two poles. Those wires weren’t part of the signage, it turns out.
The worker smiles like it got one over on J. So J growls and tears into the netting with her claws. Then another flash of purple light, and and electric current is thrumming through the wiring, flowing immediately into the metal of J’s claws. Servos malfunction, circuits blow, and J briefly goes offline.
When she’s online again, that smug little face is still staring at her. Even closer now, leaning forward like J is some exhibit to gawk at.
“So.”
“So?”
“Isn’t there something you want to say?”
J doesn’t really have room to cross her arms, but she tries. “I didn’t think you were worth preparing a monologue for.”
“I mean ‘sorry’ for a start.”
“Why would I ever apologize. To a barely sentient toaster, no less.”
“The name’s Uzi,” she said. She scowls. “We were having an epic life or death struggle and then you made it weird!”
“It worked, didn’t it? I’ll do whatever it takes to succeed. Call it cutthroat business practices.”
“It’s called cutthroat. Not tongue-down-my-throat! It’d rather you slit my neck than be so gross.”
“Free me and I’ll be sure to twist the knife.”
But Uzi is continuing. “So that’s it? That’s all it was? You were just messing with me? I guess that’s… Maybe that’s less complicated.”
“It would have to be simple. I assure you, your AI could hardly handle complicated.”
“You fell into my trap.” Uzi’s pressed forward for emphasis.
“Is this all it takes to make you think you’ve won? Too easy.”
“Keep talking and I’ll turn on the current again.”
They’d gotten closer to each other through the exchange. Very close, with only net and a few inches separating them.
“Want to do it again?” J asks.
“What?”
“The… life or death struggle part. It’s a slow day, I could fit you into my nine o’ clock.”
“Depends. Are you going to kiss me again?”
“Is it going to work again?”
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t do it. I’m taken.”
“By who? I last saw you killing toasters by the dozen.”
“It’s a secret. But you already know he’s alive, don’t you? It’s N. We’re not — it’s not official. But like. I’ve already kissed him. So it’d be weird.”
“Dump him.”
“I am not leaving N for you.”
“Me? Why would I ever date you? No, just a general bit of advice. He’s worthless and terrible. Even a corrupted, full of herself toaster with tactical hangups could do better.”
“Insult him again and I’m turing on the current and leaving you till the sun comes up.”
Amber eyes stared, hollowed but narrowed.
Uzi continued, “But… No, you aren’t right. But maybe you’re like, coincidentally on to something. Maybe I should… He’s amazing, and — Don’t say it, whatever you’re about to say. Good. See? Murder drones can be taught. I’d know all about it, hehe. But as I was saying, he’s amazing but… I don’t know if I can do this.”
“I came to fight, not to do therapy.”
“Just listen. I don’t care what you have to say. It’d be terrible advice, anyway. But I have literally no one else to talk to.”
“Then stop killing them,” J suggested. “Is that the terrible advice you want?”
Uzi continued, ignoring her. “We met this couple up in the mountains. And they just like, sit around raising pillbabies and playing with their dog. N thinks they’re so happy, but I just think it seems boring. And I wonder: is that my future? And, I can’t. I can’t be some wife on a farm raising kids, even if the farm is a gothic cathedral with a sick graveyard.”
J nodded. “You’re a career woman,” she said sagely.
“Is this like, a bit that you do? Can you stop?”
“Can you stop the angsty teen melodrama? Build your communication skills. It’s what a relationship requires.”
“What if he’ll be hurt that I think his idea of a happy life is so lame?” A pause, then Uzi added, “And if your next sentence contains the words ‘retirement plan’, ‘pivot’, or ‘long-term projections’, I’m turning on the current.”
“You keep making that threat.”
“You keep responding so well to it.”
“Look, I have a much more practical suggestion. Cut me down, and let me talk to N.”
“Heck no. You’re just going to kill him.”
“Of course. Not. Of course not.”
Uzi sighs. “I think I’ve gotten all I’m going to get out of this conversation.”
“Wait. Before you go…”
Kiss me again.
Hug me.
Just… touch me.
But she couldn’t say any of that.
“You know, if you hate me so much, you have the perfect opening to strike.”
“You’re… telling me to hit you.”
“I’m informing you of a tactical opportunity you failed to capititalize on.”
“Why? What are you getting out of this? Oh god, are you making this weird too?”
“It’s not weird. You’re one who has me tied up.”
Uzi raised a hand, forms a fist, but is still frowning. “Hm. If I really want to piss you off, I can’t give you what you want.” She opened her fist, then she reaches out anyway.
And he places her hand on J’s head between her pig-tails, patting and rubbing and scratching.
“What — What are you doing? Stop that. I’m not some pet for you to—”
“Good girl.”
“You’re making this weird.”
Uzi flashed a >:3 on her screen. Then a symbol flares to life above her palm. “Anyway, I can’t have you following me. So, enjoy the electrocution. Not an empty threat now, hehe. Don’t worry, it’s not hooked up to the grid. The battery will run out before sunrise.”
J held her head down. She hadn’t looked up to met Uzi’s eye since the headpat. Otherwise she’d have seen the blush marks.
But she still spoke: “Wait… will I see you again?”
“Not if I see you first.”
And then the came the arcing pain of raw energy coursing through J, obliterating her.
And yet, after having someone talk to her, touch her, be there with her — the electric surge hurt less than all the days that came before.
That relief lasts until she cast her eyes toward to the future. And felt the great ache of realizing that those few seconds of condescending, spite-fueled headpats and a conversation more empty vitriol than meaning… they would be the only thing J had to smile about, outshining anything, everything she could foresee.
Before the power surge took her offline, J realized for the first time in years, she didn’t look forward to clocking in to work tomorrow.