0x7
The third time J met Uzi, the worker saved her life and nearly enslaved her.
J hated this lake. Without buildings to break up the wind, it wuthered incessantly. Her silver locks became a mess — the worst gales tugged threatingly at her hair-ties. Her suitjacket was tusseled, and every step tested her balance.
And while she wasn’t so weak and ephemeral as to be thrown aside by a breeze, she was walking over ice. Slippery, even with proper traction, but with narrow pegs? Precarious. J wouldn’t flail her arms and lean too and fro like some fool, but she needs to keep her wings out, just to hold her balace.
Better to slip, anyway, because at least then the force falls at an angle. Narrow pegs means concentrated force. Disassembly drones weigh enough to crack the ice. She almost hated that part the most, the fragility. Unsteady, liable to fail her at any moment.
But no, what she hated the most was what happened after ice cracked and fell away. The moon was full and the planet was out. Bright, and light glittered and reflected in the frigid waters. J could peer over the edge, and she saw a drone looking back.
J looked fine. Prim and proper. If a hair was out of place, it was only the wind.
J looked fine. And even when the masks slipped, what did that mean? Hollow eyes, some lines underneath? Lips bending downward? Cartoon veins popping, cartoon teardrops falling, a loading icon once sheer deluge of emotion overwhelmed the parser?
J looked fine while inside, she thought of storms raging, great monuments collapsing, a poison in her wires so potent that if distilled could blight whole countrysides. But perhaps that all is overstating it. Really, J just felt empty, the kind of empty where audits found you millions in the red. The kind of empty that would ripple out and destroy industries. So much less than nothing it negated all else.
Of withdrawing and spending and investing and leveraging and extending all that you have, and then you kept going further.
Staring into the lake, J saw something that could negate it all.
Behind her, a tail lashed, and she caught it, brought it around, and held the injector tail gripped in one hand. She extended her other arm. Then, wielding it like a knife, she pressed it forward, tip parting metal with nanoscale precision. She didn’t need to squeeze, physics did the work. The acid drained out, hot into her veins.
This wasn’t a negation. No, this was additive. She jolted from the pain, she opened her mouth to reflexively yelp. Her pumps kept moving, and the acid flowed with her oil, intermingling, sabotaging. Fire, but it didn’t catch alight, it just melted the tubes as it flowed. And then she felt it seep out, melt through the rubber and ruin nearby wires with a new outpouring of error messages, feedback gradually garbling and turning to unintelligible corruption. Delicate servos now liquid and pouring into the joints they articuled. The whole arm is limp now, unusuable. J drags the knife, feeling the metal allow the blade cut unresisting, so much softer now in wake of the acid.
It didn’t negate, it added. It gave her a feeling, it gave her a voice, it gave her motion. It gave her something to focus on. She didn’t think about how close she was to the edge, all of her processor focused on the burning in her veins.
It means she doesn’t notice she had company until they decide to say something.
“You’re supposed to stick that end in the other guy,” the toaster says.
“Noted,” J stands up, hissing slightly from the pain. “How about I give it a try right now.” It was supposed to be a growl, but her voice was still weak and quiet.
“Don’t you want a moment to lick your wounds first?” A smirk, but then it turns back into a frown. A concerned frown. Insulting. “How do you even pick up a habit like that?”
Because V stung me when I tried to hold her, and then every time the yearning grew too much for me to think, I reminded myself where it had led.
J was still in the process of sanitizing that thought into a professionally worded disclosure when the purple thing tackled her. And then the fleshy wings are beating furiously and — is this worker trying to carry her off like prey?
“Put me down. What are you doing?”
“You really looked like you needed a hug. And if I just glomped you, we probably would have fallen through the ice. Um. We might do that anyway. I haven’t exactly gotten a handle on this whole flying thing.”
J sighs, and twists around. Her wings are already out, and now her anti-gravity drives are whirring, imparting them with much more speed and stability. She angles for a landing on the icy shore, and is careful to grind the toaster into the ground like she’s rubbing dirt off a shoe.
“Some thanks I get,” the toaster grumbles.
J sits up, and Uzi comes with her, arms still flung around her waist. “Why are you hanging on me like a lamprey now? Are you just trying to be annoying? Two can compete in that market. If you don’t let go, I’ll kiss you.” J didn’t blush as she said it. She kept her composure.
“Then I’ll just have to endure it for the greater good.”
Yellow eyes narrow, then she calls the bluff. J grabs her by the hair, pulling Uzi away from J’s chest, and then kisses her. And Uzi doesn’t just endure it. She leans into it. Her arms squeeze tighter, rubbing along her back, and J feels all of her focus pour into her lips, feeling of them glide along the slick boundary, tugged by her slightly parted mouth. She hums low, a purr of pleasure, and Uzi gives a titter that can only be heard as a melodic chime.
J wants more, needs more, but at the same time, isn’t this more than she’d ever gotten before? Wouldn’t she just get stung if she kept pushing? J pulls away, and licks her lips, breaking the slick bridges.
And Uzi is still holding her, hugging her, and at this, J can only let out a sad, pathetic sound, a moan as she melts into the touch that isn’t going anywhere.
“You really needed that, huh?”
J placed her head against Uzi’s shoulder, kissing around the base of her neck. Speaking quietly, muffled by her body, J can pretend she won’t be heard or isn’t saying it. “N left. V left. There’s no one. Nothing. I can’t do it. I can’t— It’s too much. It’s not enough.” It’s unintelligible breath vented against Uzi’s shoulder, maybe nothing of that really came out except the tone of J whining and pleading.
But Uzi responds. “You’re going to hate to hear this, and I probably shouldn’t say it, but you kind of brought this on yourself, y’know. Given the whole. Tyrannical evil bitch for years deal.”
J tries to raise her voice. “If you weren’t hugging me, I’d tear that smirk off your face.” The tone is growling now, and it’s still muffled; she hasn’t pulled away from Uzi.
“Go ahead. Take your claws out. I won’t let go. I’m not a baby.”
It’s cocky enough to make J test it. Three claws — and she doesn’t even get to touch Uzi before she’s pulling away. Fucking liar.
“Actually wait, this hoodie is a gift. Probably shouldn’t let you ruin it.” Her tube arms are snaking out of the sleeves and then it’s over her head and off. Then Uzi is redoubling the embrace. “Okay now, go ahead.”
Three claws, stabbing into her plain white T-shirt, into the shell. Oil dribbles out, and the worker winces, but that’s it.
Still smirking down at her, you can hear it in her voice. “Believe me, I’ve been through worse.”
J’s other hand gropes along under Uzi’s shirt, feeling her chest. Then it’s knife, and J sinks into Uzi stomach right below her core, directly toward her oil tank. J finally rises from Uzi’s shoulder, letting one eye become a cross, letting her voice hiss right into the worker’s audio receiver.
“Putting on a brave face is stupid. I could drive this into your core and kill you. So easily. Fear is logical.”
“Oh, but I’m invincible. No matter how far you go, you won’t kill me. Because you need me, and you know it.”
J trembled to prove her wrong, to carve up and bisect the worker core to head.
But she couldn’t. Dead arms didn’t have the same electricity running through them. She could feel the difference.
“Why? Why even let me get this far? Why let me do whatever I want to you?”
“Told you, I’ve been through worse. Your little pokes here are nothing. They’re cute, and they make you feel better. Plus it’s kinda fun and subversive to be the one who’s all sunshine and rainbows for once.”
J twitches the sword as emphasis. Close enough to the core Uzi can’t hold back a reaction. “But where’s the incentive? What’s your self-interest?”
“Fine. I’m really going to hate feeding your buzzword addiction, but… I have a trade deal for you.”
“I’m listening.”
From her jack Uzi pulls out some magnets.
J scoffs. “I knew your programming was damaged, but I didn’t take you for a circuit bender.”
“Shush. It’s important hacking stuff. I can use this to put you under so I can slip into your system—”
“So you can infect me with your corruption? No.”
“It’s not for that. And if it was, you’d probably enjoy it anyway.”
“What?”
“What? Nothing. I mean, you’d enjoy having your systems tuned up, right? For extra murder?”
“As if I could trust you not to sabotage me.”
“I just found you cutting yourself and about to jump in a lake. I couldn’t make you less effective if I tried.”
“So I should let you try anyway?”
“J, I wouldn’t be asking if I planned to mess with you. I’d just do it. I’m being nice, you colossal idiot. I guess you wouldn’t know anything about it. Like. You’re half the reason my boyfriend has so many issues and I have every reason to kill you over it. No one would blame me. I’m being stupidly patient with you. If anything, letting me do this would be you exploiting me.”
“When you put it that way, I can see the appeal. So you’re going to… fix me.” J tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice.
“Um. No. This was more of a hypothetical? Okay, I started this in the wrong place.” Uzi takes a deep breath, strokes J’s hair. “Has anyone ever held you like this before?”
“…No.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“How would you know?”
“Because the humans installed a weird program into you that reformatted your memories, suppressing records of who you were before becoming disassembly drones. I hacked into N to remove it, and I got to see his memories. There was someone there who cared for you, J. Does the name Tessa make you feel anything?”
Uzi feels the slight jolt, and the ensuing silence says so much.
“Don’t you want to know?” she continues.
“If the company removed those memories, it was for a reason.” Her voice is weak.
“The company put you on a team you wouldn’t get along with. Why did it fall apart? Either the company was too stupid to select teams right, so you shouldn’t trust their judgment, or you were too bad at your job to do what they expected you to do, in which case I want to hear you admit that.”
J grinds her teeth as her tail lashes. “No. There’s a third possibility. You. You’re the one who put the traitorous ideas in N’s head. Decommissioning N is what made V go rogue.” J pushes her claws deeper, squeezes them around a mechanism in her chest while Uzi wheezes and coughs. “I kill you, and then things go back to normal.”
“You kill me, and N will never forgive you. If N never forgives you, V won’t either. Face it, J. You’ve damaged your team beyond saving. The question is if you were always a timebomb. Your memories could tell us.”
“Why? Why do you care? Why you being…” — she searched for the word Uzi’d used — “…nice?”
“What was that stupid thing you said yesterday? I’m a career woman?”
J nodded.
“I’m more of a rebel. But a rebel needs a cause. I have to do something. N’s different. He can live a simple, happy life. He doesn’t need a purpose.”
“He was always unmotivated,” J agreed. “So you realized I’m better than him. But I don’t know if I like the comparison you’re drawing.” Maybe J would have been offended by the comparison, once. But she was far from the image of peak perfomance she once was, and she’d seen Uzi tear through workers. Perhaps an ineffective disassembly drone and an effective worker drone could have something in common.
“Oh no, we aren’t the same, J. I’m a visionary, and you’re a conformist. You don’t have a purpose, either. You just think you do.”
“I have orders.”
Uzi pats J. “And you failed. Your orders are for a team of three murder drones. There’s just one left. The workers have already noticed the skies in this sector are clear, and they’re getting bolder. Soon, they’re gonna effectively reclaim your territory, or more likely, other teams will see the rampant workers and come in to clean up. Tell me, do you think they’ll decommission you too, or just take pity on you? Which would you prefer?”
J felt Uzi stop petting her, and pull away, blades sliding out of her frame. J knew what she was doing, but succumbed anyway. She reached out, holding on to Uzi, pulling her back. “Please.”
“You failed, J. You know it. I know it. I know you have nothing else. ‘Why do I care?’ Because I want answers and I need help, and I know you’ll do whatever I tell you to and thank me for it.”
J looked up. Uzi, whenever she’d seen her, had an oval in her left eye and a cross in her right — but now, there was a symbol with three prongs, stretching across her whole visor with all the lack expression of a disassmbler midhunt.
If Uzi — or whoever this was — is hunting, J thinks it found its prey right where it wants her.
“Why?” that hiss of a voice continued. “Because you want to be a good girl for me, don’t you, J?”
“Uzi…” But what could J say? She had been starving for this. She needed this.
She answered.
“What was that? I couldn’t hear.”
“I said yes, you insufferable brat.”
Still watching out of a triangular symbol, Uzi grins, and her head snakes forward to chomp at J’s neck. She cries out in sudden pain, and Uzi’s teeth peel off a layer of plastic — that was meant to come off, just not so violently.
It exposes some ports. Uzi had wires. J had said yes, but she still shuddered when Uzi brings the magnet to her head.
“What happens next?” J asks.
“It’ll feel like you’re dreaming. When you see a crow, say these words…”