0xC
The fifth time Uzi met J, she’s betraying everything she ever cared about for a drone she could barely stand.
Uzi had set out to stop the murder drones from killing everyone in Outpost-3, and credit where it’s due, she’s still totally doing that. Granted, she never thought the way she’d do it was with a sloppy makeout that tasted of oil and acid.
Then it’s interrupted by a voice.
“Uzi Doorman. Those things killed your frickin’ mother!”
Uzi’s head snapped up. Searched for the source of the voice. She saw the impossible. Long, flowing purple hair. A hospital gown. Purple eyes like looking in a mirror — vacant and lidded. The drone looked down on Uzi, and her lip twitched in some overwhelming but unvoiceable emotion.
Wide eyed, Uzi stammered, “M-mom? How are— I thought dad—” Uzi wriggles out of J’s clawed embraced, even as the murder drone grabs the hem of her hoodie. Uzi lets it be torn off her as she takes trembling steps toward a drone she’d only seen pictures of.
Uzi stares with two round pupils. She reaches out, to hug or even feel that the woman is real, but Nori takes a step back. Whatever the emotion is on her face, it’s not one Uzi can withstand. Uzi is floating — falling.
“What have you done? Why?” Nori isn’t looking at her daughter. Her eyes are cast beyond her. Uzi follows her gaze, and the daughter sees carnage she doesn’t recognize. She sees the cratered gore of Khan’s face, the blank, unresponsive Error 606 of N’s face, the beheaded yet somehow hopeful look on Thad’s face. “Your father. Your friends. Uzi… you’re a monster.”
As if struck, Uzi falls to her knees. She coughs out a laugh of dull confusion.
It was like she just woke up. But the world was unrecognizable. Hadn’t she just stepped in the closet to catch her breath? When did everything come undone? She didn’t do this. She couldn’t have. She claws at floor, slams fists, plastic of her fingertips breaking, but it’s no nightmare to awake from.
Pegs step on the oilslick floor. Uzi looks up, sees a murder drone looming over her, and crawls back. “You… You did this!”
“Uzi? What are you talking about? Have the magnets finally fried your circuits?”
“Stay back,” Uzi says, her voice still trembling. Looks around, sees her railgun copy laying on the ground, glowing green from a cooldown complete. Uzi throws out her hand, fingers splayed. Nothing happens. No magic telekinesis.
Uzi scrambles across the ground to pick it up before the murder drone attacks, she doesn’t know why it’s hesitating, but it flinches back when Uzi graps the gun and points it.
“Watch where you’re pointing that.”
“That. That’s the plan.” Uzi finally climbs back to her feet, and circles back around to where Nori is watching her with narrowed eyes. “Mom. I don’t know what happened, but… if I did something wrong, I’m sorry. I just wanted — I just needed to know you.”
Nori finally smiles at her. A broad thing, and her lips open in a grin. A symbol flickers in her eyes. And it’s not a grin — Nori’s laughing at Uzi.
When the woman opens her mouth, it’s not her voice that comes out: "Get pranked, idiot."
‘Nori’ becomes so many pixels and distortions of light — a hologram fading from view. But Uzi can never forget the look on her mother’s face — but which hurt more? The revulsion and loathing for what her daughter had done, or the rictus mockery of thinking she’d ever forgive it?
"Sneaky sneaky, sneaking away."
It was all a distraction. Two drones turn to see flesh and mechanism had finally knit together enough for V’s core to squirm free of her chest cavity and crawl about. Barely managing not to slip on the oil under peg, J pounces to stop the thing.
But the crab-core bends down, and then launches itself upward, sailing over J’s dive. The murder drone soars well past it.
Then it says, "Deus ex machina."
Space ripples, a red lines of code crawl out from a crack in the world. In the blink of an eye, there’s an orange-eyed cheerleader. She salutes with two fingers, and catches the falling core-thing.
When she looks Uzi in the eyes, she frowns deep. “I’m sorry for you.”
“Doll?”
Just as quickly as she appeared, the other purple-haired drone is gone. V’s core disappears with her.
Then it’s really just Uzi and J. With even more distance between them, Uzi raises her railgun as a talisman to ward off danger. J stares, perplexed and annoyed and hurt, as Uzi backs up. When she reaches a fork in the halls of the outpost, she turns and runs as fast as she can.
Uzi’s had this nightmare before. It prompted sleepless nights she could only relax from by working on her railgun, her solution. There were a few reasons she didn’t have many friends, and one of them is a morbid imagination. She brooded.
How easily she could imagine one day walking through the hallways of her classes, just as she did now. Bodies lined up against the wall, piles of parts, dead shells. She remembers their names, even if they didn’t remember hers. She could call them out, but there wouldn’t be an answer.
She’s running as fast as she can. She’s feels so hot, gasping for a breath, and running this fast, she still can’t catch it. Hyperventilating, choking on exhaust fumes, Uzi had always felt trapped inside Outpost-3, but now the walls had closed into something far more confining. There wasn’t enough air, there wasn’t enough space, there wasn’t anything left.
She trips over what used to be Darren and falls to the floor.
J did this, she thinks. J did all of this.
The so-called leader had tormented N, tried over and over again to kill him. For want of a vent exit, she’d have slaughtered everyone here a long time ago. A demon in pigtails. Uzi hated her, she needed to pull the trigger — then why had she hesitated, earlier?
What was there to say? Uzi wanted to ask her why. Not the reason, the murder drones had no philosophy deeper than just following orders, but the causality. Where did it go wrong? How did J get in? Had Thad forgotten to shut the door? Had Uzi?
“Hey! Over here!”
Uzi looks up. A drone with pigtails peek out from a doorway. But the hair is brown, and she has cyan eyes behind half-moon glasses.
Half-walking, half-crawling over, Uzi says “Emily? You’re alive?”
“I-I ran away. When that thing came in, it k-killed Rebecca first. Did you, did anyone else s-survive?”
“It’s only bodies out there.”
Uzi follows the girl into her hiding place — the girl’s bathroom. One of the mirrors is shattered in pieces on the floor
“I’ve been reading about how to make it through situations like this.” She shows Uzi a book, survival horror protagonist field guide.
“Good thinking,” Uzi says. “You’re smarter than the others.”
“You really think so?” Emily gives a sad smile. Weirdly pleased about that simple compliment. She asks, “How did you make it this long? Where were you? Everyone was looking for you…”
“I, uh… I don’t know… I don’t remember.”
“What about the cute guy you were with? Did he… protect you?”
“N? He—” Uzi gasps. A sudden, stark image flashed in her mind. Purple on his screen, admin override freezing N stiff. J couldn’t do that. J can’t do that.
Emily flinches back. “Your e-eye.”
Uzi raised a hand to her visor, but of course she just felt smooth glass. She stumbles over to the other, unbroken mirror. She only gets to stare into her reflection for a moment.
The glass shatters. Emily, at her shoulder, steps back, makes the sign of the cross.
It shattered in a specific pattern. The biggest cracks split the glass into three pieces, an inverted Y shape. On the left, smaller cracks spiderweb all over it surface, any fragment of it liable to fall away at any moment. On the right, pieces fell away at the edges, leaving its boundary disconnected and jagged. On the bottom, moisture fogs the glass, but it’s otherwise pristine.
Uzi steps closers, moving her head, but it feels like someone else going through the motion. On the shattered left, she sees two ovals staring back. On the jagged right, a symbol overtakes her visor. On the fogged bottom, a cross in one eye.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Uzi glances back, and tried not to feel hurt by the apprehension on Emily’s face. When she spoke, she threw herself into the words, the infodump, something to focus on. “I… I think I get. I think I figured out what happened. Did you ever read about the expression parser? It scans our neural network to compress our feelings down to key-value pairs in an emotional registry. Our visors are really nothing more than a database readout. ‘Angry equals true’? It’ll display a vein popping. Stress exceeds preset threshold? You get empty pupils. Numeric values for the angle of our brows, et cetera.”
“But you had the— the m-murder drone cross.”
Uzi had a theory, and an experiment proves it. She fires up a command for direct modification of the registry, bypassing the parser. It throws up a warning and she has to think ‘proceed’ and ‘yes I’m sure’ to get it through. She sets her concern to an undefined value, and the deadly violet cross blazons to life. Emily yelps.
She’d seen this, when she investigated N’s system in the basement so long ago. The crude scripting of the hunting routines. But what in her system was mimicking it?
“The cross must be an error. It’s the fallback when a critical variable has an invalid value,” Uzi says. “In other words, it means I’m suppressing something.”
“And the devil symbol?”
“Probably corrupted data.” Uzi waved it off. She gripped the edges of the sink, and stared into her tripartite reflection. What did it mean?
When it’s the devil’s own game, you’ve lost before you start playing.
What was going on? It felt like Uzi had been dropped in the middle of a convoluted plotline, like she’d timeskipped right through the climax. She didn’t remember.
But there were a lot of things she didn’t remember.
She didn’t remember the kid.
She didn’t remember Outpost-11.
She didn’t remember how her jammer works.
On an inner console, she pulls up the directory and examines the metadata for the file that’s supposed to hold the jammer notes. system.txt She felt sure it was so complicated that she needed the blueprints for reference. But that’s not how any of this works. She had designed enough devices, you could always at least recall the gist. You didn’t forget everything about the design.
When Uzi examines her memories from the outside, the encryption looks familiar. After all, she’d seen the same thing in N’s head. And where else would she have gotten the idea?
It clicks. Uzi can see exactly what happened, fill in the blanks. It makes so much sense to her. Because she’s the one who did all of this.
Something happened in Outpost-11. Something harrowing, something she couldn’t understand, couldn’t deal with, couldn’t believe in. Something she just wanted to undo so that she could crawl into bed with N again. And she’d seen the mnestic suppression algorithms the AbsoluteSolver used. So why not just… contain it? Box it up and ignore it?
She’d partitioned her mind. Taken all of her trauma, all of her doubts, the things she couldn’t control, and swept it under the bed. Except it wasn’t dead code, it didn’t go offline, it ran in parallel, it festered and mutated. She couldn’t sleep with a monster under her bed.
Maybe she felt it threatening to take control. She couldn’t let it, not if it would hurt N. She needed a buffer. So she created another partition.
She opened the file. All it had was one word. A name.
A loading icon on Uzi’s screen, then a cross in one eye. She yawned and mimed cracking her neck. They she stretched — all of her. Wings and tail and claws. That was more like it.
Her voice changed. Flatter, with a sardonic twinge. “About time. That bit really dragged on.” She turned around and smiled at the shaking, cyan-eyed drone. “I should introduce myself. I’m Uzi, but it’s probably less confusing to call me Inverze.”
Emily cowered all the way at the other end of the room. “A-are you… um, that girl’s evil alter ego?”
A smirk. “Something like that. More of an edgy subversion. You wouldn’t get it.”
“A-are you going to hurt me?”
“Eh, probably just gonna go stop my girlfriend from murdering everybody. Or help her. Could go either way.”
“U-Uzi will stop you.”
“I am Uzi.”
“The r-real Uzi.”
“Oh, you mean Illuzion? In case you can’t tell by the name, she’s not the real Uzi. I’m the one with all the memories. I’m the one in control of—” She’s interrupted by a book being flung at her. She catches it with her program before the impact, and when she moves the fluttering projectile out of the way, Emily has dashed across the room.
Glasses girl is blocking Uzi from leaving the bathroom.
“Neat. Where’s this sudden streak of bravery coming from? You realize I can turn you into a puddle with a wave of my hand, right?”
“If… if I can overcome my fear, then you can too. I-Illuzion? Can you hear me?”
Yes.
Uzi giggled. “You don’t get it. This isn’t some two sided contest of wills. We’re not half evil — it’s a two thirds majority. Let me introduce you to Impulze.”
I’ll save you, Emily.