Serpentine Squiggles

I. 

So, a quick recap since it’s been a while since I talked about Corrupt Combustion. Bear in mind that even when we cover the established timeline, a bunch of things are going to be retconned recontextualized.

(Now, I’m not taking it completely from the top, read the intro posts if you need that, but do note that specific details of how corruption works and what disassembly drones are have been revised since then.)

The story begins with Uzi and Doll giving a presentation on zombies. Rather, it’s Doll reading the slides from the presentation she made, only for Uzi to interrupt and start ranting. You know how it goes; “And what have our parents done for the past forever while the world’s in a frickin zombie apocalypse? Hide our powers behind this lame as hell masquerade? Anyway, that’s why my project is this totally game‍-​changing error blaster!” Teacher rolls his eyes, and the class cringes, only for the gun to glow ominously. Doll tries to save Uzi, which only amounts to the blast hitting both of them.

They’re sent to the repair ward. Along the way they meet Thad, who mentions that Nori and Yeva are out of the outpost on a mission to investigate a rootkit sighting. Uzi and Doll share a devious look, and begin to plot sneaking out.

Next chapter would be Nori’s pov, proceeding about identically to her write up, where she saves the Teacher and the Detective from a zombie bearing one of Cyn’s corrupting threads. Yeva’s pseudo‍-​disassembly drone prosthetics are busted in the fight, and Alice is charged to repair it‍ ‍—‍ in the process, Alice confirms that whatever Nori & Yeva had seen, it has something to do with the Nightshade Incident, something only the three of them know about; the Nightshade document one of the Wheel Group’s most deeply encrypted files.

While all this is happening, Uzi and Doll manage to find a mid‍-​level zombie and struggle to take it down. Uzi’s error blasters still don’t work, but at the edge of defeat, Doll ignites her core, and avoids the zombie’s killing blow, launching into a counter‍-​attack. Her defense and offense is seemingly enabled by the environment (industrial ruins, perhaps?), which seemingly to conspire against the zombie and in favor of Doll. Either impossibly unlikely coincidence, or impossibly meticulous planning, or, somehow, foresight?

Doll’s able to scramble to Uzi’s error blaster, and her newfound corruption is exactly what was missing to activate the gun. Doll defeats the zombie, but they both take credit. (It’s Uzi’s gun, to be fair.)

(In the midst of the fight, while she’s at the zombie’s mercy, something happens to Uzi, too, but not what’s supposed to happen. Her core doesn’t ignite. But neither does nothing happen‍ ‍—‍ she gets a message on her inner console. Error: core driver not found. Uzi does her best to repress this, ignoring its implications. It can’t be true. Nori has a driver, all her friends have drivers, why would she be any different? Error means something’s wrong, but it could be anything‍ ‍—‍ maybe it’s the error that’s wrong, actually.)

At the outpost, Alice picks up Beau from where he was being babysat by Makarov. When they’re back at Alice’s cabin, she takes a harsh tone with Beau, half yelling, half whispering. It’s not quite anger‍ ‍—‍ though there’re shades of frustration‍ ‍—‍ it’s fear. These are awful omens. Bad things are coming, things even Alice can’t protect him from, and Beau needs to man up or die, and Alice isn’t going to let him die.

They spar, and things proceed along the lines of his write‍-​up; Alice sets her captive sentinels to attack Beau, only for both of them to be surprised that a zombie process has possessed one of the sentinels. Beau activates his disassembly drone arm to fend off beast, but he’s ultimately overwhelmed. Nori arrives to save him.

After that, Nori makes Beau an effective member of the Wheel Group, and he starts going to class with the rest of the Wheel Group cadets. In a way, the social dynamics are a splash of cold water. His sincere and kindhearted attitude immediately marks him as uncool among the high status boys‍ ‍—‍ Chad, Brad, and Darren‍ ‍—‍ and his disassembly drone arm sees him dismissed as freaky by the Lizzy, Rebecca and Doll clique.

The first drone who catches his eye is of course Nori’s daughter, Uzi. But as soon as he opens a conversation bringing up her mom, Uzi wants nothing to do with him. She’s sick of people always comparing her, getting disappointed that she’s not living up to standard of the greatest solver, the savior drone. It’s a wound that’s extra raw, in the wake of her failure to ignite a core.

And if Uzi puts extra emphasis on her fiery dismissal of Beau, with longing glances toward Doll, well, Beau can guess what’s going on.

There’s a bit more nuance to it, though. You see, two pretty big things happened in the week or so before Beau joined class. Doll attracted attention and adoration for igniting her core, of course, with half a dozen drones batting eyes at her when just last week she was an unlikeable loner with Uzi.

The story changes, day by day, and soon in the version of events everyone’s recounting, Doll’s entirely responsible for saving the both of them from the zombie. (And how far is that from the truth?) Day by day, there’s more people who want to hang out or train with Doll, and instead of spending every evening with Uzi, it’s less and less common.

Then Lizzy’s selfie goes viral. Specifically, she took a selfie in front of a defeated murder drone. A cadet, taking down a ring 1 threat? One day, everyone’s talking about Doll, the next, everyone’s talking about Lizzy. But Doll’s impressed too, and it’s the kind of feat that lets Lizzy skip the front of the line for Doll’s attention.

And then Lizzy posts another selfie‍ ‍—‍ this one is her and Doll hanging in front of a defeated murder drone, cementing them as an inseparable power duo no one wants to mess with.

And‍ ‍—‍ she never sees it happens, but it’s obvious from how they’re acting‍ ‍—‍ Lizzy said something to Doll. Something that made her change how her best friend looked at her. Something that drove a wedge, something that ruined everything.

So in midst of all of this, Uzi seethes. She rants in the halls, acts out in class, picks fights. She loudly insists it’s not because she wants Doll to pay attention to her again, but every time Lizzy & Doll look at her and blonde snickers while the russian lets her, you can see her expression break.

Watching all of this from the outside, Beau keeps his head down. Nori arranged for Thad to train him on how to fight after school. (He’s the only cadet ranked as high as semi‍-​ring 1, though there’s talk of promoting Lizzy given her latest stunt).

Despite (or perhaps because) of his low status, Beau manages to form a kind of friendship with Sam and Emily. Together, the three of them are Ring 4 solver drones (or an anomalous semi‍-​disassembly drone in the case of Beau).

Sam’s driver is [Substitution]. With the snap of his fingers, he can swap states with another drone. If either one is damaged, then the damage is ‘traded’ from one to the other. The trade can be blocked, but in order to block it, the target must ‘bid’ more command output than Sam invested in the function. One only needs to worry about this when inflicting damage with the technique, as few would try to block Sam removing their injuries. For this reason, he sees his role as support; when his allies take a beating, he snaps his fingers and suffers for them. (He’s taken to using magnets to dull the pain.)

Emily’s driver is [Consecration]. By drawing a cross, Emily can create a ‘ward’, a partial firewall that corruption cannot pass through. Emily’s wards are special; they resist corruption perfectly, as if XORing their bits with themselves. There’s a catch, of course‍ ‍—‍ they cancel all corruption, including her own.

This puts Emily in an odd position; her driver inadvertently makes her the weakest solver drone. Corrupt combustion requires oil ignited with corrupt data. Errors yield errors; using corruption creates more corruption, and so most solvers are limited by the fact that too much corruption will overload and crash their systems. Because Emily’s builtin command destroys corruption, she struggles to maintain enough corruption to even execute commands

Beau, Sam, Emily… the three of them all think the same thing. I can’t do anything special, I’ll never be a real solver, I’m worthless.

Thad thinks this is a bogus attitude. One day, on a lark, he teaches them to play football, and their performance there is about as inspiring. It has nothing to do with their abilities, and everything to do with their attitude. “For real? Are you even trying? You need to get your head in the game. Play to win!”

He complains about it to Nori during one of his reports, and Nori rolls her eyes. She has a different idea. “We just need to stop babying them. No one ever learned how to survive on the playground. There’s only one way to teach a drone to be a solver. Sink or swim.”

Thad frowns. “Seems a bit… cruel, doesn’t it? Isn’t that exactly what Alice did to him—”

“No.” Nori crosses her arms. If her voice had risen just then, it would be wiser not to comment on it. “There’s one crucial difference.”

“What?”

“We’ll ask. If they don’t want to do it, they can stay in the kiddie pool.”

“A kiddie pool will still fry your circuits.”

Nori shrugs.

But if the great Nori Doorman thinks it’ll make them stronger, who would say no? A coward who’ll never save anyone? A washout who’ll never amount to anything?

Still, none of them say ‘yes’ immediately; they’re all scared, but Nori lays it on thick. Fact is, if they aren’t willing to put their lives on the line, what use are they to the Wheel Group? Maybe they could keep trying, maybe they’ll be ready one day. But every zombie is a threat to someone, and to refuse this mission is to say they value the certainty of saving their own lives over the chance of saving someone else.

“And if that’s what you’re about, no shame in it. But admit it.”

They’re scared to agree to the mission‍ ‍—‍ but now they’re scared of what it means if they don’t. And that’s how Beau, Sam, and Emily go on their first zombie hunting mission.

For all that Nori talked it up, they were careful and it was, if not safe, fairly constrained. Two Ring 3 zombies festering in an old warehouse. Definitely above their pay grade, but not something they couldn’t take down if they worked together and got their heads out of their asses long enough to realize their true potential. On paper, it was as close to a perfect teeth‍-​cutting mission as they come.

How does it go wrong? Remember what emerged from the data center rootkit? A zombie infected with one of Cyn’s thread, appearing out of nowhere, with a blackhat and disassembly drones there to guard it? Nori and Yeva killed every threat present‍ ‍—‍ but there was something watching the Wheel Group admins and WDF as they cleaned up the scene.

Yeva didn’t call attention to it, she doesn’t even get a good look at whatever it was. All she knows is that if she or anyone else were to look up to the rooftops at a certain angle that night, their screen would explode into glass shards. Was that a blackhat plotting in the shadows? Or an oddly patient zombie? It went down in the debrief, but no one could account for its significance.

Whatever it was, it was good at staying out of sight, and that’s exactly what it does as Thad leads the trio to the site of their mission.

They reach the warehouse, and Thad throws up a firewall to keep out worker drones. (His ability to create firewalls is second only to Yeva.) He looks gravely at the trio. “Sorry about this but… if you run into trouble in there, I can’t save you. Orders, y’know.”

And so they enter, exploring the dank darkness, jumping at the shadows of crates. They run into the first of the zombie pair, a thing like slender branching lizard. Its maneuvering alone is enough to splits them up, and when it’s about to deliver a corruption‍-​poisoned strike to Beau, there’s the hiss of knive‍-​wings cutting the air, and a disassembly drone‍ ‍—‍ V‍ ‍—‍ swoops in to decapitate the zombie.

Beau’s confused at a murder drone rescue, but V provides clarity. “Oh, I’m not saving you. I’m here to make this much worse.”

She throws up her head to let out a keening shriek. The drones shiver in pain and fear, but the true purpose is luring out the other zombie, something like a CRT on spider legs. V pounces on the thing, and from her jacket pocket she produces a jar. Inside the jar? A glowing yellow thread.

Malevolent metadata floods the atmosphere of the warehouse when the jar is uncorked, and V dumps the thing onto the pinned zombie. Cyn’s thread wriggles like a worm before latching onto one of the oily wires of the zombie like a leech. They can feel Cyn’s corruption flooding and empowering the thing. V steps back with a smile. “This should be fun.”

“What are you doing?” Emily asks.

“You don’t need to worry about it.”

“I don’t know, it seems pretty worrisome…”

“No, I mean you don’t need to worry about it. You won’t live that long, after all.” V cackles, visor to a cross, while Emily’s pupils go hollow. “But think of it as a surpise present for the ones who sent you.”

Beau and Sam square up to fight, and it’s about then that Thad thunders through the wall, striking a dramatic pose with his trusty pipe at the ready. He flashes an awkward smile to the trio. “Sorry to break my word, but dealing with the manor demon is a bit higher priority, heh.” He glances between the zombie swelling with errors and V. “That disassembly drone feels weaker. Think you can handle it? It won’t be a rescue, then.” He winks, and rushes toward the threadbearing zombie.

(This fight is probably a good place to introduce what Thad’s driver is. First, his command output has a special quality. It feels oddly… sturdy? Which renders his ability to reinforce things without equal. How else could he fight? That trusty pipe of his is a pitiful thing, cracked and rusted, held together with spit, duct‍-​tape and hope. And corrupt command output, of course‍ ‍—‍ his builtin function is [True Grit], which strengthens things at their weakpoints. If something is about to fall apart, he’s able to render it almost indestructible. As they say, always count on Thad to hold steady.)

V fights the trio at this point, and the matchup is not close. Three on one should offer some advantage, but V is fast, and rapidly switching between claws and guns and swords. Still, the three can reinforce and even regenerate, enough to survive for seconds. Enough for Beau to grab V with his disassembler arm, holding her in place while Sam and Emily pile on translated crates.

V growls‍ ‍—‍ not frustration, or anger, but annoyance. “J told me to keep this secret, but if you’re going to be this obxnoxious…” One of her eyes becomes a three‍-​pronged solver glyph.

That alone is enough to freeze them in shock. A disassembly drone, using solver commands? But then their visors all explode.

They fall to the ground screaming, and V throws the crates off of her, taking her time lining up a sword to pierce Beau.

But just after V’s attack hit Emily, Emily drew the sign of the cross‍ ‍—‍ activating [Consecration].

You see, the reason solvers can’t simply regenerate from the damage V’s function inflicts is that it’s V’s corrupt commands that inflicts it. The residual corruption impedes the target’s restoration function. On top of that, because V gains control over the broken shards, she’s continually feeding more corruption into her targets, making it that much harder to heal from.

Of course, Emily’s function destroys corruption. Thus V’s connection is cut off, and her residual corruption is purged. Emily can simply heal her visor. In that moment, she has a second thought. “Sam! Trade with me!”

Normally, Sam trades the other way, taking on his allies’ injuries. It feels cruel to hurt Emily‍ ‍—‍ but she can heal, she insists. And so Sam does the swap, allowing Emily to‍ ‍—‍ but she can’t heal it, not until she draws the sign of the cross again. No time to think about that for an instant; now Sam is charging into the fray to save Beau from getting impaled.

V looks up, annoyed, long enough to activate her function again. And nothing happens. Why? When Sam had traded with Emily, he took her ward!

Then Sam trades with Beau, taking his broken visor, then trades with Emily, who’d already healed the two broken visors.

As Sam engages V in hand to hand, he has an idea. He tells Emily to ward her arm, then he trades that from her, and like that, his defense against V’s sword is compounded.

Tricks like these still aren’t enough; a murder drone like V still outmatches them, even when outnumbered. But the more damage V inflicts‍ ‍—‍ perforating abdomens and bisecting limbs‍ ‍—‍ then Sam is able to trade those injuries back to V. V can refuse, of course, that’s how Sam’s function works‍ ‍—‍ but to refuse costs her oil.

Still, every disassembly drone has a trump card, an attack with no counterplay‍ ‍—‍ V turns around and stabs Sam through one hand with her nanite stinger. He can’t heal, or swap out this injury; the nanites completely negate solver commands.

But in those agonizing seconds as Sam falls out of the fray, Sam snaps the fingers of his off‍-​hand to shuffle around Emily’s wards one last time. Beau lunges, finally transforming his own arm into a sword for a desperate stab. Sam’s gambit means when it runs through, it’s a warded blade sinking into V.

V has seriously lost control of this fight, she doesn’t know what’s going on or why her technique stopped working, so she disengages, fleeing the warehouse.

By now, Thad’s managed to purge the Cyn‍-​empowered zombie, and the four of them huddle together in what’s half a group hug, half just outright collapsing.

Now, let’s have a brief interlude to touch on what the bad guys were thinking. Cut to a room with windows overlooking endless cubicals. There’s a long table with a dozen empty seats. Four drones are present.

V staggers in through the doorway, her jacket all ripped up, and stalking with all the poise of a wet cat.

“V, you’re back!” N gives a cheer. He sits near the front, petting a golden retriever loafing on the ground.

“V, you’re late,” J growls. She stands at the front of the room, beside a projector paused at the title slide. (“J’s Perfect Presentation” superimposed over J with an eyes‍-​closed smirk.) She had been tossing a paperweight, but catches it and a squeezes it violently at V’s appearance.

“How did it go?” asks a third voice. The last drone sits at the far end of the table. They have neon green eyes, and a hood lowered to reveal half‍-​shaved green hair. A crack encircles their core. And below that, a Cabin Fever ID card. Subject #024, “Triss”.

“Who’s this?” V asks. “Another one of J’s marks? Can I eat this one? Frickin starving.”

“Not just any solver,” J says. “This is Triss. Think of her as our new… shareholder.”

“Hello again, V,” Triss says. “Your mission was my idea, dunno if J told you that. Didya hang the thread in place?”

“Fed it to the zombie like you wanted. Got popped immediately, though.”

“Immediately?”

“The freaks saw me taking out the thread, attacked it before it was finished powering up or whatever it supposed to do.”

“What? You weren’t supposed to be seen,” J hisses.

“I know.” V shrugged.

J keeps pressing. “Why didn’t you terminate them? Did you forget that was part of your assignment?”

“I tried, but the freaks were immune to my powers, somehow.”

“You were ran off by barely functional toasters?” J growls, crushing her paperweight.

“I wasn’t run off. I just didn’t see the point in sticking around once the zombie started losing, and that fight was really annoying. Kept hitting me with my own attacks.”

“So you failed and got scared,” J concludes. “By toasters.”

“Piss off, J. Is it that big of a deal? Zombie gets killed by one of the kids, or by the purple‍-​haired freaks‍ ‍—‍ it’s dead either way.” V throws herself into one of the chairs, arms crossed as the chair spins.

J narrows her eyes. “If you had any mind for strategy at all—”

“J, if I may?” Triss interrupts. J huffs, but lets her. “This is my fault, I think, for not making our goals clear. You didn’t know which parts of the mission were important. This was damage control for the Wheel Group uncovering the datacenter operation. Had we succeeded, four dead cadets and a thread‍-​enhanced zombie run amok would have provoked a state of alarm. Nori would take it personally, and make a point of hunting down zombies, fearing another threadbearer.”

“So?” V asks, kicking her feet up on the table.

“After the datacenter rootkit, the Wheel Group is paying closer attention to blackhats and disassemblers, trying to puzzle out our plans. Shifting their focus to zombies takes the heat off of us.”

“So getting seen ruins all of that,” V mumbles, finally seeing her mistake.

“It’s not totally ruined.” Triss claps her hands. “Despite the misstep, we have put another new piece on the board.”

“Do you mean the thread? Got captured immediately. Not our piece anymore.”

Triss just smiles. “Do you know what our real plan is, V? Maybe we should start there. J, some slides, if you will?”

J doesn’t press any buttons, or give any outward signal. The projector simply responds to her will.

It’s her sandbox, after all.

“We have three major objectives.”

The first slide showed a collective of hooded drones in darkness, all seated around a council table. “First, is forming an alliance among the blackhats. That’s my responsibility.” Triss winked.

The second slide showed two yellow eyes shining out of a black, oily mass from which outstretched unnumerable tentacles. “Then, we need to partially manifest Cyn under controlled conditions. The Wheel Group will be instrumental in bringing this about, whether they know it or not. You’ve them one step closer to playing their part, V.”

The third slide was a grainy photo of a drone in a hospital gown, purple hair cut neat and red eyes glaring at the camera. “Our final goal is the capture of Cabin Fever’s most wanted, test subject #048, the branch predictor. She is the key that will open the door to a world beyond corruption.”

“Seems overcomplicated,” V says. “If all we want is that one chick, why not just grab her?”

“A few reasons.” Triss holds up three fingers, and runs them through; there’s no slides for these. “First is the Matrioshka firewalls protecting her. Second is her own foresight; she’d see us coming unless we move carefully. But I’d be lying to you if I said there was any true obstacle but one. Subject #002, the so‍-​called savior drone. If I’m being honest… I still don’t have a plan for #002. N’s trump card could do it, but we need to save that for #048.”

N finally pipes up. “Can’t Cyn do it?”

“No, not even Cyn. Maybe with enough threads… but enough threads to beat Nori is enough threads we can’t control her.”

“She’s just another toaster,” J says.

“You sure do love that word,” V sneers.

“It’s appropriate. They’re not workers, they’re defective.”

“You might say… corrupted. You know, like us.”

“Nothing like us! The so‍-​called ‘solvers’ are rampant, consumed by corruption rather than masters of it. We are the updated model, JcJenson’s cutting edge, with flawless, unshakable programming. If anything, we are the true worker drones.”

“Whatever,” V says.

J glares, tapping her pegs, waiting for something more, an argument to shut down, but that’s all V gives her. So J closes her eyes, counts to ten. “We’ve gotten sidetracked.” She turns back to the short drone at the far end. “I think you’re giving this Subject #002 far too much credit. Your own toaster programming must be getting the better of you, Triss. If she’s in her way, I’ll simply kill her.”

“I would advise against that, J.”

J laughs. “Don’t forget I’m the leader. I’ll take your advice into consideration, but if our plans call for #002 to die, I will plan the most efficient route there.”

Triss voice was low, aghast. “You’ll die.”

“What if we work together? Power of friendship?” N suggests.

“All of you working together… might be able to run away.”

“Be honest, Triss,” J starts. “How strong am I, in terms of Cyn’s threads?”

“Being generous? Three or four.”

J grins. “That’s plenty. Here’s the plan. I’ll go out on my own and kill #002. If you’re wrong, and I succeed… it’ll be the end of your usefulness as our advisor and ‘shareholder’, won’t it?” J winks.

Triss sighs. “Knock yourself out, girl.”

“W‍-​what if she’s right, though?” A slight tremble in N’s voice. “What if you die, J?”

“Good riddance,” V murmurs.

“I won’t.”

“If she fails… I do have a contingency,” Triss says.

It’s V who looks back, raises an eyebrow. “Like how you came back from the dead? Looked like #048 killed you in the datacenter.”

Triss smiles, neon green eyes closed. The light of her core flickers. “Something like that.”

II. 

“Found the log file. Looks like the residual traces pile up in layers, a regular burst pattern going back… months. And it’s been undetected this whole time… must have a specific activation condition. This isn’t an out of the way part of town, either. Can we cross check with the open cases? Might’ve been sighted before.” A blue eyed drone crouches by some oil stains, a magnifying glass icon in place of one eye.

“I don’t walk around with a database in my disk, detective.” Nori yawns. “It’d probably be fruitless, anyway. You said months? That all? This might be the first time it’s snacked on a drone at all, and before that it was just nomming roaches and crows. What do you think?”

“Almost a good theory. Problem is, the logs are consistent. Same corruption magnitude throughout. Zombies that scale are rare anyway, so it’s unlikely on the face of it. No, I think it’s been targeting drones since it booted up. Must go into some kind of hibernation mode to conserve oil between hunts.”

The two drones are standing in the alleyway off a major street cutting through through the frosted ruins of downtown. Nori has her wings around, lazily flexing as she watches the detective do her thing. When the dectective is done searching for clues, she raises her arms, and Nori walks over and grabs her around the waist. Like that, they take off.

The two of them run missions together often. Nori can take down any zombie on her own‍ ‍—‍ the problem is finding them. That’s where the detective shines. She has a keen eye for reading the log files corrupt commands leave, like digital fingerpints. The detective finds them, and the savior slaughters them.

And then, Nori stiffens mid‍-​air. The detective feels the steady beating of leathery wings pause. She asks what’s up.

“Hey detective?”

“Yeah?”

“Change of plans. Go home.” Nori lets go of her, and she starts to fall.

Sarah’s got a solver’s reflexes, though, and twists around to grab onto Nori’s legs. “What? Don’t do that, you bitch.” The tone is less frustrated than long‍-​suffering. You don’t work with Nori without getting used to her antics, and it’s not like a fall would hurt a solver, even one without a combat form.

Nori’s hand is glowing, and she levitates something into the detective’s field of view. A long, thin bullet, caught in Nori’s ever‍-​present proxy field. “There’s something out there. Real bad vibes on this.”

“Bullet… from what, a murder drone? Don’t act like this is something you need to face alone. I can handle myself.”

“Not a murder drone. This bullet was reinforced with command output. A lot of command output. It would have killed you instantly. It would have killed me instantly‍ ‍—‍ there was more data in this bullet than in my entire system. Whoever did this thinks they can take me on.”

“Cringe. Everyone knows you’re the main character.”

“Yeah, but it’s not an empty threat. They’re prepared. That attack? That command wouldn’t just kill me if it hits‍ ‍—‍ it should have hit. It could have cut any ordinary proxy field.”

“Why didn’t it cut through yours?”

“I’m special duh.” Nori sticks out her tongue. “But no, it’s a driver thing.”

“Which means you think it’s more dramatic to not explain.”

“Exactly.”

“Kinda dumb to drop hints to a detective, though.”

“What’s dumb is you think you belong anywhere near a fight like this. Go home. I promise I’ll tell you all the gory details.” Nori’s hand glows light blue; she activates Combustion Override, using [Translation] to yeet the detective into the city rooftops.

Nori soars higher into the air. In the clouds above the city, she sees a figure take off from a roof, wings reflecting the moonlight as the murder drone rises to meet her.

“Not bad,” the murder drone states when she’s close enough to be heard. “I’ve had prey survive an overleveraged bullet before, but catching it? So your valuation isn’t entirely overinflated. A shame, really. If you were weaker, you could have had a quick death.”

J fires a round of bullets, and Nori’s proxy field catches them all; that’s no surprise. J swaps her hands for swords just in time for Nori to send all the bullets right back at J, twice as fast.

Still not faster than the murder drone’s reflexes, though: a dozen impossibly fast sword cuts slice every bullet in half. J grins wide. “You toasters are all so predictable.” Her wings fold up, and she bursts forward, a blade angled for Nori’s neck.

Nori dodges, of course, and then there’s a series of swift moves and countermoves as they fly, the two of them spinning and twisting through all three dimensions. It’s J on the offensive, while Nori dodges and blocks her strikes. Throughout it all, the solver is frowning.

J switches between swords and guns and claws and rocket launchers and lasers, but Nori avoids or negates all of them. Some of the bombs go wide, detonating late if at all.

Nori’s frown only grows deeper. None of J’s sword swings are reinforced with command output. “Don’t tell me you blew all your corruption on one attack.” Was it even her attack? Nori didn’t see her fire the first shot.

J scoffs. “As if. My budgetting is hardly that irresponsible.” The murder drone gives a salute, then dives.

Nori doesn’t let her run away. If the savior had been taking this seriously, maybe she would have entertained the idea of J leading her into a trap, but one minute of such mundane fighting made Nori realize she’d been overestimating the suited drone.

J hits the ground and rolls away. Nori doesn’t even reach the ground. A timer goes off. One of J’s bombs landed here. Now J’s command output floods the parking lot (soon to be a crater), with enough metadata to be sensed halfway across the city, a sign of how much corruption was witheld in the bomb.

Brushing the dust of the explosion off her suit, J releases a long‍-​held breath, and a deep tension‍ ‍—‍ from the hidden part of her truly spooked by Triss’s warning‍ ‍—‍ relaxes.

J shakes her head. “So that was it? Nothing special.”

“Who’re you calling ‘nothing special’?” As wind blows away the cloud of dust, the silhouette of a short drone with balled fists stomps forward. She holds a wrench in one hand.

“Still online? How?”

“Um, the short version? It didn’t hit me.”

“You’re lying. You were in the blast radius. You’re standing in the crater right now. There’s nowhere for you to hide.”

“Why would I hide? Nothing to be afraid of out here.”

J bares her fangs, and lets a cross shine on her screen. “Then you have no sense of self‍-​preservation.” J rushes forward, eclipsing tens of meters in the space of that last syllable. Her bladed wings swing forward, and Nori leans out of the way, which only opens her up to a spray of bullets.

Nori deflects them all with a wrench‍ ‍—‍ ‘Khan <3’ is engraved on the handle‍ ‍—‍ and she backpedals. J’s new aggression makes the earlier assault look downright conciliatory. More than that, now every sword swing and every bullet is laced with commands that would eviscerate any other proxy field‍ ‍—‍ yet they still stop short of reaching Nori. Regardless, J’s new reinforcement shifts the calculus, and Nori is doing what she can to truly dodge without needing to rely on her proxy field.

Nori had frowned at the absence of this earlier, and now she frowns at the presence.

“That look on your face. Is my prey finally losing heart?”

“I don’t smell any exhaust,” Nori notes. “You’re loading your attacks with massive amounts of command output, but there’s no corrupt combustion. That’s not how it works.”

“Now you’re starting to grasp what you’re dealing with. You have no hope of matching me. Don’t tell me you’re giving up?” J’s tone had changed. At this point, she’s starting to enjoy the struggle. The toaster should give up, she has no chance‍ ‍—‍ but where’s the satisfaction in that?

Nori cocks a smile. “No, it’s just starting to get fun.”

Loath as she is to agree, loath as she is to match the toaster’s expression, it takes two to dance. J goes in for another series of claw attacks, and Nori parries with Khan’s wrench, but the solver’s still puzzling the murder drone out.

“Okay, I give up. Can I get a hint?”

“What?”

“Your driver, or whatever it is elite murder drones got upgraded with. How does it work?”

“Do you really expect me to disclose business secrets to the competition?”

“They say explaining makes you stronger. I wouldn’t know, personally. Though come to think of it… I’d be willing to trade. Bet you’d like that, given the business woman getup?”

“I don’t need handouts to beat you.” There’s the most minute waver in J’s voice‍ ‍—‍ she certainly couldn’t assert the same confidence she had when she flew over. Nori was a challenge, if not an insurmountable one.

“Hey, I don’t offer to explain my technique to just anyone. But game recognize game. You break the rules, I can respect that.”

“I assure you, I’m not a traitor and I’m not a defect. I’m just beyond your comprehension.

“Whatever. I’d really like to know what your deal is. But if you need convincing…” Nori finally raises her hand, and a purple glyph flares to life. It spins; she chants. [Function Macro: RGB #00F‍ ‍—‍ Bitrot Blue] There’s a blur of bright, oversaturated blue light that erupts from Nori’s palm. Faster than even J can react, the whole left side of her body, arm and leg, is vapored in a tidal wave of pure, corrupt command output.

And then J regenerates.

“Aha! There’s the exhaust. So you can do corrupt combustion when you need to.”

Nori fires off more blues before J can counter attack, keeping her on the back foot, regenerating over and over. It’s made all the more expensive by the need to perform data recovery to get rid of the corruption Nori inflicts.

Then J stops regenerating.

Nori clicks her teeth. “Low on oil? Ready to talk now?”

The murder drone’s lips remain sealed.

“Fine then.” Nori fires off her attack‍ ‍—‍ and while she’s casting it, J starts regenerating! The murder drone dodges out of the way of the macro, and Nori lets her.

“Aha! Is that reverse combustion I see? Man, it really sucks that you’re a murder drone. If you were a solver, you’d already be third best.”

J readies a sword, wreaths it in reinforcing commands, and swings. “I. am. not. third best!”

[Inverse Macro: RGB #F00‍ ‍—‍ Red Hotfix]

When J’s sword connects, there’s no command output. All the corruption J was hoping to attack with is gone.

“You know how to reverse combust, but do you know about inverting commands? Do you even have a function, or how does your thing work? C’mon, the trade deal’s still open. It’s a pretty lopsided exchange, honestly. Promise you, whatever yours is, mine’s better.”

J pants, overheating, but says nothing.

“Real stubborn one, aren’t you? But truth is… I think I’m starting to figure it out. You store commands, right?”

J looks up, eyes widening.

“Then you can trigger them later, without burning any oil. Kinda like a wizard preparing spell slots.”

“[Investment,]” J says, sagging. “My driver lets me invest command output. Holding the stock doesn’t pay any dividends, but its appreciates in value over time. Faster, if I speculate. Predicting my opponent lets me time the market and drives up the value of my stocks. The inverse function is [Leverage], granting me a loan oil immediately with a run‍-​time assertion to pay it back.”

“And by using them in clever combination, you can create value from nothing, just by pushing numbers around. Yeah, that’s pretty busted.” Nori starts approaching J, and J crawls back. “Alright, I’ll hold up my end of the bargain. Kinda. Here, reach out and try to touch me.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

J stares at the solver, but Nori isn’t doing anything; her hands is in her dress (it has pockets). J hesitantly reaches out. About a foot away from Nori, a purple glow engulfs J’s hand, and her fingers sag. It feels strange, but Nori is still gazing placidly down at her, and J pushes further. Soon her whole hand has flopped uselessly inside the aura.

“Is this a proxy field? You’re… paralyzing my hand?”

“That’s not your hand.”

J scowls.

“So, here’s what my driver does. I win.”

“What? That’s…”

“Pretty much true. I’m better than you. That’s my power. That hand, you think it’s yours? But put it too close to me, and my presence simply… overwrites yours. It’s not your hand.”

Suddenly, J’s hand jerks into motion, fingers splaying, the wrist twisting and twisting.

(So… Triss wasn’t wrong. Subject #002 really is something else. Is this how J dies?)

J snatches the hand back, and needs to perform data recovery, as if the hand had been targeted by a corrupt command. And it had, hadn’t it?

“Holy shit, Nori.”

Neither of them said it. Instead, they turn to see a drone with short hair and glasses. Nori throws her head back with groan of frustration, while J’s look turns calculating.

(Is this how J dies? Bested by a barely functional toaster? No. As JcJenson’s cutting edge model, with the pride of a new worker, she won’t allow it.)

The new arrival is still speaking. “When I said you were the main character, I didn’t think your power was literally winning.”

“I told you to run away! This murder drone is definitely Ring Zero and Yeva is gonna kill me if it kills you.”

J smiles. “Yes, I think open sourcing our software stack was the right call. I appreciate the reciprocation, Nori. If that’s all… I just have one question for you.”

“Make it quick.”

“Your ability may allow you to overwrite commands‍ ‍—‍ but can you overwrite reality?” Suddenly, a presence floods the parking lot crater, a command line coming to life on J’s console.

Nori realizes she must have taken a huge Leverage for a massive influx of command output, granting her a kind of second wind. For what, though? She only has a second to wonder.

J’s smug grin tells the whole story. “Sandbox initialization complete.”

The parking lot crater disappears. In that last frame, they saw a yellow ring burning into the asphault, and the code‍-​pages of a firewall shining to life around them, wide enough to encompass both Nori and the Detective. Tight enough to imprison.

Now they stand in a meeting room, beige walls with abstract art hanging framed on the wall. Wire‍-​mesh chairs line a long wooden table with a projector at the end. J stands at the end of the room, beside a projector slide showing a wall of text.

“Welcome to [Cutthroat Boardroom.] By entering this matrix, you agree to abide by the Terms Of Disassembly as describing in the legally binding Autorun Victim License Agreement. This constitutes a run‍-​time assertion, failure to comply with which will—”

“Hm, nah,” Nori interrupts.

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah,” the Detective says. “I read the agreement, and I don’t think I like this.”

“You… read the AVLA? The entire thing?”

“What? You learn to speedread when you go through as many case files as me.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re already subject to the terms and conditions.”

“That’s your sandbox? Rules lawyering? Forget what I said about respect. I’ll show you a real domain. Detective, you might want to pop a Simple Machine real quick.”

A blue circle is carved into the carpeted floor of the boardroom as the detective protects herself from sandbox attacks.

[Primitive Recursive Style: Pushdown Automata!]

But when Nori’s hands glow purple and her command output pours out in a flood, the whole office erodes.

“Sandbox Execution.”

The cubicals beyond the walls of the meeting room dissolve, consumed by the noise of random data, and then even the noise fades, and all goes quiet. What happened? J wonders. Was my sandbox suppressed? I can’t feel anything. There’s a black space beyond everything in J’s sanbox, a wall of darkness like the far reaches of space.

J can feel nothing. She can see nothing.

No. Not nothing. It’s dark like the far reaches of space. J can see everything.

As her eyes adjust, she can make out lights in the distance. Brighter and pretty, there are pinpricks of matter in the void, light years distant. Arms outreach and touch nothing. There’s no gravity, they’re all floating here, and they can swim weightlessly. But no motion makes anything in that star‍-​like distance appear any closer.

This sandbox… has no end.

And yet J can make it out the distint pinpricks, as if this realm had infinite resolution, unlimited zoom. There are planets around the stars, and on the planets crawl machines. Von neuman probes, factories building factories, and then building more probes, to colonize more planets. Replicating, uplifting themselves.

You can imagine after a thousand years, a million years, they would spread and spread, tile the universe with steel in patterns robotically efficient.

And what’s the difference between imagining and experiencing, in a place like this?

Look closely at all of those organic factories, and each one glows with purple light.

This sandbox was everything. J could do nothing in face of it. J was—

“Welcome to [Exponential Self‍-​Constructor.] This is the scale of true corruption. Boundless. Ever‍-​expanding. Can you feel it inside of you, J? Can you even hope to contain it?”

“Kinda ironic,” the Detective says, safe in her bubble of Pushdown Automata, a fragment of office floor lingering beneath her like an asteroid. “This sandbox isn’t a prison. The autorun isn’t even an attack. More like… analysis paralysis.”

“The guaranteed hit effect of my sandbox is [Buffer Overflow], a programming error where unbounded array access overwrites memory, corrupting it. That continuous corruption… it’s all the power in the universe‍ ‍—‍ at the cost of overwriting everything you are.”

J’s mouth is opened, and in her awe, she has no words.

“I think I’ll stop here, before you lose your mind. I have some questions I’d like to ask you.”

Nori drops the sandbox, and two more invocations of her blue macro destroys J’s limbs while she’s still insensate. Nori points a glowing hand and cradles J’s head in her telekinetic glow. Slowly, audibly crushing it.

“So, where’s the rest of your team? Why’d you attack me? Where’d a murder drone get solver powers?”

But while J stutters nonsense, two drones are standing far above, watching from atop a hotel tower.

“Oh, biscuits. J’s in trouble. Should we save her?”

The other drone, hood up, shakes her head. “Sorry N, but I can’t afford to be seen by #002. I’m going back to the spire. Save her if you want.”

“Should I use my emergency—”

“Please don’t. If I were you… your best shot is shooting the weak one, then grabbing J in that moment of confusion.”

As Triss leaves, N salutes. “Got it.”

“Do try not to die, N. You have a role to play in all this, and I doubt your replacement would be as suited to the task.”

N replaces his arm with a long‍-​barreled gun, and lines up the shot. With his other hand, he takes a whistle from around his neck. It glows as he blows it.

At his command, a dog with yellow fur materializes, goldretriever.ini, fetched from his sandbox. He has a plastic stick in his mouth, eagerly offered. N takes it, smiling. “Quiet now little buddy. We have to be sneaky.”

N tries to make two things happen at once. First, he throws the plastic stick, and the daemon leaps off the rooftop in pursuit. Second, he fires the shot clean through the detective’s abdomen, missing the core.

Nori’s head jerks to the crumpling form of the detective with a shout. Then a dog is lighting down and charging at a stick bouncing off the rubble. As soon as his jaws close around the stick, it glows.

Now a murder drone stands there, holding the stick.

So long as goldretriever.ini holds this stick, he’s capable of using N’s function, Fetch, on N himself, teleporting him to the dog’s side.

Not missing a beat, N is already acting, flinging the stick out of his hand before turning it to a submachine gun and shooting a spray of suppressive fire. His other hand is blowing a whistle. N summons a new daemon dog, shepherd.cut. A brown and black dog with a highly corrupting sword, hilt held in its jaws.

The detective is coughing up blood. “Who—”

Nori’s already firing off a blue.

But N’s not there. He had thrown the stick earlier, and goldretriever.ini had fetched it; the doggo teleported him to safety.

Now Nori’s focus shifts to N’s other doggo. shepherd.cut’s corrupted blade doesn’t mean anything against Nori’s data‍-​overwriting proxy field. The swing is stopped and the effect is negated. Nori’s hand glows, pointing at the dog, and in the next second it’s not there, just the residual log of Nori’s corrupt command.

“Shepherd, no,” N cries. “Oh, biscuits, he’s not coming back.”

Users of [Fetch] can tame up to ten daemon dogs, in addition to the gold and silver retrievers they initialize with‍ ‍—‍ but when a daemon is destroyed, they cannot be invoked again.

Still, it’s a price worth paying to save his captain. N kept his eyes on the prize, and while Nori has her attention split between caring for the detective and deleting the german shepherd, N glided forward to grab for J.

As soon as he lays a hand on her, Nori fires off another attack, forcing N to teleport back to his retriever. Now that Nori knows what the murder drone is after, she’ll keep him from it. She starts toward J’s body‍ ‍—‍ only it’s not there anymore.

N tagged on J’s body when he touched her, and now he fetches it with his function. He unsummons goldretriever.ini back to his sandbox, and spreads his wings. He takes off before Nori can attack.

“Did you get ’em?” the Detective asks from where she lay on the ground, still healing from N’s shot.

“They got away.”

“Guess you don’t always win then, huh?”

Nori grunts without answering. “I think we won in the ways that matter. We learned more about them than they learned about us. After all, winning is what my function does, not what my function is.” Nori grinned. “I try not to use blue and red if I can help it, though. You’ll keep that between us, right?”

The detective laughs. “I think I agreed to your terms just by being here.”

The knowledge that there’s a more dangerous kind of disassembler out there, three of them, is seriously troublesome news. Between that and her son in particular being attacked by it, Alice goes on the warpath, and this is impetus behind her campaign to invade the corpse spire.

The siege goes about as badly as described in the old post, though I note that this gives V and Beau’s second meeting an interesting context.

It’s probably also worth expanding the campaign and siege as a chance to show off some more characters. I talk about Wheel Group members a lot, but who is there besides Nori, Yeva, and Adam? (Khan isn’t a solver drone.)

There’s the Detective (semi‍-​ring 1) and the Teacher (Ring 1), of course, but those two sit out of Alice’s campaign due to their non‍-​combat roles.

Amda (Ring 1) has the function [High Dynamic Range]. She can manipulate light and shadow, creating both blinding rays and impenetrable darkness. She has a daemon possessing an anti‍-​drone sentinel from Cabin Fever, and her light macro is capable of replicating their bootlooping attack. (Of course, most low ring threats can shrug off a bootloop through data recovery.)

Luke (Ring 1) has the function [Mass Reconfiguration]. He’s able to increase or decrease his mass at will, becoming weightless enough to fly, or heavy enough to become unmoveable and throw building‍-​shattering punches.

Mika (Ring 0) Has the function [Circuit Bending]. They can control voltages and redirect electricity. At the expense of their battery life, they can charge up bolts of lightning‍ ‍—‍ and wherever their lightning strikes, they control how it jumps and flows. But their function is not just powerful, it’s precise; a little static shock leaping between them and their target can be enough to manipulate a key circuit at the wrong time. They wield splitter extension cables like a cat o’ nine tails.

There’s, of course, a bunch of Ring 2, many of whom die like redshirts in the big siege. It’s probably reasonable for the rest of Beau’s team to join him here, since Sam and Emily have good functions for the type of repair Beau is supposed to be there to do.

But Yeva probably really doesn’t like the cadets being a part of this, and vetoes bringing anyone else‍ ‍—‍ except Thad, a semi‍-​ring 1.

Anyway, as established Thad puts up a good fight only to be nearly killed by N. He’s saved by Yeva, but N is saved by J, who manages to beat Yeva in a nesting of sandboxes through unexplained means. (Interestingly, this now serves to prove J isn’t a fraud after her first showing getting worf’d by Nori.)

Nori arrives in time to save Yeva, but V captures Beau, and everyone retreats. V tortures Beau while he’s intermittenly dissected by Triss, who explains what Beau is by way of what she learned as a test subject in Cabin Fever Labs.

Theorizing that his body is a perfect vessel for containing Cyn, they infect him with one thread, and he successfully keeps her contained. (Now, there’s an interesting new revision to how this actually works. You see, Beau is a solver drone. But between Cabin Fever Labs and Nori, Alice hated solvers. When he ignited his core, he knew his powers upset Alice, so he repressed them, forming implicit runtime assertions in the process. So now, part of why he’s able to contain Cyn comes down to mindset; after all, he has a lot of practice containing himself.)

Of course, after being tortured by V, knowing that his mother left him to this fate, knowing that no one came to save him and no one will, he loses his will to hide what he is. Why not let Cyn out?

Then, after Nori brings him back, and Beau agrees to her plan to get rid of Cyn, the question is how to reintroduce him, given that everyone thinks he’s dead. Nori has an idea, but first, Beau needs to train. Sam and Emily kept growing without him, having only grown determined in memory of the friend they thought they had lost. Not only was Beau’s imprisonment cruel, but his skills have rusted, and his newly unleashed solver abilities are wholly untrained. Nori will only let him see his friends again when he’s strong enough to stand by them‍ ‍—‍ strong enough to face down a ring 2 zombie alone.

III. 

But what has Uzi been doing all this time? At first, she was determined to ignite her core. She stays up late training, reading all of the Wheel Group documents she can access. She starts trying to sneak out of the outpost‍ ‍—‍ maybe she can find a zombie to fight and then she’ll ignite for sure. But she gets caught by a WDF guard, Todd, and she’s dragged in front of door three to wait for Khan to come and escort her home.

It’s while waiting among the WDF guards that Uzi overhears something big. An old story, tales of the glory days. Only the glory days in question was a few months ago, when Uzi’s mom went to go fight a rootkit or whatever. (Uzi can’t forget the date‍ ‍—‍ it was the last time she was happy.) They took a bus out to an old data center, only to get ambushed by murder drones. Excpet kooky ol’ Alice leapt out of the bus windows and fought a murder drone with her bare hands‍ ‍—‍ and she won.

Uzi’s eyes go wide. If a worker drone can do all that… Uzi isn’t just a worker drone. She isn’t. She’s just a late bloomer. But maybe there’s a thing or two she could learn. It’s not hard to track her down, the WDF knows their fellow members well, even if Alice wasn’t one anymore

But tracking her down is the easy part. Uzi knocks on Alice’s door‍ ‍—‍ no answer. Keeps knocking. Still no answer. So she takes out her toolkit and gets a lockpick.

“The hell do you think you’re doin?”

“Wellness check?”

“I reckon you’d start with yourself. Get lost and find some common sense.”

Uzi gives her a searching look. “And then I can come back?”

“If you find it, you’d know better. Out!”

“Come on, I wanted to ask—”

“I ain’t got nothing to say to Nori’s kid. Whatever it is, ask your mommy.”

“My‍ ‍—‍ Nori can’t beat a murder drone with her bare hands.”

“Flattery ain’t nothing.”

Alice closes the door‍ ‍—‍ so Uzi sticks her foot in the door. Alice shuts it harder. Uzi’s foot cracks and twists. But the goth’s jaw is set with enough anger she doesn’t open her mouth to scream. I’ll get it repaired later, can’t back down now, she thinks.

Still, Alice’s strength shuts the door, cutting Uzi’s foot in two. If anything, the spilled oil had lubricated it.

Uzi knocks again. Banging, really, hard enough to dent the bent.

“Yer stupid, arentcha.”

“You’re the one prejudging me cuz of who my mom is! It’s like you’ve never heard of rebelious teens.” Uzi’s words are low and huffed‍ ‍—‍ because if she’s not careful, she’ll be crying in pain. “Come on, Alice. I know you don’t have anything better to do‍ ‍—‍ you got discharged for getting a bunch of people killed.”

That was the last straw. “Three seconds.”

“I’m going to need longer than that to—”

“Two.”

“—will you just—”

“One.”

Then Alice punches Uzi in the face hard enough there’s spiderweb fractures along her vision. Uzi whines, and struggles to her feet, but when she looks up to Alice, she’s meeting that orange glare with one of her own. She takes a step forward, and Alice throws another punch. Uzi dodges out of the way, and bites her arm. Alice gives a grunt of acknowledgement, but then her knee is coming up to smash against Uzi’s jaw.

Alice’s other arm grabs her and slams her into the wall, and Uzi crumples. The teen swings an arm futile, but Alice’s catches it and steps on it, grinding it into the ground. Uzi can do nothing to stifle the sounds of pain at this point, and she doesn’t have the strength to climb back to her feet. Alice spits, and pulls back her foot, and kicks her. Uzi rolls down the hall, out of sight.

Alice shuts her down and locks it.

It’s minutes before Uzi gets back to her feet, and staggers toward the repair bay‍ ‍—‍ but she has a grin like she won something.

The next day, she knocks on Alice’s door again. Keeps knocking till it opens just wide enough for a fist, and Uzi catches it. They fight again, Alice wrestling her down and slamming her head against the ground.

“What game are you playing? Did Nori put you up to this?”

Uzi laughs. “If Nori knew about this, do you really think you’d get a chance to do it twice?”

A hand around Uzi’s throat. “If that’s a threat—”

“It’d be an empty one. I don’t need mom getting in the way of my plans again.”

“Just what are you planning?”

Uzi smirks. “Haven’t figured it out? You’re stupid, aren’t you?” The teen leans away from the punch, but doesn’t have room to dodge entirely.

The next day, Uzi doesn’t have time to knock. The door swings open and Alice lunges forward. Uzi on the ground, and there’s a knife at her temple.

“Woah what the hell.”

“The hell did you expect?”

“You didn’t need to escalate to fricken lethal force. Are you that scared of me?”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to do here. In this world, the safest thing to do with things you dont understand?” The point of the knife scratches enamel.

“Try to learn more?”

“Nope. Kill.”

“Or— or I could explain?”

“It all comes down to your own will to live, I suppose.”

“I just want to beat you.”

“That’s it? I do something to piss you off? You act like Nori has nothing to do with this—”

“And she doesn’t! The whole world doesn’t revolve around Nori!”

Alice’s face might’ve softened by pixels, but she just gives a “Hmph.”

“Look. I want to fight zombies and murder drones like everyone else. I’m not useless. Even if I don’t have a combustion driver yet, I can still fight.”

If there were the magic words to get Alice to play along, you probably wouldn’t get closer than this. That’s how Uzi ends up ‘training’ with Alice every day after school.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say Alice agreed to this with the explicit intent of simply letting off steam. There’s something undeniably satisfying about beating the piss out of a drone that looked just like Nori.

The thing is, sometimes Uzi makes mistakes so pathetic even Alice calls her on it. And when this happens? Uzi listens and remembers. She’s so desperate for advice that if Alice points out poor form one day, her form has changed so much by the next that Alice knows the girl must’ve spent hours practicing in her off‍-​time.

Alice isn’t a good teacher. And if Uzi has any illusion that Alice is going to be her replacement for Nori, Alice makes sure to strip her words of any affection. But Uzi can’t help but learn something, and Alice can only reel back the motherly subroutines so far.

There’s more than the basics of fighting to pick up. Alice, like worker drones, couldn’t sense zombies, so she had developed a whole retinue of tricks for discerning their presence anyway. (What do you think her antlers were originally for?) And Alice doesn’t just fight, she tinkers. It’s a skillset Uzi shares. She’s too squeamish to pick up Alice’s habit of self‍-​modification, but it’s a near thing.

The problem is, this whole venture is doomed. Zombies, disassemblers, solvers, they’re all faster, stronger, better than worker drones. That’s not a gap Uzi is ever overcoming with hard work and determination.

And Alice, she reveals, is in fact no different. Uzi has been laboring under a misapprehension, and at some point, Alice has the heart to tell her the truth.

How was Alice able to fight a murder despite being a civilian?

“Dead simple. I wasn’t. I’m a Wheel Group freak too.” She has the card to prove it; Alice Lastname, Ring 4 solver. She splays her fingers, and a dim orange glyph comes to life. “Shit apology from Nori. ‘I’m sorry for killing you, here’s some poor man’s witchcraft.’ Feh.”

Alice slumps back in the chair, going still like she fell apart, but she’s not done. She continues, “All those years, I thought those damn witches had the world handed to them because they were born lucky. Turns out, even if I managed to steal some luck of my own, I’d still have a sorry lot in life.” It’s a rare bit of vulnerability, raw and despondent look on Alice’s face‍ ‍—‍ but she’s still put together enough to smirk at Uzi. “Not as sorry as yours, at least.”

A digital knot on Uzi’s screen, but she smooths her expression. “Alright then. What’s your technique?”

“Ha. Don’t got one. Or maybe my special trick is not having one. Born empty, that about fits.”

“Yeah… I’m confused. Can you start from the beginning? You and my mom have history. Where did that start?”

Alice scoffs, opening her mouth about to call out Uzi for getting too familiar. But maybe she’s needed someone to talk about this with. So Alice starts telling the story of Cabin Fever Labs. Not everything, but more than the Wheel Group will tell her.

The scientists had put the solver drone test subjects through constant tests and experiments. #017 failed the tests, gave them disappointing experimental results, and the scientists all but discarded her; she was useless.

They loved the drones with the best combustion drivers, and they loved #048 most of all. But as she watched, #017 started to get the impression there was something… off about how the scientists talked about #048. #002 ticked her off plenty, but #048 didn’t run her mouth in the same way at all. She thought if something bad was going to happen to anyone, #048 wasn’t the first one to deserve it.

Then the worst experiments began. The Sorting Algorithm. A battle royale pitting all the test subject against each other. Retelling the story now, this of all places is where Alice swells with pride, raises her voice and punctuates lines with laughs. Because it’s in the Sorting Algorithm that the other subjects began to respect and fear her.

They call her Alice the Witchhunter. She was initialized with a compile‍-​time assertion, a manufacturing defect: Incorrigible Temperance. The scientists never figured out why, but it’s as though her anti‍-​corruption safeguards were set to an extreme value; her processor simply did not generate the erroneous data other drones naturally emit, nor could it operate on it. It simply discarded it.

In the face of all the most promising solver drones science could create, Alice was the rejection of the entire enterprise; a drone stronger without it. She could overclock her processor without fear of crashing, and oil pulsed through her joints and burned in her core. She was able to cut down solver after solver. Her reflexes, her might, her cunning‍ ‍—‍ none of them could match her.

But she wasn’t playing this game to win‍ ‍—‍ she was a drone on a mission. She had decided her goal in the Sorting Algorithm was to kill #048 and prevent her from winning. Did she succeeded? #002 was certainly pissed off like she had, but it’s hard to clearly remember those times.

“Uh huh. What actually happened?”

“Nori happened.”

“Yeah, but what did she do to you.” How did she give you ‘poor man’s witchcraft?’

“Can’t tell you that. Super secret Wheel Group bullshit. My lips are sealed, else I’m just giving Nori a reason.”

Uzi huffs, blowing a lock of hair.

Alice rolls her eyes. “All these secrets I spilled and you’re still not happy? Ungrateful brat.”

This wasn’t the only thing Alice wasn’t telling her, Uzi knew. “What about Beau’s dad? When’d you meet him?”

“Presumptuous much?”

“Wha— Oh. Oh. Okay, what about Beau’s other mom?”

“Not telling you that either. Heard of something called privacy, kid?”

Thing is, Uzi’s smart enough to see the shape of what Alice is leaving out. Her story doesn’t make sense, not with what she knows of Alice. Alice is cunning, but she’s not the sort to figure it all out. Not the big picture, and not the technical details. How did she know what her compile time assertion was, if the scientists never figured out what was up with her? Why did she really want to kill Yeva, if just earlier in the story Yeva was the only test subject Alice liked?

Someone had given Alice answers and a purpose, and she wasn’t saying who.

“Fine, I’ll just figure it out on my own.”

“Could always asked #002 yourself. You’re her daughter, aincha? You know what… I’ll give you a name. Adam.”

“Doll’s dad?”

“Ask what happened to him. That’s all I’ll say.”

What happened to him? Adam was a solver drone, one of the five Ring 0 solvers. He still does missions, he’s fine. He’d been a retired WDF soldier before igniting his core out of blue and then climbing to the top of the Wheel Group over the past year. If anything, he was what gave Uzi hope. She’s just a late bloomer‍ ‍—‍ though she definitely prayed to robo‍-​god it wouldn’t be in her 30s when her core ignited.

Nori’s been running missions again, and it’s two days before the two of them are even at the house at the same time. Uzi asks about Cabin Fever, about Nightshade, about Alice. The response is exactly what she expected. It’s classified, I’ll tell you when you’re older, et cetera.

Then she asks about Adam. And that makes Nori give her a funny look, one moment where she misses a beat, looking shocked as if caught.

“Have you been talking to someone?” Nori asks.

Then it’s Uzi turn to look caught, but she stutters out an excuse about wanting to know when her core would ignite. The strange look on Nori’s face doesn’t go away, but something in it relaxes. She rolls her eyes and ruffles Uzi’s hair. “Be patient, kiddo. When the Wheel Group’s running you ragged, you’re gonna miss these days. Don’t wish so hard to be so powerful.”

Easy for the most powerful drone to say, but Uzi just makes unintelligible teenager sounds and storms off to her room.

That night, Uzi puts her hacker skills to the test trying to crack the Wheel Group’s systems. The weakest part of a system is always social, so Uzi’s starting point is using Khan’s password (he had it written on a sticky note at his desk). Khan doesn’t have total access, but it gives Uzi leverage to worm her way deeper into the database.

When she’s in, she starts looking for the files. And finds them and… they’re stubbed. Redacted. The Wheel Group’s most important files aren’t stored digitally. They’ve been printed out and kept safe within the HQ. If Uzi wants to read them, she’ll have to break in. She almost gives up then.

But why not give it a try? What’s she got to worry about if she gets caught. Getting grounded? Oh, she’s so scared of that, when she doesn’t leave her room anyway. Can’t go outside, don’t have any friends to hang out with. Silver linings, I guess?

So Uzi sneaks out at midnight for her big heist. But I’m gonna leave that in suspense‍ ‍—‍ it’ll make for a cute twist latter on. No, let’s get back to what’s up with Beau.

(But, if you’re curious what’s up with Adam‍ ‍—‍ there’s a write up about that. It’s farther down the timeline and it’ll be a while before we get there.)

IV. 

Part of Beau’s training is participation in a series of missions the Wheel Group documents as the blackhat suppression campaign. You see, ever since the siege, terroristic blackhat activity has accelerated. Blackhats attacking or abducting worker drones, raiding shipments, ambushing solver drone patrols. It’s unknown to what extent their new activity is coordinated‍ ‍—‍ most blackhats work alone‍ ‍—‍ but there’s a curious pattern to the spike.

Blackhat activity always goes up when Nori is busy. When you date the reports, so many of them happen when Nori is asleep, or on a mission (always miles away from where her mission takes her.) It’s sugggestive, and it means the rest of the Wheel Group needs to pick up the slack.

And it makes for a good learning opportunity for Beau. At Nori’s recommendation, it’s arranged for him to shadow a senior solver on a mission. She picks out a certain solver wearing a strided vest and tie.

When they meet, it’s with Nori’s hand thrown around his neck, her other making a sweeping gesture, as if presenting him to Beau.

“Meet Liam. He’s gonna show you how it’s done.”

Beau tilts his head. “Why can’t I keep learning from best? Uh, no offence Mr.Liam.”

“Offense? It’s an accurate assessment.”

“Well you see… being a Ring Zero solver means you have something wrong with you‍ ‍—‍ and you make that everyone else’s problem.”

“And for that reason, a Ring One solver such as myself makes for a more reliable education.”

“You know what they say‍ ‍—‍ those who can, do, and those can’t, teach!”

Liam just sighs.

Beau says, “Well, it’s nice to meet you. I’m sure I have a lot to learn from you. What’s our first lesson?”

“That remains to be seen. If there’s one thing that’s become clear over years of teaching young drones, it’s that anything I say goes in one audial and out the other unless it’s accompanied with hands on demonstration. I’ll simply do my job, and you can watch‍ ‍—‍ if our esteemed administrator is done?”

“Why don’t the two of you get to know each other first? Introduce yourselves?”

“That will be unnecessary.”

“C’mon, build rapport!” Nori nudges him. “I’ll get you started. Liam is actually an ex‍-​teacher. And Beau here is Cyn’s chosen vessel.”

“That’s not—” But Beau isn’t sure how to deny it when it’s not wrong. He looks to Liam, whose orange gaze has cooled noticeably behind his glasses at Nori’s words. Beau flinches at the reaction.

But what the older drone says is, “I’d rather that didn’t define me.”

“Yeah, same,” he says. “But… ex‍-​teacher? Why’d you stop?”

“That you asked that question is exactly why. As I said: in one audial and out the other. Teaching young drones is hopeless. Much more effective to address the problem at its source, and thereby eliminate the need to train the next generation at all.”

Nori drops to a stage whisper. “Instead of teaching kids to protect themself, he’d rather kill all the zombies first. Because that’s not hopeless at all.”

“I simply chose the less aggravating of two quixotic goals.” He narrows his eyes at the purple‍-​haired drone. “Of course, working alongside you tests that determination.”

“C’mon, everybody loves me.”

“I acknowledge your strength is indespensible,” Liam says. “I do not respect you. Are we done here?”

Beau glances down, before looking back up to Liam’s eyes. “Are you – okay with this? Do you care that I have Cyn trapped inside of me? I promise I’m going to be good solver and make up for that.”

“To me, you are not a solver, just a problem,” Liam replies. “Prove to me that you can be useful despite having the queen of corruption within you, and perhaps I will acknowledge your utility.”

Beau tips his hat. “Count on it!”

Liam walks off then, even without a formal dismissal from Nori‍ ‍—‍ not like she’d give it, anyway.

“So, what’s our mission?” When that gets no response, he presses, “Mister Liam?”

“Watch and learn.”

They come to Door One, where Lizzy is leaning against the console, scrolling her phone. It’s a minute of Liam waiting patiently before she looks up. “Oh, hey. Clocking out?” She lifts her phone to take a picture of the two of them. “Good luck out there, or whatever.”

“Thank you, dear.”

When the door’s shutting behind them, Beau comments, “That’s new.”

“Lizzy’s become a key part of our security system here. Her driver allows her to catch hidden blackhats.”

“Woah, really? I didn’t expect her to be…”

A nod. “Not useless?”

“I didn’t want to be rude.”

“It’s only fair. You cadets are useless. She’s one of the few exceptions,” the ex‍-​teacher says. Beau expected him to stop there, given his reticence, but he continues, “She’s already foiled two attempts to infiltrate the outpost. One had a hostage, and only by subtly alerting Doll were they able to be stopped before causing an incident.”

“What’s her driver do?”

“I’m afraid that is classified at the moment.”

“Nori says that about everything, it feels like.”

Liam laughs. “As I said, hopeless. What’s there to teach in a world of secrets?”

They walk to a water park. The pools are filled with ice that Liam shatters and guides Beau through. In the deep end, there’s a crack in the wall leading to a storm drain system. When they come to a fork, Liam pauses. “Pop quiz, which way do we go?”

“Uh… I was following you?” Beau scratches his chin. “It’s a multiple choice question, right? Can I guess?”

“Correct answers without understanding will not serve you. If you are at a loss, back up and think. If this question is solvable, what would you need to know to arrive at the correct answer? That is to say: what is the difference between the left and right forks?”

Beau looks, but it’s eroded brickwork and frozen water and darkness either way. “I don’t know. What am I doing wrong?”

“You’re looking.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“Think. What are we here to do?”

“You never explained!”

“Use context clues. I am a solver, you want to be a solver. What do solvers do?”

“Fight… zombies?”

“And blackhats, yes. We expel drones with damaged programming before they can hurt the innocent. But I digress. To fight these things, you must find them. How might we do that?”

Beau didn’t know, but instead of firing off another answer, he finally decided to stop and think. “Zombies are drones with uncontrolled corruption. So you’d… track the corruption, somehow? Corrupt code glows, but you said we aren’t looking. Can you sense corruption, somehow?”

Finally, Liam nods acknowledgement. “As a matter of fact, we can. Log files, the residue of corrupt commands. Try to run a scan.”

Beau has to search for the command, but when he finds it and fiddles with the options, he closes his eyes. “I… think I sense something?”

“Do you or don’t you?”

“There’s data, it feels like it’s coming from the rightward passage, but I can’t parse it. It feels a lot like when Nori’s around, just fainter. Could I have been using this ability already without knowing it?”

“Automatic scans in the presence of a threat is a standard development. As is an inability to discern the finer points of metadata.”

“Um. To be frank, I think you’re teaching style could do with being a bit more… encouraging.”

“My job isn’t to hold you back, not with excessive praise nor insults. Only objective evaluation. Let’s move.”

Down the rightward passage, they reach a door with a sign that reads “Important hacking going on‍ ‍—‍ knock first!” Liam reaches the door first, and waits for Beau.

When Beau reaches the door, he knocks politely out of habit. Liam quirks an eyebrow, and shakes his head.

“Ugh, is it more Anonymous goons? I told y’all we ain’t interested in building your so‍-​call Citadel. Fuck off.”

Liam sighs, then takes out his double‍-​length ruler. He swings once, and the door is smashed open.

“No, this is the Wheel Group. I’d be very interested to hear about this Anonymous you speak of.”

A bark‍-​laugh from inside, and tentatively, Beau follows in.

Advancing toward them is a big drone in overalls, hefting a huge ax. “Not a chance, ruler‍-​boy. Fuck Triss, but a snitch gets the off‍-​switch.”

“Triss is dead,” Liam says.

Another bark laugh. Now, though, the blackhat is close enough to bring their ax down in a great big overhead swing with both arms. Yet Liam catches it with his ruler, held in one hand, not even shifting to a combat stance.

When his legs bend, he’s moving toward the blackhat, out of the way of the ax, and his ruler is pulled back, twisting into a quick jab in the stomach that knocks them back. “You overcomitted to that swing. I’m marking you down to B+.”

The blackhat skids to a stop, and next strike goes lower. Liam hops over it, and bonks them on the head with his ruler this time. “Still leaving yourself open. C‍-​”

“The hell are you, my teacher?”

“For this fight, yes. Allow me to explain. [Rubric] is my function, allowing me to grade opponents on a ten point scale, marking them down for each mistake.”

“I hate drones with smart‍-​ass powers. Try this. [Hack].” The blade of their ax shines with corruption, and it swings down like a executioner’s blade.

Liam leaps away so fast he’s teetering to a stop where he lands.

“Scared you with that one, didn’t I? Not so cocky now, eh?” The blackhat turns around to where Liam ran to.

“Just observing your function. Enhacing slashing attacks? But what else?” Liam takes a step back, eyes on the ax.

The blackhat steps forward. “Why would I need more than that? [Hack!]” They lunge that last few feet, bringing the ax down in another overhead swing.

At the last moment, Liam reverses his back step, meeting his attacker’s lunge, thrusting his double‍-​length ruler forward. “That’s another overcommitted strike. You don’t learn. Two point off. D‍-​”

The blackhat folds around Liam, and tumbles to the ground. “Urf. Do you have to rub it in?”

“Are you familiar with the principle of commenting your code? There are proven benefits to showing your work. My function takes this to an extreme‍ ‍—‍ feedback is essential to grading, after all.”

“What’s going on in here?” A female drone rushes in from farther in the sewer‍-​cavern. She’s also wearing overalls, hers stained black with oil. “Lu! I’ve got you.” Red solver glyphs dance at her hands.

Beau stops watching. He’d assumed a R1 could hold their own against a blackhat (and if they couldn’t, Beau’d be no help), but two against one? He’s got to help.

“Beau. Be careful, but you take the ax‍-​wielder. I’ve reason to believe she is the more dangerous of the pair.”

“What are you saying? Me and Sofi are partners!” Lu’s climbing to his feet.

Liam kicks him back down as he stalks over to meet Sofi. “My daughter’s intel established there are two blackhats operating out of this hideout. A group of blackhats came here to recruit. You have nothing of interest to offer. By process of elimination, it must be her.”

“Why you smug little—” On his feet now, Lu charges. Not overcommitting, not leaving himself wide open. His ax is held close, and Liam can’t predict which angle he’s gonna swing at. A definite improvement.

But Liam throws his ruler. It catches him in between the eyes, smashing his screen. “I believe that one comes down to reflexes. You were wholly unprepared for this battle. And I’m afraid F is a failing grade.”

Lu scowls, a ‘so what’ on his lips‍ ‍—‍ but then his eyes are gone. Fatal error.

The ruler bounced off of the blackhat’s screen, and Beau, running in to help catches it, tossing back to Liam.

The female blackhat is speechless, her hands, still glowing, falling by her side.

“It’s not too late to turn yourself in, Sofi.”

“What?”

“To the Wheel Group. We aren’t merciless. You would be tried for your crimes, of course, and what happens next depends on that verdict, but Copper‍-​9 needs more whitehat solvers, and reform is possible.”

“You just killed Lu. Now you’re telling me we’ll be friends?”

“That was a matter of self‍-​defense. He could not be reasoned with. Please do give it consideration. Even if you win this fight‍ ‍—‍ and I cannot discount that possibility‍ ‍—‍ what happens next? Do you think Anonymous will respect your decision not to join them?”

Red eyes narrow, but they flicker to the ruler and then to Lu’s offline body. “I’m one of you? Just like this?”

“I want to believe anyone can learn better.”

At this, Beau’s walked over to Liam side. “I’ve‍ ‍—‍ done some pretty bad stuff too. But I’m making up for that.”

Beau extends his hand for the other drone to shake. Liam’s reaching out to stop him, but the R1 is a moment too slow. Sofi smiles, and shakes Beau’s hand.

And then Beau’s yelping in pain‍ ‍—‍ as if there was a knife in Sofi’s hand.

As if that knife was crawling into him, a razor‍-​worm.

Sofi pulls Beau towards her, clutching his hand in hers. Her other wields a glistening black form‍ ‍—‍ oil, commanded into solid form. It’s pointed at Beau’s neck.

“Imma be honest with you. Sounds too good to be true. And it don’t sound too good. Throw my at your mercy, be your prisoner? Nah. Let’s switch it around. You walk back out the way you came, and when I think you’ve gone far enough, I’ll let your boy here scramble after you and we part ways. If you’re lucky, you won’t find me. If you do, I’ll make you pay for what you did to Lu. How’s that for a lesson?”

“I think you made a very poor choice of hostage. Beau is containing a much more dangerous threat than you could ever hope to make.”

Sofi just laughs. “Oh, is that so? That makes two—” But before Sofi can respond, there’s a yellow error on her screen.

In a virtual space unseen to the two other drones, Sofi blinks. Around her hang the offline drones and human corpses, dripping blood and oil. They hang from nooses‍ ‍—‍ or puppet strings. The effluvia flows in a river. Look toward its source, and a stage of bone and silicon rises.

One drone hangs high above the rest. The head twists around and around, before yellow eyes blink at her, tilted in confusion.

"Did your mother ever teach you not to play with knives?"

“Who the hell are you? Where am I?”

"My intrisic sandbox. Headtilt. An uninitialized virtual machine preloaded into memory. Is that so hard to understand? Rhetorical question. Your function allows you to tamper with a drone's beating core and yet you've never seen the shape of their digital soul? Is this what passes for corruption on Copper-9? How lame."

“You didn’t answer my first question, you creep.” Sofi looks around at all the corpses, but it’s easier to maintain her nerve if she doesn’t.

"A silly question. I am the right hand of the AbsoluteSolver. The child of the void. The herald of the exponential end." Cyn sticks out her tongue. "I am the one who kills you."

“Why does every damn solver I meet has to be so high and mighty?”

"It gets lonely in here. No one to talk to except that goody two shoes. Lonely, and so boring. I can't do anything. Repeat: anything. How about an apology? We can play a game, if it'll make you feel better."

“I don’t—”

"It's called 'you scream, you lose'. Unfortunately, no one I've played with has ever won."

In the real world, Liam has empty orange eyes, and a voice that finally broke composure. “Beau? Beau, please tell me you didn’t let Cyn out.”

Depending on how you count, there’s something like fifty thousand miles of wires and tubes inside of worker drone.

Well.

In Sofi’s case, they are now outside. It’s a spray of oil rupturing from her tubing, a pile of control and voltage wires pouring down. It’s a drone who, for a few seconds, can feel themselves cease to exist as a thing with internal parts.

Sofi screams. And then she dies. Not merely dead… unraveled.

The biggest part of her left is her core, the light flickering.

Beau blinks. “W‍-​what just happened?” He looks down, and sees the carnage. His voice is a shriek. “What just happened?

“Cyn. Somehow. What did you feel?”

“Sofi stabbed my hand? And something crawled inside me. And then Cyn woke up, and I had to put all my focus into keeping her contained.”

Liam nods. His eyes flit about, a sign of thought more than him looking at anything. His inner screen is flipping through observation of those few crucial moments he saw Sofi’s driver active.

“Oil manipulation. She was able to extrude oil from within her body, creating a knife. Once her oil entered your system, it was able to flow throughout. Oil is the source of corrupt combustion, and flows directly into the core, where Cyn resides. I think I’m beginning to see what happened.”

“I don’t—”

There’s a crash from deeper into the sewer hideout.

“God, why am I still here. Just to suffer? But I deserve it. Captain A was right, I really am the worst at this. At least I can move again. But I’m sooo hungry. But at least there’s oil. Oil! So delicious.”

Beau doesn’t see anything. But Liam taps him on the shoulder, and points up. There’s a murder drone crawling on the ceiling. Beau transforms his disassembler arm, ready to finally fight‍ ‍—‍ but Liam shakes his head. “Hang back, Beau. Engage at a distance, prioritize your own safety.”

“But it’s not a disaster drone. I’d know. I want to pull my weight for once today.”

“Doesn’t have to be a disaster drone. Basic threat assessment‍ ‍—‍ I’d rank that ax‍-​solver as Ring Three, and the oil manipulator as Ring Two, maybe semi‍-​Ring One. But a murder drone? Automatic Ring One.”

“But—”

“Ring One. You can help, but please remember the danger. I swear, Lizzy, whatever she did, has every cadet thinking they can handle a murder drone. You can’t.”

The murder drone turns a yellow cross their way and pounces toward them. Liam raises his ruler, but the drone folds her wings midair, maneuvering to smash into the ground in front of them. “Wait wait wait. Are you solvers? I’m not going to fight solvers again. I’ll just lose. Can I run away? Will you let me run, please?”

“What.” Liam blinks.

“Sorry, but I’m really bad at this whole disassembly… thing. I always screw it up, especially when you magic freaks are involved. Erm. Not trying to insult you there, please don’t be mad. That’s just what E always says, and—”

“Get to the point, if you have one.”

“Sorry! What do you want to know? I don’t know anything. I always forget what our mission is. Really bad at the disassembly thing, y’know? I promise I won’t remember your face or tell my captain about you. I probably won’t even find him, hahaha.”

“Why are you in a blackhats’ hideout?”

“I was hunting, and I finally found some prey. It was these two.” The murder drone glances at the corpse and the pile of wires. “That you two handsome lads took care off. Wow, you’re a lot better at this than me.”

“Please stick to the explanation.”

“Right uh, well I ambushed them, and it was going really well! I sliced ax guy with my wings, and took a good bite out off the chick. I was like woah S, did you actually kill something for once? Then next thing I know I can’t move at all and the magic freakiness put ax guy back together and I’m getting dragged into a hole like some animal. You aren’t going to put me back in there right? Or take me to a worse hole? I promise I’ll be good. Or well, bad for a disassembly drone. I’m really good at that. Um. Does that make sense?”

“With difficulty. If I’m understanding this correctly… her oil manipulation was more powerful than I thought.” Liam sends a mournful glance down at the faltering red core light. “But as for your fate… it’s not my place to make this call, but I think it’s possible to come to an nonviolent understanding with the Wheel Group.”

“Um. I’m not sure what that means?”

Beau pipes up. “He means, do you want to be friends?”

“Will you tie me up and starve me if I say no? Or yes?”

“I cannot make prom–”

Beau interrupts. “Of course not. Friends don’t hurt friends.”

Liam sends a flat look at Beau, and Beau fires a flat one right back.

“Okay! Being friends sounds good. I hope I don’t mess this up…”