Serpentine Squiggles

Deadlocked & Thrashing

Alright, let’s do this.

I hope no one is reading this without knowing the context – it’s there on the discord – but for the sake of self-containedness, lately I’ve been consumed by brainworms for a particular Murder Drones alternate universe – what if solver magic copied Jujutsu Kaisen’s homework?

A simple find and replace is oddly compelling. Instead of a Domain Expansion with a sure-hit effect, you have a Sandboxed Execution with an autorun program. Instead of Binding Vows, you have Assertions. Veils are firewalls, revealing your technique is commenting your code, and so on.

Update: I’ve now explained the power system in much more detail in a new article.

I call this the Corrupt Combustion AU. I’m gonna talk about the backstory of an important character in this world – and it is not who you think.

We’ll start with broad background and slowly get more details. This is gonna be pretty a sketchy summary, treat it as an outline or incomplete notes.

One of the big divergence is not only are solver drones significantly more powerful, there’s also a lot more of them, and not all of them come from cabin fever. As a result, there’s a lot more happening outside of the colonies. (An important detail that won’t figure in heavily here is that Nori & Yeva have figured out a way to ‘patch’ drones infected with a solver, essentially giving them an antivirus.)

But because of this, Nori and Yeva go on to create the Wheel Group, a semi-secret society of solver users focused on training their abilities, containing the AbsoluteSolver, and keeping most of what’s going on secret from normal drones. (Civilians know the Wheel Group exists and fights off threats, but they don’t know how.)

Wheel members don’t just fight murder drones, by the way. The wastelands of Copper-9 are haunted by zombie processes, entities akin to cursed spirits that form when too many errors and corruption accumulate in one place.

Once Outpost-3 is secured and the Wheel Group ascend in power and promenience, Nori and Yeva mount an operation to rescue Alice from Cabin Fever Labs – and they succeed.

So Alice is still unhinged and spite-filled, but spending fewer years trapped in hell leaves her with a modicum of chill. She’s not infected with the Solver, but on account of her self-modifications, cunning and sheer fuck you attitude, she’s able to hold her own against zombie drones.

Back at the outpost, she seizes power in an increasingly militarized Worker Defense Force, training them to fight disassembly drones. With Alice & Nori working together, they create tech that lets a well-prepared squad of workers hold them off with surprisingly few casualties.

Most importantly for this prequel: Beau finally gets uploaded into an older body — except he keeps the murder drone arm.

You see, Beau is special. Because after Alice & Nori take down a few more murder drones, they try to repeat the trick. But grafting disassembly drone parts onto workers always fails; they simply can’t control it and die.

Beau can control his just fine.

Emphasis on can.

Because this is all the backplot still.

The story proper begins with Alice “sparring” with Beau. She berates him and doesn’t pull her punches in the slightest. it becomes clear that this is such a common occurrence that Beau has grown adept at dodging and enduring pain. Beau never fights back in these spars, not initially, but Alice always yells at him until he does.

Alice’s frustration only mounts. Because yes, he punches, kicks, grapples, everything she instructs the other WDF recruits to do — but he never transforms his arm into one of the murder drone’s weapons.

“What good was giving you that arm if you ain’t gonna use it?”

Alice seemingly gives up. She decides to take Beau on a trip. Maybe Beau’s uncertain, but he can’t say no. Maybe Alice promises the trip is to show or give him something, her assurance being enough to get him a little excited

They go somewhere outside the outpost. A derelict building Alice has turned into a secret base. When they finally arrive, it’s a trap: Alice has kept corrupted Anti-Drone Sentinels locked up in the basement. She releases one and locks Beau down there at its mercy while she watches. It’ll kill him if he doesn’t use the arm, so he’s forced to finally use it again. Probably alongside flashbacks to the hell he endured — and inflicted — in Cabin Fever.

Alice doesn’t let him go after one Sentinel. Maybe she releases more, ups the challenge, but eventually through cleverness or corrupted strength, the sentinels break themselves free, all of them. Here, when it counts, Alice tries to save Beau (he’s her son, after all) but she’s just a worker drone, and she can’t. Beau tells her to leave, save herself, and she does while Beau tries to fend them all off with only a disassembly drone arm and determination.

He manages to break out of the basement, crawl out of the building, but he’s leaking out all his oil. As his processors spin down, he hears the always steady beat of leathery wings descending. From the heavens comes Nori Doorman, the savior drone. The last thing Beau sees is her reaching down a hand with a smile that seems radiant.

Beau wakes up in the hospital being treated by Nori. Yeva is in the room, yelling at Alice, and Alice is sneering back. It takes him a while to piece together what’s happening – because Beau has passed Alice’s ‘test’, she’s recommending he be recruited to the soldier drone corps. “Or even the wheel group.”

Yeva’s outraged, because he’s just a kid (he’s Doll’s age), and her test nearly killed him. Meanwhile, presently ignoring them, Nori is nonchalant and teasing Beau. Not the most sensitive bedside manner, but it still takes the edge off his anxiety. (At least until he remembers that he’s being treated by Nori Doorman.)

Maybe a stray comment sends Beau into another flashback, but Nori pulls him back with a touch. She offhandedly suggests she could suppress away his bad memories, and he’s like yes please.

Anyway, the argument between Alice & Yeva proceeds in the background, going in circles, and Nori rolls her eyes, and she’s just like, how about we let Beau decide? If he doesn’t want to, he won’t. If it does, he will.

(After all, she’s Nori Doorman; she can just say the word and it’ll happen, nobody would overrule her.)

So what does Beau decide?

He wants to make Alice happy, so he says yeah. But he wants to be like Nori, too. So maybe he could be a field technician, repairing soldiers damaged in combat?

It’s a choice that makes both Alice and Yeva unhappy, but Nori gives a cocky smile.  Yeva accepts it, but Alice argues back.

And then, finally looking at Alice, all of Nori’s carefree swagger vanishes.  “I said Beau decides.  That’s final.”

“He’s my son.”

“And you’re here out of my better nature. I pulled you out of Cabin Fever. It’d be just as to put you back in the ground.” Nori frowns in momentary thought, then raises a glyph, igniting the solver gryph.  Purple force engulfs Alice, lifting her as she cries out.  “Honestly, give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

Yeva starts, “Nori, don’t—”

“Not in the mood, Yev.” The light in Nori’s hand turns red for a moment, then Yeva’s red eyes are replaced by a loading circle.  Turning back to Alice, she continues, “You think I don’t recognize your handiwork? You tried to kill Beau. Why should I let that slide?”

For all that Alice keeps her cocky smile, there’s something strained in her voice. “I just wanted to make ’im stronger.  Thought you’d appreciate the will to power. Or do you only respect for what you’re born with?”

Nori’s face wrinkles in disgust, and her fist closes, Alice’s frame is crushed.

Before, Beau had been torned between not questioning Nori and not questioning Alice, but this pushes him over the edge. He begs for Nori to stop.  “I thought you saved people?”

Nori speaks without glancing at him. “The power to save people means knowing when people can’t be saved.” But when she finally looks back, her face softens, and so does her grip, and Alice slacks in her telekinetic hold. “But I did say it’s your choice, didn’t I? Say the word, and I’ll destroy her.”

“Please don’t.”

“After everything she’s done to you?”

“She does it because she loves me.”

“Whatever.” Nori drops her hand, and her victim slumps.  “Never forget that your clock ticks because I let it, Alice. You get to live because Beau says so, and for only as long as he says.”

Working as a field tech sucks. Beau sees a lot of drones die, and trying to do repair work edges into making his memories of torturing people for Alice resurface.

Still, Beau does good work. Better work anyone else save Doorman herself, actually – despite being a kid, he’s got way more experience operating on drone internals. 

But he's not just a field tech.  He spars with Wheel Group members, getting trained to defend himself.  He's terrified by the prospect, after everything Alice had inflicted on him in their "spars", but he's training partner is Thad, and he's gentle. 

Of all the Wheel Group, Thad has the most to teach him.  With some practice and technical fiddling from Nori, the special arm lets Beau use augmentation commands like a murder drone, but without an ignited core, Beau can't use proper solver commands.  Thad is an outlier; he punches and kicks, and that's about it.

He meets other solvers-in-training too, including Sam and Emily, the only two he really gets along with.  He has lunch with them, or hangs out after school, and they play games and complain about their classmates having no chill or being gross and immoral.  He's a nice splash of normality, when Beau spends his days with the dead and dying.

Over time, they see a pattern to the deaths — murder drones are getting bolder in their raids on worker settlements.  Solvers left to guard them are torn apart, even R1 rank drones that should be able to hold their own against a murder drone.  There's something new out there.

As the weeks go on, the confirmation comes like a monument erected — a spire of corpses growing taller in the distance.

Between this new threat and Beau's rising star as a medical prodigy, Alice gains the political capital to push for a more involved campaign, invading murder drones’ hunting grounds to eliminate this threat and secure more territory.  Why hold the line and get picked off when we could go for the throat and end this?

Yeva’s opposed to it, of course. she thinks their efforts are better spent protecting the people in the colony; committing forces to an expansion leaves us vulnerable.

But Yeva, like most of the Wheel Group, gives off elitist, ivory tower vibes, while Alice has popular support. (Nori doesn’t weigh in.)

So the campaign happens.

The best of the best are selected from the WDF, and Nori disables their anti-corruption safeguard, allowing them to learn and remember the truth about solvers and zombies. But that's about all Nori contributes; it's too important for her to remain and defend the settlements, and she has maintenance requirements that would be difficult to accomodate traveling with an army.  So they depart without her.

And at first, it actually goes... better than the skirmishes Beau had seen as a field tech for. Yeva’s there to help with repairs, and she’s there to help with fighting (she’s not R0 for no reason), and she’s there to use her precognitive abilities to direct the tactical and strategic command.

They have a few engagements with the murder drones, but they back off quickly, almost as if testing their defenses. (Keen-eyed readers at this point will recognize the drones in question – it’s J’s squad.) Yeva concludes their behavior is out of character for murder drones, and this should inspire some dread, but Alice is bullheaded about pushing forward.

It gets worse. So much worse. Yeva can see the future, but she can’t be everywhere, and now they’re deep in murder drone territory. Drones start dying.

Nevertheless, Alice rallies drones to for a final blitz to take down the murder drones at their spire.

The night before that climatic push, Alice sits down with Beau. He’s afraid she’s gonna demand he fight, but she doesn’t instead, she compliments his efforts to save people. In fact, he’s done so well, and the stakes are so high, that he should at least be in the vanguard to save as many as he can. And this works; Beau sees the logic.

On the morning of the grand seige, it's dark like night.  In radiatation-sick sky, a storm was building in dark clouds.

Hot, stinging yellow begins to fall from above.  Acid pours adown the battlefield like rain.  There's low, loud rumbling, and flashes of light in the clouds, and dark figures with bladed wings can be seen darting above.  Until one raises a hand, and an overcharged EMP white out the sky with lightning, generating enough electromagnetic distortion to physically damage drones.  One begins to descend, and the winds howl around him, the air screaming with connection commands, overwhelming any drone that hears it.

The chaos of battle begins, it's a massacre.  WDF drones are slaughtered, and solvers die one by one. There are a dozen of disassembly drones arrayed against them, but three distinguish themselves above all the others. By their armbands, it's J, V, and N.

(They are as unstoppable, like forces of a nature.  It's this battle that gained J's squad a new title: the disaster drones.)

Thad faces down one of the undistinguished murder drones, and he's holding his own, on his own, defending a group of WDF grunts cowering behind him.  Except N is charging in from a blindspot, angled to carve through the grunts and kill Thad.

Thad is on the front line, and Yeva can see how if he falls, it all falls apart.  So at the crucial moment, she's forced to execute her sandbox to stop him.

This is a trap, of course, and what happens next shocks everyone except Yeva. J executes her own sandbox, nesting Yeva’s within it.  No solver has seen a disassembly drone execute a sandbox.  No one sees what happens insides, but when the firewall falls, whatever J did was cunning and powerful enough to leave Yeva coughing out oil on the ground.

But Yeva endures it and keeps fighting – every solver user can use the restoration command – but she's greatly crippled. Couple that with the fact her drivers weaken from the sandbox execution? Yeva is hanging on by a thread.  Yet, as always, the russian doesn't look perturbed.

Throughout it all, in the vanguard, Beau is doing all he can to save people, but it means little in the end. He’d already been using the arm for surgeries, but now he uses more and more presets to save as many as he can.

Then Alice cries out his name. A murder drone is closing in on her, a female with short hair.

Alice tells him to shoot.

But instead, he lures the murder drone's attention to himself, baiting the drone pounce on him instead. Beau tips his hat.

“Don’t die for me, you idiot, kill it!”

Alice gets up – she was never injured, she’d faked it – and seeing Beau unwilling to fight back, she turns away. She calls him useless as she leaves, berates that he wouldn’t fight back even to save his own mother.

Then she’s calling for a route among the surviving soldiers. The tide of the battle is clear, and Alice’s real plan hinged on Beau finally finding the will to fight. He was their secret weapon.

But as workers start to flee, they hear the always steady beat of leathery wings descending. Nori Doorman, the savior drone, had finally arrived.

She crashes to the ground in an explosion of solver light. She smiles, head cocked. Says something like, “Sorry I’m late. Must’ve slept in again.”

And like that, the tide of battle turns.

You see, compared to most of the nascent Wheel Group, Yeva is built different. Compared to even Yeva, Nori is built different.

She’s never needed to document her driver, but it’s suggestive that she’s the only drone known to be capable of what she calls “reverse combustion”.

Solver users burn oil, turning it into command output. Nori can turn command output back into oil. How? She claims it’s simple, just “burn it in reverse.”

Reverse combustion means that in a battle against drones that run hot, Nori will never run out of oil, because all of their commands simply replenish her own. In the exageration that wreathes all heroes, they say Nori can go infinite.

Of course, reverse combustion is easier the more there is to reverse.  It scales. Being outnumbered by murder drones meant Yeva struggled – but it meant Nori thrived.

Put simply, Nori utterly stomps J. But before Nori can deliver the killing blow, J's body disappears, teleported in a puff of glow light.  N's retrieved the battered form of his leader and retreats back toward the spire so she can convalesce. V follows his example, but drags along Beau to toy with.

Nori could follow them into the spire and finish them off – but she’s more concerned about Yeva at the moment.

So they regroup, Nori gives Yeva emergency care, and they plot their way out. Alice makes it out of the battle, as well as a few of the elite soldier drones and some lucky wheel group members, but it’s a paltry amount compared to what was first dispatched from Outpost-3.

Nori asks Alice: “Hey, what happened to that kid of yours, what’s his face, Bobby?”

Alice had seen V carry him off – still alive – but she just says he died.

“How tragic.” Nori shrugs and picks up Yeva to fly back to outpost-3. Her parting words are, “Good luck!”

V tortures Beau.

I’m torn as for how I want to handle this. The explicit inspiration is Kaneki’s torture in Tokyo Ghoul. (Which, incidentally, one of its narrative effects was recontextualizing Kaneki’s mother as abusive).

However, one of the key thematic elements of Kaneki’s torture is that it’s pointless. And I can do that here – pointless cruelty fits with V’s persona.

But Beau’s torture aches to serve a narrative role. There are things Beau can tell them, things to be revealed in dissection.

I suppose I could thread the needle, and have V’s torture be pointless; it’s not punishment nor incentive to cooperate. It just happens. V isn’t even the one who interrogates him, and his interrogator & dissector doesn’t concern themselves with his treatment outside of their investigation.

Who is the interrogator, then?

Well, it wasn’t J who devised all off the clever tactics the murder drones employed against the invaders, nor in the seige.

There’s a someone giving orders to the disaster drones.  Beau doesn’t get a name, he doesn’t even get a good look at them.  The drone’s form is obscured, only visible as a black silhouette to his optics, as though their combustion driver had stealth functions.

The mystery drones wants to know about Outpost-3 and Nori’s abilities, of course. But they are also very interested in Beau’s arm. How he’s able to use it, when no worker drone can.

The humans down in cabin fever had theorized about the possibility of a perfect interface, a perfect vessel for containing the power of the manor demon. It’s the true purpose of the Sorting Algorithm, to find the most compatible host.  They thought Nori was the answer.  But the interrogator suspects that Beau could be another.

And they’re right.

But why care about this?  Isn’t the disassembly drone’s mission just to disassemble solver drones?

Simple. The interrogator alludes to being made a plaything by a powerful drone, blurring the line between solver and zombie. Cyn had innate functions allowing her to pull threads, weave and unravel them. Eventually, they broke free of her control, but before they could defeat Cyn, the manor zombie forked herself into numerous golden threads. These threads empower drones while possessing them with fragments of Cyn’s consciousness.

When this drone forcibly attaches an thread to Beau’s body, the theory bears fruit immediately; Beau doesn’t get possessed. They’re excited: this brings them one step closer to getting rid of Cyn for good.

Though Beau keeps Cyn contained, he still hears her voice. She doesn’t say much. Sometimes there’s a Giggle.

V’s torture continues. At first, Beau might’ve thought he deserved it, for the things he’s done, for the people he failed to save.  But if he should have saved more people... shouldn’t someone have saved him?  Days turn into weeks, and it becomes clear: no one is coming for him. His own mother left him to die. So eventually, he snaps, just a little.

"I want to play, little brother Beau. Will you let me have a turn?"

“Yeah… yeah. I’m tired.”

When Cyn takes control, Beau’s body teleports out of the spire.

“How did you do that? They said your driver was just pulling and twisting threads.”

"Giggle. A stitch in time saves nine."

It’s a massacre. Cyn teleported to another colony, and the drones inside are simply... unraveled. A distress beacon goes out, even as the carnage continues, so as Beau’s body wades through a river of oil, he almost doesn't hear the always steady beat of leathery wings descending.

Nori arrives, interposing herself between Cyn and her next victim.

“Beau, was it?” Nori says casually.

And Beau hesitates, reeling back Cyn’s influence. Even after everything that happened, he still looks up to Nori.

“You’re still in there?” She blinks. “That doesn’t happen.”

“I think I’m what the humans call a… perfect interface.” (His voice is stuttering, long unused to anything but screams and sobs – and, lately, giggles.)

“I hate humans.” They thought they knew everything, and that hubris had birthed this nightmare. “And I’ll hate it more if they’re right.”

Nori has a simple request: let Cyn take control again, then stop her after ten seconds.  She takes a seat on a waist high bit of rumble, and waits for Beau’s move.  She glances at her wrist, even though she isn’t wearing a watch.

Cyn takes control, outstretches a hand armed with a glowing solver glyph. Just like the dozens of drones she’d unraveled in the massacre.

And nothing happens. "One," Nori counts.

Yellow eyes stares out of Beau face, locked on Nori’s placid smile. "Annoyed expression."

"Two. Are you that surprised someone knows your tricks? And here I thought you’d remember me."

With a sweep of Cyn’s arm, dead drones rise to life, a throng of soldiers pulled by strings. They surround Nori, and then she spins a purple rune, and every corpse is liquidified, instantly crushed by overwhelming force, oil sloshing with nothing to hold it.  Nori hadn’t even looked up.

"How?"

"Do you expect me to sit down and explain my abilities? Nah. It’s not that hard to figure out if you pay attention. I think that’s four seconds, now? Hope you’re keeping count in there, Bobby."

"Snarl." Without her minion, Cyn lunges forward, swinging Beau’s arms at his hero. And then Nori’s eye twitches, and a purple glow wreaths her arms. More swings, punches, kicks, a headbutt, and each one is met with a restraining purple glow, a forcefield around Nori.

Cyn can’t even land a finger on her. 

Nori yawns.  "Six."  She hasn’t spared the zombie a glance. 

Cyn’s eye twitches again, and then both of her hands are manipulating solver glyphs. Yellow spins and spins, weaving the threads of drone wires and tubing around them. The strands fold and twist, as if threading a weft into another dimension.

"Seven." Nori has her head craned upward, watching the moon move across the sky.

Darkness engulfs Cyn’s silhouette and black tendrils arise from the shadows around around her. "We are the Solver of the --"

"Nope," Nori says. She flicks her finger, and purple force sends the possessed drone flying backwards as if catapulted. "You’ve gotta earn it. Eight."

Cyn closes the distance again with a lunge -- command output-clad feet kick the ground and launch her faster than optics can track. Nori doesn’t flinch.  She’s still seated.

Then yellow lines of code start pouring out of Beau’s chassis, weaving into layers and condensing into a field encircling Nori.

Purple commands rush out to beat back the tide.

"Is that really the fight you wanna pick?" Nori asks, but there’s something other than casualness in her tone. Both of her hands glow. For the first time, she’s standing up, and looking at Cyn. Whatever the demon was doing now, it had perturbed her.

Purple surges out faster than yellow, and Nori’s focused her output on intercepting Cyn’s. With her flow impeded, the zombie drone can’t complete what she constructing.

And then yellow corruption explodes out from all the corpses surrounded them, the ones Cyn hadn’t animated and thus Nori hadn’t destroyed. Cyn had quietly, stealthily imbued them earlier in the fight. Because they’re beyond the radius of where Nori focused her own flow, the savior drone can do nothing to stop the code from completing a barrier around them.

"Sandbox initialization complete. Shall we be-"

Yellow eyes become blue, and Cyn’s firewall dissolves out of existence.

Beau blinks, and when he does, the bead of sweat on Nori’s brow disappears. She smiles radiantly, winks, then boops him between the eyes, and he’s out like a light.

He wakes up in a cell in Outpost-3, Nori’s bright and cheerful expression shining in his face.

“Sup, Beau,” she greets.  Then, “Say, you’re into the whole dying for the greater good thing, right? Alice told me about the stunt you pulled in her clusterfuck of a siege.”

He slowly nods.

Nori explains that there was a meeting or tribunal or whatever among the inner council of the Wheel Group and everyone else read into the top secret Cabin Fever stuff. At first vote, the ruling had a supermajority. A formality really — there was already precedence for what to do with Cyn’s puppets.

“Pretty much everyone agreed that we should just straight up kill you. Secret execution in the night. Alice has been telling everyone you died in battle, so we wouldn’t even need a funeral or a cover story for you. Just snip snip bleh.” She sticks out her tongue.

“Did you…”

She shrugged. “Didn’t vote. Hero worship harshes the whole democracy thing. Plus there’s a few people who don’t exactly trust my judgement around Cyn.  For what it’s worth, I do wanna kill you. Like... You’ve had a pretty rough life, yeah?”

Beau’s answer is obvious.

“Couldn’t have been easy living with the terrible things down in Cabin Fever. And then there’s the sentinels!”

Beau laughs nervously. Oddly, the defensiveness he’d usually reach for when someone insulted his mother had vanished.

Then Nori leaned in closer, and smiled broadly. “But if we could trade lives, I’d take yours in a clock cycle.” Her eye twitched. “Cabin Fever Labs only got better after the core collapse. I’ll be cute about it. You don’t get to be a god-like user of viral cannibal corruption magic with a happy origin story. So call my murderous urges a trauma response.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I forgive you.” She winked. “That was a joke, but I suppose the really funny part is I’m serious. You’re exactly what the humans wanted to create down there. A vessel for world-destroying power, and slavishly loyal to boot.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be… like this.” Then the obvious occurs to him. “But if you all voted to… why am I alive?”

“Well I came here to kill you, then I got a look at your system. The absolute thread is bonded to your core, but it’s not like any other case of possession we’ve ever seen. I’d know, I have personal experience with it. And the way you just shook her off on command, like flipping a switch? That’s not how it works. That doesn’t happen. There’s precedent for what to do with Cyn’s puppets -- but that’s not quite what’s going on with you, is it? Hate to say it, but the humans might not have been wrong about the whole perfect interface thing. When I disassemble you, I bet that thread will shut down with you. Which got me thinking. Why not let you bond with more threads? We could get rid of that thing for good.” Nori smiled again. “Like I said, since you’re into the noble self-sacrifice beat, I could give you the mother of all martyrdoms. Least I could do, after all the shit you’ve been through.”

“So you won’t kill me yet? I can live, and make up for what I unleashed? I don’t think I could go back to… my old life.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t let you. My plan is to tell the council I changed my mind, and they’ll go along with it because I’m Nori. I let you join the Wheel Group, and personally train you in solver magic. You’ll get to save some lives while we hunt down threads, and then you die a big fat death.”

“…Thanks, Nori. I’m… honored, truly. You’d let me live a little longer, even after I… You’re the greatest.”

“Don’t flatter me. I do have a condition. You get to live… if you call me a bitch.”

“What?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear. Not a fuck, not a damn. And the formality? Gets on my nerves. If I’m going to be your teacher, I’ll make a right gremlin out of you. The humans wanted a loyal vessel, and by robo-god I’m going to ruin that.” She grinned. “I could say it’s better if you aren’t so bend-over-backwards nice that you’ll hand your body over to that thing next time it asks sweetly, but that’s just a bonus.”

“You… I… can’t. Not after everything you’ve done. You’re too good.”

“I have done some pretty cool stuff, haven’t I?” Nori leaned back with a self satisfied smile, eyes closed. Then she cracked them open, and raised one eyebrow. “What about the things I didn’t do?”

“What?”

“I show up to battles dramatically late because I wanted to get a little extra naptime and no one ever calls me on it. The worst anyone will say is ‘oh, classic Nori’. If I object to it, they all think I’m being modest. I’d like at least one drone to see me for exactly what I am.”

“You sleep to maintain your special abilities, right? That’s what everyone says.”

A flat look. “I need some time to meditate, sure, or I’d be off my rocker for real. But it’s a great excuse, let me tell you. Don’t feel like saving the day that week? Oh, the wheel of robo-dharma spins and I must maintain my inner digital nirvana. I’m truly sorry I couldn’t be there.”  Nori chuckled.

“Okay. So you aren’t literally perfect. Is that the standard you hold yourself to? No one can do that. I still admire you.”

“You’re really failing my little test here, but I’ll meet you where you’re at, and be so kind as to make things easy for you. Here’s a secret: it’s my fault. All of it.”

Reflexively, Beau says, “It’s not–”

“You think I didn’t know Alice was lying when she said you died? You think the great Nori Doorman couldn’t sense that your core was still spinning? I knew the murder drones took you.”

Beau could only sit in shock at that. “W-w-why? How could you–”

Nori shrugged. “Yeva was hurt. Better you than her, I thought. After all, I know who still owes me a week of babysitting, hehe.”

“That… that does make sense. Yeva is more valuable than me. You made the right choice.”

Nori groans. “Ugh.  God, I’m really starting to hate you and your stupid-” but then she stops. Beau’s cringing back, a ‘sorry’ already on his lips, and Nori sighs and facepalms. “Your mother used to talk to just like that, didn’t she? Ugh, I can’t even hurl invective at you without feeling like the bad guy.”

“If you don’t want to feel bad… doesn’t that prove you’re good?”

Nori had a pinched expression for a moment, caught in the logic, but then she smirked. “Nah, I just don’t want to be like Alice. I suck in a cool and disaffected way, not a pathetic and abusive way.”

“I guess I just disagree. You’re way better than my — than her.”

Nori grinned hungrily, and leaned forward. “So you would say that your mother is a total…”

An anxiety is looming larger on Beau’s face, giving way to dread, but the climax was: “Bitch. She’s… yeah,” he said, convincing himself. “Yeah.”

“That’s something, at least.”

“It’s her fault. She… she pretended to… she wanted it to happen.”

“Don’t baby me, Bobby. I knew what I was doing. Think about it. Maybe I could have taken an extra minute to save you, that wouldn’t have risked Yeva’s condition much. Yeva would’ve told me to go for it. But why bother, when your mother gave me the perfect excuse?”

Beau looks down with empty eyes. Then he narrows them. “But wait… if you knew I was alive all this time, then why didn’t you–”

“Alright, in my defense, I did think they’d killed you a long time ago. Murder drones, it’s kinda in the name. I guess I could have checked, but yeah, didn’t really care that much.”

Beau remained silent at that, and thought. “I guess I can’t really admire that. It was wrong and you could have done better. You… really aren’t the best.”

“That’s the most scathing criticism I’m getting out of you? Eh, we’ll work on it.”

“With all due respect” – he paused as Nori snorted at that – “if you want me to become this rebelious… gremlin… doesn’t that kind of conflict with your plan to kill me when I’ve gathered all of the special threads?”

Nori smiled, and pushed forward until she was all Beau could see.

“Oh, by all means, fight back as hard as you can when the time comes. I could use the workout. I was her puppet once, and there’s nothing I want more than a little cathartic payback. It doesn’t matter how many threads that thing gets. When Cyn comes back, I’ll win.”