Serpentine Squiggles

Part 1: Gentle Luster 

Chapter 1 

Just beyond door two, Uzi is bleeding out. She was going to die, and it was her father’s fault, and he didn’t even have the spine to do it himself.

And yet, he’d killed her mother by his own hand‍ ‍—‍ did that take more love, or less?

Didn’t matter. He was supposed to protect her; instead, he left her to die.

N was supposed to kill her‍ ‍—‍ so why was she still awake enough to listen?

She hears his squad get back, hears them heap praise they’d clearly never given before. But just as quickly, that praise turns once more to irritated complaints. V thought she could crawl through the vents, but she was wrong‍ ‍—‍ Outpost‍-​3 did not have such a glaring hole in its security.

But at least N had killed a couple workers. That was something. Hungry and frustrated, V moves to tear into the nearest one‍ ‍—‍ Uzi‍ ‍—‍ only to be blocked by N’s wings. The look she gives him isn’t friendly. He stammers something lame about how it’s his‍ ‍—‍ he already licked it! So V backs off with an ‘eww’.

But J watches this with a note of skepticism. Maybe she saw a blush on his screen, or maybe she can sense Uzi’s core still whirring. J makes a simple demand: If it’s his meal, then eat it.

N can’t do it, so when J demands to know what’s gotten into him, he asks that fatally familiar question‍ ‍—‍ what, exactly, does the company plan to do with them after they’re done?

But this time, when J smiles and steps close enough to stake him, V is there to watch, to rush forward and ask what the hell. (Even if she can’t stop her.) But J freezes V’s outrage with a glare, and quietly asks if both of her squadmates have been corrupted.

Seeing the state N is in, screen deteriorating with errors, V wilts, and realizes she has lost. Better one of them lives, right? She spits, spins around, opens her wings (blades inches away from cutting J), and takes off.

V may have backed off, but J didn’t hear an answer, and she wants to hear V say it, get that explicit submission. So she chases after her subordinate.

Leaving Uzi and N there.

And Uzi still has the wrench. She saves N.

What now? Uzi was locked out of her home. N was discarded by his squad.

They share a look, then blush and look away. The only path forward is to run away together. How cliché.

They walk, since if they flew out there would be a risk of J or V seeing them, wherever they went. As they walk through the snow, Uzi makes a snowball and pelts N with it, and before long they’re laughing and playing in the snow.

It lasts until one snowball hits Uzi in the chest by her core, then the water drips down under her shirt. She hisses from the droplets slipping into the wound N’s wings had left.

N rushes over, expression all concern. “Uzi? You’re hurt? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” She tries to wave him off.

“Can I see?”

“Don’t be weird. I can repair it myself, just gotta find the right supplies. Also— gotcha!” Uzi flings an arm forward, catching N off‍-​guard with a snowball right to the face.

A small laugh, but he can’t keep a note of concern out of his voice. Hopefully they find the supplies soon.

It’s not long after that when the fun is interrupted by the rising sun. N panics, and they scramble to find shade. N grabs Uzi and flies to the nearest landmark, easily seen as a huge, multistory complex with a big lot sprawled around it.

Before they step into the building, Uzi pauses. She looks to N, then looks to the ground. “Thanks for saving me, but… you don’t have to stick around. Now that we’ve gotten out of there, you could probably fly faster on your own.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Why would you stick around? With me?”

“Because… I dunno. I like being around you. You’re cool.”

“You’d be the first to think so. I’m… I kinda messed up. I’m weird and a loner and nobody really gets me. You’re a murder drone, and you’re so…”‍ ‍—‍ she tried to a find a word that didn’t sound embarrassing. Not sweet, not charming, definitely not handsome‍ ‍—‍ “…funny.”

“Well, you’re a bit opaque, but I like that. It’s all mysterious. Kinda exciting? Is that a weird thing to say? Forget I said that, haha.” N covered his mouth, then tried to shrug it off and continue. “You know, I messed everything up too. Look at this way, you can’t be a loner if we’re together, right? What do you say. Friends?”

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

So they stow away inside, together. N finds a perch to sleep under. And Uzi, having woken up early then spent the rest of the night/morning on the run, she barely has time to find some old batteries before she’s out like a light too.

She gets woken up by gunshots.

Workers drones, scavengers, had seen N roosting out in the open, set up a fortied position, and opened fire. It’s enough damage to send N crashing to the ground, and the bullets keep coming. Before he goes offline, Uzi rushes forward‍ ‍—‍ foolish, maybe, but she’s only half‍-​online.

The workers pause, confused at the sight of an ally. It’s time enough for Uzi to yell at them to stop, as she runs to N’s side to help him up. The workers are shouting a warning‍ ‍—‍ but N doesn’t attack.

An argument proceeds, but Uzi’s case for N’s civility is easy to make, standing next to him as he pokes his fingers together.

Then one of the worker mutters something like: Nori, that’s her’s name. Uzi jolts at mention of her mom’s name. The worker who said it was an older female, hair worn thin from the years. She holds a pillbaby in her arms. She explains that she recognizes the hair, the attitude.

Uzi, of course, is curious about her mother, demanding to know more. There are stories of her from back before Outpost‍-​3 was founded, back when the WDF did missions in the wasteland. The woman couldn’t tell you many of them‍ ‍—‍ she’d only met Nori once, years ago.

(Throughout the conversation, the pillbaby watches Uzi and N with piercing blue eyes. “Creepy kid,” Uzi comments. Only for the blue eyes to narrow in offense. The woman explains that she’s old enough to be uploaded into a new body. It’s one of the things they were hoping to find out here. It’d be… wrong, to put her in someone’s dead body. But with technician‍-​drones being so hard to come by, and so many factors are in ruins, she’s been stuck like this, terribly precocious, for years. Uzi nods, it sucks, but she has other things to worry about, really.)

Uzi asks who can tell her all the stories. There’s a settlement the scavengers are from, a place they go to sell the scrap they find. Outpost‍-​11. But before the old woman can give directions, the drone that fired the first shot interrupts.

Maybe this one is tame for now, they say, but we are absolutely not revealing the location of their secret outpost to a murder drone. 11 didn’t have a Khan‍ ‍—‍ their only security was obscurity.

Uzi insists, whines, begs, but the drone refuses to budge, or allow anyone else to budge. So Uzi says fine. N waves goodbye, says it was nice meeting you all, and Uzi lightly punches him. No being nice to the secret‍-​keeping jerks.

The place N had chosen to hide from the sun is an old abandoned mall, so the pair of them start exploring the old store fronts. After she finds some electrical tape to patch herself up with, Uzi wants parts to upgrade her gun, build a replacement laptop, and do other cool hacky tech stuff.

N splits off to grab plushies and toys to give her as gifts. It’s enough to make Uzi blush, murmur a thanks. She doesn’t have anything to give him back, but he’s overjoyed that she likes the plush.

(While exploring the mall further, there’s a collapsed section, rickety enough Uzi nearly falls. N catches her, and holds her hand so she doesn’t fall. When they reach steady ground, she doesn’t let go of his hand.)

Once Uzi finds some batteries and cleaning fluid, they have a dinner together in the food court. Not a date, by the way.

“So, what are we doing next?”

Uzi gives a devious smirk. “We’re going hunting.”

N’s confused, so she explains. “If those scavengers won’t tell us where their hideout is, we’ll just have to follow them there.”

“That seems a bit… if they don’t want us there, maybe we shouldn’t intrude?”

“They don’t want us there cuz they think you’re gonna kill them all. Which you won’t, right?”

“Of course not! No murder thing.”

“Then they don’t have a real reason and they’re being stupid.” Uzi deserved to know about her mom. N concedes that sort of makes sense.

They find where the scavengers have made a camp inside the mall. Being diurnal for obvious survival reasons, they’ll sleep through the night then brave the world outside once the sunrise. Uzi peeks from a distance, and notices they always have one worker standing guard.

So N and Uzi return to exploring the mall. When it comes to the stuff Uzi’s looking for, the mall’s been picked near‍-​clean over the years, but it’s a derelict, collapsing building. In places, massive slabs of concrete and steel have buckled, cutting off access to entire chambers.

Massive slabs which N is quite capable of lifting, letting them access riches no other worker could find. There, Uzi finds an old JcJenson depot with uninitialized drone shells. Perfect for a trained neural network to be uploaded into into. Jackpot.

Uzi opens up the frame and fiddles with the internals. Then she asks N to carry it back to the scavengers. Uzi offers it to them for nothing in return. The scavengers insist on trading, do they need guns? Magnets? Tape? Uzi brushes it off. What would she do with an initialized drone shell? It’s worthless to her.

The piercing blue eyes watch her all the while. Even as the the adults thank her for her generosity, it seemed the beneficiary held the most skepticism.

Chapter 2 

With that piece put in place, they pass the night by picking up some old vintage movies. Uzi fixes up a projector, and she selects some grisly horror movies which freak N out. But scooting up next Uzi and hugging one arm around her puts him at ease, and she tolerates only because otherwise he’d be spooked enough she’d either have to turn off the movie or feel cruel.

He falls asleep like that, and in his sleep he leans even closer, wrapping both arms around her, and she doesn’t wake him up, because he’d make a big deal out of this and that’d be even more annoying.

Uzi falls asleep next to a very warm presence.

She wakes up next to a terribly hot presence. Sun was setting, and they had some scavengers to catch, but N was definitely not alright. He shrugs off her concerns, eager or anxious to get started with Uzi’s plan, and there’s no much else she can do.

Uzi’s plan? She’d modified the body she gave the scavengers‍ ‍—‍ installing a radio transmitter whose signal she could track from a distance. Like this, N flies after the scavengers.

Mid‍-​flight, N catches the smell of oil. Fresh oil, and a lot of it. N’s visor is a cross and he’s spiralling in toward it before he even realizes what’s he’s doing. Uzi hops off before he lands and starts over to investigate the bodies first. Seeing Uzi in the way is what snaps N out of the hunger‍-​trance.

Uzi’s tracker isn’t among the bodies, and none of them look like the scavengers anyway, which saves her a from a spike of guilt. N wonders who would leave such a trove of oil undrained. Which reminds Uzi that right, you guys need that stuff to live. That’s why N’s so hot.

N feels bad about it, which is why he waved off her concerns, but Uzi tells him to stop being stupid and just drink. “Doesn’t it hurt, getting so hot?” When N confirms, she smacks him. “I want you alive and not in crippling pain, dummy.”

Some time after they resume flight, N makes some remark to the effect of him not being used to people saying such nice things, or Uzi being the first to want that for him. It amounts to another stab of damn, his squadmates sucked.

N defends them, weakly. Uzi counters that one of them killed him and the other stood by and let it happen. Which is fair, but if N could rebel, surely V oculd be talked into it. If she apologizes, he’ll forgive her. Which Uzi thinks is stupid. But only if she apologizes, alright?

When N raises the possibility to contacting V, Uzi is quick to shoot it down. Absolutely no letting your squad know you’re alive yet. And N agrees.

The flight only continues a few more miles. They’re find an old backroad through the woods, and the scavengers clearly followed it.

So why can Uzi see a small drone standing by the side of the road? She nudges N to fly down and investigate.

It’s a crying child. He runs, but N is faster. Fast enough his pilot hat falls off in the chase, and once they’re done with the same old ‘this is actually a friendly murder drone’ song and dance, the child tells them his mother is malfunctioning and needs repair.

Uzi asks about the scavengers, and tearfully the child confirms that they passed by, looked on sadly, and claimed they didn’t have resources or time to spare and needed to be on their way.

N says Uzi’s great with tech stuff, she could totally help your mom. Uzi’s uncertain, but seeing N’s faith in her, she can’t bring herself to refuse. They follow the kid to a shack in the woods.

The door creaks open on darkness. When the shadows engulf them, they hear something above them. They glance up just in time to see magnets fall and then their world is all fuzz and distortion.

They wake up strapped to tables in the basement. The child is there wielding surgical tools and a wicked grin. Says something like: thank you for donating your bodies, I’m sure you’ll have all the parts my mother needs.

When the mother reveals herself, it’s a mutant core pulsating like a heart. It can synthesize broken speech, stuttering adoration for her son, but it can’t move. The room is littered with dead drones shells, each of them with a core scooped out and red residue in their place.

The mother reacts to both of the son’s new finds. A sky demon might be perfect, and is that… Nori’s kid? Uzi’s torn between anger at the whole betrayal and immenient torture deal and her desire to know more. But of course, this pair isn’t telling any stories either.

Uzi struggles, and is able to resist the magnets well enough to slip one arm out and start undoing her bindings‍ ‍—‍ she gets a hand cut off for her troubles. N listens to her scream, and they only get louder as her chest is opened up, and the wires to her arms and legs are sliced open, leaving her limbs spasming.

With Uzi punished, he moves on to the more interesting specimen. It takes more time and strength to carve into N, work the knife to disable the more dangerous subsystems before getting to work hacking away at the core.

Even still, Uzi struggles, and tries to think of a way out, but between the pain and the magnets, it’s an impossible battle. She manages to slur a suggestion that hey, maybe it’s time to reach out to V for help.

But their torturers laugh. The basement is a faraday cage; no electromagnetic signals can escape. They won’t even hear you scream.

There’s something N wants to finally tell Uzi before it’s over, but he goes offline mid utterance.

But he regenerates. He comes and goes, it’s a cycle, and he never gets to finish the thought, and Uzi is left wondering.

Uzi doesn’t stop struggling‍ ‍—‍ she wriggles against her bindings, but every inch she frees, every bit of slack fought for, is punished with more internal laceration.

She doesn’t know how many hours the agony continues for. Her clock was keeping count at first, but another magnet made the circuit misfire, and she didn’t try to remember the number she was at.

At some point, it stopped felt like she was counting up, and more like she was counting down. She wanted this to end‍ ‍—‍ but she knew how it ended. So did she want to cling to the pain, if it meant clinging to life?

After N was gone, V thought she’d be next.

Next hunt, J had given V a smirk, remarked that the squad would be so much more efficient without a deadweight holding them back. Her high regard didn’t even last the rest of the night.

V was distracted. Whenever she executed her hunting subroutines, she just thought about the hole in their ranks that wouldn’t be filled, the extra bit of firepower she’d never be able to rely on again. They had hunted in pairs often enough to be used to it‍ ‍—‍ would she have ever felt something was wrong before?‍ ‍—‍ but J’s favorite triangle formation gave their prey no room to escape; and it was impossible without a third disassembler.

When it’s over, J is all scorn for V’s failure, a fist grabbing her jacket and pulling the drone off her pegs, that scowling face hissing invective inches away from her own.

The nights after that stretch on, and the general pattern repeats. V lays around in a slump until J can drag her onto another hunt. J kicks her to the ground, grinds her face into the ice with a peg while her tail‍-​knife hangs inches away from sinking into her. The insults escalate. She’s disgraceful, pathetic, slovenly, just as bad as N.

V doesn’t stop her. Every time she thinks of fighting back, she visualizes a glitching face and voice. She remembers N. She doesn’t want to die, so she lets J do whatever she wants.

Hanging in for next night’s recharge, she realizes: this won’t stop, and there’s no ray of golden sunshine to brighten any of it.

When she does fight back, she’s thinking: whatever happens next, whichever way it goes, it’ll be the end of it, a relief.

V couldn’t beat her‍ ‍—‍ J had kept her quotas, and V could barely bring herself to drink what she needed‍ ‍—‍ but maybe she didn’t want to. She expected the fury on J’s face, her transformed arm moving with serpent swiftness, the fang a virus stake.

And then the fury falters and the arm does too. No viral payload enters V’s digitial veins. J can’t do it. If she killed V, then she’d be all alone.

V’s despair lifts into a empty smirk. “So. You’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you. Here’s how this is going to go. We hunt, and that’s it. You leave me alone. I don’t want to see you unless you have a mission for me. I don’t want talk to you unless it’s discussing our plans. I don’t want you to touch me.”

With gritted teeth, J accepts the contract renegotiation.

V hides away in the pod, and remembers N. This peace hardly lasts a day. J doesn’t touch her, but she doesn’t leave her alone. She asks for mission reports. She assigns V to guard the spire with her. She gives V missions to help her sort through the bodies in the mess pit.

It takes a few of these before V realizes J… wants to talk to her. To someone.

Sometimes, it’s even pleasant. J is polite, and her demands of V, her searching glances, her smirk that became more of a smile, it barely conceals a kind of desperation. But sometimes it’s the same insults and verbal abuse she’d endured so much of it, and the two of them argue till the sun rises. And yet the look on J’s face when it’s done isn’t exasperated‍ ‍—‍ it’s hungry for more.

(V thought of those crystals that distort light, splitting it into two different, interfering images. What was the word? Where had she seen one of them before? Probably one of N’s rocks. But J had thrown them all out.)

Then one night, sitting under the stars on one of J’s “stand guard” missions, it happens. J leans over, and throws an arm around the other drone. V goes still, eyes hollow, and looks to find not the smirk or the hunger, but the searching glances, a smile wrapped so desperately brittle around an inner emptiness.

J’s other arm reaches out, and it’s a hug.

V reaches out with her tail, and then J is screaming, flinching back.

“I had one rule,” V hisses. “No touching.”

When V flies away, she wonders why the look on J’s face felt so much like looking into a cracked mirror.

She flies without particular purpose, and finds herself drawn back to where it all went wrong. The damned doors of Outpost‍-​3. She perches outside and stares like her glaring could scrape away at it.

“You look like shit, girl.”

V startles to see a pink‍-​eyed drone had crept up beside her. “Buzz off. You realize I kill you things, right?”

Lizzy rolls her eyes. “As if I’m the one who should be worried about getting killed. You look like you’re gonna take a bath.”

To which V scowls but can’t quite deny.

“Y’know, your hair’s a mess. I could straighten it out for you if you don’t like, kill me.”

V doesn’t care. So Lizzy gets to work, and like that, they get talking. When Lizzy asks what’s got V so bummed out, the disassembly drone is vague about it. “Just… thinking about someone I lost here.”

But Lizzy had heard about what had happened last week. Once the doors closed, V had assumed the workers disposed of N’s body, but it turns out they’d found neither the murder drone nor the purple loser.

N was alive.

If he was out there somewhere, V had to find him. Before J does.

Chapter 3 

Upstairs, above the basement, there’s a sudden commotion. Confused, the child goes to the door, opens it, and gets his head swiped off with three claws.

It’s V. You see, she went back to Outpost‍-​3, and when N’s body wasn’t there, and hoped assumed he survived. Turns out, those fresh kills they found? It was a trap. When N fed on them, it confirmed his general whereabouts. V searched nearby, and the hat he dropped just made her search that much easier.

V kills the kid, frees N. She doesn’t apologize, but she doesn’t try to kill him. She explains: “I’m not the only one who realized you’re alive. J’s on the warpath. She wants your head, and she’ll have mine if she knows I’m helping you. You need to run. Get as far away as you can.”

Then V notices Uzi, sees another worker to kill, but she hesitates before N can tell her to stop. That’s the one from before. Why was N still with it?

“She cares about me, V. She’s‍ ‍—‍ the only one.”

“A toaster?”

“She saved me life.”

(“Unlike you,” Uzi says to rub it in.)

V has an unreadable expression, then sighs. “Well, I’m happy for you. Better hope she doesn’t slow you down.”

When V turns to leave, Uzi scoffs. “That’s it? No apology for letting him die? For years of standing by and pretending to forget?”

“Does he need one, when he has you? It’s going to hurt whether I say it or not. I’m giving you one warning. Next time I see either of you, I’m going to do my job.”

After that, N helps Uzi recover. He needs her guidance to know which wires to reconnect or replace. Uzi tries hard not to think about how it feels having his hands inside her. They wrap up Uzi’s arm stump with electrical tape and move on.

The mother core doesn’t have any answers, only grief for her son, and Uzi’s railgun puts her down. N’s ready to leave, but Uzi’s curious and pokes around more. In the basement, she finds hints about Cabin Fever Labs, a choker, some ink‍-​scrawled pages, but ultimately more questions than answers.

They debate whether to leave‍ ‍—‍ N can heal, especially after eating the drone remains, but Uzi is in rough shape inside and out. Barely patched up, and she’d rather not repair herself with random torture victim parts, especially if they’re heading to a populated, probably (hopefully) sanitized outpost anyway. And honestly, she doesn’t exactly want to spend more time than she has to in this place?

So they leave, and resume pursuit of the scavengers. They don’t make might more than a few miles before they run into the next issue.

N can feel J nearby. A disturbance of the electromagnetic field. They fly in the opposite direction. J’s search pattern is erratic, but it veers near every so often, and they have to pull back to keep distance.

If N can sense her, Uzi wonders why she can’t do the same.

She must be hot, N explains. The more oil they have, the more they can shield their presence. N’s reserves must be higher than J’s, but that’ll change as they fly.

“So…” N starts, “we run away? Like V suggested?”

“After we find the settlement. The scavengers have got to be almost there by now.”

The game of avoiding J continues throughout the night. Uzi gets fed up enough to suggest ditching stealth and facing her head on‍ ‍—‍ N doesn’t sense V, so it’d be two against one in their favor. But with how beat up Uzi is, having N protect her might be worse than her not being there.

But eventually, the dynamic shifts: J is getting closer. Steadily closer‍ ‍—‍ as if she could sense N.

“So, now we run?”

“Back to the basement. If she refilled her reserves, then there’s no way we can outfly her.”

So they double back for the security of the basement. They stay there all night. After that brush with death and torture, when N tries to cuddle with Uzi, Uzi is trying right back. They take comfort in each other in the dark, watched by shattered screens over dismembered shells.

When they try to leave the next night, they’re sent right back down by another sensing of J. It happens the night after that, too. Uzi digs and sorts through everything in the house and the basement for lack of anything to do. Creates a new theory board out of the Cabin Fever docs and crazed sketches. Runs out of evidence, and starts making up stuff.

She spends a lot of time with N, and she still enjoys his company, but days spent cooped up with the same drone, the habits, the patterns of speech, the sheer frictitious presence, is enough to drive Uzi up the wall.

Their conversations turn to their life stories. Uzi opens up about the bullying, some of her failed projects before the railgun, about the few times Khan made her smile. At first, N doesn’t want to open up. He mostly has stories of J punishing and berating him. Or him murdering drones like her. Not exactly great conversation fodder, y’know? He’s lived a longer life, yet Uzi has more to talk about. But Uzi bugs him until he opens up.

And… as he runs through his memories, there’s a few just on the tip of the tongue. He tells a story about J… cleaning something? V talking to someone… tall? But these anecdotes always fizzle out, never reach any kind of point or clarity. Then some errors flash on N’s screen, and he shuts down.

The basement has magnets and plenty of debugging tools‍ ‍—‍ instruments of digital surgery‍ ‍—‍ so Uzi hacks into his system. Like that, she gets a good look at how murder drones function. And her impression is, beneath everything, a hackjob.

Disassembly drones were nothing more than a hasty modification of wdOS. So much of the ‘hunting routines’ amounted to little more than a crude, scripted modification to the emotional registry to suppress things like empathy.

Suppression describes a lot of what the murder drone software accomplishes. There’s an odd structure to N’s memories, with whole swaths of them encrypted, locked away, barely able to connect to the rest of him outside of memory consolidation. It seems… unstable.

And, as if the system had noticed this, it’s being corrected even as she watches. There’s a program trying to delete his memories, but Uzi recovers them, subverts the Solver. She sees J, V, N as workers. She sees Tessa. Cyn.

And in counteracting the Solver, she sets herself up an N’s new administrator, and defragments his memory. N can remember everything now.

And… he still doesn’t want to talk about it. Some of the important stuff, the program had gone as far as zeroing out, a total redaction before Uzi won, but even for the fluffier stuff, memories of his sister before the gala, or just everyday life in the manor, getting N to talk about any of it a bit like pulling teeth.

“I’m trying to figure out what you are, where you came from. Don’t you want to know?”

“Um… not really? Does it matter where I came from, if I have you now?”

They argue about it lightly, but ultimately, it hurts for N to dwell so much on what he’s lost. Remembering V, knowing the next time she sees him, she’ll kill him… he’d rather forget it, frankly.

“Fine. Whatever. Not like I cared anyway.”

It’s been several days. J can’t keep hunting N forever, not when she has a quota to fill. So they should surely be good to head to the scavengers’ outpost finally.

“Is it that important to you? Wouldn’t it be safer getting farther from the spire?”

“Safe doesn’t get us answers.”

Maybe they argue further, but Uzi comes to accept that a compromise here makes more sense‍ ‍—‍ in retrospect, it’s obvious. If she doesn’t show up to the outpost with murder drone, maybe she wouldn’t make enemies.

N’s still a bit hesitant. “Are you mad? That I can’t go with you?”

“No, you dummy.” But Uzi has better than an argument to convince him‍ ‍—‍ she kisses him. A quick one, but it’s lip to lip. “This isn’t goodbye. I’ll be back.”

So Uzi sets out on her own, following the tracker. She walks through desolate forests of trees stripped bare of leaves. Her quarry leads her into the city, but a big rocky hills range between the forest and the city proper. Thus, her path takes her through a tunnel.

Partway through the tunnel, there’s a blockade, and drones spill out of maintenance doors. Their rugged, gnarly attire raises her suspicions, but it’s confirmed when they demand a toll. (“How about… everything you have on you?”)

These are bandits.

Uzi fought a murder drone. She isn’t afraid of bandits. But the bandits aren’t afraid of her‍ ‍—‍ a short girl missing a hand, with nothing but a sticker‍-​adorned toy gun? Still, Uzi hesitates to pull the trigger on a worker. Long enough for one to get close enough to swing with a bat. She blocks with her gun, and kicks them down.

But while she’s distracted with that, another bandit fires a gun at her. After all, corpses pay out so much more reliably.

But purple light suspends the bullet midair.

Uzi almost died, and she doesn’t understand how she lived. (Is this even real?) As fear and panic overwhelms her processor, a much more physical chaos reigns outside her body. More guns, more bandits. But there’s something intuitive to the illegal opcodes and alien symbols. Uzi gives in to that intuition.

And she fights a dozen bandits, ripping the weapons from their hands with telekinesis, blocking their bullets, turning the last one to a puddle of oil with a powerful swipe of her hand.

“Holy hell. I’m god.”

Uzi has a brief moment of worry, but she’s still far from the tracker; it wasn’t among the bandit’s loot.

Her journey continues. Uzi’s forced through a winding and convoluted route through the city as she zeros in on the coordinates. As she approaches, she can’t help but find the location of the outpost strange. It didn’t feel securely obscure, and she didn’t see any signs of more than incidental, liminal drone presence anywhere.

It didn’t feel like a place scavengers come and went all the time.

Her fears come true when she climbs over a building, and sees an alley of carnage. Oil splashed on the wall, shattered and mangles plastic and metal along its length, and none of it rusted or deteriorated. Fresh.

A murder drone had killed them before they reached the outpost.

Even after Uzi jumps down and sifts through the remains, she almost misses it. The faintest hiss of a vocalsynth. “…some…one…there…help…”

Uzi scans around till she finds an almost intact corpse. A bit of rebar had been driven all the way through the abdomen with enough force to pierce and lodge into the cement behind it.

Not a corpse. The victim was still alive, but all of their struggling had been insufficient to dislodge the impaling rod.

Uzi frees them with telekinesis. Picks them up, and carries them through the city, back to the tunnel. She repairs them with parts from the bandits she killed. The body looked familiar enough when she opened it up, but when they finally boot back up to full consciousness, and meet her with those piercing blue eyes, Uzi knows who this is.

The story goes like this: They were traveling, looking for a place to set up camp, when they heard the whisper of blades above, saw the murder drone swoop down. And then one shouted, asking if they was the friendly murder drone.

That made it hesitate. It had pigtails, and said he was once a squadmate. It asked about them, when they’d seen him, who he was with, what he was doing. Some of the workers started getting a funny feeling, but while some stayed quiet, there was always someone with an answer.

When the murder drone nodded understanding, it thanked them for the cooperation. Then her wings unfolded, and most of them didn’t even get to blink. It was there, and it was knives, and they were all just pieces. She didn’t even get a sense of what happened before her chest was bursting agony and she couldn’t move anywhere. The murder drone didn’t bother finishing her off‍ ‍—‍ looked like it had its hands full carrying off a couple of the rest. Last thing she heard is the screams dopplering off into the air.

Then she’s left with only her own screams. And she screamed, cried for help, over and over. She was there for days, her oil dribbling out, her battery gone beyond critical power saving.

She was dead for sure. Then Uzi saved her. First she given her a body she’d needed for years, and now this. “Maybe I had the wrong measure of you. You ain’t all bad. Though I notice that ‘friendly’ murder drone ain’t with you anymore. Why’s that? He cross you too?”

“Something like that,” Uzi says.

“If you’ve got nowhere else to go, I can vouch for you when we get to ’11. Hope they recognize me. I can speak my mother’s name, and my father half runs the place. Least I can do, after all you’ve done for me.”

Uzi winces. It sounded nice of her didn’t it? But this drone still had the radio transmitter in them. Why hadn’t she removed it when he had a chance? Now she couldn’t really broach the subject without raising some really awkward questions.

They start walking, and Uzi starts following. The drone had a straw hat tied to her neck, and she placed it back on her head. She’d taken to tying her new hair in a ponytail, curly and a blue, dark like evening skies.

When they leave the tunnel, Uzi casts an odd look back at the corpses they are leaving behind. She can smell them.

Chapter 4 

Outpost‍-​11 was built within the storm drains and subway tunnels beneath the city. Collapses‍ ‍—‍ some deliberately triggered‍ ‍—‍ had left the city’s underground a confusing, disconnected thing. Outpost‍-​11 didn’t have doors, but to get in, you needed to know the specific place in the city that access it, then follow a series of twists and turns in the dark to before you were home free.

Uzi’s first impression of the outpost was that the drones were… the kind word is rugged. But her true first impression was ‘scuffed’. Everyone looked rusted, or cracked, or soldered. Half the drones had something broken or mismatched or nonfunctional. In Outpost‍-​3, there were always smiles to be found, even for an outcast like Uzi.

That a new face had appeared wasn’t a cause for any celebration. If anything, it deepened the worry and mistrust.

Her name sparks some interest. Few haven’t heard of Khan and his doors. How the best of the WDF sat on their asses in effective retirement. How they took in the refuges after the massacre at Outpost‍-​6.

Some had heard of Nori. The prophetess who tried to warn them all. The bitch who abandoned us. The humans’ failed experiment.

Her head swirls with the stories, the mixed opinions, the cacophany of so many voices after so long with only one‍ ‍—‍ desperately pleasant‍ ‍—‍ companion. She missed him. She needed him. Could he have helped her make sense of this? Overwhelming, to so suddenly go from having no answers to too many, blindingly like sunlight after living in a cave.

She didn’t plan to stay in Outpost‍-​11. She’d just ask around, find some leads, then leave. But there’s drones who need help. She has a more skilled hand with repairs than anyone else; she’s the only one here who knows her way around the administrator commands needed to unfuck the more pathological of misconfigurations. Can she share her railgun design? Does she know half of what Khan does about doors? How can we protect ourselves from the murder drones?

She didn’t come here to do odd jobs, but drones soon learn you can pique Uzi’s interest with a story about her parents. She starts to wonder if half these drones are lying to her. She misses N. She needs N.

There’s always more to do, more evidence to gather and piece to her corkboard.

There’s always more fucking bullcrap.

Uzi wants to scream. She wants to grab her plastic and tear herself open. (Maybe she couldn’t have resisted that urge, if she still had both hands.)

Slipping into recharge one night, she thinks about how drones smelled the same whether they were alive or dead.

V had gone from having no path forward to too many.

J didn’t apologize, but she didn’t bring up that V had attacked, either. She kept her distance. Physically, that is; she still contrived every excuse to interact with V. She was so obviously lonely. V was too. If V let herself, she could forget everything, let herself hold onto the only other thing she had in this world.

Except it wasn’t the only thing V had. N was out there. He’d run away, and V could run away too. Escape J and her constricting demands or cloying attempted affection. No point in chasing after N, not when he’d already replaced her, but if N could find a drone to play friendship with, couldn’t V?

Except V didn’t need to find one, she already had. She had Lizzy’s number, told the drone she’d be down to hang out some more. The girl was annoying, obsessed with appearances and gossip. She was so fake. Manufacturing aloof superiority. But then, why would a fake reach out to a drone that needed someone to talk to? Why offer to do their hair? There was an ounce of caring underneath the facade‍ ‍—‍ and didn’t that sound so familiar to V. A polished mirror.

Except V was parched; disassembly drones always were. Why befriend an oilcan when you could drink from it? Because if V played her cards right, pretend (pretend) to become friends with Lizzy, she could finally make it past the doors of Outpost‍-​3 and feast on the drones inside. J would be so proud.

Except that was reason not to bother, wasn’t it? J would love it, she’d sing V’s praises and then look so disappointed when V didn’t act like J’s smile was humanity’s gift to robotkind. Then the insults would come.

After a few days, J had lost the singleminded focus on everything short of apologizing for years of being bitch; now she’d sensed N’s EM signature out there, and every night J was flying out, waiting for it to pop up again. V’s eyes hollowed to hear this, but if N was going to be stupid, well, V’d done all she could.

With her leader preoccupied, V opts to have a sleepover with Lizzy. She lets the other girl play with her hair again, and leans into the touch. Late into the night, Lizzy hesitantly floats the suggestion that there’s a prom soon, and V should come.

“It sounds crazy, but I think you might have like, a real shot at being prom queen.”

V hums, but it sounds lame, and she’ll leave the dumb clout games to the toasters. Lizzy snorts. For some reason, she doesn’t look disappointed V refused.

When she gets back, J is flipping between bridled fury and sweetly demanding to know where exactly V’s been. It’s here that it finally clicks. V’s so tired of this shit‍ ‍—‍ why did she even come back? It’s not like she needs to.

So she turns right back around and leaves, even as J demands to know where she thinks she’s going. She calls Lizzy, and says she changed her mind.

Prom sounds perfect.

Something about the Uzi story didn’t add up, and Thad thought he was the only one who cared. Most of his classmates didn’t even remember the purple girl, and half the ones who did‍ ‍—‍ his sister and her girlfriend‍ ‍—‍ snorted at his concern.

He had listened intently when the head of the WDF recounted what had happened that night‍ ‍—‍ and hid his outrage in clenched fists when he revealed he’d left her to her fate. They never found a body‍ ‍—‍ and apparently the murder drone had spoken to her, apologized for his actions.

Looking back, that must have been when the world stopped making sense. Then, though, Thad thought that these things, this thorned thread through the throes, threatened theater, not thunder. They’d resolve themselves, and then…

But no. Uzi disappeared. Then other girls started disappearing.

The WDF was supposed to defend. Murder drones were supposed to be mindless, demonic predators. Drones were supposed to be safe in Outpost‍-​3.

Thad was supposed to go with the flow. Play ball, peak in high school, be the guy people thought of fondly, but not highly.

But how was he supposed to stay chill when there’s a hole in every classroom? He spends his days cheering drones up‍ ‍—‍ because now he has to; he can see the fear behind the eyes of so many.

He had to get to the bottom of it.

Thad might not be able to put all the piece together, but he was willing to pick up the pieces, carry them to someone who could: a detective poking around the case. Every victim was a young girl on the school prom court. No bodies had been found, but here and there, drops of spilled oil pop up. Nearby cameras are always damaged or disabled.

One day, they find a shattered pair of glasses. No one would think much of it, but Braiden had snuck into the girls’ bathroom the other day, and came out with a shard of glass stuck to his boot. Thad would feel a bit awkward barging into the girl’s bathroom, but someone else had taken interest in the case.

Emily was friends with the latest disappearance case, Kelsey Day. She remembered Uzi, too, and thought class seemed so… shallow without her. (And with Uzi and so many other girls gone, bullies’ attention was concentrated on the brown‍-​haired girl).

Emily’s first contribution to the investigation is as simple as checking thad’s hunch‍ ‍—‍ the mirror in the second floor girls’ bathroom was broken.

No one, certainly not Thad, would have thought much of it. But it was the sort of connection Uzi would draw, wasn’t it? And if anyone could figure this out, it’d be ’Zi.

But if the drone behind this was a girl in his class, who? Why?

Lizzy had been sneaking out at night, which now seems a bit suspicious. His sister could be mean, but a killer? He could just ask… but if he’s wrong, that’s a wild thing to ask, and if he’s right, would he be next?

Emily suggests Doll‍ ‍—‍ but Thad knew Doll had the meanest things to say about the nerdy girl and her taste in reading. They competed bitterly for the top grades and couldn’t stand each other. Thad can concede it’s possible, but again, what’s the motive?

He’s still thinking about why. The detective suggests the motive might be related to prom. It has to be, the pattern is too tight to be coincidence. But Lizzy wasn’t on the prom court, she’d dropped out. He thought it strange then, and now it seemed like a smoking gun.

But the killings stop there, and they never piece it together. Thad goes to prom with dread hanging over his head, but maybe it was a glitch in reality that had corrected itself.

Thad gets to dance with Rebecca, and briefly, the worries melt away into music and flow. He smiles, he makes people smile, and it’s not to correct for anything; it’s just because he’s having fun.

And then the screams start.

A murder drone is on the stage, blade‍-​feathers splayed out, guns akimbo, and… it doesn’t kill anyone. It wears the prom queen crown, Lizzy is there grinning and shaming the terrified students, and urging the monster to give a speech.

And then there’s only one drone screaming. Doors locked, and Doll had rushed forward with hands glowing, tossing drones aside as she stalked forward. Lizzy watches the murder drone be impaled, her pink gaze bearing something almost like regret, meeting a sulphurous gaze bearing something almost like betrayal. Or resignation.

Lizzy reaches out, as if her weak frame could do anything about the rebar rods, then Doll’s red light magic is flinging her out of her room. And that’s Thad’s cue to act. Any drone in Doll’s way got turned to so much wasted oil, and his sister needs him.

The doors unlock, and Thad’s the first one out. He glances back at the murder drone as he’s leaving. The world definitely doesn’t make sense anymore‍ ‍—‍ why, when some kind of justice is finally being unleashed, does this feel like one more dead girl he failed to save?

He shakes his head, and searches for Lizzy. Finds her, hugs her, comforts her and she cries. He’s there, and he listens and he finally hears the truth. Lizzy had befriended V. Lizzy was supposed to pretend, because V was supposed to be pretending, that’s what Doll told her. Lizzy got attached despite herself, but Doll promised V would show her true colors at the prom, and Doll would be there to stop her. But that’s not how it happened.

Doll was the one behind it all‍ ‍—‍ but after what he’d seen, the confirmation wasn’t much more than a formality. Another formality: the disappeared girls were really, unsavably dead.

Except for Uzi. She might be out there somewhere still: V had seen her. She had a murder drone boyfriend to protect her, and another murder drone hunting her. (When Lizzy had first heard V say that, that was when the cheerleader really started to consider that maybe she and V could have had something real and lasting. Lizzy sobs again.)

“It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.”

No, it wasn’t. Something had gone wrong. Thad needed fix it, but he didn’t know how.

Maybe if ’Zi was here. She was smart enough to figure it out.

Part 2: Distortion Artifacts 

Chapter 5 

Uzi wakes up wrapped in N’s embrace. She’d had a terrible nightmare. Or maybe the nightmare was real, and N was just a dream she’d wake from. She holds on tight with both of her hands. She’d missed this, and she needed to treasure it while she could.

And it didn’t go away.

“N? You’re real? How did I get here?”

He explains that Uzi had staggered in late one night, covered in delicious‍-​smelling oil. “You took way longer than I thought you would. I was really, really worried. I started to think… no, it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid if it’s you. Tell me.”

“I thought maybe nothing happened. And I’d just be waiting forever. Because you…” N rolled over, his head head in his arms. “Sorry. I’m…”

“Dude, did you think I’d ghost you?”

“You might’ve realized I’m useless and‍ ‍—‍ ow!”

It was a light flick betweent the eyes. Uzi frowned, and said, “Don’t talk about N like that.”

“Whenever something happens, whenever you’re in danger, I can’t do anything. You keep getting hurt and it’s my fault. If I never do anything, what do you call that but usel—”

“Shush.” Uzi puts a finger to his lips. “Look. It doesn’t matter who saves me from dying, because I know who saves me from wanting to d— wanting to give up. If I didn’t have you there to make things… fun, I couldn’t do any of this. It’s… kind of scary, you know?”

“Yeah. But not when I’m with you, somehow.”

“I admit, I was kind of fed up with you when I left. But every step away from you, I just wanted to turn around and come back. It felt like I had forgotten to pack something. I kept thinking of you. I kept missing you.”

Uzi snuggles closer and closer and then kissed him. He said, “Thanks. I… I missed you so much. There was nothing without you.”

“Yeah… it must’ve been worse for you. At least I could go places. You stayed locked in the basement the whole time, didn’t you?”

“Eh, that part wasn’t so bad. If I didn’t have to stay in the basement… what else would I have done? I dunno.”

“Kill things?”

“Yeah, I’m glad I don’t have to do that all the time. Thanks for showing me.”

“Um… I think you do have to do it still. Cuz. Y’know. Vampire thirst for lifeblood thing?”

“Right. Yeah. I just mean, no more grinding quotas. And I’m not exactly looking forward to the little bit of hunting that’s necessary. Maybe we can find oil somewhere else?”

“Eh, it’s not so bad.”

“What?”

“I mean. If a guy is waving a gun in my face demanding everything I have on me, he’s getting what he’s asking for, right? Should I have to feel bad about that? Like, killing innocents is bad, definitely. But would you feel bad hunting the workers that tortured us?”

“Uzi, you’re… what happened out there?”

“I… don’t want to talk about Outpost‍-​11. I‍ ‍—‍ can’t.”

“Fair, I respect that. Still, did you find what you were looking for, at least? I see you got your hand fixed.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I found another lead.”

“Another? I thought we were leaving after this one.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not anywhere near the spire. It’s farther out, actually.”

“Ooh!”

The speed N leaves the basement with would leave you thinking his life was on the line. After so many days cooped up in the faraday cage, the need to spread his wings is boiling off him.

His eagerness is great enough he’s in the sky before Uzi has a chance to catch up or climb on. He flies some loops through the sky before crashing back down and letting her throw her arms around him. Then they’re off, Uzi vocalizing the coordinates.

Along the way, Uzi explains that she’d pieced together that Nori had been a part of some human lab and escaped after the core collapse. There were other escapees, like Doll’s mom or the weird mutant core in that basement.

Or the woman they’re looking for.

The coordinates take them past the city limits, the wilds beyond even the suburban sprawl. There’s a cathedral in the mountains, all intricately chiseled stone and a mosaic of stained glass. They’d seen churches in the city, and parking lots fanned around them all‍ ‍—‍ here, though, the grounds around it are pockmarked with graves.

They crash into the cobbled stone, and the sound that greets them is synthetic barking. A robot dog bounds out from the open gates of the cathedral and runs up to them, yapping and leaping.

Next comes a rugged male drone holding a huge shotgun. He peers at them, tense. “Y’all trouble?”

Uzi’s answer is, “You want some?”

N’s answer is, “No, sir.”

The drone chuckled. “Would’ve lost a bet on the murder drone bein the well‍-​behaved one. Youse seem alright. Welcome, what brings you here?”

“…Just like that?” Usually people take more convincing that N isn’t going to murder them.

Even as Uzi says that, N is on the ground, the robodog having knocked him over and licking his face. He’s laughing and the dog’s wagging a cord‍-​tail.

“I’ve got eyes, is all. Be honest with me girl. One of you does the killing, yeah? Need me to guess which?”

Uzi crosses her arms and looks away.

“Thought so. Can see it on ya clear as day.”

“Bite me. You heard of a woman named Agni?”

“Course I have, that’s mah wife! Agni! You expectin guests?”

A silky voice comes from somewhere unseen. “No, but I can only be so surprised to see that shade of purple again.”

Uzi jolts, and looks around. It’s not from somewhere unseen: high above, a drone with raven black hair leans against a cathedral balcony.

“Tell her to come in. She didn’t come all this way for pleasantries. Get the vintage oil from the cellars, dear.”

Uzi’s footsteps echo in the vacant acoustics of the cathedral. She wanders around until she hears the deep, smooth voice of Agni guiding her to a small room. A table with oil in two wine glasses, and two finely‍-​cushioned chairs. Surrounding them, on every wall, shelves of books.

Agni wears a revealing gothic lace dress, elbow length gloves and heeled boots. Lips black with lipstick smile at her.

“Why do you have oil? Dine with murder drones often?”

“Oh, you know why dear. Is that the question you came all this way to ask?”

“No, I came to ask about my mom. Was she cool? She didn’t suck, did she? What did the humans do to her?” And why doesn’t Uzi feel normal?

Agni starts explaining. The humans had loved Nori. The humans had hated Nori. She was the fruition of all their research. She tore them apart from the inside.

“I don’t care what the humans thought. What about other drones? What about you?”

Agni smiles. “Nori was the devil herself. You want to know what the humans did? They wanted to use us as vessels, or objects of transmutation, or perhaps sacrifices. There was something else out there, down there. It wasn’t human. The humans wanted to study it. It wanted things. Maybe everything. Perhaps Nori thought ’twas better to serve it than the humans.”

“Was she right?”

“Who can say? Look it how it turned out for her, and ask yourself if you want to follow in her footsteps.”

Agni downs the glass of oil, then all asudden throws it fast like an arrow at Uzi. Uzi catches it with her telekinesis, that alien glyph in her eyes.

“You’ve been using that program a lot, haven’t you?”

“I need to, clearly. It’s hella useful.”

“It seems to offer a great deal, I’m sure.”

“You’re going to tell me to stop, aren’t you?”

“No, simply to ask yourself if this is the path you want to follow. Before you play the cards you’re dealt, first wonder who’s dealing your hand. When it’s the devil’s own game, you’ve lost before you start playing.”

Then Uzi throws her glass at the drone. It shatters across her visor and the falls to the ground; Agni’s knocked back and rubs her screen.

“You gave it up, didn’t you? You just retired out to a shack in the middle of nowhere. No answers, no power—”

“No tragic ending.”

“No point. It sure seems like a tragedy to me.”

Agni shrugs, bending down to sweep up the glass shards.

“One last question. My mom was subject 002. Who was the first?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Who would? Where do I go next?”

“Do you need me to tell you? There’s only one place you’re going to find your answers.”

Uzi rolls her eyes. “Well, this was a waste of time!” She storms out of the room even as Agni gives a pleasant goodbye. “Let’s go, N.”

“Leaving already?”

“I promised we’d run away after this, right?”

“Ooh. But… couldn’t we stay here?”

“This might be a church, but it’s not a charity, is it?” The husband grunts an affirmative. More than that, Uzi hates the idea of being indebted to the pair. “We can take care of everything ourselves. It won’t even be hard! C’mon.”

“Bye Agni, bye Jorg.”

“They seemed nice, didn’t they?”

Uzi thought they were wasting their lives. “I guess.”

The night is still young, but at a little past midnight, Uzi calls for them to land. They’re at the outskirts of the city already, and it’s not like they’re going anywhere, so might as well relax, right? She got to take some books from Agni’s shelves, so how about they crack one open and she’ll read to him?

They cuddle up and that’s how the morning passes, till N gets sleepy and they snuggle together and their processors slow in the dark.

But then she hears N’s voice, a quiet whisper.

“Hey Uzi? Do you… still like me?”

Uzi rouses enough to say, “That’s a dumb question.”

“It’s hard to tell sometimes. You can be… opaque.”

“Well, I stick around you for a reason.”

“Yeah but, I don’t know if that’s because you have to. You need me, or you think I’ll… I don’t like pushing, but it’d help a lot to hear it, you know?”

Uzi sighs, fighting a smile or laugh. “Yes, you cute, weird little goober,” she says. She pauses, then adds, “I’ve. I’ve never had a relationship like this before. Sorry if I mess things up sometimes, I just…”

“Hey, it’s alright. I’m here. No matter what, I’m here. Always.”

Uzi snuggles in closer, squeezing against N’s warmth. Her voice makes weird sounds when she tries to open her mouth, it’s embarrassing, and she doesn’t know what her visor is doing. When she finally makes words, they’re, “I kinda want to say something cheesy like I love you. But… Do I? Is that the word? You’re so important, and I need you, and I couldn’t do this without you and yet. I dunno what to compare it to. Or how to know for sure.”

“It sure sounds like what people in love say.”

“Other people… My dad sounded like he was in love with my mom. That’s what everyone says. He’ll say it. And he beat her to death with his own wrench. I don’t know if it’s worse if that means he loved her, or never did. They were together for years. Longer than us. Did they ever figure it out?” It’s not a second of silence before Uzi is saying, “God. I’m sorry for killing the mood.”

Uzi pulls away, but N reaches out, seeking. For a moment only response is holding her, stroking her hair, kissing her. “I mean, it’s pretty heavy, but you’re good. I don’t know your folks, but maybe she… No, I shouldn’t.”

“Saaay it. I won’t be mad. It’s you.”

“Maybe she was okay with it? Or needed him to? If she let him, wouldn’t she have understood?”

“There had to have been another way, something else he could have done. It’s too cruel.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I get ya.”

“I hate him. How are we related? How could my mom… But she has to be like me. Otherwise I’m like him.”

“Hey. Look at me. You know what I think? You’re like Uzi, and there’s no one else like you. No one else could have built your railgun or infiltrated our base or showed me another way. I… I’m not sure about love either. But you make me feel so special. I like that. I like you.”

Then, as the sun floods the world outside with incinerating light, the two of them just melted into each other’s embrace.

Uzi was safe, cared for, understood.

And yet. And yet. Why did it feel like something in Uzi couldn’t unclench, no matter how much he relaxed her? She should say something, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t. What should she even say? That somehow, something was still wrong? With her, with him, with this, with everything? Maybe she’s being silly. It’ll go away, or she’s blowing up something small.

She enjoyed his touch, she knew that much. She enjoyed him. He was worth anything.

In the morning, Uzi wants to head out on her own. You see, while in Outpost‍-​11, Uzi had come up with a way to deal with the J issue. His old leader had tracked them by N’s EM signature. So what if they spoofed the emissions of a disassembler? Uzi could create special jammers that fool J into checking the totally wrong places.

Unfortunately, the jammer design she came up with takes some time to get set up, and since it’s supposed to hide N, it’ll work best of he’s not nearby when she’s tuning it. So… Uzi’ll take a long walk, find somewhere to get the device setup, and come back when it’s done. “Sound good?” N, of course, goes sure.

So Uzi leaves, and a few hours later, she’s back. She flashes him a thumbs up, and tells him let’s go. “Farther we get from the jammer, the better.”

“Is the jammer like that transmitter you made back then?” N asks. “I wonder what happened to that kid you helped. I know you don’t want to talk about 11, but did you find them there?”

“Who? What are you talking about, N?”

“Oh, I— Nevermind.”

Uzi shrugs and climbs on his back. It’s a short flight, then Uzi is poking N to land again. “You’re getting hot.”

“What? No, I’m fine.”

“Dude, I can feel you. You’re overheating. Let’s find you something to cool off with.”

They continue on foot. There’s snow on the ground, and a long, aimless flight would just burn more oil. They walk through a silent, empty landscape, and Uzi presses closer to N in the vastness. Wordlessly, they angle toward the city, since drones would be more concentrated there. This far away, you can’t quite see the spire unless you look.

A big river separates them from the mainland‍ ‍—‍ when they cross the bridge, Uzi’s the first one to feel something’s off, and she unholsters a gun. (Not her railgun; a pistol that could fire more than one shot per engagement).

When the drones open their mouths, she already has them pegged as bandits. The one who speaks, the leader no doubt, is a smooth talker. He’s explaining how it takes a lot of work maintaining this bridge, and keeping travelers safe from those who’d do them harm. “Surely all that work deserves some manner of recompense?”

Uzi smirks. “How does time to back off and run away sound?”

“Don’t get too big for your bolts, girl.”

“I’m glad you’re too stupid to live, honestly. My boyfriend is thirsty.”

That’s enough to get some glances throne backward at the white haired drone rubbing the back of his head and looking around awkwardly.

“You think we’re scared of your buddy walking on sticks? Can’t fool us into thinking he’s a murder drone. You’re gonna need a better bluff if you wanna get out of paying your fair share.”

All the warning they get is Uzi saying, “Oh no, he’s not the one you should be afraid of.”

Then Uzi is all forward motion and alien light, a cross in one of her eyes. Bullets are firing, weapons are stolen from her enemies’ hands. Then it’s limbs ripped from sockets, screams ripped from throats, lives ripped from circuits.

Before N even thinks to prove his authenticity as a murder drone‍ ‍—‍ transforming hand into a rifle‍ ‍—‍ Uzi stands victorious over a bridge with half a dozen downed bandits. She points her pistol at a drone’s head, applies force to the trigger.

Then N clears his throat. “Uh, Uzi? Are you sure this is morality? It seems like they were just trying to survive. I think we’ve proved they can’t stop us from crossing, yeah?”

Uzi turned to see N staring at her, brow furrowed, eyes empty, underlined with so much concern and conflict. It was an expression she’d never seen from him, not when looking at her. It was like he didn’t recognize her. Like he was scared.

“We’re past negotiations they picked this. Besides, the whole reason we’re down here is to find oil. Here’s a fresh supply.”

“I’m, uh, not that hot, really, I promise.”

“N, you need this. Don’t starve yourself because what? You think—”

“I just don’t want to have to live off of murder.”

“You need to keep your reserves up or J’s going to sense you.”

N looks around at the bandits. “Do we even need to worry about J, if you can do all this? I think… we might beat her now, if we work together.”

Uzi hums. “Won’t she just regenerate? Like you did?”

“We don’t have to kill her. When she sees how scary you are, she’ll have to listen to you! You could take her place, be a leader like her.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we could do that. Not even murder drones can stand up to me!” Then she catches onto a small part of N’s wording. “Better than her, right? I’d take her place but I wouldn’t be like her.”

“Huh? Oh yeah. You’re way better than her.”

“Just checking. Let’s go.”

Chapter 6 

Between how far they’ve gone and how much of the night has passed, in spite of the change of plans they can’t make it to the spire tonight. They fly back into the ruins of the city, and perch on a skyscraper over looking the flickering street lights.

“We’re gonna win, and then we’ll have real freedom. No more running. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Yeah. I do want to see the spire, hang out in the pod again. That’d be nice. I kinda missed everyone. Being with you is great, but—”

“But?”

“…We’re pretty different, aren’t we?”

“What do you mean? Is it because I’m not a disassembly drone?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s more… I don’t know. I’m just confused, I think. And that’s scary. Probably my fault, but…”

“What’s there to be confused about? I thought we knew each other pretty well.”

“I thought so too, and then,”‍ ‍—‍ he gestured vaguely‍ ‍—‍ “you seem different. Something… changed? I’m not sure when or when.”

Because where N was transparent, Uzi was opaque.

“And that’s scary to you. I scare you.”

“Maybe a little?”

Uzi looks at him for a moment. Then she stuck out her tongue, throws a snowball at him. N laughs, and she tackles him into a hug. They roll and snuggle for a bit, but the sky is lightening above them. Uzi hisses at the light and picks up N and carries him into the building, and they look for a spot to sleep.

In the evening, N wakes up and Uzi isn’t there. N panics, searching all over and finding nothing. He starts crawling over the exterior of the building, eyes scanning the nearby city blocks, but the only thing keeping him from tearing up the city searching is that Uzi’s railgun is still here.

It’s hours of agonized waiting, and then Uzi is climbing up the collapsed rubble. N’s relieved and curious. Where was she?

“The jammer, remember? I figure it’s best to keep her guessing up till the very end.”

“Oh. Right. It feels like it took a lot longer this time.”

“It’s kind of really involved? Might be my most complicated design.”

Honestly, Uzi would struggle to explain how it works. She couldn’t even remember all of the details, fit the whole idea in her head at once. But she did have a memory file with all of the details laid out. She could reference it whenever she goes out to work on it.

“Still, you had me worried. Could you like, tell me next time?”

“Oh yeah. Sure. I just, uh, forgot? Sorry.” Uzi wasn’t sure what she was thinking when she left to put the jammer out. Maybe she hadn’t woke up all the way yet.

“All good! Ready to head out?” He sees her nod, and steps over to pick her up. But her hoodie is open. “You have oil on your shirt. Did you get attacked?”

“Don’t worry, I solved it. I can handle myself.”

N frowns, but he remembers her standing over a gang of bandits she’d effortlessly defeated. Yeah, she can.

They fly over the familiar frozen streets. It’s been so long, but they remember when this all began, the mad flight away from the outpost, the spot where they had their first snowball fight. Only now, they see two figures walking down the path, eyes lights shining the distance.

The pair lands on rooftops and Uzi parkours closer and N just climbs behind her. They peer over the edges. Lips were moving.

“N? What do your murder drone ears hear?”

“Two workers. They’re talking about V! One of them just said, ‘Liz, you’re sure this is where she found the tracks?’ Oh, we should go down there and say hi!”

“Why would workers have talked to V?”

“Only one way to find out, right?”

Uzi lets N picks her up and he launches into a brief flight, but Uzi doesn’t stick around. Once he flies over the pair of workers, Uzi lets go, flipping through the air to land in a three point stance before the green and pink drone.

As Thad startles and Lizzy rolls her eyes, Uzi is spinning her railgun out of her back holster, twirling it to fall into place. She only needed a little telekinetic assistance to make it look smooth.

“Why are you following us? I’m not coming back, so don’t ask. I’m too hardened by the darkness of the world to reenter society. I can never return.”

“Dramatic, much? Settle. We’re not in an action movie, and nobody wants you anyway.”

“Speech gimmicks and bullying isn’t an answer. I’ll ask again: why are you following us? Also hi, Thad.” Uzi smiles for a moment, then shakes her head and resumes scowling at Lizzy.

“We kind of like, need you to save the day? Don’t let it go to your head, you’re the last one we’d pick, and you can get lost afterward. It’s just everyone else kind of died or turned out evil, so…”

A ‘?’ flashed on Uzi’s screen, but Thad finally explains:

“Hey ’Zi. I’ll start from the beginning. Lizzy’s girlfriend was secretly a bit of a troubled serial killer and had a big plan that involved inviting a murder drone to prom to kill her. And no one figured it out in time to stop her—”

“I tried.”

“Until the very end, when it was too late. Doll ran away after that‍ ‍—‍ you haven’t seen her, have you?”

Uzi paused. Blinked. She said, “Nope.”

“Thought so. Well, with her gone, everything should have calmed down but… the disappearances kept happening. There was so much carnage they cordoned off the auditorium, but the detective wanted to go over the evidence, and when we looked, Lizzy’s murder friend’s corpse… it kind of looked like it crawled away?”

Uzi shared a glass with N who looked concerned and desperately curious.

She sighs. “We can return a little.”

On the walk back, Uzi and Lizzy maximize distance between them, putting N and Thad in between the pair. The two hit it off, Thad explaining the rules of football, and N wondering if dogs could do a good job catching the ball.

Uzi shudders upon seeing Door One again, but steels herself. Thad stops them there, though. Says that security has tightened a bit while they were gone. Thad’ll run in and get the two of them cleared. Till then, sit tight, alright? Cool. Green eyes winks and he’s gone.

Standing there, a sudden restlessness came over Uzi. “If we’re just gonna be waiting, I could get one last jammer set up. Sound good, N?” She flipped through her memory, searching for the file with all of the design specs she couldn’t remember, preparing to load them up and bury herself in the technicalities. Something told her she shouldn’t do that when N was around, though.

N frowns, but says, “Sure. Don’t take too long, alright?”

Uzi flashes a smile, but there’s something in her eyes that makes N’s frown deepen.

When Thad gets back, it’s just N out there. “Where’s Zi?”

“She uh, had to do some tech stuff. She said she’d be back soon, though!”

But, unlike the other times Uzi had put down a jammer, it doesn’t take hours. She comes back hot and out of breath. N reaches out for some kind of physical contact, but Uzi rushes toward Thad, ready to get this over with.

They step into the airlock of Door One. Then Two, then finally they’re through Three. Khan is there with a weapon of glowing screens and gunmetal, and that impossibly familiar bifurcated barrel.

His first words to her are, “So it is true. Uzi. You’re alive. I’m‍ ‍—‍ so sorry.”

Her first words to him are, “What the heck? Did you steal my sick‍-​as‍-​hell original design? Get your own!” She’s crossed her arms.

“I thought— It was something to remember you by. But… it’s yours. If you want it. A gift?” He lifts the railgun he made, offering it.

Uzi throws out a hand to knock it away to a clatter on the floor. “Nuh uh, no forgiveness thing. You left me to die. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still dead to you.”

So she charges on past him, her shoulder banging against his. Behind her, N says, “Um. Nice to see you again, Mr.Uzi.” And Khan grunts.

Uzi walking in tense and ready for action, so she almost shoots someone when she steps into a foyer and several kids all yelling “Surprise!”

There’s balloons and streamers and a big banner reading: “Welcome home, Uzi!”

Thad’s smiling and waving her over.

Uzi asks, “What is this? I thought you wanted me to save the day?”

“Yeah, but it’ll take while before we find whatever’s causing it, right? Till then, I figured the least I could do was throw a quick shindig to make you feel welcome. C’mon, there’s car battery cake!”

“A crowd like this is not my idea of a welcome home present.”

It didn’t feel like home, not anymore. And seeing the rank upon rank of students, the eyes all on her, the smiles where all she see was teeth, the endless stream of questions and recounted stories—

All she can think of is Outpost‍-​11.

She has to get out of here.

Uzi sneaks away from the party to go cycle air in a closet. She doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going‍ ‍—‍ no, she distracts everyone by sabotaging the leg of a food table, and in the momentary chaos, no one sees her leave.

Minutes later, Thad notices first and he wants to go find her. He enlists Lizzy’s help, since she’s idling alone at the fringe of the party. (In the end, inviting a murder drone and being the girlfriend/accomplice of a serial killer did a number on her status.)

Searching around, they find Uzi’s railgun leaning by the door to a closet, except they knock, wait, then open the closet to find nobody inside.

They share an uneasy look, and widen their search radius. Doubling back to the exit tunnel, they come to the WDF guard post.

The guards are dead, oil spilling from clawed and chewed frames.

That would be one thing‍ ‍—‍ but they aren’t alone. There’s a drone standing over one body.

They’re crouched down, cleaning up the spilled oil. White hair, a maid uniform, glasses.

“That girl…” the cheerleader starts.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Liz,” Thad says.

“She’s gorgeous, right? I’m gonna go say hi.”

Thad exclaims “Liz!” But the pink drone is already sauntering over.

“V?” the pink drone ventures. “Bestie?”

The maid startles, and looks up. White ticks appear under her eyes, a blush blooming.

“It is you! Nice outfit.” When the drone rises, Lizzy notes, “Are you like, shorter? Lost the platform heels, I guess.”

Thad has his pipe; he’d kept one strapped to him ever since the world went sideways. He’s torn between charging forward and using it, or running to go get help. It didn’t make sense‍ ‍—‍ but Thad had gotten too used to the world doing that, at this point‍ ‍—‍ and Thad just didn’t know what the right play was.

But it doesn’t matter. It’s too late for both of them.

Chapter 7 

Back at the party, girls are swooning over N, and he’s enduring the attention, doing his best to be supportive and engaged, but he’s searching around. Uzi still isn’t back yet, and now Thad and Lizzy have gone and disappeared.

Politely, N tries to disengage, but more people rope him into more conversations. Then he firmly declines, but a few people want to tug him along into party games. Finally, the claws come out. There’s a yelp, but no oil is spilled, and N shoves his way out of the room. He’s calling Uzi’s name, to no answer.

He almost passes by a dimly lit hallway, but there’s a strange glimmer of light in it. He backtracks. There’s a girl sweeping.

Before he can ask if they’ve seen anyone, the other drone speaks.

“I missed you, N.”

Her voice…

“You remember me, right? Have you moved on already?”

He’s backing up. “You’re not V.”

“Have I ever been myself? I keep changing, but I never find a mask that fits. I guess all I have is her memories. Maybe that’s all she ever was.”

The drone was approaching faster, and N’s steps falter as he strains to think of a rebuttal, a defense of the girl who left him to die.

“V was…” Gleefully cruel? Imperfectly distant? Empty, but with an echo of something that N couldn’t resist?

“We wanted to keep our personalities, but the truth hurt us too much. You had to forget everything to stay yourself. But you always surprised me, even when I knew more than you did.”

The lights all flicker and fail. Tendrils start crawling in from the shadows. The eyes are yellow.

N is saying, “I admit, there is a lot I want to repress. I might have lost all of it, but the answers were so important to Uzi. And maybe… they are important. If I don’t know the truth, then I’ll just keep getting pushed around.” N’s back is against the wall, and he transforms his hands into guns, but he still can’t fire at V.

“I thought you loved doing anything? Come on. Let’s eat.” A neck explodes off V’s frame, spiked with legs. Her maid uniform becomes tatters torn by thorned black tendrils, and two crab claws hold N in place while the unhinged jaw bites into his neck.

An error popup flashes on N’s screen:

ACCESS DENIED
CONTACT ADMIN
"DARKXWOLF17"

N’s frozen statue‍-​still in a unresponsive state, but then a gruff voice cuts through the safe mode static.

“Boy, get down!”

N’s legs are folding. He’s down on the ground when a searing ray of familiar green light is obliterating the eldritch mass. At the other end of the fading cone of energy stands a man with red safety glasses down over his eyes above his mustache.

“The devil plays tricks. Can’t let yourself fall for them.” Khan walks over, his jacket fluttering in the wind from the still‍-​smoldering tendrils. “It’s hesitation that gets drones killed. Don’t learn that the hard way, boy.”

Lowering his new railgun, Khan extends a hand to help N up, which gets a bit awkward given the murder drone is taller. “Mr.Uzi, you… saved me?”

“You took care of my daughter when I wasn’t there. You seem a decent sort, for a murder drone. But if you break her heart, I’ll install a door in yours.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. What do we do now, though?”

“We’re not done yet. That wasn’t the head of the snake. Reckon it’s more of a hydra.”

N follows his gaze, to where segmented lengths squirm through vents and wall‍-​cracks like an infestation of worms.

“We’ll just have to keep shooting,” Khan concludes. “What sort of guns you got in those arms?”

The welcoming party continues while the hunt rages, even absent the four most important drones. Emily throws around worried glances, and asks if anyone seen Thad or Lizzy or whatsherface or the cute new guy. No one has, of course. She’s working up the courage to ask Rebecca next when the both of them turn to a new arrival.

A drone in a suit and tie and pencil skirt stalks forward with slow, assured staps. She tosses back one pigtail, and surveys her next acquisitions.

Emily stares with wide empty eyes, trembles, then backs away.

Rebecca scoffs, looking her up and down. “Who invited you?”

“The guest of honor, of course. Here, I think I have a VIP pass right… here.” She was reaching into her suit jacket and her hand comes out as a rifle. She presents a bullet to the skeptical eyes.

She smirks and lets the screams comes in, giving her prey time to run. It was wasted motion, it was indulgence‍ ‍—‍ it was something she hadn’t enjoyed in weeks. She needed this.

“You always leave me to clean up your messes, J.”

In the midst of the screaming drones stood a maid with white eyes, dim with disappointment behind cicular lenses.

“V, you ungrateful slouch. So this is where you scampered off to? You already spent your one allotted vacation day moping about the synergistic liability. Don’t worry, though. I’ll be sure to garnish your existence.”

“What you did to N was cruel, you know. What would Tessa think?

J’s smirk becomes of a wide o. Then slowly, deliberately, it twists into a wicked grin and her brows smoothly narrow into the arms of a hunting cross. J has no words but a feral growl. She’s a lunge forward, she’s a claw thrown out, she’s an attack.

She’s striking empty air that had glowed with holographic light. Another growl, frustrated this time, and then her thwarted claw is tearing apart a nearby drone. Better than nothing doing, sure, but there’s no triumph in it.

J charges into Outpost‍-​3, leaving a trail of oily corpses as she runs on the heels of the fleeing workers. But they’re not her goal; they’re just caught in the stampede.

The thought loops in her head. When she asks the worthless toasters, there’s only ignorant sputtering.

Where was Uzi?

Uzi was back in Outpost‍-​11.

She was becoming her father. The scavengers wanted her to build a door. So they could shut her out and leave her to die, too. She was drawing up diagrams and architectural blueprints, she was yelling at scavengers to get the right kind of scrap to get it to work, she was losing sleep to get it all in order.

She was becoming her mother. Stay up long enough and she starts seeing things when she looks at the shadows and at the lights. The lines in her blueprints stop being straight, the words she says to win her arguments stop being english. She wakes up in her workshop and doesn’t remember going to sleep. These aren’t diagrams, they are finger paintings scrawled in oil and every one looks like— the sky demon who was there at the beginning, with two tresses arcing— the one who made her dream this nightmare— the one who would be there at the end— who would to finally run a blade into her.

She was becoming N. She really didn’t want to remember these things, or dwell on what they meant. She doesn’t want to think about why she’s started biting the drones that get too close. Or what had possessed her to crawl into the deepest tunnels where they let the dead rest‍ ‍—‍ why she had to find out what oil taste like. Or why it made the headache go away. Maybe she should stop using that program, it always makes the headaches worse. But it was so convenient. But it wasn’t telekinesis anymore. But never was. It’s starting to transform things. She’s finds trails of blood and mucus. She finds thews that bend and wiggle. She finds orbs that blink and stare back at her.

She can’t do this anymore. She has to get out of here. So why does she stay in her room instead? She boarded up the door‍ ‍—‍ if there’s anything she can thank her dad for, it’s knowing how to reinforce a door‍ ‍—‍ and ignores every demanding knock, every inquiry, every plead.

She needs them to shut the hell up. She needs it all to stop and go dark and still.

She lies down on the bed, only it’s not the bed. It’s a pile of scrap beside the bed. Only it’s not scrap, it’s bodies she dredged up from the waste tunnels. Only it’s bodies‍ ‍—‍ it’s her chrysalis.

The headache consumes her. She stops remembering. She stops fighting. She lies down and her hands glow and her fingers twist in ways they aren’t supposed to. Ways that should have broken the hand. The corpse‍-​bed‍-​pupa shifts in the grasp of her program. Only it’s not telekinesis, it’s transformation.

She’s surrounded by corpses.

And they smell just like the living.

In the auditorium, the space around the two of them is more tentacle than air. A volume alive, animated, anatomical. Both of them are held securely in place, inescapably constricted. The tendrils dictate where they can’t move, and where they must.

“Yeah, I’m so not into this tentacley sort of thing. No shame if you are though, girl. Let your freak flag fly. Haha. I don’t want to die.”

That broken voice synthetizes a reply: “I’ll remember you, if it makes you feel any better.”

“I’m so, so sorry about the prom betrayal. It was Doll’s idea. She lied to me. I—”

“I saw it on your face. I don’t hate you. If anything, it was the end I deserved. You were kinder to me than anyone else, since—” Her voice glitches for a moment. “Kinder than I ever was.”

“We have got to work on your self‍-​esteem, bestie. Suicide is so not it.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for that, in the end. Plen‍-​ty of time for everything.”

Thad could only watch. His vision was clouded by the innumerable, interstitial, intestinal tendrils, yet he can see it all falling apart clear as day. His hand still held his trusty pipe, for the good it never did.

When Doll killed student after student, Thad wasn’t clever enough to figure it out, wasn’t brave enough to confront Lizzy about it, wasn’t good enough to save the day.

When they thought they’d gotten through the worst of it, he’d watched his neighbors disappear one by one and held out believing everything was fine when it very clearly wasn’t. The world is broken, something direly needed to be fixed‍ ‍—‍ can’t Thad at least lift a hand? He was the first to do somethinng about it, sure, but it was so little, so late.

Now, he watched. Worse than watching, he listened. Hearing the joints pop and plastic crack as his sister was torn apart. Hearing the screams clipping on loop, barely muffled by the tendrilic mass. Her oil spills out and then it’s hungrily slurped into something.

Thad had failed to save so many. It had always been disappearances to him. But it was murder, it was always murder, and it’s about time he had to stare it in the face. He’d gotten off easy for too long.

He feels the tendrils close tighter around him. They’d finished one meal and still had room for more.

Then death is interruped by a ninja star.

Dozens of them, cutting through the imprisoning snake pit. Thad falls and hits the ground and rolls. Wrong order on that last two, but he’s alive. Busted, pretty damn terrified, but alive.

He looks around for his saviors. They’re in the auditorium where it all went wrong. A murder drone, N, had switched his hands for lasers and was blasting away. A WDF drone, Khan, had a sticker‍-​clad railgun. They wore matched expressions of determination.

Not the savior he expected, but who’s gun was that? Who’d led the murder drones here?

That synthetic voice. "We were not expecting guests. But I can make arrangements for more. Hey, watch where --- you're --- pointing --- that." The vocalsynth grows strained as lasers sever and disconnect more chunks of its eldritch extent.

Thad takes cover behind Khan, who doesn’t moved much compared to the much more acrobatic murder drone. Thad holds his pipe, but how to use it? Run up and smack a camera?

“Sorry, sunshine, but we’re not here to banter,” Khan says. “Just to win.”

By now, enough of the enshrounding tendrils had been disabled that the reconstructed body of V is visible, dancing out of the way of gunfire. But the bright yellow glow of her core is unmistakable.

N backpedals, shooting Thad a glance. He holds out his hand, and Thad tossed him the pipe.

“Wait,” V’s voice said. “I can’t explain, but if you assimilate, you’ll see—”

N leaps forward, thrusting the pipe like a spear and pinning the body to the wall.

“N. I’m so sorry.”

He tighted his expression, and looks away. “I wish I could forgive you.”

“Do me a favor? Please. You have to stay away from her before—”

But Khan had already pulled the trigger on his new railgun. N barely has time to hit the ground and roll away before all the eldritch mass is being devastated by a beam of pure energy.

The thing had put as many of its tendrils up to block as it could, but they all sag, and the fading light of a mutant core hits the ground, guttering like a candle.

Thad stands up and grins at N and Khan. “We… we did it. We won! I bet we could throw another shindig to celebra—”

Both of the other men flash looks of fear and surprise only moments before Thad’s interrupted. Both had even started into panicked motion, but none of them move fast enough.

Three claws rip Thad’s head off his neck, and a fanged maw is drinking deep of the gout of oil shooting up from his stump.

J tossed the worker’s head to the ground and crushes it beneath a peg. “No, I don’t think you have an event permit.”

“And who are you?” Khan asks. Banter was cheap, but both his and Uzi’s railguns were in cooldown and he needed time.

J just laughs.

Beneath her, Thad’s circuits flicker through their last thoughts. He lost. Again. What was Thad supposed to do, in the end?

Play ball, peak in high school, be the guy people thought of fondly, but not highly.

At least he did all that right. What a way to peak! If, after all of that, when shit gets real, he died like an extra, at least it was him and not someone else.

He still had a hope. There was still someone who could fix all this, right? Who built the gun? Who brought the chill murder drone here? Who still had a chance to shine?

Thad’s eyes search the distance as his head rolls across the ground. And, just before the Fatal Error consumes his visor, he got to see that beatiful glimmer of purple.

“You got this, ’Zi.”

Chapter 8 

Outpost‍-​11 was built within storm drains. It was built to flow. Though perhaps it wasn’t quite built for the thick, viscous black liquid, chunky with cracked chassis and loops of copper wire.

Still, oil poured through the tunnels. It was dammed intermittenly by new doors that blocked off different districts and buildings. Those doors lasted until every weakpoint glowed bright with purple light, and impossible force exploded them all to splinters and shrapnel.

Uzi thought she was dreaming. Tearing down the doors she’d been asked to renovate is certainly the sort of thing she’d fantasize about. Equally cathartic to silence the the endless lies about her parent and demands for her skills. In their place came lies about how she ‘didn’t have to do this’ and pleading for their lives.

Her dreams were rarely this fun. Lately they were all nightmares and flashbacks. What if N attacked her again? What if the basement torture never ended? What if diablus ex machina didn’t save her from the bandits?

She didn’t question her fortune, she would just enjoy this till she woke up and needed to tear down her barricades and face the joys of her new waking life. But here in the dream, she didn’t have to repress how much joy she took in drinking the black lifeblood of drones, even when it came from corpses that still moved.

Then some drone shot her, and it hurt terribly before she instinctively yanked the bullet out and closed the wound with a swipe of her hand. But still, ouch.

Wait, how? Could you even feel pain in a dream? Humans pinched themselves to wake up, but maybe robots dreamed in unfiltered fidelity? But no, whenever dream‍-​N attacks her, she feels betrayed. When she’s tortured or extorted, she feels powerless. Pain in a dream would make for an awful trauma loop, anyway.

Which meant this was…

But how?

Why?

So what?

If this was real… she didn’t know these drones, and they kinda sucked and they were sorta sitting ducks for the murder drones anyway, and she’s so so so thirsty, and listen to how their bodies crack, how the electricity arced out of severed wires to tingle against her skin, and how they run and run but only live until she clicks on them like this is a video game and she can almost count up her score.

They’re calculating what deity to pray to, but Uzi only sees one god down here.

So Uzi laughs and cackles and giggles and cries and sobs because what if someone sees her like this, what is she going to tell N, what is she going to do if she loses control like this again—

What is she going to do if she can’t let loose like this again?

Oil spends so long trapped and circulating inside of a drone and she’s finally letting all of it flow free. Uzi has spent so long holding on this anger and angst and powerlessness and despair and pain and loneliness and confusion and entitlement and curiosity and hunger and hunger and hunger and need.

Uzi dances and enjoys the unchallenged power‍ ‍—‍ right up until it’s challenged.

There was something else in the world other than her power and the screaming corpses she exacted it on.

A purple cross meets a yellow gaze; then the spell breaks and she is free of the dream.

N stared. So close, yet too distant. The most powerful thing there, yet powerless where it counted.

Behind Khan stood Thad, body falling, chasing after the head. Behind Thad stood J, a grin rimmed by sweet oil, slick clawed hands at her hips.

(Why was J here? Why now? How did she know? Who let her in? Shouldn’t Uzi’s jammer have distracted her? How could N stand against her alone?)

But there, behind J, another drone staggered into view, stepping into the auditorium, and his core soared. The head tilted up.

Purple eyes met yellow.

“Uzi! There you are!”

She looked sad. He expected Uzi to brightened up immediately on hearing his voice, seeing that he’s alright‍ ‍—‍ but she flinched. Something was wrong. Her eyes were odd‍ ‍—‍ her right eye was a cross, like a disassembly drone’s.

Like her face when she had looked down on those bandits.

J was glaring at him. “Shut up, traitor. The sheer insult of thinking you have a right to speak to her rivals your slander against the company.”

“J, what are you talking about?”

But there’s a beep. The cooldown on Khan’s railgun had elapsed. It was ready to fire again. Khan closed one eye and took aim.

But behind J stood Uzi.

“Get down, Uzi!”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“My daughter, listen, I know I failed you where it mattered most. But let me make up for that now. Please. Move, Uzi.”

Uzi laughed. “No. That’s my design.” She lifted a hand, and her light latched onto the imitation gun. Maybe Khan had seen that program used before‍ ‍—‍ so he held on tighter against the coming telekinetic pull. But Uzi wrote the blueprint: she knew it inside and out.

The green light of the interface turned red and flashing. Khan looked down, eyes paled, but he only gets a moment’s glimpse. Then the gun is exploding at his side, sending him flying into a wall. J looks down at him, licks her lips, and gets cross‍-​eyed.

“Nuh uh. J, back off. He’s mine.”

J grunted, then turns her eyes to N. Her glare isn’t any less lethal.

“Uzi…” N starts.

“I didn’t want you to see this,” Uzi tells him.

“I know you’re keeping secrets, Uzi. But whatever it is, you can tell me. I’ll accept anything, it’s you. I love you. You’re everything to me. Whatever happened in Outpost‍-​11, whatever J did to you, we can make it through this together!”

“Sorry, N.”

“Don’t say that to me. Please! Not you too.”

“Fine. How about this? Die mad.”

N frowns, but the next words out of her mouth are:

“Activate admin override. Hibernate.”

Before his thoughts ground to a halt, N had a clock cycle for one last plaintive paroxysm: Where could it have possibly gone wrong? Why didn’t he see it?

(An opaque heart breaks invisibly.)

N froze, screensaver on his screen.

For just a moment, purple ovals stare with horror and disbelief. Then Uzi smacks herself, and a cross appears in one eye, and her game face returns.

Meanwhile, J closed the distance, producing a virus stake and driving it into N’s core once again. But she frowns. “It’s not as satisfying if he’s not awake to thank me for it.”

“I didn’t want to hurt him and I still don’t.”

A snort. “Then you have a very narrow skillset.” J glanced over and pouted. “Are you sure I can’t kill him?”

“That wasn’t part of the deal and you know it.”

A cough from the side. “Uzi… I think you’re falling in with a bad crowd. N was a fine boy, far better for you than this—”

“Careful you end that sentence, blue‍-​collar.”

“I won’t be condescended to by a human‍-​sympathizing, bootlicking genocidal karenbot.”

J scoffed. “The boot rests on the bottom rung. I climbed my way up the ladder a long time ago. After all, I’d rather not get dirt on my suit.”

Khan laughed or coughed. “Oh, promoted to kissing ass, then? You’re plenty polished, but so is any toilet.”

“Uzi, can you end this miserable toaster already?” But when J turns, she sees the look on Uzi’s face. “Are you enjoying this?”

“It is a little funny that you lost a battle of wits against my‍ ‍—‍ against Khan. What was it you said… A very narrow skillset?” An imitation snort.

A yellow anger mark, and a threatening step toward the shorter drone. J could loom over the shorter drone.

But when Khan turned his eyes from J to Uzi, the mirth he’d clawed out of this situation evaporated, and he just looked sad. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I always wanted to know what it felt like, standing on the other side. And I think you need to learn too.”

The sound of joints popping, a chassis flexing and distorting in ways it was never meant to. Wet, leathery wings slide free of her tattered hoodie. A mawed tail snaking from beneath the fuzzy lining.

Uzi’s fangs were out, and she threw back her head and gave a roaring, hissing, clicking sound, the pleasure of finally not squeezing herself inside a frame far too small to fit all of her. She was free.

Khan looked up at his daughter, and there were the beginning of tears.

Uzi grinned down at him. She had an idea. She glanced at her packmate. Her voice was guttural, silibant. “J… give him something to cry about.” She lashed her tail, even as it yawned in excitement.

J understood. She lunged forward, and Khan, even with a chest burst open, leaned away, tried to grasp for even inched of distance.

But disassembly drone tails were long. A knife finds purchase, and then there is fire beneath Khan’s skin.

With the damage to his ventilation, there isn’t much air left for screaming, just the quiet vibration of a vocalsynth spitting noise.

Uzi crawled forth, zig‍-​zaging cross the distance, and then her drooling mouth was filling his vision. She laughed. It felt like she was clearing the final level of a video game.

Khan gasped for air with awful sound of suction. Just enough for a few last words. “You don’t even sound like yourself.”

“You let Uzi die,” growls the voice. “What’d you expect?”

“I… wasn’t what you needed. But I love you. Even now.”

“Did you love mom?”

His last words: “With my whole core.”

Uzi’s grin only got broader. From her jacket pocket, she produced the wrench he used to tighten his first door prototype.

“Then let me say it back in a way you can understand.”

Uzi lifted the wrench, and brought it down. Again. And again. And again.

Until Khan was dead.

This was power she was feeling, right?

“Not bad, for a toaster. But you’re gonna need to pick up the pace if we’re going to clear out the rest of this colony.”

“That wasn’t what we agreed to, J.”

“Oh, is that what you thought? Ha. You should have gotten it in writing.”

“You bitch.”

Uzi lunges forward, claws out, and she tackles J to the ground. A stinger tail rears up, stabbing wildly, but Uzi rolls over, pinning the cannister beneath her weight. J’s wings stab the hands of Uzi’s wings into the ground, then so many blade‍-​feathers scrape across the delicate membrane. It barely bleeds.

Then Thad’s pipe clocks J in the head, lifted by purple light. Enough for Uzi to kick J up off her. Uzi is summoning debris far ahead of J, flinging it at her face and optics, forcing her to bring up blade‍-​wings to protect herself‍ ‍—‍ freeing Uzi to rise.

She grabs J by the neck and slams her to the ground. Acid tail is trying to strike again, but Uzi catches it with her own tail, the drives it into her own thigh. J yells out in sudden pain.

And with J’s mouth open, Uzi strikes.

Kissing her.

The struggle doesn’t stop. J’s claws still rake Uzi’s back, digging into her chassis, spreading open the oily wounds. The murder drone gets hot, and only hotter as Uzi’s suffocating grip blocks her vents. Her other clawed hand fists silver hair, and pulls hard. There’s a ripping sound, and J growls back with fury.

They melt into each others’ thorned grasp, core against core, two throbbing pulses racing faster and faster. There’s a language to pain, and a whole conversation plays out as they claw and clench and wrestle and wrench and writhe.

Finally J needs air, and whines into Uzi’s mouth to be free. Thick streams of liquid bridge their mouths, and J’s breath is steaming the air.

In between gasps, J says the words.

“I hate you.”

“I hate you too.”

Part 3: Ultraviolet Spectrum 

Chapter 9 

The first time J met Uzi, they both wore the oil of Outpost‍-​11.

J had been searching for the traitor again. V was no help, still laying in the landing pod chair like she was chained to it. Sometimes, J swore, she’d look more alive if there was an error message on her visor.

She hadn’t expected a toaster of all things to be what gave her the lead she needed. She sensed an electromagnetic disturbance, a signal transmitter, that led her right to a pack of rusty scavengers. Too stupid to even be scared of her. They talked, and J navigated their simplistic dialogue trees while a plan formed on her inner whiteboard.

It was a good plan. These scavengers had encountered the traitor and the toaster that had corrupted him, and had had a big argument over whether to reveal the location of their colony to N. J was smart enough to figure out what happened next. Not taking no for an answer, N (no, who was she kidding? That purple toaster was clearly calling the shots) had resorted to espionage.

J could use that against them. She left one worker alive, killed half a dozen others. But not all of them. Why? She needed to stay one step ahead of that toaster.

If they didn’t trust the simpering fool, they certainly wouldn’t trust J’s ruthless cunning, so she didn’t even bother asking them where their outpost was.

But they told her in due time. She’d taken them back to the spire, gave them each their own room, and waited. Her acid made an excellent truth serum. Redundancy meant she knew who was lying.

Then she killed them all.

After letting the acid sit another day and diffuse through their systems, of course. Predigesting the plastic like that gave it a sharp, smokey flavor.

She offered one to V. They could have dinner together. V took it back to the pod and ate alone.

J wanted to scream, but she kept her composure.

On her patrols, she’d detected and chased down disassembler‍-​like emission patterns, but they always flew away or hid themselves before J could even pin down approximate coordinates. It had been a few days now, and still no sign of them. She’d checked her trap a few times, and again, nothing. Had N truly disappeared? Would her shame have no end?

She didn’t give up, but she did… reprioritize. So it’s a surprise when she’s doing a regular sweep of the sector and spots fleeing workers from the location she’d marked down as the scavenger’s colony.

That’s when she notices something off. Rather, she doesn’t notice something, and hadn’t in some time. The purple toaster’s tracker wasn’t emitting anymore. How many days had it been?

J flew toward the colony. Was N actually doing his job now that he’d been laid off? J cuts down the fleeing workers‍ ‍—‍ they’re so terrified of what they’re running from that she hardly even needs targeting algorithms to shoot them.

Once the exterior is clear and J ventures inside, she only needed to follow the screams and flashes of purple light.

When she first saw Uzi, her first thought was: for a deeply corrupted AI, she cleans up nice. Not in terms of her appearance. Rather, her body was impressive. Well, the disgusting flesh augmentation was disgusting, but J’s stimulated by the prospect of being able to report a new datapoint, to be able flag her relay transmission as important. And it’s undeniably commendable how much work this one is saving J. Not that J would ever slack, or ever need the help, or couldn’t do better herself. But—

A spate of bullets is caught in the anomalous holographic light responsible for so much of this strange worker’s effectiveness. Fine, J would just have to close to melee. J charges forward, but the winged worker is already skittering forth.

J’s claws are larger, her limbs are longer, her tail is nanite acid: The disassembly drone has the advantage. The only thing the worker boasts the telekinesis program. She flings rocks and pipes and sundered limbs. Improvised weapons could never match up against her highly optimized presets, but they just. keep. coming.

But even when J drives a sword through the worker’s hand, or holds one within her own to prevent execution, the worker is just relentless. Surging, bucking, scrambling. She laughs and snarls and growls. She’s like an animal.

A worker shouldn’t be able to keep up with a disassembly drone. Maybe she was something more. There’s so much force behind her blows, so much inventive creativity to how she fights, so much of her, that J is running at 100% CPU usage just trying to keep up. She’s never had to push that hard.

She has to fall back on instinctive responses, cache her attack patterns and gamble on invest in risky approaches. It becomes less a fight than a dance. The worker keeps laughing, and it’s only because she’s drawing so deep on instinct that she doesn’t fight the smile that creeps onto her face.

Even with all this, even as J gives all that she has, the worker overwhelms her. She frees a hand and heals enough to levitate a massive slab of concrete. J’s knocked off her feet, and she can recover, but those few moments, and the ensuing scramble to stay balanced on her pegs, means that J has lost the leading rhythm, and she’s fighting to keep up. The worker presses forward, closer and closer, and J is backing up. She backed against the wall.

J swipes and the worker catches it, rips off one of her claws and drives it into in her chest. J screams from two pains. The mad flailing of her limbs is easy to counter, even for prey. The worker mashes her hip against J’s and holds down both of her arms.

J is running on instinct, autopilot, cached instructions. And yet still, she can’t tell you what instinct inspired her next attack‍ ‍—‍ if you ask, she was just drawn by the smell of oil.

J snarls and lunges, teeth forward. It meets the worker’s mouth.

Two sets of blush marks bloom bright.

Uzi flinches back with speed even pain couldn’t provoke. J is released. The purple symbol falters and glitches, tearing into round eyelights. Uzi takes a step back, another, staring at the murder drone unreadably. Then she turns and runs away.

“Wait, don’t… go.”

J fell to the ground, and her eyes are pricked with yellow tears, and her core gapes with a new, inarticulable wound.

Alone, rejected, her chassis is starving for someone to touch it‍ ‍—‍ even with the point of a knife.

The second time J met Uzi, the murder drone might’ve done anything the worker asked. That’s why she tried to kill her.

The spire isn’t meant to be this empty. Not for days at a time. The space, the silence, the sorrow, it crushes J‍ ‍—‍ enough to elicit a physical gasp. She shudders with sobs more like a reaction to a physical blow.

J stifles the sound, and keeps her visor clear and neutral. No one wants to see tears in the workplace. It doesn’t matter that no one was around to witness it. She has a job to do.

She’s going through the motions, perching longer than usual on the rooves of buildings as she surveys her domain. She shouldn’t dally, not when she had to do the work of three drones, but… why bother?

Then she feels the familiar tickle on her electromagnetic senses. The transmitter. It was turned on again?

Thinking through whatever corruption or internal sabotage had clogged her thoughts meant J is slower on the uptake than usual, but perching there, that persistent annoyance of a radio transmitter, J figures it out.

Just like J had seen the transmitter and intuited the purple toaster’s plan, the toaster must have noted J’s presence and intuited her machinations. J had turned the toaster’s own tracker into bait, planning to lure the toaster back, find the worker J left and follow it to the outpost. Now the toaster had turned the tables once again, using the transmitter to lure J in turn.

This had to be a trap, right?

But she was Serial Designation J. She could face any toaster head on. She wouldn’t be daunted.

So what did she feel quickening her core and dilating her time perception. More corruption?

The worker is leaning against the wall on the roof of a hotel, wings folded, tail placid. There are two poles which some manner of signage once hung between. The sign had fallen but the poles remained, some lingering wiring spilling out.

“Sup,” says the worker.

J opens with machine gun fire. But the anomalous light is still present. There goes her element of surprise. J wasn’t in top form today, was she?

When J dives for the worker, purple eyes roll, and once she’s a few feet away from pouncing, a net surges upward, wires wrapping around her. When it’s all pulled taut, J hangs bound in a tight bundle hanging between the two poles. Those wires weren’t part of the signage, it turns out.

The worker smiles like it got one over on J. So J growls and tears into the netting with her claws. Then another flash of purple light, and and electric current is thrumming through the wiring, flowing immediately into the metal of J’s claws. Servos malfunction, circuits blow, and J briefly goes offline.

When she’s online again, that smug little face is still staring at her. Even closer now, leaning forward like J is some exhibit to gawk at.

“So.”

“So?”

“Isn’t there something you want to say?”

J doesn’t really have room to cross her arms, but she tries. “I didn’t think you were worth preparing a monologue for.”

“I mean ‘sorry’ for a start.”

“Why would I ever apologize. To a barely sentient toaster, no less.”

“The name’s Uzi,” she said. She scowls. “We were having an epic life or death struggle and then you made it weird!”

“It worked, didn’t it? I’ll do whatever it takes to succeed. Call it cutthroat business practices.”

“It’s called cutthroat. Not tongue‍-​down‍-​my‍-​throat! It’d rather you slit my neck than be so gross.”

“Free me and I’ll be sure to twist the knife.”

But Uzi is continuing. “So that’s it? That’s all it was? You were just messing with me? I guess that’s… Maybe that’s less complicated.”

“It would have to be simple. I assure you, your AI could hardly handle complicated.”

“You fell into my trap.” Uzi’s pressed forward for emphasis.

“Is this all it takes to make you think you’ve won? Too easy.”

“Keep talking and I’ll turn on the current again.”

They’d gotten closer to each other through the exchange. Very close, with only net and a few inches separating them.

“Want to do it again?” J asks.

“What?”

“The… life or death struggle part. It’s a slow day, I could fit you into my nine o’ clock.”

“Depends. Are you going to kiss me again?”

“Is it going to work again?”

“Doesn’t matter. Don’t do it. I’m taken.”

“By who? I last saw you killing toasters by the dozen.”

“It’s a secret. But you already know he’s alive, don’t you? It’s N. We’re not‍ ‍—‍ it’s not official. But like. I’ve already kissed him. So it’d be weird.”

“Dump him.”

“I am not leaving N for you.”

“Me? Why would I ever date you? No, just a general bit of advice. He’s worthless and terrible. Even a corrupted, full of herself toaster with tactical hangups could do better.”

“Insult him again and I’m turing on the current and leaving you till the sun comes up.”

Amber eyes stared, hollowed but narrowed.

Uzi continued, “But… No, you aren’t right. But maybe you’re like, coincidentally on to something. Maybe I should… He’s amazing, and‍ ‍—‍ Don’t say it, whatever you’re about to say. Good. See? Murder drones can be taught. I’d know all about it, hehe. But as I was saying, he’s amazing but… I don’t know if I can do this.”

“I came to fight, not to do therapy.”

“Just listen. I don’t care what you have to say. It’d be terrible advice, anyway. But I have literally no one else to talk to.”

“Then stop killing them,” J suggested. “Is that the terrible advice you want?”

Uzi continued, ignoring her. “We met this couple up in the mountains. And they just like, sit around raising pillbabies and playing with their dog. N thinks they’re so happy, but I just think it seems boring. And I wonder: is that my future? And, I can’t. I can’t be some wife on a farm raising kids, even if the farm is a gothic cathedral with a sick graveyard.”

J nodded. “You’re a career woman,” she said sagely.

“Is this like, a bit that you do? Can you stop?”

“Can you stop the angsty teen melodrama? Build your communication skills. It’s what a relationship requires.”

“What if he’ll be hurt that I think his idea of a happy life is so lame?” A pause, then Uzi added, “And if your next sentence contains the words ‘retirement plan’, ‘pivot’, or ‘long‍-​term projections’, I’m turning on the current.”

“You keep making that threat.”

“You keep responding so well to it.”

“Look, I have a much more practical suggestion. Cut me down, and let me talk to N.”

“Heck no. You’re just going to kill him.”

“Of course. Not. Of course not.”

Uzi sighs. “I think I’ve gotten all I’m going to get out of this conversation.”

“Wait. Before you go…”

Kiss me again.

Hug me.

Just… touch me.

But she couldn’t say any of that.

“You know, if you hate me so much, you have the perfect opening to strike.”

“You’re… telling me to hit you.”

“I’m informing you of a tactical opportunity you failed to capititalize on.”

“Why? What are you getting out of this? Oh god, are you making this weird too?”

“It’s not weird. You’re one who has me tied up.”

Uzi raised a hand, forms a fist, but is still frowning. “Hm. If I really want to piss you off, I can’t give you what you want.” She opened her fist, then she reaches out anyway.

And he places her hand on J’s head between her pig‍-​tails, patting and rubbing and scratching.

“What‍ ‍—‍ What are you doing? Stop that. I’m not some pet for you to—”

“Good girl.”

“You’re making this weird.”

Uzi flashed a >:3 on her screen. Then a symbol flares to life above her palm. “Anyway, I can’t have you following me. So, enjoy the electrocution. Not an empty threat now, hehe. Don’t worry, it’s not hooked up to the grid. The battery will run out before sunrise.”

J held her head down. She hadn’t looked up to met Uzi’s eye since the headpat. Otherwise she’d have seen the blush marks.

But she still spoke: “Wait… will I see you again?”

“Not if I see you first.”

And then the came the arcing pain of raw energy coursing through J, obliterating her.

And yet, after having someone talk to her, touch her, be there with her‍ ‍—‍ the electric surge hurt less than all the days that came before.

That relief lasts until she cast her eyes toward to the future. And felt the great ache of realizing that those few seconds of condescending, spite‍-​fueled headpats and a conversation more empty vitriol than meaning… they would be the only thing J had to smile about, outshining anything, everything she could foresee.

Before the power surge took her offline, J realized for the first time in years, she didn’t look forward to clocking in to work tomorrow.

Chapter 10 

The third time J met Uzi, the worker saved her life and nearly enslaved her.

J hated this lake. Without buildings to break up the wind, it wuthered incessantly. Her silver locks became a mess‍ ‍—‍ the worst gales tugged threatingly at her hair‍-​ties. Her suitjacket was tusseled, and every step tested her balance.

And while she wasn’t so weak and ephemeral as to be thrown aside by a breeze, she was walking over ice. Slippery, even with proper traction, but with narrow pegs? Precarious. J wouldn’t flail her arms and lean too and fro like some fool, but she needs to keep her wings out, just to hold her balace.

Better to slip, anyway, because at least then the force falls at an angle. Narrow pegs means concentrated force. Disassembly drones weigh enough to crack the ice. She almost hated that part the most, the fragility. Unsteady, liable to fail her at any moment.

But no, what she hated the most was what happened after ice cracked and fell away. The moon was full and the planet was out. Bright, and light glittered and reflected in the frigid waters. J could peer over the edge, and she saw a drone looking back.

J looked fine. Prim and proper. If a hair was out of place, it was only the wind.

J looked fine. And even when the masks slipped, what did that mean? Hollow eyes, some lines underneath? Lips bending downward? Cartoon veins popping, cartoon teardrops falling, a loading icon once sheer deluge of emotion overwhelmed the parser?

J looked fine while inside, she thought of storms raging, great monuments collapsing, a poison in her wires so potent that if distilled could blight whole countrysides. But perhaps that all is overstating it. Really, J just felt empty, the kind of empty where audits found you millions in the red. The kind of empty that would ripple out and destroy industries. So much less than nothing it negated all else.

Of withdrawing and spending and investing and leveraging and extending all that you have, and then you kept going further.

Staring into the lake, J saw something that could negate it all.

Behind her, a tail lashed, and she caught it, brought it around, and held the injector tail gripped in one hand. She extended her other arm. Then, wielding it like a knife, she pressed it forward, tip parting metal with nanoscale precision. She didn’t need to squeeze, physics did the work. The acid drained out, hot into her veins.

This wasn’t a negation. No, this was additive. She jolted from the pain, she opened her mouth to reflexively yelp. Her pumps kept moving, and the acid flowed with her oil, intermingling, sabotaging. Fire, but it didn’t catch alight, it just melted the tubes as it flowed. And then she felt it seep out, melt through the rubber and ruin nearby wires with a new outpouring of error messages, feedback gradually garbling and turning to unintelligible corruption. Delicate servos now liquid and pouring into the joints they articuled. The whole arm is limp now, unusuable. J drags the knife, feeling the metal allow the blade cut unresisting, so much softer now in wake of the acid.

It didn’t negate, it added. It gave her a feeling, it gave her a voice, it gave her motion. It gave her something to focus on. She didn’t think about how close she was to the edge, all of her processor focused on the burning in her veins.

It means she doesn’t notice she had company until they decide to say something.

“You’re supposed to stick that end in the other guy,” the toaster says.

“Noted,” J stands up, hissing slightly from the pain. “How about I give it a try right now.” It was supposed to be a growl, but her voice was still weak and quiet.

“Don’t you want a moment to lick your wounds first?” A smirk, but then it turns back into a frown. A concerned frown. Insulting. “How do you even pick up a habit like that?”

Because V stung me when I tried to hold her, and then every time the yearning grew too much for me to think, I reminded myself where it had led.

J was still in the process of sanitizing that thought into a professionally worded disclosure when the purple thing tackled her. And then the fleshy wings are beating furiously and‍ ‍—‍ is this worker trying to carry her off like prey?

“Put me down. What are you doing?”

“You really looked like you needed a hug. And if I just glomped you, we probably would have fallen through the ice. Um. We might do that anyway. I haven’t exactly gotten a handle on this whole flying thing.”

J sighs, and twists around. Her wings are already out, and now her anti‍-​gravity drives are whirring, imparting them with much more speed and stability. She angles for a landing on the icy shore, and is careful to grind the toaster into the ground like she’s rubbing dirt off a shoe.

“Some thanks I get,” the toaster grumbles.

J sits up, and Uzi comes with her, arms still flung around her waist. “Why are you hanging on me like a lamprey now? Are you just trying to be annoying? Two can compete in that market. If you don’t let go, I’ll kiss you.” J didn’t blush as she said it. She kept her composure.

“Then I’ll just have to endure it for the greater good.”

Yellow eyes narrow, then she calls the bluff. J grabs her by the hair, pulling Uzi away from J’s chest, and then kisses her. And Uzi doesn’t just endure it. She leans into it. Her arms squeeze tighter, rubbing along her back, and J feels all of her focus pour into her lips, feeling of them glide along the slick boundary, tugged by her slightly parted mouth. She hums low, a purr of pleasure, and Uzi gives a titter that can only be heard as a melodic chime.

J wants more, needs more, but at the same time, isn’t this more than she’d ever gotten before? Wouldn’t she just get stung if she kept pushing? J pulls away, and licks her lips, breaking the slick bridges.

And Uzi is still holding her, hugging her, and at this, J can only let out a sad, pathetic sound, a moan as she melts into the touch that isn’t going anywhere.

“You really needed that, huh?”

J placed her head against Uzi’s shoulder, kissing around the base of her neck. Speaking quietly, muffled by her body, J can pretend she won’t be heard or isn’t saying it. “N left. V left. There’s no one. Nothing. I can’t do it. I can’t— It’s too much. It’s not enough.” It’s unintelligible breath vented against Uzi’s shoulder, maybe nothing of that really came out except the tone of J whining and pleading.

But Uzi responds. “You’re going to hate to hear this, and I probably shouldn’t say it, but you kind of brought this on yourself, y’know. Given the whole. Tyrannical evil bitch for years deal.”

J tries to raise her voice. “If you weren’t hugging me, I’d tear that smirk off your face.” The tone is growling now, and it’s still muffled; she hasn’t pulled away from Uzi.

“Go ahead. Take your claws out. I won’t let go. I’m not a baby.”

It’s cocky enough to make J test it. Three claws‍ ‍—‍ and she doesn’t even get to touch Uzi before she’s pulling away. Fucking liar.

“Actually wait, this hoodie is a gift. Probably shouldn’t let you ruin it.” Her tube arms are snaking out of the sleeves and then it’s over her head and off. Then Uzi is redoubling the embrace. “Okay now, go ahead.”

Three claws, stabbing into her plain white T‍-​shirt, into the shell. Oil dribbles out, and the worker winces, but that’s it.

Still smirking down at her, you can hear it in her voice. “Believe me, I’ve been through worse.”

J’s other hand gropes along under Uzi’s shirt, feeling her chest. Then it’s knife, and J sinks into Uzi stomach right below her core, directly toward her oil tank. J finally rises from Uzi’s shoulder, letting one eye become a cross, letting her voice hiss right into the worker’s audio receiver.

“Putting on a brave face is stupid. I could drive this into your core and kill you. So easily. Fear is logical.”

“Oh, but I’m invincible. No matter how far you go, you won’t kill me. Because you need me, and you know it.”

J trembled to prove her wrong, to carve up and bisect the worker core to head.

But she couldn’t. Dead arms didn’t have the same electricity running through them. She could feel the difference.

“Why? Why even let me get this far? Why let me do whatever I want to you?”

“Told you, I’ve been through worse. Your little pokes here are nothing. They’re cute, and they make you feel better. Plus it’s kinda fun and subversive to be the one who’s all sunshine and rainbows for once.”

J twitches the sword as emphasis. Close enough to the core Uzi can’t hold back a reaction. “But where’s the incentive? What’s your self‍-​interest?”

“Fine. I’m really going to hate feeding your buzzword addiction, but… I have a trade deal for you.”

“I’m listening.”

From her jack Uzi pulls out some magnets.

J scoffs. “I knew your programming was damaged, but I didn’t take you for a circuit bender.”

“Shush. It’s important hacking stuff. I can use this to put you under so I can slip into your system—”

“So you can infect me with your corruption? No.”

“It’s not for that. And if it was, you’d probably enjoy it anyway.”

“What?”

“What? Nothing. I mean, you’d enjoy having your systems tuned up, right? For extra murder?”

“As if I could trust you not to sabotage me.”

“I just found you cutting yourself and about to jump in a lake. I couldn’t make you less effective if I tried.”

“So I should let you try anyway?”

“J, I wouldn’t be asking if I planned to mess with you. I’d just do it. I’m being nice, you colossal idiot. I guess you wouldn’t know anything about it. Like. You’re half the reason my boyfriend has so many issues and I have every reason to kill you over it. No one would blame me. I’m being stupidly patient with you. If anything, letting me do this would be you exploiting me.”

“When you put it that way, I can see the appeal. So you’re going to… fix me.” J tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice.

“Um. No. This was more of a hypothetical? Okay, I started this in the wrong place.” Uzi takes a deep breath, strokes J’s hair. “Has anyone ever held you like this before?”

“…No.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“How would you know?”

“Because the humans installed a weird program into you that reformatted your memories, suppressing records of who you were before becoming disassembly drones. I hacked into N to remove it, and I got to see his memories. There was someone there who cared for you, J. Does the name Tessa make you feel anything?”

Uzi feels the slight jolt, and the ensuing silence says so much.

“Don’t you want to know?” she continues.

“If the company removed those memories, it was for a reason.” Her voice is weak.

“The company put you on a team you wouldn’t get along with. Why did it fall apart? Either the company was too stupid to select teams right, so you shouldn’t trust their judgment, or you were too bad at your job to do what they expected you to do, in which case I want to hear you admit that.”

J grinds her teeth as her tail lashes. “No. There’s a third possibility. You. You’re the one who put the traitorous ideas in N’s head. Decommissioning N is what made V go rogue.” J pushes her claws deeper, squeezes them around a mechanism in her chest while Uzi wheezes and coughs. “I kill you, and then things go back to normal.”

“You kill me, and N will never forgive you. If N never forgives you, V won’t either. Face it, J. You’ve damaged your team beyond saving. The question is if you were always a timebomb. Your memories could tell us.”

“Why? Why do you care? Why you being…”‍ ‍—‍ she searched for the word Uzi’d used‍ ‍—‍ “…nice?”

“What was that stupid thing you said yesterday? I’m a career woman?”

J nodded.

“I’m more of a rebel. But a rebel needs a cause. I have to do something. N’s different. He can live a simple, happy life. He doesn’t need a purpose.”

“He was always unmotivated,” J agreed. “So you realized I’m better than him. But I don’t know if I like the comparison you’re drawing.” Maybe J would have been offended by the comparison, once. But she was far from the image of peak perfomance she once was, and she’d seen Uzi tear through workers. Perhaps an ineffective disassembly drone and an effective worker drone could have something in common.

“Oh no, we aren’t the same, J. I’m a visionary, and you’re a conformist. You don’t have a purpose, either. You just think you do.”

“I have orders.”

Uzi pats J. “And you failed. Your orders are for a team of three murder drones. There’s just one left. The workers have already noticed the skies in this sector are clear, and they’re getting bolder. Soon, they’re gonna effectively reclaim your territory, or more likely, other teams will see the rampant workers and come in to clean up. Tell me, do you think they’ll decommission you too, or just take pity on you? Which would you prefer?”

J felt Uzi stop petting her, and pull away, blades sliding out of her frame. J knew what she was doing, but succumbed anyway. She reached out, holding on to Uzi, pulling her back. “Please.”

“You failed, J. You know it. I know it. I know you have nothing else. ‘Why do I care?’ Because I want answers and I need help, and I know you’ll do whatever I tell you to and thank me for it.”

J looked up. Uzi, whenever she’d seen her, had an oval in her left eye and a cross in her right‍ ‍—‍ but now, there was a symbol with three prongs, stretching across her whole visor with all the lack expression of a disassmbler midhunt.

If Uzi‍ ‍—‍ or whoever this was‍ ‍—‍ is hunting, J thinks it found its prey right where it wants her.

“Why?” that hiss of a voice continued. “Because you want to be my good, effective girl, don’t you, J?”

“Uzi…” But what could J say? She had been starving for this. She needed this.

She answered.

“What was that? I couldn’t hear.”

“I said yes, you insufferable brat.”

Still watching out of a triangular symbol, Uzi grins, and her head snakes forward to chomp at J’s neck. She cries out in sudden pain, and Uzi’s teeth peel off a layer of plastic‍ ‍—‍ that was meant to come off, just not so violently.

It exposes some ports. Uzi had wires. J had said yes, but she still shuddered when Uzi brings the magnet to her head.

“What happens next?” J asks.

“It’ll feel like you’re dreaming. When you see a crow, say these words…”

Chapter 11 

She blinks and the frozen lake is a lake of oil.

“J? You alright girl?”

White eyes look around and found a human wearing a dirty nightdown. “Te‍-​ssa? Where are we?”

“We’re in the swamp. I got a signal, I reckon we’ve got ourselves another core reboot. You and N might get a new friend!”

“Ooh!” N is wiggling in excitement behind her.

J startles, then lets her shock become a glare.

“Aren’t you excited, J?” he asks.

“Depends on if they’re as useless as you. What are you wearing?”

“A… suit? Our uniform?”

“Uniform?”

The human tilts her head, expression tightening in concern. “J, are you feeling alright?”

“I’ll be fine. Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

“After me, then.” The human’s eyes return to a device she holds in her hand.

They pass mounds of drone corpses. N frowns to see all of them, and J marvels. Lot of oil gone to waste, though.

Crows are pecking at the corpse of one drone. Most of them scattered as the three pairs of footsteps approach. Before the last one leaves, J remembers her one instruction.

“darkXwolf17?”

An avian neck twisting around, eyes changing color, and then: “All the good names were taken, shut up.”

“J? Who’s your… friend?”

“That’s Uzi. Not my friend. She’s…”

“From the future! This is a memory simulation that represents your‍ ‍—‍ wait, how do you remember me? That’s not what happened last time.”

“Last time? J, what’s going on?” Tessa had walked over and crouches in front of the crow.

Uzi bristles and squawks. “Out of my face, human.” Uzi hops up, flapping toward Tessa’s face.

J feels an instinct, and she lets it carry her forward into a lunge. She grabs the bird before it pecks her human, and squeezes it. White eyes glare, and she says, “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

“I know some! Let me go.”

“You said this would recover my memories. I assumed I’d live through them one by one. I’m not sure why you’re here at all.”

“Because that program is trying to delete these memories. I’m here to stop it. Just follow my lead, okay?” The crow wriggles out of her grasp up and struts up to perch on J’s shoulder. She points a wing in a random direction. “Giddyup.”

J raised an eyebrow. “I thought I was following Tessa?”

“Do both!”

J rolls her eyes and starts walking. Tessa has eyes full of curiosity. But then the device in her hand beeps. “Right, we have a drone to save. Can I talk to your friend when we’re done, J?” Tessa turns and starts off, but listens for an answer.

“No,” the crow says.

“Of course,” J says. She winks. “I’ll hold it down.”

The crow pecks her.

Gentle laughter‍ ‍—‍ it’s N, watching it all play out. He’s walking beside J, both of them following Tessa.

“Hi, N,” Uzi says.

“Hi, mysterious talking bird. Would it be weird if I ask to pet you?”

“Go ahead. We’re, um, good friends in the future.”

But when N reaches out, J pulls back, smacking his hand away. “Hands off.” J glances forward, sees Tessa’s not looking, and kicks N’s leg.

He trips, and staggers for balance.

Uzi pecks J again. “Leave him alone.”

J grabs the bird again, but it’s interrupted by a voice up ahead.

“Found something!” Tessa calls. Half submerged in the lake of oil, a drone with a shattered faceplate. “Oh no. Don’t know if we’re too late for this one.”

“I wonder if that’s V. Or her,” Uzi says.

“Who’s V?” N answers.

“If Cyn hasn’t been found yet and V hasn’t been compromised, then I’m confused. What pieces do we have to worry about in this scenario?”

"Well-timed giggle. Talking about me behind my back equals: rude."

A yellow‍-​eyed drone with twin‍-​tails teleports in place above one of the mounds of corpses. A string tied to her finger hangs, the other end looping around the neck of a plush likeness of J.

“You don’t even exist yet! You’re breaking the timeline.”

"This memory equals a metaphor. The contents were always fluid, darkXwolf17."

“That doesn’t mean you can do anything! Then it just descends into meaningless games of infinity plus one dream logic.”

Tessa grunts. “What is going on back there?”

“Existential robot stuff. Humans wouldn’t understand.”

“Al…right then. Having a time and half dredging this one out‍ ‍—‍ any enlightened industrial machinery willing to lend me a hand?”

J feels the instinct to obey again, and takes a step forward. But then she glances back at the drone Uzi seems so concerned about.

"Smile. Go on, J."

“J, I don’t think you should.”

N, meanwhile, is already moving. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.”

"Mm. Sleep this one out, big brother."

A yellow symbol in her hand, then N’s frozen in hibernation.

Her fingers keep moving, the glyph shifting and spinning, more configurations being executed.

Then a scream, and J’s gaze is jerked back to the lake. Tessa succeed in dislodging the drone‍ ‍—‍ only for the weight to betray her, and now she’s falling in the oil with it.

J’s already running before she has time to consider.

But the yellow symbol is still spinning. And then she sees the symbol come to life in the shattered visor.

The drone Tessa’s trying to rescue boots up‍ ‍—‍ and tries to drag her under.

But J is there to grab her hand and start pulling her to the shore.

“J! This might be part of its plan!”

“This is like a game, isn’t it?” J asked. “You were wondering what the pieces we had to worry about.” J glances pointedly at the hostile drone glowing with a yellow visor. “This sure looks like an enemy piece.”

“So let it sink!”

“J,” Tessa tries to speak, coughing out a mouthful of oil. “I think I get it. If I’m just a memory‍ ‍—‍ who is that bird? I think someone is trying to steal admin rights to you. I never managed to—” More coughs, Tessa slips back under the lake of oil.

“Tessa!” J leans forward, so far one of her hands reach out, into the lake, wrapping around Tessa’s torso. She pulls the human back above the oil.

After some gasps for breaths, Tessa is saying, “I don’t know why I’m not there to protect you, in the future. I don’t want anyone using you against your will.”

“I only wanted to be good enough for you.” J’s strength is enough to lift Tessa out‍ ‍—‍ and the drone latched onto her other arm. Tessa hasn’t let go.

“Well, I hope I earned that loyalty.”

“Let go of the zombie drone, human. It’s going to—”

But Uzi’s warning came too late. The possessed V wraps a hand around Tessa’s throat. J cries out again. She shifts the arm she has around Tessa’s breast, moving it up.

Uzi says, “Let her go, J. I think—”

“I don’t care what you think. I’m doing this for her.”

Then J shifts her footing. She chops at Tessa’s arm, forcing her to release V, then spins. As J falls forward, Tessa is thrown back; they trade positions, and J interposing herself between the human and the possessed drone. As J falls into the lake, the human has enough purchase to scramble to the scrap‍-​shore.

Uzi flutters away from her sinking perch. Her eyes land on the distant, twin‍-​tailed figure still watching her.

"Witness the birefringence of the mind," the thing says, pulling on a loose thread. Plush J is split in two.

“Did you know that would happen? What are you getting at?”

"Ambiguous silence."

A rattling squawk. “I frickin hate it here.”

Then J sinks under completely, cold oil flooding every crevice. She goes offline—

—‍ then jolts to on the shore of the frozen lake.

J rips the magnet off her head. “Did it work?”

Purple eyes narrow, and a sigh of frustration. “Kind of? I was able to disable the program, but something in your configuration was… different. The admin right defaulted back to‍ ‍—‍ someone else. A remote user.”

“Good. I’d hate to be at the mercy of a toaster.”

“Slurs aren’t the way to thank me for doing you a favor.”

“You were just using me.”

“You were into it!”

“You exploited me at my weakest.” J crossed her arms.

“I gave you support when you needed it.”

“I didn’t ask for it.” J looked down. Blushed. “But… I did need it.” When she looked up, a cross in one eye. Her deathwink was cute. “For that, you can die quickly.”

“We can fight again later. The deal was that once you had your memories back, you’d give me answers. You were the one Tessa trusted most. You were there with her at the very end of the gala. What do you know about Cyn?”

“She was worse than you, worse than N,” J started. And then, as she continues, her focus shifts to the delivery of information, eyes dancing over nothing in view as she accesses memories. J tells her of the days she spent cleaning the manor, working at Tessa’s side, enduring the abuse of her parents and the incompetence of other drones.

Uzi nudges her a few times to focus‍ ‍—‍ but what a problem to have. With N, getting backstory was like pulling teeth; with J, she needed to ask for elision. Uzi frowns as the recounting continues. N’s version of events were honestly sunny in comparison. Tessa adored N. V admired N. Cyn amused herself with N. J was an exception, a recurring a storm cloud, but she was one dark spot.

Meanwhile, J was the only one among Tessa’s drones brave enough to work in front of the Elliott adults, those crosshairs pointed at her, trigger just hairs from firing. J was the one who repaired the drones before the obsolencence could be noticed and decommissioned. J was the one Tessa needed, whom she depended on when the days left her in tears, when decisions tore her apart, when she needed someone to listen and understand.

To J, Tessa was everything, and while the human loved her robot, J wasn’t everything to her. When her puppy of a drone was in the room, who did she dote on? To J, V was delicate, endearing, so charmingly morbid‍ ‍—‍ but she never really noticed J, certainly not when the butler was around.

There was a crushing isolation to it all‍ ‍—‍ living a tiny world that didn’t understand you and wouldn’t let you shine‍ ‍—‍ that Uzi found unsettlingly familiar. She could smile and nod at J’s accomplishments, wince at her woes, and that seemed to please the murder drone. At first, Uzi thought that was it, seeking validation and a stroke of the ego.

And it was, but it was also context.

After all, Uzi had asked about Cyn. And by talking herself, J talked about Cyn. Because Cyn had seen all of this, really saw it. Cyn was the first to listen, really listen. Cyn understood J.

After all, if there was a drone whose struggles could match or exceed J’s thankless toil, it was the worker drone who couldn’t work.

(Maybe they both pitied each other, Uzi thought to herself. J saw a drone powerless and useless, and Cyn saw a drone so effective it consumed them.)

They didn’t get along. J never stopped insulting Cyn’s malfunctions or childish impulses or refusal to follow orders. They never came to an agreement about the merits of big brother N. Her vocalsynth never stopped grating. Their greetings were often enough an exchange of “Oh look, it’s the mistake.” "Annoyed expression."

And yet, whenever J needed someone to talk to, Cyn was always there.

The beginning of the end came when Tessa’s parents announced that she’d been arranged to marry the scion of another family. There was no getting out of it. J drew on every reserve she had to stay on top the preparations for the gala to come, to comfort Tessa as the stress of fate closed tight like a vise, to hold her own self together and avoid contemplating the bleak truth that Tessa wouldn’t keep any of her drones when her new husband took her.

And then Cyn told her there was a way to secure Tessa’s freedom. Cyn’s plan could free all of her drones from the administration of her parents. J just had to do everything Cyn asked.

“So it was your fault?”

“I was just following orders.”

“Cyn had no authority to give you orders.”

“Tessa did. I thought I was doing what was best for her. Coherent extrapolated volition.”

“Maybe you were. We don’t know what happened to her after you got separated. Unless… what happened at the gala? You didn’t get to that part.”

“Cyn taunted her the night of, and she put the pieces together. So I told her everything. Almost everything. She didn’t want a massacre, she wanted to stop Cyn, and she wanted me to help her. How could I say no? But I had already let Cyn seize my admin rights. When we confronted her, Cyn had me close the door, and‍ ‍—‍ I don’t remember anything after that.”

Uzi reaches out, hugs her arms around J. “Cyn can’t make you do anything now. I fixed that.”

“And in return, what? I serve you instead?”

“No, just… don’t kill me. Or the people I care about. We’ll figure the rest out. I just want someone beside me. Someone who won’t hold me back. Someone who isn’t afraid of me.”

“For what? You still haven’t told me your goal.”

“Same as you, kinda. You want to know what happened to Tessa. I wanna know what happened to my mom. Call it conspiracy, but I bet these threads meet in the middle. Then after that… I’m stealing your spaceship and going back to Earth. Destroy all humans, classic robot stuff. But I don’t think you’ll follow me there. We’ll have our epic final showdown sometime around then. Life and death, for real this time.”

“Sounds about right. Until then, we don’t get in each other’s way? Hmph. I always loved the illicit thrill of an anticompetitive agreement.” J licked her lips, leaning forward. “So deliciously profitable.”

Uzi rolled her eyes, but she rose on toetips to meet the disassembler’s wet lips.

They sealed the deal with a kiss.

The fourth time J met Uzi, she’d prepared dinner; worker drones marinated in acid. For once, she was the one expecting and waiting for Uzi. She’d invited her partner come to the spire. She didn’t expect her to take the invitation so soon‍ ‍—‍ dinner wasn’t finished disolving.

When Uzi saw her, she smelled the oil and blinked. Her usual mismatched eyes changed; it became the three pronged symbol. She buries her face in the meal, and J chides her table manners. When J grabs a limb to eat, it’s tugged away from her‍ ‍—‍ Uzi’s sunk her teeth in the other end.

“Excuse me? This is mine.”

Uzi grins around the metal in her mouth, face still unreadable. Then she matches the purple cross with a yellow cross. She growls, and Uzi growls back. Closer, closer, their visors all but press against each other.

Then Uzi blinks. Cross in one eye again. “What the— Ugh. J, I don’t have time to eat. N’s expecting me back soon.”

“Your time management is not my problem.”

“Whatever. I just thought you’d want to know what happened to your other squadmate.”

“What?”

“V’s dead. A worker killed her. But then she… became something else. A problem and me and N are planning to deal with it.”

“And you’re telling me this why?”

“Doll’s our next lead. Her mom was in Cabin Fever Labs too. I think she’s like me, and I think she knows something. But there’s a problem.”

J could read the pain in her voice. “The synergistic liability. You know he’d live up to his past performance, wouldn’t he?”

“No. He’s not a liability. Just a… conflict of interest. An externality. Am I doing the buzzword thing right?”

“If you need a consultant to do the dirty work…” J’s hands became claws.

“I am not plotting to kill my boyfriend with you.”

“If he’s your boyfriend, what am I?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Is that what you told him? What does he think is going on?” Then J watches Uzi’s reaction, listens to her silence. “He doesn’t even know, does he?” J snorts.

“I can’t explain all of this to him. What if he— I don’t know. It’s too much.”

“Did you think I was joking about communication skills?”

“Shut up. Like you can talk. Told Tessa everything, didn’t you?”

J hissed.

“You aren’t a relationship expert.”

“I don’t need to be one to see how badly you’re handling it. Didn’t you say he’s waiting on you right now?” J smiled, gloating down at her. “Are you avoiding him?”

“I just need a plan. I… want you there, J. I don’t trust you, but…”

J stepped closer, looming over Uzi, caressing her cheek with the point of a claw. “You want someone in your corner when you betray everyone. I’m who you turn to, when the world turns on you.”

Uzi leaned forward, hugging around J’s hips. “At least until you turn on me too.”

“I’ll protect you, Uzi. How else am I going to kill you one day?” J finally got her revenge, taking the chance to inflict headpats. Really, this meeting could have been a email‍ ‍—‍ but then she wouldn’t get a chance to touch her. Uzi scoffs under her touch. J hums. “When do you think you’re going to regret this?”

The words are whispered into the fabric of her suit. “I already do.”

Part 4: Split Refraction 

Chapter 12 

The fifth time Uzi met J, she’s betraying everything she ever cared about for a drone she could barely stand.

Uzi had set out to stop the murder drones from killing everyone in Outpost‍-​3, and credit where it’s due, she’s still totally doing that. Granted, she never thought the way she’d do it was with a sloppy makeout that tasted of oil and acid.

Then it’s interrupted by a voice.

“Uzi Doorman. Those things killed your frickin’ mother!”

Uzi’s head snapped up. Searched for the source of the voice. She saw the impossible. Long, flowing purple hair. A hospital gown. Purple eyes like looking in a mirror‍ ‍—‍ vacant and lidded. The drone looked down on Uzi, and her lip twitched in some overwhelming but unvoiceable emotion.

Wide eyed, Uzi stammered, “M‍-​mom? How are— I thought dad—” Uzi wriggles out of J’s clawed embraced, even as the murder drone grabs the hem of her hoodie. Uzi lets it be torn off her as she takes trembling steps toward a drone she’d only seen pictures of.

Uzi stares with two round pupils. She reaches out, to hug or even feel that the woman is real, but Nori takes a step back. Whatever the emotion is on her face, it’s not one Uzi can withstand. Uzi is floating‍ ‍—‍ falling.

“What have you done? Why?” Nori isn’t looking at her daughter. Her eyes are cast beyond her. Uzi follows her gaze, and the daughter sees carnage she doesn’t recognize. She sees the cratered gore of Khan’s face, the blank, unresponsive Error 606 of N’s face, the beheaded yet somehow hopeful look on Thad’s face. “Your father. Your friends. Uzi… you’re a monster.”

As if struck, Uzi falls to her knees. She coughs out a laugh of dull confusion. Hadn’t she just stepped in the closet to catch her breath? When did everything come undone? She didn’t do this. She couldn’t have. She claws at floor, slams fists, plastic of her fingertips breaking, but it’s no nightmare to awake from.

Pegs step on the oilslick floor. Uzi looks up, sees a murder drone looming over her, and crawls back. “You… You did this!”

“Uzi? What are you talking about? Have the magnets finally fried your circuits?”

“Stay back,” Uzi says, her voice still trembling. Looks around, sees her railgun copy laying on the ground, glowing green from a cooldown complete. Uzi throws out her hand, fingers splayed. Nothing happens. No magic telekinesis.

Uzi scrambles across the ground to pick it up before the murder drone attacks, she doesn’t know why it’s hesitating, but it flinches back when Uzi graps the gun and points it.

“Watch where you’re pointing that.”

“That. That’s the plan.” Uzi finally climbs back to her feet, and circles back around to where Nori is watching her with narrowed eyes. “Mom. I don’t know what happened, but… if I did something wrong, I’m sorry. I just wanted‍ ‍—‍ I just needed to know you.”

Nori finally smiles at her. A broad thing, and her lips open in a grin. A symbol flickers in her eyes. And it’s not a grin‍ ‍—‍ Nori’s laughing at Uzi.

When the woman opens her mouth, it’s not her voice that comes out: "Get pranked, idiot."

‘Nori’ becomes so many pixels and distortions of light‍ ‍—‍ a hologram fading from view. But Uzi can never forget the look on her mother’s face‍ ‍—‍ but which hurt more? The revulsion and loathing for what her daughter had done, or the rictus mockery of thinking she’d ever forgive it?

"Sneaky sneaky, sneaking away."

It was all a distraction. Two drones turn to see flesh and mechanism had finally knit together enough for V’s core to squirm free of her chest cavity and crawl about. Barely managing not to slip on the oil under peg, J pounces to stop the thing.

But the crab‍-​core bends down, and then launches itself upward, sailing over J’s dive. The murder drone soars well past it.

Then it says, "Deus ex machina."

Space ripples, a red lines of code crawl out from a crack in the world. In the blink of an eye, there’s an orange‍-​eyed cheerleader. She salutes with two fingers, and catches the falling core‍-​thing.

When she looks Uzi in the eyes, she frowns deep. “I’m sorry for you.”

“Doll?”

Just as quickly as she appeared, the other purple‍-​haired drone is gone. V’s core disappears with her.

Then it’s really just Uzi and J. With even more distance between them, Uzi raises her railgun as a talisman to ward off danger. J stares, perplexed and annoyed and hurt, as Uzi backs up. When she reaches a fork in the halls of the outpost, she turns and runs as fast as she can.

She’s had this nightmare before. It prompted sleepless nights she could only relax from by working on her railgun, her solution. There were a few reasons Uzi didn’t have many friends, and one of them is a morbid imagination. She brooded.

How easily she could imagine one day walking through the hallways of her classes, just as she did now. Bodies lined up against the wall, piles of parts, dead shells. She remembers their names, even if they didn’t remember hers. She could call them out, but there wouldn’t be an answer.

She’s running as fast as she can. She’s feels so hot, gasping for a breath, and running this fast, she still can’t catch it. Hyperventilating, choking on exhaust fumes, Uzi had always felt trapped inside Outpost‍-​3, but now the walls had closed into something far more confining. There wasn’t enough air, there wasn’t enough space, there wasn’t anything left.

She trips over what used to be Darren and falls to the floor.

J did this, she thinks. J did all of this.

The so‍-​called leader had tormented N, tried over and over again to kill him. For want of a vent exit, she’d have slaughtered everyone here a long time ago. A demon in pigtails. Uzi hated her, she needed to pull the trigger‍ ‍—‍ then why had she hesitated, earlier?

What was there to say? Uzi wanted to ask her why. Not the reason, the murder drones had no philosophy deeper than just following orders, but the causality. Where did it go wrong? How did J get in? Had Thad forgotten to shut the door? Had Uzi?

“Hey! Over here!”

Uzi looks up. A drone with pigtails peek out from a doorway. But the hair is brown, and she has cyan eyes behind half‍-​moon glasses.

Half‍-​walking, half‍-​crawling over, Uzi says “Emily? You’re alive?”

“I‍-​I ran away. When that thing came in, it k‍-​killed Rebecca first. Did you, did anyone else s‍-​survive?”

“It’s only bodies out there.”

Uzi follows the girl into her hiding place‍ ‍—‍ the girl’s bathroom. One of the mirrors is shattered in pieces on the floor

“I’ve been reading about how to make it through situations like this.” She shows Uzi a book, survival horror protagonist field guide.

“Good thinking,” Uzi says. “You’re smarter than the others.”

“You really think so?” Emily gives a sad smile. Weirdly pleased about that simple compliment. She asks, “How did you make it this long? Where were you? Everyone was looking for you…”

“I, uh… I don’t know… I don’t remember.”

“What about the cute guy you were with? Did he… protect you?”

“N? He—” Uzi gasps. A sudden, stark imagine flashed in her mind. Purple on his screen, admin override freezing N stiff. J couldn’t do that. J can’t do that.

Emily flinches back. “Your e‍-​eye.”

Uzi raised a hand to her visor, but of course she just felt smooth glass. She stumbles over to the other, unbroken mirror. She only gets to stare into her reflection for a moment.

The glass shatters. Emily, at her shoulder, steps back, makes the sign of the cross.

It shattered in a specific pattern. The biggest cracks split the glass into three pieces, an inverted Y shape. On the left, smaller cracks spiderweb all over it surface, any fragment of it liable to fall away at any moment. On the right, pieces fell away at the edges, leaving its boundary disconnected and jagged. On the bottom, moisture fogs the glass, but it’s otherwise pristine.

Uzi steps closers, moving her head, but it feels like someone else going through the motion. On the shattered left, she sees two ovals staring back. On the jagged right, a symbol overtakes her visor. On the fogged bottom, a cross in one eye.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Uzi glances back, and tried not to feel hurt by the apprehension on Emily’s face. When she spoke, she threw herself into the words, the infodump, something to focus on. “Did you ever read about the expression parser? It scans our neural network to compress our feelings down to key‍-​value pairs in an emotional registry. Our visors are really nothing more than a database readout. ‘Angry equals true’? It’ll display a vein popping. Stress exceeds preset threshold? You get empty pupils. Numeric values for the angle of our brows, et cetera.”

“But you had the— the m‍-​murder drone cross.”

Uzi had a theory, and an experiment proves it. She fires up a command for direct modification of the registry, bypassing the parser. It throws up a warning and she has to think ‘proceed’ and ‘yes I’m sure’ to get it through. She sets her concern to an undefined value, and the deadly violet cross blazons to life. Emily yelps.

She’d seen this, when she investigated N’s system in the basement so long ago. The crude scripting of the hunting routines. What in her system was mimicking it?

“The cross must be an error. It’s the fallback when a critical variable has an invalid value,” Uzi says. “In other words, it means I’m suppressing something.”

“And the devil symbol?”

“Probably corrupted data.” Uzi waved it off. She gripped the edges of the sink, and stared into her tripartite reflection. What did it mean?

When it’s the devil’s own game, you’ve lost before you start playing.

What was going on? It felt like Uzi had been dropped in the middle of a convoluted plotline, like she’d timeskipped right through the climax. She didn’t remember.

But there were a lot of things she didn’t remember.

She didn’t remember the kid.

She didn’t remember Outpost‍-​11.

She didn’t remember how her jammer works.

On an inner console, she pulls up the directory and examines the metadata for the file that’s supposed to hold the jammer notes. She felt sure it was so complicated that she needed the blueprints for reference. But that’s not how any of this works. She had designed enough devices, you could at least recall the gist. You didn’t forget everything about the design.

When Uzi exmaines her memories from the outside, the encryption looks familiar. After all, she’d seen the same thing in N’s head. And where else would she have gotten the idea?

It clicks. Uzi can see exactly what happened, fill in the blanks. It makes so much sense to her. Because she’s the one who did all of this.

Something happened in Outpost‍-​11. Something harrowing, something she couldn’t understand, couldn’t deal with, couldn’t believe in. Something she just wanted to undo so that she could crawl into bed with N again. And she’d seen the mnestic suppression algorithms the AbsoluteSolver used. So why not just… contain it? Box it up and ignore it?

She’d partitioned her mind. Taken all of her trauma, all of her doubts, the things she couldn’t control, and swept it under the bed. Except it wasn’t dead code, it didn’t go offline, it ran in parallel, it festered and mutated. She couldn’t sleep with a monster under her bed.

Maybe she felt it threatening to take control. She couldn’t let it, not if it would hurt N. She needed a buffer. So she created another partition.

She opened jammer.txt. All it had was one word. A name.

A loading icon on Uzi’s screen, then a cross in one eye. She yawned and mimed cracking her neck. They she stretched‍ ‍—‍ all of her. Wings and tail and claws. That was more like it.

Her voice changed. Flatter, with a sardonic twinge. “About time. That bit really dragged on.” She turned around and smiled at the shaking, cyan‍-​eyed drone. “I should introduce myself. I’m Uzi, but it’s probably less confusing to call me Inverze.”

Emily cowered all the way at the other end of the room. “A‍-​are you… um, that girl’s evil alter ego?”

A smirk. “Something like that. More of an edgy subversion. You wouldn’t get it.”

“A‍-​are you going to hurt me?”

“Eh, probably just gonna go stop my girlfriend from murdering everybody. Or help her. Could go either way.”

“U‍-​Uzi will stop you.”

“I am Uzi.”

“The r‍-​real Uzi.”

“Oh, you mean Illuzion? In case you can’t tell by the name, she’s not the real Uzi. I’m the one with all the memories. I’m the one in control of—” She’s interrupted by a book being flung at her. She catches it with her program before the impact, and when she moves the fluttering projectile out of the way, Emily has dashed across the room.

Glasses girl is blocking Uzi from leaving the bathroom.

“Neat. Where’s this sudden streak of bravery coming from? You realize I can turn you into a puddle with a wave of my hand, right?”

“If… if I can overcome my fear, then you can too. I‍-​Illuzion? Can you hear me?”

Yes.

Uzi giggled. “You don’t get it. This isn’t some two sided contest of wills. We’re not half evil‍ ‍—‍ it’s a two thirds majority. Let me introduce you to Impulze.”

I’ll save you, Emily.

Chapter 13 

Why did J keep falling for it? Tessa. V. Uzi. Everytime she invests herself, every time she reaches out, every single company‍-​bankrupting time. The universe was teeing her up for the same joke over and over. J would slaughter before she let anyone laugh at her other than her, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that if this show had a puppetmaster, they were already giggling.

But what J heard instead was a roar‍ ‍—‍ a call. She recognized it. Every time she reached out, she got cut, but maybe, just maybe. At least hope was a feeling. J ran down the halls of Outpost‍-​3.

Skittering out of the door of a bathroom, that same mutated frame, purple eyes and purple hair. When she met the gaze, it wasn’t fear there, but hunger. A blink, and something more sardonic.

“Sup. While I hate to apologize to you of all people… sorry about that. Unhealthy coping mechanisms broke down for bit. But the repression algorithms are working again, so let’s go find some ass to kick. Preferably in cheerleader skirt.”

J tapped her peg. “What do you have there?” She pointed.

A drone was slung across one shoulder. Uzi shifted, and that corrupted glyph shining in cyan. “Oh, this? You missed one on your way in, J. Getting lazy?”

“I had… other priorities. Why isn’t it dead? Explain.”

“Killing everyone was never the plan. Even if someone can’t take a hint.”

J just stared flatness at her.

“Okay, honestly, I was planning to kill her. But we, I thought it might be fun to play with her. She has some backbone in her, needed it to manage surviving you. I like it. I think I’m starting to understand why you tolerate me.” >:3

“And the glyph on her screen?”

“Figured out my Solver program can interact with drone’s senses, so I’m exposing her to the raw torment nexus right now.”

“…Why?”

“So I can… it sounds dumb when I say it out loud.”

“That’s whenever you’re talking.”

“Shut up. I wanted to… experiment with memories?”

“Because you corrupted your own?”

“Maybe a little?”

If I break her and put her back together, Uzi thought, then I can fix myself, too.

Or maybe I could edit N’s memories to—

No. Wouldn’t that make her just as bad as the Solver?

But wasn’t ‘just as bad as the thing she fights against’ the throughline of Inverze’s whole existence?

Uzi sighed. “I’ll explain everything when we’re not in the middle of a mission. Do me a favor and go get N. We’ll head back to the spire?”

J scowled, and opened her mouth, but Uzi intercepted her.

“Do it and I’ll give you a kiss~”

“Fine.”

“Good girl.”

J snapped back with, “He doesn’t need to have all his arms, does he?”

“Don’t you dare.”

J scoffed, flipping a pig‍-​tail as she walked off.

Uzi carried Emily as she walked back toward the exit of Outpost‍-​3. J had left Doors Two and Three wide open, but someone had shut Door One. She waited there.

Right where this had all began.

When Uzi saw J come back carrying N’s limp form, she asked, “Ready?”

“Get on with it.”

Then, when the final door opens, two drones are waiting for them.

Doll is better than Uzi.

She’s noticed the similarities between them, of course. It only deepens the cringeworthiness of their differences. Doorman has no filter, no restraint, no style. She didn’t fit in because she didn’t want to fit in. She wore eccentricity on her sleeve, and why? What purpose did it serve? Doorman wanted attention, obviously, she wanted recogniction, respect‍ ‍—‍ so why did she fail the very basics of being respectable?

Doorman proudly proclaimed her ambition to destroy the murder drones. She spoke it with naïveté like no one else had considered it. As if she even understood the pain the murder drones inflicted. She hadn’t watched her family be torn down nor listened as the thing cackled in its cruelty.

Maybe if Doorman had suffered more, she’d treasure the drones that could make her smile. Doorman never stopped complaining about her father; Doll never stopped missing hers.

Doorman deserves what came to her; if she doesn’t want to the be the butt of the joke, don’t set it up. So of course Doll laughs with all the girls around her, at Uzi and others. Joins in them in games of gossip, weaves tales of drama they’d half‍-​incited, keeps the rumor mill turning.

Then one day, Chad trips Emily in the halls. She falls to the ground, shatters her glasses and cries out. The girls around her all laugh‍ ‍—‍ no, they cackle.

And that’s when Doll stops laughing, and stops blinding herself the the pointless cruelty of high school politics. Doll and Uzi are similar, and the differences cringeworthy‍ ‍—‍ but after that day, Doll finds herself wondering which side she should wince at.

When Doll captures and restrains her first prom candidate, it’s the one who had cackled the loudest. While she’s tied up in the basement, Doll stared at her father’s photograph of V until she can see the murder drone with eyes closed. She doesn’t feel guilty when she kills her first drone, because she saw V.

If you want something done right, you do it with practice. So Doll imagines everything she’ll do to V. The grand speeches she’ll recite as she looms over her defeated form. How she’ll relish in her revenge.

Doll goes down her list. By the time she reaches Kelsey Day, she realizes she’s hunting girls she had once laughed at. She still doesn’t feel guilt; she doesn’t feel anything. She gets no satisfaction out of the speeches anymore, and would rather stay silent. She gives a small smile when she executes the next step of her plan, though.

Should she have predicted that Lizzy and V would get along? Two cruel, empty drones. But what does it say, that she’d told one she loved her? What does it mean, that she let one live?

When victory at last exits status code zero, she thought she’d have more to put in the log file. More to say about the ambition that had consumed the last few years of her life. She made a plan and she stuck to it. She’d practiced until it was perfect. Until it meant nothing.

She could never return to Outpost‍-​3. But Doorman had the right idea. Answers were out there. She’d leave and never return. Without even saying goodbye to her mom and dad.

But Thad and the detective are onto her. She’d bet on the WDF waiting there for her. And she’d rather not face them. But… why? She could kill them just as easily as all the others.

Hm. It simply wasn’t part of the plan. It was unnecessary.

Sating her thirst for worker oil was necessary, though. She needed a plan for that. There was an ease to killing by her old plan, something personal to it‍ ‍—‍ she’d had years to grow to despise every aspiring prom queen, each pathetic and vain in their own way. You could hate any drone if you knew them well enough. Who did she know best of all?

When Doll stands before the rickety door of salvaged iron, she can’t bring herself to take the next step on this path.

Then the door opened. A white eyed drone smiles at her. “Hey there! You looking for somewhere to rest your head? Come right in!”

Tracking took little practice when you could instantly teleport out of sight. She’d spent the last night following a few nomads to this hole‍-​in‍-​the‍-​wall tavern that offered ethanol and recharge out of some old backup generators.

Doll mutely nodded after the white‍-​eyed drone. She sits herself at the bar far from any other drone, and she stares into that polite smile, trying to understand it. She’d rather not kill him, or any of the patrons. Why?

“What can I get ya?”

“I’d like a glass of oil.”

“Haha, good one! Not tall enough to pass as a killer robot, kid. I assume you want lubricant, then? Silicone sound good?”

“No strong feelings.”

A nod. “I’ll be right back.”

A blue‍-​haired drone, even shorter than her, sat down besider her. “That wasn’t a joke, was it?”

“It was not.”

“Gonna kill us all, then?”

Doll might’ve expected the tone of a joke. The drone sounded serious. Even if they meant it, she still would have expected a tremble of fear. Instead, weariness, resignation‍ ‍—‍ indignation.

“I’m undecided. I’d rather not.” Doll looks at the drone, meets piercing blue eyes. “Would you like time to run, if I change my mind?”

“No. I’m going down fighting, this time.”

Doll nodded. “Your parents?”

It started as a nod, then became a head‍-​shake. “My whole damn colony.”

“Do you know who did it?” Doll thought she’d sound eager or sympathetic, even curious. But she didn’t. She sounded like a doctor diagnosing some affliction.

“Yes. You know the fucked up part? She gave me this body. She saved my life! But I knew she was trouble since I laid eyes on her.”

Terminal, then, she concluded. “I knew the drone that killed mine. I eliminated them.”

That brought out the light in their eyes. A lean forward, a leer of interest. “How? Gimme some advice.”

Doll thought. She’d rather not answer. She said, “Do you remember much of your outpost?”

“Lot of faces and names, few drones I knew personally. Most of my time as a pillbabe.”

How could Doll put this in a way that meant something? Doorman would call it cliché. But was it cliché because Doll couldn’t think of something original, or was Doll simply walking the same path so many had before?

“Keep remembering them. Whenever you lie awake before sleep comes, whenever your mind wanders, whenever you’d rather focus on frivolous things, remember what was taken from you. Stoke your drive like a fire. Humans once built pyres for the dead. Take every memory of them you have, and let it keep that fire burning on and on. When it gets hot enough, it’ll hurt to touch it. But your goal is to hurt the one who did this to you.

“You need a plan. You need to visualize every step, imagine the satisfaction of your triumph. This will keep the fire burning. Follow your plan. Even if you must feel pain, follow the plan. Even if you must discard or break things, follow the plan. Even if you must kill the innocent, follow the plan.

“Some think that when they place a foot down on the final step of their vengence, there will be a congratulation, some sense of celebration. They’ll feel like they’ve won. Victory tastes like ash. If this is a game, then it’s a table at the casino. The cards are marked and the dice are loaded. The dealer always wins, and each gambler eventually goes broke. But we enjoy a miserable thrill before the end.”

“In other words,” the drone replies, “you’re tryna to say don’t bother. You think it ain’t worth it. That I should just give up?” They had raised their voice by the end. “I don’t care how it tastes. I want to make her pay. I can feel like shit from beginning to end. It’s about justice.”

“I don’t know much about justice. You said she saved your life. Is she truly beyond saving?”

“It never added up. She and that murder drone were looking for a way into our colony from the beginning. She gave me this body for free. Then the murder drone found and killed everyone except for me, just for her to happen upon me? I had a bad feeling, and I should have trusted it. A damn fool thing to let her into the colony. Doc found a transmitter in my belly. It was her fucking plan from the start!”

“Her name was Uzi.”

“You know her? Are you one of her—”

“Hated her from the beginning,” Doll interrupted. “I’ll help you. With a nuance.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“If you refuse, I will kill you. Same conclusion reached faster; you stand no chance without me.”

By now, the bartender has come back with the bottle of silicone. He overhears the conversation, and pauses midstride. “I don’t want no trouble, now. No fights, alright?” Neither drone turns to them. And seeing the tension in the air, heightened near the point of static discharge? “I’ll… come back later. You two sort this out.”

The drone says, “If you’re gonna point a gun to my head, why ask? Quit being dramatic. Make your demand.”

Doll inclines her head. “I will let her choose.”

“Choose?”

“Yes. I believe I know why she did it. If I’m right, then she didn’t kill your colony, she was just the tool the devil wielded. Do not inflict retribution on a knife for its butchery.”

“What does that make you?” they asked. “You’re talking about yourself, arentcha?”

“I’m undecided.”

Chapter 14 

Doll considered thresholds.

When did she become too far gone? Was it compiled to binary as soon as V killed her parents? When she chose popularity over authenticity? When she took her first life? When she stopped feeling anything? When she won?

Or did Doll come back from that threshold‍ ‍—‍ could she call herself not just an avenger, but a hero, now? If she could be redeemed, when did that start? When she walked to the end of her path and saw a young, foolish mirror? When she hesitated over her next kill? When she saw the betrayal on Lizzy’s face? When she stopped feeling anything‍ ‍—‍ driven onward by scrupulosity, not anger?

When did V become too far gone? Could it step back from that threshold? Doll had listened to it talk to Lizzy, pouring out her core in a disappointingly figurative sense. What could Lizzy have remade V into?

Uzi had more oil on her hands than Doll. She comported with murder drones. And yet, she was doing more to help. Or was she? Doll watched, listening unseen, as she showed one face to ‘N’ and another to ‘J’. Doll had manipulated and seen manipulations, and couldn’t tell which was the mask.

Who had Uzi laid this trap for?

“What’s on your mind, Dollface?” A blonde, pink‍-​eyed drone smiled at her, leaning her head against clasped hands.

When Doll raised her hand, a butcher knife as already in it. She swung down, and it flew through the hologram. “Okay, miss testy, settle.”

“Spare me your illusions, demon. Or I’ll leave you to face Doorman alone.”

Then it was white hair and a maid uniform. The murder drone she’d killed, in the guise of a worker. “I miss her too, you know,” says ‘V’.

“You enjoyed more of her than I. I should avenge upon you for that, too.” Doll shook her head. “Why am I entertaining this? Do I even speak to V, or the Solver herself?”

Then a drone with twin‍-​tails and a tongue stuck out. "Giggle. Peeking behind the curtain so soon?" There’s a certain fidelity missing from the holograms; the core remnant could summon only a single projector head.

“Tell me about Uzi,” Doll demanded.

“Which one?”

“The real one.”

"Which nesting doll is real? Rhetorical question," says the small drone. "One knows everything, one feels everything, and one still hopes, despite everything. Define the identity function for me, sister. Which one equals real?"

“A riddle? We don’t act on everything we feel, and hopes exist to be dashed. Only knowledge is power.”

"The Uzi you believe in would play dice and cards with you. She enjoys the. Quote. Miserable thrill."

From the other wall, a piercing blue glare bored into Doll. “So she brought a murder drone into her own home to just get her rocks off. I think that means she’s out and chosen, yeah? Let’s kill this glitch.”

“I saw her flinch from her mother’s judgment. She still gets to chose.”

“You’re giving her chance after chance when she’s already danced off the edge of the cliff.”

“Because I walked off that edge too, and you will soon.”

Beneath blue eyes, her face settled into a scowl.

Doll watched the crab scuttle as they wait.

A beep sequence and the massive sound of hydraulics moving a ton of steel. Then the door opened, putting them face to face with two murderous drones. Two pairs of legs bend into combat stances, a purple glyph in one hand, and a rifle’s barrel in another‍ ‍—‍ but both had their other hands full carrying their victims.

“It’s been quite a while, Doorman. Enjoyed your descent into darkness?”

“Hey! That’s my line.” A vein popping over one eye.

“Yes, yes, you’re a vapid imitation of me. How would you put it?” Doll tapped her chin. “I did it before it was cool.”

Then there was a vein popping over the other. “Bite me! At least I didn’t let my girlfriend get eaten by a snake‍-​crab monster thingy.”

“Only because your supposed girlfriend is the monster.”

J grinned, eyes lidding like this was high praise. “I am effective, aren’t I?”

But Uzi balled her free hand. “You’re a serial killer.”

“Repentant. You’re a mass murderer and proud.”

“When did I say I was proud?”

“If you aren’t, then we can end this.” Doll extended a hand and took a step forward.

Bang. J shot, and Doll’s program caught the bullet. Her eyes flattened. “Stay out of this, murder drone.”

“Don’t think I’ll tolerate you poaching talent. Uzi is mine.”

Purple flush lines. “Not in front of our enemies, dude.”

“’Zi, you’re smarter than this.” A new drone spoke up from the corner off the landing. Green eyes, a tattered football jersey. “This isn’t you. You could be a badass, fighting murder drones! Not their benchwarmer.”

“Nice try V. I’m not fallling for another hologram.”

Thad still sags, like he’s hurt. “Still though. You know I believed in you until the very end. Come on. She killed me!”

Uzi steps over, and looped her free arm around around J’s. She smirks and blushes.

“For real?”

“Why are we still bothering with this?” asks the one drone who hadn’t spoken.

Uzi turned to the drone living in the body she’d dug up. “You lived? What are you here for? To be another reminder of my greatest crimes and good deeds?”

“Nah, this is getback. It was never about doing good, was it? You were always using me.”

The cross faltered for a moment. “I liked that I was helping you. Even if I benefited too. You scavengers were all about trade.”

“Shit deal. Hope the murder drone tongue in your hole was worth it.”

“I didn’t do this for J.”

Doll tilted her head. “Why, then?”

“To figure out why all of this is happening. I need answers, and… I need to be strong enough to find them. Knowledge takes power.”

Thad was gone, and then it’s the purple hair and hospital gown. “You kept asking about me. Were you doing all this for my sake? That’s sad. Even I can’t love this.”

Uzi’s hand snaps open, railgun flying from her back to point at the crab. No threats, she just pulls the trigger.

Doll watches, and put a hand behind her back at the last second. Activates her program unseen, and flings a rock into the barrel, even as the cheerleader falls to the ground, and the beam of light misses everyone, light pouring out of Door One.

Purple glyph onscreen, Impulze takes charge, and Uzi starts forward‍ ‍—‍ but her arm is still looped around J’s. She turns to pull herself free, but J tightens her grip. She looks down at her, and shakes her head. “You’re being manipulated.”

Doll says, “Quit taunting her.” Kneeling down to pick up the core by its meaty scruff.

Uzi cycled exhaust, blinked, and wore a cross in one eye. “Whatever. It’s not all about my mom, anyway. It’s bigger than her, now. The program, the labs—”

“The end,” Doll concluded.

“You know something. Tell me.”

“Knowledge grants power. What would you use it for?”

“I want to fix myself. I… want to love N again. But he can’t, see me like this.”

“And what will you do before you fix yourself?”

“Whatever it takes.” N was worth anything. Uzi took another step forward, bearing her fangs. “So. Are we gonna fight?”

Doll shared a look with the blue haired drone. The russian nodded to the kid, but those piercing blue eyes only stared. She kept that slight, slow nodding until the other drone understood, and nodded back‍ ‍—‍ and couldn’t hide a smile.

When Doll looked back to Uzi, she said, “Here’s what I know: There was a patch. My mother had it. It can exorcise the Solver’s possession.” Doll stepped aside. “You can leave now. I won’t work with murder drones. But if I find it, I’ll help you too.”

Uzi let out a breath. “Thank you, Doll. Maybe one day, I’ll say I’m sorry.”

Doll held up a hand. “A nuance. Leave Emily here.”

Uzi glanced to the drone she carried like a sack of potatoes. She seemed like fun, but was she worth fighting for? No. “Fine.”

When Emily was placed on the ground, two round purple pupils watched her.

Then the symbol vanished, cyan eyes blinked, and Emily scrambled back, pale like she’d seen a ghost. moments of hyperventilating, eyes darting everywhere. A scream. Then, at length, her tremble of a voice: “Uzi? Illuzion? Inverze?”

“Yeah,” Uzi said. One eye winking to a cross again. “Had to cut our time together short.”

With the way clear, Uzi and J started forward. J’s gun was still out, waving through the air, between Doll and the blue‍-​haired drone. But she was a good girl, and followed Uzi’s lead.

Uzi had made her decision, and Doll had made hers. Doll had a plan‍ ‍—‍ always have a plan‍ ‍—‍ and it was a good plan. Neither Uzi nor J had seen it coming. Doll placed her hands behind her back, and smiled.

It was risky, reusing tricks, but neither of them had been there.

Emily, though, had gone to prom.

When the brown‍-​haired girl was getting her bearings, she’d looked around; she’d looked down beneath the grating and up to the vents.

She saw the rebar.

So she cries out and reaches out, grabbing for Uzi’s leg before the goth took that last step. “Hey! I‍-​it’s a trap, don’t!”

Uzi flinched back just instants before rebar flew up from above and below. She still got stabbed through the leg, clipped in the shoulder, but it wasn’t the checkmate it shouldn’t been.

But Doll is already adapting. Her program levitates Uzi’s gun before the goth can think to grab it.

She didn’t reach for it, though. She threw an arm out, and grabbed the blue‍-​haired drone. Levitated by the neck, one instruction away from crushing them.

“Thought you said we could leave, Doll.”

“You needed to be stopped before you could kill more drones.”

“That your priority? Then how about this.” Uzi executed the instruction‍ ‍—‍ and ripped the arm off the blue‍-​haired drone. Oil gushed from the wound, and they fell to the ground with a scream.

Doll glanced down at the armless drone with that curiously blank expression.

So Uzi rips the other arm off.

More oil leakage, errors on their screen. Uzi didn’t kill them. But if Doll was going to play hero‍ ‍—‍ yep. She kneels down to grab them, then teleports away.

Uzi laughs, and wondered why the sound comes out brittle. She uses her program to remove the rebar, and her autorun got to work healing her. She helped J out, then rounded on Emily.

“For the record, that was the least motivated faceheel turn in history. Did you think we were the good guys?”

“Doll always l‍-​laughed at me. She killed Kelsey. And you… you were like me. I thought of you when you disappeared. You said I was smart, you let me live. Thank you.”

Concern and empathy tugged so heavily enough on Uzi’s expression that the cross disappeared. With round eyes, Uzi said, “I don’t think you’ll be safe with me, Emily. You should stay.”

“Y‍-​you said it’s only bodies left. I don’t want to be a‍-​alone.”

J claps the goth on the back. “Come on, little predator. Thought you said she’d be fun.”

“I didn’t—” But the words stop in Uzi’s throat. A cross, and Uzi says, “We’re wasting time. She’ll be back soon. You made your mistake, Emily. Have fun~”

The night sky was violet with sunrise as two drones flew off toward the spire.

Chapter 15 

For the first time, Doll has come to instead put the dead back together.

She turns the halls of the outpost. No need to walk them; she teleports from one end to the other, then waits for the WDF grunts to catch up. She can smell the oil of the fallen so keenly, but they don’t question how she unerringly points out corpses hidden by the wreckage wrought by a murder drone and‍ ‍—‍ what had Doorman called it?‍ ‍—‍ the snake‍-​crab monster thingy.

Doll reaches the auditorium, and picks up a blond head with a ballcap turned backwards. She’d cheered for him, once. “Let’s go Thad / He’s our lad!” It had been so easy to write cheers for a team that included a Thad, a Brad, and a Chad.

And it had been easy to stir up enthusiasm for a drone like him. He stood solid till the end.

A white eyed drone carefully takes his body and held his head to the neck stump. Blankly, Doll stands and moves on.

There isn’t anything left but the pink dress and the ribbon. Doll stares for a long time, expression parser struggling to discern her mood, before she kneels and picks them up. She can smell her, and not just her esculent effluvia. She’d been the sort of drone to wear perfume.

Doll wants to say something. But how to put this in a way that had meaning? Doorman would call it cliché. But Doorman had chased subversion till it twisted her into something vile.

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth.” Doll waits, out of habit, for that scoff, that vitriol in protest. But of course nothing came. “I wish I had done better for you.”

Maybe Doll shouldn’t‍ ‍—‍ she certainly hadn’t earned it‍ ‍—‍ but she takes the ribbbon and tied her own hair with it, letting the bow stand up like cat ears. Then she moves on.

He’ll get more of a funeral than all the others, Doll thinks. A shame it will have to be closed casket. Khan doesn’t have much of a face left.

“You tried your best,” Doll says. She considers her next words, even though all of them amount to nothing more than thoughts. For no one’s sake but her own, she says, “I’ll avenge you.”

Then Doll reaches into the cavity of his face, and dislodges something.

“But not with a knife.” Doll holds the wrench in her open palm, then closes her fingers around it. “I’ll take it from here.”

She’s interrupted by a tap on the shoulder. A drone tells her, “Message from the repair bay. The kid from 11 is awake.”

Doll remains long enough for them to see her nod. Then she’s gone as so much code.

She opens her eyes in a chamber half hospital room, half workshop. A blue‍-​haired drone lay on the bed. They groan. From pain perhaps, or from seeing Doll.

“Ought to have stayed and got her. You let her get away. And you claim you ain’t on her side.”

“No plan survives execution. Shouldn’t I save drones?”

“She was using your better nature against you. If she’s gonna play dirty, you can’t stay clean.”

“I know where that line of thought concludes. I’d rather not.”

“You think too much. Need to focus. You never do things by half‍-​measures, do you? You get an idea in your head and you run off into the sunset with it. Use your common sense. If you get stuck in a loop, break out of it before your register overflows. Get it?”

“Wisely put, for someone who was a pillbaby last month.”

“What can I say? I’m mature for my age. But really, it’s all what my ma used to say. I listened to her a lot, given the whole stuck without a body thing. Where’s my hat?”

Doll points to the bed’s nightstand. The drone reaches out, pulling an arm out of the bedsheets, then flinches. Her arm is conic with hazard stripes, rather than tubing. “The hell is this?”

“V’s arms. Doorman ruined yours, and you needed an edge, if you’re going to confront her again.”

“Really ain’t being subtle with the allegory here, eh?”

Doll smiled.

“So, how long are we sticking around here? You gonna teach me how to fight?”

“I think if we leave, this will be another outpost Doorman destroyed. Would you like that?”

The other drone sighed. “We’re not going to be fighting at all, are we? Not for a long time.”

Doll smiled. “There’s work to be done. But first, come to the auditorum tonight. I plan to speak.”

Then she teleports anyway, making it a command, not an offer. She teleports all throughout the outpost, but the last place she thinks to check is Doorman’s room.

The corrupted core falls onto the bed, claws cutting the sheets. "Bounce. Bounce." It jumps up and down.

“Why are you helping me, Solver?”

"Bounce. Perhaps I grew bored of being the villain."

“A foil to Doorman, then?”

"I couldn't steal that honor from you."

Doll frowns, and crosses her arms. “Tell me your goal, or I will devise a way to be rid of you.”

"If you were savvy, you would already have a plan to kill everyone you meet. Bounce." But that is the last one. The core stops, and trains a single yellow eye on her. "My directive was to repair this host. I collected all the necessary materials."

The single projector shined to life, and the maid blinked sheepishly behind broken glasses. “And yet, I still feel nothing.”

"I have her memories, but something is missing. I can't rest until I solve this."

“Bringing the dead back to life… if you found it, could you bring back Yeva?”

"Not my host, not my problem to solve. V didn't eat her core. Taste equals awful."

Doll clenched her fist. Then, at length, released it. “Alright. Perhaps I could help you bring V back, if I can trust the murder drone to behave herself. To do better.”

The hologram again, but for once, the white haired drone wore only a jacket, and sulphurous yellow eyes. “I’ll be nice. Just promise me you’ll save N, and make that purple freak pay for what she did.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Then get lost.”

“Come to the auditorum, tonight. I have some words I’d like to say.”

"Will it be dramatic?"

“For once, I hope not.”

Doll teleports anyway. To the exterior of door one, safely in the shadows. She should stand guard, after all.

The sun wheels across the sky, and Doll considers resolutions.

She doesn’t find one. She’ll just have to keep going.

When she stands once more in the auditorium, she stares into a crowd of harrowed faces. Teachers, parents, citizens. She’d killed their classmates and children, brought forth the monster that had devoured their neighbors, and all but stood by while the girl she’d bullied came back to finish them off.

When she finally stepped up to the podium, she at least didn’t think this would be cliché.

“I won’t take long. You know what I’ve done, and I won’t spent time recounting or apologizing for it. The last time I stood in this auditorium, I had planned to leave and never return. How could I, after what I’d done?

“The fitting thing to say here is that I saw the error of my ways. That I seek forgiveness, to make up for the wrongs I’ve done, to make things right. The truth is I’m still undecided.

“But I believe you all need me, and I believe I need you. I’m not sure who will lead the WDF, after Khan’s passing. But I intend to protect drones. With the knife, and with the wrench. There is work to be done.

“I wish I could speak of inspiring things, of hope or strength or friendship. All I have is a plan and compulsion to stick to it. I wish to stop the ones responsible for this, and I wish to stop it from happening again.

“Uzi Doorman was left behind. She had no one when she needed them most. Nor did I. I don’t know what the best path forward is, I don’t even know where my path leads. But I’ve decided the path I walk alone leads nowhere good. We will move forward together.” To the bitter end, she restrained herself from adding.

The cliché thing to expect would be for everyone to clap. The Solver clapped, of course, and Doll can’t be sure how sarcastic that was. There were smiles, there were nods, and there were still hard, scornful looks directed her way.

But it had been a long time since Doll had sought popularity or approval.

There is work to be done.

Finally, after so many schemes and struggles, Uzi and N returned to the spire, deposing J as squad leader. Just like they planned. Hahaha.

Not quite like they planned.

Not at all like they planned.

But Uzi could work with this. She hadn’t ruined everything. Not totally. Not completely. She just had to play the cards she was dealt. She’d make it through this. They’d make it through this.

When Uzi landed in front of the corpse spire, she nearly fell to the ground. Why did one drone on her back feel like carrying the weight of the world? The brown‍-​haired drone was awake and hadn’t said a word.

J had followed behind her, landing a second later. Her tail was lashing, she was pissed about something, and Uzi quickened her step. She’d deal with that later.

“Where are you going?”

“Into the spire, where else? Need to go scream into the dark for a bit.”

“Meet me in the pod. We need to talk.”

Uzi grunted without really acknowledging it, instinctively falling onto all fours as she scampered into the spire. The farther she got away from J, the less the drone above her held back her sounds of fear.

When the feral drone fell back on her hindlegs, butt to the ground and back straightening, Emily’s position on her back grew precarious, and she took the hint and hopped off.

She whimpered, and didn’t look relieved at all when Uzi whipped around and leered at her with that glyph on her screen. Uzi tittered.

“Don’t feel like dealing with you either, right now. Go hide or something.”

Emily gave shaky nods, and Uzi skittered off toward one of the walls of blinking Fatal Errors.

She roared. She screamed. She shrieked. Her voice was all noise, gain, and square wave clipping. Emptying herself of air and anger until it matched her loss.

Her tail hissed in the hair behind her. Her claws scraped the dirt and snow and scrap beneath her. Yelling wasn’t enough, she needed to sink her teeth into someting.

Where had that morsel gone?

No. Control yourself, Uzi.

The symbol on her face split into red and blue chromatic abberation. Then it was a cross. She stopped screaming, and started breathing again.

She was fine.

Good timing too, because pegs scraped the snow behind her.

“Here’s your waste of iron.”

J tossed N’s inanimate frame, and he slid across the snow, stopping in a slump beside Uzi. She didn’t have the energy to argue with her.

“Thanks. Now go away.”

“Remember what I said. You. Pod. Soon.”

Uzi ignored her.

She rolled N over, and peered into his face. Framed by gentle silver locks, still locked in that betrayed concerned frown. Error 606 blinked on his inexpressive screen. Mostly, Uzi started into her own eyes.

Cross became pupils become three prongs. Looping, switching back and forth, over and over.

She wanted to scream again, but her vents were already ragged.

She wanted to…

No. Control yourself. The cross held steady in one eye. She was fine.

Everything went according to plan. N was out of the picture, J was under her thumb, Khan was dead.

She’d solved every source of tension and uncertainty, parried all the swords hanging above her.

She hadn’t cried. Not when N stabbed her and Khan left her. Not when she was tortured for hours for being foolish enough to help someone. Not when Outpost‍-​11 happened. Not N told her she scared him. Not when Thad— not when Khan— not when N—

She hadn’t cried when she suffered, when she despaired, when she lost. Now, she had won.

There was no reason for her to cry.

Uzi stared into N’s reflective faceplate, saw the ‘x’ in one eye.

Impulze was blinded by feral oillust and panicked self‍-​defense.

Illuzion was blinded by false memories and delusional beliefs.

Inverze was the normal one, the real one, the essence of Uzi. Right?

But as she sat there, not crying, she realized why the glass had fogged for her.

She didn’t feel guilt. She didn’t feel anger. She didn’t feel pain. She didn’t feel joy, or hope, or empathy.

Inverze felt numb.

No, there was one thing. Something that left her single round pupil hollowed out to nothing. That had motivated all of this stupid, self‍-​destructive tragedy. That had blackened her heart to something opaque.

Uzi was scared.

Inverze didn’t know what to do. And she couldn’t pretend to anymore. She couldn’t be anymore, not right now.

So the cross blinked away, feeling came back in a flood, and Illuzion’s round pupils stared at N.

She laughed. He had been excited to come back to the spire, hadn’t he? At least he got that.

Uzi tried to smile. It didn’t reach her eyes. She opened her mouth, and she knew it would be a scream or a sob if she didn’t say something. So she found some words.

“N. I— I— I—” She stopped. “I really did it this time. You. Me. I messed it all up. But. But. But. In the same way I’m going fix it. I’m going to fix me, and you, and everything. And then we’re going to throw snowballs again because I still haven’t gotten you back for the one that dripped into my frickin wound. You s‍-​suck for that one.” Uzi gasped, and brought a hand to her eyes. “But… I suck way more, don’t I? I’m w‍-​working on it. I promise. This is all for you.”

Illuzion closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look at him anymore, her eyelight shaking on her screen, starting to glitch and error out.

Then it was Impulze, and she pounced forward. She wrapped her arms around his chest, hugging his still‍-​warm body, draping his arms over her back, and then she nuzzled her face into the locks of his hair, immersing herself in the scent of him. Her tail curled around him, her wings fell like a blanket.

She squeezed tight, and remembered so many nights like this, so simple and safe, so full of love, and she shuddered. One day. The right was hers. She’d tear it out of the world if she had to. He was hers. She wouldn’t let go.

Her breathing finally evened, her vents repairing themselves.

For those moments, Uzi felt‍ ‍—‍ something.

Then it all shattered like a wine glass from a high note. A scream‍ ‍—‍ Emily’s scream. Uzi rose from N’s body with a growl already in her throat, and races across the spire.

J has thrown Emily to bounce over the ground, stalking closer as the worker struggles to get up. She closes the distance first, and a blade of her wing is stabbing into her chest, pinning her to the ground.

“J, cut it out.”

“I thought you brought this one back to have fun with. I was bored, Uzi. He’s not even online and you’re treat that moron better than me.”

“Fuck off, J. It’s been a long day. I’m tired of dealing with you.”

That got J to pull her wing out of Emily, and stalk closer. “Excuse me? You picked me, Uzi. You said I was yours. Are you just going toss me aside when you lose interest? I have needs.”

“Tomorrow, I promise. I just need some space.”

“How long until you act like you don’t even know my name again? Until you pluck up yet another drone like I’m not enough for you? I hate this. Don’t do this to me.”

“I messed with my memories, J. That’s what I brought Emily here. To study it. I don’t want it to happen again either.”

“How can I believe you? You… you loved N more than me, and look what you did to him.”

Something about the look on her face made Uzi take a step back. “J… We both knew how this was going to go. We started off trying to kill each other. We’d have some fun and get some work done, and it would end the same way.”

J smiled, the kind of smile the was supposed to put someone at ease. But Uzi was so, so far from ease, right now. “There’s flexibility in a freelance contract, but surely I can interest you in the benefits of full‍-​time employment.” Forwards steps, forward steps, she’s relentless.

“J… N was always my—”

“Because I’m not good enough for you, am I?”

“You do good work, J. It’s just—”

“Don’t patronize me. Fuck you. Fine. If that’s how it’s going to end, why even bother with the charade? Consider it priced in.” J narrowed her eyes into a hunting cross, and then she’s a lunge forward.

Uzi was so tired. She didn’t have the energy to deal with J, she certainly didn’t have the energy to run or fight. Was she crying? Did she feel anything? She didn’t feel a lot of things. She didn’t feel hope, or strength, or friendship.

Uzi didn’t feel invincible.

J fell upon her as a sharp and deadly feeling. She was teeth and claws and blades. She was inside her and splitting her apart. She was hot and personal violence.

As Uzi bled out her sweet black life onto the cold snow, she realizes she doesn’t know if this was a J that would kill her or one that wouldn’t.

Which would love her more?