Circuits Turn to Stone
Uzi didn’t remember the blade-wings in the sky nor the drooling, oil-hungry mouths. Neither did Doll, her former best friend. But their mothers did — how could you forget how you almost died? Yet everyone survived; both families were safe behind the outpost’s doors.
Were.
Khan and Nori are dead. Everyone would be, too — a murder drone had slipped past the doors — but Doll was there to fight them back. Now she wants to take the fight to them. She’s everyone’s hero — except one.
With no one to turn to and nothing to prove, a profound lethargy grips Uzi. She wonders why she even keeps going. She skips school, doesn’t answer the door, and lies in bed for days at a time. In this empty house, she’s utterly alone.
So why does she hear a voice?
Post-hoc Cost/Benefit Analysis
J was calculating, but Uzi was impulsive. That didn’t make her unpredictable, it made her a known quantity. Simply price it in, then maximize revenue and minimize expenses.
But how much should you worry, when someone else is setting the terms of the equation? Did it matter if you wrote the bottom line first, just this once? As long as the books get balanced one day, a little fudging right now is just practical.
(Or: five times it made sense for J to let Uzi live, and the one time it really didn’t.)
Heroine in Abeyance
Archivolt Tower scrapes the sky, a luxury hotel wrought of galvanized steel. Electricity once coursed through the facade, a defense to ward off even murder drones. Tonight, every generator shut off — hacked, overridden, but it’s a worker drone who gives the signal.
Uzi knows what lay within. She has the floor plan and org chart. She saw the shattered mirror fragments dumped outside, the drones dragged inward with shackles and magnets. She’d tried talking, and got a bullet grazing her shoulder for her trouble. They were past negotiating.
J knew what lay within, too. Enough targets her quotas would be an afterthought, so long as no liabilities screwed this up — so long as Uzi’s info could be relied on.
Archivolt Tower was just another piece of the puzzle. Uzi couldn’t get her answers alone, and she needed those answers. J was just a means to an end. She hadn’t thought about anything else since leaving Outpost-3.
(J’s voice was more familiar than her father’s, these days.)
Corrupt Combustion Zero
Subjects #024 and #029 climbed out of hell together. #002 had the devil’s own luck; #048 had a genius that could bring the company begging. But Triss and Amda just had each other.
A sickness burns within drones and turns them into feral monsters wielding impossible powers. Against these threats, Amda would just falter again — but Triss has fire enough enough for the both them.
Call it a gift, call it a curse, but Cabin Fever left its mark all the same. Corruption imbues their cores like mana, and every subject has a spell.
Amda’s spell transmutes corruption into pure, blinding light. Triss’s siphons it, steals it, seals it away inside her. Yeva thought they both had potential.
Triss just hopes she doesn’t tear out what it is that shines in Amda. Fire enough enough for the both of them means Triss doesn’t need to steal anyone else’s. But how much solace is that?
Here on Copper-9, even the fires burn cold.
Witchhunter, Heretic, Holy Reckoner!
Nori and Alice didn’t meet in Cabin Fever Labs. Oh, but they did meet above the edge of a knife black with oil. But this was months before hell cracked open its gates.
Before it all came crashing down, there were free worker drones on Copper-9, right under the humans’ noses. A haven for the cast-off and uncooperative — but a castle was only as safe as its walls were guarded.
The humans’ test subjects weren’t created, they were found: corrupted drones snatched from wherever they wouldn’t be missed. The free workers’ haven was only as safe for as long as it didn’t draw the humans’ attention.
There is a corrupt library, a digital grimoire, the book of sulphur, known to workers, capable of altering a drone’s programming, stripping them of safeguards, and promising more. Decrypting — if you can decrypt it — doubles as an invocation of the humans’ curiosity.
Nori can’t say she’s all that different — how could she say no to forbidden knowledge? But she’d never dream of getting herself kicked out of haven. Permissions crw-; read, write, don’t execute.
Yeva’s masters keep only a single drone in their dacha, tasked with chores enough for a team of drones. But she wouldn’t abandon them — not even when Nori was tempting her with invitation to the haven — but when a knock to the head sustained in that strenuous regiment leaves her speech synth mute, her masters don’t share that loyalty. They were going to scrap her, and Nori couldn’t do anything to save her friend.
Unless she cast from the book of sulphur.
With a family of humans now lying in shallow graves, the only witness to Nori’s secret is Yeva, and she isn’t telling anyone. That a worker commited these murders is just one theory the humans might consider — but Alice has a hunch right away. She’s dealt with witches before.
Nori and Alice have one thing in common: they can’t let the humans find out the truth. But only Alice has a plan for how to ensure that.
Alice just hopes she can drive the knife in before she needs a cross