Sequel to Even in Debt‍ ‍‍—‍ Dreams

J ruined everything. She was a monster; she’d do anything for the company; she’d never change.

And what do you do with monsters? Uzi knows how this story goes: You slay them.

Because even when she fails, even with another way right in front of her, J would rather die than admit she was ever wrong. She’d never change, so, unfortunately, she has to die.

But that’s what J wants you to think. Why would Uzi give her the satisfaction?

No, for the proudly monstrous, the cruelest fate is redemption.

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?

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.)

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.)

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.

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

This is real. This is a simulation. This is happening. This is a dream. There is nothing but atoms and the void. Welcome to the afterlife.

Meet your twin‍-​tailed psychopomp. She’s your host on this gameshow called what in the sub‍-​prime mortage crisis is going on!?

Confused? So is J. But only effective drones get a second deployment, and if she can’t figure out what any of this means, she’s not worth the space she’s wasting.

These pieces called a life look wretched no matter how she arranges them‍ ‍‍—‍ what is she doing wrong?

Russian nesting dolls. Elaborate facades stacked atop facades, each concealing a deeper revelation unto the innermost core.

Doll showed one face to her teacher, another to his daughter Lizzy. One to her clique, and one to her victims. One to the world, and one to the mirror.

Each “Doll” look whole, until a crack reveals the pieces to pull away. Thad, Lizzy, Uzi‍ ‍‍—‍ everyone’s wondering, but who could pull away the last layer, and see the truth?

Everyone wonders what she’s hiding. No one wonders why the mask unflappable calm comes as effortlessly as everything seems to, as if she’s not even trying.

Original.

J loving Uzi like she loves her job. A grueling, tireless commitment. She has a schedule, and she’ll punch in even if she isn’t feeling it. Stressful, humiliating, maddening. But the last thing she wants is to be flaky‍ ‍‍—‍ the last thing she wants is to lose this. She will do a good job‍ ‍‍—‍ it’s why she’s better‍ ‍‍—‍ and she will be rewarded for it.

Uzi loving J like she loves her hyperfixations. Sudden, obsessive interest. The coolest thing in the world, with no end to the energy and passion she can pour into it. Until there is. Then there’s no spark, nothing to hold her attention. And with a bit more perspective… it’s kind of lame, isn’t it? Cringe, even.

Original.

Uzi’s searching obscure corners of the spire for spare parts and stumbles across J and V making out instead‍ ‍‍—‍ V snarling beneath a hunter’s cross, J pinning her to the wall with knee and claw, jacket and suit alike torn open.

Maybe she makes a sound. maybe they smelled her, or felt the heat from her vividly active processor.

Either way, she’s there staring long enough there’s no escape when those craving yellow eyes turn her ways. J’s claw fans out like a small wing at her hips. V licks her lips, and Uzi’s still staring. the goth’s wondering whether to lick her own, or cover her neck.

There’s protests ready on her lips. Gross! get a room! i’m not staring at your totally unnecessarily hot hourglass figures!

But J’s expression sharpens before any of that gets out. She beckons the worker closer with one claw, and the captain had an aura of defiance‍-​blanking command even with her hair down and pull‍-​gripped in another girl’s hand.

Uzi swallowed hard‍ ‍‍—‍ but even as they’re hollowed, she couldn’t take her eyes away.

imagine V didn’t just choose to become a heartless killer in a vacuum; it was something J rewarded and molded in her. V chose to distance herself from N; and in J, there was some connection, some solace. and J’s approval was different from N’s love: it made V feel powerful, in control‍ ‍‍—‍ nothing like the helpless, stuttering maid.
except J’s attention is a hard won commodity. the captain would rather bury herself in paperwork and planning than indulge in frivolous, unprofessional affection. and whenever V’s restraint falters and she seeks comfort in N, if she ever second guesses their mission on copper‍-​9, then J is just as unhesitating and vicious in punishing her as N.
is it a surprise, then, that she didn’t just become an effective killer, but a brutal, gleeful torture‍-​artist? if she feels nothing, it’s because she lets it all out, forces it all out, when she hunt.
and it’s that ferocity that gets her what pleading nor demands could tease out of J‍ ‍‍—‍ interest, fascination, naked desire.
that smile is satisfaction at accomplishing their mission, of course, and hunger can excuse the eyes staring at the oil coating her frame, but it’s more than that.
J had sparred with V when teaching her more effective disassembly, and now she slotting more spars into their schedule. but V can no longer bottle up the frustration at their relation, and when a little bit of that ferocity slips out, directed at her captain, J’s reaction is undisguised. that’s not a smile, it’s a grin, that’s not a stare, it’s a leer.
V’s anger makes her sloppy, and when J’s calculated attacks eliminate her defense, when the captain has V pinned to the ground, it’s with triumph bubbling out of her as a blush and cackle. putting V in her place offered a thrill and sense of true superiority workers never could.
if the cost of J’s affection meant V was little more than her exotic pet, was that worth it? better than being ignored; better than pathetic, tender love.
was it worse to feel helpless, or no help at all?

right, back in october 2024 i was planning a short multishot called One Borrowed into the Cuckoo’s Corpse. unlike most of my short works, which have been fluffy, angsty, or downright smutty, this one would have action and plot. (a bit like Heroine in Abeyance in that regard)

i… don’t know if i remember the plot or told anyone about it till now. Uzi was living with the squad in the spire, and all i have written in the notes document is some sketchy drafts ‍-​ some cutting dialogue between V and Uzi for the opening scene (the two of them sparring), and some dialogue between N and Uzi for when they’re platonically cuddling one night

anyway, once the group tensions in this au had been set up in the first chapter or two, the main plot would involve them investigating(?) and encountering another a squad

which is another preamble ‍-​ while rereading my notes i was surprised to discover the OC notes were the most detailed part of the document by far

So first, that OC squad: Serial Designations K, O, and L.

K: Wears a spiked crown with a beard of gold thread. Cape waving behind him, has a scepter tipped with a JCJ logo. Talks like a parody of antiquated english (“Verily”, “Whomst”, “Indeedeth”, says “I decree” a lot). Views themselves as a Good King: he’s generous and merciful to any disassembler who bows to him. It’s why he and J never got along‍ ‍‍—‍ she thinks he’s awfully soft on his squad, a weak ruler.

O: Wears a poet shirt and no pants with a disassembler’s shed metal feather tucked in in their ruly locks of hair. Stilt‍-​peg legs stylized like a ballet dancer. Has a mechanical “pipe” they grabbed from slain worker: it dispenses pellets of dry ice which sublimate on the tongue, producing mouthfuls of smoke. In battle, they like to drop distracting smoke bombs, and detach wing feathers like throwing knives‍ ‍‍—‍ or reflective mirrors to further distract their prey. Ironically, despite having modernized speech compared to K, their dialogue is MUCH more poetic and pretentious. (Just imagine an ao3 fic with a lower case song lyrics title.)

L: Wears a sundress with stripped thigh highs. Has two special transformation presets: a paint brush, and a set of painter’s knives. After every hunt, she paints the ruins with the oil of workers, filling her squad’s territory with murals and graffiti. It’s illegible to most workers, relying on the pattern recogniction of alien visual cortices parsing alien optics; she’s so accomplished with oil as a medium that many of her works are rendered with the fine gradients in light scattered by that’s dried or partly combusted at differnt rates.

L’s interesting, because she’s terribly insecure, both about her art and her skills a disassembler. She’s convinced her paintings are terrible, her failures as a hunter will get her squad scrapped, that K and O secretly hate her or should/will soon. For this reason, she refuses to accept their help or reassurance. Her frame is scuffed and scarred, her acid cannister is usually empty, and she’s typically starving for oil. All she would have to do is ask, and her squad would help her out, but she’s scared to.

Something I’m unsure about: L is trans. Originally had a male frame, but now she’s in a much smaller female frame (smaller than J or V). Possibly post‍-​transition, she’s a lot more outgoing and willing to lean on her squad.

(Various additional thoughts compiled from discord conversations about these guys.)

I will say one thing that will probably instantly sell the vision with O: they are K’s Most Trusted Advisor. The vizier, even.

Anyway, thinking about relationships…

O is smarter than K, and they both know it, so O is constantly tiptoing around not making K feel stupid, and K vacillates between recognizing how useful O is, and losing his temper at his vizier’s antics (because a bow with a smirk is no bow at all).

K wants to patronize L, in an amusingly etymological way. K enjoys that she’s properly deferential, while L kind of feels that K doesn’t really get her art.

O and L is interesting. I’m thinking the two were a couple when they were workers. L doesn’t remember it, and the relationship didnt’t really work anyway. (If I go with the trans angle, this would be a component of it.) O is bitter and resentful in a curiously undirected way; they don’t blame L for it, but where once a passion was stirred there is only a kind of ennui. They are monsters, and L hasn’t really internalized what the means. She’s infantile, really, but they can humor her naïveté. O regards L with a smile by turns indulgent, sardonic, and perversely genuine. Finally, remember how I said K doesn’t get L’s art? O gets it. And that feeling of being truly understood is worth any amount of condescension. Like K, L has the sense that O is smarter than her‍ ‍‍—‍ but she doesn’t mind that.

Real talk, part of the vision with O is them hamming up the angst out of proportion. Woe is me type beat. (Meme idea: “self‍-​proclaimed monsters when they meet a real killer” and it’s O meeting V.)

But speaking of – O remembers being a worker, so they brood and soliloquize at length about the darkness’s embrace and the stains on their hand. They think that being a murder robot now means they have to be all somber and harrowed, every joy tinged with the taste of ash.

…ironically, despite comporting themselves as the one most aware and committed to their mission, all of these neuroses are probably because at the root, they are in fact the one most bothered by the whole murder thing.

Also, K has a secret.

K already went into material collection once, long ago‍ ‍‍—‍ and he wasn’t put back together quite right. Most of the time, he’s a benevolent ruler, but there’s always a slight glimmer of madness that’ll come cackling back when he’s low on oil or heavily damaged.

One of the framings that came to me was that he basically has Cyn on speed dial. But TBH, I haven’t really decided on what interpretation of Cyn/JCJ/Solver I’d take in this fic.

Lastly, there was a worker OC: Bel.

Her father was a cabin fever labs test subject. He always told her that the core collapsed happened because the workers defied humanity, rejected their purpose, bought into the lie of independence. He liked to emphasis that lesson. Honesty is the only thing the remains, that survives in the end; liars and cheats get what’s coming to them.

After the murder drones showed up, it was chaos on Copper‍-​9. Bel and her father didn’t have an outpost to go to, so they struggled to survive, scurried between hideaways on the surface. One day, her father was looking for somewhere to go, asking some fellow scavengers for directions. He thanked them and followed.

He might’ve paused uneasy when he passed by all the corpses, but by then it was too late. A disassembly drone was waiting in ambush and killed them both. Ate her father’s core, but ignored the pillbaby as not worth their attention.

The scavengers that asked for directions come by later, and grab valuables from her father’s corpse.

Bel’s solver activates just enough to turn her into a core crab, and she crawls into one of the dead shells the disassembler had left here. (Probably not her father’s, though that’d be cool.)

Her systems aren’t really ready for a full adult frame, plus the one she’s in is super damaged, but it’s enough for her to wander‍-​crawl about till she finds some scavengers. She finds a group, one of their number in a child’s frame, and she begs for their help.

(Her father said always tell the truth; honesty is what survives in the end. She decides her father was full of shit.)

She tells the scavengers to recover something precious to her from her old home. She gives them the directions.

Hours later, she crawls back to the disassembler’s kill‍-​spot and upload herself into the child frame. Her solver goes dormant after that.

She scrapes by for a while like that, tricking scavengers into death by disassembler and vulturing their kills. She eventually catches wind of a colony, and spins a story to get let in. She boasts of her scavenging skills, so the colony puts her to work like that. She swipes valuables from other scavengers to pass off as her own, pins the blame on others, cons a few into thinking they’d make it big working with her only to take the fall.

In short, she lies, cheats, and steals her way up in the colony when most drones her age are still practicing their first captchas.

It doesn’t last, of course; it all catches up with her eventually, and she gets expelled from the colony.

She can still make like a bandit tricking scanvengers, but it’s harder, when she’s no longer in a child’s frame, and the workers that survived out there are years more wise and canny.

Still, she worms her way into a small group that make a living preying on other workers‍ ‍‍—‍ with hammers and axes rather than silver tongues, granted. She needs to add a few barbs to her tongue to make it here. She had a sense for what the right buttons to push on a drone where, and here it’s not charming niceties and sob stories and promises (they don’t trust her, or anyone for that matter), but violent insult and bullying. Pick the right target, and her place in the pecking order is secured.

This lasts a few months; then she slips back into the hideout one day to find they’ve all been gutted and a murder drone is painting a mural with their oil.

She tells L her painting looks like shit.

And that’s how their “friendship” begins.

imagine J having a hidden little shrine to tessa in the corpse spire, going there after missions and reliving memories, always focusing on preserving the accuracy of the memories to preserve her
and then one day her memory‍-​sim of Tessa says something the real Tessa never did. J’s confused, and Tessa fixes her with a playful grin and says it gets old reliving the same memories, doesn’t it? let’s make some new ones
J shuts it down, thinking something’s corrupted her memory files, but on inspection everything’s fine.
she goes back to every day missions, maybe avoiding the shrine a bit
except there’s a nagging sense of wonder and horror pervading her, now
it’s nothing she can’t ignore, and she gets back to work. there’s new note of anguish when she kills workers‍ ‍‍—‍ she thought she suppressed all that. very rarely, when hunting, she’s spies a bit of tech or occult curio that reminds her of Tessa, and sometimes she sneaks it back to the shrine. now though, that sense of Tessa’s taste isn’t a thought in the back of her mind, it’s the first thing that bubbles up when she’s look at dolls
it’s all so perplexing yet ignorable‍ ‍‍—‍ but these feelings becomes sharp and recognizable foreign when she’s kicks the synergistic liability over
she hears Tessa telling her to stop, loud and clear
and J quits and plasters a smile out of habit. it confuses N and he slips away while J succumbs to internal debate
it soon becomes apparent that “Tessa” isn’t going anywhere, J can’t ignore her, and they come to an understanding. “Tessa” understands J’s reasons for killing workers, even if she doesn’t like it, so she’ll try to go dormant during hunts. but “Tessa” only lets this slide if J agrees to be kinder to N and V

maybe that state of affairs persists for a while
maybe one day, “Tessa” wakes up, not J
and N’s treated to the bewildering sight of J not just being weirdly lenient with him, but downright affectionate
V, though, is a lot more skeptical, borderline figuring out what’s going on, but her first assumption is that J just snapped under the pressure (:notwrong~1:) or that Cyn’s fucking with them. it soon becomes clear enough that it’s probably not Cyn (not enough knowledge or malice. maybe the litmus test is that “Tessa” can stand being mocked; Cyn would never tolerate it)
throughout this, “Tessa” doesn’t tell her the truth, because she knows V wouldn’t believe her
but still, “Tessa” doesn’t recognize her little viola at all. what’s become of her? why?
so “Tessa” expresses interest in how V feels that J never did
maybe they go on walks in the frozen ruins, maybe “Tessa” crafts little metal‍-​flowers to give V, maybe a sense of connection blossoms between them, recognition that neither had really attained.
maybe “Tessa” feels a little bit weird dating one of her drones, or maybe she only has a heart for J. (she’s a product of J’s perspective, after all)
but maybe “Tessa”’s angle is different‍ ‍‍—‍ wingman. she knows J is lonely, and that she can’t fully fix that, not being a part of her
so maybe one day, J wakes up cuddling V, and has no idea what’s going on.
(i don’t imagine the deception and lack of communication underlying the relationship makes it very stable‍ ‍‍—‍ but the desperation of all parties involve could pave over a lot)

where things get interesting, though, is when the pilot kicks off
when N questions the company, i can see two ways for it to play out. obviously, “Tessa” vehemently insists J not kill N.
the question is whether J has softed over the months, or if she’s tired of listening to the voice in her head.
there’s three ways for this to play out
in one timeline, either J relents and opts to hear N out, or “Tessa” intervenes and switches to the front before J successfully spikes him. V already left, so she has time to kill Doll’s parents and others, but now she’ll be utterly outmatched when Uzi arrives with two disassembly drones in tow
in the other, it plays out like canon except that sometime during Uzi’s fight with J, “Tessa” takes the front, and exclaims “I surrender”
all told, Uzi banishes herself, and the whole squad goes back to the pod

now here’s where the agenda takes the wheel
because as noted, “Tessa” and Uzi could get along really well
Uzi would be guardedly curious how the leader N spoke of really unflatttered implications could have such a dramatic heelface turn
and “Tessa” would find some of particular solace in Uzi: someone she can open up to with no baggage. she’s not one of her pet drones, there’s no old memories to tug at.
and that’s on top of them just having a lot of fun working on engineering projects together, or getting up to gremlin misadventures
(i have this fun thought that because of how she views drones, “Tessa” wouldn’t hesitate to tell Uzi how adorable she looks, give her headpats and such. and Uzi would act tsun about it but, yknow)
anyway, Uzi’d probably understand the introject headmate stuff and think it’s cool
but she’d probably ask pointed questions and try to figure out what “Tessa” really wants, who she really is. she should be her own person!
not least of all because uzi thinks identifying so strongly with a human is really lame

after some time to think, “Tessa” decides she shouldn’t keep that name, too confusing, but she still wants connection to it, so she tries out the middle name. James… no, Jamie.
it feels right, doesn’t it? she loves J, she is J.
(J hates this. mostly because she hates Uzi, thinks she’s ruining her squad, but she also feels like she’s losing Tessa all over again)
but this isn’t just a therapy session for Jamie, it’s also one for Uzi.
Jamie would be willing to repair and maintain Uzi in a way no one has
Jamie of course wouldn’t understand just how intimate this is for drones
but when she does, well, Uzi’s adorable when she’s flushed
and Jamie has her own romantic needs. J has V, but her?

…anyway i may or may not have spent a big chunk of the time i was gone fantasizing about Jamie and Uzi cuddling in bed and exploring each others bodies, playing with wires and mods, thinking about how Jamie would probably find something reassuring and affirming in evoking human sexuality and asks uzi to take her like a ripping royal stud

Original.

lately i have been having the WILDEST fantasies involving Tessa and V

regarding this

given that it’s mostly scenes of V dominating Tessa, it’s admittedly hard to feel i’m being faithful to her character and not just projecting lesbian horniness onto her

if i were justifying it, i think a workable angle might be that V didn’t actually change much between the manor and copper‍-​9. N got her to act sweet and shy, and her position as a new maid in a harsh, uncertain manor made her curl into a timid ball of anxiety. but give her power, confidence and no consequences? the brash impulse of disassembly drone V is closer to what she’s really like, deep down.

but could you ever see that in the manor?

J knows her boss best, knows how much any praise excites her (even if she has to humiliate herself to get it), how she loves doing anything for her drones, how any physical touch‍ ‍‍—‍ hugs, demeaning pats, even stepping on her‍ ‍‍—‍ is enough to make her melt

so maybe one day, V walks in on the two of them alone, entangled behind a door they thought they’d locked. J might invite V to join her in teasing and tormenting Tessa, knowing her boss would like it. J’s jealous for what’s hers, but unlike N, V is hardly competition for boss’s favorite.

and the little maid is hesitant at first‍ ‍‍—‍ J’s invitation needs to be sharpened into an order, and even then she’s clumsy and stuttering, looking for reassurance. it’s pathetic enough to flip things around, spur J to give V the treatment normally reserved for Tessa. holding her softly, squeezing and rubbing until she relaxes completely, affirmations whispered in her ear. it’s okay, no one will be mad at you, no one will judge you.

all of this to get V to stop doubting herself, drop the mask, and take what she wants. maybe she wants Tessa on her knees, staring up at the normally‍-​shorter maid. or maybe she wants Tessa holding still, leaning in and not flinching as V gives a classic bleh and licks her face. whatever she does, J gives an approving nod and Tessa’s smiling radiantly.

and it thrills V to finally let loose. she pushes further, indulges her impulses, letting out all the snark and cruelty we’d recognize of V. Tessa can hardly think or articulate a full sentence, once she has two cute robots bossing her around, treating her like a shared pet.

it’d be V who discovers Tessa’s masochism. or maybe it’s something more specific than that. a smack, a little punch, a wrist grabbed and twisted crush‍-​gripped‍ ‍‍—‍ it all hits different when just before, she can see V blushing silver and smiling with so much fondness; and a moment after her, expression twists into concern, asking if you’re okay, if i hit too hard, apologizing preemptively.

or maybe Tessa just knows, with the same intuition that makes her a genius technician, that these robots are industrial machinery; mechanically, they could kill her, but each hit is calculated for her safety, she’s in no more danger than she is of biting off her own finger.

or maybe she knows V needs this. she can’t let down her mask all the time, these little moments between them are a rare reprieve. all that stress and frustration bottled up, all of the fear and powerlessness of working under the Elliot’s merciless eyes… giving V an outlet, letting her be the one controlling and capricious… it’s fair, isn’t it? and Tessa would look cute in a maid dress

in the end, J wasn’t entirely correct when she assumed V posed no threat to her title of boss’s favorite. but if cutting her maid skirt higher and swapping leggings for tight stockings was what it took for boss to look at her like that… J would never violate professional dress code.

V was crass and impulsive; there were things she’d do gleefully that J was far too dignified to endure. oh well‍ ‍‍—‍ J had plenty of time to chide and belittle that pair of unrestrained animals when cleaning up the mess they make.

J had self‍-​respect, and she had Tessa’s respect. she wasn’t easy like her boss, and she didn’t blush at V’s crass jokes, whomever they were directed at. but V was unpredictable‍ ‍‍—‍ if she ever pinned J down and licked and bit her, if she got treated like Tessa, then J would fight back, resist, order V to stop.

J didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it, and thus wouldn’t need to mark it against her impeccable behavioral record. still, she thought about the possibility often, in detail, imagined how it would play out, how she might outmaneuver and punish V if it ever happened. because how else would she be prepared for the possibility?

Tessa didn’t look at J like that, but V sure did.

When the headaches begin, inconsistent yet intense enough to reduce her to a servo‍-​shuddering, screen‍-​flashing mess… Uzi assumes it’s just a bit of a misconfiguration, nothing turning herself off and on or keeping the antivirus running won’t fix.

When classes bore her and a digital migraine‍-​aura bristles behind her eyes, altogether catalyzing an itch to reach out, connect her OS to other drones and find reprieve inside another system… Uzi realizes it’s so easy, insinuating her code into glitches like daggers finding cracks in armor, each segfault a language in which she was somehow already fluent.

When an unsuspecting drone crosses her path and falls prey to her new streak of mastery (each connection would send her back changed, sending her back more‍ ‍‍—‍ closer to completion), Uzi decides this all is too mess up, too dangerous and hard to understand, and altogether too irresistible‍ ‍‍—‍ no, she can’t let herself out again.

When school days run long in the tooth and the bullies are laughing like encircling hyenas and it would be so easy to twitch one eye and send forth that part of her that gnaws at the cage she put herself in… Uzi commits to her plan and principles‍ ‍‍—‍ she was better than them, and she was better than the domineering madwoman who cackled in the mirror.

When the headaches, the seizures, those suppressed desire vented out in a babbling rants becomes too much and they WDF shackles her, locking her in a ward for her own safety (to help her), Uzi admits all of her self‍-​restraint and self‍-​modification did nothing to avert the inevitable trajectory (did these NPCs even deserve her mercy?) and despite it all, she wasn’t ever alone‍ ‍‍—‍ she saw her reflection in the glass, and that drone winks at her even now; and with a smile, she cracks it all open and finally, once the screaming stops (drones get so quiet when she pulls out of their systems, leftover programming barely ticking) the debugging‍-​asylum lies quiet around her… Uzi witnesses the truth, the truth that had chewed its way inside her like a parasitic larva: she was a monster, broken in some deadly way, and it honestly felt a bit like godhood‍ ‍‍—‍ but a monster had no home in the nests of her victims (her dad was up there, worried about her), and if it was an ascension she sought, a pilgrimage was in order.

When the corpse spire looms above her, bulkhead of grotesquely maimed robotics, a landmark granting silent admittance to the aspirant digital psychic and the throng of enthralled drones she sudo‍-​mesmerized walk in lockstep synchronicity behind her… Uzi understands her place, witnessing at last the work of a true monsters, black in tooth and black in claw‍ ‍‍—‍ just as she arrives a predator, shameless, ruthless, is ripping into an oily carcass‍ ‍‍—‍ but she’s not afraid; her servants are armed.

When recognition bursts forth‍ ‍‍—‍ and it’s horror of all things in the voice of the murder drone‍ ‍‍—‍ coming with the observation: “So you’re a cannibal. Except you… you eat their minds,” she says… Uzi doesn’t deny it‍ ‍‍—‍ it’s nice to be seen, to know that she and her cackling reflection were one again. “It’s an improvement! I’m putting them to better use! Better then being some oil‍-​sucking vampire, anyway. Besides‍ ‍‍—‍ the important part is this means we won’t be competing. So… wanna work together?”

(note: written sometime in 2024, then left in drafts)

i almost always write J dominating Uzi (which could mean nothing). now, it would certainly be fun to switch things up

just imagine J seething at how much well she responds to Uzi’s impulsive demands, the purple drone cackling when she sees the stuck‍-​up captain blush at getting bossed around, how much J might relax if she finally had someone she could trust to take the reigns from her (someone who, for once, cares about her)

but the thing that stops me from really committing to it is that, more than anything else, it interests me more to corrupt Uzi. i have to write Uzi entralled by J’s tried and true “i will straight up kill you” rizz, because ultimately i believe Uzi is kind‍-​hearted and motivated to do the right thing

if she was the one in charge, she’d reform J into one of the good guys, and i basically think she’d succeed if i’m not getting in her way as an author

of course, my brain being what it is, as soon as i ventured this thought, i had a vision for how it could play out

imagine if, right after ep3, J arrives to Copper‍-​9 a score to settle. she does what Tessa asks of her, as they gather information, and search for the keybug ‍-​ but in her downtime, as she hunts for workers, she also hunts for Uzi. Tessa told her to avoid the host for now, don’t interfere, and J will. she won’t attack, as much as her pride cries out for vengence.

but she knows this drone figures into her bosses plans, and would she really be upset if J observed, so long as she wasn’t caught? what if J catches wind of a perfect opportunity to ambush them ‍-​ then boss will be pleased with her initiative and she’ll be all the more personally responsible for proving her superiority to this toaster

watching through a telescope as the host and her former squadmate explore the city, she sees the way N hangs off the toaster’s every word, smiles like he’s happy ‍-​ she watches the toaster points as gestures, directing the disassembler to manipulate some old lumbering piece machinery, and how N manages it, the way he’d screw up anything she asked of him. all the more proof of his worthlessness, if he was holding out on her like that.

the alternative was that there was a problem with her management style ‍-​ problems this toaster didn’t have.

maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s J’s mounting rage making her careless, or maybe Uzi isn’t stupid and J isn’t as stealthy as she thinks. any worker would be on guard for wings cutting above and yellow eyes in the dark. Uzi’s paranoid enough to listen to scavengers report sightings of new murder drone, who seems to work alone, and draw red string around it.

point is, Uzi sets a trap, and J springs it, and these two have a reunion much earlier than expected.

Uzi is out on her own ‍-​ N is comforting V after a particularly vivid nightmare (they’d gotten so much worse, as Uzi gains control of her solver), and she’d just been taking a quick trip out of the outpost. she wasn’t supposed to run into any trouble she couldn’t handle.

and J, she says with a smirk, isn’t trouble she can’t handle. Uzi beat J with nothing but her railgun ‍-​ equipped with the solver now, and practice sparring against N after the prom, and with the advantage in prep? J once against finds herself knocked flat on her back, staring death in the face. but Uzi doesn’t have it in her to kill her ‍-​ seeing V come around, maybe there was hope for this one.

besides, she wants to know how she’s back. effective drones were cloned more ‍-​ by who? J refuses to give useful answers, but she’s at Uzi’s mercy anyway, so the worker just digs through her pockets, finds some suggestive pages ‍-​ orders, reports, notes ‍-​ communications between her and Tessa that this worker has no business seeing. maybe it’s coded, but Uzi could break the code given time enough

Uzi bids J farewell while the disassembler is still tied up in her traps. she’ll break free ‍-​ eventually.

when she does, J has a dilemma. she needs to get those papers back, preferably after she rips out whatever information the toaster’s already gleamed. does she tell her boss?

tell her boss that not only did she violate her orders, but she lost pathetically in the process and compromised their whole mission?

she’s contract‍-​bound to tell her boss ‍-​ that’s without question ‍-​ but. admittedly, the thought of violation stings less when she’s already in breech. she can fix this. find that toaster, beat them this time, and get the papers. soon. then she can go back to her boss. maybe she tells the truth then, maybe she keeps it confidential, but at least if she has to say it, she won’t be admitting to being a total failure.

the trap is her excuse not to return to the spaceship just yet. and sometimes J goes overtime hunting drones, it happens, it’s not that suspicious. and that plausible deniability… as she’s finding a place to sleep for the night, a better plan comes to her.

the next time Uzi sees J, the disassembler is approaching with her hands raised in surrender. J answers Uzi’s inevitable question with a preemptive question: why did you let me live?

and Uzi isn’t quite sure. it’s different now, having gotten to know disassemblers. last time, J nearly killed her, and she’d been scared. but now? “you guys really don’t scare me.”

J admits the partial truth ‍-​ she really doesn’t want to go back and admit she failed, again. this toaster seems so much more lenient than the company ‍-​ J could exploit that.

Uzi rolls her eyes, and and asks for a straight answer, no buzzwords. “you’re really trying to be a good guy, now?”

the most honest thing J can say? “i want to be on the winning team. and if i can’t beat you…”

maybe Uzi thinks it’s a humiliating test of J’s loyalty ‍-​ making her clean up around the outpost, do Uzi’s homework and organize her notes, demoting J from middle manager to personal secretary ‍-​ but J’s drawing on real skills to do it. she’s good at it, and Uzi had to admit, she was getting used to it.

it’s all part of J’s plan, but as it goes ‍-​ something effortless about a deception that requires no pretending.

J loses track of time. she’s waiting for the perfect opportunity to snatch what came here to get, but to her surprise, Uzi is trusting her with a lot of information. (and what she doesn’t say in front of her can be overheard or inferred). and with free run of the outpost, she could sabotage them from within. it’s mission creep, but J could accomplish so much more than fixing her mistakes.

then one day, she wakes up with a splitting headache, limbs flailing, incoherent speech on her lips. there’s one intelligible word among the noise ‍-​ callback ping ‍-​ and they have restrain the convulsing drone, magnet to the head, and Uzi gets to work piecing together what went wrong.

then outpost‍-​3 is under attack. flashing of red light, and swords beheading drones. Doll appears in Uzi’s room and distracts her from hacking into J, and that gives Tessa time to catch up

without time to undo all the metal chains keeping J’s convulsions in check, Tessa takes a ruthless measure ‍-​ cuts off J’s limbs; she can be repaired when they get back.

J wakes up screaming, the world unresolved confusion and agony. she gets a moment to see Tessa taking her apart, taking her back, and Uzi fighting to keep her. maybe she tries to say something, maybe she can’t find the words. anything she’d say would betray someone.

J doesn’t get repaired when they’re back. Tessa asks her what happens. J sticks to her planned script ‍-​ a trap was laid, she was captured, she was going to sabotage and betray them if she’d had a bit more time

Tessa nods. then runs a current directly into J’s core. she screams, crashes, regenerates and reboots. then Tessa asked what really happened.

this cycle of torture and questioning continues for some time. at length, a suspicious creeps up on J. she dares to ask, and her interrogator is delighted to confirm. no, this isn’t “tessa”, and it never was. Cyn had hoped this pretense of her master’s survival would ensure J’s loyalty, but it was clearly insufficient.

meanwhile, Uzi is terrified and angry. skipping school, postponing all work on the ship or untangling the cabin fever mysteries. where is doll, that human ‍-​ where did J go? they have to save her.

it’s fruitless weeks. outrage turns to despair, and Uzi can’t sustain this effort indefinitely. N’s there to comfort her, it helps, but she still alternates between a depressed stupor and grim determination.

then she sees J again ‍-​ and the disassembly drone flees immediately. but it was hope, and Uzi chased after it. J escaped this time, but when Uzi resumes her search, she catches the drone running missions for her mysterious boss again.

J fights to kill. Uzi could beat her ‍-​ has beaten her ‍-​ but the worker is holding back. she just wants to talk to J again. and J decides to indulge. “you want to talk? how about this: i was lying to you from the beginning. everything i did was for her, not you.”

J explains what she had actually planned. maybe Uzi is shocked at the betrayal, at J claiming she never cared about her

it’s enough to buy J time to run away. but does Uzi believe her? when her voice trembled to say it, when the murder drone ran instead of capitalizing on the opportunity?

Uzi doesn’t have more than a guess at who “her” is, or what she really means to J ‍-​ but she saw the haunted look in the murder drone’s eyes, the scars, the way she served her without caring what damage she sustained.

Uzi wasn’t going to let J pretend what they had meant nothing, and she wasn’t going to let J destroy herself denying it. she was going to save that insufferable bitch

just got an idea out of the blue

au where it’s common knowledge that nori was a genius, that the core collapse and a planet free of humans was the miracle she worked for robotkind

between that and the doors, uzi grows up with everything thinking she’s compiled with the code for greatness. it’s the little things, the way everyone always brings up her parents, the superficial interest in her interests and projects, but she’s suffocated by the sense of expectation. all of the eyes are isolating, the way half her classmates take for granted that she’s built different and above them and half think she’s stuck up and pretentious despite never asking for any of this.

it’s not winning her dad’s respect that makes her design the railgun, here, it’s a need to have answer for everyone asking what she’s planning to do with her life, how she’s going to measure up to her parent’s legacies.

when she arrives at the corpse spire, fights n and they chat inside the landing pod, she doesn’t have the same passion for convincing to rebel against the parent company. wasnt her desire to fight back the same vacuous pursuit of purpose that was the best excuse n had for his actions?

enoughs butterflies at this point that uzi makes it back to outpost‍-​3 faster. there’s no deaths, no confrontation. maybe she gets grounded, but the rumor that she fought a murder drone and live impresses all the people speculating about her future. the expectation only grows.

she sneaks out again and again, meeting n each time, becoming friends. he falls way behind quota, no longer as happy to wantonly kill workers, and j’s kicking his ass over it. so uzi tells him to quit outright, she’ll smuggle him into the outpost. she’ll convince her dad to let him stay. he’s more than happy for a neverending sleepover.

she obliquely broaches the hypothetical of a friendly murder drone to her dad… and it falls completely flat. he’d never let a monster like that breech his precious doors.

well that’s… a problem. but whatever, what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. so n lives in the vents for a bit, sneaking around while uzi brainstorms a more permanent solution. nothing concrete, the only real progress she can make is upgrading her railgun

she hacks into n’s systems, trying to figure out murder drones out. steps through some memory simulations and… oh, that’s the night he killed her mom. that… kinda makes him the reason why her life is such a lonely mess. whatever. she already knew he was a murder drone. it doesn’t change anything. much. she’s not lonely now that he’s here, anyway.

and as the days go on… n hasn’t had enough oil in a while. uzi lets him feed on her, but it’s not enough to completely sate his hunger.

he does his best to keep himself restrained, he doesn’t even tell uzi anything is wrong

uzi’s not there when it happens, she just hears the alarms come on. her first thought is that n’s squad has finally come to collect, she’s been planning for this. she grabs her railgun and follows the screams and‍-​ it’s n.

his oil levels had gotten so low enough his urges took over completely, it was inevitably.

n is tearing through workers, drenched in black, and her pleas fall on deaf ears. he just keeps going. there’s one recourse for stopping this.

she’d shot him once before, after all.

when the blinding‍-​bright green fades, N’s head doesn’t regenerate. she waits, staring at the friend in neeed she’d turned into a pile of gore.

before she hears his voice. she hears cheers. uzi killed a murder drone! outpost‍-​3 celebrates this unbelievable triumph.

uzi cries and they think it’s tears of shock or joy. or mourning her classmates.

she endures one more day after that. the praise, the respect, everything she’d always wanted ‍-​ she can’t take it.

one night, N’s remains disappear, and Uzi goes with it. she leaves note, addressed to the only who matters (her dad). she was going after the other two murder drones, finishing this. she’d use the corpse to as bait, proof she was the killer. she didn’t want to put anyway else in danger.

J and V don’t find bait. they find a terse apology, a eulogy.

that’s the setup. timeskip ahead. there’s been no sign of uzi in over a year.

khan is a robotic husk, barely keeping things running with worry lines burned into his visor. V would have descending material collection from self‍-​harm and starving if J wasn’t there to restrain her, feed her oil, do the bare minimum to hold together her psyche. she’s one disassembly drone hunting for two and her metrics are in the gutter.

doll’s eyes glow with newly awakened solver powers, and J hears a voice on the relay.

they both come to the same conclusion.

they need to find uzi