Okay, parkour is a little bit harder than the videos made it look, Uzi thought. Maybe it was all the ice, maybe it was the cloudy night sky making it hard to see, or maybe it was that Uzi was a bit—
Haha, no. Of course not!
Uzi bounced with an arm outstretched, fingers straining to grasp a shattered bit of masonry, just out of her reach. The abandoned storefront, otherwise featureless, just a few a handholds up there, barely out of reach. She’d been searching for way up to the rooftops. Plenty of things to climb on this street, but you’d scampered up atop a doorway or awning, and then what?
Lots of starts, no middles.
The worker was midair when it came—a whine-shriek shivered past, a wind with a knife’s edge.
Uzi dropped to a crouch, the mechanical memory of halt, blank and hide drilled into her since she had a frame to animate. Halt your servos, hydraulics at once going still and silent. Blank your screen, and all of the indicator lights elsewhere on her body dimmed and guttered like candles. Then hide, curled up all anxious, and pray to robo-god the vultures circling find another corpse.
Err—well, that was a little bit backward. Can’t exactly hide if you’ve already halted. But sometimes teachers screwed up the explanation—it was probably supposed to be “halt current activities”.
But it’s pointless anyway, because Uzi wasn’t out here because she was helpless like everyone else. The opposite! The exact opposite!
(She was so used to this being something she daydreamed about, doodled in class—not real, not finally finished.)
Uzi sprung back up into a stand, all her weight on one leg while the other kicked back, hitting the railgun holstered on her back. It bucked upward, only to be deflected by her hand, and ultimately swing-ricochet in a very cool way into her other, waiting hand. Only took like a second—she was the queen of quickdraw.
So many months to finish this—and she hadn’t even shot anything. Maybe tonight would be the night?
But something told her to check. It feels like— Her eyes craned upward, peering at cloud-fog that gave a meager aureole to every flickering streetlights. She saw the shadow glimmering, a sharpened silhouette. Her. Of course.
Who else would it be—it was her every frickin night she went out this week, like some personal vendetta. As if every other murder drone—she knew there were at least three!—had gotten a memo to avoid her.
Uzi sighed. The exasperated kind, that didn’t flutter out of her chest. She looked left and right. C’mon, Uzi, play it cool.
She decided to turn around and lean against the wall, one foot on the ground and one against the wall. Hands slid into her jacket pockets, and the railgun was leaning beside her, parallel. Her dark purple contrasted nicely against the pale, iced-out blue-green of the storefront behind her.
A roach drone skittered in an alley two blocks down, and Uzi cast her gaze down the street, focus bouncing like a skipping stone—defiant of gravity.
Gravity being what pulled the murder drone to the street with a great crash that echoed in all the surrounding buildings’ hollow spaces.
The click-scrape of pegs against asphalt sounded like a lunge or sprint, but Uzi was slow giving it her attention. A casual glance, too cool to care.
“Sup,” she said, winking at the yellow cross.
In reply, a cone-gauntlet flick-transformed into a gun barrel already opening fire. A spray of bullets, and Uzi knew to drop. A dozen bullet holes drew a line across the storefront—and given that Uzi was a few percents its width, it meant only one had even come close to hitting her.
“Robo-jesus, we really doing this again?” Uzi watched smoke waft from the barrel, and traced her eyes up its length and then along the body of its wielder. That form-fitting suit, and today she wore a dark undershirt with a tie bright where her corelights would be.
Her scowl only deepened as Uzi blatantly checked her out.
“I got the hint the second time, you know.” Actually the third—Uzi wasn’t that quick on the uptake—but this was the fifth.
“Clearly not, or you’d be dead. Hold still and I can foreclose on the insult of your continued existence.”
“You take me that personally, huh?” Uzi shook her head, and she could hear the murder drone grinding her teeth.
Then the gun was a sword, and the three meters between them was three inches. Her pig-tails trailed like weightless ribbons behind her, and in front a blade was thrusting.
Uzi knew the exact moment to dodge, sword stabbing past her and into the wall. She reached down and grabbed it. The murder drone’s other hand was a pistol now, and was pointing at her head. Well, in the general direction of her head—the arm wavered wildly.
Uzi was trembling too.
Brows furrowing, vocalsynth hissing. “My objective is professional. I am the most effective disassembly drone in this sector. You are nothing but a target, a corrupt AI wholly unable to secure its survival and disgustingly confident in spite of that fact.”
Confidence… yeah, Uzi wasn’t used to being called that. She wasn’t used to acting like that, not in a way that robots didn’t laugh at. “Surviving you four times has that effect.”
“It was a fluke—a blip in the market. There is no doubt that a disassembly drone of my caliber could decimate you into an unrecognizable scrap heap. Need a demonstration?”
Uzi giggled. “Honestly, why not just say you let me live. It’s true, plus you’d keep more aura points that way than what, consistently jobbing against me?”
J tugged on her sword, but—on whispered instinct—Uzi pushed down on it at just the right time, and it only sawed deeper into the wall. If anything, it was more stuck.
Frustration bled into her voice. “Do you think this is…” But then she lost articulation, and it just became a noisy growl.
Uzi reached out, her hand falling on the other robot’s shoulder. “I think you know what this is.” The worker smiled. Or smirked.
“Fine, it doesn’t matter. You won’t get away this time.”
Uzi glanced down. Frowned. Five nights, and it played out the same way every time—she didn’t want to be mean, but Uzi might be getting tired of it, honestly. She needed more than this, this was…
Lots of starts, no middles.
“Hey uh…” Her eyes darted to the drone’s armband—SD-J—as if Uzi hadn’t studied every glance to create a 3D model of her. “J? Do you want to do something different today? Get to know each other, rather than just fighting—”
“Shut up. Shut up! I’m tired of hearing your voice. It never ends. When I stop to think—when I dream!—I hear it. Taunting me. You miserable scam. You’re unfinished business, of course, so maybe it’s just me reminding myself. Motivating myself. I need to do what I should have done the first night I saw you—shoot instead of yapping—but… why. can’t. I. just. do it!
The gun—J’s only free hand—shook more fiercely now. She must be trying to press it against Uzi’s temple, but it won’t stay put, swinging—at some angles it was almost like it’d hit J herself.
“J-J? Are you—”
“Is this some sort of chemical agent in the air? A violation of my electromagnetic field? A wireless signal you’re insinuating into me? I can’t focus, I can’t hold myself steady, I can’t barely stop myself from—” A choking sound, sputtering to a stop. Teeth grinding, spitting, “It must be some kind of fraud—you’re just a toaster, after all. This heat…”
Uzi’s hand drew back, smacking her own visor—facepalm. “Oh my god. Really? Do you not—you didn’t realize?”
“Explain.” J intoned like an order.
The worker rolled her eyes. What was it J had said, that first night? “Look, miss murder, you said you had ‘prey’ fight back before right? Killed yourself a whole mountain of bodies.”
“And you’re next~”
Oh she’s got it bad. “Stop thinking about that for a minute, and think. Has it ever felt anything like this?”
(Honestly, as much as this was frickin annoying, Uzi couldn’t really blame her—last week, she had never felt any of this either. She didn’t think it was real! Just another thing made up, like robo-jesus or property rights. All of her high school friends couldn’t stop gushing and gossiping about it, so this just made her even more the outcast.)
J remained silent, as if it was pulling teeth to speak any word that was conversation and not passionate threat-rants. “…Continue.”
“That’s a yes. Robo-God, this is so embarrassing. Do I have to keep going?”
J waved the gun in front of her face again. Like that’s anything but a prop.
Uzi sighed. “You aren’t trying to kill me, J.”
J scowled viciously, showing off all her teeth like a drawer of blades. As if that wasn’t the coolest thing.
She doesn’t realize I drew all my OCs with shark teeth.
Of their two dueling expressions, Uzi’s dreamy smile proved the most disturbing, and J pulled back, and finally begging for her to continue. “Then what is going on?”
She sounded so desperate. “Say please?”
“No.”
“Fine. Just… give me a hand?” Uzi held out her four-digit hand, as if for a high-five. After a moment, the useless gun barrel transformed into a larger hand, lit by yellow light.
Uzi reached out, slowly inching closer and—
A flash, a snap—a spark of static electric zapped a bridge between them.
J flinched back, a jerk so violent her sword finally ripped free of the wall, a brick stuck to the tip.
“Was that some kind of attack!?” Legs bent into a combat stance. And that still means she looms over me.
Uzi opened her mouth. Then she closed it.
I thought it was deep denial. I’d get that; even I thought it was unrequited till last night. But…
“You… don’t know. I thought you’re older than me, but you genuinely don’t know anything about it?”
“Stop lording whatever single, minuscule scrap knowledge this is over me, and tell me, already. Directors, this must be the first time you’ve gotten to feel superior and you’re milking it for all it’s worth.”
Uzi kicked off the wall, crossing the distance between them. She knew—the same instinct that told her she was near, that told her how to dodge all J’s attacks—told her now that if Uzi reached out, stroked the drone’s silver hair and cupped her cheek, held her other and squeezed, the predator would let all of this happen.
And it did—tenderly.
The two of them stood so close together—warm, ready heat was blooming in her core with the whine of a processor overworked. The possibilities danced at her finger tips—and yes, this was a dance.
Uzi could yank on those silver locks right as she leaned forward and breathed in hungrily; or Uzi could grope lower, grab that suggestively-bright tie and tug, like a lose thread which would unravel that suit and J’s composure with it; or Uzi could bite and scratch and pin her down like a—
And J would play along. J would dance to the rhythms of music she couldn’t hear—her core gripped in sympathetic shiver-hums like an instrument waiting for its part.
But J didn’t know anything about what was going on, she just felt the urge. And if Uzi pulled her along, stole this dance from her—it was all a bit forward, wasn’t it?
Ugh. There’s a power dynamic here and it’s not the one you think.
Uzi was panting, core whirring like it would rock out of her chest. J had eyes animated closed, lips parted as if silently pleading for more. Then she seemed to dimly realize something unacceptable had come over her, her expression froze and then almost physically this display was wrenched back inside herself with effort that showed its strain. J tried to glare, flatly and skeptically.
Uzi could feel that if she kept her waiting any longer, J would tap her stiletto-peg impatiently, only she was so unsteady on her feet that this would tip her over. J would fall, but Uzi could feel she was positioned just right to catch her, and then—
She was getting lost in daydreams. Almost as bad as her classmates.
There was no fighting it, not completely. Uzi leaned forward, like she longed to do, but with effort, twisted to ensure her lips had no course to J’s. (They weren’t ready for that.)
No, Uzi brought her mouth to J’s audials, and turned up her synth’s breath parameter. ASMR whisper voice activate.
“J… you’ve got a bitcrush,” Uzi said. “I can’t believe the company never told you about the bolts and bytes.”