J heard the footsteps first. Heavy, clanking things. Only two drones in the spire lacked the silent precision of proper disassembly drone legs—and N did his best to shrink from notice. No, there was only one drone here who had the temerity to stomp.
Was that grounds enough for writing her up? If J tried it, there was sure to be an argument. J didn’t fear conflict, but she assessed the tactical positioning—no doubt the first line of defense would be that it’s so minor, not worth notice let alone punishment. Ultimately, it was J’s call, but her authority wasn’t beyond question.
That much had become increasingly undeniable.
And it was minor—but J wanted quiet. Right now of all times, certainly. And that J wanted it was all the justification she needed to expect it, that was reason enough for her inferiors to fall in line—but J would not let herself look weak. She knew that damn worker had a sense for every crack in her armor. If her arguments weren’t airtight by the most pedantic standards, she—
Purple eyes shining in the dark. J froze.
J sat in a leather chair, in a dark, dark chamber down in the tunnels below the spire. She’d furnished this room and told no one of it—hence all the clanking search to find her.
No lights in the room but the glow of her body.
To J, darkness meant nothing. One optic caught the faintest light, the quanta of individual photons, while another discerned the spectrum of thermal radiation—a 35°C glow outlining that small form, warming to near 40°C by the chest. Spatial audio caught the whir and thrum of oil pumped into that core. That core drove computations, and internal antennae caught microwaves from the gigahertz tick of her processors.
All this instinct-information intruded upon her solitude. J was awash in data, while the worker blinked and squinted.
J’s screen was blank—she had no one to emote to—so she appeared only as five orbs, impassively round and floating in the black.
“J?” a soft whisper. After all that clanking, J was prepared for a demand, a whine, a nasal blare of that insufferable vocalsynth. Instead, the worker breathed the syllable, low enough only J’s enhanced hearing could catch it.
J remained still in the dark. Her mouth bent in an invisible frown, but she was five glowing orbs. Impassive.
A minute. The worker made no further sound, and with a faint nod, she drew back from the threshold of the underground chamber.
The orbs flickered.
That was all the acknowledgement J found it in herself to grant.
The worker’s head lifted, mouth bending upward with inscrutable hope. “Hey,” she whispered. “I’m gonna come in, okay?”
J allow an optic to flicker once more.
The worker ghosted forward with care that had been absent till now. Mothdrawn toward the light. Her eyes remained locked onto J’s amber gaze. Of course the captain expected her team to maintain eye contact—but this was something else. Purple eyes gazed into her, not a screen animation.
Then bang, the worker’s hip impacted against the table that lay in front of J.
The disassembly drone flinched. A sound escaped her, a hiss of air.
“Oop, sorry. I’ll just.” She climbed up onto the table. “There.” Then she leaned forward toward J, still staring at her optics. The worker bit her lip.
J said nothing. Would she leave on her own?
“That tired, huh?”
Flicker.
“Can… can I touch you?”
J didn’t flinch—but her earlier flinch had her jolting upward in her chair. She fell back now, to extend the distance between them.
Earlier, the worker had chosen to interpret her wordless acknowledgement as ‘yes’—how, then, could she say no?
The glow of her optics dimmed slowly, then flickered twice in rapid succession.
“Ah, okay. Sorry.” Her hand had already reached out, as if asking had been a formality, and now it awkwardly pulled back. Not sure what to do with her hands now, she sort of tapped fingertips together.
They sat in silence for a moment, but each second was dilated time. J’s processor kept catalogue of every twitch of the worker’s servos. The duty cycle of its core implied periods of ebb and flow, a rhythm with an opportune moment to strike.
“Do you need anything?”
Twice-flicker.
“Okay, good.”
Then leather tore. J realized she’d been gripping the armrests of her chair, and this sudden externality was the cue she needed. Enough of these games.
“What do you want,” J growled.
“Nothin’,” she claimed.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I bet.” And then she grinned. “Your murder drone programming struggles to comprehend how awesome I am. Happens a lot.”
“You’re bothering me for a reason,” J stated.
“That’s true,” she said. “If you’re looking for a confession… fine.” The worker leaned a bit closer, and animated some pleading look. “I wanted to make you feel better.”
J grunted. “You can try.”
“Wow, you’re really begging for it.”
“No, I am not,” J growled. “My words were very clear.”
“You know what’s clear?” she said. “Well, not clear since I can’t see in the dark as well as you can—but I don’t think I saw your uniform on. You’re off the clock, you’re tired, this is your private space.” She scooted back on the table, as if in sudden awareness of personal boundaries. “I think if anyone else tried to walk in on you down here, well. Good thing they all have murder drone regen, right?”
J wasn’t smiling. The worker wasn’t right. “You think you’re special,” she spat.
“I am~” she said. “But this isn’t about me. I read your report.”
J couldn’t deny the urge to smile, slight as it was. Finally, someone read them! But why did it have to be—
“It must have been rough out there. I… should have been there, instead of just—”
“Not your call,” J interrupted. “I make the deployment decisions.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, as if that at all followed.
“No? Then who you propose to blame.”
“The jerks who ripped off your arm?” she said, with that inflection of affronted disbelief. “Or the humans who screwed up everything, can’t go wrong blaming the humans. No offense.”
“Useless,” J said. “I can’t optimize factors outside my control. Next time, I just have to do better.”
“If you don’t relax, next time—”
The worker’s arm gestured out for emphasis as she spoke. J had been tracking the worker’s every movement for some time. Or rather, her processes, in instinct’s grip, had. By that subconscious calculus, a threshold had been crossed.
J was reacting to a transmodular gauntlet jabbing forward at that same time the worker was, with only marginally less surprise. A traitorous reflex, but it hadn’t lost entire sight of her priorities—there were no claws, no blades, just a hand that gripped a soft metal tube with deforming force.
Queued words choked up in the worker’s vocalsynth, but made no further sound.
If anything saved her, it was that. If she had cried out, if she had made some irresistible noise of pain or protest, then J would only wrench more out of her. Lunge or drag her forward, bare her fangs—
“This isn’t like me,” J said, jaw not unclenching. “I—lost control.”
J’s screen remained blank—what expression might have betrayed her if not?—but her optics flickered now. J could make no sense of it, but purple eyes danced between them, attention rapt as if the twitch of the lights meant something.
“It’s okay. My bad for spooking you.”
“You should go,” J said.
“I’ll stay till I hear an order.” She sounded like she was laughing as she said it, but she didn’t laugh.
“Stupid. Selfish.” The worker wouldn’t have to live with the consequences if J’s composure broke. Mere damage could be repaired. But J’s dignity?
“You are~ I forgive you, though.”
J squeezed the hand tighter. “I won’t regret it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
J growled.
“Okay, I’ll stop.” Finally the worker broke eye contact, gaze falling to where J’s larger hand held her own. “But really. I get why you’d be on edge. You’ve seen what hands like mine can do. You just went through hell because of them. I don’t blame you for being on edge. I should have been more mindful.”
J sighed. “I hate fighting solvers.”
The worker smiled. “We’re the worst.”
“Not you.”
“Aww, thanks J.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
Stuck out her tongue. “I think it was clear.”
“I don’t have to tolerate this mockery. You said you were waiting on an order?”
“Mm, but then you’d have to let go of me. You know what I think? It wasn’t you who grabbed me. And I think the other you has other ideas.” The worker nodded, eyes darting in a way that asked her to follow.
Looking elsewhere was as simple as J adjusting the focus of cameras in their spherical housing. A change imperceptible from the outside, aside from perhaps a slight attenuation of the glow.
Yet somehow, J had felt watched.
Following where the worker indicated, J was still holding the worker’s arm—but without realizing her grip had gradually shifted throughout the conversation. Governed, evidently, by that same traitorous instinct. Except now she didn’t just grasp the worker’s arm—more accurate to say she… held her hand.
“I was looking pretty close before you let me in, you know. And I didn’t see the glow of your handlights. They’re like your face, right? Stays blank unless you turn it on. Makes a better default for stealth hunting. So your hands probably stay untransformed, to speed up switching out to what you need?”
“Why are you explaining my body to me?”
“I’m just saying. If you were reacting on instinct… why you go for just a hand when something more… pointed would have been just as much work?”
“You’re implying—”
“You wanted me to leave because you’re worried your instinct-threads are gonna try to murder me, right? But it seems to me they know better.”
“Don’t interrupt me. I have enough self-control to avoid killing you if you don’t indulge me.”
“I’m that hard to resist, huh?”
“Do you have a deathwish? I will order you out for your own safety.”
“Look. I’m sure ripping me open and stuff would be fun for the um. Other you. I just think it has other idea, too.”
“My… urges are my own private matter to attend to. Do not… personify them.”
The worker sighed. Then seemed torn for a moment, then said, “Sorry for this.”
“What?”
And then the worker pulled away. Suddenly, forcefully. She was jerking and struggling against J’s grip.
So J squeezed tighter. What could she do but crush the resistance? The worker tried to pull away, so J yanked her forward. The worker’s weight fell upon her, a scrambling mass. A strong arm thrust past her abdomen, encircling, restraining those flailing arms, plastic tight against steel.
Instinct sung the next step. J’s mouth yawned open, and sharp teeth scraped and pierced shoulder panels. Yelps, cries, J’s name. The sound should have been warning—not reward.
And that hand, traitorous as ever, now felt along the worker’s body. Fisting her shirt, slipping under fabric, clawing at the joints of her frame.
Something rumbled in J’s chest, and the worker shuddered against her.
Purple hair fell against her, head nestled near J’s neck, and so close to her audials, her voice was less than a decibel. “You monster~”
“You morsel.” J vocalized with her mouth still full of worker, so the sound travel through the chassis. Black tongue licked white plastic.
Then J froze abruptly, putting an end to this. She lifted her head.
The worker pulled away too, eyes lidded. Even with a blush—why was she blushing?—she looked so smug that a part of J insisted biting her again would punish this impertinent little—
But that was no doubt the same part that already had its way biting her.
J couldn’t give a flat glare with a blank screen in the dark, so she let the flatness of her voice convey it all. “Is this your idea of fun?”
The worker wiggled in J’s lap. “Yours too, I think.”
“The least you could do is entertain yourself without humiliating me.”
Though her arms were restrained, the tubes could snake behind J—hugging almost, if this weren’t such an obvious danger to her—and now small hands rubbed circles into J’s back.
“You really have no idea what you want, do you?”
“I said not to touch me!”
“J…” The worker started to rise—but the arm was still thrown around her back. If anything, it pulled her tighter at her attempt at escape. Purple eyes looked into her, watching the subtle shifts of coronal optics. “You two are a mess.”
J growled—and something about the sound just made the worker giggle.
“How do I stand to put up with you.”
“You still haven’t figured it out?” The worker leaned forward again and J felt soft synthetic lips wet against her cheek. A quick peck, and then she was back to looking down on J. “You’re a good boss, J. I’m glad I got to make you feel better.”
What makes you think I feel any better? But something curious had happened—instinct stopped her, rather than the other way around.
J said, “Thank you, Uzi,” and meant it.
Her optics flickered once again—despite herself.