Hostile Takeover

Amid the hail of gunfire, J stopped to glance at her reflection. Bright moonlight upon glistening oil rendered her a stark, pale ghost. Yellow eyes pierced the night air beneath a row of matching bulbs, bright in working order. She smoothed a strand of stray synthetic hair back into place among her pigtails, flashed a winning smile, and returned to the hunt.

Hail fell in only one direction: down. There was no return fire. Above, two angels of death dived through the sky. Each flew on either side of J, like winged stormclouds. Muzzles flashed and gunshots rang out louder than thunder. Bullets joined with the falling snow, heavy impacts crunching against the crumbling rooves, or shattering the frosted ground, or smashing flat against the hard asphalt.

Or here and there, a skillful shot deformed instead the hard plastic and soft silicone of JcJenson’s patented robotic chassis‍ ‍—‍ followed by the squirt of oil, so sharp in that moment it was the only thing in the world J could smell.

Her sensors traced the origin of the scent. Northeast, the chemical gradient suggesting aproximately 15‍-​20 meters. Head swiveling around, optics preemptively focusing on the predicted range‍ ‍—‍ there, a flash of movement. Target acquired.

A short, bipedal robot dove for safety under the awning behind one house. Some tattered yellow garment covered most of the frame, the dive sending a hood flying off its head. It crawled to the house’s rear wall, and didn’t stop to fix its clothes.

J tsked. Running for your worthless life was no excuse to let your wardrobe malfunction. And rolling around in the mud and ice like that? J would never let the snow ruin her outfit‍ ‍—‍ a business suit and pencil skirt she’d taken pains to fit. (A flake fell on her now, the contact with her metal chassis immediately turning it to steam.)

The house faced the road, far enough ahead that the backyard awning wouldn’t take the target out of J’s sight. As her optics focused, the display program digitally zoomed and enhanced. Identification routines autoran, and J was sure.

Blue eyes glowing on an LED screen. Blue, not yellow, with no coronal sensory array, no injector tail… all were damning heuristics‍ ‍—‍ but it was policy to confirm a unit’s model before disassembly. She pinged the RFID‍ ‍—‍ model confirmed: worker drone.

That mouth opened. J’s thermal optics caught the exhaust minutely warming the air. A sigh of relief? It lasted until another spate of rapid machine gun fire punctured the cloth awning, opening a cluster of holes. The drone snapped its head up to stare.

J could imagine the animation onscreen, eyes hollowing with fear, vocalsynth emitting a yelp. She couldn’t hear, and in snowfall like this, no amount of gain would recover that audio signal. Oh well. There’d be plenty of that to come.

Above, an angel folded bladed wings, swooping down to point a barrel under the awning. The robot was already scrambling up, and threw themselves around the corner of the house. The predicted trajectory ran south, toward the road J walked down. It crouched as if sneaking (as if it could escape), yet moved at speeds fast enough to trip once.

J shook her head and spread her bladed wings. For the moment she remained undetected‍ ‍—‍ visibility was poor in the storm, and worker drones’ senses were worthless.

The drone paused at the sight of the wide asphault road before it. Paralyzed, unable to path‍-​find a new escape route? Of course it can’t find one. We’re watching from the skies. Nowhere is safe. In that moment, J thanked the human habit of putting houses uniformly among flat, empty lots. No cover for prey to get lost in.

With a crash, her brief flight ended. J spared the drone the agony of coming to a decision. Her hand disappeared into her conic gauntlets, and transformed. Then she granted it instead the agony‍ ‍—‍ relief, really‍ ‍—‍ of a sword between its digital eyes. J smirked, and the only response was that same smirk reflecting back on a momentarily blank screen. Half a second, and the bright red of Fatal Error.

J hoped the drone got a good look at death in its last clock cycle.

Electric discharge from dying circuits tickled her blade even as a layer of oil formed. J licked the blade clean, grabbing the permenantly‍-​shutdown drone with another hand.

Sharp teeth ringed a yawning mouth. They closed around the drone’s neck with irresistible force, severing the head. With that impediment removed, the drone served its purpose: oil flowed out in a river. J carefully angled the spurting corpse so excess oil fell upon the drone itself or the ground.

This wound would be enough to empty the drone. J was efficient. Now she would drink, and needed cause no further damage to the piece of equipment.

As the oil poured into her system, J shuddered. The liquid immersed her tongue, warm and so smooth. Fresh oil always went down easy if it had been flowing in a drone just moments before. Internal sensors felt the new wealth, and pumped it into her true reserves. Oil filled her, but power and freedom too, like a debt finally cleared.

J’s accounting was precise; her reserves held 3.2 liters of oil, and judging by weight, this drone would offer her a mere 1.3 more. Simple upkeep consumed mililiters of oil by the minute, a clock ticking always toward an hot, suffocating demise. Every disassembly drone could feel that.

There were five stages of overheating, from the warm & clear to ‘you’re toast, idiot,’ and J teetered in the third stage, hunter’s fever, mere days away from overheating. And that was if she didn’t execute special disassembly functions.

But what modern business didn’t run on thin margins? J’s accounting was precise.

She lifted the drone so the last drops of oil slid out, then stuck the unit with her needle‍-​tipped tail, actuator primed to inject. Bright, burning yellow fluid filled the unit, melting it from the inside out. The nanites spoke the last word in disinfecting‍ ‍—‍ expensive, but final. Disassembly by acid.

Finally, she licked her lips and resumed walking.

Snow fell on her and became beads of water.

J stalked forward. Minutes passed. The report of more gunshots resounded, as her squadmates still flew above. This formation was J’s idea. Hungry death from above would flush out the drones. Soon their pathfinding would compute a line of safety existed along a thin line between the two drones.

And then, they’d spot a dark figure in the snowfall, yellow eyes piercing, as J slowly advanced. There’d be only one safe passage remaining, one direction to go.

Herded just like cattle. J didn’t cackle madly like some, but an elegant, efficient plan like this merited a satisfied smirk.

One worker, however, didn’t get the memo. It climbed into a lower window of a two‍-​story house. (Delayed, for a moment, by its yellow robe getting caught on a window edge.)

Can’t have that, now can we? J spread her wings, and kicked off the ground. Flight routines carried her for seconds‍ ‍—‍ she could already feel her oil consumption spike, seconds of flight costing tens of milliliters. Snow blasted away in the radius of her landing, half of it rebounding off the house’s walls.

Already, her sensors were tracking and modeling the drone’s whereabouts. But the drone kindly opted to save her the trouble. A yelp of surprise, quickly triangulated. A source highlighted on her HUD. Had the drone climbed to the second floor already?

Hand replaced with three claws, J slashed the wall. Mass‍-​constructed human homes never withstood her strength, and now the plaster folded as so much debris, like mere shreds of paper. She stepped in, and another slash opened the ceiling above her. She leapt up.

Then a glass cup clinked off her head, and one eye twitched. She turned toward its source. There crouched the drone, hiding in the doorway of a room. Another projectile flew‍ ‍—‍ headphones?‍ ‍—‍ and she bisected it mid‍-​flight. “Spare me this futile resistance. Be a good little toaster and submit to disassembly, alright?”

The only response was another projectile flung. J slashed it‍ ‍—‍ and was that a can of beans? The organic mess exploded, draping her in lumpy soup.

Herding was all well and good, but it was time to eliminate redundancy.

“Your contract has been terminated,” she growled. A fanged mouth snarled beneath visor displaying only ><, the wide cross of a disassembly drone running hunting routines. The drone witnessed this for a single frame.

J burst into motion. She moved faster than the worker drone could ever react. Before it finished processing the next frame, two halves of a split head fell away. She didn’t stop there, and a flurry of impulsive cuts and the drone became so many oily fragments. Splashes of its oil mixed with the bean soup, and this was a welcome improvement.

(Before it died with a hiss, the vocalsynth was stuttering on a syllable‍ ‍—‍ had the drone uttered last words? J played back the last few seconds from her working memory, and parsed the sounds‍ ‍—‍ “Please, Father, w‍-​where—”. J deallocated the memory. Meaningless. A satisfying note of fear, at least.)

J sighed. Optics surveyed the carnage behind her LED screen. This wasn’t the plan. She needn’t personally disassemble every drone they saw, after all. Too slow, and her squadmates had to feed, too. (Though each necessarily began the hunt with far more of an oil buffer than J.)

No, she would be the shepherd guiding these drones to the slaughter. This one, though… it deserved this. No regrets. She knelt to consume what was left.

Moments and then, from the other side of the house J was dropping out of a newly made exit. Behind her chimed the soft bomb‍-​beep, a countdown concluding. Now the house was a conflagration, so much burning wood and melted plaster. J didn’t look back.

It was simple. J needn’t waste time dragging the drone out of the house, nor come back for its fragmented remains.

Call that disassembly by fire.

She wiped away oil and food waste with tatters of the drone’s yellow robe‍ ‍—‍ what little of it wasn’t already coated in oil. Then a shadow passed over her. Her eyes narrowed. She dropped the cloak.

“N,” it could be a greeting, were her tone not weighed with chastisement, “you’re down here. Yet I seem to remember your job being somewhere else.”

The drone landed, a thick coat flapping up for a moment. His legs were bending, as if to make himself smaller. He poked two fingers together and ventured, “Haha, yeah. I guess I just wanted to uh, make sure—”

“You didn’t think a disassembly drone might have any trouble with the shutdown of a single worker, did you? You wouldn’t insult me with concern over a such a thing, would you?” Her needle‍-​tipped tail stabbed through the air for emphasis.

“Uh, no, I definitely don’t care about your well‍-​being! Wait, no! I mean, you wouldn’t be in any danger at all against any worker drones, I knew that.” He looked away, tail falling to the ground.

“Uh huh. So, just too weighed down by uselessness to keep flying?”

N rubbed his head. His eyes cast around, searching the ground. He spotted the discarded robe. “Well, it’s a bit odd, isn’t it? I wonder what’s up with the weird robes on all these drones. Oddly… human fashion, y’know? And it’s so coordinated. Seems like all of the drones we’ve seen tonight are wearing them.”

J waved a claw, rolling her eyes. “Workers imitate humans, N. It’s all they’re capable of.”

N frowned, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Probably just found a bunch of human skeletons wearing the same thing. A dead cult or something. Still… do you think they’re working together for something?”

J stared at N. She cycled air through her vents, and forced relaxation into her posture. Repetition is the heart of clear communication, she reminded herself.

“We’re out here because we detected a new signal broadcasted over the frozen wasteland. If we’re lucky, we just tracked down a new outpost. Tear that down, and we’ll rank top team for sure.” A professional smile. “But we can only do that if a certain barely functional excuse for a disassembler gets back in the sky to herd these toasters!”

It was an order. N at least had the sense to stiffen at that. With a jolt, he threw up a hand in a shakey salute. “Right, got it, captain!”

Wings spread, then an explosion of snow, and finally J’s genius formation was restored.

If these drones escaped, someone would be drinking two week old drone oil dregs, and it wasn’t going to be J.

V swooped down and plucked a drone from the middle of the herd. Thirteen drones crowded the streets. Did they think there was safety in numbers? Did they think they’d escaped the angels above? For a moment, it had seemed so, even as N’s gunfire inched closer and closer. So V reminded these toasters that each motherboard’s clock still ticked because they let it.

It was a panic. Below glowed a rainbow of LED visors, each screen throwing light in different direction. Every so often, they glanced back at the one disassembly drone who approached step by step, continually, relentlessly, a dark silhouette barely seen beyond the snowfall. Looking at her, the expressiosn on every face is the same: fear, worry, dread.

Despair.

Above them, V bit into her prize with a rumbling tear, metal grinding, joints torn apart. A piñata but the candy was black. Oil painted her chassis and poured down into the crying throng upon the streets.

What a waste.

J rolled her eyes, and shifted her walk cycle one setting up from her slowest.

The faster drones in the herd rushed forward, mad dashes out of a confused mass. One toaster fell down to be trampled by the rest. A kick cracked their screen and the expression briefly errored out. They couldn’t get up.

J lunged forward, kneeling to feed on the trampled drone, before it rebooted. Now it never would.

V’s spun as she fell into another dive and grabbed a drone‍ ‍—‍ another?‍ ‍—‍ from the rear of the panicked mass. Screams echoed across the empty landscape, fear overloading its processor so much the vocalsynth stuttered.

The disassembler thrusted a hand into the drone’s inner workings. J couldn’t see what V did, but her sensors detected the activation of a special disassembly function, and the spark of electricity was suggestive. Prediction: V overcharged an impeller, which meant—

Oil sluiced into a cavity where an overclocked motor spun wildly. V squeezed the thing tighter, giving the oil even less space. The drone popped, and the rapidly‍-​spinning impeller sends oil flying wide, as if from a sprinkler. V laughed.

It landed on J’s outfit.

“Enthusaistic as ever, eh V?” J wiped down her skirt.

At least she didn’t speak with a mouth full of oil. “What? I get hungry. They were dead anyway.” She waved a severed limb dismissively.

“This wasn’t part of my plan. Do you think N is going to cover for your lapse in suppressive fire?”

“Who?” She grinned with an absent‍-​minded tilt of her head, as if one letter were too much to remember.

J rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t matter. You have a role to play.”

“Ah yeah, the plan. Where your only role is to look pretty, right? How about you try running and gunning a whole neighborhood on an empty tank. Call this… the cost of doing business, right?”

“Just remember what you’re supposed to be doing. I can count on you, V. Keep it that way.”

V ripped another chunk out of the drone, and swallowed it, metal and all. Refilling spent ammunition? Perhaps this was excusable…

“Whatever you say boss. Aren’t we supposed to be disassembling them, anyway? And you get on my case for playing with my food.” V grinned. “Kind of feels like you’re the one just showing off. But we can just kill them now. All these fancy tactics are a waste.”

J’s eyes twitched, but for a moment, she ventured no rebuttal. V was right. If her arguments were a bullet, that was a shot to the legs. J was good‍ ‍—‍ she was the best, and what did it matter? How could J distinguish herself when an intelligent approach was no more effective than wanton violence?

J’s broke eye contact. “It’s about leverage, V,” she finally said. “It’s one thing to shut down a drone, but think about the opportunity cost. Let them run for a moment. If they think they can escape, where do they go? Where do they feel safe? We wait, and then we tear it all apart.”

It was an investment.

“You’re betting on another outpost,” V concluded. “Sure. If you’re right, let’s say I’ll owe you two oilcans, then.”

“Just get back in the air.”

V spread her wings. “Way I see it,” she said, holding up her half‍-​eaten drone, “if you want the toasters running, you gotta give them something to run from.” V cackled, fangs on promenient display.

Then the snow exploded with her takeoff. The angel returned to the sky.

J shifted into a yet faster walk cycle, hoping to catch up to the herd. Optics estimated them to be about 50 meters away now. Worker drones still glanced backward. She turned up her visor’s the brightness and gave them a smile to admire when they do.

The toasters scrambled away, but it was more than fear driving them forward. Their eyes settled on a structure rising in the east, at the other end of the road. J could just barely make out the distant form, and could guess what inspired their hopes. They must think they’ve found safety.

This is our objective, no doubt about it.

«Fall back! Behind me!» J broadcasted. A shortwave radio buzz was her voice in another medium. Above, a hitch in the automatic fire and then blade‍-​wings folded; her squad heard her.

Worker drones had transceivers, too‍ ‍—‍ so disassembly squad spoke words cloaked and ciphered. Their hopeless prey only heard howling static that jammed their own transmission.

J could watch a flinch of fear flicker through the crowd ahead, shuddering as if from a banshee’s scream. But the gunfire had ceased and the circling death above was spiraling away‍ ‍—‍ wasn’t that good?

Soon, a wave of relief passed through the herd.

She crossed the intersection. Then ahead, the road gave way to a great circular parking lot. Frost‍-​ruined cars dotted the expanse. A halo shape, the lot ringed a building like a great hand rising from the earth, so many towers steepled like fingers.

A spiderweb of thin wires hang taut, strung between the fingers as if binding. Thicker lines hung lower, hugging the shingles, or hanging off the gutters. With the icicles stabbing down and frost sheathing the wires, electrical lines crept like overgrown vines.

Atop the highest spire, a piece of wood rose to be abruptly severed in half. (What once stood there instead had fallen to a lower roof, stuck in the snow‍ ‍—‍ some cross from a dead human religion?) But where it once hung, something new crowned the tower, pointing toward the sky: a radio dish.

Enterting the lot, they pass by a decrepit sign. OCR functions scaned the image, then convert to ASCII:

Church of the Electric and the Divine

"Search not for the ultimate answer, but the ultimate answerer."

“Source of the signal located,” J murmured to no one. Neither squadmate would care. She was used to that.

It was always the captain alone who listened attentively at their relay console, ever‍-​patient for a new trasmission breaking her creators’ years of stone‍-​silence. She checked each night, and with no result, turned her attention elsewhere, sweeping the radio bands. But hoping for worker foolish enough to broadcast often brought that same disappointment.

So when J first heard it, she almost missed it. Encrypted, one easily mistook it for ambient radio static. But it persisted in the same band, bearing signs of amplitude modulation. Suspiciously consistent, but J was no code‍-​breaker.

Still, if this were a worker drone signal, then worker drones must have the keys. When J hunted her first drone with those yellow robes, she learned the decryption keys were transmitted among the workers in a kind of pantomime initiation ritual. Of course, they would never be so kind as to admit their artifical predator into this secrecy.

And J couldn’t break codes‍ ‍—‍ where she excelled, though, was in breaking drones.

All security faltered to an attacker with physical access. So J had pinned down that drone while it whimpered and struggled. Grinding the heel of her stiletto‍-​peg until it cracked the casing, waving the acid‍-​tipped blade by the face and letting anticipatory dollops drip sizzling onto the glass‍ ‍—‍ J recalled that hunt fondly.

Even still, these interrogation techniques hadn’t secured her knowledge.

Among J’s toolkit were instruments once used for debugging drones‍ ‍—‍ all the more fitting they be used now for rooting out corruption. J had devised a method for extracting information from her prey. The exploit itself was a convenience and an oversight.

Reboot a drone while connected to their system, and a narrow startup window existed where the right input bypassed normal login and halted initialization of conscious threads. Just like that, J had root access, arrogating admin rights. To her, the drone became no more than an external hard‍-​drive.

Two abrupt impacts cracked the frozen ground behind her. Stirred from her reminisce, J’s coronal optics caught sight of V and N, alighting at last.

“So uh, what’s the plan, captain?” N asked from behind her.

“Reconnaissance. That signal traces back here and I intend to know what else these toasters were transmitting.” And why.

Said toasters had now reached the massive doors of the church, rising several times taller than the robots. Plastic fists slammed against the wood demanding entry. Pairs of hands with no rhythm between them‍ ‍—‍ that they could be heard so clearly without amplification spoke to the desperation.

“If this is their hideout,” V started, “any reason to let them go in?”

“Nope.” J transformed her hand into a long‍-​barreled rifle. “It’s time for this nonprofit to be audited.”

As one, the disassemblers flew forward. Ahead, the door had finally lumbered open, just a crack, and the worker drones were slipping in single‍-​file.

By the time J touched down, six had gone inside, and the rest were climbing over themselves in their rush to get inside, knocking one another down.

V acted first. A gunshot punched clean through the rearmost drone. Meanwhile, N circled around and grabbed a drone that got squeezed out of line, his tail stinging. With her rifle, J took a clean shot, firing a single round powerful enough to turn the head of one drone into scrap and still embed itself in the chassis of the next.

Two down, making four total within a second of their arrival. Only three drones remained alive outside. But that one second had been enough for another to slip inside. Two drones remained, then.

One of them, still knocked down from when another climbed over them, clambered to their feet. It took one look at the disassemblers surrounding. Then it delivered a kick to the drone behind it, sending them to the ground as they slip inside.

The huge door slammed to a close, trapping this last drone outside.

Its eyelights went dim and hollow as digital tears sprang forth. The only sight greeting it was J’s hungry smile. The simulated waterworks intensified.

“How pathetic. These units are incapable of even the most basic coordination.” Between one frame and the next, J went from meters away to deadly close, her tail stinger scratching against the drone’s visor. “Do you understand? Disassembly is necessary.”

No time to answer. J had already impaled it. Her nanites melted a drone sputtering meaningless noise.

“Man, I haven’t seen security this annoying since that one outpost.”

A flat glare from J. “The ‘one?’ This team has cleared far more than one corrupted colony.”

“Duh. I’m talking about the one we didn’t clear.” V rolled her eyes, not even looking at J. The disrespect. “You know, the one with the tricky doors. Real heavy.”

The captain’s frowned deepened. Then it clicked. She didn’t let it show on her face, but she said, “Not heavy, secured with hydraulic force. A pathetic roadblock that can only succeed in briefly delaying their fate.”

That got a look from V‍ ‍—‍ a smirk. (She had a ring of oil around her lips, feeding on one of the drones outside.) “Oh yeah? And how many years has it been?”

And who’s job was it to find a point of ingress? J was busy enough handling every managerial responsibility on her own. Maybe J would have already penetrated those defenses if someone didn’t slack on everything except disassembly. J opened her mouth to tear into her insolent squadmate—

“Oh biscuits,” N swore as he gave another futile slash. Three claws dug into the wood before brightly grinding to a halt, as if it didn’t have the strength of a disassembly drone behind it. “What kind of human building would be this tricky to open?”

The captain glanced around. V was feeding herself, and J stood there glaring while N tried to get past the door. His attempts were useless, of course, no compliments for that. But talking to V was about as useless.

J sighed, and said, “Guess we know why the drones were congregating here. N, V, try other points of ingress. Hit the windows, find weak points in the stone. I’ll examine these wires.”

Around the circumference of the main spire, haphazardly spaced, tall windows punctured the brickwork. Stained glass, if the fallen shards indicated anything, but someone (the toasters?) had plated them all over with salvaged metal sheets. Still, they’d surely remain a hole in the security.

J readied her claws, then stabbed them into the wood deep as she could, and then started climbing the door.

High above, a small cicular window sat at the top. It wasn’t plated over.

Her claws had no trouble penetrating the wood, they simply stopped with inexplicable resistance a few centimeters in. But‍ ‍—‍ with a mild drain on her oil reserves‍ ‍—‍ augmenting her strength meant this was sufficient for the disassembly drone to pull herself up.

On the frame, J perched and peered into the church. Nothing but a blurred mess, and no denoising algorithm could clarify the image. The stained glass fogged opaquely with age and ice and tiny cracks. What waited for them within? A disassembler had nothing to fear from their prey, and yet this…

Claws raked forcefully against the pane. Light sparked, and new cracks formed, but no entry. J frowned. The door, perhaps, could be excused as oddly durable construction or unseen reinforcement‍ ‍—‍ but this? Glass couldn’t resist a disassembler’s strength. J could see through it. There had to be some manner of… field effect? What could cause this?

Light came again and again with repeated experimentation. Not sparks, but a glow. Whenever J’s limbs met the resistance, the aura bloomed. Source or symptom?

A cruciform had split the window into four panes, and even beyond that, black wires spiderwebbed the other side. Thick, branching things, with faint triangular patterns along their length. They glowed in sympathy with every strike.

J could feel them humming with current, almost pulsing. And with that, a theory formed…

From her special disassembly functions, J selected her short‍-​range EMP burst, and activated her transmodular gauntlets. Expensive, but it easily disabled drones‍ ‍—‍ and in this case, disrupted electrical wiring.

If these wires powered the security system…

Slash. And now the glass simply shattered. Slash, slash, and the wires are all cut. Hm. Will this be enough to disrupt the flow elsewhere in this wall?

J flexed her wings once before folding them up, rocking herself into the church. Grabbing hold of the disrupted wiring as she fell inward, she dragged them with her. J had more than enough strength to rip the wiring out of the walls, wherever they’re hooked to.

Then glass was shattering at windows below her.

«Thanks, J!» N transmitted. J ignored him.

Her two squadmates burst into the church. N to the left, V to the right.

Waste no more time. Wings flared, claws flexed, and acid dewed on the needle‍-​sharp tip of the tail. Warm lips curled upward‍ ‍—‍ not a winning smile, not yet, but a predatory grin. It was time to hunt.

J descended.

A wide chamber stretched below her, lit bright but flickering. It was teeming, dozens of drones pumping with delicious oil. All clad in those familiar yellow robes. Some sat in pews, while others were still staggering in. The crowd roiled, clearly agitated. Why wouldn’t they be? It was over for them.

Far at the front, one drone stood before another clad in void‍-​black robes addorned with a symbol: a golden hexagon, three lines curling out from three vertices. Its body language was most animated, and J caught a loud vocalsynth.

“—too late, Father! Ascension is our only hope, the remote host connection—”

The reply came quieter, but J’s hearing was sensitive. “No, we have not recieved her blessing. Our deliverance is not yet upon us.”

“But our wards have fallen! The sky demons are here!”

The black‍-​robed drone nodded profoudly. “The only hope for us is to await the dawn.”

V scoffed. “You won’t last that long.”

N landed with a bounce, hands rising to either side of his mouth. “Ooh, is this a cult meeting? Can I join? I love unquestioning loyalty to a dubious cause!”

By now most of the drones were turning to shattered windows. Processing the sight of winged death. Screaming. As N darted forward eagerly, the nearest drones scrambled backwards.

“Aww,” he said, hands transforming into guns and burying several rapid fire rounds into the workers, three of them dead in seconds. “They never make much conversation, do they?” He frowned.

At last J landed, stone cracking beneath her. Glancing left, she leveled a withering look at N. “They’re defective, idiot. Barely sentient toasters, remember?”

(N tried transforming his hand back, but it takes moment‍ ‍—‍ unusual lag, J noted.)

To the right, terrified yells and cries of “please no”, “not my wife”, “please don’t feed me my own wiring” reached them intermittenly. Both turned their gaze to V carving her way through the congregation. More noise than usual. Most drones didn’t get time to make this much noise‍ ‍—‍ as if V was killing them at a much slower clip then normal.

“Enough chat. We have… a mission.” Then J felt her own processes lag for a moment, and narrowed her eyes. They were all oddly sluggish.

…Why was it so bright in here anyway?

From the edges of the room, burning fires illuminated the chamber. Smoke crowned them, and banners on the wall waved gently from the heat roiling off them.

“So that’s their ploy? They think some heat will buy them time? Almost a clever strategy,” she conceded. J flashed a smile to her fellow disassembly drones, teeth sharp. “But what good is a heat trap in a room full of coolant?”

As if to demonstrate, V cut down another drone, dosing herself in the oil. With every mouthful she consumed, she moved a bit faster.

All of them acted on a clock, then. Empty the room before overheating. A yellow cross blazed onto J’s visor, and N wasn’t far behind. A roar of jamming shortwave static purred from their transceivers, an instinct‍-​refrain of «Prey spotted! Let’s hunt! Devour them!»

It was an oilbath. Deep in a hunting routine, J didn’t have the spare processing power to organize the sequence of images and motor inputs into a coherent narrative, and didn’t need to.

«Prey! Hunt! Devour!»

She saw V smash the visor of one drone and used the plastic shards as improvised throwing knives. She saw N cut feats of acrobatics, almost dancing among the panicked horde. His nanite stinger pricked one drone then he slid it across the floor, passing it to V to be further disassembled.

Pews were flipped over, candelabras fell to the ground, and the resounding acoustics of the room meant the protestations of the worker drones echoed like a great, suffering choir. Their agony reached a climax and sustained a long note, discordant and screaming.

J disabled four drones with a single sweep of her wings. They staggered back, and then there was N, finishing the job. Each dead drone was punctuated by a torrent of black gold pouring down hungry throats; they drunk as if eternally parched. Slick oil coated their bodies‍ ‍—‍ though J’s hair remains spotless.

The three disassemblers worked like a perfectly‍-​tuned machine. No bickering, no difference of perspective. Everything was as simple as locate, shutdown, disassemble.

To the drones, they were death in three bodies, moving so fast, transforming and coordinating so quickly, it all could only be understood as a blur, a chaos of images, a sudden and unexpected halting of computation.

This was what the company designed them for. They fulfilled their function, and it was beautiful.

Now the song transitioned into a new section; at this point, the room held more drones shutdown than online, by far. Now they were not drinking oil faster than the heat mounted.

J staggered in front of one drone. This one had wielded enough cunning or luck to scuttle to a doorway leading out of this central chamber. N, though busy on the other side of the room, had the presence of mind to toss a whole pew across the room.

It sailed across the distance and slammed against the wall above, sliding down to block off escape for J’s prey. (Distantly, the exertion of throwing the pew sends N careening backward onto the floor. J didn’t spare a glance.)

The worker turned to face the disassembly drone, visor shining sea‍-​green eyes. J’s screen flashed a high‍-​temp warning, and the worker narrowed its eyes in seeming determination. It broke off a large splinter of the pew, as if to use it as a weapon.

J smirked. “Oh, you’re going to fight back?” She paused, and watched expectently. “Go on. I’ll let you have a free shot.”

The drone stared at the disassembly drone, uncomprehending. Its predator was… letting it attack? It swallowed, then as if gathering courage, finally charged forward, cocking back its wooden shiv, preparing to swing.

Before the swing has time to connect, J had already pricked it from behind with her nanite stinger. The drone is a mess of sputtering vocals, artifacts consuming its screen.

“Just kidding.” J laughed. “If you really wanted to live, you should have shown more initiative than that. No handouts.” J stepped on the drone, grinding its head into the ground.

Another high‍-​temp warning interrupted her. J scanned the room for more targets. There‍ ‍—‍ was that the one they called ‘Father’?‍ ‍—‍ it wore void‍-​black, golden‍-​trimmed robes. It scuttled beyond the center of the room, hopping toward the pulpit, climbing over the railings. The trajectory was clear. At the back, a passage lead deeper into the church.

That wouldn’t do. “I’m afraid an attestation requires examining all assets. Get back here.”

J spread her wings, burnt oil to fly, and she was pursuit.

A spiral staircase winded through the church, circling higher and higher. Given this was the central tower… This ‘Father’ drone aimed for the radio transmitter, no doubt.

Even with decades of disuse, time seemingly paid extra neglect to the tower’s upper reaches. The walls fell away in places, letting cold winds blow in through small cracks‍ ‍—‍ a welcome reprieve for J. The high‍-​temp warnings had abated, at least.

Though her reserves were replete much more oil than before‍ ‍—‍ 15.2 liters‍ ‍—‍ that meant so much less until she could vent all the excess heat. Idling at stage three overheat consumed so much more oil; she was losing tens of milliliters by the second.

When exhaust left her mouth, it steamed in the cold air. But she felt the relief of temperatures plummeting, her systems all but shuddering. Stage two was no comfort, but brazen thirst beat hunter’s fever.

In this ascent, J hadn’t seen the drone she pursued at all. But she was a disassembly drone, and her sensory suite was extensive. She scented the microparticulates of partly combusted oil upon the drone’s exhaust. She heard the soft bumps and steps‍ ‍—‍ was it trying to be sneaky? How cute‍ ‍—‍ the sound traveled through the brickwork.

Worker drones didn’t run as hot as disassembly drones, but her thermal vision could read the faint trail. And there was her electromagnetic sense‍ ‍—‍ which, oddly, was the least helpful. Worker drones emitted plenty of radiation, left unmistakeable eddies in the EM field‍ ‍—‍ but now, it had vanished from her magnometers.

What waited for J atop this spire?

Only so much space existed in this church for Father to cover, and J simply moved faster. Before long she stood beneath the trapdoor hatch into the topmost chamber. On whim, she slowly opened the door. Slowly, rather than bursting in. Let it stew in dread. Won’t that taste better? The door almost didn’t open for all the black branching wires running around it.

A mess sprawled throughout the topmost chamber. eReaders, DVDs, pages drenched in incomprehensible scribbles. A telescope pointed out of the grilled window, and on the other side of the room flatscreen monitors and archaic CRTs covered the wall. The drone had unplugged them all by the time J walked in, shoveling wires out of the window by the armful, before slamming the windows closed.

“Last words?” J asked.

“No.” The drone didn’t turn around.

“Wrong answer. You’re going to tell me—”

“Yes.”

“You think you can interrupt—”

“Now.”

That was when J realized it wasn’t talking to her. She lunged forward, flipping the drone around to face her. Its screen showed console output.

$ jcj_system -m factory-reset --kill-all --force
Factory reset selected.   Back up system data beforehand?
Files not backed up will be IRRECOVERABLE.
> No.
Are you sure?
> Yes.
Preparing factory reset.
With current options:
- Configuration will be wiped.
- All processes will be halted.
- No files will be preserved.
Please schedule a time, or say 'quit' to abort.
> Now.
Please stand by...

A growl. “This is definitely concealment.”

What a damn coward.

Before J had even finished reading the screen, she had torn open a panel to expose the drone’s data ports, transformed her gauntlets to produce a bright blue serial debugging cable.

Yet J couldn’t make the connection before the progress bar at the bottom had filled. The screen went blank.

The captain had devised a method for extracting information from her prey. Boot a drone while connected to their system, bypass login and halt conscious threads.

She held down a button to cycle power. A short beep, POST successful, and a JcJenson (in SPAAAAACEE!!!!) logo flashed onscreen. J saw a “Welcome to your new worker drone!” initialization screen, like a newly manufactured pill‍-​baby, neural network fresh and untrained.

Please input registration key to continue.
> 

Then the welcome screen was torn in four by three slashing claws, and J seethed. Without an OS, without a lick of data on the hard‍-​drive, it was useless. Whatever the full text of the transmission, whatever these toasters were doing here, every secret this ‘Father’ had held, was now lost, erased as one last act of spite.

Whatever. She didn’t need answers. Without them, this drone was nothing more than just another body for the pile. And that means her mission was a success.

One more colony (or pseudo‍-​colony) wiped off the planet.

(But how would J distinguish herself, without those answers? If all she did was disassemble, just like every other unit in her line?)

Oh well. With this pseudo‍-​colony wiped, it was time to fly back to the spire. This excursion cut it close‍ ‍—‍ the sun would rise in less than ninety minutes, and out of the tower’s windows, she wondered if it was mere fear and predictive modeling that painted hints of predawn light on the horizon.

J punched at the windows, and instead of shattering, they remained intact. A blink animation on her visor. She tried a different window, a wall, none of them break.

A familiar resistance. That impossible holographic glow.

She clawed at the floor‍ ‍—‍ same effect. Same aura. The wires she’d seen coming up here. The wires Father had carefully thrown out of the window.

A trap? From a worker drone?

An amusing attempt‍ ‍—‍ J could almost admire the strategy in it‍ ‍—‍ but nothing a worker drone could accomplish would impede a disassembly drone for long.

J cut all of the cords in the room from the various monitors. Tried the windows again‍ ‍—‍ no effect. So all of the wires that fed into this ‘ward’ effect must be outside this room.

And she couldn’t cut them without already being outside.

No matter. How had she first gotten into the church? She hadn’t been able to access the cords then. She charged up another EM burst. The screens flashed and the severed cords sparked, but the windows still refused to shatter.

J glared at the windows. She zoomed in on the grills beyond, and analysis identified the Faraday cage, protecting the wires from her burst.

Nothing she could do but growl impotently.

A worker drone’s trap. And she, a disassembly drone, was stuck in it.

Less than an hour to sunrise. In a room with wide windows.

J smashed her fist against the floor, with all of her special disassembly function‍-​augmented strength behind it. Her hand exploded into a shower of metal and plastic and dripping fluids.

A flood of errorlog’d warnings flowed up her HUD, but the regeneration function was already executing. Her hand reformed in seconds, mending the joint with her arm as if nothing had happened. (As the most effective disassembly drone on her squad, the regeneration function was second nature to her.)

But there were things she could not regenerate from.

J could lay on the floor and cling desperately to the cover of walls when the sunrays started burning. Undignified, and not even effective‍ ‍—‍ bounced light wouldn’t be much better.

She kicked the self‍-​lobotomized drone. Another grunt of frustration, then she knelt to shut it down (disassembly by force) and feed on its oil. Against an immenient sunrise, another liter or two didn’t mean more than a few more seconds of survival.

Was this how J left the company’s service? Baking in the sun light after a successful mission?

“What’s a drone got to do to get a tax break?” She laughed once, an empty, nervous sound.

Yellow eyelights scanned the room again and again, searching for any neglected detail, a way out. The amber light drained from behind the glass, and eventually the head hung, staring at the floor. J reached up to grab her hair, pulling, twisting it out of place. With each tug, it felt like yanking the worries out of her, just a bit.

Maybe it wasn’t over. Her useless squad could get her out of this, right? She just needed to give the order.

«V! N! Ascend the tower. Now!» J broadcasted. Knowing to cut the wires should be within the competence of even her squad.

Except the seconds tick by, and she receives no ACK, no response of any sort.

«V? N? Are you listening? Come here!»

J opened her mouth to continue, but before she spiraled down into desperation and pleading, she thought. Her squad would never ignore her like this.

Of course! Her sensors hadn’t even been able to pick out the drone up here. No signal she sent would make it out. She was caged, blocked off.

This was a trap. How could she get out? How? Hm… Whatever field resisted her attempts to destroy the windows, that had to cost energy, right? Simple physics. Whatever fueled this ‘ward’ had to be weakened with every rightful destruction averted.

Except there was something else depleted with each attempt. J watched her oil reserved tick down, minute by minute. J had no reason to think she’d outlast this ‘ward’. But a disassembly drone was made of superior components than anything a worker cobbled together. She had to try—

Something moved outside the window. A glowing pair of yellow eyes, familiar sword‍-​blades sawing at electrical wiring, and punching through the glass imprisoning her.

“V,” J greeted. “A late but welcome arrival. Had trouble cleaning up down there?”

“Trouble? It was an oven down there, you do the math.” Then J noticed V had something‍ ‍—‍ someone‍ ‍—‍ slung over her back. “You left N to overheat.”

‘And me’ went unspoken.

J shook her head. “Not my fault the idiot wasn’t paying attention to the heat warnings.”

“If he dies, C‍-​ the company isn’t sending a replacement.”

J swished her tail in dismissal. “Good. He’s worthless and terrible. I’d kill him myself if it wasn’t against company policy. We’d do just fine without him. Better.”

V just stared. “Squad’s all we have, J,” she eventually ventured. “We didn’t get to pick. I’d certainly never pick you.” That last sentence came quietly, at the lowest volume setting of her synth. Why bother? J could hear it just fine.

“Oddly sentimental. What happened to forgetting his name?”

V scowled, and turned around, taking a step back toward the window. “Don’t tell him.”

“What?”

“He didn’t overheat. Don’t tell him why.”

Then J put the pieces together‍ ‍—‍ N was overheating, V stabilized him. How? He needed oil and he wasn’t conscious to hunt for himself, so…

J rolled her eyes. “Workplace drama is not my concern. Just keep it professional.”

“Right, whatever you say. Let’s head back before the sun cooks us.”

“Not quite. Mission isn’t over yet, V.”

“What now?”

“We’re here to get to the bottom of the transmission. And now, find out what’s powering these ‘wards’. I want to be prepared the next time a drone uses this cheap trick.”

V glanced down. Scattered on the floor were the scrawled pages, overflowing with incomprehensible demonic imagery. Characteristic of cultic esoterism. V’s optics settled on a triangular motif repeated constantly. Something coiled tense in V’s tone. “You sure you want to do that, J? Corporate doesn’t pay you to ask questions.”

“Corporate doesn’t need to pay us,” J said. She pointed up at the radio dish. “These toasters were broadcasting. I want to know everything. Look at how they congregated here. If we gain control of the transmitter, we could lure our prey wherever we want them. That’s a surefire a roadmap to exceptional third quarter profits.”

V walked over to the window, pausing there, hand tracing along the jagged windowsill. The bent bars of J’s momentary prison. V said, “Whatever you say, boss. You give the orders, we follow.” Without turning, she quietly finished, “Just hope you don’t regret it again so soon.”

Beneath the church lay a basement.

Despite the tower bearing the radio dish and the heaviest concentration of the wardlines, nothing truly critical seemed to lie there. A yellow ethernet cord conveyed the radio signal from elsewhere. When they followed that cord, they found more wardlines joining together, as if branching backward to its source.

J picked up one wardline to examine it closely. When cut, a small trickle of oil dripped out. Like the wardlines were so many black veins for the church.

The thick cord that ran into the basement must have been the major artery. The door to the basement was an old rotten piece of wood. Yet when J yanked, it held fast. It didn’t resist with the inexplicable strength of the wards, and a moment later it gave, sending her stumbling backward with a fragment of wood clutched in her hand.

Stuck, and not as if it had frozen shut over the years. It felt as if some mold or ooze had hardened over it. Without her hunting routines honing her olfactory array onto a particular smell, J had no filter against the putrid mélange that wafted from this dark hole.

“Last chance to quit while you’re ahead.” V strolled forth behind J. Just the two of them‍ ‍—‍ V had buried N in a mound of snow outside. No point of lugging him around if they weren’t about to fly away.

Ignoring her, J got to her feet, brushed splinters off her skirt, and descended into the basement. Rickety boards bend under her weight, one of them snapping, but her coordination carried her to the bottom unphased. V just leapt down in a single bound, frontflipping to land on her feet.

Like upstairs, where the fires had burned in the worker’s attempted disassembler trap, the basement air was warm. Warm and humid, like human breath. (Though… why did J know what that felt like? No humans left on Copper‍-​9.)

Disassemblers had an array of senses: even the sound of her footsteps and the hum of her servos was enough for J to begin refining an echolocation map of her surroundings, let alone all the other sensors they boasted.

Yet still, wandering through these claustrophobic depths, it didn’t feel right modelling the territory without visual indicators. Crippling. J transformed her left arm into a flashlight.

The first sight that greeted her was a dead worker drone.

Visor gone, circuitry hollowed out of the head. Chassis lying in a puddle of oil. It was old work, and no disassembler would leave this oil here to congeal.

“So this was a cult,” V commented.

J kept moving. They passed a few dead ends, a few passages boarded off. A few more dead worker drones, some screens flickering Fatal Error or Error 606. The offline drones get more frequent as they followed the thickening vein‍-​cords.

So focused on echolocation and listening for a hint of what lay deeper, several moments passsed before a background process flagged something not heard‍ ‍—‍ the only set of footsteps was her own.

J glance to either side and turned around: V was gone.

She heard something else, claws digging into wood, unseen metal impacts. J’s eyes emptied, and she swung her flashlight around. Then she looked up.

V crawled on the ceiling, claws and knife‍-​tail holdling her up. She grinned, even as J’s worry turned to a glare.

Shaking her head, scoffing, J continued on. When she passed another puddle, she heard V drop to the ground. J flashlight illuminated V kneeling, hand reaching out for a dark, drying puddle.

Is she that hungry? Before J could ask, the question became irrelevant.

“This isn’t oil. This is blood.” V’s eyes narrowed.

“Is that valuable information?”

“Where did it come from?”

“Thawed out a frozen human?” J frowned at the image.

V shook her head. “It’s too fresh.”

Standing, V resumed walking, and J sped up to keep pace. They explored the basement side by side now.

V paused, and did a double take down one half‍-​boarded up passage. “Something moved. Not a drone. It was… twitching.”

The drone corpses, meanwhile, had become so common they piled atop each other, lining the hall they walked down. Screens still flickered, some so rapidly it couldn’t be a simple error state‍ ‍—‍ bootlooped?

A door lay at the end of the hall. J and V glanced at each other, then took the last steps forward, pushing open the final door.

The room overflowed with worker drone corpses. Or rather, worker drone parts. Piled to the ceiling. No screen showed an error state; each one was rendered nonfunctional with damaged and discarded parts. Upon the floor, a centimeter thick layer of oil sat, cold and thick.

One thing existed in the room, besides plastic and metal. A slab of stone rising from the center of the floor, symbols etched into it, and spikes ringing it‍ ‍—‍ the only word that came to mind was altar.

A drone lay on it, the only one not in a state of abject disrepair, though the chassis’s front was left popped open. Inside, the wiring and motors that belonged in a worker drone’s internals mingled with blood and organic sacs.

After a moment paused and staring, J tapped the drone.

The screen flickered on. A symbol appeared, faintly, barely discernible past visual artifacts and glitches. A hexagon with three prongs, the same symbol that had transfixed V in the tower.

V froze.

Glancing at her, J raised an eyebrow. “V?” She poked the other disassembler.

Her response came slow, as if under heavy process load. “S‍-​shoot it. J. Destroy it. Q‍-​quickly.”

J narrowed her eyes. What if this unit could answer her questions? But a worker was a worker‍ ‍—‍ her directive was to disassemble them, after all. Doubtful this one was in any state for coherent thought‍ ‍—‍ if it wouldn’t just wipe itself like Father.

A shot through the screen, then a triple slash to be sure. “There.”

But V didn’t relax. If anything, she was steadily stiffening, locking up. She stared at the screen where the symbol had shone‍ ‍—‍ so bright it had burned out some of the LEDs, and a ghostly afterimage remained.

J’s eyes narrowed into an outright glare. “You know what this is, don’t you? You know what this means. Spill it, V. That’s an order. V! Are you listening to me?”

V’s yellow eyes are soon replaced by the loading icon of a drone rendered unresponsive due to long operations on the main thread.

A quiet hiss‍ ‍—‍ was J imagining it? She needed to run it through a signal processing and applifying routine twice before her system has a tentative parse. Did V whipser, “Cyn, no, please—”? (…Did J recognize that name?)

J pushed V, and the other drone tipped over, barely retaining the instinctive response to catch herself with her arms. Her servos were slow and unsteady to act.

“J‍-​J,”‍ ‍—‍ V finally spoke, her synth almost unintelligible for the stuttering‍ ‍—‍ “y‍-​you‍-​ We have to dis‍-​disassemble them. All of them. Every‍ ‍—‍ c‍-​can’t take chances‍-​s.”

(A nervous stutter seemed uncharacteristic for V. But this wasn’t nervousness: it was lag.)

“There’s almost four dozen drones here. The sun is about to rise.” They had cut it too close: there was no time.

“D‍-​disassembly by fire. It’s the only way to be s‍-​sure. We have to be sure.”

J regarded her squadmate, and set her mouth into a line.

Behind J, the church burned.

All of the wood. All of the oil. All of it, aflame. An explosive conflagration. J was receiving high‍-​temp warnings just standing near it.

V was offline. J reset her when she had been barely responsive for minutes on end‍ ‍—‍ it was just maintenance, at that point‍ ‍—‍ and carried her out, laying her in the snow beside N.

J’d tried to drink some more oil from the ground floor drones, but between the heat of the main chamber, and the time she (didn’t) have left, most of it was left to be eaten by the flames.

Crackling flames lit the parking lot in stark light. The heat melted the ice and snow mounds, revealing dark asphalt.

J stood over a newly formed water puddle, and regarded her reflection in the moonlight. She brushed oil and debris off her shirt and skirt. She wiped her face clean. She smoothed her hair until her pigtails looked nice and sharp. She flashed a winning smile.

Both of her squadmates were offline and the sun rose in an hour.

But it was no problem. J was the most effective disassembly drone in this sector of Copper‍-​9, after all.