04:50

Serial Designation J needed a roadmap.

Not literally — her memory banks held a topologically mapped reconstruction of her surroundings. But figuratively? Where did she go from here?

When would she fly back to the spire?

The disassembly drone paced the parking lot of the Church of the Electric and the Divine. Metal and glass glimmered while her shadow danced and flickered faster than she moved, the bright fire still burning the church.

Nearby, in a heat-slicked pile of snow, lay her squadmates. N was half-buried, his jacket taken off and laid beside him. V, meanwhile, leaned against the mound as if sitting. Sleep Mode shined upon each visor, though that indicator obscured their true state. J knew N’s systems still busied themselves regenerating from the heat damage (whose fault was that? His.) In contrast, V systems threatened to cause heat damage, processors still spinning deep in memory consolidation routines J didn’t have the means to terminate.

Both of them were useless at the moment. So, where did J go from here?

The faintest stars already were fading above the horizon. Less than an hour from now — 05:49 — the sun would rise. Unless they moved, they would die.

04:55

J’s pacing soon carried her several meters from the unconscious drones. Thoughts cycling through her processor, she drifted toward the cooler air, farther from the burning church. She neared the edge of the lot. From behind, the entrance sign was blank.

J glanced it, then in place of one eye a lightbulb icon flashed. The sign wasn’t exactly a curtain, but this wasn’t exactly powerpoint presentation; J just needed to get her thoughts out, look at them.

Her left hand transformed into a projector while J fiddled with her window manager’s display options, then a map of the the local geography glowed on the blank sign’s rear. Bright yellow projections rendered outlines of frozen rivers and snowcapped mountains.

Sectors — as defined by J — comprised roughly the region corporate could expect a disassembly drone to cover in a single night, a circle formed around their spire. It would take a three hour flight to reach the edge. Time enough to go out, complete a mission, and return before the sun rose.

On her new projection, J outlined the perimeter of their sector with a thick line. The sector encompassed hundreds of square kilometers. Within it stood one end of a mountain range; a (now frozen) lake surrounded by a dead forest; and the entirety of a city for which this was an outlying suburb.

In the center, a star marked the spire, and a cute pictograph of a drone with pigtails indicated J’s estimated current location.

Tonight’s mission hadn’t taken them far: the church lay northeast of the spire, not even halfway to the perimeter. Why else would J have cut it so close? She wasn’t careless. An hour flight and J’d be back. Half that if she pushed extra speed. Judging by the time — 04:57 — she’d indeed have to push it, but returning safe to the spire tonight would be as simple as executing the command. Starting right now.

Then J glanced to the snowpile behind her, expression a glare surrounded by worry lines. Yes, J could make it back, but when would N and V wake up?

(“You left N to overheat.”)

It wasn’t J’s fault N hadn’t kept an eye on his own reserves. It wasn’t J’s fault seeing a dead drone — of all things! — deadlocked V’s CPU. J had come first and done fine before N, before V. Of course she’d be the last, and she’d do just fine without them.

Wait. J had come first? Where had that thought come from? They arrived on Copper-9 together, as a squad.

She started to run a stack trace, but —

05:00

She didn’t have time to run deep introspective scans, not now.

I won’t leave N and V to die, she decided. It’d be criminal neglect, for sure, unacceptable sabotage of JcJenson equipment.

But the logistics were a nightmare, worse than tax season. How do you transport two sleeping disassembly drones halfway across a sector?

Carrying was an option, sure — disassemblers carried corpses back to the spire, after all. Sometimes entire cratefuls. But disassembly drones were heavy.

Of all the special disassembly functions, flight consumed the most oil. Now that she’s cooled down, J operated with about 14 liters of oil — flying back to the spire fast enough to beat the sun would guzzle 9 liters at minimum.

Flying back carrying N and V? Simply impossible.

J stopped pacing, and kicked the pavement hard enough to leave a crater. The damage to her peg leg healed half a second later.

Could she hunt a drone? Her models shot down the possibility. Over the years, the number of worker drones remaining trended predictably down and their caution only grew more obnoxious. Could she find a drone, if she spiraled out for a few miles? Maybe. Would it save her any time? Absolutely not.

J didn’t want to let her squad die, but if she had to pick who survived…

No. Her calculations were circling around a possibility, shutting it down preemptively. But if it was a matter of her squad’s continued operation… J couldn’t carry them back to the spire because she simply lacked the requisite oil, and she couldn’t hunt a worker drone for fresh oil, and the nearest concentration of workers just went up in flames — by V’s request. (Why did J listen?)

Nevertheless, that didn’t mean J had no sources of oil left.

J turned around, and regarded V.

The other female disassembly drone wasted plenty of oil in her hunts, but J knew V had shutdown more drones tonight than J. (It didn’t mean V was more effective — true effectiveness was delegation, intelligent management!) V had even began the night with more oil in the tank (as was necessary for her role in the formation).

J walked forward. Purely in terms of volume, J stood before an oil mother lode. And the objective now was survival, with sunrise imminent. Every second counted. (05:01) Only one effective choice, right?

J sat down, folding one leg over the other, and leaned closer to V.

Limp against a mound of snow, her short hair wet, strands a mess, V sat statue-still. Earlier, beneath the church, J’d shunted her into sleep mode suddenly, and her mouth still lolled open, as if in persistent surprise. (Even unconscious, would J ever dare look so undignified?) Some of V’s repair nanites dripped out of her mouth. That crossed the line. J reached out wipe them away, then closed V’s mouth for her. Then J caught herself. There were more important matters (05:02).

Forced into sleep mode, processors hanging on inexplicably high priority threads, V wasn’t waking up. Even from J’s touch. Okay. J animated her eyes closing, and shut off her optics.

Pretend it’s a worker drone. J groped forward blindly, hands grasping onto warm synthskin before she lunged forward, mouth agape. And J bit. Warm liquid surged forward, and J drank.

Then she flinched back and spat out the oil mixture, retching even after her mouth emptied. Already, her plan melted to sludge. Forget drinking one mouthful of that, let alone enough to fill her tank.

A clever design, really, J thought. Make disassembler oil unpalatable to consume, and even defective or compromised disassembly drones would have no option but to fulfill their purpose. As to be expected of the engineering genius of JcJenson.

But again, this was a matter of survival. Of continued operational capability! J said she wouldn’t let her squad die, and if that meant enduring this wretched parasitism…

J leaned forward to drink more, only to be stymied. The bite she’d taken out of V had already healed. Oh. This was bad. Not only would her regeneration be fighting J’s efforts, it was itself a special disassembly function — meaning V would be burning oil even as J tried to reallocate it.

J transformed her hand.

Combat options comprised to overwhelming majority of transformation presets, but a few exceptions, utilities such as her projector, did exist. J produced a tool she’d been trained to use, but in her time on Copper-9, the need had yet to arise.

A clamp held a serial debugging cable. She released it and deftly unfolded the cord. Retransforming her hand, she touched V’s neck, searched the surface under her head… There.

Depressing the cover of a hatch, it popped open, revealing a few ports. J kept her optics shut off, operating by feel. She took one end of the cord and missed the correct port a few times before the debugging cable clicked into place and a soft LED indicator shined onto her fingers.

(Unconsciously, V curled toward J, hugging closer. J pushed her arms back with a huff, flush lines creeping onto her visor.)

More confidently, J popped open the hatch on her own neck, plugging the other end of the cable into herself. Still flushed, she looked away, attention instead directed toward an inner console.

J began sending commands to V’s operating system.

05:05

[girlboss@SD-J ~]$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 027: ID 0403:4701 JcJension IN SPAAAAACEE!!! LLC, Ltd FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC
[girlboss@SD-J ~]$ ls -l /dev/ttyUSB1
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188, 0 May 23 05:06 /dev/ttyUSB0
[girlboss@SD-J ~]$ dronesh -r --device=/dev/ttyUSB1
[guest@SD-V /]$ jcj_ddctrl --help
jcj_ddctrl: Permission denied
[guest@SD-V /]$ sudo jcj_ddctrl --help
Guest is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
[guest@SD-V /]$ su adminj
adminj@SD-V's password: *****

After a false start, J was in, and the lines of commands and standard output scrolled through her internal console log. She paused there, and frowned. What was the invocation, again? It had been years since she had to configure her disassembly functions by hand, rather than a background process managing it.

A quick search through her memory brings up the name, and—

[adminj@SD-V /]$ jcj_ddctrl --help

J groans in frustration. The help option brings up pages and pages of flags and subcommands she didn’t need. She wasn’t sure anyone needed some of these. --pretty seemed worthless to her, diluting the output with format codes to compensate for some human information processing deficiency she didn’t have. Why is there an (--email) option to read configuration from a specific remote server? An option to randomize (--scramble) the delicately interdependent configuration seemed like it’d just brick a drone. But the worst was a --dance option that does nothing but display a visor animation. This had literally no utility.

The option she’s looking for took scrolling way back up to the top of the output. Fortunately these interface manipulations take miliseconds for a digital intelligence.

[adminj@SD-V /]$ jcj_ddctrl --quiet --cfset dd.nanites.regenmod=0
[adminj@SD-V /]$ jcj_ddctrl --cfget dd.droil.reserves
28.7L

V had double J’s reserves?

Enthusiastic as ever. At least that made J’s plan easier.

The debugging cable still bridged the two of them, but J didn’t need to move far. She opened her mouth, perhapes to bite her squadmate’s neck once more — then a lightbulb flashes in one eye.

Time was money. So wouldn’t it be cheaper to drain V from closer to her reserves? J’s hand transformed into a knife. For a moment, she stared at V, still deep in sleep mode. (A hand consciously moved to hold J, before being pushed away again. J rolled her eyes.)

J held up her armblade. As if she was about to attack her fellow disassembly drone, and she couldn’t close her eyes for this cut. Not if she wanted to do it right.

She wouldn’t let them die. J expelled exhaust, pulled her arm back, and sliced V’s chest open. Oil flowed out. J slid away the cover, revealing V’s twitching internals, and—

You didn’t need to see this.

05:10

“Um, J? J? What are you—”

J snapped out of sleep mode. Why was she in sleep mode? That didn’t matter. N was awake.

(Would N blame her for letting him overheat? Would N blame her for V’s malfunction? Should—)

J growled. “So you’re finally up. Took you long enough. When did you deign to rejoin the online?”

“Erm, just a minute ago. Last thing I remember I was err, murdering drones with you and V but now we’re outside and you’re…” N looked down, head cocked. “Um, what exactly are you doing?”

J looked down, the serial debugging cable still stretching between her and V. She flushed.

Oh, I was just treating my fellow disassembly drone as a mere oilcan. I’ve been promoted from predator to cannibal, you see. Ugh. J couldn’t do this, not with N watching — but did she need to, now that N was awake? Recalculating…

Why was he staring at her? Oh right, he’d asked some dumb question.

“It’s not what it looks like, idiot. V crashed on the mission — like you — and I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with her. Entirely professional.”

N’s eyes widened. “Oh, oh dear. Will she be alright?” His hands went to clutch at his head. “I hope she doesn’t—”

“Not what you should be worrying about right now. Be quiet and let me work.”

N saluted. “Please help her.”

J muttered, “Oh, good idea. Here I was thinking it’d be better to sabotage the only other effective drone in the sector.”

First, J had to check her internal logs to figure out just what the heck happened. The last four minutes of her memory just got wiped. Last thing she remembered, she was about to — attack V? Then what happened?

Did some background process trigger?

Investors, I’m almost as bad as V.

Speaking of V and memories… Since J was connected to V’s system, she did have an opportunity here.

Ethically, it’s questionable, but surely she had valid concerns for V’s safety and their mission.

Still, should she? J could transfer a copy of V’s memories. If V wouldn’t tell her what happened in the basement and what she was thinking, J could get the answer for herself.

A full copy of V’s mind would be take up too many terabytes and require too many minutes transfer, but if J did a quick concept scan to pull up the relevant connectome—

She couldn’t.

J checked, and she hadn’t been locked out. adminj was logged in and had high level permissions. Including read access to V’s memory database.

But when J tried to pull up any memory, even innocuous ones, she only read garbage output.

Another anomaly: A disassembly drone’s memory database easily accumulates terabytes of data — J’s was tens of terabytes — but V’s had accumulated hundreds.

Did V suffer from some glitch preventing her from discarding redundant memories? Obviously, drones could generate petabytes or more if they kept audio-video logs of every hour of their experience.

But again, J couldn’t check if this was the case because any attempt to read V’s memories output as incomprehensible as piping /dev/jrandom. As if V’s experience of the world was neverending TV static and radio noise. V was crazy, but she did understand what was going on.

Was it an incompatible format? But that didn’t compute. J was executing commands on V’s operating system. She used the same programs that V would use to read her own memories.

Unless…

But that didn’t compute either.

Who encrypted their own memories?

“Um, captain?”

J snapped back to her visual feed. Eyes focusing on N, narrowing to a thin stare. “What.”

“I hate to sound like I’m questioning the mission — I’m not! I promise! — but I’m worried. Why… are we out here? It’s almost sunrise, and uh, that’s pretty bad right?”

“Oh, really? With the constant danger of overheating, I never considered that staying out in the sunlight might be a problem for us, tell me more.”

N shrunk back. “Yeah I regret saying that. Sorry!”

“Whatever shall we do? Naturally, we should fly back to the spire built to protect us from the sun — except someone let themselves overheat in the middle of a mission, and someone else crashed, and neither of you can fly in your sleep. Should I have let you die?”

“Could… you have… woken us up?”

You were less trouble asleep.

“I tried that. You were healing.” J waved dismissively.

05:15

J jolted. “Bankruptcy! We’ve got thirty minutes. Whatever. You’re awake now. I’m flying back to the spire. Carry V yourself. She’s in your hands now.” J turned away.

(It made her flinch, a guilty frown briefly lighting her face where none could see.. Leaving V in N’s hands might be as good as decommissioning her, but they were running out of time. J didn’t want to die. If N failed to make it back to spire and baked in the sun, it was his fault. If N failed to carry V and baked in the sun, it was his fault.)

(…But who was in charge of this mission?)

J unplugged the debugging cable, and let V slump back in the snow.

“Poor V. Do you think… should we wait for her to wake up?”

“With how long you’ll be waiting, there’d be no return on your investment. We’d barely be able to make it back to the spire as it stands.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it back to the spire carrying her. I’m a little… low on oil, you know?”

J already had her wings spread, about to takeoff. She paused. “I’m not going to make it back with both of you. It’s you or V.” A moment later, J regretted giving him the choice. She’d take V any day of the week. Another moment, and J realized it was moot. N would never let V die.

“Wait… why do we have to go back to the spire?”

“Stay out here then, it’s your funeral.”

“No, I mean… we’re surrounded by human buildings. You were just talking about a basement in that church. Can’t we just take shelter in one?”

“In the burning church. When our issue is overheating.”

“No, not that basement. Any basement! How hard would it be to find somewhere safe to sleep?”

J stared at N.

She didn’t tell him it was a good idea.

But she didn’t leave.

05:25

Flying over the suburban landscape, J almost felt peace. If she didn’t think about the glowing death in the east, she could lose herself in this sight.

Hundreds of houses in neat, orderly rows. The land flat and unadorned. The uniformity almost… robotic. Easy to see why humans built so many of these suburbs.

J and N landed in the yard of another house, exterior painted an ugly red, and ventured forth to investigate. N kicked up a little bit of frozen dirt, but J left long, deep tracks. She carried V now, since even her modest reserves exceeded N’s.

(A bridal carry. Just so V didn’t get in the way of J’s wings. J tried to ignore that V’s arms instinctively tightened around her. It was just background processes. N glanced at them sometimes, and flushed. Jealous? J sighed and rolled her eyes. Not like J was enjoying this.)

N reached the door and touched it. The door immediately fell inward, crashing to the ground, making N flinch. He stepped in, trailing snow behind him. J paused at the falling door, kneeling to pick up a “Notice of Violation” — a citation from a “Homeowner’s Association” complaining of numerous code violations. She scanned the checked issues — no digging pits wider than 1x1x0.5m in the yard, no unauthorized structures taller than 2m visible on the property, no local power sources or external generators…

The two had seen several of these notices in the dozens of homes they checked. J had grown to respect this “Homeowner’s Association” — who else to thank for the nice, orderly appearance of the suburb?

N stopped and shook his head, turning back to J with a frown. “No good. This one has a hole in it too.”

J frowned.

If there was one thing she didn’t thank the humans for, it’s the shoddy construction that wasn’t even hardened to withstand weathering from decades of a persistent nuclear death storm.

The process went like this. Flying over the houses, J could scan their rooves, find the ones that hadn’t crumbled — a filter most homes couldn’t pass. Most remained pockmarked with holes, or imploded from internal collapse. A bad sign for structural integrity.

When a house looked promising, time after time a close inspection revealed burst pipes, flood damage (was it a flood, if it was ice?) that had invariably ruined the lower levels.

They needed a basement without holes the sun might shine in through. Brief exposure, especially from bounced reflections, wouldn’t be so bad — but for an entire day?

And on top of that, insulation merited consideration. N proposed to pile up snow around whatever house they picked, if they had time to. J thought it would be a better idea to pick three nearby basements so the three of them didn’t overheat a confined space and die in their sleep. But N didn’t want V to wake up alone, with no idea what’s going on. J could just leave her a message. The idiot still didn’t like that.

But really, that argument didn’t matter, not when they hadn’t found a single basement good enough to risk their life on.

(When they first arrived on Copper-9, it had been easier to find shelter. Easier to find prey, too. J swore they built half a spire in a single night. The sudden pang of nostalgia stabbed unexpectedly close.)

J shook her head. She’d exited the ugly red house (that color had to be a code violation). She gave a sigh that was more of a growl, and her tail lashed behind her. Another dead end. She looked southwest, contemplated flying back to the spire anyway. Still, she waited outside the building, standing upon a wooden deck, boards bending under her weight.

When N walked outside, she kicked his legs out from under him and pointed her nanite stinger dangerously close to his face. She leaned in, scowling.

“I don’t know why I ever agreed to this worthless plan of yours. If I end up consigning myself to death following your harewired schemes I will chain you to the ground and pluck your circuits out one by one while the world destroys us.”

N stared back with hollow eyes, nodding shakily. But then confusion inflects his fearful expression. “Wow, that threat is an incredibly specific scenario that feels… concerningly familiar.”

J stabbed her needle-tail an inch closer, saw N flinch, then stood back up. She spread her wings and took off from the porch, leaving the wooden deck a collapsed mess.

05:30

They returned to the air. Below them, roads spiraled and sprawled. The hulls of cars rusting away lined the streets. J spied the reflective glint of a dead drone — newly dead. They were doubling back over their previous path, now. Just to the south, J saw the charred ruin of the house she blew up.

Although their search pattern meandered here and there to scope out potential houses, it veered southwest, back toward the spire.

So J looked on skeptically when N turned left and flew north.

“Wrong direction, moronbot. Don’t forget our backup plan is flying top speed back to the spire while we can.”

“Yes, but… Do you remember that group of worker drones V intercepted earlier? They were coming from this direction. I wonder why.”

This was hardly the time to get curious about worker drones. But instead of saying it, J sighed. How much did it matter that N’s plan would get them killed when J’s plan wasn’t any better?

“Whatever N. Just carry V for a bit. I’m going to try to scout out some more houses. We can cover more if we split up.”

So they split.

05:35

When the reminder fired, J was in the middle of checking a house with a hole in the roof — at this point she was desperate. Seeing the time, J can only think one thing: It’s too late.

Disassembly drones could burn more oil to go faster when flying. Truth be told, J didn’t know what her top speed was; oil was always the limiter. But J had enough data to model how fast she could go, if she spent a certain volume. She knew the distance to the spire.

05:49 didn’t spell instant death, only the beginning of the end. But fifteen minutes wouldn’t get her close enough to the spire that she’d risk it.

She was overleveraged on N’s plan, then. Joy.

Moments later, she heard something, a burst of noise from above. Looking up through the hole in the roof, she saw in the sky lit up brightly — already?

But no, not the sun, not yet — analysis evidenced it to be a signal flare. N must have fired it. They hadn’t agreed on a meaning — N couldn’t plan — but he must have found something worth her attention.

J unfolded her wings and took off from inside the house, putting another hole in its roof.

Airborne, J scanned. N was nowhere in the sky, but between all of J’s senses, it took her seconds to locate the two disassembly drones. Milliseconds later, she had an idea why he’d gotten her attention.

If anything of obvious interest existed in this suburb, J could have seen it from the distance. And she had seen this… or rather, she saw the snow covering it, and assumed it was merely a big pile.

The house — painted the same unassuming beige as many others — sits under a roof lined with radio dishes and solar panels (definitely code violations), with several cords leading behind it — where a monolithic mass rose from the backyard, occupying almost all space.

N stood before it, brushing ice off its surface like an archeologist uncovering a dinosaur. Constructed of solid metal, layers of it, all reinforced. The same weather that had ruined swaths of houses had done nothing to this. It looked like a military installation, a whole chamber submerged in the earth.

As J dived closer, N was circling around the thing, as if searching for a entrance, before shrugging and with a leap, sailing clear over the house to meet J’s arrival. V was on the porch: N had gone to the trouble of placing her in swinging chair.

N waved as J landed, watching her jog forward with a nervous smile.

“Hey J, I think we found some kind of old bunker? Do you think the humans built this before the core collapse? Looks completely intact! If it could survive that, it could definitely protect us from the sun, right?”

J looked surprised for a moment, before smoothed her face into professional skepticism. “We’ll see if it’s another dead end.”

“If uh, if we can find a way inside…”

The ‘bunker’ wasn’t even taller than they were, and a disassembly drone was roughly as tall as a human. It was clearly an underground chamber.

“Did you… look in the house?”

“Oh, nope. Good idea. Let’s check together!”

J rolled her eyes. The door opened, rather than falling off its hinges, and reams of paper flutter as the door moves. N glanced at them, and laughed.

“And to think, the HOA wanted this thing removed immediately!”

J gave him a flat look.

And into the house they went.

05:40

Metal pegs clicked against the tiled kitchen floor. Where other homes had trapdoors over staircases leading into the basement, they found a metal door, keypad in place of handle. Hanging ajar already, the passage sloped down into a short corridor punctuated by another door. An airlock? In residential building?

A frozen human skeleton stands beside the first door. A phone in their hand, raised to their ear. They died mid-word.

“Who were they calling, do you think?”

J didn’t answer.

“If the door was left open… do you think they were waiting on someone?”

J strode into the airlock, turning to wait for N to get done gawking at the human. The other drone closed the door behind him. A hiss, and around them the hums and thumps of unseen mechanism getting to work.

Impatient, J punched the door — not at full strength, but this security was of no benefit to them. But her punch has no effect. Eyebrow raised, she threw another, harder punch. Still no effect.

Hand transformed into blades, and she can’t scratch the metal at all. Terribly familiar.

“Everything okay, J?”

“It’s warded.”

“I’m sure if we just wait—”

The door opened in the middle of N’s reply.

Florescent lights flickered on as they enter the bunker. Bright and sterile illumination revealed an abject mess. All manner of plastic and metal trash lined the floor, tools and scrap, the debris no doubt left by the passage of worker drone salvagers.

Beneath the layer of scrap, wires snaked across the floor beneath their legs. J stabbed one, and oil spurted out.

“Hm.” She integrated some data. “Looks like we know where the toasters got their ‘ward’ idea from. And here I was about to give them some credit.”

N stepped into the room after J. The bunker couldn’t all be seen from the entrance — the floorplan had as much, if not more area than the house above it. A wall split the entrance room, with two doorways. N darted forward glancing in one door way — and he froze.

Nonplussed, J started after him. As expected, it’s nothing — an offline worker drone. A domestic model, dressed up in a butler’s suit.

N stared at it with an odd expression, but J moved on.

Splitting up, J opting to explore the right side of the bunker. J kept her sensors online — thermal imaging, spatial audio, special disassembly scans — but no threats emerged from within the strange human bunker. A couple other worker drones stood around (one bearing the cryptic Error 606) but there’s no echo of the faux horrorshow beneath the church.

In one room, she found scraps of paper, a few oilstained with the odd triangular symbol. J swept them all up and dissolved them in nanite acid — might as well avoid re-triggering whatever error made V bug out seeing things like this.

The next room held a few more offline drones, one in a maid outfit that caught J’s eye. A laptop sat on a table, battery dead, but J saw a debugging cable running from the laptop to a drone. Beside the cable, an open box filled with cords, plugs, and hardware tools. J would recognize a JcJenson technician’s kit anywhere — but this kit had black electrical tape stuck to the side, hiding the JcJenson (in SPAAAAACEE!!!!) logo.

J glanced over the contents. She had her own debugging cable, and had no use for the others (aux? DisplayPort? a Game Boy link cable!? Did drones even interface with that?) It bore a few surprises — magnets?

But what widened J’s eyes is a hexagonal software upload spike — capable of uploading the wdOS_606 virus directly into a drone's core. Again, J had her own (just in case the worst came and one of her squadmates proved corrupted), but wdOS_606 was not software distributed lightly. An ordinary technician could not have access to this.

But that wasn’t the only spike present. Deeper in the toolkit, with a note clipped to it, there is another. According to the irregular humanscratch, the new spike served as a boot disk, abusing the core drivers to sideload a new software. wdOS_606 didn't take effect immediately, after all — as the virus compromised the system, even the company's patented, revolutionary security would be overwhelmed. A perfect opportunity to rewrite otherwise encrypted OS strings.

The company had equipped her with nothing of the sort. She contemplated it for a moment. The branding wasn't machine-printed, it was marker-penned. And surely officially sanctioned procedure wouldn’t be so roundabout, seeming so much like a hack, an exploit, a subversion. Would this at all further the goal of disassembly, or was it just a means of inflicting corruption? Well... Safer in my hands than a worker drone's, that’s for sure.

The company trusted J not to fall to corruption’s siren. If not her, then who?

05:45

She reunited with N in the rearmost room of the bunker. Several screens adorned the wall, powered off but hooked up to a computer tower taller than they are.

N squeaked — a sound a disassembly drone should never make — and ran up to the computer. He jumped in the office chair, spun around a bit, and started excitedly pushing keyboard buttons. (Around the keyboard, papers littered the desk in a mess.)

On her way over, J depressed a power-on button and waved N off.

“Quit it, let me see if this thing boots up.”

The screen flashed on quicker than expected, and some of N’s random button presses get sent as input.

Incorrect password.
Warning: after 5 failed attempts, disk will be wiped.
4 attempts remaining.

“Look what you did. Leave this to me.”

J stared at the password prompt for a moment. Who could afford to install a top of the line security system capable of enduring the core collapse? Who would have access to not one, but several domestic worker drones? The Error 606, the wardwires — all of this suggested a deep familiarity with the inner principles of worker drones. It was a riddle, and J knew the answer.

J types in JcJenson.

Very incorrect password.
Corporate bootlicker detected.
0 attempts remaining.
You can't silence me.

“Why you libelous—”

“Hey J?”

“What?”

“I uh, think whoever was here before us already cracked the password.”

N pointed to one of the pieces of paper littering the desk. It bore the same mechanical handwriting that had penned the pages J dissolved.

J huffed and typed it in: 16DgLX2c0ke9qk0u.

While there might’ve been interesting files to peruse on the computer, J had one real goal. Computer-controlled electronics filled the bunker. From this terminal, she could control the lights, open or lock any of the doors, send commands to the worker drones (none of whom were online).

But most importantly? J had access to the climate control. She could turn the thermostat low, to downright frigid temperatures.

The sun couldn’t reach them here. They were in absolutely no danger of overheating. There was even drone oil to spare!

J had held out, reserved judgment, nursed her doubts as best as she could. But now, she had to admit it.

“Am I dreaming? I never thought I’d say this, but...” J hung on her next words, but she finished what she started, “Good job, N. You made a plan, carried it through to fruition in spite of everything. We… owe our lives to you. Or well, V does. I could have survived just fine.” J looked away. “Still… good job.”

N beamed at her. Literally beaming, his ^_^ face shining at its highest brightness as he bounced, squeaking.

05:50

“And that’s the sun rising. Let’s get to bed.”

V stands in the basement of a crumbling church. She’s pinned to the walls and can’t move. Dirt pours in from above, burying her, and there’s a word you realize was never processed but clicks in the negative space — catacomb.

Blackness.

A high temp icon flashes on N’s visor, and he falls flat on his butt. V lunges for J, a hunter’s ‘X’ blazoned on her visor. J holds a sword — not an arm transformed, extending a weapon, but an actual human sword, hilt and crossguard and half a meter of blade — and swings it at the winged, fanged beast lunging at her. J slashes and catches V with a brutal gash tearing open her chest. V falls to the ground, and J stands victorious. She looks into the other drone’s dark visor and there’s nothing there, only J’s reflection. J has no winning smile for this victory; she looks scared, shaken.

Blackness.

V stands, doused in oil. It runs in rivulets down her chassis. The oil coating her face looks like tear tracks. ‘X’ on her visor, V sits on a pile of worker drone corpses. Except the screens flicking on, one by one then two by two, showing static, glitching artifacts, error messages. Then in a wave overtaking the screens, a triangular glyph spreads. The ‘X’ is gone from V’s visor, replaced now by a empty-eyed look of fear. It’s familiar. If the screen was off, J could be looking in a reflection.

She’s scared. They’re both scared. What’s going on? What does this mean? Why won’t you tell me anything —

V screams.

Darkness.

It’s not completely black, not the void of no visual input. None of the lights are on, but there were dim lights that never went off in this bunker — such as a drone’s visor.

J’s screen flickered from Sleep Mode to a clock ([12:06]) to eyes. She flushed some garbage experiential data from her RAM — some temp files created by memory consolidation processes attempting to compress the day’s events into an abstracted, transformed representation, as well by prediction routines using those updated representation to extrapolate new scenarios. Key functions for an artificial intelligence capable of unsupervised learning.

(In other words: bad dreams.)

J hung upside down. She’d climbed to the ceiling, her tail digging into the plaster (not warded, thankfully), and the bottom of her legs magnetized to the metal of an inactive light fixture.

Hanging upside down like this, oil could flow down to her central processor without needing to spend any energy pumping it. J wiggled a bit, getting some of her servos moving out of weird configurations they’d locked into while recharging.

Recharging… it was only noon. Why is J online already?

The sound of V’s scream lingered in her memory despite the flushing. J looked around, and saw the female drone scrambling off the floor to a stand, the fearful look on her face oddly familiar.

“Where are we? When — Why did she—”

“V?” It was N’s voice, and it was soft. “You feeling alright?”

V stiffened at his voice. J watched calm disinterest wrap itself around her expression. She shrugged. “I feel nothing. Who are you?”

(Why did N’s tone make her scowl? He never talked to J like that. And she didn’t want him to start. But had anyone ever talked to J like that? If anyone had earned that affection, if anyone deserved it, she did. Confusingly, J couldn’t tell if she missed it, or longed for it.)

“Doesn’t matter,” J growled. “The mission encountered market volatility and had to adapt. We’re in a bunker. I’ll explain in the evening. So will you. Go to sleep, V. Tonight, we need to talk.”

V flinched in J’s direction. Then she crossed her arms. “Whatever you say, captain.”

J watched the other disassembly drone climb up to the ceiling to sleep properly. V didn’t meet her eye the whole time.

When the other drones entered sleep mode, cores burning oil to recharge their batteries, J sighed.

Shutting off her optics, sleep comes, but J could still see V.

“N? W-what are you wearing?”

“Oh! You remembered my name!”

“I — Just a lucky guess. Now answer.”

V was (again) loud enough to wake J up, but at least it wasn’t a scream, this time.

When J turned on her optics, she had to fire off a quick system command to check if she was still dreaming.

Because N stood in the middle of the room. He wore a familiar suit and tie. (Why familiar?) On either hands, he balanced platters — one bore plates of batteries and the other he poured glasses of drone oil. He twirled the plates without spilling a drop.

J fell to the ground, still staring at N and finally placing the suit. “Why are you dressed like a worker drone?” Another day, J might have laced the words with venom, and made no secret of veiled attack on N’s competence. And yes, there wasn’t none of that (this was N, after all), but J held back, a little.

“Well, they weren’t using it and it seemed a bit… dapper? I thought it’d look nice.”

“And the plates?” J asked.

“Breakfast in bed?”

“It’s 19:17 in the evening and we sleep hanging from the ceiling.”

N frowned. Then a lightbulb. “Dinner while dangling, then?”

J facepalmed.

V fell to the ground quite a while after J, still regarding N with a strange expression. “Do you remember?” she asked.

“Remember what?”

“Nevermind. Don’t worry about it. Just… we’re disassembly drones, not worker drones. Keep dressing like one and I might get confused.” V flashed an X, making both N and J jolt (for different reasons).

“Don’t bother,” J said, waving a hand. “Disassembly drones taste awful.”

N turned to gawk at J. “H… How do you know that?”

J didn’t answer, just reached out for one of the glasses of oil N prepared, taking a sip. Not good, honestly — the best oil was fresh, and this wasn’t. But it had been half a day since J shut anything down, and it was better than nothing. Certainly got the taste of V out of her mouth.

Both N and V were watching J with odd expressions, but she ignored it. “What’s with the batteries? We aren’t workers, we generate our own power.”

“Can still eat them! I thought they were kinda tasty.”

V downed a glass of oil, then tossed the glass to shatter against the hard floor behind her. “I’ll pass.”

“Hmph,” J hummed. She tossed a battery into her mouth. Watts of power trickled into her system, the acid tickling in a way oil never did. Immediately, her head lifted a bit higher. The brief influx of energy lifted her mood like a mission completed. J nodded. “Charging ourselves from existing power source means more oil available for other functions. That would be… efficient.” Another good idea from N? Did it take heat damage to make a useful disassembler out of this one?

V scoffed. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“Resource management is its own reward. Have you never optimized cash flow?”

“Have you?”

J lashed her tail and scowled. “Since you’re up and bantering, I take it you’re ready to deliver your after action report?”

With optics trained on V, it was easy to detect the subtle tension that stiffed in the drone at those words. Her tone remained casual, though.

“You’re still doing this? You realize no one reads your reports, right? It’s a hobby, at this point. Don’t see why we have to participate.”

Why wouldn’t you want your operations organized and documented? J kept a detailed account of their shutdown quotas and patrol routes. Sure, none of that was required — but no one ever got promoted by doing only what was required. She was sure the higher ups would appreciate her meticulous records.

What J said to V was: “The debrief is more than just an account of what drones were destroyed. It’s important to keep abreast of employee morale and potential group dysfunction. You can imagine exactly why I’d be particularly interested in your report, after last night. Right, V?”

N looked between the two of them, perplexed.

V started, “You don’t—”

J interrupted, seizing control. “Save it. Get your thoughts together, if you must. We won’t need to cover that episode immediately. There’s a process to this, I’m sure your remember by now.” J walked across the room, from below where she slept to sitting in the swiveled chair in front of the computer monitors.

V sighed. N stood at attention.

The male disassembly drone stayed at her right, while the other leaned against a spare table to the left of this main desk. V leaned against the table rather than standing straight. Instead of focusing on J, she had switched her hands for three bladed claws, and licked the oil off them. Why didn’t the transformation function clean for you? But J shook off the thought.

J gathered up some of the blank paper either the humans or the the worker drones had left around. This would do just fine. She transformed her hand into a hand holding a sturdy JcJenson branded pen.

J clicked it for ink, and began, “Captain’s log, October 29, 3071…”

As she spoke, and as she jotted down half formed thoughts on the paper in front of her, she brought up a spreadsheet program on her internal window, and filled in the serial numbers for the drones she shutdown. The real work would be done digitally (it was 3071, after all), but J enjoyed the feel of the pen scratching. Any excuse to use the merchandise was a good one.

In the end, J had shutdown 17 drones tonight. She prompted the others for their shutdown totals. N offlined 11 — an improvement, admittedly.

V deflected — “Do you really expect me to keep count?” and “Who keeps track of the serials? The thousands of dead all blend together after a while.” — but once J cut through the banter, V remembered every serial number. 28 total for her.

J combed over the spreadsheet, aligning the columns, adding notes. A curious pattern to last night’s drones — many of the drones had similar serials. Related origins? (J knew the drones of Copper-9 liked to pretend to be humans, roleplaying as family units. Inexplicable self-anthropomorphization.)

What interested her more were the malformed serial numbers, as if the product of a corrupted manufacture. A few of the ruined factories scattered throughout the world could be coaxed into operation, she knew. The population of worker drones trended down, thanks to their work, but new ones were still being created.

J couldn’t settle on an evaluation. Rampant self-replicating AI is exactly what they were sent here to stop (fortunately, it clearly wasn’t self-improving, and even “intelligence” might be a stretch). But more worker drones meant more drones to shutdown…

J didn’t know what their orders would be, after Copper-9 was clear. A retrieval shuttle, and more planets to cleanse?

(Was there something waiting for her back on earth?)

“J?”

“What is it, N?”

“You spaced out a bit there?”

“I was organizing the spreadsheet.”

“Oh my bad, sorry.”

V muttered. “And here I thought I was the one procrastinating.” She stood up from leaning on a table, and walked toward the door. “If you’re just gonna fiddle with the books, this meeting is over, yeah?”

J kicked out her feet, sending her office chair sliding to the center of the room. She spread her wings, blocking V’s escape.

V laughed. J could interpret it as shaky, nervous, but only because she was primed to search for weakness — she knew V was hiding something.

“Come on, J. Instead of sitting here typing in numbers, why not go out and make the number go up?” V smiled and winked at her. Again, if J looked she could interpret the cracks in it.

“Tell me what happened under the church, V.”

V stared at the wing blocking her path for several silent ticks of the clock. “What’s there to tell? You were there. You saw everything I did.”

J’s expression remained flat. “Only one of us walked out of there online, and I want to know why.”

“I didn’t go offline, you forced me into sleep mode. And I checked the logs — someone went fucking with my system while I was down. That was you, wasn’t it, adminj? Let me guess, you’re asking me because you couldn’t get the answers on your own. Stay out of my head and go back to LARPing as middle management.”

“Done?”

“That’s all I have to say. Move your wing or I’ll move it myself.” V switched her hand for her favored sword-blade, and J simply raised an eyebrow.

N both looked like he wanted to say something and wanted to be literally anywhere else. He looked helplessly between V and J.

“Are you threatening a superior, V?” J clicked her pen once, the inked tip disappearing. “I tolerate a lot of back talk from you, but there’s a line between a sharp personality and insubordination. I let you LARP as an aloof psycho who can’t even remember our names because you’re effective. But what happened under the church? That wasn’t effective.”

“The drones were dead. The church was cleared. I got the job done. It doesn’t matter.”

“That’s not your call. You don’t get to decide what does and doesn’t matter when I’m the one planning and managing this squad.”

“You care about what’s effective, J? Our mission is to kill drones and pile them to the sky. That doesn’t take planning and it doesn’t take asking questions. Your mission isn’t to understand what’s going on, J.”

J was looking up to V from her seat in the chair. “Do you understand what’s going on? I can figure out for us. I know you’re scared too—”

“No. I’ve made peace with what I am.”

It was a millisecond — J had to scan frame by frame — but V glanced at N for an instant.

J clicked her pen, inked tip returning. She leaned in closer, and spoke between visible fangs. “You don’t get to say no to me, V. This isn’t a negotiation. Tell me what happened under the church. What did you see? That’s an order.”

V laughed. “And if I don’t answer? N told me how hard you tried to save me, when you could have left me for dead. Face it, either you realize you need me or you don’t have what it takes to kill me. Either way, you’re just posturing. No.”

“Do you still remember our mission? Because it’s not to ‘kill drones’ — we’re cleansing this world of corrupted AI.” J clicked her pen, sheathing. “You’re normally effective, V. But locking up over a dead drone isn’t normal. It’s becoming clear that you’ve been corrupted.”

J stood from her swivel chair, finally eye level with V. She advanced a step.

“You’re right that I don’t want to kill you, V. I still remember what you’re capable of. But if you won’t answer me…” J transformed her hand, and produced the modified software spike.

V tried to sound unperturbed. “A virus spike? Gonna stake me through the heart and melt my brain?”

“Not quite. A boot disk — this can rewrite your OS. Perhaps you’ll be more cooperative with a clean install.”

V blew out exhaust. “Whatever.”

For a moment, J hoped that was assent, concession. She almost relaxed. But she could tell the millisecond things went wrong.

V’s main thread executed hunting routines. Her eyes disappeared from her visor. Her own wings spread, slicing the wood of the table behind her. Her legs bent into a fighting stance.

J wasn’t on guard. V would act first. J didn’t even have a weapon out, just hands.

“Woah woah woah, stop stop stop!”

Then there was a disassembly drone between the two of them, one hand pointed at either them. V lost the wide ‘x’ as soon as she saw N.

“We don’t have to kill each other, and we don’t have to wipe anyone’s OS! Please!”

“N,” J said sweetly. “You’ve done well, so I’ll charitably assume you didn’t mean to push me. But this is a private disciplinary matter between me and V. See yourself out~”

J didn’t mention that V would have caught her off-guard. Loath as she was to admit it, V greatly exceeded J in terms of practice inflicting damage to drones. Even equal footing didn’t feel balanced.

J should have just hit her with the spike without talking. She loved it when workers understood just how pointless their struggle was before she killed them. V wasn’t a worker drone, though. Yet she’s corrupted like one.

“N,” V said. “If J is going to fuck with my configuration, do you really think you’re safe with her?”

N frowned, but then he said, “I trust her, V. She’s our captain! She just wants what’s best for the squad. Maybe she doesn’t know everything you do, but please. We don’t need to kill each other over it!”

“Does it hurt to know that N is outperforming you, V? If I were you, I’d welcome having my software corrected.”

“That—that won’t be necessary!”

J cocked her head at N.

“I’ll talk to her. We’re AI capable of unsupervised learning, right? You said I’m outperforming V… then maybe I could teach her! Please, J. Let me talk to her before… before you do anything drastic.”

J stared at N and scrutinized. V watched N with an expression of surprise but also… recognition?

“I’m putting a lot of faith in you, N. But… that investment returned dividends, last time.” J sighed. She folded her wings, and turned to the doorway. “Fine. Consider this meeting adjourned. She’s your responsibility, N. But if she has another episode…” J turned around, and between two fingers held up the applicator. “She’s mine. And I think I’ll start by reformatting that bloated memory file of hers.”

J left, and V’s hateful eyes bored into her retreating form.

J needed fresh air.

Not literally — her intake and exhaust vents were for passive cooling and expelling semi-combusted drone oil byproducts. But figuratively? J needed out of this bunker.

The airlock hissed around J.

She smoothed her hair. Her hand transformed into another utility preset — a (literal) handmirror — and she checked her reflection. Her hair wasn’t smooth. She swore running her fingers through it pulled it further out of place.

But her squad falling apart and her dreams of top team turning to ash was no excuse not to look her best.

She climbed the slope and stepped into the blessedly cold night air.

J pulled at and combed her hair as she walked, but the evidence of her mirror didn’t change. It was a mess. She’d messed it up.

J sighed. She transformed the mirror into a sword, and her other hand as well. Carefully, she lifted them, crossed the blades, and scissored off her two pigtails.

Then she concentrated — executed a special disassembly function, and regenerated the damage.

Sword turned to handmirror. Check the reflection.

J looked fine. Proper and compressed. J was fine.

J was the most effective disassembly drone in this sector of Copper-9, and she was stuck with the worst squad holding her back. N had risen in her estimation, and V had fallen, and the result was simply that they were both just short of worthless. She could barely depend on them. Synergistic liabilities.

J clicked her pen.

She’d never get her own branded pen, would she?

No. She was the most effective disassembler here. Her squad held her back — but that only meant that without them, she could reach her full potential.

Those two knew the way back home, and a whole night stretched out in front of them. J didn’t need to worry about them, not now.

No, J would go hunting. Alone. With her tactics, with her organization, she bet could shutdown just as many drones on her own. Maybe even more.

(How would V feel about that?)

J spread her wings, and took off into the lonely night air.

First, she would fly back to the spire.