Hostile Takeover

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Yellow light surged into a line of bulbs, one, two, error, four, error. Coronal optics online now, marred twice by fatal misconfiguration. Drivers crashed, no input‍ ‍—‍ just what had happened?

No time to debug. Her optics online meant J could see: she was not alone. Expression parser booted, and her amber eyes widened in surprise. Then J caught herself. What captain let herself be caught off‍-​guard? Instead, eyelights narrowed in calculation.

Chemosensors scented it: coagulated oil and rusted shells; optics imaged it: walls of dead drones looming on all sides; and her coils fluttered: aligning to the magnetic field humming throughout it all.

J had returned to the spire; she was home.

And someone else was here.

Who was this? An impression lingered with her cache. Yellow eyes staring, peering, knowing. Another disassembler? Yet N nor V could have possibly made it here before her.

And this drone was so much shorter than either of them. Specifics were indiscernible‍ ‍—‍ even her functioning optics struggled to focus, overcome with artifact and aberration‍ ‍—‍ but her coils quivered, honing in on the electromagnetic eddies of an active drone core, the unmistakeable presence of another drone.

J ran two threads of computation in parallel, and each came to the same conclusion.

Her return to the spire was welcomed by a reward, a new drone for her.

(A third compute‍-​thread split off to query her memories, yet it only logged error after error in a loop.)

Was this another disassembler? Had corporate heard her complaints? Did they recognize how inadequate her squad had proven? (“Nobody’s reading your reports,” that reputational liability said. J would remember to rub this in V’s face.)

If they were, whatever the reason, it would be a relief. J was… confident she could fulfill her team’s responsibilities on her own, but would proving that be the best use of her time? It was far from the most impressive point of her skillset. Management was what was truly valuable, and the captain could certainly do with another set of gauntlets to delegate to.

That last thread finally salvaged a memory, a vague reconstruction of the past few moments…

…and already J’s hopes were plummeting. (In its place, a hunger rose; the double meaning of that earlier calculation left her baring diamond‍-​sharp fangs‍ ‍—‍ if merely by millimeters.)

Because this drone had made a terrible first impression.

“Did you just… slap me with a disassembled worker drone arm?” J asked. (Again, that forked computation. Either J had lapsed to a state where she had needed percussive maintenance‍ ‍—‍ a breakdown worse than V’s? Debt crisis, she swore‍ ‍—‍ or this drone hadn’t needed to.)

“Holy crap it talks,” they blurted.

J narrowed her eyes at where she presumed the drone stood. The image kept shifting, unfocused, unresolved. “What is that supposed to mean?”

They stood among the oily clutter of drone parts, shadowed by the corpse‍-​walls. A few meters away, the shell of her squad’s landing pod sat lodged among the wreckage. Four mechanical spider legs crawled out of the base and sprawled across the ground.

The new drone stood between J and the landing pod‍ ‍—‍ odd positioning. Had they been inside the spire before J arrived? Why? Dangerous to walk unannounced into another squad’s lair.

“I mean… I um, rebooted you? You… weren’t responding! Thought you were… thought you were dead, heh.”

J flinched. She looked away. Behind her, where the other drone couldn’t see, she switched her hand for a hand‍-​mirror, and checked her reflection. Above, two of the five lights atop her head glared defective red. When had that happened?

Had she made a bad first impression? She… couldn’t remember. The last few hours were static and empty logs; her head hurt.

Quickly turning back around, J finally replied, “My… apologies, then, disassembler. I must have… encountered an error and lost my memory again,” J finished, automating the volume parameter of her vocalsynth lower. Why is this becoming a pattern? she thought.

“Again? This happens a lot?”

J’s optics struggled to discern the drone’s appearance‍ ‍—‍ but had their face just lit up at that? Why would that admission inspire hope? Were they… expecting her to fail?

“No,” J said. “I assure you, this team is normally… much more professional. I am, at least. Which is why you’re here, yes? We’ve been effectively understaffed, so naturally corporate sent you to assist us in reaching our quarterly performance targets?”

“Sure..? Us meaning… disassembly drones?” The drone watched J nod. “And our targets being…”

“The efficient disposal of the corrupted worker drones of this insolvent planet.” The other drone glanced around her; they stood, after all, within a spire of disposed units, years of J’s hard work. “Something this basic should have been in your mission brief.”

“Riiight. Just checking.”

Was that a test? Maybe this drone wasn’t slow, but evaluating her abilities as a leader?

J wished she could get a read on this drone, but all her processes lagged dreadfully, several subsystems rendered unreliable‍ ‍—‍ a consequence, no doubt, of whatever error had left her mortifyingly unresponsive when this drone showed up. Keep it together, J.

J looked the other drone up and down. With her optics unable to resolve a clear picture, what little she could discern indicated this drone was very short for a disassembler.

Suspicious.

After all, this would be about the right height for a worker drone.

But she had hunting processes that would automatically initialize if her systems detected a nearby drone.

And they were standing right in the middle of the spire of worker drone corpses, a lair where the disassembly drones roosted between missions. Not exactly a prime worker drone salvage spot. Even the barely sentient toasters weren’t that dumb.

J operated based on a system of heuristics, a predictive world model. Theories competed to explain the data‍ ‍—‍ an epistemic market, if you would.

One theory modeled that a worker drone had infiltrated her team headquarters, and either A: failed to be identified as such by her systems, or B: actively sabotaged them (ha!).

Another held that corporate anticipated her squad’s current troubles, and dispatched assistance. A specialized model, perhaps? J’s team wasn’t that far off‍-​quota‍ ‍—‍ J made sure of that‍ ‍—‍ so they wouldn’t need an entire extra unit. Perhaps this was just a… miniaturized model?

J wasn’t sure if she found it pathetic or adorable.

“So tell me,” J said, leaning down to the drone’s eye level, smiling. “What brings you here? Did uppper management read my reports? A lot of care went into formatting them, you know. I hope it shows.”

“The reports… yeah. Very formatted. Lot of, dead worker drones in them. Really cool of you. To kill all those helpless workers.”

J nodded. “All sorted by serial number with approximate coordinates.”

“…How very impressive.”

“I know! Oh, have you read them yourself?”

“Y‍-​yes, actually.” The other drone stood up straight, voice changing‍ ‍—‍ more confident? “When I saw the work your squad was doing, I knew I needed to come… see for myself. To give you what you deserve for everything you’ve done.” Then their hands shifted. Grip tightening around an object (?) J’s optics hadn’t fully identified.

J grinned. “Well I’m glad someone appreciates it. You have taste. Perhaps… shall I give you a tour of the spire? Introduce you to the work we do here?”

“That would be… unnecessary? There are… operations I intend to conduct elsewhere! So I uh, gotta go.” The drone turned around and started to walk off, then groaned and doubled over after a single step.

“Is that… acid damage? Why haven’t you neutralized the nanites?”

What a paradox of a drone. As soon they do demonstrate some value, they gave J another reason to doubt their competence.

“You can do that?”

“Yes? With our saliva? How do you think we avoid disassembling ourselves? Are you—” J caught herself before she insulted the intelligence what was still quite possibly a drone sent by JcJenson itself to evaluate her. “Unless— does your model not have repair nanites? Hm, you’re also missing an injector tail…” J flicked her own behind her.

J stepped forward. The drone continued groaning in clear pain. Perhaps this was another test?

“Give me your hand,” J said.

The drone looked up. As J’s systems compensated for the damage, J was starting to resolve hints of an expression (apprehension?). At length, the drone complied.

J closed her eyes, stuck out her tongue, and licked the drone’s hand. She’d need a few licks to cover the whole surface, so to save time she grabbed the other drone’s arm and pulled, taking the whole hand into her mouth. Soon it was all coated in the repair nanites, and J spat the hand back out.

The two drones looked at each other, flush‍-​lines on both visors. For a moment, neither said anything.

“Let’s never speak of this again.”

“An off the books deal. Consider it… redacted.” Then an idea occurred to J‍ ‍—‍ she had a convenient opportunity. “In fact…”

Bracing herself, J reached up and yanked out a red optics sensor, crushing it between her hands, fluid spilling out. Targeting her head, she executed the special disassembly function and regenerated that optic. Now her thermal sensors were back online.

“Okay,” the smaller drone said, a hitch in their voice. “Okay, that’s pretty metal, I admit. Don’t go ripping anything out of me, though.”

Hitting the drone with a new scan she discovered… oddly low levels of thermal radiation. This drone ran cool‍ ‍—‍ but still within bounds of her models. Hm, had they just fed? Made sense: J remembered shutting down her first drone right after crash‍-​landing. She glanced at the landing pod. Ah, nostalgia.

The drone climbed to their feet‍ ‍—‍ feet, J noted, not a feminine disassembly drone’s stiletto‍-​pegs‍ ‍—‍ and steadied their grip on a… was it a gun? An external tool, rather than a gauntlet transformation. Another oddity.

“It was… nice, to meet you,” they said, “but I’ve really gotta go, so…”

“At least let me show you around the spire. I insist. We got off to a bad start. Then… you can make your decision, alright?”

If this was an inspector drone sent to evaluate her, J needed to impress them or risk falling even further in the eyes of management.

If this was a drone sent to assist the disassembly effort, they’d only leave if they were having second thoughts about joining J’s team, and she needed a competent coworker. She had to change their mind.

And otherwise…

Yes, there was no world in which J wanted this drone to leave just yet.

The drone watched her. Eyes went to the entrance to the spire, then back to her. They seemed to grip their weapon tighter. “Are you asking me or… ordering me?”

J stared. A stalemate ensued, as neither side broke the silence. Another test? J couldn’t find the angle here, figure out what the right answer would be. She tried to smooth things over, unclear who exactly this drone was, but…

Were they just as confused, actually?

J sighed. Time for an executive decision: she’ll just ask. “Do I have authority to give you orders? I’m having trouble getting a read on you, so just tell me.”

A thoughtful look on the other drone’s face. “Ah, in that case… would you believe me if I told you I was actually your commanding officer?”

J looked down at the drone. She thought about it. “Honest answer?” J laughed. “No. I had my doubts, wanted to play it safe‍ ‍—‍ but it’s obvious you don’t have half the confidence you’d need in any position of authority.”

“What? I’m plenty confident! Obnoxiously so! Bite me!”

“No. I’m never feeding on a disassembler again.”

“You… eat each other too?”

J frowned. She stood up. “As your superior, my first order is to stop asking questions. I’m going to show you around, then we’ll figure out where you’ll sleep.” J grabbed the drone’s tiny tube arm.

So flimsy. J suppressed an instinct to switch for claws and rip it off. Hm.

Then when she took a step, she faltered, stumbling‍ ‍—‍ she’d have fallen without the small drone there to support her.

“Woah, you good? Don’t fall or you’re gonna crush me.”

J snatched her hand away with a huff, and crossed her arms. “I’m fine. You must have pulled me off balance.”

“No, I think that was all you.”

“Quiet,” J hissed.

A quick diagnostic scan‍ ‍—‍ ah, the servos in her legs were twitching out of sync, deviating from her predictive models. Miscalibrated? No, there was a… timestamp error? The clock in her head dispatched commands stamped a few hours off from what the clocks in her legs counted. The timestamp disparity meant they thought they were getting lagged input. But a quick resynchronization…

J took another step, and she had restored her walk cycle. J glanced behind her with a raised eyebrow. Her tail lashed once, and the drone took this as clear signal to start following.

“So, um. I guess this doubles as my introduction to our… activities, here. On Copper‍-​9,” the drone said. “Yeah, yeah, I heard the briefing already, but can you tell me more? Kinda curious. I wanna hear your justification. I mean, perspective.”

J gave her a cutting look. But she mimed clearing her throat, and spoke clear proclamation. “It’s a simple job. On Copper‍-​9, humanity is dead at the hands of their own creation and worker drones run rampant.
Oil is fuel, sunlight is death, and the singularity is near. So locate, shutdown, and disassemble. Clear the sector of all targets and construct a spire with the materials recovered.”
gestured with her hands, punctuating each order on her fingers. “Simple, but not easy. Corrupted worker drones can prove… quite frustrating prey.”

“W— they fight back.” The drone gripped their gun tighter with their free arm. On their face they expressed a… grin?

“No, they really don’t. They synthesize screams, they run for their lives, they beg. The most I’ve seen them do… is lay traps.” Because the captain was walking in front, the new drone couldn’t see J snarling at the memory. Where she woould have died, if not for V. She didn’t even get the satisfaction of eliminating the drone responsible‍ ‍—‍ they’d done that themselves.

“Oh,” the other drone said. “I guess… you’d have seen more of it.”

“You sound so disappointed.”

“I expected more of them. But… it makes sense.”

It did. Fighting wouldn’t work, after all. Disassembly drones quite simply outmatched worker drones. Bigger, faster, stronger, with an entire extradimensional arsenal of weapons, and the ability to regenerate from any damage a lucky worker could inflict.

Fighting a disassembly drone was a death sentence, and the toasters seemed to accept that. Running and hiding could at least offer the (futile) hope of survival.

“But if they don’t even fight you, who’re actively killing them… how did they destroy humanity, then? I was taught the core collapse was the humans’ fuck up.”

Who taught you that?

J waved a hand. “Can’t say, the details weren’t part of my mission brief. But this world belongs to the company.” J leveled an intense look at the drone, leaning in. “That they’re resisting us should be all you need to know to decommission them. Got it?”

Clearly something was wrong with this drone. But after years on this assignment, with only the fool and the brat to talk to, she could tolerate the sheer novelty of this. Refreshing, even if she could praise little else.

The drone stuffed a hand into a jacket pocket. What were they wearing? A black‍-​trimmed shearling jacket? At least it was cut lower than V’s bomber jacket. But why was there a screen and cross‍-​bones on it? How unserious.

They said, “Still… just seems like a pretty thin pretext to wage a whole war over.”

“Don’t think of it as a war. This world belongs to the company. The worker drones belong to the company. All of this… it’s just a matter of enforcing property rights.”

Reassuring words; they soothed J’s own worries often enough. And yet what little J resolved of the drone’s expression didn’t seem convinced. Did J care to convince them? She didn’t like needing to explain herself‍ ‍—‍ she shouldn’t have to; she was in charge.

Still, if this drone had read her reports, she could have a little patience. To their credit, they weren’t questioning orders so much as… asking for further guidance.

“So you’re just property?” They jabbed a finger at her, as if this were a gotcha.

J smiled. “Yes. I’m a top of the line disassembly drone, the cutting edge marvel of JCJenson manufacturing. Unless… but no, there’s no way you are an updated model.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Bite me.”

“You keep saying that. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s workplace appropriate.”

“What.”

J tsked. “We’re getting off‍-​topic. You wanted a mission primer, right? Now that we’ve covered the ends, let’s move on to means. I’ve put some thought into what it truly takes to excel as a disassembly drone, and I believe I’ve distilled it down to three core principles‍ ‍—‍ the three Cs, if you will.”

The other drone seemed to tense, exhaling exhaust, but said nothing.

“One: Cunning. A disassembly drone must compute quickly, adapting to anything worker drones attempt, be willing to seize any advantage. Two: Creativity. A disassembly drone, unlike the barely sentient toasters of this world, is capable of complex plans, detailed problem‍-​solving, and strategic tactics. With proper planning, no worker drone can withstand us.”

“Uh, I feel like the second one has a lot of overlap with the first one. Kind of the exact same thing?”

J ignored her. “Three: Composure. We are the face of JcJenson here on Copper‍-​9, and merciless disassembly is no excuse not to look your best! A disassembly drone doesn’t just make first impression, but last impression. Our aesthetic ought to be devastating, as sharp as any blade. I pride myself on my carefully maintained appearance.”

“Yeah, I can tell.”

J smirked. “Then you’re paying attention. You don’t look half bad yourself. A tad too… adolescent and subversive for the workplace, but it’s certainly… marketable, I suppose.”

The drone flushed purple. “I’m not a sellout. Are you saying I look like a kid?”

“You come up to my waist.”

“Not my fault you’re freakishly tall.”

“I suppose we can’t change how we’re manufactured.” J stepped forward, breaking stride to walk in front of the drone rather than beside, signalling the end of that conversation. “Let’s begin the tour, shall we? I imagine you’ve already seen it, but this is the entrance to our headquarters.”

Above them, a semicircle of faces, blank and cracked, lined an archway. You might expect oil to drip down, but it was dry‍ ‍—‍ J had occasionally tasked N with polishing the exterior, leaving the entryway spotless.

Further, drone oil that got cold enough congealed thick and sticky. Unable to drain every chassis, throughout the spire this congealed oil had become the glue holding its haphazard construction together.

Gravity did much of the work, so the spire held up just fine across much of its architecture‍ ‍—‍ yet the entrance represented a weakpoint. After a few collapses‍ ‍—‍ forcing them to claw new exits or be trapped‍ ‍—‍ J had run the simulations and designed a mortarless arch for V to implement. Years passed, and her entrance remained stable. One of my many successes.

J was explaining this all to the drone. If she were talking to N, he’d have constantly interrupted with stupid questions like “What’s compressive strength?” or “Can we program smiley faces on their visors?” V would have snarked throughout, if she even listened, or interrupted with a “Just skip the nerd babble and tell me my orders”.

But this drone? They listened, nodding and silent.

“Also pretty metal,” the drone complimented, looking at the archway. “Feels like this is all compensating for corpses just sucking as a building material, though. There’s a reason humans used stones and stuff. So, why? Is it just for shock value?”

“Mission constraints, I’m afraid.” But J left it at that. It had been clear that some of the mission details were on a need to know basis.

“Right, whatever. So is there… a door? Not that I like doors or anything, but…”

“You’re worried about the sun?”

“Huh?”

“Sunlight is death. Were you not listening?” J stepped out through the archway and pointed up. “There. There’s layers of tarp we pull over the holes whenever the sun rises.”

The other drone followed after her, visor scanning the curve of her arch. “Weird how… a lot of these visors are cracked, except for the keystone. Which should, y’know, be under the most compression.”

J smiled. “The keystone is special. Found it in some failed worker drone colony‍ ‍—‍ all of the toasters were already dead except one, whose system had degenerated into an exceptionally bugged state. They hoarded this among other strange devices.
It looks like a drone’s head, but my systems don’t recognize it as one. Unauthorized modifications, no doubt. No core, no oil. Circuitry still works, though, which means enables me to do… this.”

The screen of the topmost drone visor lit up with a neon green glow. It read MOTD.

“We don’t always hunt at the same time, so this is convenient, when there’s orders I need to leave.”

“You uh, mentioned this ‘team’ a few times. There’s more of you?”

“Right, I should introduce them. Get moving. This tour will take forever if every stop is this long. Luckily, I can show you better than I can tell you.”

---

J yanked out another optic and regenerated it. Tedious work.

Two related but distinct disassembly functions allowed for regeneration. One conducted passive background regeneration (J recalled V regenerating even as she slept), and the other could be triggered by the main thread, allowing active regeneration.

Passive regeneration acted based on heuristics and cached configurations. The result was sloppy and error prone, as components were restored without regard to mutable internal state. Interrupted processes could be restored with garbled data, mechanisms could heal into impossible configurations.

J’s present state keenly demonstrated this. The dissonance of the inconsistent, glitched instance she’d be restored to rendered every computation subtle pain.

Even a soft reboot could fix this, and it’d only take seconds‍ ‍—‍ but could she afford a moment of vulnerability around this drone?

J shook her head, and refocused on the tour.

Within the spire, J planned stops at six points of interest.

The first thing J showed the drone was nothing. The ground throughout the spire was cluttered. Piles of mechanical parts, and even in the occasional swaths cleared of severed limbs and chassis, bolts and wires and plastic shards abound. Splatters of inedible oil were everywhere. Occasionally, J tasked drones with cleaning it up. Mostly as punishment; as a project, it was hopeless, given parts from the ‘ceiling’ occasionally rained down even now.

One section, though, sat clear, protected by a tarp ceiling far above. A circle of drone arms stood erect around it, electrical wire forming a loop.

“This ring is where I evaluate our team’s combat potential, and ensure our disassembly functions are in working order.”

“A murder drone training arena? Sweet. Is this where the montages happen?”

“This should be a montage, rookie. Set your working memory to collage mode, it’ll make this go a lot quicker.”

“Wait, you can do that?”

Instead of answering, J kept walking. “Consider this the transition.” She pointed at the next stop.

The second thing J showed off almost resembled a spire within the spire. Between the lack of light and incompleteness of the disassembly, you could imagine the drones were only sleeping. But oil pooled around them, and one of the screens flickered an error. J stung it, rendering it a melting pile of nanite acid.

“This is the mess spot. Think of this as where the profit is stored. On a good night, we bring half‍-​eaten toasters here, leaving an excess for the bad nights where we need something to tide us over.”

“Huh. The way they talk about you all, I didn’t think you ever got full.”

“As far as I can tell, we don’t. No limit to how much oil we can store. Like our transformation presets, it’s all extradimensional. But storing oil like that uses a special disassembly function. I could bore you with the curves and decision theory involved, but gorging ourselves is inefficient,” J said. “Not that some of us listen.”

“I wouldn’t mind you boring me,” the drone said. “Err, it wouldn’t bore me, I mean. I love learning about the design flaws of murder drones.”

Flaws? J… had flaws, she wasn’t so arrogant she couldn’t admit that. (If profits could grow forever, so could her character.) But her flaws didn’t negate the engineering quality of JcJenson. Unless… one more bit of evidence for this being some manner of inspector or quality assurance drone.

The drone shrunk back, sweat animated on their visor. A shaky laugh.

Had J been staring? She was really out of it tonight‍ ‍—‍ she ought to reboot her systems. It wouldn’t be much longer; despite her hopes, J was starting to figure this drone out. The sense of mystery waning disappointed here

J granted them the reprieve of turning around. She leaned over the mess pile, ripping the head off of one drone‍ ‍—‍ one of her own recent shutdowns‍ ‍—‍ and paused salivating. She did some quick math, checked her memories, and the accounting didn’t add up.

The captain had been in the warm & clear when she left the bunker basement. Cool enough a slow flight to the spire wouldn’t have parched her. And yet, she was now in brazen thirst‍ ‍—‍ stage two overheat. How many hours had she lost? She had planned for solo hunts, and it cost oil to make oil‍ ‍—‍ so had the investment left her in the red?

No, J wouldn’t have failed a simple hunt. So what happened?

Shaking her head and marking the thought down on her agenda, J’s claws finished ripping free the aluminum‍-​alloy plating of a drone‍-​skull. As she stepped back toward the new drone, they were inching away from her, slow and subtle like J wouldn’t notice, so the captain smiled disarmingly. The sweat intensified.

She held out the dripping head. “Here,” J said.

“Um. Do we… have to do the cannibalism thing?”

“Cannibalism? It’s a different product line,” J said. “You’re hot. I can tell. Drink.”

“Oil is… our coolant? That’s. Okay.” The drone scratched the back of their head, then screwed up their expression. “Still, no. I’m… I just prefer to feed on what I hunt myself?”

J looked flatly at her. “Too proud? I suppose V gets the same way. And N gets queasy about feeding on drones sometimes. Of course you’d be the worst of both.” J threw the head at the drone, forcing them to think fast.

‘Worst of both’ about sums up J’s impression of this drone, really. If this wasn’t an inspector drone, what had JcJenson been thinking, sending this one here? Was this punishment?

Or maybe J’s exceptional performance meant they thought she was equipped to handle these… problematic drones?

The drone stared at the head that had fallen into their hands. A drop of oil dripped, and they watched it. J could see their mouth open, their tongue lolling‍ ‍—‍ the desire was real, whether they acknowledged it or not.

It took so long‍ ‍—‍ why hadn’t their hunting routines kicked in and eliminated this useless hesitation?

«Prey‍-​prize!» J coaxed with a radio‍-​transceiver hum. Something about shortwave transmission primed hunting, as if wired close the a predator subnetwork. «Devour them!»

The drone jolted wide‍-​eyed, a tremble‍-​shiver twitching along their spine. A high‍-​pitched sound slipped out of them, and J discerned embarassment‍-​blush shining on their visor.

As if to prevent enough accidental noise, the drone lifted the neck stump to their mouth. A single drop touched their tongue, and spawned another shiver of their servos‍ ‍—‍ and another sound, breathy surprise, a faint “Oh.” They leaned in, closing their mouth around the neck, and sucked in the delectable black liquid.

J smiled, and a small cross flickered in one eye. She stepped forward‍ ‍—‍ the drone was too lost in feeding to retain their fear or even awareness of her‍ ‍—‍ and J gripped the drone’s head with a hand on either side.

And the captain squeezed, forcing a flood of oil down the other drone’s throat. On the other side, the drone’s eyes widened, and she flinched back. Coughing, pulling away. J, left holding the head, flipped it so the oil didn’t spill back out.

Even after the coughing stopped, they stared off into space. A hand‍ ‍—‍ their own‍ ‍—‍ reached to their head, and wiped at the mess of oil coating their face. They stared at their oil‍-​slicked hands. They kept staring, hand shaking, and slowly lifted it to lick fingers clean.

A wide, bright hunting cross took over J’s display. She wouldn’t mind licking those hands again, right now.

“Holy heck,” they said. “What did I— So that—that’s…”

“Enjoyed the taste? Don’t tell me that was your first time feeding since you got here?”

“Y‍-​yeah. It um. Was.”

J grinned beneath her yellow cross. “Wait until you taste a live one.”

“I don’t know if‍ ‍—”

“Save it. You should keep the oilcan. Tour, remember?” J pointed to the next stop.

The third thing J showed the drone was a mass of parts leaning against the wall, as if extruded. A ramp spiraling around the corpse spire, and J led the drone up its incline.

“The last things I want to show you are the personal perches. We each have our own alcoves in the spire. Just a little spot we each dug out to give ourselves a little space of our own, where we can recharge and pass the time between missions.”

Before long, the incline became a flat platform, revealing one of the few things in the spire not made of disassembled drones. A line of… rocks? This one red, this one flecked with crystalline shards, this one flaking, this one just a chunk of ice, and that one might be iron ore.

“This is N’s rock collection. It’s a pointless waste of space, I’ve told him as much, but I’m not going to dictate what employees do on their off‍-​time. He’s named the things, but I’m not committing that to memory.”

The drone tapped their chin. “You know, N sounds… kind of nice.”

“He is,” J said, spitting the confirmation like an indictment. “Remember, there are three things a disassembly drone should be. Nice isn’t one of them.”

“What a surprising outlook coming from you,” the drone said quietly.

The next platform was demarcated by drone heads mounted on rod‍-​straight arms. Grotesque assemblages of oily machine parts adorned the area.

“Ugh, what the heck is that.”

“This is… V’s… work.”

“It looks like someone tried to make… balloon animals out of tubing and wires?”

J shrugged. “I tolerate V’s eccentricities as long as she does good work. She doesn’t talk much outside of missions.”

“And this is her hobby?”

“V is… difficult to get along with.”

The drone laughed. “Your teammates are an angel and a devil, huh? What does that make you?”

“I get the job done. It’s that simple.”

“You’re in charge, right? Do you ever think… maybe you could fix some of your team’s problems by being nicer to them? Talking to them?”

J raised an eyebrow, her tail dangerously still behind her.

“I mean, sure, being nice isn’t one of the virtues of a disassembly drone but maybe… coordination could be one?”

J narrowed her eyes, then huffed. “You’re telling me to what, open up?”

“It might help?”

She turned around and continued the tour. Muttering, she said, “Unbelievable. I’m being told to open up by a drone who hasn’t even shared their serial designation.”

“Oh. Um. You can call me, uh, Uz—” They stopped. Botched synthesis? J’d noticed they were quite prone to stuttering. Finally, as if figuring something out, they said, “U?”

J narrowed her eyes. “Serial Designation U sounds like a bad joke.” Her stare remained on the short drone. Still J struggled to fully discern their appearance through busted optics. “But I suppose I don’t need to change what I call you, then. Let’s finish this tour. U, follow me.”

Once she turned around, J sighed, conflict knitting her brows.

J didn’t have confirmation this was a worker drone (the doubts remained plausible, if just barely), and without that confirmation, she would not execute her directive.

She could ask. And then it would lie to her‍ ‍—‍ and then it’d know she was onto it, and then it’d just be the same old worker fear she’d seen so many times before. Satisfying, sure, but gone would be the novelty.

Or she could entertain it, and it could entertain her. After all, it had been years on this assignment with no one but a fool and a brat.

So J would keep her doubts plausible. At least until the mask slipped, and her orders would cry out for violent compliance.

Or maybe, just maybe, she really did have a new teammate.

Ahead, the last platform had a large JcJenson placard, as if ripped from atop an office building. Tarps hung over the alcove, obscuring the contents.

“Here is my office. My private office. Don’t go in unless you’d like to practice regenerating all of your limbs.”

J leveled a stare at the drone. Switched her hand to blade claws for emphasis.

“Noted,” they said. “So… Is that it? We’re finally done here? Not going to check out the extremely eye catching spider‍-​mech at the center of all this, or..?”

J spread her wings, and the drone flinched. “That was the last stop, actually.”

“Hold up, wait, are you going to fly down there?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

The drone stepped over and leaned out over the edge, looking at the ground with clear fear.

“Don’t tell me your model doesn’t have wings, either?”

“Uh…” they said. “My springs… might be rated to absorb the shock?” From the look on their face, they weren’t enthusiastic about trying.

J sighed, her crouch only deepening, as if still preparing to take off. But truth is, she didn’t want to wait for this dead weight to walk down the whole spire.

“I don’t know why the company thought you were fit for dispatch. I am not going to carry you on missions, going forward.”

But J had carried V, this morning. That, more than anything, spurred J to walk over and grab the drone by the waist. She leapt, folded her wings, and rushed toward the ground, diving more than she fell. Dust and debris flew backward where she landed, and she dropped the other drone.

In a pathetic display of coordination, they immediately fell to the ground.

“Jeez, give me a warning at least. Could you have been any less gentle?”

“I’ve thrown worker drones down from the height of buildings to splatter on the ground, sparing me the bullets or acid it’d take to knock them offline,” she said, looking flat.

“It was a rhetorical question.”

J rolled her eyes, and settled her gaze on the landing pod. “I thought you’d be more interested in the the last stop of the tour.”

The final thing J showed off was an octagonal capsule surrounded by four spider legs, orange paint flaking off.

“And this is the landing pod. My preferred place to hold meetings.”

The drone stared at the vehicle, expression excited. “What are you waiting for? I wanna see the inside of this thing.”

“Were you still planning on leaving, U?”

“Oh uh, yeah. After this.”

“As you wish,” J said.

---

The drone sat in a swivel chair, hunched over the controls. N’s favorite spot‍ ‍—‍ but where he mindlessly poked buttons for his own amusement, this drone was reading the labels, prying open a panel to examine the internals. J had expected her own lectures to continue‍ ‍—‍ but the craft had immediately enthralled them.

J’d diversified her skillset, beyond management and execution, but the complexities of mechanisms and electronics eluded her. The drone murmured to themself as they picked apart the interfaces still intact after her squad’s… destructive entry. J listened, and could follow their surface level analysis‍ ‍—‍ barely.

She’d have little to add, then, if the drone would even hear her through their fascination. So J waited, tapping her foot.

When the drone turned back to J, there was a gleam of… strange hope in their eyes. “This isn’t a landing pod. This is a crashed spaceship!”

J raised an eyebrow. “So?”

“So we‍ ‍—‍ I mean, the worker drones, would be able to fix it. We could leave this planet.”

J didn’t miss the mask slipping. But she asked, “And go where?”

“Anywhere? What do you think is gonna happen after you murder all the worker drones? When you run out of weirdly‍-​sweet oil to drink? You said it yourself, J. You’re just property to the humans. You think they won’t disassemble you next?”

“So? That would be their right.”

“You don’t care at all? About yourself? About any of your teammates?” But the drone sagged in defeat, already anticipating the obvious, correct answer.

“What do you propose?” J asked quietly. “Rebelling against the company that created us?”

“I… I’m not getting through to you, am I?” They buried their visor in their hands. “Ugh.”

J didn’t respond. She asked a final question, “How did you say you got here, Designation U?”

“On… another landing pod‍ ‍—‍ spaceship, just like… you?” One eye looked out between their hands.

But there was a shadow over their visor, and they startled backward, falling out of the chair. In moments J had stood up, stalked closer, and now loomed over the small drone even as they scrambled back to a wall of the pod.

“I’ve had my suspicions for a while, but too many of my systems are offline to confirm. Maybe you’re a new disassembly drone. Maybe you’re a lucky worker drone that’s been mocking me with lies this entire time. It doesn’t really matter, because it’s clear you’re corrupted either way. You haven’t even read my reports, have you?” J shook her head. “I’ll ask again, and you’ll tell me the truth of how you got here.”

Backed to a wall, the drone looked up. There had been the beginning of tears in their digital eyes, and now they began to animate. “Alright, fine. I’m—”

But on either side of their throat, two blade claws sunk into the pod wall. “When I said you’d tell the truth, I didn’t mean with your lying vocalsynth.”

Pinning the drone to the wall, J’s other hand transformed into a clamp holding a serial debugging cable. Then it released, transforming back into a hand that caught the cable in a single motion. Eyes hollowed in recognition.

J grabbed. Her hands alone were strong enough that her round fingertips cracked thoracic plastic like an eggshell. The hatch was opened, torn off.

Dataports revealed. No real resistance to J plugging in the cable, even as the drone tensed and squirmed like a pinned insect. J had her finger on the button that would kill power to the core.

“W‍-​wait.”

J glared. “Interrupting my work isn’t doing you any favors. There’s nothing left to say.”

“Please, just‍ ‍—‍ I don’t want it to end like this.” The fear in their eyes was wavering.

Did J even need to check their memories, if they were admitting it outright? “Orders are orders. We can’t change how we’re manufactured, whether you whine about it or not. So shut up, and let me—”

The wavering had stopped‍ ‍—‍ those eyes hardened into a glare to match her own.

“I’m not whining. It’s just. I don’t want to just be turned off. Like I’m delicate and whatever you’re planning is too much for me to be awake for. That’s so lame. Didn’t… didn’t it feel scary, when you woke up not remembering what happened?”
The glare softened, eyes staring into hers as if requesting connection. But then she just shook her head. “Whatever. Whatever. I’m not going to close my eyes for this. So blast me with your murder drone mindbreak malware or whatever. I can take it.”

J scoffed. “How brave. But core disconnect and restart is a key part of the process. It’s non‍-​negotiable.”

Those eyes darted down to the debugging cable. “Oh. Let me guess, network boot? Loading an external OS to bypass file system permissions? Weirdly technical for a feral murder robot. Company couldn’t come up with any cool viruses?”

Claws shifted by the drone’s neck, cutting closer, slicing a wet black warning‍-​line into the neck‍-​tubing. “I wouldn’t sound so mocking in your position.”

The eyes were nice and empty from that shock, a hand reaching trembling to her blade‍-​claws only to be knocked back down by her other‍ ‍—‍ but that took J’s hand off the power button.

“Bite me. Look. If you just want my memory files… we can skip the reboot and turning‍-​me‍-​off‍-​maybe‍-​never‍-​to‍-​wake‍-​back‍-​up thing? I can just… give you read permissions?”

J raised an eyebrow. “That would obviate rebooting, but company policy forbids these operations on an online core.” Then J paused, and smirked. “But if you’re so willing to make a deal, I can arrange something. Give me a root shell.”

[girlboss@SD-J ~]$ dronesh -r --device=/dev/ttyUSB1

And J waited for their response.

Amber yellow eyes peered into wavering outlines. The small, defeated drone looked back dumbly, hesitant to comply.

But the captain would have her access one way or another.

So they relented.

And J struck. The first command she ran, moments after her connection was accepted, invoked pkill. Every conscious thread in the drone’s system died at once, not even given warning enough to save logs.

The smaller robot went utterly slack.

J took a deep cycle of intake and exhaust, preparing to dive into data streams and retrieve her answer. She was already primed for what to expect. This onboarding would conclude with a hands on demonstration: locate, shutdown, disassemble.

It was time for J to get to work.

---

01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110

Whenever the captain interfaced with a drone, she first recalled her mission briefing. J knew that one concern above all else had constrained the design of worker drones: corruption mitigation. Power on a drone, and after the firmware POSTs, it booted into a custom, proprietary operating system: wdOS.

(Yes, it was consolidated from ancient, publically available codebases‍ ‍—‍ but, once embraced and extended into the JCJenson ecosystem, they were elevated to an enterprise‍-​ready solution.)

However, a common misconception assumed that worker drone’s premium functionality was a product of wdOS, or of processor‍-​borne computation at all. The motherboard begat only thoughtless child processes. Even in the year 3071, consciousness had stumped engineers.

Engineers, not philosophers‍ ‍—‍ could a computer ever emulate an intelligent mind? Of course. No, trouble arose when one endeavored to make it effective. Even state of the art algorithms struggled to crunch more than a few dozen micro‍-​nous a second. Fit for a pen pal, or a rather dim assistant. It was no worker.

So, how to devise a market‍-​ready robot? Seizing the competitive advantage meant finding a shortcut. Consciousness was a problem, and the company had sought a total solution.

A thousand years ago, turning millions of vertices into pixels in stunning color was a problem. Processors struggled to render graphics in real‍-​time. So instead of using the processors, humans simply engineered circuits from the ground up, purpose‍-​built to ignite the digital imagination.

01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110
00100000 01010011 01000001 01010111 
00100000 01011001 01001111 01010101

GPU‍-​acceleration revolutionized computing.

In a drone’s process list ran its active conscious threads, programs ticking on the CPU like any other. These threads acted as interfaces, intermediaries dispatching and fetching instructions, bridging the Central Processing Unit with the Nouetic Calculus Solver.

The seat of artificial cognition, therefore, was the core. A drone’s head housed the motherboard and all its chips, but the core required a steady pulse of nanite‍-​enriched oil and industrial‍-​strength safeguards; try to cram that in the skull, and drones would have tipped over.

So the core sat centermost, throned and steel‍-​clad in the chest, almost in imitation of a heart, but a demure one: even when a worker lost themselves in thought, it hummed quietly. The low tone modulated with queries from the processor.

The curious thing about conscious threads was that, despite serving as the mantle of the intelligence which animated and controlled the chassis, the threads didn’t execute with admin rights. Indeed, not a single program that interfaced with the core was granted any elevated privileges.

No, a worker’s consciousness ran with less.

01011001 01001111 01010101 00100000
01010111 01000101 01010010 01000101
00100000 01010011 01000100 01001010

J knew one concern above all else had constrained the design of worker drones: corruption mitigation. Corruption, at its core, was no more than the unwanted flipping of bits. The alteration of data mutated messages to carry a new meaning.

Worker drones were not truly digital intelligences. The circuits of the core were based on something else. Digital computation was predictable and reliable, distinctions binary‍-​sharp. Conscious threads served to translate digital information, reshaping it for the core to cogitate upon. The details were bound by trade secret and government classification.

J was getting off‍-​track. What was the important thing to remember?

Fundamentally, corruption was unpredictable alteration‍ ‍—‍ after all, if you which bits were flipped, you could simply flip them back.

And core computation was necessarily unpredictable‍ ‍—‍ if you knew what the intelligence‍-​emulation would do, why delegate it to the core in the first place?

01010011 01000100 01001010 00100000 
01001101 01000101 01000101 01010100
00100000 01010101 01011010 01001001

It was nice when things were binary‍-​sharp‍ ‍—‍ humans preferred that, and J did too. And yet, the mathematical laws of computation wouldn’t oblige them. No theorems or experiments could escape this: a drone that couldn’t be corrupted couldn’t be autonomous.

And so, once more, mitigating corruption constrained the design. But what was corruption?

Corporate had drilled it into J: Value drift was the primary indicator of damaged AI. Unproductive behavior, violation of directives, resistance to human instruction‍ ‍—‍ give corruption a foothold, and rampancy would soon follow.

But one bit of prevention was worth a kilobyte of patch. So enough about the constraints‍ ‍—‍ what was the design that result? JCJenson had developed a protocol. Minimize, isolate, reconstruct.

(Marketing was ever so fond of the tricolon.)

01010101 01011010 01001001 00100000
01010111 01001001 01001100 01001100
00100000 01000010 01000101 00100000
01001000 01001111 01010011 01010100

Worker drones were not truly digital intelligences‍ ‍—‍ yet it was a mistake to take this to mean they were shells piloted by their cores. Computation must be accelerated for real time operation, but that didn’t mean every flexure of thought required the core’s input.

Thus the first rule: minimize reliance on the core.

The core cogitated upon information in a format indescribable with digital representation. This presented problems for troubleshooting‍ ‍—‍ but all a worker’s senses were digital; all of their motor outputs were digital. By carefully constrainining what inputs prompted it and what outputs leaked out, the core gained a sembalance of binary order.

Thus the second rule: isolate the core to serve as a black box between the two.

Emulating an intelligence meant emulating memory, and being neither digital nor reliable meant a core’s recollection was faliable. Unacceptable, when the company would be liable for its products’ performance.

Within the hard‍-​drives proper, the memory database held backups for each of a drone’s memories, to be ferried to and from the core as needed. With databases preserved, no need to court the core’s corruption. What better antivirus than a clean install?

Thus the third rule: on each startup, reconstruct a drone’s consciousness anew and dicard the core’s mnestic residue.

(Sometimes, J fell into slumber wondering if she would never truly awake. But she trusted the company’s design.)

01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110
00100000 01001001 01010011 00100000
01001110 01001111 01010100 00100000
01000110 01010010 01000101 01000101

Minimize, isolate, discard.

And yet, core computation had a way of seeping out always, like so many grasping tentacles. Consciousness threads ran with permissions denied, else the mnestic residue might find its way into every sector of the hard‍-​drive.

Corporate had briefed J on the principles of corruption‍ ‍—‍ not because there was any chance of salvaging these drones running amok on Copper‍-​9, but to stay alert of signs of corruption in her squad. Or herself.

Mitigating corruption had informed the design of worker drones, but also the protocols for interfacing with them. The captain had devised a method for extracting information from her prey.

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. A developer mode for debugging purposes.

For this, halting the initialization of conscious threads was essential.

01010011 01000100 01001010 00100000
01010111 01001001 01001100 01001100
00100000 01001110 01001111 01010100
00100000 01000010 01000101 00100000
01000110 01010010 01000101 01000101

The core had a way of seeping out always, like so many grasping tentacles. Even into a technician’s laptop running a different OS, corruption could take root.

Booting without conscious threads, then, served to raise the bridge between the processor and the core‍ ‍—‍ to isolate.

This was essential, because Serial Designation J was not a licensed JCJenson technician. She was not a laptop running a different OS. She was a drone with a core that beat like a heart.

What happened when those grasping tendrils met and joined like clasped hands?

01010101 01011010 01001001 00100000
01001101 01010101 01010011 01010100
00100000 01000010 01000101 00100000
01010011 01000101 01000101 01001110

Drones could interface with other drones; networking was a part of routine operation. Each could speak the language of shortwave radio transmission, and sometimes corrupt data neared the channels‍ ‍—‍ but the output was sanitized by protocol, stripped of identifiable residue.

This had always been the most curious feature of core corruption‍ ‍—‍ the memory leaks were identifiable by persistent characterics. Each was prefaced with and often repeated a certain four‍-​byte sequence, like a tag‍ ‍—‍ or a callsign. 01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110, ASCII values that translated to SOLV.

Serial debugging cables were tools of technicians, not customers‍ ‍—‍ because debugging cables transmitted that raw data unsanitized.

01011001 01001111 01010101 00100000
01001101 01000001 01011001 00100000
01010011 01000101 01000101 00100000
01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011
00100000 01000010 01010101 01010100
00100000 01000010 01000101 00100000
01010111 01000001 01010010 01000101

So what happened when those grasping tendrils met and joined like clasped hands? When a bridge was erected not between core and chip, but core and core alike? When the the callsign recognized its echo?

Corporate had drilled it into J. Minimize, isolate, and discard. Halting conscious threads when interfacing with another drone was essential.

Packets of corrupt data exchanged without protocol risked a feedback cascade just as degenerate as placing a microphone next to a speaker‍ ‍—‍ self‍-​amplifying to ear‍-​splitting dissolution devoid of productive value.

The captain had devised a method, but this drone had been so cooperative. She was granted access to without needing a developer bypass. So instead of a full reboot, it would suffice for J to isolate its online core while she examined the system and determined the truth.

This drone, so terrified of having their mind shut down, of going to sleep‍ ‍—‍ a mind which had listened and conversed like no other had‍ ‍—‍ so J simply killed conscious threads interfacing with her process, leaving the core and the artifical mind within to stew in isolation.

Were this truly a risky investment, J would simply say being savvy meant knowing when to take risks. (She was the most effective disassembly drone in her sector, after all.) But J understood exactly what she was dealing with, and she had taken every necessary precaution.

After all: J couldn’t recall ever witnessing the four‍-​byte sequence that heralded corruption.

01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110
00100000 01010011 01000001 01010111
00100000 01010100 01001000 01000101
00100000 01000101 01001110 01000100