A prize waited for J at the corpse spire.

Definitely a surprise, but J welcomed it — had corporate heard her complaints? Did they recognize how inadequate her squad had proven?

Whatever the reason, it was a relief. J was… confident she could fulfill her team’s responsibilities on her own, but she didn’t relish the prospect of proving it. Not quite her skillset, you know? But it seemed she didn’t need to worry!

Because they’d dispatched a new disassembly drone to work under her!

Though this drone had made a terrible first impression.

“Did you just… slap me with a disassembled worker drone arm?” J asked.

“Holy crap it talks.”

J narrowed her eyes at where she presumed the drone stood. “What is that supposed to mean?”

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

The new drone stood between J and the landing pod — odd positioning.

“I mean… I um, rebooted you? You… weren’t responding! 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, one 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 lit up at that? Why did 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, and 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 worker drones.” The other drone glanced around her; they stood, after all, within a spire of disposed worker drones. “Our mission is locating, shutting down, and mercilessly disassembling the corrupted worker drones of this fallen planet. Something that 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 her processes lagged dreadfully, subsystems unreliable — a consequence, no doubt, of whatever had left her mortifyingly unresponsive when this drone showed up. Keep it together, J.

J looked the other drone up and down. Without her optics resolving 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 there were background hunting processes automatically initialized if her systems detected a nearby drone.

And they were standing right in the middle of the spire of worker drone corpses, the lair where the disassemblers 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 sent assistance — a new model, perhaps? J’s team wasn’t that far off-quota — J made sure of that. So they wouldn’t need an entire extra disassembler. So perhaps this was just a… miniature 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 impressive.”

“I know! Oh, did 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.” Their hands shifted. Holding an object (?) J 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 it?”

What a paradox of a drone. As soon they do demonstrate some value, they give 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 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 a 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 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, flushed lines on both visors. For a moment, neither said anything.

“Let’s never speak of this again.”

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

J reached up and yanked out her red optics sensors, crushing it between her hands, fluid spilling out. Atop her head, she executed the special disassembly function to regenerate that optic. Her thermal sensors were back online.

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

Hitting the drone with a new scan she discovered… low levels of thermal radiation. This drone ran cool — but still within bounds of her models. Hm, had they just fed? Makes sense; J remembered shutting down 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 disassembly drone’s pegs — and steadied their grip on a… gun? An external tool, not a gauntlet transformation. Another oddity.

“It was… nice, to meet you, 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 had 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 your superior?”

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?”

J frowned. She stood up. “As your superior officer, my first order is 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.

J suppressed an instinct to switch in claws and rip it off. Hm.

When she took a step, she faltered, stumbling — she’d have fallen with the small drone supporting her.

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

J threw the small drone’s arm out of her grasp, 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 twitched 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 the local 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 repaired 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 an introduction to our… mission, here. On Copper-9. Can you tell me more?”

“Yes. It’s a simple job. By the worker drone’s hands, humanity is dead, and their oil is your fuel. Locate, shutdown, disassemble. Clear the sector and construct a spire with the materials assembled.” J 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 had 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 she walked in front, the other drone couldn’t see J’s snarl at the memory. She’d have died, if not for V, and 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 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 they seemed to accept that. Running and hiding at least offered 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 thought the core collapse was the humans’ fuck up.”

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 at all 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 a fool and a brat to talk to, she could tolerate it just for novelty. Refreshing, if she could say little else.

“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.”

What little of the drone J could resolve didn’t seem convinced. Did she want to convince them? J didn’t like having to explain herself — she shouldn’t have to; she was in charge.

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

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

J smiled. “Yes. 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.”

“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, 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 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, and we should look 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 became the glue holding its haphazard construction together.

Gravity did a lot of 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 explained this 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 babble and tell me my orders”.

But this drone? They listened, nodding and silent.

“Also pretty metal,” the drone said, looking at the archway. “Feels like you’re running up against corpses just sucking as a building material, though. There’s a reason humans used stone 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 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?”

But J stepped out through the archway, pointing up. “There. We have layers of tarp we pull over the holes when the sun rises.”

The other drone followed after her, visor scanning 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 mentioned this ‘team’ a few times. So 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 state. The result was sloppy and error prone, as components get 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 state she’d be restored to rendered every computation pain.

Even a soft reboot would 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 is nothing. The ground throughout the spire is 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. This where the montages happen?”

“You’re in 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 lighting and incompleteness of the disassembly, you could imagine the drones were sleeping. But oil pooled around them, and one of the screens flickers 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 designs 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. They gave a shaky laugh.

Had J been staring? She was really out of it tonight — she ought to reboot her systems, but not when she was in the middle of potentially being inspected.

J granted the drone 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 stepped back toward the drone. They were still inching backward, so J smiled disarmingly. The sweat intensified.

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

“Um.”

“You’re hot. I can tell. Drink.”

“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. It’s like you’re 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 means they thought she’s 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.

It took so long — why hadn’t their hunting routines kicked in and eliminated this useless hesitation? Still, the drone lifted the neck stump to their mouth. A single drop touched their tongue, and a brief shiver twitched their whole body. They leaned in, mouth open wide, and sucked in the delectable black liquid.

J smiled, and an ‘x’ 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 she 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. J, left holding the head, flipped it so the oil didn’t spill back out.

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

The wide bright ‘X’ on J’s visor, she wouldn’t mind licking those hands again, right now.

“Holy heck,” they say. “So that—that’s…”

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

“Y-yeah. It — 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 is the personal perches. We each have our own alcoves in the spire. Just a little alcove 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 the first thing 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 this one might be iron ore.

“This is N’s rock collection. It’s a pointless waste of space, 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 adorn the area.

“Ugh, what the heck is that.”

“This is… V’s… work.”

“It looks like some 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 to 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 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 could 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. 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 had 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 lean 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 takeoff. 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 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 building 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 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 their... destructive entry. J 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... 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? 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.

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

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

But there’s a shadow over her screen, and they startled backward, falling out of the chair. In moments J had stood up, stalked closer, and now loomed over the other 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? 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 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. It released, transformed back into a hand that caught the cable in a single motion. Eyes hollowed in recognition.

Then she pressed the hatch to reveal ports, and plugged the cable in. It met no resistance, though there wasn’t much room to move with your neck between two claws. J turned her attention to her internal console. She wouldn’t have write access to this drone’s system, not without more work examining and shutting down what security might exist — but memory diagnostics weren’t protected by default.

“Memory files don’t lie. I’d consult my own… but rebooting would take precious seconds, and you’re anxious to escape, aren’t you? Be still. I’ll know who you are soon.”

And then this onboarding would conclude with a hands on demonstration: locate, shutdown, disassemble.

In the end, a prize had waited for her at the spire.