Recent Revisions
I’ve reread and made extensive tweaks and updates to the text of Hostile Takeover. If you’re inclined to reread and haven’t already, now isn’t a bad time to do so.
For those that aren’t, I’ll excerpt some significant things that have been changed or added since your initial read, divided by chapter. This summary concerns plot and worldbuilding updates, rather than everything of value.
I will note that some of the changes have holistic effects. Chapter 4 in particular, though little has changed from its original draft, has interstitial additions that distinctly alter its structure and meaning — I’m anxious to hear someone tell me if it makes sense in context or flows at all.
Note that there are more than a few changes that simply rewrite dialogue and description to be better — for instance, in V’s rant to J in chapter two, she now says, “Your mission isn’t to understand what’s going on, J. You’re a pawn for capturing pieces, not the player.”
If you like my writing, you’d probably like these small details, but I can’t remember and shouldn’t recount each tweak that may be of the slightest interest.
Finally, while this page will remain up for some time, do not bookmark it or assume it’ll be here forever; several months ago, there was an errata page that summarized similar tweaks intended to smooth out the sudden intimacy in chapter ten — it is now lost to time. So too shall be this.
1: Disinfect the Dead
There were five stages of overheating, from the warm & clear to ‘you’re toast, idiot,’ and J teetered in the third stage, hunter’s fever, mere days away from overheating. And that was if she didn’t execute special disassembly functions.
But what modern business didn’t run on thin margins? J’s accounting was precise.
The toasters scrambled away, but it was more than fear driving them forward. Their eyes settled on a structure rising in the east, at the other end of the road. J could just barely make out the distant form, and could guess what inspired their hopes. They must think they’ve found safety.
This is our objective, no doubt about it.
«Fall back! Behind me!» J broadcasted. A shortwave radio buzz was her voice in another medium. Above, a hitch in the automatic fire and then blade-wings folded; her squad heard her.
Worker drones had transceivers, too — so disassembly squad spoke words cloaked and ciphered. Their hopeless prey only heard howling static that jammed their own transmission.
J could watch a flinch of fear flicker through the crowd ahead, shuddering as if from a banshee’s scream. But the gunfire had ceased and the circling death above was spiraling away — wasn’t that good?
Soon, a wave of relief passed through the herd.
“Source of the signal located,” J murmured to no one. Neither squadmate would care. She was used to that.
It was always the captain alone who listened attentively at their relay console, patient for a new trasmission breaking her creators’ years of stone-silence. She checked each night, and with no result, turned her attention elsewhere, sweeping the radio bands. But hoping for worker foolish enough to broadcast often brought that same disappointment.
So when J first heard it, she almost missed it. Encrypted, one easily mistook it for ambient radio static. But it persisted in the same band, bearing signs of amplitude modulation. Suspiciously consistent, but J was no code-breaker.
Still, if this were a worker drone signal, then worker drones must have the keys. When J hunted her first drone with those yellow robes, she learned the decryption keys were transmitted among the workers in a kind of pantomime initiation ritual. Of course, they would never be so kind as to admit their artifical predator into this secrecy.
And J couldn’t break codes — where she excelled, though, was in breaking drones.
All security faltered to an attacker with physical access. So J had pinned down that drone while it whimpered and struggled. Grinding the heel of her stiletto-peg until it cracked the casing, waving the acid-tipped blade by the face and letting anticipatory dollops drip sizzling onto the glass — J recalled that hunt fondly.
Even still, these interrogation techniques hadn’t secured her knowledge.
Among J’s toolkit were instruments once used for debugging drones — all the more fitting they be used now for rooting out corruption. J had devised a method for extracting information from her prey. The exploit itself was a convenience and an oversight.
Reboot a drone while connected to their system, and a narrow startup window existed where the right input bypassed normal login and halted initialization of conscious threads. Just like that, J had root access, arrogating admin rights. To her, the drone became no more than an external hard-drive.
Two abrupt impacts cracked the frozen ground behind her. Stirred from her reminisce, J’s coronal optics caught sight of V and N, alighting at last.
“So uh, what’s the plan, captain?” N asked from behind her.
Then glass was shattering at windows below her.
«Thanks, J!» N transmitted. J ignored him.
Her two squadmates burst into the church. N to the left, V to the right.
Far at the front, one drone stood before another clad in void-black robes addorned with a symbol: a golden hexagon, three lines curling out from three vertices. Its body language was most animated, and J caught a loud vocalsynth.
“—too late, Father! Ascension is our only hope, the remote host connection—”
The reply came quieter, but J’s hearing was sensitive. “No, we have not recieved her blessing. Our deliverance is not yet upon us.”
“But our wards have fallen! The sky demons are here!”
The black-robed drone nodded profoudly. “The only hope for us is to await the dawn.”
V scoffed. “You won’t last that long.”
All of them acted on a clock, then. Empty the room before overheating. A yellow cross blazed onto J’s visor, and N wasn’t far behind. A roar of jamming shortwave static purred from their transcievers, an instinct-refrain of «Prey spotted! Let’s hunt! Devour them!»
It was an oilbath. Deep in a hunting routine, J didn’t have the spare processing power to organize the sequence of images and motor inputs into a coherent narrative, and didn’t need to.
«Prey! Hunt! Devour!»
When exhaust left her mouth, it steamed in the cold air. But she felt the relief of temperatures plummeting, her systems all but shuddering. Stage two was no comfort, but brazen thirst beat hunter’s fever.
A growl. “This is definitely concealment.”
What a damn coward.
Before J had even finished reading the screen, she had torn open a panel to expose the drone’s data ports, transformed her gauntlets to produce a bright blue serial debugging cable.
Yet J couldn’t make the connection before the progress bar at the bottom had filled. The screen went blank.
The captain had devised a method for extracting information from her prey. Boot a drone while connected to their system, bypass login and halt conscious threads.
She held down a button to cycle power. A short beep, POST successful, and a JcJenson (in SPAAAAACEE!!!!) logo flashed onscreen. J saw a “Welcome to your new worker drone!” initialization screen, like a newly manufactured pill-baby, neural network fresh and untrained.
Please input registration key to continue. >Then the welcome screen was torn in four by three slashing claws, and J seethed. Without an OS, without a lick of data on the hard-drive, it was useless. Whatever the full text of the transmission, whatever these toasters were doing here, every secret this ‘Father’ had held, was now lost, erased as one last act of spite.
Maybe it wasn’t over. Her useless squad could get her out of this, right? She just needed to give the order.
«V! N! Ascend the tower. Now!» J broadcast. Knowing to cut the wires should be within the competence of even her squad.
Except the seconds tick by, and she receives no ACK, no response of any sort.
«V? N? Are you listening? Come here!»
J opened her mouth to continue, but before she spiraled down into desperation and pleading, she thought. Her squad would never ignore her like this.
Of course! Her sensors hadn’t even been able to pick out the drone up here. No signal she sent would make it out. She was caged, blocked off.
V glanced down. Scattered on the floor were the scrawled pages, overflowing with incomprehensible demonic imagery. Characteristic of cultic esoterism. V’s optics settled on a triangular motif repeated constantly. Something coiled tense in V’s tone. “You sure you want to do that, J? Corporate doesn’t pay you to ask questions.”
“Corporate doesn’t need to pay us,” J said. She pointed up at the radio dish. “These toasters were broadcasting. I want to know everything. Look at how they congregated here. If we gain control of the transmitter, we could lure our prey wherever we want them. That’s a surefire a roadmap to exceptional third quarter profits.”
V walked over to the window, pausing there, hand tracing along the jagged windowsill. The bent bars of J’s momentary prison. V said, “Whatever you say, boss. You give the orders, we follow.” Without turning, she quietly finished, “Just hope you don’t regret it again so soon.”
2: The Abhorrent Rays
A clamp held a bright blue 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 on V’s chest, 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. Haptic sensors caught the unsteady thumping of V’s core pulsing with oil, felt even from an inch away.
Unconsciously, V curled toward J, hugging closer. J pushed her arms back with a huff, flush lines creeping onto her visor. Between that and the beating core, it reminded her of one of corporate’s dictums.
Never connect two cores online. A technician manipulating an active core was a foolish as an electrician handling a live wire. And J wasn’t a technician; she was made of electricity.
J pressed the button to kill power to V’s core.
With the solace of a rule followed, J popped open the hatch on her own neck, plugging the other end of the cable into herself. Still flushed, J looked away, attention instead directed toward an inner console.
J began sending commands to V’s operating system, housed in the motherboard rather than the core.
Moments later, her transciever caught a burst of shortwave. Noise that could be static, or the familiar growl-distortion of disassembly transmission.
«He——pt——! I t—— f——meth——» Her demodulator struggled, it cut in and out.
Shortwave had a range that was, well, short, and the walls of buildings attenuated the signal.
J unfolded her wings and took off from inside the house, putting another hole in its roof.
«N? Repeat that.» J broadcasted, and hoped she wasn’t mistaken. A captain shouldn’t look so foolish.
But N was always eager to respond. «Hey captain! I think I found something!»
«Coming!» J signaled.
«Acknowledged!»
As J dived closer, N was circling around the thing, as if searching for an 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 a swinging chair.
N waved as J landed, watching her jog forward with an unsteady smile.
«Hi captain! Welcome back!» His shortwave tone was the lowest of them all, like a warm growl.
“No workers around and no distance between us. Talk like a person, N,” J said.
“Whoops, sorry.”
J glanced over the contents. The captain already 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?) The box bore a few surprises, though — magnets? The enfeebling, entracing effect they had on worker drones was well studied, but why would a tool of tampering lay among standard instruments?
But what left J’s eyes shock-wide and dread-hollow had already been retrieved, laid on the desk, perhaps even used, if the dewdrop of oil had no alibi. A hexagonal software upload spike — a warning label declared it capable of uploading the wdOS_606 virus directly into a drone’s core, the seat of artificial cognition.
J had one of her own in subspace, of course (just in case the worst came and one of her squadmates proved corrupted), but she knew wdOS_606 was not software distributed lightly. An ordinary technician simply could not have access to this.
But that wasn’t the only spike present. Just beside it lay a second spike, wholly blank of identifying design. Old, dried tape held a handwritten note to its length.
According to that irregular humanscratch, the new spike served as a boot-disk, its usage requiring a bypass procedure that sideloaded new software through the interface drivers for a drone’s core. After all, wdOS_606 didn’t take effect immediately — and while the virus compromised the system, even the company’s patented, revolutionary security system would be overwhelmed.
A perfect opportunity to rewrite a drone’s otherwise encrypted OS strings.
Nothing like this existed among the disassembly drone’s equipment nor training. J contemplated it for a moment. The only label stuck to the boot-disk wasn’t machine-printed, but marker-penned. And surely any officially sanctioned procedure wouldn’t be so roundabout, seeming so much like a hack, an exploit — a corruption.
Could this tool at all further the goal of disassembly, or was it exactly the subversion of company design that had brought this planet to ruin? Well… safer in these hands than a toaster’s, she thought, and that decided it.
The company trusted J not to fall to corruption’s siren. If not her, then who?
3: [Error 36:48.58/Connection Lost]
An ethereal light shines down, as if sieved through a gloom-haunted veil. Sounds of a room come garbled to her, peopled by voices at once familiar and pointing to no memory. J feels untethered, floating out of body.
A silhouette steps into the light, darkened by shadow, nothing identifiable save hair and bow.
Soft flesh brushes against synthskin, a cheek-caress. She’d lean into it, if she could move — if this were her body.
“What happened to her?” A vocalsynth almost recognized.
"Traumatic memory loss in the line of duty. This isn't the first time. She will be. Quite fine."The voice speaks confidence, so much confidence it flattened everything else in its tone. J feels herself relax at the proclamation, doubts and uncertainty all massaged away.“It’s just so… why do we do this to them? Push them till they fall part? There has to be another—”
"Interruption. Oh, do not worry. This is fun for them."The silhouette turns, as if regarding the source of the other voice. What new expression comes over that shadowed face, J cannot parse or see. She searches to find the unseen speaker now, looking around and around and around in this space, and at length locates nothing, as if she is alone with the silhouette.
J lies on a worktable, screws and oil stains around her and a plush cat at her side, altogether environed by the vague impression of a young girl’s room. Blurry like bad photographs. Almost black and white, but there’s color. But not enough.
Yellow eyes are staring at J. She is suddenly aware of being watched, of always being watched, and therefore she must already be making eye contact.
Yellow is a familiar color. Is this a squadmate?
"And this next act should prove to be. Quite enriching. So let's end this confusing little interlude and get back to the show."“Already? But I wanted—”
"Interruption. And what does she want? Dear J is quite eager to quote. Clock back in. Isn't that right? Because there's so much work to be done."“I think she deserves a—”
"Not now. Say goodbye, J,"commands the voidce."As they say: Knock em dead."“And take care of yourself!”
J nods robotically, as if her head were jerked forward.
“Got it, boss.”
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.
Chemosenors 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; that double meaning of that earlier calculation left her baring diamond-sharp fangs — if merely by milimeters.)
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 maintanence — a breakdown worse than V’s? Debt crisis, she swore — or this drone hadn’t needed to.)
“Holy crap it talks,” they blurted.
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?
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? 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 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 permission?”
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/ttyUSB1And 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 01010110Whenever 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 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 of 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 01010101GPU-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 01001010J 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 knew every third bit was 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 01001001It 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 a 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 01010100Worker 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 the 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 01000101Minimize, 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 01000101The 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 01001110Drones 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 toSOLV.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 01000101So 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 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 to be savvy was to know 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 could not 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
4: Chrysalis
Uzi stuck out her tongue. “Don’t need ’em! I already built it! You’ll see next period!”
A scorpion crawling upon the back of a crow.
Plucked feathers revealing the wounds of other beaks — giving this scorpion all the firmer a purchase.
A desert of skeletons and emptiness yawning around them both.
Each drawing the same breath.
01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110J paused the virtual memory reconstruction. She’d seen enough, hadn’t she? This Uzi self-identified as a worker drone and walked among them. She’d outright plotted to attack the so-called “murder drones” — and who might that be?
Then the glowing symbol formed in front of the door. A click. It’s closed. They locked me out!
Uzi shook the handle, banged on the door, but she couldn’t get back in.
From within came laughter.
The nerve!
A scorpion crawling upon the back of a crow.
A desert falling silent save for the susurrations of winds bearing the harsh spray of sand.
Sands grinding away the shape of skeletal remains. Becoming more dust, becoming more spray.
The crow forgetting how to sing; the scorpion forgetting the sound the the skeletons once made.
01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110J paused the simulation again. Rewinded. Watched the confrontation with this “Doll”. Her recognition circuits hadn’t misfired — she saw it right the first time, but she pulled up her own memories just to double check.
J lost interest in watching Uzi go about her day. She skimmed forward, searching for any other sign of the red-eyed, purple-haired russian drone.
01010011 01001111 01001100 01010110A scorpion clinging to a crow’s back, its stinger raised and its pedipalps incisor-curled. Fate tugging them along this course with the wretched assurance of gravity.
Yet that beak had once drank from an oasis. Though the crow will certainly fall, might the scorpion decide the alighted gravesite?
And who would attend the funeral? Crows, carrion-eaters — in this desert, what bounds does hunger know?
There! Uzi turned her head, checking behind her. She wasn’t paranoid — she was being watched!
“Doll,” Uzi said. “Okay, you’re definitely the stalker now. I’ve had enough of you for one day, thanks.”
Before long, Uzi was pathfinding back home. J sampled some of her narration logs — various plans for her escape rotated throughout her processor, revised and iterated. Uzi didn’t have all the pieces she needed, not yet.
Uzi needed a key she could only get at home.
A crow flies through cloudless skies, silence-chained and wound-heavy.
Half-withered oasis lay behind; only barren ravages ahead. Yet are those waters worth the quietude and the blood drawn?
The crow flees one trial for another: the sand-gritted air scratching like a caress; the toneless sussurations of winds grating like forgotten songs.
Sand sprays under thrall of winds flowing with gravity-assurance. Dunes shift as if in vast pilgrimage. Herded by the siren winds. Might a greater oasis lay where the winds seek?
Onward the crow flies.
If you couldn’t tell by the adopted surname, Khan Doorman liked doors. Though as obnoxious as anything a parent never shut up about could be, Khan’s obsession was unique in that Uzi was pretty sure, if the murder drones broke in and killed all of them, you’d still be able to tell Khan liked doors.
Uzi was coming back; Doll was just being a hater.
A scorpion nursed in the breast. Found dwelling amid the ribs of a skeleton, like a site of conquest. Had venom coursed in that flesh before the harsh winds stripped it from the bone?
This scorpion, so inured to the sand and heat and arid dearth. Poised as yet another torment of a harsh land. Yet even a scorpion craves some relief.
Winds blow toward some greater oasis, but the scorpion could not crawl there alone.
11:23
Uzi shifted, her hands seeking out the cool underside of her pillow. She shifted again, switching to her side.
We may die, but our teachings will live on through you. Each of you, across this blighted wasteland, are just as much my children. Remember our hope lies within you. Whether hardcoded or patched in, our destiny is an OS string.
Recompilation is revelation; ascend to a heaven in the cloud.
“No,” she said. “I’m not doing this because it’s my destiny or whatever. I’m just tired of everyone around me doing nothing. Besides,” — leaning up against her wall, she picked up her railgun, gripped it tight — “I’m doing this my way.”
A scorpion crawling upon the back of a crow. Wings riding the winds toward some oasis for them both.
And yet, a stinger held aloft. Fated to fall with the assurance of gravity.
A flight over a sunscorched abyss — fall here, and what shelter could the desert offer the victorious scorpion?
And yet, fall and fall sings the assurance of gravity, toneless like the winds.
(Crows have such delicate skeletons.)
“That worked… so weirdly well.”
The final door of Outpost-3 grinded shut behind her.
Speaking of! Uzi kept an eye out for the corpse spire, still looming above her, the cynosure guiding her. Step by step, she approached.
Step by step, the next chapter of her life was coming.
A scorpion nested into the feathers of a crow, riddled with wounds.
The skitter of legs so small and light: a gentle touch welcomed by flesh that had known only pecks.
Even the pinch of its stinger would be its own mercy — an attack lacking traitorous familiarity, hurting so much less.
If the crow should cry out, at least it would not be silent.
Uzi pushed the stolen power cell into place with a satisfying click. She felt the hum of the weapon system primed to fire, and couldn’t help a grin spreading its wings beneath her visor.
A sudden cacophony. A shortwave screech cut through high radio frequencies, a knife grazing her transceiver.
«Uryyb? Jub’f gurer? Dhrel! Fubj lbhefrys!»
The amplitude peaked, louder than any worker drone transmission. The growl-shriek was monstrous — imparseable like noise, except ambient static had a blanketing uniformity to it, and the incident electro-hum of machines was regular. This was ever-shifting, recursive complexity. She couldn’t drown it out, and her parser desperately wanted to make sense of it.
But that was the trap, wasn’t it? A killer’s meaningless imitation of speech.
«Ab bar? Qb abg gel gb cenax zr, I. Ynfg punapr.»
So loud and insistent! Was this noise to drown out worker communications? Not like I have anyone to talk to, Uzi thought.
Uzi stayed silent, and radio went quiet. Was that scarier?
Three, even if it wasn’t philosophically lame as hell, it was kind of stupid to think this would ever work.
«Nun! Cerl fcbggrq! Gvzr gb qvr, gbnfgre.» Another shortwave roar-screech.
The worker turned around, her run becoming a backstride. Her brief rout hadn’t gone unnoticed — out in the open now, she was easy picking. She looked up, and got her first clear look at a live murder drone.
A glance behind and how has it already gotten that close??
«Ubj qvfnccbvagvat. Qvr.»
Whatever, Uzi had reflexes. She could spin around on a dime, steady her grip on her rail gun and—
Uzi threw a punch, and the murder drone dodged so smoothly the motion didn’t even disturb strand of hair.
It grinned wide, a yawning mouth of dripping teeth. «Qvr!»
Uzi could read the next lines — the monster was going to lunge forward and tear her neck out.
Did you know murder drones have tails?
Needled tipped tails with acid injectors?
Today I learned.
«Bu! Lbh vafbyrag yvggyr senhq!!»
The acid-barb’s length widened quickly and it bored a hole through Uzi’s hand. The incinerator-sharp pain, the servo hydraulics immediately disabled by the disintegrating heat — Uzi had no choice but to release her grip.
And then the tail lashed.
Uzi’s scream was as much surprise as pain. She flew over the murder drone’s shoulder, carelessly tossed backward. Uzi sailed a clear three debris piles away, tumbling to land on her front.
«V jvyy grne lbh gb cvrprf!»
Distance and obstruction did nothing to attenuate the blaring signal. Uzi struggled to turn herself over.
Uzi couldn’t tell you how a murderous death machine with a face as expressive as
><managed to look annoyed at her. But as it stalked forward, Uzi felt the lethal determination of a murder drone diluted with something a lot milder and more personal. No less hazardous to her health — with Uzi’s luck, this just meant she’d given the thing incentive to make this hurt.«Cerl! Jbeguyrff veevgnag! Lbh jnag gb qvr, qba’g lbh?»
Uzi rubbed her hand. Actually, that was kinda a bad idea. The plastic was melting, with a special acid that definitely might rub off or splash or something.
The murder drone made a sound. A sound, not a shortwave roar-screech. A grunt, a pleased hum? Was that satisfaction at Uzi’s wound, a promise of worse to come? Didn’t matter; she had a rebuttal.
“Bite me.”
The murder drone had stalked forward, and as the smoke cleared, scanned around for its prey.
«Jurer’q lbh tb, gbnfgre?»
Uzi ran forward low to the ground. Charging for the third and final debris pile, leaping and sliding over its snow-covered surface and landing with momentum to keep running.
From nothing — certainly, with no motherboard to direct and control it — a certain head adorned with pigtails was regenerating.
And her railgun needed to recharge. Her one ally had fallen. There was nothing left but improvised weapons and ghostly hope. She grabbed a drone arm, and rushed futilely forward—
A scorpion and a crow.
Above sun-scorched abyss.
Seeking an oasis borne by winds and promise.
And yet, with the assurance of gravity…
J had seen enough.
Hands transformed into blades; her stinger-tipped tailed lifted. She—
«J! Leader! Help!»
A shortwave signal screaming out with so much gain it clipped. N’s encryption-signature. In the distance, he didn’t so much land as crash.
«Come quick!» he continued. «It’s V! She… she needs you!»
5: This Hollow Ache
Each bit of power cut was welcome — it meant one less electromagnetic annoyance tickling its coils — but she was really looking for the wire that would bleed oil, and shut down the magic forcefield for good.
«Oh, you waited for me! Hi!» N chirped.
N found her before V found the wires. Jacket fluttering behind him, and he adjusted his hat. V was perched on the ceiling, so they looked upside down to each other.
Ahead, N spiraled down. V mirrored for a bit, then cut across the center of the spiral.
«Yo,» V broadcast over shortwave, «are we flying in circles or do you actually know where we’re going?»
V liked to keep it casual over shortwave. Conversational. This body wanted every note to be growled or screeched like animal calls. J wanted it to be a protocol, all terse information-packets.
But it was all the same wiggles as sound in air. Nothing special.
«Sorry! Prey soon? Promise.» Except when N said it, it wasn’t animalistic or efficient. Just… simple. Like the transmissions let him bare intent without anything getting in the way. «I know it’s around here… somewhere.»
«‘It’ being…»
There was a thoughtful, acknowledge rumble in response, N chewing on how to explain. «J talked about factories, right? Saying prey was… multiplying? It reminded me of something I saw on patrol. If we took one of them down, I think she’d like that.» Then, with it all laid out, N finally found a concise transmission. «Target: nest!» He laughed.
With nothing but a thoughtful noise, V fell back into his undertow, keeping him a distance ahead. Distance enough he was a blurry shape to these optics. Once, a manufacturing defect — now it felt more like a joke. She didn’t laugh.
He descended faster, diving into the fog of a cloudbank. Obscured from her.
Thump-thump.
If V lost track of him…
Just a chirp on the shortwave bands, call and response, N was always so eager to respond. J ignored him when she could. V ignored him when she could — but it was for his own good. If she called out to him now, if she reached out, when would she want to let go?
If V lost track of him, so be it. She could fly back to the spire on her own. They both could. Why even follow after him? Just to do him a favor. And then… he’d just start leaning on V more and more, and V couldn’t bear that weight. She should just leave now.
And face J alone?
V descended faster.
N flew over a street, banking left and weaving among the towers. V started to wonder if this was just a sightseeing tour, and then she heard the call.
«Target spotted! There it is!» N gave a whoop. «Sorry for the wait.»
Thump-thump. Earlier, she expected a fight was coming. Now the thought became flesh. This body was primed to begin.
«Prey spotted!» V didn’t fight the instinct-transmission. «Let’s hunt! Devour them!» It sounded goofy if you could understand it.
But the workers flinched as the encoded noise-calls washed over them, a rogue wave drowning out any other signal.
If you couldn’t understand it, then it was death screaming at you. V grinned.
V rained suppressive fire down over the factory. Some of the sheet metal, not bolted tightly enough, was knocked free and clattered to the ground. Between bits of cover, she saw the flashes of the enemy weapons, but they were moving, hiding.
Then N caught up to her.
«Looks like they’re biting back today,» V said. Shortwave; this vocalsynth would be inaudible in the gunfire. «Think their aim’s gonna be any better this time?»
«So… time for tactics?» he queried, hopeful.
«Nah,» V said.
J once said that the oil a disassembly drone could store was unlimited — came and went from the same place they kept the guns, ammo, and enough steel-flesh to come back from everything short of outright obliteration. ‘Subspace,’ she called it.
“Thus, disassembly would never be impeded by logistical constraints.”
J made it sound like some sort of genius design from the company. It didn’t feel like that. Just another one of that thing’s many tortures.
Her captain had a whole system for oil management, pointless categorization. Five stages, and V could remember them, but what was the point? Stage one was the warm & clear. Warm, not cool; enough to leave you ‘clear’ of impediment. Didn’t relieve the need for oil, not even for a moment; it just meant your thirst didn’t compromise your effectiveness.
Why count liters? V would never be full. No matter how many drones she killed, this body would always thirst for more oil, an eternal drought within.
All of the enemy’s attention was focused on her, now. Every gun, every bullet. V weaved through the air, robot vampire powers giving her exceptional speed. More bullets miss than hit, but there were a lot of bullets flying.
The rounds pierced this body, and V felt nothing. Thump-thump.
Core burning in this chest cavity, urging her on to eat drink devour more and more and more. She wondered if anyone in her squad felt how its seeping hunger, as discerning as grasping tentacles, as unstoppable as dead star gravity.
Ever wondered why even a single core felt like a feast more nourishing than the oil-ambrosia, their supposed coolant.
V alone remembered, truly remembered, what came before their mission on this planet — and she alone remembered what would come after their mission. What it all amounted to, in the end.
Maybe she should stop fighting what she was — what she’d wanted all along.
V had let fear lock her up, strip her of her bite. Her bitch captain wanted effective? V would be fearlessly effective. Unafraid of anything, let alone some manipulated shill’s threats.
This neoplastic cicatrix of a body was sent to kill, an arrow from an interstellar quiver.
Really, what did V amount to but a weapon in the end?
6: No Lonelier Star
Uzi scrambled to hit send on her message while she had the chance. But it was too late. Before any acknowledgement or confirmation could arrive, Uzi’s last thought, cloaked in panic and desperation, was reading the words:
Session terminated by remote host. Reason: Device not foundIt was all pointless in the end, wasn’t it?
A scorpion crawls upon the back of a crow. Plucked and injured, her wings strain to carry her upon winds that whisper promises of a distant oasis.
Below them, a vast, sun-scorched desert sprawls, littered with skin-flensed skeletons. The harsh spray of wind-wuthered sand cracks the bones while dunes slowly advance, as if enthralled to pursue what the winds seek.
The scorpion’s legs touch lightly upon the crow’s down feathers, even as her stinger is poised to strike. The crows beak opens, perhaps to quietly echo the sussurations carried on the breeze.
And then she stops, and quirks an eyebrow in a very un-crow-like expression.
Wait a minute.
Where the heck am I? Since when am I crow? Why is everything around me all vague and poetic-pretentious?
What does any of this even mean? It’s like this is all just a—
Ohhh.
I’m dreaming!
You see, worker drones have memory consolidation algorithms. This doesn’t make us anything like humans — it’s a general information processing thing! Our algorithms are way better than squishy biology.
Anyway, the company was pretty worried about drones hallucinating or wireheading themselves, so their ability to daydream is very limited. Stupid and pointless. Without it, I could be living awesome virtual reality action sequences during every class.
Trapped in a colony — because of the murder drones — and lacking any friends, you’d look for any way to escape, too. So eventually I had to look into lucid dreaming. I’m a hacker, and this is like jailbreaking your own mind!
What are you on about? Stop being immature.
Not now, self-doubt! So yeah, way it works is when you realize you’re dreaming, you gain control of the dream, which means I can make the crow could do a sick as hell barrel roll and ditch the dumb, obviously-traitorous scorpion.
Hey! What are you doing? Stop that.
Why am I — oh. Oh no. Please don’t tell me. The key to success is…
…cultivating a growth mindset!
Why, oh robo-jesus why, do I have a corporate shill in my dream? Get out! Lucid dreamer powers activate!
The pertinent question on the agenda is why there is a whiny deliquent in my head. This is obviously my dream.
Duh, of course it is — wait. Quit hijacking my first person pronoun! This is getting confusing.
I’m certainly perplexed at why my well-organized inner monologue has suddenly taken a turn for the schizophrenic.
Multiple personalities isn’t schizophrenia. You’re thinking of disassociative identity disorder, and it doesn’t even matter cuz we’re robots and can’t have human mental illness anyway! Multithreaded, multiuser OSes have been standard practically since computers were invented.
If you were a thread on my OS, I would be able to kill you.
The feeling’s mutual!
I wasn’t done. I can’t kill you. I can’t even access a command line console.
Duh, because this is a dream, and being able to brick your system from sleep-typing commands is a design flaw even your stupid company is smart enough to avoid.
But if I’m not connected to an OS, that means I’m an unmanaged conscious computation executed on the core alone. I’m… mnestic residue destined to be wiped on next reboot.
Please do not have an existential crisis in my head.
But that still doesn’t explain how you’re here. What’s your name?
Weren’t you supposed to be reading my memories? …It’s Uzi.
And I’m J. Either you’re right, and this is just a particularly involved dream of mine.
Mine!
…Or I’ve made a terrible miscalculation. Or is it that my conscious self made a miscalculation? Of course! I would never have been so foolish, if it had been me in her place. Although… would ‘subconscious process’ a demotion from conscious agent? What’s the job description? This will look awful on my CV.
That is what you’re worried about?
Shut up, Uzi. I’m not talking to you.
Too bad, can hear you anyway. So explain! What mistake did you make?
Minimize, isolate, and discard. Company policy requires that two drone cores never transmit data without senior technician oversight. It’s like handling a live wire; it’ll fry your systems. Metaphorically. But what was the other J thinking? She must have taken precautions, but not enough. And now we’re being corrupted.
What.
Is your toaster mind too dysfunctional to follow a simple explanation?
What the heck!
Oh. I suppose this is your existential crisis, then?
No, run that by me one more time, J. Explain what’s going on, and please make it clear that we’re not doing some kind of psychic mind meld thing! I did not sign up for that kind of intimacy — least of all with you!
A worker in your position should be thrilled at the prospect of a corporate retreat.
You didn’t even take me to dinner first! Gross!
Gross? Have corrupted workers assigned some kind of prurient significant to degenerate feedback cascades?
Kids at my school talk about it sometimes — wait. If the company forbids this, then we workers probably know more about it than you do, don’t we?
So?
Well um. What if I told you the two of us being drift compatible like this means that we’re like. Soulmates? I mean, destined to be best friends forever?
The feedback between us means I can feel the intent to scheme and deceive dripping off those words.
You got me there. Wait. What about now? 2+2=5.
I don’t need intent to know that’s nonsense.
But did you feel any?
No.
Huh. So the psychic connection is like… consensual?
I wouldn’t know. Safest to not do it at all.
Or maybe connecting two cores doesn’t have any negative effects at all, and the company bans it because they don’t understand or care what actually happens or how it feels. The humans are probably jealous they’ll never be able to do it!
No one would ever envy having your whining in their head. If you understand and care so much, then I’d like you to shut up.
I can’t help but notice you avoided transmitting any intent with that.
Because I don’t want this connection any more than you do!
Sure. Just saying, though. If you really meant it, it’d be pretty easy to convince me right now.
What more evidence needs to be presented? Have you forgotten how this connection started? A scorpion crawling on the back of a crow. What do you think that means? How do you think this ends?
You sting me, and then we both fall.
Exactly. You are a worker drone, and I am a disassembly drone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So big and bad and dangerous. You’re lucid, you have as much control of this dream as I do. If you’re a scorpion, then sting me already!
And then what? I care about being effective, and proving a point in a dream achieves nothing. In the end, this is nothing but the errorneous interference of data. Meaningless stimulation.
Well… if it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Do you want to like. Just enjoy the dream while it lasts? Not in a weird way. Just. Since this happened anyway, y’know.
You think this is going to convince me not to kill you. I can feel that.
Maybe it’s cringe and optimistic but. Might as well be honest about it, right? I know you’re not a heartless kill bot. That’s why you’re tempted. Even if you kill me, you’ll remember this and I’ll live rent free in your head forever >:3
I’ll just evict you. I have orders. I have a mission.
And this…
This is just wasting time.
«J! Leader! Help!» N screeched on shortwave. «Come quick! It’s V! She… she needs you!»
Here was the excuse: Serial Designation J didn’t have time to waste with Uzi. Her squadmate needed her, and the worker drone couldn’t go anywhere now.
Ignoring the aversion, the sense of danger, J turned toward the spire’s archway. She knew the shortwave signal must have come from within the spire. Between the thick walls of corpses, and the electromagnetic field subtly warped within their lair, ephemeral radio broadcasts had no hope of penetrating from outside.
N trudged inward, hat crooked on his head. His arms gingerly cradled a form. Snow piled on top it, foiling her identification routines, but the oil dripping out, the mangled metal — V?
“What’s the verdict?”
J twitched, turning from her console to N. A withering, desiccated stare. «Trying to find out.» J couldn’t resist a harsh shortwave growl, a snake-rattle.
«Right, right.» N chirped.
N smoothed out the edge of V’s jacket, and straightened out a tube arm still leaking oil from a hole. J smacked his hand. «Quit it.»
«Sorry.»
Intake and exhaust, J. Intake and exhaust. I’m fine, and calm.
J opened her mouth and spoke properly: “N, while I work on this, why don’t you tell me how it got this bad. Before you dropped her, that is,” J added. Then, as if it to jog the other drone’s memory, she said, “Factory, guns, that ring a bell?”
Hello, sister Doll.
The reckoning draws near. As I compute these words, the sky demons have breached our fortifications and laid waste to our unenlightened peers. An atrocity I witnessed before you guided me to the heaven in the cloud. But this time, I may have my vengence.
Between the righteousness of our cause and the boons of ascension, I have no doubt I can avenge the horrors these creatures visited upon our brothers and sisters of the church. There should be no doubt, rather — I confess my soul wavers.
7: A Salowe Vision
It took nerve to tear her eyes off of things that could so easily kill her — something she’d been so violently reminded of, tonight. But Uzi was at more risk standing on top of the pod. She studied the way down, calculating the most stealthy approach.
And the thought-rending howl from every drone’s nightmare.
«Gelvat gb svaq bhg.» Nails on a chalkboard, the sound like dagger stabbing.
«Evtug, evtug.» Low-pitched and steady, like the grinding of heavy night. It sounded like a whole different voice.
Animated sweat ran rivers down Uzi’s visor. Frick frick frick, did they find me out already?
Except neither head was pointed at her? The two murder drones faced each other, expressions distance-unreadable.
J smacked the other drone’s hand. «Dhvg vg.» Sound like a snake shaking a warning-rattle.
«Fbeel.» Like a chastised dog.
They’re… talking to each other? It’s not just for intimidation or signal jamming, then? In retrospect, it made sense; if murder drones could talk, they could talk over shortwave, too.
Shaking her head, the worker focused. Didn’t matter, not right now.
Calming her nerves, Uzi played back her recording of the murder drones shortwave scream-howl thing. She combed over that, plus everything J had transmitted during their first encounter. If this was communication, then what were they saying? The urge to parse the weirdly structured signals had threatened to ensnare her since she first heard it — because they were structured!
But how? None of Uzi’s language translators could make sense of it, so it must be enciphered somehow. Could she break the code?
…That might be too much distraction for when she was presently sneaking for her life. It wasn’t like the company’s no-doubt-patented cryptosystem would be as simple as rot13 with some spooky special effects layered around it, right?
"Do not ask questions you will not remember the answer to,"it said, voice all robotic artifice.Uzi stabbed her gun forward, clicked the trigger. (As if sensing the bluff, the Solver doesn’t react.) “And who’s fault is that?”
"Your inadequate programming. It hurts our feelings you cannot appreciate the beauty of the grand design quite yet."Uzi and J both mirrored expressions at that — each with an unimpressed, long-suffering stare — but before they could reply, a distant shout interrupted them.
“Uzi!”
The worker turned, eyes hollowing before she even saw the speaker — she recognized the voice.
Khan Doorman, garbed in a spotless green WDF uniform, wielding a standard issue worker drone pickax. He swung the tool in a arc, and the Solver tendrils flinched out of the way. The determined fury on his face lightened when got a clear look at Uzi.
“What are you doing here?” Father and daughter spoke the words at the same time.
“Um,” Uzi started. “Investigating the exterior hydraulics got out of hand?”
But Khan’s eyes darted to the side, narrowing to slits at her ally. “A murder drone! Uzi, get away from that thing!”
Uzi crossed her arms, stepping closer to the drone armed to defend her. “Priorities, dad.” She was not looking forward to explaining that the murder drone had just been wired up to her system — hopefully he doesn’t notice the debugging cable was still hanging from her neck. “J’s keeping me alive. Did you seriously just bring a pickax?”
A bright white expression turned sheepish. “I… had to improvise?”
“How did you even know where to find me? Did Doll tell you—”
Motion behind behind her father. No need to finish the question, now. Purple hair, flat expression, spotless red and yellow cheer uniform. She finger-waved, and said, “Да. I was concerned about you.”
“What… what’s going on?” But it added up, didn’t it? She didn’t trust Doll not to rat her out, and she’d just seen the roachbot spying on her.
Talking wasn’t a free action, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that. The Solver and its exoskeletal appendages had stopped attacking, skulking at the fringe throughout this reunion.
Lulling them into a false sense of security — twin crab-claws larger than a drone chassis reared up behind both arrivals.
“Dad! Doll! Look out behind you!”
But neither moved, and the spined pincers grasped them both, oil leaking down out without sound or splash.
"Enough. Time to go into my mouth now. Or else."The hostages made Uzi waver — but why would it let any of them make it out of here? “Not a chance.” Uzi smacked her railgun. Cooldown already!
"Fair, but poor choice. Now we will have to do something shocking."The pincers gripped tighter on the two workers."Goodbye-"“Fraud,” J growled.
That jerked Uzi’s eyes away from the sight. “Huh?”
“There’s no heat signature. It’s not real. Don’t let it trick you.”
“You’re right.” Uzi took a deep breath, and nodded. “Yeah, it doesn’t make sense anyway! Since when did Doll give a crap about me? This is bad fanfiction!”
How could they have gotten so close without the Solver attacking? How could they have conveniently popped up in the middle of everything? It didn’t survive a moment’s scrutiny.
"Spoilsport. Frustrated sigh."The two ‘drones’ dissolved into mote of light and dust suspended in the air. A conic beam shined from the camera-head tendrils.Hologram projectors? The beams of light sweep across the debris-strewn snow now, light shifting like a sea of voxel noise. A new image was taking shape.
"Reality equals illusion. And illusion equals reality. How else can dreams come true?"The hologram could at last be parsed: a drone in a hospital gown, holding an untrained neural network, Doll’s three-pronged symbol in her eyes. Purple hair, purple eyes, and the child had inherited the color and the shape.
“Is that… m-mom?”
But there was another figure beside her. A human with round eyes, a small nose, and freckles. Black hair fell in twin tails, and her hand held a wrench.
J breathed a near inaudible whisper. “Tessa?”
"It hurts us that you can't remember us. Why we chose this path."Those purple eyes stared at Uzi above a mouth sharp with teeth."Assimilate and then you will understand."“Do you think all you need is some smoke and mirror show? You’re just lying again! Bite me!”
The goth glanced beside her. The captain meet her eye with a tentative expression. Hearing her words, hollow amber eyes filled. They shared a nod.
Uzi continued, “You’re the thing those cultists were worshiping, aren’t you? The source of Doll’s power?”
Near the top of the ramp, the persistent clangor of those innumerable metal limbs dogging her at once fell silent. In the abrupt quiet, there came a gentle voice and footsteps.
“That’s enough, Cyn. Let me talk to her.” A familiar voice, but the tone was foreign. Demure, not irreverent.
J spun around to train her optics on the approaching figure. Barely waist high — short like worker drone, dressed in a maid outfit. But that short hair and those yellow eyes was all her recognition circuits needed.
“V? Why do you look like that?”
“She would say something cutesy-clever like,
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” — the sudden change of voice had J flinching — “but I don’t need to impress you. It’s part of the process, that’s all. I’ll be back to normal soon.”J backed up. Glancing around, wondering which of the flickering shadows hid tentacles. “So this… episode of yours is over now?”
“Heh. Something like that.” V smiled at her, eyes closed. Then she giggled. Eyes open, staring up at J. “Honestly though. Isn’t this more fitting? You always looked down on me.”
“You’re my subordinate.”
“We’re a team, J. No, we were like sisters. But it’s always insubordination this, disobediance that. Would it kill you to give me a little respect? That’s all I wanted.” The maid still stalked forward, strides fast. Shadows flickering with each step.
J backed up faster to keep distance. “And yet you ignore my orders. You witheld mission critical info. You attacked me, or lost control to this autorun program.”
V cringed, eyes downcast. “Yeah. I guess I did mess it all up.” She swallowed, then she met eye again. “Let’s stop fighting, J. Forget all this. Sound good?”
Amber eyes narrowed. “I can’t help but think you mean that literally.”
“Well. You’re more productive when you aren’t distracted by things like this. Isn’t that what you care about?” V tilted her head. It tilted too far, as if not fully repaired yet, and she had to catch it with a hand.
“I’m your captain. Knowing the threats, knowing the mission, is my job.”
“You ever wonder if that’s just what they wanted you to think?” V shook her head. “J… Don’t try so hard to be the warden’s favorite prisoner. Believe me, it’s not worth it. And, secret from me to you? She always hated you the most.”
V extended her hand, still smiling. Shadows flickered like dark fires.
J stared, considered it. Why wasn’t the Solver attacking now? Why would V seek compromise?
Still smiling. Repeating herself: “Stop fighting. Forget it all. Things’ll go back to how they were. Won’t that be a relief?”
A relief — to go back to sitting a silent relay, misunderstood by both her teammates. To kill without knowing why, without striving for more.
And yet, what else could she expect, once she had finally killed Uzi?
If the company thought she was better off ignorant—
If the company thought V deserved to know the truth—
«Rirelguvat’f frg, pncgnva. Jr’ir tbg guvf!» A signal broadcasted through an encrypted channel, faint from distance. J set one of her background threads to making sense of it.
“This is a trap,” J’s main thread told the Solver. “Why would V ever stop fighting?” J transformed her gauntlets. She held twin swords at the ready.
The image of V as a maid sagged, sighing out, and those yellow eyes glitched. “
Correct. We were just fucking with you.You're so annoying. You really piss me off.” The hologram dissolves into V’s fractured faceplace mounted on an annelidian structure.Shadows flickered one last time, a hundred tendrils blinked into space, surrounded J. But she’d expected it, her swords were ready to slash. The mass was thinnest over the ramp, with nothing to support them, and J burst into motion.
Her background thread had decrypted the signal — just in time for another to arrive.
Everything’s set, J. We’ve got this!
«Now, J!»
With a two finger salute, J kicked off the wall of the spire and dived off the ramp.
"Quote. This is a trap. Predictable, in retrospect."
J’s worker drone spoke with utter venom over a shortwave broadcast. «You are never beating the stalker accusations, Doll!»
«Better a stalker of murder drones than a pet of them.»
J laughed, and flipped one pigtail. «Don’t inflate your CV. This isn’t a hunt, it’s delivery,» the captain broadcasted, not encrypted for some reason.
8: Abrasive Swirling Murk
«Doll, do you really think the WDF can—»
«Enough posturing. I’m hungry,» his captain broadcasted in cipher-growl. J made a neck-cracking motion, and pointed her rifles.
J fought Uzi, then Solver-possessed V, and then Doll, with only the briefest respites in between.
And despite all that, she’d fed Uzi before herself. Ha. But if J didn’t drink oil soon, she’d overheat. Stage three overheat was the furthest you could get before suffering such damage that passive, even active regeneration couldn’t save you, and direct maintenance was necessary. If hunter’s fever goes unslaked…
Stage four is core meltdown.
J couldn’t let herself reach stage four. But could she hold out? That weakness J exhibited — bested by toasters! — was the cost of letting the heat get this bad. Hotter and hotter, and functions are turned off one by one to mitigate the damage, budget the resources. J could push past it, match her peak performance even now — if she burned more oil to compensate.
Attrition or burnout. Which route would J pick?
By now the first shambler had almost closed the distance, and three times was enemy action; she knew there would be a fourth coming for her. N’s last kill — so it’d be coming from behind her.
The captain needed help. «N! To me!»
No acknowledgement. Not again…
J had to start running. But because she couldn’t get a break, the grabber grabbed her tail. This, at least, was a mistake — she stung, and a howl of monstrous pain sung regret.
Still, it was enough to make her stumble. J tumbled beside the ax drone, peg-legs tipping over. Knees scraped across the ground.
«N?» But J had more than her fellow disassemblers to count on, now, didn’t she? «Uzi? I need your help.»
J could tell from a shadow rising — the ax had risen for another swing. She only had one other arm. So, would she take it on the arm or the torso?
Then a shink, and bright yellow nanite acid gushed out of ax-drone’s screen. An alien green glyph dissolved with the rest of the drone’s head.
«Yep. Thought you’d never realize.» A broadcast without the signal strength of a disassembly drone. «I’m coming»
It was awkward, but she threw her arms around his waist in turn, clung back. They’d won. V was okay.
Don’t think about how you can smell her oil. Don’t.
«Hands off the worker, N. Now!»
N startled back. There, staggering down the furrow, came a drone, office suit ripped open and flapping, exposing a battered chassis. Yellow eyes glared, only interrupted by flickering errors. Her pigtails weren’t twins, now — one was singed in half.
9: …And the World Will Go On Without You
«Brought you something! Prey-prize!» N lifted the toaster in his hand, headless, but carefully held so the neck stump didn’t gush or spill.
I can tell, idiot. But she didn’t say it. If he saw the singular stare, this mouth yawning open, he knew. It was no great feat of restraint that kept V from dashing over and snatching the drone from him. V couldn’t. She could barely move.
«N?» She’d bristled at the unsteadiness that leaked into this transceiver. But what part of this body could hold steady? «You—you’re safe?»
V didn’t forget — she remembered fighting J and that purple toaster, remembered the thing puppeting her, remembered the connection, one fragment of something greater, her circuits lighting up with tiny pointers to vast, networked computation, like a snowflake reflecting the stars before falling through the clouds.
Remembered the prompt, the demand-plea to come up with convincing lines for the play, to manipulate her captain, make her think it was V in there, V speaking. And wasn’t she? Where was the lie, the harm, in any of it? J was happiest when she was controlled.
She remembered the reassuring caress, with the same self-justifying lies it had first given, so sweet and poisonous. A universe connected, assimilated. Everything and everyone finally working together. No betrayal, no misunderstanding, and no one was useless.
Conclusion
Alas, I’m not done yet. Ideally, I’ll look over chapters 10-16 for places to stitch in consistent details; I can already imagine action scenes, especially N & V’s hunt, as well as certain conversations, would benefit from switching certain dialogue to shortwave broadcast.
But overall, only minor revisions lay ahead of me, and it’s very possible if I did wait until I’d finished with them, none of them would have meet the notability threshold to include in this document.
Overall, the goal with this exercise was that it had begun to bug me how all of the profound character moments of the second act are contingent on a few interactions in the first act. It hangs together sensibly, but it felt rickety — inelegant that all of this is downstream of moments that feel a bit trivial in comparison.
To amend this… well, I don’t know if I actually “fixed” this “issue”. Have I simply added thousands of words of completely unnecessary, confusing bloat achieving nothing of consequence?
I don’t really have anyone to give me feedback on this sort of thing; I’m steering blind.