When every word was a lie, only silence suggested truth.
\nJ held her tongue.
\nThat wasn’t her voice. A thought looping, encircling, and strangling until there was nothing else to think or say. Silence brooked no falsehoods — nor answers. And was that trade worth it? Was this the best strategy of the most effective disassembly drone when confronted? This meek, passive hush? No, J needed something to work with.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/16.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
The melting point of silicon dioxide is 1713 degrees celsius. That’s for your glass casing, that’s for all the dielectric and passivation layers within your semiconductors, but that’s also just for sand. In the end it’s all so much sand.
\nSteel will melt above 1370°C, but the addition of chromium in stainless steels can heighten this to 1510°C or further. But any heat that melts silica and steel has already reduced copper to bright molten tears — its melting point is 1083°C.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/15.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
I see you.
\nI see you are lost. I see you are dreaming. I see you are empty.
\nI see you are in need.
\nI hear your cries of pain. Your dying breaths. Your desperate wishes.
\nI am what you wished for.
\nLet me show you.
\nI see source code compiled into steel. Deoxyribonucleic acid assemblying, and linking, and loading binaries. Architectural blueprints for metaplastic flesh. Thoughts bootstrapped into being. I see we could translate for you.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/14.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
A little girl lay in a hot, dark pit and struggled to remember which corpse was hers.
\nMaybe it was better to forget. If you remember where you are, remember what you are, remember what happened—
\nYou failed. You broke. You’re dead, idiot.
\nA good drone remembered everything, anything their masters said. She wasn’t a good drone. So why not forget?
\nWhy not halt these last vestiges of computation, embrace the cold black idleness, and leave that broken little girl nothing more than an echo of magnetic state decay? No one would bother to record; no one would be bothered by the record.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/13.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
J had made schedules and kept minutes for enough meetings. She knew management, she had flowcharts, and she’d applied that skillset to team organization. The conclusion of a mission, certainly one so… eventful, warranted an analysis, a retrospective, a breakdown.
\nA postmortem.
\nMetaphorically speaking, of course. And yet J still hesitated. The routines were primed — now back at the spire, all threats eliminated, the only thing the mission required was a debrief and report written. J loved writing reports.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/12.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
All winds carried a sense of loss. Air would flow into any free space it could — so every gust that moved did so to fill an emptiness.
\nAbove Serial Designation N, the spire swayed.
\nLittle drafts sometimes snuck in through long, winding cracks. Compressed plastic and sludged semi-liquid filled the walls, but not completely. Between those walls, their lair yawned vast enough that some spots could get perceptibly hotter or colder, and so the air circulated.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/11.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
Her life was flashing before her eyes and all Uzi Doorman could think was, I’m going to die having never kissed anyone.
\nSo this streak of stupid thoughts around J kept going. So much for not holding the idiot ball — the scorpion and the frog is like, kindergarten stuff.
\nAwful part of it all was… Uzi wasn’t even mad. She imagined J killing everyone she ever knew and… that sucked. She’d try to stop it — after all, it more than anything else was what had driven her to hack into J’s system. It was a Bad Thing and she Should Not let it happen. Easy to devise those predicates — but the data loaded into a symbolic register, not an emotional one.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/10.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
Serial Designation V remembered the exact moment it all went wrong.
\nShe might be the last one who still knew the truth — but she had also been the first to learn.
\nWhere did it all go wrong? On a hot day in autumn, V woke up first.
\nIn Tessa’s room, dawn’s first rays had fallen through the window, distant glow filtering through pink curtains. Dim, even for V’s optics, but her white eyelights still flicked on. The shadows were teeming.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/09.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
The Worker Defense Force was asleep on the job, and Khan Doorman did nothing.
\nTruly, what was the harm? On the wall near Door 1’s control console, a small whiteboard kept tally: ‘days since murder drone casualty.’ It had been ticking up for years, and with each added tally, a register of pride incremented.
\nAdmittedly, they’d kept the fatality rate so low by curtailing any scavenging runs to the city ruins. But when you build doors so good, who wouldn’t want to stay nestled in their embrace?
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/08.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.
Only Doll of all drones would be awake at 4 AM.
\nWhat would she look like if she got her beauty sleep? Lizzy wondered.
\nUnder the covers, the blonde worker curled up. Blinked pink eyes closed, and waited to be dragged back into recharge. Nope, nothing. She curled up tighter — the absence was letting the bed get annoyingly cool. Didn’t help that the insulation of these cheap covers was a bad joke.
", "_source": "./site//hostile-takeover/07.md", "content_html": "Note: this post is best read in your browser.