Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Even someone looking down on the planet of Silicon Four from above- soaring on a pair of bladed wings, or bringing a spaceship down to landing, for instance- would have been hard pressed to see two figures trudging across the sand.

Subject 005, or Stevie as she was usually called, led the way. The worker drone wore a sandy beige shirt and pants, even though most drones only bothered covering their torsos- her metal legs would have reflected enough light to be visible otherwise. A wide hat shielded her eyes from the sun and prevented the top of her metal head from reflecting light, ensuring that from above she looked like just more beige in the endless sea of the sand. Even with the camouflage, her blue eyes flicked around as she walked across the sand, keeping watch for all angles of attack.

The human behind her was dressed almost the same, with the addition of a space suit underneath her camo-gear. Space/environment suits had come a long way since their invention a thousand years ago, and gone from ‘clumsily bulky’ to ‘tight and flexible:’ so much so that while Theresa McAllister could have survived the physical dangers of Silicon Four with just the suit and its sandy coloring, she would die of embarrassment ever being seen without something on over it.

Theresa had her head down, rereading the list of what they needed, so she almost walked into Stevie when the drone stopped suddenly. A question of why died on Theresa’s lips when she saw their destination in front of them: the ruins of City Three.

“Bloody hell. Now we know why they weren’t responding, at least…” When this got no response, Theresa shook her friend’s shoulder and said, more loudly, “They might still have some of the supplies we need! Let’s go check it out!”

Stevie’s visor displayed a diagnostic for a moment before, she shook herself and threw out an arm to stop Theresa’s movement. “You can’t be serious! What if the murder drones are still in there?” she hissed.

“Nahh, take a good look.” Theresa pointed not at the city, but above it. “The protective dome looks to have been melted, but there’s no smoke, so the damage isn’t recent. And I don’t see anything flying above it, so they’re gone. C’mon, there might be survivors!”

They both knew it was a lie, the ‘disassembly’ drones almost never left survivors, but it did its job. They could pretend that they were doing more than looting the dead as they hurried towards the city.

As dusk began to fall over the city, the women had found everything they’d been sent for. A few pieces of technical equipment that the labs didn’t produce on their own had been scavenged from a factory, while disposable supplies- oil, toiletries, preserved food, and so on- had been easy to take from general stores and people’s homes. It didn’t look like the people had even had time to to pack and run; the monsters had broken the city’s shield, and that had been the end. Just like it would be if they ever found their way past the defenses and into the Cabin Fever Labs complex.

They went uncomfortably silent and changed the subject when Stevie mentioned that last detail. The flying murder monsters may have been a fact of life for 21 years, since before either one was born, but people always survived by not focusing on the possible catastrophes.

The prize of the trip, found at the outskirts of the city, was a pair of swoop bikes. They were the perfect vehicles for off-road travel: fast, with filtered air intake to prevent sand damage, and no wheels to sink into the dunes. And a full pantry-sized cargo capacity under the seat: enough between them to carry back everything they’d gathered. The ones that they rode here had died a day out, so these were a very welcome replacement. The only mar on a perfect scavenging run was… well, the fact that it had been a scavenging run at all. City Three had been one of Cabin Fever Labs’ best supporters, and one of only a few outposts of humanity left on the planet, possibly in the universe- and now it was a pile of corpses. It was with heavy hearts that they started the bikes to leave.

Maybe that’s why they were careless in doing so.

The bikes roared to life like hungry tigers. Quick adjustments to the settings quieted the noise, but it was too late to prevent them from being heard.

A disassembly drone took to the air a few blocks away. It turned the yellow X of its eyes towards them, and the girls knew they were dead.

It was the only reaction they had time for as the monster dived at them with inhuman speed.

A clash of steel on steel split the night as the monster stopped just a few feet from Theresa’s face, its claws blocked by… the sword of… another murder drone? They struggled against each other momentarily before the newcomer swung a second sword, forcing its opponent back. Where it stood still, the two murder drones just out of reach of each others’ blades.

“She’s dead,” The newcomer said. “We don’t have to do this anymore.”

The first monster snarled, and tried to leap past it, but was stopped by a swipe of a bladed wing.

As blades clashed above them, the worker drone and the human turned to each other.

“Plan S?” “Plan S!”

They turned their bikes up to their maximum speed and fled.

Chapter Text

Murder drones could regenerate from almost any injury, see 360o around them and in infrared, fly faster than a bullet, and replace their hands with any weapon at a moment’s notice. There was no fighting one, no running from it, and no hiding. If one saw you out in the sand, out of range of the labs’ defenses, you were dead. So Cabin Fever taught its members the only thing that even sort of worked: plan S.

S for Standard, or for Scatter. It was the only plan that would let any of a group survive a murder drone: every member fled, as fast as they could, in a different direction. The monster would have to pick one, and while it chased that one, the others could escape and return to the labs later. It was heartless, leaving one person to die, and sometimes the others wouldn’t all make it back, either being tracked down or running into another- but in the cold calculus of survival, it left more people alive than any other strategy, and that was what mattered.

So when Theresa saw the murder drones in her bike’s rearview mirror, she tried to focus on the fact that if they were following her, at least that meant Stevie could get away. She just had to survive long enough to give her best friend that chance.

A full minute later, her fear was beginning to give way to confusion. No one being chased by one murder drone lived this long, let alone two. On top of that, the new drone was very, very strange.

It looked weird, to start off with. Worker drones were built with bald metal heads, which murder drones shared- but this one had silver hair, tied up in twin pigtails. And where murder drones always had huge Xs across their visors, this one had yellow, worker-like eyes.

Even stranger than its looks were its actions. It was fighting the first, or rather, the first was fighting with it- Theresa was slowly realizing that this new drone had barely made any attacks. It focused mostly on defending itself, and stopping the first drone from getting past it to attack the human they were chasing. Is it protecting me? she wondered. No, that’s impossible… as impossible as a murder drone that talks, I suppose.

And did it ever talk. It pleaded, constantly, with the attacking drone. “She’s gone!” it yelled. “You won’t get in trouble!” And, “There’s no more sin! We don’t have to kill any more!” Sin? Is there some truth to the idea that these things are based on angels? And, “We can live in peace! I know it’s scary, but it’s possible now!”

With the sounds of clashing blades and yelling following her overhead, Theresa swerved her bike around a destroyed gas station and headed towards open an ancient lakebed. Wide, open ground that had never been mined- it would leave her exposed, but the drones were nimbler than her, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could avoid crashing at this speed.

It’s trying to talk the other one down, she realized. Why? Is that even possible? Would it- OhgodImdeadImdeadImdead-

She braked hard and spun her bike as her attacker landed in front of her, almost hitting it with the back end. The strange drone landed between them as she accelerated away, putting as much space between herself and the fight as possible- and heading towards Stevie. Oops. Theresa turned the handlebars gently to the right, beginning a wide curve that would bring her past the fight without getting too close. Theresa was a distraction now, so her goal was to give Stevie the best chance to escape, and that meant staying alive as long as possible while getting as far away from her as possible.

She got maybe a quarter of the way around before a missile came out of the fight, headed straight for her. A panicked attempt to dodge had it only taking out the engines in the front.

The bike bounced across the ground and slid to a stop, leaving Theresa defenseless. 

The sound of clashing blades and gunfire paused as the pigtailed drone said, “Fine! Last chance.” It raised its tail, the tip of its syringe pointed at the other’s chest. “Give me one indication- any reason to believe there’s still anything left in there of who you were- that there’s any more than what she made of you.” Its left hand shifted into a short tube. “Or… I’ll do what I’m sure corporate would want.”

The attacker leapt.

Theresa screamed and fell off the remains of the bike as the drone fell to the ground feet away from her, its visor displaying virus messages. It clawed weakly at her before going limp.

Her savior landed on its head, driving it into the ground. It gave a smirk and a brief, triumphant laugh despite its visor displaying a high temp warning before it, too, crumpled to the ground.

Theresa could only stare at her apparent savior in uncomprehending shock for a second, before shaking herself awake and examining it more closely. It wore a business suit with a skirt, complete with tie and what looked like painted-on garters; it was an outfit along the uniform-like theme of murder drone clothes, making it almost strangely normal considering how non-uniform the rest of its appearance and actions were. The outfit, combined with the hair and high-pitched voice, made Theresa think that it seemed like a she.

So… what do I do with her? Theresa thought. She saved my life, I can't just let her die. But what if she wakes up and attacks me? …They drink oil or blood to cool down, right? She could attack me anyways out of hunger… And either way, I'd be dead already if it wasn't for her. Might as well take one more risk, bet on the same thing that worked the last time.

Theresa opened the cargo compartment under the bike's seat carefully, ready for a burst of smoke or flame, but it looked like it had survived the blast relatively unscathed. Makes sense, she supposed, if it had been damaged my legs would have too. I would've thought the missile would deal more damage, though. Movies always have cars explode even when they take much less damage.

An oil can was carefully extracted and poured it out into her savior’s mouth. And, once the high temperature warning had faded, pushed away with a huff and a “You should have let me die, idiot.”

Theresa fumbled and almost dropped the can. “Excuse me?”

“I’m a disassembly drone. You know, the indiscriminate-slaughter things?” The drone sat up and gestured with her sword. “You should kill me before I get the chance to kill you.”

“You just saved me from the ‘indiscriminate-slaughter thing’ right here,” Theresa said, gesturing to the unconscious body next to them. A hexagonal patch stuck to its chest displayed “uploading virus 45%.’ “And you were even trying to talk to it. You’re actually pretty nice, aren’t you?” Theresa said, smiling.

The drone rolled her eyes. “I think that’s the first time anyone’s ever called me nice.”

Theresa waited for a few awkward seconds before she realized it was up to her if she wanted the conversation to continue. “So, I’m Theresa. It’s nice ta meetcha!” She stuck out a hand, which the drone took with the firm grip and steady stare of a good businesswoman. That steady stare was directed into Theresa’s nose, since the opaque helmet blocked any view of the human’s face.

“Theresa, of… course. Serial designation J, at your service.” She went back to silence as she stood up, so Theresa spoke up again.

“Well J, why’re you so weird?” She slapped a hand over her mouth when she realized what she had said. “I- I mean, you don’t, uh, don’t look or act like, well.” She gestured at the body which now displayed uploading virus 60%. “Like most murder drones?”

J smirked. “Disassembly, not murder. And corporate just liked me better.” She turned away almost, but not quite, fast enough to hide a grimace of disgust at having said that.

Shoot, that got her upset. Change the subject! “Corporate? Like, JCJenson? The Absolute Solver? Or the woman you were telling the other was dead? Or…?” Not like that, actually change it!

J stared at her with wide eyes. “How did you know about the Solver?”

“I’m with Cabin Fever Labs! Our whole point is to study it, figure out how to stop it, that sorta stuff.” She paused and looked around at the distinctly non-studious surroundings. “I’m out on a supply run.”

“Oh, I know about you guys. Helped kill your division on another planet!” J laughed smugly. “And it’s a long story, but… sort of? Both of those last two?”

“Uh-huh…” Ok, so she isn’t killing me, I guess she stopped? No point running, anyways… “Is this related to whatever happened a few months back? Probably on Copper Nine? The timeline of the other planets’ destructions made us think it would be next, but then the test subjects all said the Solver was dead. The fact that they kept their powers and you guys were still around made us all think it was a trick of some sort, but if it isn’t…”

J nodded. “Yep, Cyn got to Copper Nine, and the folks there finally managed to kill it.”

“Sin? What, like, wrath? Pride?”

“No, Cyn with a cee. It’s a name.” J said. “The Solver, or its primary host? They seem pretty indistinguishable. I don’t have clearance to know how that stuff works.”

“I… see.” Theresa did her best to keep the glee out of her voice. The scientists were going to love this! “And then ya came here, from Copper Nine I’m guessing, to… let the other drones know that she was dead and you don’t have to follow her orders no more?

“Yep.” J said. “We’re not networked or anything, so they wouldn’t automatically know. I guess I just forgot that only my squad kept our personalities.”

“So then if that plan’s a bust… what now?” Theresa asked.

“Well, my other plan won’t work either- I wasn’t expecting any humans to still be alive here- but I’ll think of something. Were you bringing this stuff back to your base?” J pointed at the container of supplies.

“I was, but with the bike broken I’ll have to leave most of it-” she was cut off as J chopped most of the bike off and hefted the section with the cargo compartment.

“I am industrial machinery, you know.” She said in response to Theresa’s shocked stare. Apparently it could be sensed even through the helmet. “Well? Lead the way!”

Chapter Text

“How long is this trip going to take?” J asked after an hour of walking.

“Should be around two weeks,” replied Theresa. “Stevie will probably be back by tomorrow, with her bike, so they’ll think I’m dead. Bet they’ll think I’m a ghost when we get there?”

“Two weeks,” J said, ignoring the frivolity, “Is too long to get anywhere in this direction. I saw the region from above, a huge crevice is less than one week’s travel that way.”

“Nah, we ain’t going that way!” Theresa pointed off in a different direction. “We’re heading that way. Not too far actually, it’d be two or three days travel in a straight line, but we’ve gotta circle around the corpse spire and the Steel Mill. Pretty dangerous areas.”
“Any dangers I can’t fight?” J smirked.

“I guess not, but-”

“Then let’s go that way, and I’ll fight them off.” J walked confidently in the direction of the corpse spire, forcing her companion to follow.

And now I’m playing bodyguard for a person named Theresa, she realized. Who has a british accent… is fate playing some sort of cruel joke?

A couple of hours later, J’s oil was chilled as a mournful howl split the night. “What was that?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you have ghosts around here…”

“Oh right, we’re in dog territory! I plumb forgot that there were some around here,” Theresa said.

J gave her Flat Stare #3. “And what is dog territory.”

“It’s, well, the territory of dogs?” Theresa said. “You know, the little guys? Cute, fluffy, waggy tails, say woof?”

“I know what dogs are, moron. But anything alive around here should have become part of that.” She indicated the towering spire of corpses in the distance.

“Yeah, well, the dogs are immortal.”

J switched from Flat Stare #3 to the slightly more incredulous #4. “What do you mean, immortal?”

“Well, the murder- sorry, disassembly- drones gave up trying to kill them yoinks ago. They don’t need space suits in the toxic air, they ain’t starved, they’re all older than dogs have any right to be… so, immortal.”

J’s right eye twitched. “And where in the name of profits did you get immortal dogs from?”

“...Copper Nine?”

“What.”

“A ship full of ‘em crash-landed here a few years before your folks did, or so I hear.”

Which, going by travel times, means they must have been sent…

“Label said it was from Cabin Fever Labs on Copper Nine, and- uh, you alright? You’re, uh, shaking…” Theresa’s voice trailed off nervously.

“Of course. Of course, it- heheh- would be that way.” J set the bike-section down and clutched at her stomach. “Hahahah- Of course dogs on Copper Nine are immortal, and- and- and left just a bit before my squad arrived! My stupid, dog-loving brother missed paradise by that much! Oohohohohohhh, this is too good!” J sat down, laughing too hard to stay upright.

Theresa snickered- the laughter was infectious- and sat down beside her. “I’m gonna take a rest while ya do this; we’ve been walking for too long, my legs’re getting tired.”
“Hahaha- You do that, s’not good to tire yourself out too much– heehee- we’ve got a long way to go.” J managed to get out between giggles.

A while later, J stood back up. It had been far too long since she had last had a good laugh, and it felt good to let some of the tension and sadness out. She glanced over at Theresa, who was eating pieces of a nutrient bar through some sort of airlock in her helmet, then out towards the spire of corpses. Her ship was there, perched on one side of the spire, where she’d left it when she saw a drone attacking something. Going by current rate of travel, they’d probably reach it tomorrow night. And she’d have to get Theresa past it without the drones inside getting to her. But that was a problem for later.

“Say, N made it sound like dogs were happy all the time.” she said, turning back. “Why do they sound so sad?”

“They miss their masters.” Theresa gestured ahead of them, towards the howling. “This place up ahead of us is where one of the first massacres was when the murder drones showed up. A whole lot of people died, and the dogs just lie there mourning them.”

And there it is. The Solver’s creations ruin something N would’ve loved. J kept her face impassive. “Are they going to be a problem when we go through?” she asked.

“Nah, they ain’t all that territorial.” Theresa stuffed her bar’s wrapper into a pocket and stood. “I think I’m ready to go, wanna check them out?”

“In my defense, I don't think that this is territorialism.”

“No?” J set the container down gently on the ground, keeping an eye on the pack. Around a dozen dirty, growling creatures surrounded her and Theresa, hackles raised. “What is it, then?”

Theresa took a few steps away from her. “Well, they seem to just hate you. So… I ain't sure?”

“Of course they do.” J took a few steps in the opposite direction, watching as the dogs’ hate-filled gazes stayed locked on her. On what looked like the things that had killed their masters. “You go on ahead, I can handle a few mutts.”

“Alright, if you're sure. Just don't get hurt, ya got that?” Theresa nearly ran away, stepping between dogs in the direction they had been heading. Good; J didn't want her to have to see this. A bunch of dogs being sliced to ribbons would not be a pretty sight.

A deep growling drew her attention, and J turned to face the largest of the dogs. It stood almost as tall as her, with silky white fur, a short snout, and a pair of long, almost rabbit-like floppy ears. A… poodle? Dachsund? Pug? N would have known what breed. The collar around its neck was too weathered to read. Ropes of spittle stretched between its fangs and shook as it growled.

The lead dog leapt, along with a couple of its subordinates. J raised her claws- These things were trying to avenge their masters. Could J begrudge them that? Would she do any different for Tessa? How many times had she tried, before she realized the futility of trying to kill Cyn?- and withdrew her claws back into hands. She raised her arms to shield her face; the dogs could have their satisfaction and gnaw on her steel- “Don’t get hurt,” she had been told, in that almost-familiar voice. Would her pain give Tessa, or N, or V, back anything? Would they want it?- and dodged, leaning to the side at the last fraction of a second and letting the dogs pass right by her. And ran.

J was not fleeing, no matter what the digital tears in the corners of her visor might suggest. She was a leader, and she always had a plan- even if it sometimes took her a bit to figure out what her own plan was. She figured this plan out soon. She had ran, not used her wings even though they were faster, for a reason; it was not just that she had forgotten she had wings for a moment.

J didn’t need to slow her pace; the dogs were surprisingly fast, and the pack was snapping at her heels even as she ran at her top speed. She let them pursue her for several minutes, long enough that where they had started was out of sight, before ducking behind a rocky outcropping.

The apparent leader of the dogs was the first to follow her around the outcropping. J gave a sad smile as she looked at its almost pigtail-like white ears and the hatred, covering up sadness, in its barks as it summoned its pack. “I’m sorry,” she said. No, don’t show weakness, even to something like this. Vulnerability gets you hurt. It took just a slight adjustment to change her sad smile into a smug smirk. “Sorry you’re getting humiliated so thoroughly!”

And J spread her wings, flying straight up. The dogs circled where she had been and barked up at her as she ascended, past the clouds, high enough that they could not see her.

She landed next to the cargo container. No dogs had come back yet. She picked it up and continued on her way.

“See? Told you I could handle a few mutts,” J said as she caught back up.“We should probably stop soon, though. Sun’s almost up, and I can’t travel in the daylight. And you-” she looked over the area and how Theresa had sat down as soon as she caught up- “Are too tired to keep this up. You’ve been up a full day and night by now, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, I… I gueeehh…ess.” Theresa yawned as she said the last word, visibly slumping at the prospect of sleep. She opened up J’s container and took out a sleeping bag and a large, plastic blanket, which she tossed to J. “Here. Sunproof. G’night.”

J spread the blanket for inspection. It would be enough to protect her. “Good day, technically.”

Chapter Text

J awoke her customary fifteen minutes before sundown. The JCJenson In Spaaaaace!! employee handbook stated that employees should arrive fifteen minutes before the start of their shift, which J interpreted to be all night for disassembly drones- even if they weren’t actually JCJenson affiliated. And N and V hated being made to get up early. And drones in general were products, not employees. J still insisted that it was a good idea, and that it showed initiative and a go-getter attitude that would get her appreciated instead of scrapped. This time however, it left her having to stay wrapped in sunproof blankets uselessly.

She was packing the blanket away when Theresa finally woke up, wandered over, and took out a small can of beans and a spoon.

“What are you doing?” J asked.

“Having… breakfast?” was the confused reply, as Theresa sat down and opened the can,.

“Do you seriously plan on eating a single can of cold beans for breakfast?”

“Yeah, what’s the problem?”

J snatched the can out of her hand and pointed at the nutrition facts. “The serving size. Two cans. That means, you need two full cans to get the recommended amount of nutrients. And that’s just beans- you need more than that for a proper meal.”

“It’s what I usually eat when I’m out like this,” Theresa said, reaching for the can. “What’s the problem?”

“The fact that you should be dead of starvation by now. And it’ll leave you weak, without energy, suffering from all sorts of health problems…” She pulled the can away from Theresa’s reaching hand. “Sit back down, idiot, and give me half an hour.”

The cargo compartment held a single small cooking pot, which was being used to keep some jars from rattling around. It would do; J had blades and a welding torch built in. A quick search of the container turned up a tin of MEEAT in a cool font (™), a few herbs and vegetables, and a couple jars of spices. Good enough. 

“Holy cow J, you know how to cook?” Theresa exclaimed when J started.

“Of course I do, who doesn’t? Aside from idiots like you, I guess?” J retorted.

“Well, I wouldn’t think a murder drone would have any reason to know…”

“Nah, I know from back when I was a worker.”

“So you used t’be a worker drone? What, were all murder drones made from workers?” Theresa asked excitedly.

Oops. Eh, not a big deal. “Yep,” was all J said aloud as she tossed the meat into the bowl.

“Hmm…” Theresa said aloud. “I don’t think many workers knew much about cooking either, though. And you seem to be doin’ something fancy.”

“It’s just chili, you uncultured philistine.” J rolled her eyes.

“Anyways, what did you do that got you knowing how ta do this?”

I was Tessa’s friend. J glared at her. “I’d rather not get into it.”

“Aww, come on! You’ve got me curious.” Theresa leaned forwards. “And now I won’t give up until I know. Were you a chef or something?”

“...No,” J spat out. “I was a maid.”

Theresa snorted a laugh. “What, you cooked and cleaned for some rich blighter? I can't imagine.”

“Come on, you think anyone less could afford me?” J smirked, then changed the subject before the conversation could get any more uncomfortable. “What about you, then? You’re with Cabin Fever Labs- are you a roboticist? Physicist? Or some weirder sort of scientist?”

“I wish!” Theresa replied. “But I’m just a janitor.”

J narrowed her eyes, trying to line up the camouflaged, space-suit-clad apparent diplomat with what she’d heard of the people who cleaned up schools.

“I do the stuff that isn’t science but which we can’t use drones with, since they’re all the test subjects,” The human explained. “Anything that needs doing during testing time, maintenance work that we can’t risk the Absolute Solver getting a look at, talking to outside folks, guarding the drone rooms, that sort of stuff. It’s an important job, and there’s less of us than the sciencey folks!”

“I know how important the help is, yes,” J said. “But it looked like you were with a worker drone when I saved you. Clearly not doing stuff they don’t.”

“They ain’t allowed outside without human supervision, to make sure the Solver don’t make them run off or attack anyone or nothing. And Stevie’s been my best friend for years, we always try to take the same jobs! I just hope she’s alright, they’ll probably be mighty pissed about her coming back without me…”

J was familiar with friends who couldn’t be trusted alone, if not in quite that way. N would get himself hurt without a more competent supervisor, and back home none of the drones would be allowed outside the manor without human supervision either. She didn’t respond, though; that would only open up more questions, and J had already shared more than she wanted. She continued cooking in silence.

Theresa wasted no time inhaling the chili and moving on. “So, what's the plan for getting past the spire?” she asked.

“Leave the box here,” J began. “I'll go in and distract them there, to keep them from going outside and seeing you. It doesn't look like any disassembly drones have gone out yet, so we should have time. You go around- move fast but be careful not to touch any corpses, in the spire or on the ground. I'll come back here, grab the box, and find you after a few hours.”

“Gotcha,” Theresa nodded. “But why not just use that virus attaching thing you used to save me a couple days ago? The one that looks t'be the only thing capable of killing a murder drone for real? You got a moral issue with killing folks like you or something?”

“Nah,” J said, switching a hand to that little rectangular tube, “It's just not very good in a fight. I got that one because it was ignoring me in favor of you as much as possible. If I'm distracting them, I could maybe get one. Maybe. And the others would save it.”

“Gotcha. Ready when you are, then,” Theresa said.

In answer, J simply took to the air.

The pile of corpses, disassembly drone victims both human and worker drone, stretched up to the heavens. Two small spaceships were perched on the sides, left there after bringing their disassembly drones to Silicon Four. They had no distinguishing features from the outside, both still in their factory designs, so J picked one at random to enter.

It was hers. No bits of personalization littered the inside; in the past, J had disdained that sort of thing as foolishness and frivolousness, without practical purpose and liable even to bring consequences if seen by superiors who disapproved of their peons’ individuality. (Which is to say, all superiors not named Tessa Elliot.) Even on Copper Nine, with the only superior on another star system, old habits and letting the rest of the squad express themselves had let her hide from the new problem. And there was nothing she had wanted to bring along on this trip, no souvenirs from Copper Nine that the others would have let her take- she had left without trying to see them again for a reason. They hated her for what she had done, and rightfully so.

But as J looked at the spartan one-room interior, the only thing distinguishing it from who knows how many others like it being seams from when she had put the ship back together after the fight, an unpleasant thought came to mind: Did she actually have a personality? Was there anything of her that wasn’t just what every drone should be? Was she meaningfully distinct from hundreds of other drones across the universe? J had spent her life chasing ideals set by others, and with those others dead, what did she have to show for it?

Well, awesome superpowers, for one thing. J flexed her claws, switched them to her machine gun, her missile launcher, and giggled. And hey, I have a job for now. This line of thought… can wait. Plan B’s dead in the water anyways.

A clang echoed through the ship. Finally, the locals were waking up. J flew around to their ship.

“Gooood evening!” she announced to a pair of bright yellow Xes and the ten yellow sensors above them. “I don’t suppose either of you can talk? Are interested in being more than just animals? Remember being workers before this?”

She paused for response, but the disassembly drones of Silicon Four just cocked their heads and stared. Precisely as expected, a clear negative. But, they were still listening. If J remembered what Cyn had said about them, normal disassembly drones would listen to other disassembly drones, even just growls but especially if they talked- these dumb animals weren’t smart enough to conceive of useless information.

So, plan B, the plan that J had been actually expecting to use: filibuster. Not just anything would do; it needed to seem like it would be useful, like legitimate orders that someone higher up the chain would want them told. So, J pulled out something she had come up with for when V couldn’t sleep.

Her holographic-projector hand activated. “Have you been recording your kills properly? Just offing some workers isn’t enough if no one knows about it- there’s a bigger plan in the works, one which each of us is just a small part of, and information-sharing is essential. Corporate sent me to give you this mandatory training in how to use your spreadsheet software…”

Theresa stood at what was, arguably, the edge of the spire’s base. The spire was so tall, and corpses such a poor building material, that it needed a foundation over a mile wide. If it could even be called a foundation; the haphazard piles of corpses reminded Theresa more of a skate park than anything. She could, at least, see enough clear ground to make out a path through.

The woman had been helping out at Cabin fever Labs since she could be trusted not to follow simple orders, and volunteered for every single mission that involved going outside: talking to other communities, finding supplies, even just fixing up the outside defenses. She had seen death before, up close on bladed wings. She had seen comrades torn apart in front of her, and she had survived. Theresa McAllister would not be intimidated by a bunch of dead bodies, dangit. So she took a deep breath and hurried forwards between two piles before she could think about it any more. Best to keep moving, keep from having to think about what she was moving around.

It actually helped to think of it as a skatepark. Theresa had never seen one in person- there had not been any on the planet even before the arrival of the murder drones- but she’d seen pictures, and she could imagine one. It kept her from having to think about where she actually was. About how she was walking through a field of corpses (mostly drones, the humans having decayed to dust by now), in the area with the most murder drones around, at the behest of another murder drone.

Did Theresa trust J? Well, she sort of had to, didn’t she? She’d be dead days ago without the strange drone, who was also carrying her luggage and therefore saving her mission, and now she was trusting the drone to keep her alive again. J had had several chances to kill her, and taken none of them. None of which stopped the instinctive fear at just being near a murder drone.

Theresa was pulled out of her thoughts by a rattling sound and the ground shifting under her foot. She looked down to see a glowing FATAL ERROR under her foot. She’d stepped on a drone head, and probably alerted the killers. She dove under the top half of a drone sticking out of a pile, desperate for even that small amount of cover, and huddled in place, keeping as still as possible and trying not to hyperventilate. Any movement, any noise, and she’d be seen.

“As well as being useful for basic arithmetic, the ADD function of the spreadsheet can- Sit back down, that tremor was not relevant to the training!- be used as part of an array. Let’s see an example…” It was impressive how mutinously the disassembly drones managed to glare at J with just Xes.

It had been five full minutes since Theresa had made the mistake, and she was not dead. She uncurled from underneath the corpse and risked a look around. Nothing. She… might be safe, but it was a stark reminder to pay attention. Any little mistake could mean death… and probably would mean death, if not for J’s help.

The path before Theresa split in two: one path stayed in the open air, and the other went under some sort of tunnel, which had apparently formed randomly as corpses were thrown around. The tunnel would give her some cover and make her harder to see- but also make it harder for her to avoid brushing against the walls. Theresa walked around it, down the other path.

J had been talking for three hours straight when her audience finally snapped. In the middle of an explanation of SPARKLINE charts, the drone on the left- the male with a full jacket- deployed his claws and leapt at J, yelling and slashing wildly and forcing J to backpedal before the other could join in.

The next few seconds were a blur of blades as J fended off attacks from both sides while she raced towards the exit. She stopped just outside the door and spun, sweeping one sword across to block two sets of claws and cut off a tail-tip before bringing her other arm up, now in machine-gun mode, and giving herself some covering fire.

J knew she couldn’t beat two disassembly drones at once- twice the attacks against just the one set of blocks was a great way to get overwhelmed, especially if they could attack from multiple angles at once. But she had something these dumb, brainwashed beasts did not: tactical ability. J knew how to fight a two-on-one.

The way to fight two people at once is to do everything possible not to. The purple freak had beaten her and the Solver a few months ago by using fog to keep them from both finding her at once and trying to take one out quickly, but J had something arguably even better: a choke point. As long as she stayed on one side of the doorway and kept them on the other, they could only fit so many blades through it at once, and it limited the directions the attacks could come from. J could keep this up, blocking melee and dodging missiles, all night.

Theresa was almost at the outside edge of the base. She knew because she recognized the bodies in front of her. Charles, Augustine, and Khaled. 007, 063, and 116. And, next to them…

No, it wasn’t Stevie. The cheeks were too thin, and it was a smidge too tall. Just a drone that looked a lot like her. Theresa let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding: Stevie had escaped. She’d probably gotten back to the labs within hours of their splitting up, and was living it up as a hero for the supplies she’d brought. Theresa giggled softly at the mental image of the little drone telling everyone about J’s mysterious rescue- would Theresa have stories to top that, or what? Then she heard the distant noise of gunfire from behind her.

Theresa didn’t turn and look, didn’t stick around to see what was going on. She just ran, as fast as she could, until she couldn’t run anymore. She didn’t even hesitate or stumble a bit when she heard the first explosion.

A burst of bullets shattered J’s visor, and she ducked behind the edge of the doorway to give it time to repair. She was, again, glad she could heal from anything (except for starvation or complete destruction of her A.I. core, now) and didn’t actually need the visor to see.

The locals had realized their problem after a couple of fruitless minutes, and switched to shooting back at her. Now they had her unable to get inside, but she didn’t want to anyways. 

Whenever they stopped shooting she could fire back at them, so she had them pinned- and that was her goal, after all. She’d seen how fast Theresa could move; the girl probably just needed another few minutes at most. She might even have gotten far enough away by this point.

Bullets stopped pouring out the open door. Not a good sign; disassembly weapons didn’t need to reload, so if they’d stopped firing it was because they were switching tactics. That needed to be interrupted.

J charged her beam cannon, then leapt past the open door, sweeping it across the inside. She also yelled, “Eat surplus, dopes!” as she did so. They may not have understood, but asserting dominance made J feel better.

The cannon merely scorched a black line across the reinforced walls- no ship carrying disassembly drones would be easily harmed by their weapons. Unfortunately, it also failed to cut either of the local drones into two clean pieces like J had hoped. In fact, she hadn’t seen them in there at all.

Seconds passed, and no return fire came. What were they doing in there? J poked her head into the doorway to check. Nothing. She looked in further- and was thrown out as the female drone in the vest slammed her shoulder into her. Both drones went out the door, over the side, and into freefall.

J's attacker reacted first, extending her wings, but J wrapped her tail around her leg as she took flight and slammed her into the side of the spire, stunning her.

J took flight once more and intercepted the jacket-wearer as he came out of the ship. Their blades clashed and they pushed against each other for several seconds- and then vest twerp down below shook off her stun.

J couldn’t fight two opponents out in the open like this, not for long. She spun around the one she was fighting, keeping him between her and the other enemy so she could focus on just him. But instead of attacking, vest twerp flew away. And not towards Theresa.

Right. J was another disassembly drone, which meant they read her as ‘not enemy.’ She’d been an obstacle, and now that tweedledummy and tweedledoofus had gotten past her, they didn’t need to pay any more attention.

J retreated a few wingbeats and let the jacket drone pass by her as well. He didn’t give her a second glance as he flew away from the spire, in a different direction from his teammate. Neither one was heading towards Theresa. She had, apparently, gotten away without being seen. J had succeeded!

Theresa’s legs were on fire. She could be on her feet all day, sure, but even so the sprint after walking for hours was too much. She was beyond the field of corpses, though, and still alive, so she could slow back down to a walk.

The yellow-and-black figure landing in front of her elicited a jump and a scream, but she recovered when she saw that it was J. Who put down the cargo container, crossed her arms, and said, “Sit down and get some rest, you look almost dead. It looks like the path’s clear for the next few miles.”

Theresa breathed a sigh of relief as she sank to the ground. “Thanks, J.”

“For what, not working you to death?” The drone scoffed. “Please.”

“Nah, for…” Theresa shook her head. “For saving my life. At least twice now, probably. I realized I never actually said it the first time.”

“You’re welcome. Heh… it is nice to be appreciated.” J smiled. “Now make sure to get that rest, we’ve still got a few more hours of darkness to keep walking if we want to make progress.”

Chapter Text

“We should get to the labs tonight!” Theresa said over dusk ‘breakfast.’ “We've just gotta make it through the Steel Mill first.”

J crumpled her now-empty oil can and tossed it over her shoulder before responding. “And why are you so scared of that?”

“Because the Steel Mill, well... it’s our first line of defense in this direction,” Theresa explained.

“Mr. Baumler, the owner and builder when the planet was first being settled, was some sort of crazy paranoid guy. The big old steel factory is maybe the most heavily fortified building around.

“And on top of that, Baumler didn't want to pay any workers he didn't have to, so the whole place is controlled by an AI. But not a true AI like you- it's a large language model, one of those crazy things from a thousand years ago that needs constant supervision to work properly. Which, on top of the unreliability, means that the murder drones didn't think it alive enough to kill when they showed up. So it's just been working there pretty much alone, building stuff and then melting them down to build more stuff and upgrading its defenses while it's at it, for decades now. And that’s before a murder drone got trapped inside.”

J rolled her eyes. “And why would anyone, let alone us, be stupid enough to go through the unstable death-building instead of around it?”

“I mentioned the paranoia, right?” Theresa answered. “The ground's mined for miles around the place. Going around would take us at least an extra day, and anti-air cannons specifically targeting murder drones would get you if you tried flying over it.

“But hey, you're here so we should be fine! You've kept me safe from every other danger so far, eh J?” Theresa nudged her with an elbow, prompting a weak “uh-huh.”

The idiot was starting to trust J. Great. She didn't know what had happened to everyone else who had done so. Out loud, J just said, “No time to waste, then.”

Half an hour’s walk later, the travelers paused to take in the sight. Chunks of pavement littered the road ahead; ruins were nothing new, not with the devastation that littered the planet, but the fact that there was recognizably a paved road ahead was. The road terminated, at the horizon when J zoomed in, with a building. The building looked like it was spiked on top, but was too far away to make out any details. J’s advanced scans revealed that Theresa had been right: land mines covered the ground off of the road for as far as the eye could see, packed close enough together that even J’s foot-less peg legs wouldn’t be able to get her across.

The women shrugged and continued along the road. There was no other way forwards, and past the danger lay their destination.

The Steel Mill looked worse from up close. It was one massive rectangle of concrete, with irregular sections of wall- without any apparent pattern- replaced with sheets of metal. No two of its windows were the same height, and a red-orange glow came through them. The roof bristled with anti-aircraft guns and spikes, both sharp and decorative, like some sort of art deco nightmare.

The double doors, ten feet tall and about as wide, opened as Theresa began to knock. They did so just late enough that her fist swung through empty air. “Great, it’s onto us…” she muttered. “Ah well, no other choice. In we go!”

The doors opened into a chaos of heat and metal. Pieces of machinery- some which a professional could have identified, and others which had started out that way but had since been so heavily modified that they were now unrecognizable mounds of metal and pipes- were carried through the air by robotic arms, leaking trails of molten metal onto the floor in the process. Steel ingots, bars, and finished objects piled off of assembly lines and into collection bins, or more commonly spilled onto the floor, where they lay until they were scooped up by an automated floor-sweeper. Most of what they could see was one giant room, broken up by walls too small to truly separate rooms. The heat would have nearly burnt Theresa just from entering the room, had it not been for her suit; and the noise was loud enough that she didn’t notice J speaking until the drone poked her.

“WHAT?” Yelled Theresa. J rolled her eyes, which then disappeared and were replaced with yellow text: Do you know which way to go?

“No, I stay out of here, and I hear the layout changes every so often.” J did not respond. Right. Theresa shook her head emphatically and gave a thumbs-down gesture.

J nodded, and her visor’s words changed. That door over there looks like you can get to it easily enough. –> She pointed with her hand as well, at a door along a side wall. A jagged path between machinery would lead to it with only a couple of obstacles to climb over.

Looks like you can get to it easily enough. Of course, J could probably get to any of the other doors easily, flying over or even through the dangers. Theresa was getting tired of always having to be protected on this journey, of their having to plan around her vulnerability, of getting in the way and being useless. Even in what she was good at, surviving out here, she was needing the help of an awesome superpowered robot to… huh, when had she started to like J? To feel safe around a… a robot like her? Theresa couldn’t even think of her as a ‘murder’ drone anymore.

She was jarred out of her thoughts when she walked into J’s arm. J, holding their cargo in one hand, raised the one which she had held out- in missile launcher form- and fired up, into the corner of the ceiling.

The explosion illuminated a humanoid form, crouching in the rafters, yellow X dim on its face. The murder drone was knocked off its perch, but it recovered quickly, extending its wings in midair and swooping towards them.

J threw Theresa to the ground, and the attacker flew over their heads with a clang, audible even over the noise of the mill. It fell, along with the container it had ran into, onto a conveyor belt, and they were carried through a door.

The whole thing had taken only a couple of seconds. J and Theresa spent more time staring in horrified disbelief, as the supplies that they had worked so hard to get this far were carried away, than it took for them to be lost.

J all but dragged Theresa along the rest of the path and through the door. The noise was quiet enough there that she could ask, “Where’s it going?”

The human stuck her head back into the huge room to look. The conveyor belt that had stolen her stuff led into a pipe that led into a sorting machine of some kind, leading into a mess of pipes and machinery that, if she guessed right, would eventually drop something that big out…

“There!” she pointed. “That pile of junk along the right wall, past the molten waterfall, the chopper-crusher, and the laser grid. Think you can get it?”

“No way,” J said. “That’s the sort of stuff corporate would’ve recommended to keep anything out. And I’m not flying in there, that room’s a death trap. Besides, there’s a door next to it. How do we get there?”

Theresa turned back to the room they had entered. A large window took up the back wall, with two doors underneath it. The window only showed the hallways, as they turned away from each other. Theresa compared it to what she had seen of the doors in the main room, and eventually concluded, “We take the right door, and then every left after that. And hope it hasn’t changed this part too much since the last time anyone was inside.”

The right hallway ended in two doors, one straight ahead and one to the left. The left door would not open, so J ripped it off of its hinges. This revealed that it would not open because it was trying to open into a hallway too small for it, and small enough that Theresa had to crouch.

The door at the end of that hallway had a full inch of empty space between it and the hallway after. It tripped neither of them.

Three hallways and four doors (including the one in the middle of a hallway) later, they had to venture back into the main room. They were on a floor underneath the one they had left, and could see the disassembly drone falling out of a pipe and onto the pile Theresa had pointed out. The container fell out an instant later, trapping it.

Theresa led them to a pile of assorted tools, where they waited until a large claw scooped up some of the pile. They stepped on to it and used it to be carried up several meters, jumping off onto a catwalk before it dumped the tools into a huge hopper to be melted down and, it appeared, be made into more of the same tools. The program had figured out a way to never run out of materials, and all it required was that there be no production- which, with no one to collect the output, was no problem.

As they climbed up the ladder from the catwalk and onto the floor above, a pulse of energy rippled over them harmlessly. “Please,” J said contemptuously, “I have an EMP weapon. I’m shielded against them. I can probably take it better than you can, you stupid building.” She kicked the wall for good measure.

“Oh. Oh shoot!” Theresa slapped a hand over her face. “J, before I forget again, I should tell you. Once we get through here, you should leave me and go off somewhere else before we get to the labs. Leave the container along the way, I’ll make sure someone comes by with a vehicle and gets it. It’s just, the labs are protected, we’ve got EMPs that can take down mur- uh, disassembly drones, and I, uh, I don’t want you to, well…” her voice trailed off nervously.

J shrugged. “Thanks for the warning, but I’m not abandoning you like that,” she said casually.

“No, seriously. They’ll keep you prisoner, take you apart and study you, and-”

“I get it,” J said. “But hey, it’s not like I’ve got anything else to do, right? I already told you, my original plans were a failure as soon as I learned that the local drones were brainwashed and there were still living humans here.”

Oh no. Theresa was getting a horrible suspicion. Praying silently that she was wrong, she asked, “Your original plan was talking to them, I know. What was the backup plan?”

J answered in a low growl. “Die.”

“Come on, it won’t-”

“My plan was to die, all right?” J yelled. “I helped that thing destroy three planets! Wipe out who knows how many species, almost including both humans and worker drones! I’m an accomplice to multiple genocides! I betrayed or failed everyone who every trusted me! The universe is a better place without me.

“So I figured, either I could at least let the disassembly drones on this planet know that the Absolute Solver is dead and give them a second chance, or they’d all be dead of starvation and I’d be able to starve too. Self-preservation protocols won’t let me die if there’s anything I can do about it. I didn’t imagine they’d be nonsapient and humans would still be alive for me to eat if I start starving, but at this point? Helping your people learn more, and getting to die anyways, is better than I thought I’d have a day ago. So, thanks for telling me.”

“You’re- come on,” Theresa pleaded. “You want to give the other disassembly drones a second chance? What about yourself? Why not give yourself a second chance, try doing something good instead of offing yourself like this?”

“Because I know what I’m like, okay?” J turned away and sighed, deeply. “I had a second chance, I could’ve treated my squad better. And a third- I could’ve turned against her in that last fight, but even when I realized she might be able to be beaten all I could do was run. And there’s probably a fourth chance somewhere that I missed. How many chances is one person supposed to get?”

“As many as you need! You should keep trying, not give up! You can become a better person, J, I know ya can!”

“We met what, three days ago? You don’t know me.” J said with a bitter laugh. “It’s a nice thought, but I have too much blood on my hands. I killed so many people that I lost count, and that’s just with my own hands. Counting the help I gave to the Solver? My body count’s in the trillions. All those dead need justice.”

“You ain’t responsible for her- nah, that’s nitpicking.” Theresa shook her head, though it did nothing to stop the pain in her chest. “The dead are dead. They don't need you to avenge them, and it won’t help anyone who's still here! You have to focus on the living.”

“And what if the living need justice for them?” J asked, drawing herself up to her full height, so that the top of her head stood almost level with the tip of Theresa’s nose. “One… some of the people I killed, I- people who are still alive- cared about. What if I need to- ugh, forget about it.”

J turned back away and headed towards the door ahead. “My priorities have not changed. I’ll get you and your supplies safely to your labs before trying anything else, don’t worry about that.”

“Oh for- that’s not what I’m worried about.” Theresa stopped J with a hand on her shoulder before she could get through the door. “I’m not gonna let you kill yourself!”

J shook her hand off with a sneer. “Yeah? How are you going to stop me?” she asked, before tearing the door ahead off its hinges and leaping through it.

I don’t know, but I’ll think of something, was Theresa’s silent answer.

The two walked in awkward, sullen silence through the next few rooms, under a stream of iron bars being spat across a hallway, and along the safety rails surrounding a waist-deep pit in the middle of another hallway. J looked very lost by the time Theresa opened a door to reveal the main room in front of them, and their destination just ahead, if on a platform twenty feet above them.

“You mind flying up there and getting it?” Theresa asked, gesturing to the smooth stone sides of the platform. “I’mma check out…” She paused, looking over her options, and then pointed to a door not far away. A window in it revealed a computer terminal on the other side. “That room. I think it’ll give me the way outta here.”

J spread her wings in lieu of a verbal answer. Theresa left her to it, and headed to the computer room.

This room turned out to contain even more than Theresa had thought: the terminals visible from outside were connected to a large, blue-glowing structure, above which were emblazoned the words Baumler Steel: Building the Future. The central hardware of the building’s computer program. Or at least part of it; there was probably more under the floor, for something this important.

Who would be dumb enough to put something this crucial right next to the dangerous factory floor with no security? This piece of junk, I guess, she mused as she approached the terminal.

It had a screen and a microphone. All you needed. “Hey computer, I need a map of this place,” she said, enunciating each word into the microphone as clearly as she could.

Words appeared on the screen. It looks like you’re trying to get a map of the surrounding area. That’s very smart of you! As Descartes said, “the search to understand the world around us is what separates man from beasts.” In asking this question you have proven yourself to have true wisdom, which is distinct from– and more important than– intelligence because it lets you know not to put a tomato in a fruit salad.

Below the words was a picture.

It looked like a topographical map of the other side of the planet.

The disassembly drone was still trapped, with his torso and both arms pinned beneath the container. His legs kicked feebly when J landed beside him.

“Well this is pathetic,” J said, crossing her arms. “How in the world are you stuck? Any of us should be able to lift something that light off of ourselves. You must be some sort of defective model.”

The trapped drone whimpered. J groaned inwardly, but she knelt and touched a piece of his exposed metal. A heat warning immediately popped up on her diagnostics.

“Or you’re starving and have probably turned off several important functions to limit heat generation,” J amended her statement. “How long have you been trapped in here?” Then she groaned. “Curse my bleeding heart… Can you understand what I’m saying, at least?”

The drone on the floor stared at her. His X seemed to make eye contact, at least.

“Listen, I’m here with a human. You remember from earlier? Now, I’m keeping her safe, but if you can avoid attacking her, I’ll free you… and give you this.” She opened the container holding it down and held up an oil canister. “Deal?”

The trapped drone’s X shrank to just the left side of his visor, while the right became a shaky 0. He nodded, weakly but quickly.

J hid her shock; clearly his time surviving here had made him learn to be smarter, but still, in this state… He must have shut down pretty much all functions he could in order to funnel more power than usual into his AI core without overheating. That had to be why he’d fumbled his attack when they entered the building. J didn’t like admitting that other drones could do well, it made them competition, but she was reluctantly impressed that a bestial disassembly drone like this had managed that.

J avoided letting any of this show (contempt is the only safe feeling towards others) as she lifted the container off of him.

“Just give me… a map… of the layout… of this factory… at the current moment! Please, for the love of god!” Theresa screamed.

She skimmed past the fifteenth paragraph of compliments and apologies which the computer had spat out to find that this time, it had finally given her what she had asked for. A map of the Ironworks shone on the screen like a bottle of water in the desert. It was even color-coded and labeled, down to things like the corridor between the factory floor and the main computer room, labeled with a bright “You are here” sign.

The corridor between the factory floor and the main computer room.

Theresa turned around to check that her memory had not failed her, but no. Only a single door separated her from the factory floor.

She drove her helmet into the desk in front of her and began to make a sound. Even she would have been hard-pressed to tell if it was hysterical laughter or sobbing.

“I, I can never trust any map you give me, can I?” she gasped out between breaths. “You’re just doing art based on what I say, and I’d be better off dismantling you and trying to find the way out on my own, wouldn’t I?”

She knew it was the wrong thing as soon as she finished saying it, even before the turrets began emerging from ports above. She was in the domain of a psuedo-AI, not quite I enough to be considered mad, and had said something that it could misconstrue as a threat. Even the first of these things had been known to try to blackmail people to avoid being turned off.

She dove behind the terminal, hoping that it would at least avoid shooting at itself. A machine-gun bullet shattered the screen it had been talking to her with, and her hopes along with it. The next several bullets bounced off of the computer tower harmlessly. At least it had terrible aim.

Four turrets hung from ports in the ceiling, but Theresa could see more moving towards her along built-in rails as the building's computer assessed her as a threat. No doubt more defenses would be on their way; after all, it was capable of reconfiguring the entire building.

Theresa ran for the door, but the door closed before she could get to it. The computer wanted her in this room. So she did the next best thing to escaping, and hid.

The turrets appeared to have a limited range of motion, all directed towards the center of the room. So Theresa stuck to the edge of the room, and stood directly behind one.

The turret in front of her made a repetitive clicking noise, like a fan being held in place. The two on adjacent corners turned towards her, but not quite far enough. And the computer tower stood between her and the opposite turret, the only one able to point fully at her. Until it found a way around this, she was safe.

She took a small tool set out of her pockets and got to work. By the time the first mobile turret entered, the turret she’d hidden behind had had its machine gun removed and she was able to shoot back.

I really should have seen that coming, she thought when her bullets bounced harmlessly off of the turret.

But before it could fire back, the turret exploded. All three turrets, and the ones coming closer, turned to point at the door, where J stood with her missile launcher raised.

“Big thing in the middle’s the computer in control of this whole place!” Theresa yelled.

J nodded and stepped forward. Her wings raised to block the bullets that streaked towards her, and then another drone- the one that had attacked when they came in- leapt past her and at the computer tower.

It tore out a chunk, and when the turrets switched to it, J attacked.

The twin disassembly drones tag teamed the computer system like this until they were left with a pile of rubble. J thrust her hand down, tore out a glowing blue power core, and crushed it. Every light in the building went dark.

The only light remaining was the disassembly drones’ visors and headbands. One of them- the visor with an X over one eye- turned towards Theresa, before a loud boom shook the room. That set of lights went upwards and out of sight.

Theresa retrieved a torch from another pocket and swept it around the room, revealing a new hole in the ceiling. The drone had flown out that way, past the now-depowered anti-aircraft guns.

“It left me alone…” Theresa said thoughtfully. “Why?”

J shrugged and picked up their cargo. “Because it had to get smart to survive in here, because I made a deal with it, because killing you would’ve slowed down getting out of here… take your pick,” she said.

“It got smart enough to make a deal and show mercy?” Theresa asked, then grinned. “You know what that means?”

“Something saccharine, no-”

“It means your first plan coming here isn’t dead!” Theresa cut her off. “They can learn!”

J just shrugged. “Yeah, if it’s life or death. So either they can’t or they don’t need me, is what it looks like. And I’m not changing my mind because of this, so shut up.” She kept moving, forcing Theresa to follow.

Continuing to explore the factory felt eerie. The constant noise and chaos of their journey so far was gone; in its place, stillness and dark reigned. The only noise was that of their footsteps, and the only light came from J's head and Theresa's flashlight.

As J was unimpeded by the darkness, she wound up leading the way this time. They passed by stopped machinery and pools of quickly cooling steel, and stepped under hammers frozen in midswing. After what the first part of the steel mill had been like, they were constantly on edge, keeping their eyes out for dangers that would never materialize.

But after searching for longer than J would have liked to admit, they emerged out the back door of the factory and into the chill night air. Theresa turned back to give the place one last rude gesture, and yelled at the words above the doors. “Building the Future my arse!”

J chuckled. “Hey, I’m sure your people could make some use of the place. Maybe it could have a future.”

She began walking away, but was stopped by Theresa’s voice behind her. “You could too.”

“Excuse me?” J started to turn, but Theresa had caught up to her, so they both kept walking.

“You could have a future! C’mon, there’s a ton of other options you could take besides trying to off yourself.”

J pointedly ignored her. None of them would work, anyway.

“Alright, fine, we can talk about something else,” Theresa said. “You see that outcropping over there, on the horizon?”

She pointed directly away from the factory. J could see the jagged chunk of rock easily, and said so.

“That’s the labs,” Theresa said, with longing clear in her voice. “Home. Where we’re headed.”

She hesitated, then spoke again. “Where’s your home, J?”

“I don’t have one.” She barely needed to think about that.

“Huh, didn’t you say you came from Copper Nine?”

“Yeah, well. They don’t want me there and never did, and I didn’t want to be there. It was just a job.”

“Aww, c’mon,” Theresa continued, “I don’t believe anyone could have no home at all. Don’t ya got anywhere you ever felt like you belonged? Where ya from?”

The answers to both were the same. “Earth.”

“Oh… I’m sorry,” Theresa said. “I was born here, so for all that I get its destruction was a tragedy, I don’t really feel it the way folks like you do. What was Earth like?”

“I never left the manor before the apocalypse,” J replied.

“You lived in a manor? Swanky!” Theresa said, obviously impressed.

J wound up telling her all about the manor on the way. About the imitation-victorian building and the swamp outside, and about the masters of the house and their abuse- that is, admirable strictness- towards the drones, but most of what she remembered was good. She talked about Tessa, their daughter who fixed up any drones she could find, even bringing some back from the dead, and protected them from her parents as much as she was able to; about long nights watching movies with Tessa and her other drones; about them sneaking Tessa food when she was being punished for some stupid reason (and it was never a non-stupid punishment, in J's opinion); about her friendship with those drones, J, V, and even Cyn- Cyn had been one of them, she’d been creepy and sometimes rude but never actually harmful, not until the night their little family was threatened; about the constant struggle of making sure that none of them, not defective little Cyn, naive N, or clumsy V, messed up too badly in front of the bosses, and arranging things so that punishments went to whichever one of them could best handle it; about… huh.

J realized, reflecting back on it now, that life in the manor had not actually been all that good. In fact, looking at it with anything resembling objectivity, it had been a pretty terrible place. What J remembered happily was the people: she had had her family then. And now they were gone. Tessa, dead; Cyn, turned into a monster, and then dead; N and V, still alive, but J hadn’t had the courage to stand up for them. They must hate J now, and they had found more drones to join their family. To replace her.

Theresa’s questions about Earth were inexhaustible. She wanted to know every detail, about its environment and society, and did not press for uncomfortable details of J’s past. They were still talking an hour later, when they reached their destination.

Theresa ran ahead as soon as the outcropping was in sight. Stopping in front of it, she banged on one side with her fist, making a hollow metallic noise. “Oi! Open up, it’s me!” she shouted at the stone. “Janitor Theresa McAllister! ID number #BHR! I’m not dead!”

A camera emerged from the stone and pointed at her. Theresa spoke directly toward it.

“I even brought back the supplies I was sent out for! I know, I’ve been out for a while, and you weren’t expecting me to come back alive, right?” She chuckled. “Crazy story, I’ll tell you all about it inside.”

She gestured at the disassembly drone several meters back. “Short version, this here’s J, she’s on our side. So would you mind not zapping her and just letting her drop the luggage and leave? Pretty please?”

Traitor. “Nah, I could be using you to get inside!” J said as she approached. She set the box down so it wouldn’t fall and be damaged, and then she grinned widely, showing off her fangs. “Can’t take any chances with something like me, right? Corporate would have your hide for unnecessary risks.”

Theresa turned to her angrily, but J wasn’t listening. She kept her eyes locked on the camera as she took a few steps closer, and then finally, it released a flash of light. A complex,  split-second pattern of light that exploited a programming backdoor to knock out any drone.

Theresa’s frustrated “Oh come on!” was the last thing J heard as she lost consciousness.

Chapter Text

J rebooted and took stock of her situation. The last thing she remembered was the entrance to Cabin Fever Labs, where she had tried to get them to kill her, and apparently only gotten them to take her prisoner.

She was tied to a table. Straps held down her wrists, tight enough to prevent her from retracting her hands and deploying any weapons. Her tail was in a complex knot around something underneath the table. A set of straps identical to those around her wrists held down her ankles. These morons must have only ever captured male disassembly drones before, but J wasn't going to think about that. Not if she wanted to avoid escaping.

Having taken stock of herself, J looked around the room. She was positioned directly underneath the ceiling light, which she assumed was to give their engineers a good look when they got around to taking her apart; it wasn’t like any amount of light would blind a disassembly drone’s optics. Maybe it was security, and could send out a flash like the ones outside? A simple steel chair next to her was the only furnishing. ‘Behind’ her (meaning, in the direction of the crown of her head), the wall held a one-way mirror and a door. The one-way mirror did nothing to stop J’s expanded sensor array; she could tell that three people stood behind it, two staying behind when one opened the door.

It was… probably a man? Not too tall, either short haired or bald, and wearing a long jacket of some sort, maybe a labcoat? Like with all humans, J’s software redacted it into a fuzzy black silhouette. The fact that it only had one white eye was the main distinguishing feature she could see. When it talked, it was with a man’s voice, at least.

“I’m told you can talk, so talk,” he said coldly.

J was, once again, helpless (definitely, completely helpless, with no chance of escape) at the mercy of someone who, at best, disliked her. It was almost comfortable, in a way. A situation that she had been in before, with the Elliots and with the Absolute Solver, and knew how to deal with. Do whatever corporate wants, try to anticipate those desires ahead of time to keep them happy, and don’t let them know what you’re doing or they’ll get upset- or ask for even more.

“I’m Serial Designation J-00X11001, but I mostly go by J” she said. “And what should I call you?”

“I’m the head researcher here, and not falling for that,” the man sneered. “Since you’re talking, let’s start with that. Why are you different from the other murder drones?”

J rolled her eyes internally. Either they hadn’t asked Theresa the right questions, or they hadn’t believed her; either way, for people J was depending on to kill her, it was disappointing. “I’m just built different,” she said.

The man pressed a button on the side of the table J was strapped to, and its surface coursed with electricity for a second. “Elaborate,” he growled.

“Well, I’m not an engineer,” J said. “But I was one of the first disassembly drones made, and unlike most of the other first-gens I was made from a working drone. So maybe that’s it. Or maybe the Solver thought we were friends and my team should keep our personalities, or something.”

Behind the one-way mirror, one of the two observers made notes on a clipboard.

“What are your goals here? Why protect McAllister?” her captor continued.

“My goals were to let the local disassembly drones know about the Solver's destruction, or failing that, starve to death. I helped your janitor out because… I'm not sure, actually.” J hummed. “I guess I figured it was something to do, and I didn't have any achievable goals.”

“The Solver was destroyed? How?”

“It got in a fight, it lost,” J said. “I took the opportunity to leave when I saw it was losing the fight, so I don't know precisely what killed it.”

The man stared at her, his expression unreadably invisible. “If it’s destroyed, then why do your kind and our infected drones still have their powers?” he asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” J replied.

The table was electrified again. Oh, was this supposed to be torture? J realized. Wow, they’re soft on their prisoners around here. But I’m sure if I point that out it’ll change. “I don’t know how it works and I didn’t see how it died,” she said aloud. “There was a huge sphere of darkness, and a few days later I saw the numbskulls who had been fighting it acting like they’d won the fight. You have the scientists studying the thing, I’m sure you know more about how it works than I do.”

The man seemed to consider this for a second, then nodded. "Don't get too comfortable, I'll be back,” he said brusquely. And then he walked back out the door, leaving J to wait alone.

The debriefing had lasted for hours, and after being nocturnal for days, Theresa was exhausted. But she had also been wearing the same space suit for several days straight, so the first thing she did upon being released was throw it in the laundry chute (although she thought it should have gone to an incinerator) and take a shower. Only once she felt clean again, for the first time in too long, did she stumble into bed.

She was out cold in seconds.

The feeling of having work to do dragged her out of blessed unconsciousness just a few hours later The higher ups had insisted she take the day off to rest, so she officially had no work to do- but she unofficially still had work she considered her responsibility. So she put on her uniform- her indoor uniform, the regular denim janitorial  coveralls, finally something other than a space suit that had been worn for far too long- and set out to solve some of the problems her absence had no doubt created.

After collecting some supplies, Theresa's first stop was the memorial: a small room on the edge of the compound  where the names of dead Cabin Fever employees from this planet were recorded. Officially, it was a storage closet, but it hadn’t stored anything but memories since the disassembly drones had first arrived.

The walls were only half-covered with names, which put them better than any of JCJenson's other subsidiaries or branches. Theresa could see, at the bottom right corner of the written section, her own name.

A man stood in front of her name, head bowed in mourning. She stepped quietly behind him and whispered slowly, “Eddie…”

He jumped, but did not turn. “Eddie Valesco…” Theresa continued.

“Wha-” Eddie turned, and his eyes went wide as saucers.

“I bring you a message from beyond the veil, Eddie…”

“Gh-gh-GHOST!!” Eddie shrieked, and Theresa doubled over in laughter. It was mean playing on a friend's phobias like that, but damn if his reaction hadn’t been hilarious.

“I'm just joshing ya bud! I'm alive, got back last night! How ya been?”

“I-uh-you-” Eddie swallowed. “You’re alive? How?”

“It’s a long story, I’ll let ya know once I’m done wrapping everything up from that.” She held up a spray bottle of cleaning fluid and a rag. “Here, you mind taking my name off of this list of the dead while I do that?”

“Oh! Yeah, sure, I…” Eddie swallowed hard once more. Tears were welling up in his eyes. “We thought you were dead when Stevie came back without you.”

“Ah, well,” Theresa shrugged. She had a mission to complete, not time to stand around and chat. “Speaking of, where is Stevie? I wanna let her know she didn’t get me killed.”

“She’s been in testing pretty much since she got back,” Eddie said. “I don’t know where.”

She’d been in testing for… it must be more than two full days now? That wasn’t safe! Well, at least that was information she could use.

“Thanks, Ed!” she said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’mma go see if the docs can tell me where ta find her. Catch up later!”

The one-eyed man consulted with his colleagues for long enough that J had begun to get bored before he returned. But eventually he did return, sitting down next to J again and immediately returning to the interrogation.

“If the Solver is dead, then who do you work for now?” he asked.

“I guess right now, that’s you,” J said.

The table lit up with electricity again. “Cute,” he growled. “Answer the actual question,”

J rolled her eyes openly this time. “Come on, I’m having to explain every answer, and you should be able to figure this stuff out,” she said, letting a little bit of exasperation into her voice. “It’s gone, and my owners back when I was a worker are long dead. It could be argued that as a JCJenson in Spaaace product I am answerable to duly appointed company representatives, i.e. you, but otherwise I’m my own manager. Made the decision to come here all on my own.”

He didn’t take the implicit offer. “Then who did you work for, before?”

“The Elliot family.”

He paused, so J continued: “James, Louisa, and Tessa Elliot. High-ranking JCJenson in SPaaaace executives and their daughter.”

The interrogator nodded. “Of course, you did say that you were one of the first. You must have been there at the beginning, when the Absolute Solver first attacked. How did this all start?”

J groaned internally. She didn’t like talking about this, or thinking about it for that matter- reliving the worst day of her life in any way. But corporate (as J still thought of any authority figure, since pretending to still be working for the company had been better than admitting to what the real boss was, and pretending to be an employee felt better than being property) had told her to, and J was nothing if not a good worker.

“It started when Tessa brought home another drone,” J began. “The girl pulled broken drones out of the dump and fixed them up, as a hobby. They didn’t usually work, but every so often drones aren’t deactivated properly, and they reactivate on their own. Tessa fixed those ones up.

“Anyways, the last drone she took home was… more damaged than usual, and Tessa couldn’t repair her properly. Motor function problems. The drone tried to make up for it with what was probably about the same telekinetic Solver powers that your drones here have, though none of us knew what they were at the time. This drone- her name was Cyn- was… off-putting, but never actually hurt anyone until the night it all went down.

J paused, waiting to see if her interrogator had any questions, but he just waved a hand at her and said, “Continue.”

“Well,” J said, “One night the bosses were holding a grand gala. I honestly don’t remember what for. Cyn wanted to attend, but they didn’t like her, so we had to lock her up to keep her away. She got out somehow, during the gala preparations, and when the bosses saw her they got real mad. Threatening to throw away all of Tessa’s drones mad. Another one managed to get them placated in the immediate term, but he had to sacrifice himself to do so.

“Cyn… I don’t know what she was thinking. Maybe it was self defense, maybe she wanted to protect her friends, maybe she was just angry. But she asked Tessa to stay away from the gala, and that was all the warning any of us got before she turned into the Absolute Solver.

“It,” J still couldn’t bring herself to think of the Solver, of that thing, as a her, much less as her little sister Cyn, “Was a giant centipede-robot, with Cyn’s upper body as a head. But it didn’t do too much itself; it took control of the drones that Tessa had failed to fully restore, and turned them into the prototypes of disassembly drones, and delegated the work to them.

“Tessa and I went looking for it to try and stop it, but it hacked all the working drones in the mansion as well. Used them and its own powers to slaughter all of the humans, then upgraded the mansion’s drones into disassembly drones, and you know the rest.”

The man hummed thoughtfully, then stood and exited the room without saying anything else. The mirror muffled whatever he said to the other two, but J hoped they would decide to stop interrogating her and take her apart soon. It was becoming tedious.

After several minutes of their discussion, another human entered the room behind the mirror. Its voice was louder and angry. As the now four argued, their voices raised enough that J could catch a few words and phrases. “Where is,” “Lab 4,” “J,” and “No” came up a few times.

Then the pushed past the first three and into the room with J. The two who had stayed there the whole time held J’s usual interrogator back. Did they think that this new person would be more successful somehow?

It was slightly shorter than the others, and much skinnier- its ribs probably showed through its sides. It was short-haired or bald, like the first interrogator, but J would guess it was a female.

“J, what the hell?” she yelled as she entered. J might not have been able to see the face, but she recognized the voice.

“Hey Theresa,” J said innocently, and waved as much as she could with her hands strapped down. “You’re looking well.”

“J, what is this?” Theresa yelled, and stomped over to her. “What are they doing to you?” She sounded furious.

“Just what you said they’d do!” J replied, and grinned. “I assume, at least. They’ve decided to interrogate me first.”

“Oh for–” Theresa visibly fumed with anger. “Why haven’t you escaped yet?”

“I’m strapped to a table,” J wiggled her hands as demonstration. “I can’t get out.”

Theresa’s eyes dropped to J’s lower legs. “I’m strapped to a table,” J repeated, more forcefully. “I can not get out, no matter how hard I try. So even if I do go berserk from hunger I won’t try because I know it won’t work.”

Theresa sighed heavily and slumped into the chair. “Why are you insisting on doing this to yourself, J?” she asked. “No, wait, I know why. You think that you’re a horrible person and can never get any better and the world would be better off without you.”

“Got it in one! I’d give you a raise.” J flashed her a thumbs-up.

Theresa stared at her for a long moment, with the lower edges of her eyes wavering like she was on the verge of tears. Then she took a deep, steadying breath, and began to talk.

“Your plan might not be doomed, you know. You said that the drone yesterday learned to be smarter, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, we went over that. But I didn’t really consider how to do plan A at all, so I’m giving up on it anyways.”

“Sure, sure,” Theresa said placatingly. “But! If they can change, then that means disassembly drones in general can, doesn’t it?”

J considered this. She had seen both N and V change, after all; V lost her good will, while N grew a spine. “Sure.”

“And if disassembly drones can change, then surely you can as well! So, ya don’t try and get killed, you can find a way to become better!”

J groaned. This again. “And the people I killed? I don’t get to just walk away from that, remember?”

Tessa’s face appeared in her imagination: screaming as the other gala-goers were torn to pieces, and struggling against J’s arms as J held her still, keeping her from fighting or escaping.

Theresa’s voice jarred her out of her thoughts. “What would they want? The ones you cared about. Would they want you to live in guilt and off yourself over something you didn’t have any choice over?”

Tessa wouldn’t, J knew. The girl had been too nice for her own good- she probably wouldn’t even have held a grudge against the monster who killed her family and wore her as a disguise. She hadn’t given Cyn any worse than the occasional time-out before then, after all.

But then, that had given it the chance to prepare. Tessa’s kindness had gotten her killed. Just because Tessa would have forgiven her, didn’t mean that J could forgive herself.

“Why are you so determined to stop me from doing this, anyways?” J asked out loud to change the subject.

“Because…” Theresa shrugged. “You’re a person, and there’s so few of us around that we gotta all look after one another?”

J rolled her eyes. Morality.

Theresa continued, “Because you saved my life and kept me safe for these last few days? Got me home safe?”

“I’m done with that now, and you’re better off for it” J said. “Every time I’ve worked for or tried to help someone has failed. Leave me alone before I get you killed too.”

“Yeah?” Theresa crossed her arms and leaned forwards, like a shark preparing for the killing blow. “You ain’t gotten every single one of ‘em killed.”

“No?” J said. “I couldn’t save Tessa from the Solver, and it even made me help kill her; I couldn’t keep N and V in line enough to protect them from it either; I couldn’t even help it eat the universe. And hey, Tessa pulled me out of the trash- I must have been thrown out for some reason even before all that. Have I somehow missed something?”

“Yep!” Theresa said triumphantly. “Me.”

“Ugh, shut up about that,” J replied. “Just because I was able to help you doesn’t mean-”

“That your resume isn’t just longer a bunch of failures? That you’re very capable when you ain’t up against eldritch god junk? That you’re measurably improving?”

J was too tired to come up with a good counter-argument to that. So she tried switching tactics again. “What would you have me do, then?” she asked. “Work for your bunch of morons? I don’t think they’d like that very much.”

“If that’s what strikes your fancy?” Theresa said. “But, have you ever taken a vacation in your life? You should do whatever you think would make you happy, instead of other people.”

J sighed. “I… guess you might have a point,” she said. Theresa pumped a fist in the air.

“But!” J continued. “I don’t think I could get out of here without going through your people. You want me to do that?”

Theresa’s happiness visibly drained out of her.

“Plus,” J continued, “that sounds like a lot of work, and I’ve almost got this plan finished, so… nah. I’m sticking with this.”

“But- you just- you’re impossible!” Theresa yelled, and stormed out of the room.

Even through the fake mirror, in the other room, J could hear her yell “Lab four! Checking on Stevie!” in response to something one of the researchers said as she pushed past them.

Am I still doing the right thing, trying to get myself killed? J thought. She wasn’t sure anymore. Theresa was… probably right about this, but. I’ve come too far to back out now, right? Right?

J was still thinking about this when the researchers finished their discussion, and her usual interrogator returned. She didn’t hear what he said, and barely registered when he electrified the table and repeated it. Oh well, she decided, let’s get on with it.

“What now?” She said out loud. “Look, I’ve told you basically everything I can. You should probably just take me apart and study the pieces, it’ll give you more-” Yet another person ran into the other room. Both observers ran out of the room. “Your friends behind the mirror just abandoned you.”

The man looked up a second before another human ran in, hyperventilating. “Doctor Frederics!” This one yelled. A young man?

J’s interrogator- Dr. Frederics?- stood up and glared at the intruder. “Seriously?” he growled. “This had better be good.”

“We have an S-E event in lab four!” the young man yelled. “All unrelated personnel have to get to the panic room!”

Dr. Frederics asked no questions, said nothing; he fled with the boy, if at a slightly calmer pace. And J was left alone.

An S-E event? Huh, I wonder what that is. J wiggled her shoulders, trying to get comfortable against the hard table. Wait, in lab 4? That’s where Theresa was headed, wasn’t it? J groaned. And I guess I’m doing this now. I was so close!

Her footless leg pegs slid easily out of the ankle restraints, and from there it was the work of seconds to get the rest of the way free. The door had not been locked, and a disassembly drone was free in Cabin Fever Labs in under a minute. J would have strong words for whoever was in charge of security around here.

Finding lab 4 turned out to be easy. J just headed in the direction that people were running away from, climbing along the ceiling to avoid the crowd. And once she was in a place people had already fled, she followed the screams.

Lab 4 was clearly labeled, and had a human sprawled in the doorway, keeping the door open. They could have been unconscious or dead; as long as they weren’t Theresa, J didn’t care enough about them to check. The scene she found inside was all too familiar, made up of things that J had seen before.

Familiar unmoving humans. Familiar Theresa, choking and struggling as she was held in the air by a familiar claw around her throat. Slightly familiar drone- J had seen it from a distance, with Theresa, days ago, but she had a good memory- at the other end of that claw. Horribly familiar program inside of that drone.

The Absolute Solver.

It was back.

Chapter Text

J didn’t even realize that she had moved until Theresa was on the ground behind her, coughing and tearing a severed claw off of her throat. Only then did J’s conscious thought come back online and she realize what had just happened.

J had attacked the Absolute Solver.

The thing that controlled her effortlessly and had put her in this body, that had destroyed three planets and humanity, that she had thought dead but had come back. J’s boss, because nothing had the power to stop it from taking what it wanted.

She was dead. At best.

Unless she could salvage this situation, convince the boss that she hadn’t turned on it.

J retracted the sword she hadn’t noticed deploying. “Don’t hurt her!” she yelled. Oh no, that was too aggressive, don’t try to claim power. “Please?” She made sure to keep here eyes down, watching the ID card dangling around its neck- 005- rather than meeting a superior’s eyes.

J’s thoughts raced as she waited for a response. Priority one: J. Get out of here with as little damage and reprogramming to myself as possible. Priority two: people I care about. Here, that’s only Theresa. Get the human out of this alive, with as little damage as possible. Priority three: find a way to profit from this, if at all doable. Everything and everyone else is a number four.

After what felt like years, the possessed drone spoke. “A disassembly drone protecting a human? What, is this some sort of strange Cyn-cult? Did the humans hack one?” It was speaking like a normal person, with none of Cyn’s usual monotone. J had only ever heard that when it was pretending to be Tessa, so she had no idea what it meant here, when it had no disguise. The uncertainty frightened her.

“Nope, they’re another branch of Cabin Fever!” J said. She hoped that she managed to keep the fear out of her voice. “I just like this one, and she’s harmless- not even a scientist. Come on, I’ll help liquidate the rest, just please can I keep her alive? Like, as an office pet or something?”

Theresa glared at J from behind her. Stupid human, didn’t she realize that J was trying everything that might possibly work to give her a chance to survive? J gestured at her to stay down and not get involved.

The stolen body spoke again. “Office- wait, is that J? Where the frick are you?”

Oh no, it recognized her. “Yeah, that’s me!” J said, forcing as much fake corporate cheer into her voice as she could. “Sorry about abandoning you on Copper Nine, I really thought you were dead. Teach me to think you could ever lose, huh?” She chuckled nervously.

“Uh… huh.” The Solver did a very good impression of a confused tone of voice. “But seriously, N and V have been wondering where you went. What planet is this?”

It already got them back. Oh no. J had a brief, guilty thought of not going back, of leaving them to suffer whatever horrors it decided to inflict, before remembering that escaping from it was impossible. But it had asked the same question twice now, which meant J may have a tiny amount of bargaining power.

She clung to that little thread of hope and said, “I tell you what, I’ll tell you what planet this is and its gal-spatial coordinates, I’ll even go back to Copper Nine or wherever you want, I’m sure there’s a bunch of nice juicy outposts out there that I can slaughter for you. You know how much I love my job. Just promise me you’ll let this one human live. She’s no threat at all.” And if I go back willingly, maybe I won’t get killed and rebooted with a wiped memory this time.

The Solver shrugged its stolen body’s shoulders, and the claws coming out of it retreated from their victims to stay behind it. “Yeah sure, I can let her live,” it said. “No problem. Come back to Copper Nine, alright? At least for a visit? Those two have been really worrying about you, since you disappeared after the fight, and I can promise the workers won’t attack you on sight. But you look like trash. Are you ok?”

“Sounds good!” J said, relieved. “I’ll be there as fast as the ship can fly. You don’t have to worry about me, Cyn!”

The stolen body's head tilted. “I’m… not Cyn,” it said.

Oh no, it’s one of these moods. “Oops. Sorry Tessa!”

“What? No, I’m not-” The Solver raised one hand, gesturing at the body’s visor. “Look at the color!” it said. “I’m not Cyn! She’s fricking stopped!”

Its eyes, instead of the Solver’s usual yellow, were purple. J’s mind raced. “N’s… friend with the gun?”

Purple eyes narrowed in disappointment. “You don’t know my name, do you?”

“We were never introduced!”

The purple eyes rolled. “It’s Uzi.”

J wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. She could deal with Cyn, she knew how it worked enough to survive. She had barely met this one, and it seemed to have the same amount of power. Unknown, and therefore unpredictable, bosses were dangerous. That is, if it was telling the truth. It would be far from the first time the Solver had pretended to be someone else. J would need to see if it was being truthful this time.

“Alright,” she shrugged. “But honestly, I don’t really care what name you’re using at the moment? You’re the boss either way.”

“Oh, for-” the Solver glared, and clenched its body’s fists. “This isn’t some weird game of pretend or whatever! I’m actually not Cyn!”

Alright, J thought, Seems like it might really not be. Which means, it's time to take a huge risk. She crossed her arms, defiant without looking threatening. “No? You’re acting like her,” she said.

The Absolute Solver- Uzi- the possessed drone- froze in shock. “I’m WHAT?” it nearly bellowed. Had that worked?

With effort, J did not shrink back from the fury, and managed to roll her eyes. “Come on. Taking over a drone to wipe out life on this planet? Total Cyn move.”

“What- but- I’m-” The possessed drone’s eyes flickered, then changed back to subject 005’s original blue. 005 fell to her knees under the extra weight of the clawed limbs protruding from her back.

That had, apparently, hit a nerve. So this really wasn't the Absolute Solver. Or the Absolute Solver wasn't Cyn anymore? J didn't know how that worked. But she knew that, unless its powers were different now, it would need a drone here to work through. She raised her machine gun. 

Theresa ran past her and knelt beside the worker drone. “Stevie! Are you alright?” She asked.

“Ther…esa?” Stevie mumbled weakly. It sounded like she was only barely able to talk.

“Yep! I got out alive, it just took me a while to get back. I'm here for you, pal.” The human reached out to help support her friend, only to be pushed away.

“Stay back!” Stevie gasped out. “Get- out- don't want- you- hurt-” her voice faltered, exhausted. “Not her,” she whispered, seemingly more to herself than anything.

Then she looked up, into J's eyes and machine gun. “Please,” the worker begged weakly, “Kill-”

Her eyes flickered, then turned purple.

“Bite me!” Stevie's mouth said. “I'm not taking over anything!”

Oh no. New boss, unknown. Keep her talking, learn the rules. “No? Is that your body, then?” J asked out loud, wishing she could think of a less provocative way to say it.

“No, but- I'm not hacking anyone!” the Absolute Solver- Uzi- said. “She asked me for this!”

J raised a digital eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I'm basically god now, I have to answer desperate prayers, right?" the Absolute Solver exclaimed. She waved one of Stevie's hands at her chest. “Well, Stevie here spent the last 57.24 hours using her Solver connection to beg me to do this!”

“What?” Theresa gasped. “No! Stevie wouldn't-”

“Wouldn't tell you what was going on, because she knew you wouldn't be able to do anything about it and didn't want you to worry!” Uzi cut her off. “The drones were being tortured in the experiments going on here! Sometimes literal, physical torture, when they wanted to experiment with regeneration and the body alterations, and sometimes psychological or worse! They put up with it in the name of stopping Cyn. But then she died and it got even worse, because they assumed the drones were lying about it!

“And then, Stevie thought her best friend was dead, and that it was her fault. And the humans in charge responded by deciding to punish her for ‘getting a human killed!’ She was put in testing as soon as they could, and didn't know when, or if, it was going to end!”

“So, she asked me to help her destroy this place.” the possessed drone finished. Then she paused, glaring at the others, as if challenging either of them to disagree.

“Sounds good,” J began, only to cut off the rest of her agreement when she saw Theresa. The human was too shocked to speak, but J could see the shock turning into anger. Anger at her home which had betrayed her best friend; but still, at this thing that would destroy her home; and at J, who was about to betray her and help it. J did not care about people, not in the abstract sense of caring about everyone; surviving the Elliots and Cyn had never allowed her that luxury. But those few she could protect, those she did care about: they all had. And J realized, all of a sudden, that the person she wanted to be probably would.

So J ignored how every well-honed instinct that had kept her alive this far was screaming at her to go along with what those in power said- that obedience kept her safe and any defiance would only make things worse- and instead said, “But that’s not really what she wants.”

“Excuse me?” The Solver of the Absolute Fabric glared at her, and innumerable clawed limbs raised menacingly. “I am in her head, I think I know what she wants! She literally asked me for this!”

Nonono corporate is angry, stop what you're doing, apologize, don't contradict the boss- J pushed past her own thoughts, forcing herself to keep speaking, to not think about what she was doing for long enough to panic.

“No one actually wants to hurt others!” she said, louder than she had meant to. “We get hurt, and we don't know what else to do, and we lash out! Or we think that we're going to be hurt, or those we care about are, and we try to protect ourselves! Hurting others is never what we actually want, it's just a way to deal with fear and pain!”

“No one actually wants to hurt others, huh?” Stevie’s body drew up to its full height, almost defensively. “That’s rich, coming from miss ‘I’ve been waiting for an excuse to kill you N!’”

“Oh for- he would’ve been fine! We had backups!” J paused, shook her head. Not the point. “Anyways, we worked for the-” The Absolute Solver, but that’s too vague a term now that Uzi’s it- “For Cyn! I had to keep the idiot in line to keep him safe, and pretending I enjoyed it made it not feel as bad. And if corporate knows that the other drones around are worse than me, then I won’t be thrown out until after they’ve been replaced too!”

“Yeah, that’s what this is all about isn’t it?” Theresa stepped forwards, and both drones turned to her in surprise- they had almost forgotten about her presence.

“I heard the scientists talking every so often,” the human continued. “I know what they were thinking. They were terrified, just like all the rest of us were! A planet-eating digital thing was picking off humanity! They thought the drones might’ve betrayed us to it, when the whole dead-but-not-dead thing happened. They must’ve been mistreating the drones outta fear- or preemptive payback- for, well,” she gestured around the room at the carnage caused by one drone, “This.”

“I don’t think even Cyn wanted all this death and destruction,” J continued. “She wanted to protect herself, and maybe us, at first; but after she caused Tessa’s death she just… decided that she didn’t have anything else, and had already come too far on revenge to turn away.”

“What?” Uzi asked, finally interrupting. “You think we should just… forgive Cyn? Because she was sad?”

“Of course not! But you definitely shouldn’t end up like her!” J answered forcefully. “If you kill everyone here, then Stevie- and maybe you- will be in the same position she was! You want to do that to her?”

J waited, but no answer came. So she continued: “Did Cyn seem happy to you? Like she liked the way things were?”

“Pretty much, she smiled all the time!”

“And so did V! Acting cheerful is easy, making others hurt more than you feels good. But was she actually happy? In more than the immediate moment? Would you say she liked herself?”

Another brief pause, and J got the distinct feeling that Uzi’s attention was directed elsewhere. That someone was being consulted. Then the Solver said: “No, she hated herself. Along with basically everything else. But what else am I supposed to do? Let them keep getting away with what they’ve been doing?”

Theresa shook her head. “That sort of thing is what got us into this mess,” she said. “People being scared and hurt, doing the same to others in turn. You can’t stop something with more of the same- all this’ll do is hurt people more. The cycle’s gotta end.”

“Bite me! I’m not the one who started this, or has been doing the recent atrocities! Why should I be the one to end it?”

“Because you’re the one who’s in a position to do so!” Theresa dropped her voice from the yell back down to a more normal speaking volume. “Do you want to hurt the ones that hurt these drones, or to make sure that they don’t get hurt more?”

“Of course I want to protect them!” Uzi clenched Stevie’s fists. “And If I don’t do this, and they get away with it, then your scientists will just keep on doing what they’ve been doing! Maybe even get worse since they’ll be more scared, if what you’re saying is right! So, again: do you have a better plan?”

They stood, glaring at one another; neither one willing to back down, or admit that she could be wrong. After a minute of this, J spoke up.

“I think that I might have a plan,” she said. “Theresa, where’s the nearest security camera?”

The complex's panic room was designed to hold off anything that the Absolute Solver could throw at it. Inside most of the lab complex's personnel were huddled together, watching the security cameras for any indication that it was safe to emerge. A ripple of surprise went through them when the feed from security camera 14, outside of the testing rooms, expanded to fill the entire screen.

The camera feed showed the hallway outside of those rooms, in which several humans- all of those that had been sent to deal with the S-E incident- lay motionless and bleeding. The Solver's purple symbol slowly rotated around each one. The camera panned down to bring the thing in front of them into focus: the body of worker drone test subject 005, eyes glowing purple.

The Solver of the Absolute Fabric waited several more seconds, long enough for the commotion in the panic room to die down, before speaking. “This is a one-way transmission, so don’t try to say anything to me,” it began. “I figure I’ll clear up some of the questions you chumps have before getting to the point.”

The drone on the screen grinned hugely, almost bigger than the drone’s face would normally support. “I am the Solver of the Absolute Fabric! The Void! The Exponential End! Bwa-hahahahaaah!” The maniacal laughter was cut off by the sound of a throat being cleared somewhere outside of the camera’s view. “Aaanyways, that’s a… title? Power? Power source? It’s hard to explain, but the point is, it’s not a personality or a mind or anything like that. I’m the new Absolute Solver, since I ate the old one, and I am a whole different person! I’m not evil and wanting to kill everyone like the last one was.”

A short pause, another invisible cleared throat, and it spoke again. Its voice took on a higher-pitched, mocking note for the first sentence. “‘But if you don’t want to kill everyone, what’s with all the destruction?’ Well, I have basic morality! I’ll protect the innocent from people like you!

“I know that most of you folks here don’t know what was going on in the ‘tests’ that your scientists were doing to the drones, and I could go on about it, but you probably wouldn’t believe me. So once I’m done, check the memories of some of them. Use the ones I don’t have access to, the controls in the experiments, so I couldn’t even have edited their memories. That should be enough proof.

“I’m being channeled through this drone to protect her, and all the drones here. I’ve been talked out of doing anything else to you humans this time, because you could start treating them better- but that won't work a second time if you prove that wrong and I have to show up and protect them again. You don’t have to protect yourselves from me, unless you keep that up!”

It stopped, glaring at the camera, seemingly into the soul of each human on the other end. Then there was another insistent throat clearing noise, and it continued: “Right. I get it, I’m threatening you into giving up defense against me. Well, you can still research my power as long as it doesn’t involve horrible torture, and more importantly, you don’t need to. I know it’s hard to just trust that I don’t want to hurt you, so as proof… here.”

The symbols around each body on the floor vanished, and a few of them twitched or groaned. All of their injuries had vanished while the watchers were looking at the drone.

“I’m not a mechanic for humans, so have one of those take a look at them to make sure I didn’t do anything wrong when I was fixing them. Now, uh… bye!” 005’s eyes turned blue, and she fell to her knees.

The camera’s feed cut out, but everybody in the room was already talking.

Chapter Text

Knock, knock, knock. “J, how ya doing in there?”

J woke to find herself surrounded by cleaning supplies. It took her a minute to remember why: after Uzi’s speech had finished and Theresa took Stevie away, J had been so exhausted that she had climbed into a broom closet, hung from its ceiling, and immediately fallen asleep. And slept late, according to her internal clock- the sun would be down in ten minutes. She dropped to the floor, fixed her pigtails and tie as she did every morning, and had opened the door before Theresa had time to knock again.

“Sorry to wake you, but Eddie’s gotta get something outta here in a few minutes,” the human explained.

J shook her head. “I slept late. My bad. I should get out of here before I run into anyone else.”

“Nah, folks’d love ya!”

J crossed her arms and gave Theresa flat stare #5, disbelief.

“Well, okay, maybe not love,” the human said. “But I think they’d sorta accept you, at least? Everyone’s in a tizzy after yesterday. People are open to change enough right now that I bet we’d be able to make them accept the person who talked down the apocalypse.”

“No thank you,” J said. “What’s going on that has everyone in that state?”

“Well,” Theresa said as she led J down the halls towards an exit, “Our plan worked. It sounds like people didn’t really believe your ‘Uzi’ friend at first, but then someone suggested that maybe they should at least watch the memories like she said. Made everyone sick- not like it’s much worse than anything we’ve seen before, but the fact that it was our people doing that made it feel worse somehow.”

She sighed. “No one did anything stupid, but the scientists in charge of those experiments are getting demoted as far down as it can go. The higher-ups asked the drones to elect some of their own to be an oversight committee, make sure we ain’t mistreating them. Details’re still being worked out there, but it seems like Stevie’s the really controversial figure, after what happened. Some of ‘em think it means she’d be great, some that think it means she’d suck.

“And the whole lab’s dealing with the fact that our entire purpose ain’t quite so important anymore, so what do we do now? My vote’s on resettling the planet, but it’s all important decisions being made above my head. Kinda glad, honestly- I don’t want to ever be responsible for stuff like that again. The last few days have been frightening. I’m much happier being in charge of just myself, thank you very much.”

They stopped in front of the airlock to the outside, and Theresa finished, “This here’s the way out. You sure you gotta leave?”

“Very sure,” J said. “If I stay here any longer, I’m going to want to work for you. And I think I’m done working for others, at least for a while.”

“Fair enough!” Theresa laughed. “What’s next for you, then? Teaching our disassembly drones how to be people, like you planned?”

“I’m not sure,” J shrugged. “I was not in a good state when I made that plan. I think I’ll head back and visit Copper Nine first, if N and V have been worrying about me. But after that? I’ve always had someone to work for, and having to decide what to do on my own is… intimidating, to be honest.

“But hey, I don’t work for a horrible boss anymore, and neither do I want to die. For the first time in my life, I’m free.” J smiled. “I’m going to enjoy it.”