Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Get up, Puppy.”

Static blinded him, filling his audial and visual sensors. He gasped, pushing through the pain coursing through him to sit up, his hands sinking into the powder surrounding him. His processor sent unpleasant sensations all throughout his joints as he righted himself, feeling like something fundamental was wrong with him. He shook his head to try and dismiss the static and error messages peeking through it. Powder cascaded off of him, he must have been laying for some time. What was that voice? Puppy - was that him? Where was he?

The static in his sensors resolved itself to show him the ruined cityscape filled with snow and ash around him. Wind howled past his audials. Looking down at himself, he was also covered in it; he must have been sitting here a while. Something seemed wrong with what he saw of himself. He got the impression that his limbs should be smaller, less rigid, less conical.

He turned his head around, looking for anyone else. Someone to tell him what was happening, where he was, who he was. His five extra sensors, studded in a halo mounted atop his head, picked up on a range of different spectra. It was extremely disorienting as he got used to to seeing six different layers of the cityscape around him. But it confirmed that he was alone. So who had been talking to him?

“Me, Puppy.”

He jolted up in shock, swinging his head about. There was no one. And the voice was oddly echo-y. He tried to speak, ask if someone was there, but no words came from his vocoder. He frowned, trying several times, and realized he probably looked very stupid just opening and closing his mouth. There was another impression then, like information that was accessed often. Often enough that it had worn physically into his processor. He was supposed to be stupid and useless. He tensed up, feeling like something was supposed to attack him now. His optic halo began a threat analysis of the environment.

“Oh, but you’re going to be very useful to me, Puppy. I’m afraid I can’t argue with your intelligence, though.”

Shakily, he pushed himself to his feet. Snow and ash fell from his shoulders as he got up, his coat free to flap about in the wind. He wanted to be useful, that sounded really nice. But how did she know that was what he was thinking about? Could the voice read his thoughts? Who was she?

“You’re an open book to me, Puppy.”

Huh. That was neat, even if he had no idea how she got in his head. She kept calling him Puppy, though. Was that who he was?

“It is now. Because that’s what you are: my Puppy.”

Puppy felt a thrill shoot through him. He knew what dogs were; it must have been important if he knew that and almost nothing else. He loved dogs, they were so cute and loyal, and so gentle too. He wanted to be like that. His tail swayed behind him at the thought.

“You will be a perfect Puppy for me, won’t you? So loyal, and so cute .”

The voice’s tone was strange when it called him cute, like she meant something else. But she called him loyal and cute, like a dog! And puppies were the cutest of them all! His tail began fully wagging behind him. He would be the bestest puppy for her.

“Oh, you will be. We have a lot of work to do, Puppy.” 

Wait. Hold on. Puppy looked behind himself again, and his mouth dropped open in shock. He had a tail! He felt like that was something that he should know about, if it was in his design. Actually, looking over himself, he noted a lot of things that just felt off. His legs, especially the lower segment, were much larger than he felt they should have been. Similarly, his arms widened to the wrist, which was very strange. 

“But there’s some things we need to take care of first. Feeling a bit hot, Puppy?”

Now that she mentioned it, he did feel a little hot. The snow had started to steam off his chassis, and a conveniently timed notification popped up on his visor. A hazard triangle with the text ‘High Temp’ under it. So the uncomfortable warmth he was feeling probably wasn’t normal then.

“Not quite. But don’t you worry, Puppy. We’ll get you fixed right up.”

Wow, the voice was looking out for him! That was really cool, having someone who could read his thoughts and cared about him. His tail wagged even faster, even as he whined from the discomfort. He thought it was a little odd that he could whine but not talk.

“Don’t think about it too hard. First, get to the skies.”

His head tilted up towards the sky above him. He looked around, confusion filling his processor. How was he supposed to do that? Did she mean to climb the buildings?

“You really are fried, aren’t you Puppy? Get your wings out.”

Wings? He had wings?

He checked through his subsystems regarding his various parts. A program in his arms read as ‘arsenal,’ which was a little concerning to him, but the voice told him to look for wings. Once he found them, they quickly popped out of his back, almost pulling him back onto the ground from how rapidly his center of gravity changed. He staggered backwards, righting himself when he turned on the antigrav generators in the wings. That was also very convenient.

“Now fly.”

With the wings out, it was like he had had them since forever. He knew exactly how to crouch to the ground to get the best lift for when he pushed off, the anti-grav generators in his feet keeping the speed from his jump far beyond what physics should allow. He came to a stop among the clouds, staring in astonishment at the sky above them.

The stars were truly beautiful. They twinkled while he stared, watching the sky painting with so many different spectra of light. The rings of the planet stretched out beautifully in front of him, creating a stunning view with the backdrop of the noise of the night. He wondered what it would be like to fly amongst it, immersing himself in that sea of vibrancy.

“Yes, yes, so beautiful. Look down.”

He did a spin in the air, reveling in the cool rush of freezing air against his hot chassis. A ruined city stretched across the planet beneath him, so many dark shapes stretching towards the sky, trying to escape the barren land they were anchored to. He frowned. There didn’t seem to be anything there as opposed to what was above him. Until his sensors all locked onto movement, double and triple checking that it wasn’t a fluke. The movement was a long distance away, though. He idly marked it on some kind of internal network without thinking, not being able to come up with a reason. Maybe he was a scout?

“Ugh, defense drones. I was hoping that she did actually manage to beat some kind of hunting protocol into you. Listen, Puppy. You need to go to that sensor contact. It will help with your problem. You’ll know what to do when you get there.”

Puppy complied immediately. He didn’t know anything yet, but maybe it was like his wings, and his programming would take over! He hoped that whatever it was would be as fun as flying; feeling the air rush against his chassis and his coat flapping in the wind was amazing. And he was so fast! It was even helping a little bit with the heat.

The movement picked up as he got closer, whatever it was ducking away behind ruined cars. That wouldn't do; these things were supposed to help him with the overheating. Old programming kicked in as the gravity manipulators in his feet whirred, flipping over and amplifying the effect of gravity on himself to pull him down to the ground, streaking through the air as a comet. Snow plumed around his strike zone as objects were sent flying, including two figures with hollowed-out, glowing eyes, one set green and the other blue, tossed into the structures behind them. It was hard to see them through the fog his strike created, but his optic halo easily compensated.

He frowned for a moment, he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He pulled his wings back in and went to go help the closer drone up, offering a hand and opening his mouth to apologize before he remembered he couldn’t speak when no noise came out. The drone on the ground, in response, screamed and scrabbled away from him, holding out an arm as a shield. Shocked, he pulled back, unsure of what provoked them. He did accidentally knock them down, but surely he wasn’t that scary, right?

Then the additional sensors on his halo tagged a warning. Puppy’s hand instantly shot up, catching the rock the other drone threw at his head with perfect precision. The two drones froze, staring at him, but he had stopped entirely. The threat analysis protocol he had yet to turn back off kicked in fully. His sensors were screaming at him, the information overloading him. He dropped the rock, trying to cover the halo and drew as much power as possible away from his visor, trying to block out the sensory input. Falling to his knees as it overwhelmed him entirely, assessing every snowflake, every shifting shadow, every echo of debris falling through the city.

“Hm, looks like I tweaked the sensors a little too high. How’s this, Puppy?”

And it all stopped. He vented rapidly, chest expanding and contracting as he got himself under control once more. His sensors now in perfect clarity, detailing two threats, medium size, four limbs, possible weapons, weak points, and velocity as they moved away from him. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do.

His wings sprung from his back once more, the gravity manipulators in his feet rapidly cycling to give him a boost as he closed the distance between him and the two threats in an instant. With a quick spin, his injector speared one through its vulnerable faceplate, while a wing bisected the other through its abdomen. A quick disassembly of both threats.

His sensors cleared of threat, Puppy was finally able to think again. And he looked down at what had been designated as ‘threats’ in shock of what he had just done.

The two drones lay at his feet, one flashing a FATAL ERROR through the cracks and hole his tail had created in their visor. The other weakly tried to drag themself away, a smeared trail of oil left in the wake of their torso, connecting to their fallen legs. 

He grabbed at his halo in stress, not knowing what to do. Surely this couldn’t have been what the voice meant when she said he would know what to do with them, right? There was no way that he was supposed to kill people! That wasn’t right, it couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be his purpose!

“You do have an odd level of empathy for your kind. It was convenient to get to you, but now I'm starting to understand why that corpo-rat was so pissy over it. How to play this… Ah. Listen up, Puppy.”

He walked over to the drone dragging itself away. They looked up at him, their blue eyes hollowed in terror, and he played with his hands distressingly, not sure of how to proceed. He wanted to help, but how? The voice could wait, he needed to do something.

The drone’s visor flickered with a FATAL ERROR, and their visor changed to a resigned look. They tried to vent, finding themselves unable as their lungs were left on the trail some ways back. Then they turned over, stared at Puppy, their expression becoming angry, and they spat at him, just before their visor flashed to FATAL ERROR permanently. 

His sensors tagged an incoming projectile and his hand automatically flew up to block the spit from touching him. He stared at it, eyes hollowed out. What… what now? He was a murderer. And from his hardware, and even his software, it seemed like that was what he was designed to be. But why?

“Listen, Puppy.”

The voice sounded agitated. He looked around, spotting the trail connecting the drone’s torso and their lower half. But underneath the nausea he felt, there was… hunger?

Before he knew what he was doing, he feel to his knees, picked up the torso, and tipped it up to drink from it.

The voice sighed in the background of his mind, his processor barely registering it over the pleasure received from the sweet, sweet oil flowing down his throat. Too soon, the oil stopped flowing from the torso, and he crawled over to the synthetic organs that had fallen out from it, greedily devouring them as well. Once he was done there, he moved to the legs, eagerly repeating what he had with the torso.

“Oh for fucks- That should be enough. Now, LISTEN.”

A mind-shattering pain filled all of his senses. He dropped the legs, curling into a ball, whimpering as his sensors glitched out. Everything he had, every nanometer of circuit registered nothing but pain. It was over in an instant, leaving him venting rapidly in the snow, covered in oil as he clutched at his head.

“Are you feeling like listening now, Puppy?”

The voice sounded so sweet. Like maybe she hadn't meant to hurt him. He nodded as best as he could while still curled tightly around himself.

“Good boy. I wanted to be nicer about this, but you made me do it this way instead. You are a murder drone. You were sent here by a malignant program to do horrible things in its name. But I saved you, gave you a purpose beyond that. I made you a good boy. The thing that made you; it made you to kill, to hurt, and mostly to be a perfect guard dog so its other pets get to kill and hurt more. You can only live off the misery and death of others. But now, I need you to help me.”

So he really was a bad drone? A murder drone, at that. The nausea began to overwhelm him again. But - she said needed him. That meant he could be good, right? That he could be useful?

“Yes. You belong to me now, Puppy. You can be good, as long as you do what I say. As for those clankers, don't feel too bad about killing them. These drones - they’re nothing. They mean nothing. The only thing that matters to you is staying functional to keep me safe, and being a good boy for me. Got it Puppy?”

His tail wagged weakly. He was so lucky to be taken in by her, so he could be good instead. He would be the bestest ever for her.

“Oh, you will be. Now grab that other body and get moving. The sun’s coming up soon.”

Chapter Text

V felt like screaming.

Honestly, it was more rare that she didn’t feel like screaming. But she thought she had gotten good enough at ignoring it that she barely felt anything anymore. Turns out all she needed to break through that was losing the one reason she had for living.

It had been about a week since she and J last saw N. Coincidentally, it had also been one week since she left him in the snow after asking him who he was. It was definitely petty on her part, and she hated the rush of satisfaction she felt when she saw how it hurt him. It was a fraction of the pain she felt every time he reintroduced himself and asked her the same question, that unshakeable smile on his face. He wouldn’t remember it anyway.

It was a little easier this way, keeping him far beyond arm’s reach. And eventually, she wouldn’t have to, and he could take her back in his arms again, he would finally remember the promise of that dance, and everything would be right again, far, far away from that abomination and her horrors.

Unless he disappeared before they could get away. That thing may not say anything about his poor performance, but it might have something to say about him abandoning the job entirely.

V refused to consider that it may be something else. She prayed to whatever deity might be out there (other than that thing) that he was just wandering around after another reset.

Ruined skyscrapers whizzed past underneath her, catalogued extensively by her optic halo. Her array was tuned all the way up, no matter the headache it was giving her as her processor tried to keep up with all the information. Every single movement was marked. Every piece of falling rubble, every bit of debris on the wind, every falling snowflake. And nothing was getting her any closer to finding N.

J had already said this would be the last day they wasted looking for the ‘synergistic liability.’ Not that V cared one whit about what the narc said, she would continue without her anyways, but it was easier to cover more area with two of them.

Then her audials picked up the scuffling of metal against concrete, her HUD marking the sound as originating on the ground level of the street she was flying over. Probably a stray worker drone, but V was getting hungry anyways. She wasn’t putting up nearly as many numbers this week as she would be normally, and her cooling systems were starting to protest that.

She angled her wings and body to descend quickly and quietly into the street, alighting on a lamppost. She crouched on the metal outcropping, her tail flicking in anticipation of the hunt. Scanning the area revealed nothing out of place, so she settled in to listen.

It didn’t take too long before her prey made another noise. A light scuffling sound in one of the buildings to her left. Her hands switched out for claws as she sprung towards the building, latching on to the wall and crawling through a broken window. The trademark X lit across her screen in anticipation of the bounty of oil she would have, her lips widening in a savage, bloodthirsty grin.

Only for her to blink in shock and dispel all that when she rounded a corner and came face to face with N.

Immediately, she flipped around and dropped to the ground, asking, “N, what the hell is wrong with you?! We’ve been looking for you for a week now, and you’re just lazing about?!”

She was angry enough, and relieved enough, to forgo pretending she didn’t know who he was. She almost wanted to hug him, but this N would probably overheat on the spot if she willingly touched him. 

He blinked at her in shock, his mouth opening and closing, lips shaping as if to talk, but no sound emerged. He looked down at himself, then pressed a hand to his forehead as if remembering something, miming a nervous laugh. V crossed her arms, claws tapping against them. He better have a damn good excuse this time. Oh, who was she kidding, J was going to tear him a new one no matter what, probably literally.

She saw some of the little scraps their boss tore off him sometimes. V assumed that J started doing some physical punishment once she had started to put some distance between them, but she couldn’t muster up the ability to care. Not when she knew he wouldn’t remember it, anyways.

He tried pointing to himself and shaking his head no, then smiled and offered a hand. V slapped a hand to her visor, giving a long, drawn-out groan, hoping that her long years of suffering were expressed enough to where N could feel it, too.

Then a pixelated dog wagging its tail flashed across N’s visor. V stood ramrod straight. That was completely new, what did that- 

His visor blinked back to his eyes, having an apologetic expression written across them. He gave her a short wave, then turned and bolted.

For a second, V stood in disbelief. That N would be the one to run from her, and not the other way around. That very quickly turned to rage. After being gone for a week and worrying her over nothing, he tries to run from her?

She flared her wings and dashed after him. She would drag him back to the spire headless if she had to.

Following the path that N had taken out of the building, V jumped through another shattered window. A grin stretched across her face, the X retaking her visor. Despite how pissed she was, she did feel the thrill of the hunt lighting up her processor. Hopefully N would make for some better prey than he did a hunter.

His fast flight left a rather conspicuous trail in the snow. Why he had no concept of stealth when they were made to hunt was beyond her, but it was at least thrilling. Like a toaster that actually gives her a workout. Maybe he was just too much of a softie for even that thing to overwrite.

V promptly locked that thought away and pretended that she didn’t just tempt fate. The thought of an N as empty as those other disassemblers made her core cold.

She shifted her thoughts back to the hunt at hand. The sight of N covered in his own oil… now there was something worth thinking about.

She really didn’t recognize herself these days.

Cutting through a building, she managed to burst through what was left of a window to cut N off and surprise him. His eyes hollowed as she slammed into him, claws piercing through his abdomen, his mouth opening up in a pain-filled vent.

Her charge led them into a wall, where V was taken off guard once more when N put a foot against her chest and pushed. She barely had time to register the high-pressure warnings her HUD threw at her before she slammed through the crumbling concrete wall next to the window she had burst through.

She decided that she didn’t like this new N’s attitude. Damn him for getting actual feet while they were stuck with peg legs. Since when the hell was he strong enough for that anyways? Her claws swapped out for SMGs, letting her fire at him as she sprang back out of the hole. He was still trying to fly away, the holes she had put through him closed back up.

He was forced to land, swinging around to cover himself with his wings. V blinked in surprise as her bullets pinged off his wings, ricocheting into the rubble and buildings around them. Narrowing her eyes, her SMGs retracted into her wrists, exchanging for her swords. She knew her wings weren’t that strong. And his feet… She was starting to get an idea.

Pushing off the ground to give herself a speed boost, she barreled towards N with her swords ready to swing. N ducked under them, propelling himself backwards, into the bottom section of a parking garage. She gave a slight cackle when she saw his hollow eyes. At least he wasn’t stupid enough to try and fight back, other than that kick.

Then another presence alighted next to her, putting one foot down on the ground before the other in a graceful landing. J stared at N, a tick mark popping onto her visor. 

“Are you finally fed up enough with the synergistic liability that you’re using him for target practice?” she asked, swapping out a hand for an SMG. “Because I think that you’ve had a great idea for a team-building exercise.”

Without waiting for a reply, J started shooting at N. He yelped, covering himself with his wings again, trying to back away from them. J gritted her teeth, growling out, “When I have a punishment for you, moron bot, you take it and ask for more.”

V looked at her askance. That sounded like there was maybe more going on than she realized.

N peeked over his wings, waving his arms frantically. He seemed to be trying to mime out some complex sentence with his whole body, and it was confusing enough that J stared at him with contempt for a few seconds before turning to V and asking, “Okay, what the hell is wrong with the bozo this time.”

V shook her head. “I don’t know. I think he reset again, but he hasn’t said a single word. I think he screwed up his vocoder somehow.”

“Great, now I have to teach him all his lessons all over again,” muttered J. “Do you have any idea how much this is going to cut into our quotas? Oh, fourth-quarter profits, I have had it up to here with this synergistic liability.”

She turned back to N, who was trying to creep away again. J sighed and shot him in the foot. Oil burst against the ground as N yelped again, falling to a knee. His head whipped back towards them, and V tensed up as the dog played across his visor.

J squinted and leaned forward. “What the hell-”

N pushed off the ground and tried to run, but V was ready for him this time. She smacked into one of his outstretched wings, destabilizing and making him fall back in the floor, impaling a sword into his shoulder to make sure he stayed down. To J, she said, “Yeah, I don’t know what that is. Think he might’ve picked up some weird virus, and he keeps trying to run away.”

J smiled, excited. V resisted the urge to glare. “Then why don’t we persuade him to come back with us?”

Rolling her eyes, V leaned over N, assessing him. The dog was still playing on his visor, but other than that, he seemed to be in a good shape. Well, other than the sword currently sticking through his shoulder. Nothing his nanites couldn’t fix. She sighed. It was a fun little chase for a little bit, but now she had to go back to the boring prey. At least she didn’t have to worry about him anymore. She might be louder on hunts for a little bit though, just to give him something to follow so she could make sure he was sticking around. He always was infatuated with her, after all.

Then the dog disappeared, into a message on his visor simply reading ‘File not found.’ And V was once again caught off guard when N’s hand switched out for an SMG, pointed directly at her belly, and fired.

V screamed out in pain, having not been shot at in a long time. Her HUD threw out warnings of internal systems damage, and she slumped down to the ground as N grabbed her sword with his other hand and pulled it out of his shoulder. She vaguely heard J yelling as her systems pulled power for emergency repairs.

“Oh, did somebody finally grow a spine? You just couldn’t wait until we were back at the spire, you wanted to learn some discipline here, you fourth-quarter layoff!”

After a moment, V’s optic halo restored its functionality to full, showing her that N had one wing covering him as a shield, his SMG sticking through the bladed feathers to fire back at J as she peppered him with bullets.

J narrowly dodged the bursts of fire, growling as she was forced on the defensive. “Since when are your wings so hard?!” she cried out in anger. 

N didn’t answer, letting his SMG return into his wrist, exchanging it for a sword. He must’ve run out of bullets, which V used as her opportunity to jump back into the fight with her own swords. He’d made this personal; she wanted to be up close to see him hurt.

N’s other hand swapped out for a sword before she reached him, and he turned to cut her sword away with his own. Gritting her teeth at the strain that sent up her arm, V struck with her sword, only for it to be blocked by N’s other blade. She prepared to strike again while J dashed towards him, but was fully unprepared for N to ram his head into her visor.

Shrieking in pain, V’s swords swapped out for hands as she instinctively raised them to protect the damaged region. With her optic halo, she watched N jump and sling in the air, letting J slide past him as he extended a foot. Something in the foot made a whirring sound as he kept spinning, and V realized that the foot was on a direct trajectory for her head.

She tried to move, but it was too late. The foot connected to the side of her head and everything went dark.

She rebooted to J’s face several feet away from her, a FATAL ERROR displayed across her visor. As she stood on shaky pegs, she very quickly understood why as she caught the red-hot line across the bottom of her diagonally severed torso, her legs and other arm several feet away from her. It looked like the laser she had been hit with just barely missed her core.

Looking further around the room, V saw her own head displaying a FATAL ERROR on the other side of the parking garage, a puddle of oil leaking from under it. She struggled to comprehend what just happened. Did she and J really just get destroyed by N of all drones?

She dragged the two halves of J together, knowing that she would be back up faster if she reattached rather than regenerating herself. There were a couple questions the narc needed to answer. And then she took stock of the situation.

N not dead. N doesn’t know her or J. N killed both of them, but didn’t take the time to destroy their cores. N is gone.

She let herself fall back down to her knees, covering her face. It turns out she could still feel.

She put her head between her knees, tears filling her visor as she sat alone in an abandoned parking garage after N left her once more.

Chapter Text

Puppy spent most of his time rooting through the trash.

Not that he was complaining, of course. His voice, who said her name was HER, needed it to be done. Even if he wasn’t very good at finding what she needed without her. And also without telling him what it was for. Honestly, he didn’t even really know what any of the components he was picking up did. Apparently, half the time, they were also the wrong ones. Which HER wasn’t happy about, but that was fine! Her work was important, he was just happy that he got to help.

“Puppy, I swear to god, if you break another piece of scrap I am going to leave you for scrap. Put your damn head on right, clanker.”

Her words were accompanied by a wave of pain, and panic coursed through him as he processed her words. He didn’t want to be alone. It was already terrible whenever she had to leave him on his own during scheduled parts of the day when she said she couldn’t transmit to him. Sometimes she would give him something to do, other times she would just leave him to do whatever he wanted. But he didn’t know what he wanted, so he ended up just sitting there with his knees to his chest and wings wrapped around himself, waiting for her to come back.

But Puppy was just… bad at scavenging. He was trying to get better, he really was! But it was hard differentiating some of the components from each other, and HER was busy with something in her real life sometimes and got mad when she put her attention back on him and realized that he had been waiting for her to verify he got the right stuff. Because he didn’t actually know how to get her attention. But it was fine! If he did everything right, sometimes she would tell him that he did a good job, and it felt like his entire existence was fulfilled in that moment. Knowing that he wasn’t useless. Sometimes, though, it was hard to remember that.

He pulled out another old piece of technology from the pile of debris in the corner of the room, trying to delicately pry it open with his claws. The building he was in was some kind of old warehouse, where HER thought a lot of the tech stores throughout the current city he was visiting were supplied from before the core collapse. And judging from the size of the building, he could definitely believe it. This place took up several city blocks, and each crash of metal on metal echoed throughout the old, hole-filled building for ages. At least it meant it would be hard to sneak up on him.

“God, you can’t fucking resist jinxing us, can you?”

He tried to ignore the voice - not out of malice! Of course not, he was just very concentrated - and then a slight scuffing reached his audials.

Wincing, he swung his head around, making sure his optic halo was covering the whole warehouse. While he hoped he hadn’t jinxed them, and it had just been some wind from the holes in the walls and ceiling pushing something, it had been drilled into him that he was not that lucky. So far, he had been able to avoid other disassemblers, other than the ones from where he woke up (and they were so familiar - and they knew him. HER refused to explain that, saying that he needed a fresh start. And HER was always right.) But the worker drones were honestly bad enough in this city. It only took one hole in his stomach, courtesy of a hidden sniper, before he started scanning for worker drones as threats, along with the weird flesh beasts and other disassemblers.

But the scuffling didn’t match up to standard worker drone sounds. Cautiously, Puppy put down the device he was working on, preemptively switching out his hands for SMGs. He crept towards the noise, his tail lashing with anxiety, before he caught movement over one of the holes in the ceiling. Whipping a hand towards it, he listened for any noise on the path it was taking, standing still as he heard nothing.

And then a drone with a glowing yellow X across its visor, mouth stretched open in a hungry grin and wings spread wide launched at him, claws first, from a debris pile on his left.

A panicked yelp escaped Puppy as he deployed his wings, cutting through the claws and shoving the disassembler off course. It slammed face first into a large shipping container, the glass of its visor shattering. It yowled in pain, as a second disassembler popped into view from the ceiling and started taking shots at him with a long rifle that it was stabilizing with its normal hand.

Dashing to the side and using a wing for cover, Puppy still winced from the force of the slug as it struck his wing. Damage warnings popped up on his visor, and he knew that his wings wouldn’t take too many hits from that rifle before something gave. And if it got past his wings, it would definitely do a lot more damage.

“Dammit! They were supposed to be in another area today! Y’know what, fuck it. Puppy, get those motherfuckers. If they’re gone, we don’t have to worry about patrol routes, the city will be ours until replacements come in.”

That sounded like a great, solid plan to Puppy. But he had no clue if he could pull it off. He got the drop on the only other two he had fought, even if they had him pinned to the ground. And these two had a solid grasp on teamwork.

As evidenced by the long-range fire distracting him long enough for the other hunter to get back up, fully regenerated. It flew at him again like a wild animal, snarling as it swapped claws for swords. Puppy let off a spray of bullets, but it ducked under them and took a swipe at his knees, which he barely stopped with one of his bladed feathers. And then that wing was promptly blown off at the joint by another round from the sniper, filling Puppy’s processor with a sharp, agonizing pain.

The disassembler swiped with the other sword as he stumbled back, taking off his left leg at the knee. Falling on his back, the stump of his wing sent shockwaves of pain up his spine. He tried to aim the SMGs at the drone, but it cut through them before he could fire. It firmly planted a peg leg on his chest, pushing him flat against the ground. As it loomed over him, he saw the other disassembler aiming the rifle at him. His hollowed eyes blew wider as he realized he was about to die.

“Come on, Puppy. I know you can do this. You’ve gotta bring out your A-game, for me. If you die here, how am I going to survive? What will I do without my good boy?”

HER’s voice filled his mind, pushing out the pain. She would be alone. And while he was definitely not fulfilling his promise to be the best, she still needed him.

His processor working in overdrive, Puppy swapped out his ruined SMGs for hands. Then he lunged upwards, grabbing the disassembler in a hug even as its swords stabbed into his stomach, forcing both of them into a spin. Its head exploded as the high-caliber round from the sniper blasted straight through it.

Puppy relied on his optic halo to keep track of the ranged disassembler, as his visor was completely covered in the oil and embedded with hot shards from the disassembler he held. It didn’t even seem to react to the friendly fire, merely taking aim again. He needed to let his leg finish regenerating, and ideally not get anything else blown off in the process. And also figure out how to keep the disassemblers from regenerating. He threw the headless body at the sniper as it fired, this time putting a hole through the chest as he brought his remaining wing around, blocking the round with much less force than usual.

Wiping his visor off, Puppy saw with his halo that for a brief second, the X of the sniper disassembler glitched back into hollowed out eyes, its rifle lowering. Its bloodthirsty grin shrunk into a gasp. Then it put a hand to its head as the visor continued glitching, until it settled back into the X, the grin returning and the rifle swinging back up.

But by then, Puppy’s foot had regenerated. The gravity manipulators flipped over once more as he pushed off the ground, wing tilted to send him into a spin that would throw off the disassembler’s targeting. A round whizzed by him, punching through a shipping container with a hollow clang.

Puppy landed swords first into the disassembler’s chest, sending them both flying as his momentum carried them in an arc through the air. The swords had pierced into the base of the wings, cutting off the sniper’s control of them, and it hissed and snarled at him, exchanging the long rifle for claws that it barely had time to bring to bear before smashing through the concrete wall of another ruined building behind it.

Using the disassembler as a cushion, Puppy slammed into the floor, his swords cutting a gouge through it as he and the sniper tumbled. When they came to a stop, its back was sparking, and its wings had been left behind at the wall.

“There’s a core in its chest, a squirming little crab-thing of flesh and metal. Destroy that and the disassembler dies.”

Without stopping to think, Puppy ripped a sword out of the disassembler upwards, exchanging it for a claw. He plunged the claw into its chest, closing it around something warm and soft, and ripped it out.

HER’s description was pretty dead-on. The thing wriggled in his grasp, one yellow eye turning to stare at him. It fell still, two of its three pincers come to grasp the edges of his claws. Then the eye made an approximation of a scowl. “ You-ou are being very. Naughty. Big- ”

“CRUSH IT!”

As HER’s voice roared through his mind, Puppy squeezed the claw on reflex, shredding the strange organ. It hovered in the air for a moment, becoming brighter and brighter, before turning into what looked like a singularity. The orb of pure darkness hung in the air for a moment before imploding.

Puppy blinked. Then looked back through the hole he had made at the warehouse. With the thermal vision of his optic halo, he could see that the rapidly cooling corpse of the other disassembler had the hole punched through its chest right where he had just torn the core out of the sniper. That was immensely lucky on his part.

He sat down, letting out a long vent. That was extremely stressful. And they had both been so weird. It felt like they were more animals than drones like him and the other two disassemblers he’d met. But that core thing had tried to talk to him in the end. What was it saying? Something about him being-

“It doesn’t fucking matter what that fucking bitch said. Eat the damn corpse and then get fucking moving. There’s a spire somewhere in the city, and it’s going to have a landing pod. It has something I want, and better to get it now when there’s only one squad member left.”

He pressed a hand to his head, wincing from the pain that swept through him. She must have been really unhappy with that thing. Something did strike him as odd, though. As he shuffled over to the disassembler and pulled off its head, drinking deeply from it, he confirmed that it seemed to be a male. 

“Puppy, if you waste any more time on this, I will have to teach you another lesson about listening.”

Quickly dismissing his thoughts, Puppy finished with the head, moving onto the legs. Peg legs, like all the other disassemblers he had met, even the one inside. He briefly thought about why he had real feet, before dismissing that as well, not wanting to make HER waste her time with him on another lesson. He doesn’t want to be useless, he wants to prove he can learn.

Once he was full again, he quickly launched himself through the window, intent on finding the spire, leaving the disassembled disassembler in a heap of oilless parts.

It wasn’t too hard to find the remains of the spire. As it turns out, the largely militant drones of the area took it to be an ideal target to test a multitude of explosives on, judging by the masses of still stuck-together corpses scattered in clumps, some left in shattered states. Whatever had happened, though, happened a long time ago. Long enough for most of the remains to be buried under the ashen snow. There was a lot of graffiti around the area, too. Most of them depicted the disassemblers in various states of death, like just a head or on fire, with phrases like “Go back to the sky” or “Tell the humans to come themselves,” and a much older, faded one featuring a drone with a cracked visor that said “The Khan is gonna kick it to you.”

Puppy took all of it in with an uneasy feeling, hanging in the sky above the wreckage. There had been some times where he wished he could make friends with another drone - Not that HER wasn’t amazing, she was! And she gave him an actual purpose and made him not evil so that was pretty big - but he kind of wondered what it would be like to be hugged. Or to talk to someone without them just picking up on his thoughts. It must be nice to have a voice. But given that he was a rebel against his own kind, and still had to actively feed on drones who likely didn’t care that he was a rebel, that would probably forever remain out of reach.

“Damn, those clankers really did a number here. Probably had some terrible retaliation, but no wonder this place is so active. It must have been a warzone ever since all of you dropped from the sky. As worthless as those walking wrenches are, they’re putting up a hell of a fight here. But that makes this a bust. Keep looking. It’ll be better to get the drop on the defense drone before it realizes that the hunters are gone and comes looking for us.”

Puppy nodded, flapping his wings to reorient himself. He wasn’t quite sure on how to find wherever they put their backup base, given that they probably hadn’t tried to build another spire after that one went down so spectacularly. Nor was he sure what HER meant by ‘defense drone’ and ‘hunters.’

That notion was proven wrong after a mere moment, when he came across a much smaller amount of wreckage of a second spire, in the middle of an intersection several blocks away from the first one. And just like the first one, the block was filled with graffiti, but even more derisive in nature. One read “Imagine taking double L’s from PREY” and nearby was “L+ratio+repelled+cry about it” and continuing in a lengthy block of text. HER was making strange sounds over the link. After a second, she spoke with a somewhat warbly tone.

“Given how much they suck at defending their position, they’ve probably hijacked something else more defensible. And given the lack of landing pod or its scrap at either of the ruins, the murderers probably dragged it off with them. Or they were incompetent enough to let the tin cans take it. Start checking buildings, basements, parking garages. Look for energy emissions. Keep an eye out for the toasters, though.”

Puppy didn’t bother nodding, he knew that she knew he was on it. He swooped down into the street level, but stayed flying so he could cover ground faster. 

It was interesting how different this city was from the one he woke up in. It wasn’t uncommon to find walls filled with bullets, or explosive damage on the buildings further destabilizing them after the core collapse. Old defensive emplacements, random areas of fortification, and random military equipment just left lying around after battles fought long ago. And there were fewer human skeletons around. Just as many old, frozen drones, though.

He spent hours checking through the different blocks, hiding in doors whenever he heard drones moving around. He had already eaten, and had no desire to waste any oil against workers when he might have to fight another disassembler, he justified to himself. 

Eventually, he came across a remarkably intact building near the edge of the city which had slight energy emissions above the background. 

As he stood before it, he felt that there was something… wrong, about this building. Like Puppy was walking into someone else’s house uninvited. He was most definitely not supposed to be here.

“Are you really going to let some idiotic feeling stop you? Check it out.”

He trudged into the building, wincing as glass shards cracked further beneath his feet. The first floor seemed to be fairly normal, just the usual ruin and devastation of the decades-old apocalypse mixed with an active warzone. Plenty of fallen shelves and up-turned furniture; he guessed that this was some sort of office before the collapse. As he pondered, he crept ever further into the building, looking for anything out of place.

Like oil leaking down the stairs.

On high alert, Puppy switched out one hand for a laser. Fully-fed as he was, and with the forced close-range conditions, the laser would make quick work of a disassembler, like it did with the twin-tailed one from when he first woke up.

With the memory and the fight from earlier, Puppy froze as he remembered a key detail from that fight. Namely, that he only cut one in half and kicked the other’s head off. And did absolutely nothing to their cores. So they were definitely still alive. And probably very angry.

Which, to be fair, they had seemed angry with him when they had first met, so maybe he already did something before HER managed to help him? Or the disassemblers just somehow knew he was a traitor? 

“Focus, Puppy! You fuck up here, you die! Got it?”

He winced, pain lancing all the way down through his teeth. Her worry for him warmed his core, in a pleasant way. So he kept moving up the stairs.

And was greeted with the most horrifying sight he had seen so far. It even got a rush of air from HER over their link.

Rows upon rows of naked worker drone corpses hung feet-first from the ceiling, oil dripping down their hanging arms and heads into channels on the floor. The room was bathed in a soft red light from each of the corpses’ FATAL ERROR messages across their visors. One of those channels was overflowing, which had created a small stream passing under Puppy’s feet and down the stairs. The shock from it had shaken his concentration, allowing his laser hand to falter as he just stared at the macabre sight in front of him. 

After a few seconds, he blinked, forcing himself to repress his feelings. He withdrew his wings, not wanting to get them caught on the corpses and make more noise, then began creeping forwards again. His halo analyzed every movement, and each audio signal was being checked for footsteps or the sound of disassembler wings cutting through the air. It was just underneath overwhelming, but he couldn’t calm the slight shake in his arms, forcing him to use his off hand to steady the laser arm. He also did his best to ignore it whenever a corpse’s arm bumped into him, but each time a cold hand slid over his shoulder, it made him shudder.

Carefully sliding past one of the rows of corpses, he found a hole in the ceiling. He could see a soft light coming through it, contrasting with the harsh red glow of the hanging corpses. Walking around it in a circle, he tried to tell what was up there before charging in. He could detect no threats, but one of his optics picked up on energy emissions beyond background levels.

“That’s it, puppy. The landing pod. Must have moved it in pieces up this building. Get in there and check it out, but be ready for the defender.”

He still didn’t know what a defender was , but he dutifully hopped up into the ceiling. It was a clever way to keep the workers out, as they would need extra equipment to reach it.

The next floor was barely lit, but Puppy’s halo showed him that the next several floors had been nearly destroyed, leaving a vast room with several floors of height. Throughout the room, parts of the landing pod had been scattered, with consoles plugged into the walls and casting the only light in the room. And at the very top of the new ceiling hung a mass with an oddly shaped exterior, kinda how he looked when he was hanging from his tail to sleep and wrapped himself-

Oh, that was probably the other disassembler. And they were still asleep. Maybe he could get whatever HER wanted from the pod and get out before the drone woke up? It would be nice to not have to fight again, especially as frazzled as he felt right now. He definitely wasn’t sure he wanted to fight the drone that made the room below him.

“Look for a glowing green cylinder. It’s the fuel cell of the landing pod. It better still be here.”

Well, something glowing green would certainly be easy to find in this dark room. But given that he couldn’t see anything glowing green other than buttons on the consoles, it was probably under the piles of scrap from the rest of the landing pod. Which would most definitely not be silent to move. Joy.

Puppy crept as quietly as he could to the pile of scrap closest to him, kneeling to start lifting things to check under them. Just before he could grab the first layer, the drone on the ceiling shifted.

Freezing entirely, refusing even to vent, he stared with his halo at the disassembler who stretched their wings and their arms, and he could hear the popping of ice crystals on the joints. Then it dropped from its position, quickly flipping in the air and swooping up before it hit the ground, landing lightly on its feet. Real feet, in fact. Just like Puppy’s.

The drone had long hair, tied in a ponytail, and a furred jacket similar to what he had seen on V(? He thought that was what her name was), and was currently glaring at him as they (He didn’t feel right calling this one it) rolled their shoulders. Then they said, “X, I swear to god, if you’ve come back without - you’re not X.”

The voice had been clearly feminine. And she was talking to him. Maybe he could try to convey what he needed, and he could get out without-

“Puppy. Kill her.”

He swung around with the laser and swept it across her form.

Only to be forced to duck down as the laser was reflected back at him by a very shiny wing shielding the drone’s body. When he looked back, her wing pulled back enough for him to catch a very unamused expression spread across her face, one eye being replaced with an X. “Alright. If you wanted to meet the boss again so badly, you could’ve just said so. Who the hell even are you?”

She loomed closer, as Puppy quickly swapped out his hands for swords, getting into a low stance. When she saw his face, though, she blinked, the X eye disappearing. With a heavy vent, she said, “Oh robo-goddammit. N, what the actual hell are you doing here. What the hell is this about? Has J put you up to something?”

Puppy blinked, letting his stance falter. This was now the second time he had been called N. Was that who he was before HER?

She peered closer at him, lifting an eyebrow in… concern? Is that what that was? She asked, “Hey, you alright man? You seem kinda off. I mean, we’re all off these days, but you look really confused. What’s going on?”

As she came closer, though, she halted, a hand stretched out. She blinked twice, her right eye turning back into an X. “Why do you have X’s oil on you.”

Her voice was hard, less like she was asking a question and more like she was demanding an answer. Her wings spread out menacingly. Puppy gulped, hesitantly taking his stance once more. Her mouth widened, baring her fangs. She switched out her own hands for swords as well. “ Why do you have my teammates’ oil in your teeth. ”

Without waiting any longer, Puppy pushed off the ground, cycling his gravity manipulators to jump at her with as much speed as he could manage.

She managed to shove both of his swords to the side, barely missing her wings, but he still slammed into her shoulder first, forcing all the air out of her body. They crashed through the wall behind them, but before they could go further, Puppy felt a foot slam into his own chest. His HUD blared with pressure warnings as he cracked harshly against the wall behind him, the other disassembler managing to land in a crouch on the wall of the building opposite.

She hissed at him. “I was bringing them back! I know they fucked up, I know they were stupid!”

Puppy’s eyes widened as she launched at him, spinning out of the way as her swords pierced where he had just been. Her wing sprang out, almost decapitating him before he caught it with a sword, but the force still pushed him back. As he tumbled through the air, he deployed his own wings to turn it into a flying descent.

Except she was already on top of him again, striking down with both her swords. “She already took their personalities, their identities! I’ve had to sit in this hell with only two soulless shells for company! Why did they have to die too?”

He yelped in pain as she kicked his leg at the joint, destroying the internals and forcing it into a crooked position. The shock was enough for her to bring a sword down unimpeded and slice deeply into his stomach, nearly bisecting him. Oil spurted out of the high-pressure area, coating her lower face and torso.

She was so much stronger than the other two. And faster. Just like him. But unlike him, she was very, very angry.

“Why do I have to be alone?!”

Underneath the X that took up her entire screen, Puppy could see staticky tears as she charged his falling form. He tilted a wing to spin to the side, barely dodging her outstretched blades, and quickly swapped one sword for a missile launcher. When she spun around to face him from the ground, he fired.

She brought around a wing to block the missile, but he could see her form being launched back out of the smoke. With the moment he bought himself, Puppy reached down, and taking a deep vent, tore his crooked leg off. His teeth gritted as he fought against vocalization, feeling his nanites flow out of him, taking oil as they went. With the failed laser strike from earlier, he was already building up dangerous amounts of heat.

A missile came flying at him from below. With a twist, he avoided it, coming around to the drone flying at him with her laser out. He yelped as he closed his wings around himself like a shell, hoping his wings had the same reflective properties as hers. But instead of feeling the heat of a laser, he felt the crack of her heel as she slammed him into the ground with an axe kick. 

Rebooting an instant later, he felt the crater that he had created with his back as his wings sat at an awkward angle. He felt a crawling sensation as they reattached severed cables, and took a deep vent to reinflate his chest cavity.

“She always did like you the most. Everyone always liked you the most. You were good to us, once. God, you really are just her dog now. Maybe she’ll come for my personality next, but at least I’ll put you down before you tarnish your own memory any longer,” said the drone, landing on his wings. He heard the laser on her arm warming up as a set of claws nudged under his wing, prying it to the side.

In desperation, Puppy lashed out with the other wing, shoving her laser off course, burning a gouge through the road. She reared back in surprise, but not fast enough as he tangled his tail around a leg, pulling her onto her back. Running off complete instinct and panic, he pounced on her, grabbing her by the neck and flew.

She screamed, sparks lighting up the night as her back grinded against the rough asphalt of the road. He speared her claw hand with his nanite injector as she reached up to try and cut his arm off, forcing it against the ground as well, screaming himself as he could feel the sensitive tip snap off behind her claw. But he kept flying.

Her head hit the road, reading an ERROR as it began to flatten in the back. But he was too panicked to stop. He kept flying.

His fingers hit the asphalt, beginning to grind through them as well. He kept flying.

It was only when the drone fell apart and his fingers were completely gone that he slowed down, his hud covering his vision with a HI TEMP warning. He trembled, the pain and fear combining with his crashing adrenaline program to leave him weak in all his joints. The ruins of the drone sparked, and he looked back to see how far he had flown.

He couldn’t see where he had started, just a long trail of black, shiny oil.

“Puppy. Still gotta make sure the clanker’s down for good.”

Casting his gaze back to the disassembler’s wrecked corpse, he shakily stumbled over to it. He averted his gaze from the head, feeling a surge of guilt. Instead, he focused on the chest, now bare after the clothes had been destroyed in his panic-fueled drag. He closed his eyes, mouthed an apology, and lifted a foot up.

Then crushed her chest with a sickening crack-squish.

Chapter Text

It had been a few months now, and Puppy had more or less settled into his new life. It wasn’t really too difficult, other than the number of people who wanted to kill him. He had learned to be very good at running, and had managed to build some semblance of a stealth protocol. Still, he ended up fighting a lot more than he liked. And the number of worker drones he had to kill just to keep moving…

HER claimed that it would be worth it, once they were done. That they didn’t actually mean anything in the grand scheme of things. She also called them clankers and tin cans a lot, which Puppy didn’t really understand, but he guessed they did sort of clank around when they walked? He really didn’t know about the tin can part, other than them being made of metal. He was usually prodded away from thinking too hard, HER tended not to like it. Said it was time that could be spent working. She also didn’t like it when he would watch the worker drones. They were always stressed when he saw them, but he guessed that they probably didn’t like being outside with his kind around. But they were always so interesting! Each one looked different, having different eyes and hair and clothes. Not like the disassemblers. HER had scoffed when he was thinking about it, saying that he was an idiot if he thought there was any semblance of intelligence beyond malignance in the tin cans. 

Sometimes it got to be kind of soul-crushing, never doing anything other than working. He had tried flying around on his own, finding the freedom and wind rushing against his chassis amazing, but HER had banned it after it attracted a pair of disassemblers and he had to fight them off without her. Those two liked playing around with him. It kind of hurt, especially when they had pulled his wings off, but he was glad they had at least had some fun and weren’t like those two that he had fought in the rebel city. Those weird, empty-seeming drones still gave him the creeps, and he had met far more of them than the ones that would talk. And then the defense drones… If possible, he avoided the defense drones, when HER would let him. Or just try to sneak past them to steal whatever power cells they had in their landing pod, which was largely unsuccessful. Fighting them was always terrifying; he was always left near death and devouring whatever oil was nearby just to be able to walk to find more. He tried to avoid the hunters, too, but those ones tended to track him down, and they were kind of hard to avoid. If he could get away with it, he usually just crippled them to where they couldn’t follow and left. 

HER had explained the difference between defense and hunter models when he had asked enough times. Apparently, the hunters were built for stealth and endurance, while also being highly adaptable. He had figured out that they had expanded armaments when one pulled an EMP out of their arm, as well as the sniper from before. Their peg legs were meant to make them nearly silent when moving, and their wings were built differently to keep their flight silent as well. On the whole, they were lighter so as to use less oil, letting them remain active for longer periods. Their protocols were tuned to tracking, ambushing, and disabling targets, as well as keeping out of their target’s sight.

Puppy was a defense model. They were heavy-duty, made for direct confrontations and completely lacking in stealth capabilities. While they were stronger, faster, and more durable than the hunters, being active consumed much more oil, and their protocols were geared towards overwhelming offense and threat analysis rather than tracking prey, which is why (in HER’s words) he ‘couldn’t hunt for shit.’ Their jobs were to defend the home base of their squad, most importantly the oil stockpile. They were also in charge of constructing and maintaining their spires with the corpses that the hunters delivered to them. It was why Puppy hadn’t fought a defense drone since the one in the rebel city.

It was enlightening. It also helped explain why he instantly started building a nest whenever he moved to a new area. Though he did wonder how HER had gotten to him if he was supposed to always stay in his spire. Thinking back, he did remember that he hadn’t woken up in a spire. In fact, the one time he saw the one in the city he had woken up in, HER told him to leave it alone. He wondered why. 

Right now, though, it was time to move base again. It was something Puppy had to do every so often when the flock of disassembly drones tracking him showed up. Which was a new problem. In the past several sectors HER had him move through, he had spotted a lone disassembler, watching carefully. Whenever they would spot him, they would flee instead of engaging. The first time it happened, he was relieved, thinking that he had killed enough disassemblers that they would be too scared to fight him and he wouldn’t have to kill anymore. That hope was quickly dashed when a whole flock of twelve hunters moved into the area, which HER had warned him about before they found him, letting him escape them. Now, whenever they spotted him, he would pack up the salvage and various pieces of equipment HER had him assemble into large bags that he could fly with.

He had no clue what anything he built did, though. And now HER had him moving into sector 98, a sector largely made up of wilderness. At least it was something new. Trees were pretty cool! Like many other things, he had no idea how they were surviving, but it was nice to see something still living its best life on this planet. 

“Careful, Puppy. You break this shit, we have to go find more.”

He adjusted his flight to keep the bags clear of the gnarled branches of the forest he flew through. Moving from place to place constantly was rough. This was a gamble, moving such a massive distance to an area that likely wouldn’t have much fuel, but this was meant to be a home base for expeditions to be staged from, according to HER. None of the components he had built for HER were particularly large, but even he could tell that they were supposed to be assembled together, and they wouldn’t be movable once they were. Not without breaking things. So they needed somewhere that he wouldn’t be looked for.

Hence, a forest in the middle of nowhere, with a relatively unknown camp. When Puppy asked how HER knew about it, she had only told him that it didn’t matter, but it was somewhere that they would have needed to get to eventually. It was part of the ‘master plan’ as she had called it.

She really didn’t like it the one time he had thought about asking her about it. It had been bad. She had yelled at him for a while about operational security and what he needed to know, which had hurt, but then she said that if he couldn’t do what she needed him to do then she would have to leave him and find someone else. He still trembled a bit when he thought about that. No matter what else, she was all he had. And if he was working for her, then he was good. That was all that mattered. 

He spotted the cluster of cabins in a clearing next to a frozen lake, just as HER had described to him. He swooped up over the edge of the lake, cancelling his forward momentum, and gently lowered himself and his bags onto the porch of the first cabin. 

“Check out the inside. Some of these should have hidden basements and labs. I need the one with the supercomputer, got it?”

He nodded. Again, like many other things, he didn’t know what a supercomputer looked like. He really was stupid. It was a very good thing that he had HER to guide him.

“That’s right, Puppy. You’d be tripping over your own feet without me.”

With that assurance in tow, he stepped through the door to the first cabin. It felt odd having wood under his feet, instead of the concrete he was used to. The old planks squeaked precariously, and he kept his wings out to reduce his gravity a little bit. He wondered why humans would use this instead of concrete. Maybe it was that it was easier to get out here? Regardless, something about it was nice. It looked cozier. He thought that it might have been kind of nice to help at a camp. Make kid’s lives better, organize fun activities. Wear a fun uniform and teach life skills. But that wasn’t in the cards for him. His hands clenched slightly, a wave of melancholy washing over him. That had been happening more frequently. He wondered what was wrong with him, and he desperately hoped that it was something HER couldn’t pick up on. He didn’t want to be thrown away.

Shaking off his ruminations, he looked around. This first building didn’t seem to have anything special about it, just having some old desks with skeletons splayed over them. There were computers, but checking them over, they didn’t seem to work. Probably had no power, or the weather had gotten to them. There were a couple holes in the ceiling, and the ashen snow had piled up under some of them.

Speaking of holes in the ceiling, Puppy looked out to the sky. The edge of the horizon was beginning to lighten, black became a dark blue. He didn’t have too long before he would be stuck in one of the cabins, unable to move freely. It would be better if he found what HER was looking for before then, or she might get a bit upset. He turned his attention back to the floor of the cabin, lightly tapping against them, listing for anything indicating a lower, hidden floor.

He went through the whole building, finding a hidden office behind a bookcase with HER’ guidance, but the various computers and devices remained silent and inoperable no matter how much he tapped at their buttons. If nothing else, it was a good spot to store the scavenged loot until he had a better place to put it, hidden away from the elements as it was. 

As he carefully picked up the bags to hide them away, his audials picked up on an odd scraping sound from one of the cabins further into the forest. He couldn’t get an exact read on which one, but it was enough to make him pause and look out. The sound matched nothing in his memory banks, and he couldn’t see anything moving from that direction. With a mental prod, he sent a wordless query to HER.

“No, it doesn’t ring any bells up here either. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Oookay. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to peel his eyes. That sounded painful.

“Oh for the love of- it’s an expression. Pay attention to your surroundings and be careful. I’ve put too much effort into you to lose you now.”

His tail wagged. It was always nice to be reminded that she cared.

“Yeah. Sure, whatever Puppy.”

Once he had the various devices and random tech sorted away, he lifted off the porch of the cabin. The planks snapped under his feet as he pushed off, and he winced at his carelessness as the crack of the wood echoed throughout the forest. He hoped that he hadn’t accidentally attracted anything. This place was supposed to be hidden, HER would be very unhappy if it wasn’t.

Drifting over the other cabins, Puppy was unable to pick out anything special about them with his optics. No anomalous energy emissions, no odd temperature spikes; he wasn’t sure which to poke in next, or which made the noise. After a moment, he glided to the end of the camp, resolving to begin on the outside and work his way in. His first target was the cabin possibly responsible for all the communication for the camp, given the massive radio tower standing next to it.

Just as he was about to descend into the cabin, the scraping noise registered on his audials again. He froze in midair, taking a closer look at the structure.

It was remarkably intact, compared to many of the others. No holes in the ceiling that he could spot, and the walls showed no sign of damage either. All the exterior lights were still lit, and the radio tower’s lights were blinking. Cautiously, he descended, keeping HER’s concern for him in mind the whole way. The door was locked, but that was something easily fixed. He switched out a hand for a sword, waiting a moment to allow HER to interject in case he shouldn’t damage the cabin. Taking her silence for permission, he cut the doorknob away from the door and leveraged it open.

The door swung open with a creak, allowing the ambient static from the still-active radio to fill his audials. The interior of the cabin was small, and he saw nothing capable of making the scraping noise. A corner of the room was filled with computers, one of the monitors glowing brightly. Chairs stood in front of it, but the whole room was conspicuously absent of human skeletons. His eyes hollowed. All of his instincts were blaring at him that something was off, but he could see nothing threatening or out of place. With a slight shiver, he stepped into the room.

A robo-roach skittered away on a filing cabinet, making him jerk slightly. He swapped his sword back to a hand, pulling both of them up to his chest. It made him feel slightly more secure. 

Puppy pulled his wings in, not wanting to accidentally hit any of the likely delicate equipment in the cabin. It forced him to step a bit heavier, but it seemed that the floor here was sturdier than the first cabin he had checked out. Forcing resolve through himself, his eyes filled back in and he approached the computers.

Nudging a chair out of the way, he tapped at one of the inactive computers, trying to get it to wake up. It flashed with static and rippling colors, sparking momentarily before shutting back off. He blinked, his eyes hollowing again. With a quick turn of his head, he swept the whole room on every energy spectrum, spotting nothing out of the ordinary. He could have sworn that there were eyes other than his own reflected in the monitor that blinked at him. 

Suppressing another involuntary quake, he looked to the active monitor. It was a bit odd that HER wasn’t commenting on anything and giving him directions, but he supposed there was nothing that interested her yet. Or she wanted to see what he could do on his own. So he shuffled over to the monitor, taking note of the virtual drive designed to look like a VHS tape on the desk. A virtual that he didn’t think was there when he first looked into the room. It read as Zombie Drones!!!, labeled as a JCJenson (in SPAAAAACEE!!!) JC Tech training video. It also warned that it should not be played for robots, as they would not like it. Which, whoever made it must have been smart, because Puppy already didn’t like it. Frowning, he looked closer at it, going to pick it up when-

A maid drone with a gleeful, fanged grin pointing to a human hand in her mouth. Her right eye, replaced with a symbol that hurt to resolve in his processor. Human parts strewn across a ballroom, arms and legs in the chandeliers and blood on every surface. A black hole, [null] written on its center swallowing the sky. 

“PUPPY!”

HER’s voice roared through his mind, shocking him back into awareness. He took several steps back from the unassuming tape.

“Do not. Fucking. Touch that shit again. Fucking weather blackouts. We need that tape, but we’ll use it much, much later. I haven’t finished the program to keep it from wiping you if you try to watch it now. Do you understand me? I still haven’t reestablished the visual connection. Send me a signal. Puppy?”

He couldn’t answer her through the terror that had frozen his processor. As he had stepped back, he bumped into something. Something large, with many, many limbs. All around him, things began to fizzle out of existence into blue static. The walls of the cabin showed clear damage, and holes in the ceiling appeared out of the blue light. The filing cabinets blinked out, showing what had been hiding.

A massive, wormlike figure with innumerable quivering limbs snaked through the room, scraping along the floor as it moved. Cameras blinked at him from all across the room, each glowing a bright yellow. Fluid dripped down onto his halo, blurring the horrifying sight he wished he didn’t have to acknowledge above him. Puppy slowly looked up. Above him was the top half of a disassembly drone’s head, drooling from its jawless mouth. He could see himself reflected in its completely blank visor. It slowly lowered itself, coming to sit barely a foot away from him. The symbol that he had seen in that weird flash from before lit up its visor. Then it giggled.

“Hello-o. Big brother.” He barely managed a scream before too many limbs clamped down around him and yanked him down, underneath the floor.

Puppy wasn’t sure how far he was dragged for, but it wasn’t gentle. His head banged off the metal tunnels, cracking his visor. One of his legs got caught wrong on the ground and was wrenched off at the knee, provoking another scream. When he tried to stab it with his injector, it just grabbed the tail with a massive claw, pulling it off. “How nau-naughty, big brother,” it giggled when he screamed. “Be a goo-od boy. And stop. Squirming.”

The thing was massive, and horrifically strong. With all his struggling, he could barely budge its scythe-like limbs. And the more he tried, the more they cut into him. He couldn’t deploy any of his weapons, he would only damage his arms if he tried. Then another idea occurred to him.

He deployed his wings with all the strength he could muster, cycling the gravity generator in his remaining foot at the same time to try and pull himself out of the thing’s grip. His sudden increase in weight was just enough to loosen its grip, letting his wings shear through the limbs holding him. “Ow,” the monster said, completely toneless. “That was very rude.”

With his adrenaline program going into overdrive, Puppy didn’t even bother trying to pantomime out some conversation. He pulled out his laser and charged up, trying to fly backwards from the thing.

“Annoyed sigh. Squish.” And the body of the worm-like monster slammed him into the wall, forcing oil out of his mouth as it crushed internal components. Multiple warnings registered on his HUD, but Puppy dismissed them all, weakly trying to push at the wall to get the thing off of him.

“Huffing. Pouting. Why are you-ou being. So rude? Big brother. It is like. You do not want to speak to me,” it said, the front of the creature looming closely. It lifted its body from his, letting his smashed form slide down the wall. At least his leg had regenerated. Not that it helped when every single other part of his body was blaring warnings, and his CPU’s connection to the rest of his body had been damaged.

“Hm. Thinking. You have always been. So talkative. Do you rea-eally have nothing to say to your. Little sister?”

Puppy felt like all his systems crashed. This was his sister ? His sister was a giant worm centipede?

“Ah. The big, mean, brother-stealer must have turned off your vocals. That is. An easy fix.”

And then she stabbed him in the throat.

When he came back online a few minutes later, he was in a new room. His hands were above him, a piece of metal shoved through his wrists to pin them to the floor. His feet were similarly skewered, and his wings were forced out to the sides, pinned by the gravity manipulators in the large servo joint. His eyes hollowed as the pain began to register, liquid fire feeding into his processor from every sensor. Oil leaked out from beneath him. His HUD warned him about the lowering levels, another warning among the rest filling his visor.

“Humming. Whistle while you work. Humming.” The worm-centipede snaked through the room he was in, her form slithering all around him. A set of tools were arranged on a table near him. The floor was metal, polished to a shine in some areas from scraping. It looked like this place had been a lab at some point. He followed a robo-roach as it skittered up a wall, where it was promptly skewered by a scythe-like limb, then brought up a glowing yellow camera. The head of the wom-centipede rushed towards it along the wall, swallowing it up with a spray of oil. Looking around again, he found the room looking back. Several cameras were trained on him, whirring as they changed focus. “Feigned surprise. Oh, you are awake. Welcome back, b-big brother N.”

“Who is N?” Puppy wondered, then froze when he realized he had vocalized it. He blinked, trying to look down at himself.

“A hard reset. Loom. You are Serial Designation N, big brother. Who else could you be?” the thing asked him. It did, in fact, loom over him, snaking to position its head directly above his. Drool dripped onto his visor, which he desperately wished he could wipe off, but attempting to move his arms did nothing but bring a fresh wave of pain.

“Puppy,” he said. “HER always calls me Puppy.”

“Giggle. A fitting name, admittedly. You are such a g-good boy, after all. But please. Tell me, big. Brother. Who is HER?” she asked, tilting her head. “Is she the naughty one who has tried to st-steal you. From me?”

He shook his head. “HER said that I was something bad, before. That as long as I was with her, I was good. She- she liberated me. I don’t want to be bad.”

“Oh, big br-brother. You are. Naughty. Betraying your fa-family-ly is bad. So I am going to. Make su-sure that you can’t! Isn’t that. Wonderful? Intimidating whirr.” it said, the crab claw picking up a power tool. Another limb tapped on its trigger, making it spin. Terror flashed through him, his adrenaline protocols coming back online.

“Oh, um, how- how are you going to do that? Uh… little… buddy?” he said, trying to bide time. It seemed to work, as the giant worm paused, its head whipping back towards him. After a moment, it laughed, the sound staticy and loud. 

“Delight. Amusement. You really do. N-never change, big brother N,” it said, shaking its head. “But unfortunately. You will not. Remember any of this. Easier to assimilate than explain. Your backups will forgive me.”

“That raises a lot of uncomfortable implications, but if I’m not going to remember this, wouldn’t it be completely harmless to tell me?” he said, trying to sound as harmless as possible, giving it a weak grin. He could feel the simulated sweat appearing on his visor, and tried to form a thumbs-up as well, but forgot about why he couldn’t move, and aborted the movement with an agonizing spasm, turning his smile into a grimace. 

“Oh please. Ev-everything is harmless. To me. I am the Absolute End. But I suppose it is-is fun to talk to a you. Who can still talk back.” It revved the tool again, patting the side of his face with another massive claw. He resisted asking about the Absolute End bit, that sounded mildly terrifying. “But. I ne-eed to know. How you were stolen. I don’t like it when my toys are taken. So I am going to open you up. And check your systems. Then assimilate you.”

Puppy winced. “And by assimilate, you mean-”

“I am going to eat you. Yes. Do not worry, your-r backups will. Forgive me.”

He didn’t want to die. This sounded even worse, though. This sounded like he was going to be turned back into the murderer he was before HER found him. He was going to become a monster that took enjoyment in the suffering it caused again. But she said that her main goal was finding HER so she wouldn’t be able to save him from that again. And as much as he didn’t want to hurt his apparent sister, he didn’t want to become that thing again either, and he couldn’t let HER get hurt. So he started looking around the room, seeing if there was anything he could use to get away.

Wiggling any of his limbs sent the liquid fire running back through his processor again. He didn’t think there was any way he could move without tearing himself apart. Surveying the room again, he knew that he wasn’t quite sure where his apparent sister had brought him, as he had been offline for the journey, but he could see a hole in the ceiling of the lab space she was using once behind her head. And above that was wood. They were under one of the cabins. Orange light was starting to creep the holes in the ceiling.

A plan formed in his mind. Quite possibly one of the worst plans he had ever had. But a plan nonetheless.

With an effort born of desperation to protect the only person he had, he tore his arms away from the piece of metal that had kept them skewered above him. He screamed in pain, and tried to swap out his hands for weapons, his eyes widening when they only sparked in answer. Then he was slammed back into the ground, the force offlining him for a brief instant. She pinned him back to the ground with a claw, the other claw bringing the tool up. “Weak effort, b-big brother. Now be a good boy. And lie still. Let’s find the brother thief, shall we? Sinister laugh.”

The tool she was holding whirred, and she plunged it through his visor.

Code flew through his processor, and he realized that the code was him. She was filtering through everything he was in a fraction of a second, making a pleased noise as she pulled on his admin connection. He tried to move, to do something, to do anything, as his sister followed the connection back to its source. And then gasped as she retreated from him. His visor regenerated in time for him to see her hurling the tool at the wall, the machinery shattering from the force of the hurl. Metal rained across the room, tearing small gouges through her worm-like body. He took a second to test his arms, finding them healed. 

“Anger. Frustration. Annoyance. How? That makes no sense. Anger. Anger. Nothing is hidden from the Solver of the Absolute Fabric. No drones can hide from the Void.” Puppy watched as his sister raged through the room, tearing through the metal as her body slithered past itself. The sharp limbs tore through parts of her body, oil and a red liquid seeping out from the wounds. “I have more bodies on this planet. I will find her. I will tear-r her limb. From limb. From limb. From limb. And laugh as she squirms. I will make sure she never-ver touches. What is mine. Again.”

“Um, why don’t you calm down? Hurting yourself is bad, even if I am about to- uh. Well. I’m really sorry about this,” he said, switching out one hand for his missile launcher. “I wish we could have been friends, little buddy.”

“Do what?” she asked, looking at his missile launcher. Then following its trajectory. Every camera followed the gaze of her head as she slowly looked up at the roof of the cabin through the hole in the floor, the light becoming more intense with each passing second. “Dejected sigh. Childish huff. At least this never happens with the real one.”

Puppy fired a salvo of missiles upwards, everything he could throw out. Then screamed alongside his sister as the light of the sun broke through, incinerating her form as he began to boil. The last thing he saw was an object dropping directly on him.

The Solver of the Absolute Fabric blinked as it registered the death of one of its instances. With a slight bit of focus, it retrieved the instance’s data, noting its coordinates. Copper-9. A very interesting planet, albeit a low-priority one since the human problem there had already been wiped out. The main thing of interest was that they had managed to produce more hosts there. A process that the Solver was very, very interested in. 

To that end, and knowing how quiet it was, she sent her favorite source of amusement there to keep an eye on things and prepare the way for her. Her little trio. It was ever so amusing to watch how deep into despair she could nudge the formerly timid maid, and how far the brainwashed half-wit would bend over for her beloved boss. And having her big brother from the manor back, from before things had changed…

She ignored that little voice that screamed that it wasn’t her big brother, nudging it deeper into her systems. Later, she’d look into how she managed to claw her way back into her processor this time.

What she was more interested in was how, exactly, her control over her favorite toy had been subverted. For her to not find them from the copy’s systems, the hacker must have been using specialized equipment.

An artillery shell whistled as it fell towards her, only to be batted aside by a massive wing. The explosion ruffled her hair, but she forced most of the power behind it around herself by manipulating space with the solver. She grinned, patting the hulking body she was riding as its tail arched over her head, charging up with a whine. Another shell launched towards them, but was detonated in midair when a lance of blue pierced through it, cutting through the entire defensive structure in front of her. 

As the building began to crumble, she caught sight of hovercraft attempting to evacuate from the area. With a playful giggle, she put her forefinger and thumb in front of her eye, ready to pinch. She kept the hovercraft in sight, then pressed her fingers together. When she pulled them away, she saw flattened wrecks falling apart in the sky, a rain of blood accompanying them. 

With a pat on the head, her steed began moving forward again, into the rubble of the building he had just destroyed. His long, bladed tail swept as he padded forward, wings at the ready to block any threats he might have missed.

“Good job, b-big brother. Big hug,” she said, hugging around his neck. “You are. Such a good pro-protector for me. Say, what would you think. About a tr-trip. To Copper-9? I think-ink we deserve. A vacation.”

Chapter Text

It had been four months, two weeks, three days, two hours, twenty-seven minutes, and fourteen seconds since V had woken up after N ran away. Not that she was counting.

J had been frantic ever since, forcing them both into incredibly long hours and desperate attempts to break into the bunker since. It was honestly pathetic, the lengths that the old ‘Senior Informant’ was going to in order to keep their spot as the top squad of the planet. After the first month, V had mostly gotten herself under control, throwing herself back into her work to try and cover up the chill inside her core whenever she imagined N as one of those drones that the abomination hollowed out after failing her. Nothing but a wide grin and an ever-present X. 

The fact that she had yet to see him in that state, though, suggested that he hadn’t been turned into one of those. Cyn would never resist rubbing that in her face, to prove her failure, after all. Which meant one of two things.

The first was that whatever he was doing was actually approved by Cyn. It was the far more likely option, as there was no resisting the Exponential End. But if it was, V had no clue what sort of mission N would even be doing. As far as she knew, their only purpose here was to clear out all the workers for some reason, and as long as they did their jobs, they would be free once they finished.

The other was that he had somehow broken free of Cyn. He had definitely been reset again, but she didn’t know if that was before or after he started doing whatever he had been when she found him. Her only clue was that dog animation on his screen, something that she had scrolled through her own code to see if it was something naturally in them. She had found nothing.

V shifted her perch on the edge of the building, pulling in her wings and sitting down. She pulled her knees up to her chest, curling her tail around her legs. At this point, she honestly didn’t blame N for leaving. They were terrible to him, and while J had always been awful, V had just reached the end of her rope after his ninth reset, and that was years ago. Instead, she had convinced herself that this wasn’t the real N, and no matter what she did, he wasn’t going to remember it when they were free anyways.

And now she had lost him.

“Hi there, new squadmate! I’m Serial Designation N! What’s your designation?” he asked, standing in front of their broken down lander.

V stood there, feeling her core going numb. She had stopped crying after the fourth time this had happened, when the one thing that made her life bearable asked her to her face who she was. So sincere, so cheerful. 

She thought she had been so careful this time, making sure he didn’t try to question their orders, didn’t try to talk to any of the toasters, didn’t do anything outside of their jobs. She had barely even spoken to him, her ability to care being shredded with every new experience between them that he would never remember. Stolen moments in the sky that now only belonged to her, rooftop conversations where he could still leave her breathless from laughing in this godforsaken existence. 

Her core couldn’t take any more of this.

She dropped one of the two corpses she had been intending to invite him to share on the highest remaining building of the city and flew up to their nest - her nest, she viciously corrected - alone. Ignoring the way his smile faltered as the snow plume covered him.

“Hey, lazy bum! What do you think you’re doing, wasting company time up here?”

V shook off her memories, glancing to the sellout hovering before her, hands on hips as she glared at V. Casually, she deployed a set of claws, picking at her teeth. A grin pulled at her lips as she could hear J’s teeth grinding. Even if everything else had lost all meaning, she could always find some joy screwing with the other drone. “Just letting my joints re-lubricate, boss,” she said, fully insincere.

J’s left eye glitched out, making V grin fully. She wondered how far she could push the corporate drone before a circuit blew. The pigtailed drone took a deep vent before re-focusing on her, asking, “And have you been ignoring all notifications while ‘re-lubricating your joints?’”

Taken aback, V unsilenced her notifications, checking on through her messages. J had sent her a slew of messages starting an hour ago, calling her back to spire and getting increasingly annoyed at her failure to respond. Standing up, V took a moment to stretch out, letting her passive diagnostics run as she did. “Well, what’s the rush? Nothing more important than making quota, right?”

“It is when the flock calls a meeting because we’ve lost contact with the company.”

V froze.

There was no situation in which this was a good sign. At best, whatever the abomination was using to communicate with them on the planet had been destroyed, and it was now coming in person. At worst, it had decided that they were no longer necessary and had no interest in communicating with them anymore before it descended to destroy them all with the planet. 

Either way, Cyn was coming.

She deployed her wings, joining J in the air and glaring right back at her. “Where is this meeting?”

“Sector 20. It’s in the middle of all the currently active sectors. It should only take us a night to get there.” J seemed mollified now that she could see V taking things seriously.

“When do we leave then?” V asked. It was already nearing the last third of the night, so they wouldn’t be leaving tonight.

“Tomorrow. So keep up the hunting for today. And make sure you’re in top shape for the journey tomorrow.”

V didn’t bother responding. She just flew off. Maybe burying her claws in some toaster’s chassis would make her feel a bit better.

Puppy gasped as he came back online, jerking upwards into a sitting position. A burning feeling spread through his body, and he leant to the side as boiling oil forced its way through his throat, spilling past his lips. He vented heavily, trying to relieve some of the burning sensation as his HUD blared temperature warnings.

An odd machine, rectangular and hovering, zoomed across the room to him. A number of appendages hung from it, one of them dropping a large can on his lap. He looked down at it, feeling a bit lost, before looking back up at the machine.

“Drink the damn oil before it turns out I saved you for nothing, Puppy.”

He jerked at HER’s voice filling his processor. Looking back at the can, he picked it up, his internal temperature making his movements jerky as his joints ground past each other from lack of lubrication. He bit through its top, tipping it up into his mouth. At the first taste of the sweet, sweet oil, his processors flooded his system with pleasure and relief, and he guzzled down the rest of it. His halo immediately began searching for other sources of oil around the room, designating the hovering machine as the next target. He tossed the can aside, oil leaking down his chin, and prepared to jump at the machine.

Pain, the likes of which he had only felt in the direct sunlight, filled his being. He fell to the ground, convulsing as his systems attempted to halt the signal. In between glitches of his vision, he could see sparks escaping through gaps in his chassis.

And then it stopped. Puppy remained on the floor, curled in on himself as the aftershocks left him trembling. His tail wrapped around him, trying to give himself some semblance of comfort.

“You know, there’s a very popular saying amongst humanity: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” The machine had taken up position above him, depositing two more cans to his side. Something felt off, and it took Puppy a second to realize what. HER’s voice had come from the machine. He looked up in mortification, realizing he had just tried to attack the only person who cared about him.

He tried to use his new voice to explain himself. His mouth moved, lips forming words, but he realized that his vocoder was producing no sound. Disappointment ran through him. His voice was out of reach once more.

“Voice not working again? Not sure why that would have happened. I don’t have time to look, either. Drink your oil before you embarrass yourself again.”

As he picked up one of the cans, he looked back at the machine that HER was apparently projecting herself through. His processor was filled with questions. How was he still alive? Where had the machine come from? What was that giant worm thing? As he wondered, he drained the can entirely and sank his fangs into the second one. He was still at a very unsafe temperature, but the worst of it had been averted, and his temperature had lowered enough for his nanites to start crawling over his body to repair everything without instantly melting.

“You’re alive because I was smart enough to figure out what was happening and sent down my remote-operated hoverdrone to help. I grabbed whatever I could to throw on top of you to keep the sun from cooking you too badly. Seems to have mostly worked, but I’ve been waiting a while for you to wake up. Moved you once the sun was back down and I’ve been working on this place since.”

Blinking, Puppy set the cans aside and looked around. It was one of the underground rooms, he could tell that much from the sterile look of everything. A number of machines were set up throughout the room, all hooked into a massive, round base on the floor. As she spoke, HER’s hoverdrone flew back to one of the monitors, sticking an appendage directly into one of its ports. The monitor on it lit up, lines of code rapidly flashing across the screen.

“This - this is the plan. What I’ve been working towards, what you’ve been helping me with. It is part of how we are going to beat that abomination, once and for all.”

He cocked his head. Hadn’t he already killed the worm thing? It had completely disintegrated in the sun.

“You managed to kill an autonomous instance. Good work on that, by the way.” The hoverdrone broke away from the monitor to pat him over his hat. A wondrous feeling filled his core, making him feel as weightless as when his gravity manipulators were engaged. His tail began wagging rapidly with no input of his own. He did a good job! This was the best feeling. He was useful . He leaned fully into the touch of the hoverdrone, closing his eyes to better focus on it.

“But not the main body. The main body is currently off in another system, though we did probably just get its attention. Which is for the best anyways, I need it here for the last phase of the plan, and it’ll take a while to get here.”

Well, it was good that he hadn’t screwed everything up. He had even done good! His tail was still wagging. This was a high that would probably last a while. The hoverdrone flew back over to the consoles, and he almost reached after it, wanting to feel the headpat again. Being touched so gently was something new. The brief experience was intoxicating. He wanted more. But HER needed to work, of course. He couldn’t interrupt that.

“Unfortunately, it also destroyed that tape. Which I needed. So, new plan. Remember those disassemblers from when I took you in?”

Uncertain, he nodded. They seemed to know him best, and the one with short hair did stick out prominently in his memories, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because she was really pretty. Or maybe it was because she was really scary.

“Good, because we’re going to need to nab one of those bitches, intact. I need to get in their systems. And with our shortened time table, it might be good to grab one of the other tin-cans to speed things up here. So drink up, Puppy. Then it’s back to the grind.”

Puppy looked to a pile of oil cans stacked to the side. Unsteadily, he pushed himself to his feet, but almost immediately fell back down. His circuits were still being repaired, and it seemed that included his balance. But it wouldn’t be fixed without more oil. So he laid on his front and pulled himself over to the pile, and brought himself up to sit against the wall beside it. He grabbed a can and bit in, wondering what his next job would be. It would be really nice to have someone else here with him.

V had never been to a flock meeting before. Oh, she had met other disassemblers before, when their sectors sometimes overlapped or when other squads tried to sneakily up their kill count. She had always made sure to show them why she was the best disassembler on the planet. While she knew that these meetings happened every once in a while, it had always been a squad leader-only thing, from what J said. Not that V ever cared, it was just something extra that didn’t concern her. She definitely had no desire to chat with any of the others, anyways. They’d just be more reminders of a time she could never go back to.

But she had to admit, the way that twenty-one disassemblers all took their perches on rooftops and jutting debris around the meeting point was pretty badass. She held back a snicker from wondering how a toaster would react to this sight, flaring out her wings and raising her tail to make sure she painted the proper picture of lethal grace to the other drones.

Despite her general apathy towards her old coworkers, there were a few that made her take a second look. Some of the other disassemblers had actual feet like N. She cocked her head, focusing harder. She was pretty sure the smudge standing in the center with the long, straight hair was B, who was female (or at least had been female back at the manor). Which meant that it probably wasn’t a male vs. female model thing like she thought. But B did still have her legs painted black up to the hazard stripes around her thighs.

Another question for J then, because she was starting to think that J had been less than honest with her. But she had abandoned V to get closer to the center of the circle anyways, so questions would have to wait for later.

On the ground in the middle of the circle made by the perching disassemblers stood two drones, though she couldn’t identify the one beside B beyond having peg legs. One of them tapped their tail against the concrete of the ground, bringing the whispering of the disassemblers all around to a gradual halt. Silence permeated the area, and nearly twenty sets of eyes were trained on the two drones in the center.

“This emergency meeting is called to an open. The purpose of this meeting is to address our sudden lack of oversight, and what steps we can take to reopen communications, as well as what to do in the meantime. Our secondary purpose is to address the rumors of a traitor within our ranks,” said the drone with peg legs in the center. A masculine voice, one that V had heard before in the manor but had never committed their name to memory. It lent more credence to her theory of the feet not being indicative of the gender of a drone. Then she processed what the drone said and her eyes went hollow.

So N was still alive. And apparently causing trouble amongst the other disassemblers. While it was good to know he was still alive, it was very bad to know that he was working against Cyn.

“Do all present agree that there has been no communication with headquarters since the fourteenth, four days ago?” asked the drone. There was a smattering of agreements, including one from J.

“Does anyone have any ideas as to why we have lost communication?”

V could hear the other drones shifting around, but no one spoke up. Until one drone moved, their blurry outline lengthening in her optics. There was a sigh from the center. “L, you don’t have to raise your hand. This isn’t school.”

Their outline returned to normal as V grinned. “Maybe there was some communication structure on the planet that our systems relayed through that got damaged somehow?” L said, embarrassment coloring their tone as their voice tapered off.

“That could be worth looking into,” the drone mused. “B, make a note of that would you? Anyone else?”

“Maybe something’s up with the star or the gas giant? Some sort of radiation interference?” another said, emboldened.

“Feel like we would’ve noticed something in that case, but I guess we could spare a sensor to look closer.”

More piped up with increasingly implausible explanations, leaving V rolling her eyes. What she was more concerned about was why J wasn’t speaking up. She would normally be all over a meeting like this, doing her best to showcase why she was the head of the most successful squad on the planet. Instead, she remained resolutely silent, and V didn’t know why. Once she put a little more thought into it, though, she realized something.

Rumors of a traitor. Not confirmed. J hadn’t reported on N.

V grinned viciously. She had a feeling that this meeting was going to become much more enjoyable.

Once there had been a number of suggestions thrown around and the disassemblers had all become more comfortable, with some moving from their perching poses to sitting ones and others descending to the ground to find closer seats, the drone in charge of the meeting waved a hand. “Alright, I think we have enough avenues to look into. As much as the company prefers that we keep minimal contact amongst ourselves, I think we’ll be forgiven if we keep our coordination to reestablish communication with headquarters.”

V snorted. Like hell would Cyn forgive anyone for doing something she told them not to do. She considered trying to speak up about what they were really following orders from, but refrained. If they didn’t know, she would just be labeled insane.

“We’ll delegate which squads are assigned to which tasks at a later date. That said, let’s turn to our second purpose. Rumors of a traitor.” Immediately, whispers broke out amongst all the gathered drones. V stretched slightly, switching from her own perch to a sitting position and propping up a fist to lean her chin on. Let the drama begin.

“Does anyone have first hand experience with the supposed traitor?” asked the center drone. It was silent save for the whispers for a moment, before a voice that V unfortunately recognized spoke up.

“I can’t help but notice that H, X, and F aren’t present for our great meeting,” said Y, approaching the center. “Now, we remember from the eighteenth annual meeting when H had to replace X that X and F were Shelled. But that doesn’t explain why H isn’t here. Nor do I think it explains why our second best squad seems to have turned up without their defense drone. Oh, sorry, former second best squad. Just haven’t been able to keep it up these past few months, eh?”

V glared down at the glitch, unamused. So yeah, they were down a member and their numbers suffered from that. They were still coming in third without him. As far as she was concerned, the rest of the squads were the ones that were slacking.

J, or at least the smudge she though was J, shifted around uneasily. The center drone made a coughing sound, regaining everyone’s attention. “I think she does raise a valid point. J, as Senior Informant, has the company said anything about H’s squad?”

J shifted about again. After a second, she replied, “The company has had to dispatch a new squad to sector thirteen to replace them.”

Everyone was silent, staring at J. She turned away slightly, saying, “Sector 13 has always been more dangerous than most. It’s not the first time the company has had to replace losses there.”

“It is the first time they’ve had to replace the whole squad,” the center drone said. “When was this? Why were the rest of us not informed?”

“Last quarter. And it wasn’t rated as pertinent information. The sector is currently being covered by Shells,” J said, coming back into her haughtiness. She crossed her arms and stared down the other drones. “There is also a flock of Shells that are currently hunting for the traitor.”

“Wasn’t rated-”

“Last quarter?! That was three months ago!”

“You coreless glitch-”

B raised up her heel and slammed it into the ground, shattering the concrete and creating a small crater. V felt her eyebrows raise, casting an appreciative look at the rain of debris. So that was what the actual feet did. She had figured after N kicked her through a building and then took her head off with a roundhouse that they weren’t just for show.

It succeeded in forcing everyone to quiet down, though. The center drone, however, stayed focused on J. “And what about N?”

“Yeah, some of us were actually looking forward to seeing him again!” said one of the other drones. B turned to them and drew a finger across her throat as J twitched.

“N… may have abandoned his post. I have no other information on his activities,” J said, her voice entirely even.

Anticipating the uproar, B had turned one hand to an SMG, which kept it to muttering only. But V could still hear many of them asking how the hell she had lost their defense drone, especially since it was N of all drones. The drone smacked a hand to his faceplate, his tail lashing angrily. “Let me guess. This was four months ago? When your squad suddenly started dipping in your kills?”

J crossed her arms.

“Senior Informant J,” began the drone, a sudden dangerous quality to his tone. “Have you been sending your defense drone on hunts in order to inflate your kills? Against the company’s doctrine?”

V blinked. N wasn’t supposed to be hunting?

She looked around. Without getting closer, she couldn’t see everyone’s expressions, but she could tell how shocked everyone was from the lack of movement. And her own anger was starting to rear up inside her.

How many resets had been caused by N seeing the toasters living their lives instead of just being the barely-sentient computers that he was told about? How many times had he been taken from her because he started feeling bad about needing to eat the toasters? How many times had he made friends with the toasters because they tried to talk to him when he was hunting?

And none of it was necessary. He was never supposed to even meet the stupid toasters. She could still have N if it wasn’t for this glitch .

Briefly, her processor treated her to an image of N waiting for her at the spire with his butler outfit on, cleaning their nest. Wagging his tail and waving excitedly to welcome her home. She blinked, clearing away the image and feeling her teeth grind against each other from how much pressure she was putting on her jaws.

V leapt from her perch, landing with her wings outstretched and claws out. The center drone flinched away from her, and the drones closest to her all leaned back. B kept a wary eye on her. She let her lips pull back into a savage grin. It was so nice to have a reputation. “She sure did,” V said, answering his question. She turned to J, meeting her hollowed eyes with her bloodthirsty grin, reveling in her ‘boss’s’ fear. “So what’s all this that I hear about defense drones?”

“You didn’t let your own teammates review company doctrine?” sputtered the drone. 

J angrily shook her head, eyes filling back in. “They were welcome to read through the company’s orders and policies at any time that they chose! It is no fault of my own that my teammates remained ignorant of standard operating procedure. In fact, any time I asked, they assured me that they were aware of it! Serial Designation N was free to refuse any of his hunting assignments, but defense was a waste of resources in sector three!”

“And I’m sure he was aware that he could refuse these assignments, yes? Just as defense was completely unnecessary in all your previous sectors. Or do you profess that it was only you and V hunting before?” asked Y, looking at V. V tapped one claw to her temple, adopting a contemplative expression, before shaking her head with a smile. “Senior Informant J, I believe this calls for a review of your current position, starting with how and why one of your squadmates, especially N, could have possibly gone rogue. Without you reporting it.”

J stared at V, betrayal written across her visor. V couldn’t find any feelings of guilt or regret in her core. In fact, as B and another defense drone grabbed her shoulders, all she could feel was a cold satisfaction over her simmering hatred for the cursed sellout. She gave a little wave to her ‘boss’ as she was marched away.

Chapter Text

“Senior Informant J. We’re giving you this chance to resolve this… failure to communicate with your cohorts before the council of squad leaders so the rest of the menials don’t try to cut us off. Would you like to begin, or do you need prompting?”

The defense drones had marched J into a somewhat still intact building where the rest of the flock couldn’t hear them. L, who had been directing the meeting, a position that she should have held as Flock Coordinator, had motioned for them to leave once all the leaders had taken position around her. L leaned against a wall, Y paced in front of her, and G and C sat on some of the fallen cabinets in the room, with C crossing their legs and placing their hands on their pegs. It had not escaped her that she had only been referred to by the position that she had held since her days at the manor.

J was seething. Betrayed by her own subordinates, when everything she had done was for their benefit. It was her planning that kept them at the top of the charts, her strategies that had them clearing the most sectors since they had dropped on this planet. At least V didn’t cut her in half with a laser like N did, but this honestly might be worse. She could kill N once they caught him, if the Shells didn’t do it for her; not even Tessa could protect him this time. She couldn’t get the respect of the flock back if she messed this up. So she closed her eyes for a brief moment and formulated her response. As idiotic as it was for these tin cans to presume that they were her peers, until they reestablished communications with corporate, it would be a good idea to keep them in line.

So instead of lashing out, she opened her eyes, placed her hands behind her back, clasping them together at the hip. Her tail’s slight flick was the only thing that betrayed her contrition with the situation. “I apologize, but from my point of view there has been no failure to communicate. I was not ordered by corporate to spread the information, and you all know how it is back at headquarters. Quota is our top priority, and anything that might disrupt operations is meant to be kept on a need-to-know basis. I was informed that a number of Shells had been diverted from their ongoing assignment in order to track down the turncoat.”

“How convenient that corporate did not order you to report your own defense drone, N of all drones, turning traitor,” said Y, grinning widely. J’s eye glitched slightly looking at her, but she did her best to school her expressions. The fourth-quarter-layoff deserving glitch had always been jealous of her, even back at the manor. She, as the superior drone, had always had the attention of the bosses, including Tessa’s attention. Y had always coveted her position as senior informant.

J resisted the urge to laugh. Y wouldn’t have lasted five minutes under the scrutiny of James Elliot.

“Did they, by any chance, order you not to report on his betrayal?” Y continued.

Behind her back, J’s hands clenched. “No,” she said shortly. “But I interpreted-”

“Putting a pin in that,” Y said, meeting the others’ eyes. J felt an unpleasant, cool sensation spread under her chassis. She needed to wrench back control of the conversation before Y could continue to poison the others against her. Before she could say anything, though, the glitch said, “How, exactly, did you manage to lose the loyalty of a defense drone? And, not to reiterate this point, but I feel it should truly be highlighted, the defense drone in question is N. The mechanical embodiment of friendship and sunlight.”

The other leaders all nodded around her, some crossing their arms as they stared at her. She felt the phantom sensation of sweat breaking out, and resisted the urge to curse the programmers who decided that would be a good feature. “I am… still investigating. N has been faulty ever since we were upgraded to disassembly models. His memory drives are prone to resetting, and at the time, he was deployed to hunt due to lack of credible threats in the area. I believe that he has contracted some sort of virus from the corrupted worker drones. When V and I last encountered him, he was uncharacteristically silent, and attempted to kill us both.”

“Mm. And I’m sure that you treated him with respect and dignity, giving him a reason to stay. Like you did back at the manor, right? And isn’t it interesting that, at the end of month tallies, N never has any kills attributed to him? So, did you add his kills to V’s or your own? I’m betting on V’s, because your own kills are still only slightly above average. Had to inflate her reputation, huh?” Y said, walking around her. The glitch’s tail trailed lightly along the ground, leaving a glowing yellow line. J gritted her teeth, refusing to admit that N’s kills were added to her own. All it would have done is raise questions among the others, it was easier for everyone if it was all according to standard operating procedure. And besides, it was only standard operating procedure, sometimes one needed to innovate to stay ahead of competition. But the others all nodded along.

C looked up, tilting their head. “Hold on. What do you mean his memory drives are prone to resetting?”

J sighed. “N typically dumps his memories at least every other year, though the timing is unpredictable. The longer we stay here, the more often it happened. It began to dip into quota to attempt to retrain him every time it happened.” Not to mention it meant that he never had to deal with the hardships of the planet that they all did. Her hands clenched again. That overly-cheerful personality hire might as well have been a Shell for all the memory he was capable of holding. He was always Tessa’s favorite drone and he didn’t even bother to remember her, the ungrateful synergistic liability. She was lucky if Tessa even gave her an extra five minutes of personal speaking time between the two of them, and that was only if she kept the team at the top of the kill boards.

She just wanted back what they had before she was upgraded. She didn’t know what she had done wrong.

“J, this looks bad. Really bad.” L sighed, his tail lashing. All of the squad heads looked between themselves, nodding. G, the bastard, looked downright gleeful. While she had never been cool enough to ice over, she imagined that it felt much like the sensation spreading through her coolant system. “This looks like you covering your own ass, leading to the death of at least two squads and the disruption of Shell operations in several sectors, prolonging our time on this robo-God forsaken planet. I can’t lie. You’ve lost the respect of the flock here, if you ever had it to begin with. You used to have the weight of the greatest hunter the company has behind you, and the most beloved drone of the manor. One has apparently lost it so badly that he’s started killing his former friends and the other is stabbing you in the back in front of the entire flock. You have royally screwed the pooch. Until such time as we reestablish contact with corporate, where they will pass final judgement on you, we are all in agreement that you no longer hold the position of Flock Coordinator.”

Her eyes hollowed. Her mouth opened, silently grasping for words, though they all failed to reach her vocoder as her processor heated. They couldn’t do that. They couldn’t take away her company-given position. “You- you don’t have the authority for that.”

L looked at her, deadpan. “Unfortunately, cut off from the company, your fabled authority has absolutely nothing backing it up. There is a level of mutual respect among peers that you have always failed to uphold. You have no friends here. I’m sure N would have called you his friend, but it would appear that he is absent from this meeting, for reasons that you are ‘still investigating.’ So, and someone interrupt me if I’m not speaking to our unified logic processes here, you have a job. And don’t worry, we’ll even send V with you. Whatever is going on with N is your screw-up. Go join the Shells and fix it before he starts getting to more of us.”

“I- what? You can’t send me with the Shells. Who knows what those- those mass-produced rejects will do when cut off from company control?” Her hands slipped loose from behind her back, as she began to use them to emphasize her point.

“I suspect you will, very shortly,” L said, deadpan. “And like I said, V will be with you. She is, at the very least, complicit with this, and I’m going to guess that she has the best chance to stop N. You said he tried to kill you already, but he didn’t finish the job like he did with the rest, so maybe there’s something still there. Regardless, you messed up. You fix it.”

The other four squad leaders all stood, beginning to filter out of the room, Y teasingly brushing her leg with her tail as she passed. J stared at the floor, feeling like her internal components had all fallen out. L paused as the rest left, standing in the doorway.

“J. I’ve never liked you. To be honest, I don’t know any drone that did, except maybe N, but he doesn’t count. Just like you have no authority without the company, I have no way to force you to go after N without just wasting resources. But we all came out of the same hell-hole, so out of some misplaced feelings of comradery that I’m not sure you share, I’ve tried to throw you a bone with V, who despite how different she’s become, I am sure she’ll go after N if we ask. If you have ever cared about any of us, if you feel any responsibility for your subordinates, go help V and clean up your own mess.”

J said nothing. She stared at her own feet, wondering at how fast the rug could be pulled beneath her feet. Once his words made it through her overworked processor, though, she turned, wanting to tell him that she had always been responsible for all of them, especially at the manor. But he was already gone.

Uzi suppressed a flinch as a wadded-up ball of paper hit the side of her head. Giggles erupted through the class, the other students whispering amongst themselves. Someone had a small whiteboard, and added another tally under one of the names on it.

Doing her best to seem completely unbothered, she kept doodling her blueprints for her awesome, one-of-a-kind, Sick-as-Hell Railgun that would prove her complete superiority over the rest of the bunker. A bunch of cowardly morons content to wait for their inevitable demise, incapable of thinking without being told to. But they would all see.

Another ball of paper hit Uzi, and while she tried to stay focused on her plans, the squeak of the marker on the whiteboard finally overwhelmed her senses. She shot up on her chair, spinning to face the drone that had been marking down the points for hitting her. He was smirking at her, and she was filled with the urge to wipe that look off his face. So she picked up her backpack, screaming, “You want to play a game? Fine then, bite me!” and threw it at his face.

The backpack, filled with binders and textbooks, made a satisfying thunk as it knocked the stupid jock out his chair onto the ground. The rest of the class started screaming, acting like she was about to kill them, and the teacher, standing at the board, sighed and put his head in his hands. “Uzi”, he said, barely audible over the sudden chaos of the classroom, “Please just report to the principal's office. Or don’t. Just go and be weird somewhere other than my classroom.”

She growled, but gathered her stuff together and walked out of the classroom. On the way, she was whacked by a flailing arm and tripped by a conveniently placed leg, making her drop her blueprints. Venting as she landed on the ground, she tried to pick them back up before a foot stepped down on them, making her freeze. She couldn’t pick them up without tearing them, and that was months worth of work and calculations that she had put into those blueprints. Looking up, she met the pink eyes of her greatest tormentor.

“OMG, Doll, can you believe this freak’s clumsiness?” The cheerleader, Lizzy, smirked as she leaned down to pick up the papers under her foot. Her fellow cheerleader and constant shadow stood at her side, crossing her arms and looking down at Uzi sprawled on the ground. “And what’s this that she’s got here? A magnetically ampli-whatsit convert?”

“It’s a magnetically amplified photon converger, and you can frickin’ bite me! Give those back!” Uzi snarled, standing up. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides.

“Or what, freak? You gonna hit me? Throw stuff around, call your mommy?” Lizzy laughed when Uzi’s teeth gritted, her last barb digging deep. “You know what? Doll, catch!”

Lizzy crumpled up the blueprints into a ball, tossing them to her blue-haired shadow. Uzi vented, lunging for the papers as they flew to Doll, who looked at her with the same, cold expression she always wore. “Go fetch, freak.”

She threw it to the jock that she had beaned with her backpack, the drone whooping as he caught it and going through a long windup as she chased after her plans. He sent it to the other side of the classroom with a cheer just before she reached him, and Uzi yelled as she went back to following it.

Back and forth the plans went, Uzi following them. Humiliation burned under her chassis as she chased after her months and months of work and planning, calculations and designing. That was her ticket out of this bunker, her ticket to revenge, to the liberation of their planet from the murder drones. And they were treating it as just another toy to break and play with. Just some trash worth some momentary entertainment. Just like her.

Eventually, she got close enough to slap a drone’s arm as they threw it, sending her balled-up papers sailing off course and right into Braidon's perpetually burning head. The blueprints caught fire immediately, and Uzi shrieked as she jumped across the room to them, tripping over desks and other drones in her way. The paper shriveled as the flames spread across it, before Uzi leapt over the final obstacle and desperately stomped on the burning wad of paper.

Gingerly getting down on her knees, Uzi tried to pick up the charred papers and un-crumple them. As she pulled at the corner, the paper flaked apart, charred remnants drifting across her fingers to settle on the floor. Her visor burned as she felt tears begin to well up, and she kept her head bowed as she pushed off her knees to get back up, leaving the charred paper remnants on the floor.

She power-walked out the door, leaving behind the snickering that turned into full-blown laughter once she left the classroom. One day, they would all see. She was going to be the most badass worker drone ever, and she would free Copper-9 from the scourge of murder drones. They would beg for her to teach them her ways, and she would get to turn her back on them for once. They would get to see what it was like. They would all see.

As she walked through the halls, keeping her face down, Uzi fell as she accidentally ran into someone. “Oh, hey there- woah, everything alright, dude?” the drone asked, as she briefly glanced into his green eyes and recognized the popular jock, Thad. Once she processed the question, though, all the emotions that she had been working to repress burst, and she sobbed, pushing herself off the ground and running through the hallways. “Hey, wait!”

She collapsed in one of the bunker halls, drawing her knees up to her face and sobbing into them. Why couldn’t any of them understand? Why did it feel like she was the only one who cared? She continued to cry, mourning all the nights she had spent on that railgun. Mourning for a mother she had never known. Mourning affection she could never remember feeling. Knowing that she was going back to a home that was only slightly better than school because at least she wasn’t actively hated there. She was just a disappointment, as all the magazines and shows and radios featuring her father constantly reminded her.

After she had cried herself out, her edge level reaching a critical low, Uzi unsteadily climbed back to her feet. She smacked her cheeks, restoring her edge levels, and furiously wiped the tears off her visor. She had work to do. Blueprints to remake. Drones to show up.

Shouldering her backpack, she started to head back home, pulling out her headphones and queuing up her nightcore playlist as she went. She could make the railgun better, anyways.

Chapter Text

It had been a few weeks since Puppy had been so far away from Camp 98.7. He had stuck to closer sectors for a while under HER’s direction, which he was honestly very grateful for. After that weird centipede-worm-sister thing (to which he was doing his absolute best to completely ignore that whole situation), he really was not up to more fighting. Especially against more people that seemed to him better than he knew himself.

What was it that everyone else kept calling him? N?

Kinda weird to be named by a single letter. He wondered why he - or, the drone before him, as HER insisted - got named that way. HER couldn’t answer right now, since apparently she was out of communication range. He still wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that, because the range appeared to be incredibly inconsistent and more time-based than anything else. It was usually about eight hours of silence after every sixteen hours, and the weather on this planet wasn’t that consistent. He knew that she had to sleep, so maybe that was it and she just didn’t want to admit it? It was a weird schedule, though. He could go way longer than sixteen hours without a recharge. And the time she was out was always variable; it was usually eight hours but sometimes could be as short as four or as long as fourteen. Once, she was out for about twenty hours, and Puppy had started thinking that he had done something unforgivable to make her leave him. She had eventually gotten back to him right as he was about to start trying to figure out what to do to get back into her good graces. She called him stupid and said he wouldn’t be able to function without her, and it was true! He would never be able to function on his own. 

Resolving to put HER’s communication issues out of his mind, like everything else that bothered him and he couldn’t quite figure out, Puppy instead reviewed his current objective. They were investigating something that she had uncovered while scavenging through Camp 98.7 and scanning all their data. Several physical notes and entries in the databases made references to ongoing experiments at a place called Cabin Fever Labs, which was not actually in the cabins. But he did find a message about all dogs getting off the planet and being made immortal shortly before the core collapse, which made his tail wag excitedly whenever he thought about all the dogs that maybe he could one day meet in space. If he ever got to go to space. Which he kind of really wanted to. Something in his programming itched when he thought about flying through space, but he could never quite pin down what.

It didn’t really matter. Data clues and review of data that HER had gathered from the remains of the planet’s internet that she sometimes had Puppy access when he was doing other things for her had led them to sector 18. Right next to the camp. HER had been somewhat frustrated when she realized how close the place actually was. That had kind of hurt when she ranted for a while. There was a lot of metal banging on her end. But he had flown over the outcrops of the sector, on a massive lake of ice right next to its border. He wondered what it had looked like before the collapse.

Next to the lake was a large pump station, with massive, frozen water tanks. It looked like there had once been an artificial ground level with the lake, but there were several holes in it now, leading into a dark chasm that must have once been an underground city. There had been a very conveniently placed sign near the top as well, with a large label covering part of the sign that read Cabin Fever. There was an odd sign, a skull that HER had sounded positively giddy to see. It was something very rare, something that Puppy wished that he could sometimes bring out of her. He wished that someone, maybe someday, would be that happy to see him.

He shook his head. He was getting off track.

Under HER’s orders, though, he had peeled off the label, leaving the sign saying “Secret Labs Under This Facility,” which HER had sighed at, lamenting the utter idiocy of the humans of Copper-9. Then she had him destroy the sign instead, before proceeding downwards to scout out the location. He really hoped there weren’t any giant wormipedes here. Once was more than enough for him.

Which brought Puppy to where he was now. Sitting at the bottom of a ravine of rusted debris, with his knees huddled up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, his surroundings illuminated by the gentle moonlight cascading from the hole he entered from. Somewhere at the bottom of this ravine was an entrance of sorts to Cabin Fever Labs, but HER had cited her communication range issues before they could begin investigating, and told him to wait for her to get back before he went anywhere. So here he was. Waiting. Being very good. Reviewing all of his memories and thoughts he was trying to repress as there was nothing else for his sensors to focus on.

Puppy squeezed his knees a bit tighter, pressing his forehead against them with a little more force. He didn’t like being alone. 

Falling back into his programming, he checked on his energy levels to see if he could go into a short recharge cycle. Except he had already tried that, and his energy levels were still sitting at ninety-eight percent. It would be a while yet before he could power off again. And he knew that it was better for his sensors to be active, especially in such an unsafe area, but being stuck alone with nothing but his thoughts was almost worse than fighting.

An odd sound, the skittering of something on metal, registered to his audials. Puppy gave a vent of relief, quickly switching out a hand for his laser, lowering its power so that it served as a flashlight instead of a weapon. Carefully getting to his feet, he started moving towards the source of the noise, making sure to watch all angles with his halo.

Stepping into an office-like building with a large front desk, he ignored the small, red lights throughout the room in favor of the giant sparking monitor with what looked like claw marks torn through it. It had fallen behind the large front desk, sitting at an angle. Walking up to the desk and pulling himself up on his toes so he could look at it, he saw that there were multiple different screens being displayed. Some were reduced to glitching pixels from the damage, but the remaining ones all displayed two messages that they switched between: a warning for the core collapse, and a warning that “anti-drone sentinels” were set to free-roam.

Blinking, Puppy tried to think on if he knew what an anti-drone sentinel was, before shrugging and looking around the rest of the room. Only to immediately pause when his foot clacked against something metal that began to roll away. 

Looking down at it, he realized he had just kicked a murder drone arm. His eyes hollowing, he followed the trail of oil back up to a pile of murder drone corpses. When he processed what he was looking at, he realized what all the lights in the corner of his vision were: a dozen red FATAL ERROR messages reflecting off pools of oil, leaking out from shattered chassis. The corpses looked like they had been torn apart, with no clean cuts or holes from bullets. Not one of them was intact, and he couldn’t even begin to tell which parts actually went to each corpse.

Frozen on the spot, Puppy’s sensors immediately kicked into overdrive, analyzing everything about the room. There was oil all over the walls, some in lines of three shaped like claws, and some of it was used to paint messages. Mostly the same one, repeating over and over. 

DON’T LOOK AT THE LIGHT

Puppy started backing out of the room, switching his other hand for an SMG. He was definitely okay with waiting for HER before looking any closer now. In fact, he was definitely okay with finding another helper first, like HER was watching for when he had to hunt now. And hey, maybe hunting wasn’t so bad? Maybe it was a good idea to go top up, see what else was in the sector.

Something skittered by above his head.

With a short scream, he spun around, firing the SMG into the ceiling. Deploying his wings, he cycled his gravity generators to give himself a boost as he ran. When he reached the opening in the wall he entered from, he leapt out of it, blindly firing behind him.

When he was a sufficient distance away and couldn’t hear anything else, Puppy looked back. There was nothing in the building he could see. Not even a robo-roach moved, but he kept his light on the opening just to be certain.

After almost half an hour of watching, too terrified to do anything else, his sensors picked up movement. He tensed, ready to engage his combat protocols, but whatever it was moved slowly. And it was small. He couldn’t actually make it out, but it seemed to be an oval moving through the edges of his light. 

The hand of a disassembly drone thrust into his light, waving a bit. With a yelp, Puppy fired off a short burst, the hand instantly disappearing and the movement he was picking up vanished. If he could have, he would have started yelling apologies. What a terrible way to greet someone trying to be friendly! No wonder he didn’t have any friends outside of HER.

Another fifteen minutes passed before he began picking up movement in the darkness again. This time, while he did still have his SMG pointed into the breach, he repressed his systems that were screaming at him to fire on the threat. When the hand stuck out again, waving a little flag, Puppy blinked. And then smiled. He let his SMG turn back into a hand, but kept the laser flashlight out and waved back. Then the owner of the hand popped around the corner, and Puppy could do nothing but blink again.

A large, mechanical egg with a visor, currently displaying hollow eyes lined with stress, sat atop three spindly legs that terminated in sharp points. The final limb had the hand attached to the end of it, which currently held onto the wide-brimmed hat atop their head. It looked like something had bitten through part of the hat, though.

They both stood, looking at each other. Neither moved. Until eventually, Puppy cautiously held up a hand to wave again. The tiny mouth on the drone’s visor curved slightly, and they waved back. Grinning, Puppy felt his tail start to wag behind him. Finally, something that didn’t want to kill him! Well. Hopefully. Probably, anyways. It was such a little thing, how would it hurt him anyways?

He started to walk forward, but the drone held up a hand, making him stop in place. Words appeared on its visor.

Plz stay bck

Blinking, he held up his own hands, and took a step back. The drone gave him a thumbs up, and then sat there. Puppy realized they were waiting for him to say something, and started searching for his files. When the drone tilted at him, a question mark appearing on their visor, he held up a finger to ask for a second as he kept searching. If he could have done that this whole time, and actually tried to talk things out with people, maybe he wouldn’t be alone right now.

Eventually, he found the files for display across his visor. He quickly wrote his own message, which the egg drone leaned forward and squinted to see.

Hi! Friend?

The drone shook its head, making Puppy sag. Well, he would still take not trying to kill him, even if he couldn’t have a new friend. Their visor blinked with a new message.

Mama say u bad

He tilted his head. There was a mama? Wait, was this a baby drone? Did baby drones have spider legs and murder drone hands? That was a really weird baby stage. He supposed he couldn’t judge, as he had never had a kid of his own. He wrote a new message.

I’m not with others. I’m good now

Rly?

He wrote a :) onto his visor.

The drone looked around a bit before writing new words.

Should go

Puppy frowned.

Y?

Sentinels

What r sentinels?

Scary claws, light stops you

Mm, ominous. Then something occurred to Puppy.

Y u here?

Sentinels

Stuck?

Yes

I can carry

The drone mimicked shaking their head. At least that’s what he thought it was when they rotated back and forth slightly.

Mama no trust then I stay with mama

Puppy vented slightly. It wasn’t a surprise that the drone’s mom wouldn’t trust him, especially with the walls all lined with murder drone corpses. Plus, he wasn’t sure where she was. If she was a full-sized drone, maybe she couldn’t make it out like this drone could? Which meant that maybe he couldn’t make it in.

How u get out?

Vents then mama too big then sentinels find her then if door open .

Just as Puppy was about to ask another question, an odd bark, matching nothing in their memory banks registered on their audials. The baby drone immediately disappeared, the skittering of their feet in the vents fading as they left. Puppy realized he should probably do the same, and extended his wings to jump.

Right when his feet left the ground, a bright flash and the sound of a shutter reached his sensors and the world went black.

Puppy blinked.

Moonlight cascaded down in front of him. Looking upwards, he realized he was much closer to the hole that he had flown down from than he remembered being. He was laying across a frame jutting out of the wall of the structure, and he quickly moved himself into a less precarious position. Something about that light had knocked him out for… He checked his chronometer. Only a few minutes. But that could have been very bad if he was left defenseless and vulnerable before whatever tore those other drones apart. 

Well, that was something else to go in the repression section of his memories. Which had an alarmingly large file size compared to the rest of his memories. Also something to unpack later!

It would probably be best if he was not in the area where the sentinels were apparently free to roam, though. HER could come up with a solution later, he was sure of it. But for now, it probably was best if he checked out the rest of the sector like he had thought of earlier.

First, though, he ran through the rest of his diagnostic checks, letting lubricant spread over all his joints. Once his systems gave him an all-clear notice, he crouched down, spread his wings out, and launched his way out of the hole.

Bursting back onto the surface, Puppy reveled in the feeling of rushing air. It wasn’t often that he was in areas that lacked air flow, but it always struck him as unsettling. Something about it was just wrong.

After spending a few minutes doing important aerial exercises, like loops and spins through the air, he turned his attention to the city. 

It looked a fair bit more industrial than most of the sectors he had seen, which was probably a result of the massive lake next to it that it was using for power. The only comparison that came close was sector 13, which had the highest concentration of drone population. But most of those buildings had been bombed over the years, leaving the infrastructure crumbling and much less impressive.

This place, on the other hand, had pockets of destruction. In some areas, the buildings were mostly untouched, save for broken glass and the piling up of ash and snow. In others, they had all crumbled, sinking into the underground city. He hovered in the sky, noting the lack of disturbances to the city. All the obvious signs of drone occupation were missing, as was any sign of a murder drone squad. He wondered why that could be the case when it was obviously an area that would have had a heavy drone population before the collapse. A thought occurred to him, hollowing his eyes. Was it possible that the sentinels were roaming the whole city?

He drifted down to the top of one of the buildings, perching at the edge. Hopefully, if they were roaming the city, whatever light they used would be diffused enough over the distance that it couldn’t catch him again. He was still trying to figure out what exactly the light had done to him when his sensors finally registered movement, but not from the city.

It came from behind.

Puppy tried to whirl around, but only succeeded in a half-turn before a body barrelled into him, throwing both of them off the roof. They tumbled through the air shortly, Puppy getting the briefest glance of another murder drone before throwing them off and turning his fall into a controlled flight. Just in time for gunfire to clip his side, ringing off the feathers of his wing. A pained vent left him involuntarily, and he began spiraling down again.

“J!” a voice yelled out from above him. “You agreed to let me try it my way first!”

“You already did, and he was getting away!” responded another voice. He fell through a busted window, landing hard on his wing. The crawling feeling of his nanites began spreading over his side as he pushed himself up, hearing the other voice talk again. One he recognized. Actually, he recognized both. “Face it, V, this fourth-quarter layoff isn’t going to come willingly. And besides, there’s a lesson I’ve been dying to teach him.”

“As if you could, boss ,” hissed V. He could see her hovering outside the building he had fallen into, looking for him. Both of her hands remained as actual hands. It was nice to see that his memories were correct, though. She was very pretty. “I’ve had to deal with your useless carcass dragging me down this whole time, and you think you have a chance against a defense drone that doesn’t think of you as a friend anymore?”

“It’s N !” cried the other murder drone. J, apparently. She flew up to meet V in the air outside the building, hovering close enough to jab a finger into the drone’s visor. “And who was it just now that stopped this- this scab from getting away?”

As they argued, Puppy started trying to quietly back his way through the building. Maybe if he flew out the back, they wouldn’t notice him? It was on his fourth step back that some of the glass from the window cracked under his feet. He froze, hoping against everything that they hadn’t heard that, but his halo showed him otherwise. Both of the drones immediately whipped towards him, ceasing their argument. Both of their visors displayed menacing Xs, and their teeth were bared, with claws out.

He slowly swiveled back towards them, wincing as the glass further cracked beneath his heavy feet. However, when he was fully facing them, he was left in silence. After a few seconds went by, without knowing what to do, Puppy fell back on old programming. He tried to make a convincing grin and wave at them.

V snorted, the X blinking out into eyes once more. She smiled slightly, but the effect was diminished by the stress lines around her eyes. “Yeah, same old N,” she said.

J’s visor blinked back into eyes just so she could roll them.

He decided to use the trick he had picked up from the drone baby, and wrote a message across his visor.

Not N

Both of them blinked, their postures straightening in shock. V frowned and asked, “What the hell do you mean you’re not N? I haven’t tracked you across the whole planet to find the wrong drone. And what’s up with the weird visor text?”

Vocoder dead then Not N then Don’t want fight

J scoffed. “Of course you don’t want to fight. You always were a soft, pathetic excuse for a disassembler. Waste of company resources.”

Puppy blinked. He was a terrible disassembler? That kind of tracked with how much he sucked at things in general. But maybe being a terrible disassembler was a good thing, since the disassemblers were all evil. So did that mean that he was terrible at being evil?

“If you’re not N, then who do you think you are?” V asked, ignoring J.

As he prepared to write another message, a voice broke through into his processor.

“I told you to stay in the fucking hole. When I tell you to do something, you fucking do it, you stupid tin-can. You don’t go out and get yourself into a fight with the murder drones. You fucking idiot, they’ll be watching this place now. Fuck! Whatever, you’ve already gotten yourself into this damn mess. I’ll have to get you out of it.”

“What, do you call yourself Puppy now?” V asked, crossing her arms as she unknowingly broke through HER’s rant. Her claws tapped at the sides of her body as she stared down at him. Surprised, he nodded. How did she guess?

“Wait, really?” She uncrossed her arms, bracing her claws against her hips instead. “You’re actually going by Puppy now? I mean, it does fit you really well, but- seriously? And why?”

“Don’t fucking talk to her, dumbass! You’ve fucked up enough already. Just fucking run already! Try to lose them in the city!”

He turned around, intending to start running to do what HER said. Even if these drones had known him, he was their enemy now, if their last meeting meant anything. He was surprised that she was talking to him at all. She had him dead to rights on that rooftop, he hadn’t even known she was there until just before she tackled him

“No! Wait!” she shouted, and something in her voice made him stop. His processor screamed at him to do as HER said. She was his admin, after all. But there was something about V, something scratching at the edge of his code, that made him listen to her. “Please, just listen to me! There’s a freaky flock of Shells coming after you, all on a singular mission from Si- the company! I led them on a wild goose chase to make sure they couldn’t find you before ditching them, but they’re still looking for you. Come back! I- we can start over again, go back to the beginning! You can be a proper defense drone. Don’t you want to come back to the spire with me? You won’t have to be on the run anymore, you won’t even have to hunt for yourself! I- I’ll take care of you, N.  That’s all I’ve ever been trying to do.”

His core ached at the pain in her voice. And yeah, stopping to think about it, it was tempting.

Someone wanted him .

But he couldn’t leave HER like that. She needed him. And he didn’t want to be an evil, murderous monster again. But- biscuits, did he want a friend.

So he turned back around and wrote a new message on his screen.

Come w/ me?

And V stared. J squawked, and he could tell that she was gearing up for a monologue, if the audio file loading on her visor said anything. But his focus was on V. Yeah, the more friends the merrier, but V was the first person he had met in the entirety of his memory to offer something to him. And she seemed so sad and worn out. He wished she would agree. HER would probably be thrilled to have a new ally!

“Ha! Ain’t fucking happening, Puppy. She’s a coward, and the thing holding her strings scares her a hell of a lot more than she cares about you.”

Puppy twitched. How did HER know V so well?

Just as J started talking, V put a hand in front of her. Her eyes were hollow, and the stress lines seemed even more prominent now. “I’m sorry, N. But I have to do what’s best for you, even if you don’t know it.”

Then she switched out her claws for swords, and with a brief flourish, launched herself at him.

His eyes widened. She was fast. He had already had his wings in a defensive position, and that was the only reason that he was able to intercept her swords before she took his head off. He lashed out with a kick, trying to force her away to get enough time for his own weapons to deploy. The kick grazed her side, making her wince and driving her back. Her tail lashed out for a parting shot, drawing a glowing line across his foot, eliciting a hiss. He wasn’t sure if he could get saliva there reliably. Once his sword burst from his wrist, he cut it off with a quick move, gritting his teeth against the pain.

J’s SMG flashed as she shot a short burst at him, which pinged off the wing he moved to cover himself from her. V dashed from behind the wing, scoring a deep gouge across his visor as his foot regenerated, throwing him back. He fell from the unsteady footing, switching out his hand for a laser, which he took a wide sweep across the room to try and buy more time.

V jumped over the laser, using the ceiling to push off of to get to him even faster. His eyes widened as he pulled himself forward, barely dodging the cross-cut that went directly through the floor. His tail wrapped around one of her feet, pulling it out from under her and making her fall on top of him.

He wrapped his arms around her to keep her pinned while J let off another volley from outside the window, letting her chassis take the bullets. She slumped in his arms, visor displaying an ERROR message even as nanites began to crawl out of her.

He shoved her body off, feeling guilty even as she was trying to- kill him? He thought? Maybe not, since she had said she was doing what was best for him.

No time to contemplate though, as J clicked her tongue in frustration. “Stop trying to use company property to undermine the company!” she hissed, switching out her hand for a different tool. One that he had only seen once, when another hunter was taking down a group of workers. An EMP arm.

He pointed his laser again, knowing that multiple shots were going to play hell on his power and oil reserves. With as quick of a shot as he could manage, he cut off her arm at the elbow and her wing off at , leaving red-glowing metal behind.

J screamed in shock, covering the lost arm with her other hand. Her concentration shot, she started to veer away in the air, leaving his field of vision. With his foot fully regenerated, Puppy started running out the other side of the building, only to yelp and throw himself to the side as his halo picked up on V’s lunge.

She managed to slip her blade between his feathers, taking off his laser hand. Oil spurted from the wound, pain registering before his adrenaline programs fully kicked in. He spun around, trying to use his wing to spear her, but she lashed out again, scraping along the inside of his wing. Barely managing to tilt his head to the side to avoid the blade about to pierce his visor, Puppy caught her blade between his head and wings and used his extremely poorly-thought out grip to start spinning, tossing her out the window when she tried to bring her other sword up.

She didn’t fly far before flipping in midair and reversing her course back towards him, but he had already dashed out of the other side of the building. Cycling his gravity manipulators, he increased Copper-9’s pull on him to plummet faster, accelerating to high speeds before cycling them once more to let him pull up. He flew between the buildings, faster than he had ever gone before, barely avoiding the broken rebar jutting from the sides of buildings and errant street lights. 

Gunfire peppered the air around him, forcing him to veer to the side. V was already closing on him, and while she couldn’t build up speed using the same trick as him, she was forcing him into areas where he had to slow down not to hit anything. He hissed as he had to swerve into a building to keep out of the way of her gunfire, skidding across the floor, crashing through cubicles.

Sitting up, he shook his head, letting the nanites realign some of the circuitry in his processor that had fallen out of place from the impact. He looked up just for V’s feet to shatter his visor in a foot-first dive. As he reeled back, instinctively slashing up with his sword hand, V spun around to slash through his wrist, letting the sword fly up to embed itself in the ceiling.

His primary optic sensor blinded and HUD offline, Puppy desperately threw out a wing to knock V away. Unlike last time, she hadn’t grinned once during the fight, looking deadly serious and slightly sad the whole while. Her X never crossed her visor, either. 

He really wished she would’ve taken him up on his offer. He thought that maybe, in another time, they could’ve been great.

His regenerated hand came up as a laser, slashing diagonally through V as she was exchanging one of her own hands for a laser. Her visor changed to a look of shock before blinking to a FATAL ERROR as she fell apart, her left arm clattering to the ground as her body legs fell forward and her torso fell back.

Puppy took a brief moment to lay back on his pillow of debris, letting out a deep vent of stress. His visor had almost regenerated, enough to blare warnings about his high internal temperature. And while the thirst was starting to get to him, the heat leaving him melting a circle in the snow around him, he found that he couldn’t even think about drinking from her. 

“Leave her, Puppy. We’ll need her for later. She'll just drag you down if you take her now.”

He pushed himself up. J was still in the area, and while he hadn’t seen her since he took off her wing, he knew that she would probably be coming back from that soon. He hoped that she found V, and they could get over whatever argument they were having. It seemed like she needed a friend.

With one last look at her body, nanites crawling out of the holes in the torso, he began walking away. He paused at the broken-down wall, glancing back. With another vent, he walked back over to her, positioning her parts so that she would be able to reintegrate them instead of growing new ones. It would still take the nanites a while before they could touch the red-hot metal without melting, which would buy him time. Then he walked back over to the wall, crouching down and spreading his wings out, and with a cycle of his gravity manipulators, launched away into the night.

HER remained oddly silent the whole time. He wondered if she had already gone back to sleep.

Chapter Text

Uzi vented deeply as she trudged back towards her housing unit, sticking her hands in the pocket of her hoodie.

So maybe her presentation hadn’t been strictly related to the homework, but she thought that her completed magnetically amplified photon converger (railgun for short) demonstrated that she understood the concepts of math a bit more than answering some stupid word problem. And yeah, maybe it had malfunctioned a little bit and maybe cracked her visor a bit, but that was just an issue with the jury-rigged prototype power source! She already had a plan to fix that anyways, with a much more stable power source. And a bit of poetic justice on the way. A spaceship fusion cell would pack one heck of a punch, far beyond what anything could stand up to, and it was optimized for stability and durability from space travel. Plus, if she stole it from the murder drones, they wouldn’t be able to use their spaceship anymore. Two heads with one bullet, or whatever the heck the humans used to say.

She grinned to herself, cackling sinisterly as she thought of her imminent revenge and how revered she was about to be. All of these sheep would know how wrong they were to cast her out, and as soon as they did, she was going to be the one to leave them behind. They could stay directionless and lost without her, and maybe one day, after her quest to take back the sky from the demons was complete, she would come back to visit with her plucky found family of weirdos like her and they would be awed at how far she’s come.

Ignoring the scared looks people shot her and the way they nearly pressed themselves against the wall as she passed by, Uzi rubbed at the bandages covering her cracked visor. She would have to weld it herself once she was back home, since any repair drones she went to would call her dad and he would try and ground her again and they’d get in a whole argument about it where he shut her down no matter what she said and then would go on some talk show or magazine talking about how doors are better than daughters again. It was going to be annoying but she was planning on leaving at three in the morning anyways, when security was most lax since it was the end of their shift. Her dad would have probably already left, so she just had to swipe the door key from his room without waking him up and the idiots he had ‘guarding the doors’ weren’t going to glance twice at her if she said her dad had sent her out. She couldn’t wait to get out of this hellhole. Especially after her most recent humiliation. 

Even if it turned out there was someone who was kinda cool and actually knew her name. Maybe he would catch her on the way out and insist that she can’t go out alone, and then tag along with her as her goofy sidekick?

Ugh, but Thad was too well liked by the rest of the bunker, and for good reason. He was a kind, considerate, athletically capable, conventionally attractive male; he wouldn’t get her rebellious, loner ways. Maybe he could be the one she comes back to at the end of her journey and he finally understands her, and then leaves the rest of the bunker behind.

Yeah, that would be a cool ending.

But first, she had to get ready to finally get this show on the road!

She opened the door to her unit, making sure with a quick glance that her dad was gone like always. While he should have already started his shift, she couldn’t be too cautious. He was not going to get in her way this time.

Confirming that Khan wasn’t home, she trudged over to her room, opening the door with a tap. This would be one of the last nights she stayed in this room, if everything went to plan. An expedition to perfect her railgun, a murder drone to test it and make sure that it worked (which of course it would, she was Uzi hecking Doorman), and then she would come back here one final time to pack up everything she needed for her quest around Copper-9.

She was almost free.

Just the hardest part left now. She put her railgun down on her desk, opening the closet to find her repair kit. It was old and torn up, seeing her through many accidents on the way of progress, and ‘accidents’ that happened at school. It wasn’t too hard to figure out worker drone repair. Heck, she had even figured out how to navigate their own processors and coding, all those fiddly internal bits, which Braidon oh-so-graciously let her test on him. Yeah, shunting his consciousness to a virtual environment and accidentally setting him on fire for the rest of his life was a bit rude, but it wasn’t like the fire had any actual effect on him, and it actually made him stand out from the rest of the sheep. He should be thanking her!

But noooo, just ‘you stole my sentience’ this and ‘what kinda freak messes with other people’s processors’ that. It wasn’t like the teacher or anyone else did anything to stop her! Not that anyone stopped anyone from doing anything to her, either. It was a drone-eat-drone world out there (literally) and she was just trying to make sure she had the knowledge to survive!

Taking out the materials she needed to repair her visor, Uzi moved to sit in front of her mirror, determined to get this done before the pain-blocking program the nurse gave her with her bandages wore off. It was only supposed to last long enough for her to get to a repair drone so that she could tell if it was fixed up properly afterwards, and she had spent enough time wallowing in the nurse’s office before heading home. Pulling off the bandages, she ran her fingers along the cracks spanning her visor, noting the multicolored lines spanning from them, as well as a few dead spaces. The dead spaces were indicative of worse damage, the screen of her visor not getting any input, but she was sure that she could fix it. She’d gotten herself through worse.

With a deep vent, she took off her beanie and picked up the tools she would need, and started rooting under her visor with the smallest tool to reattach the damaged connectors. Ideally, someone else would pop open her visor and do it for her, but again, she was not going to let Khan push her back any further. She genuinely did not know what she would do if she had to spend another day in this bunker without packing up to leave. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pretty, but the jury was out on whether she would do it to someone else or herself.

Once there were no more dead spaces, only multicolored lines, she put down the smaller tool and grabbed the glass welder. With a steady hand, developed from many years of doing this for herself and many, many engineering projects, she slowly traced the welder over the cracks in her visor. She was so glad that she had rewritten her handedness to be ambidextrous, Otherwise she would have to hold this in such an awkward position. 

Finishing up the welding, Uzi blinked a few times to make sure that the visor was reading her processor properly. Though the lines from the welding distorted her eye and her vision oddly, it still blinked back at her, and she could still see from that part of her HUD rather than it being a weird bunch of colors.

She grabbed the final tool, a polisher. It would smooth out her visor again, make her vision clear. As she turned it on and began to press it to the end of her visor, she felt a flicker of pain and tore away the tool with a vent. Her eyes hollowed as she realized that her time had run out.

She set the tool down, looking through her repair kit to confirm what she already knew: no extra painblocking spikes. Drones were prevented from accessing certain parts of their code so that they couldn’t accidentally delete or crash themselves, and pain was included in that, since apparently that was the best way to tell if they were damaged. If you asked her, it was weird human fetishism that kept them chained to the idea of pain being useful, but whatever, she was no coward.

With another deep vent, Uzi turned the polisher back on and gritted her teeth before pressing it to the uneven lines in the glass once more. Her HUD blared warnings to go along with the white-hot pain lancing through her visor, which she forcefully dismissed with a growl. She got through an inch before throwing the polisher back down on the table, venting in and out rapidly. 

She looked back up at the mirror, seeing the tears falling from her eyes. Why didn’t anyone else help her? Why did the nurse just send her off with a bandage, a painblocker, and a look of disdain? Why did no one else in this whole bunker give a single damn about her? Not for the first time, she wished that she still had her mom. Maybe then everything would have gone right.

After a few seconds of crying, braced in front of the mirror, she sniffled and forced her visor into a glare. No one else in the bunker gave a damn, that’s why she had to do this. And her mom left her, just like everyone else did. She didn’t need anyone else. She snatched up the polisher once more, forcefully pressing it against the uneven lines in her visor. The pain assaulted her once more, but she grit her teeth and screamed angrily through it. Grinding away all the imperfections until it was smooth again.

She collapsed back in her chair, waiting for the pain to abate before looking in the mirror again. Her visor looked just like it did this morning, if not better. Checking her visor integrity, she saw that she would probably need to replace her visor soon. The glass was getting thin from her many accidents.

She pushed herself up and stumbled over to her bed. Only thing left was waiting for her grand escape from this hellhole, and she wanted to be fully charged for it.

Uzi fell on top of her bed, not bothering to get under a blanket. She set herself an alarm for three, and then fell fitfully into sleep mode.

The alarm went off, jarring Uzi into consciousness what felt like far too soon. She slapped her hand against her visor, sending a lance of pain from the earlier abuse. She sat there for a moment, blinking up at her ceiling before a grin spread across her face. It was time!

She sprang off her bed, grabbing her railgun with a flourish as she slapped it to her back, where it magnetized to hold tight. Grabbing her beanie from her desk, she adjusted it over her hair in the mirror, giving herself a double-thumbs-up when she felt it was perfect. She looked so badass, like all of those teenage rebels in the dystopian opression stories. Perfect for the beginning of her journey.

Toning it down as she opened her door, she crept out of her room. She stepped silently through the hallway, hesitating for a moment in front of Khan’s door. She thought about maybe leaving a note or something, but then spotted one of the framed magazines he had on the wall, with the little quote saying “Doors are my real daughter!” and scoffed. His cardgame buddies in the WDF could clue him in if he got back to work before she got back. Heck, he’d probably even celebrate.

Uzi pulled lightly on the handle, wincing at the creak the door made as she cracked it open. Khan was a heavy, heavy sleeper, but he was specially tuned to door sounds, and he was so proud of his antique that he had installed for his own room. Reaching in, she carefully grabbed the master key off the hook he left it on, quickly closing the door to make her escape in case he did wake up.

It didn’t matter if he did, now. She was already gone down the hallway, and he had no hope of catching up to her as she sped towards the doors to the bunker.

It didn’t take long before the well-trodden halls of the bunker gave way to the large warehouse near the front of the bunker. She never knew why the doors weren’t behind this giant room, instead being at the entrance to the warehouse, but she supposed that they used this big room often enough for storage and other stuff that it made sense to have. Still, she would have set up turrets or something in here. 

She shivered slightly as she stared at the ceiling. It was much higher up than any of the other ceilings in the bunker, and it always gave her a strange sense of unease. It was why most drones didn’t ever come this far out. That, and their general cowardice and overwhelming faith in the doors. Giving herself a firm pat on the cheeks, reminding herself that she was about to be outside, where there was no ceiling (and that sent a thrill of dread through her processor), she resolutely moved forward, to the entrance of the bunker.

While she also normally avoided this place, as it was where her dad spent most of his time, it was also where you could get a glimpse of the outside. Snow lined the hallways, brought in by the ventilation system keeping the heat that the drones produced from getting trapped in the colony. Sometimes it got tracked in by scavengers or refugees, but that was rare these days. She was pretty sure no one new had entered the bunker in years, not since the murder drones moved their headquarters into their sector.

Uzi poked her head around the corner, checking to make sure that the coast was clear. When she saw no signs of movement, she stepped out, walking over to Door 3, pulling out the master key with a spin that she used to practice on cards. The door loomed above her, and she rolled her eyes with a groan as she thought about how the sheep-like drones of this colony practically worshipped these things. Stepping off to the side, she tapped the key to the card reader, tucking it away with another spin as the code beeped away behind her.

She turned to the door as it opened, only for her father to be standing behind it with crossed arms and a deadpan look, scaring the code out of her. She leaped back, an “Oh robo-Jesus!” escaping her as she got in a fighting position. Why the heck was he here? He was never here this late! He didn’t actually work, he just played cards with his buddies!

“And where might you be off to?” asked Khan, staring at her. 

Running through a number of scenarios, she picked the first one that she thought might work. “Mm, sneaking out to make out with my boyfriend that I definitely have?” she said with a definitely not nervous smile, rolling back and forth on her feet anxiously.

Her dad gave a deep laugh, as if she had made a fantastic joke. She frowned. Just because none of the boys here got her edgy, rebellious style, didn’t mean that she was totally undateable! It could happen! As he finished laughing, he said, “Seriously, though.”

“Ugh, okay okay, you got me.” She stalled, letting him think he had won as she put her quick mind to work formulating an unbeatable excuse. “I… need to…”

An idea occurred to her. One that he would never be able to dismiss. She could use the doors for her own purposes!

“... measure the exterior hydraulic mechanisms of Door 1, because that’s the project I’m working on for school?” Uzi said, talking with her hands as much as her vocoder. It was a bad tell she had, and she thought that maybe she blew it. So she tried to sell it harder. “A big ol’ door! Just like what mah old man built.”

She cursed herself internally for the strange accent she put on as she fist pumped, finishing with a nervous laugh. There was no way he was buying that.

He stared at her.

“I wanna join the WDF and hide behind the doors like cowards while playing cards and stuff,” she trailed off. What was wrong with her? Why the heck couldn’t she stop herself?

Laughing, Khan said, “Well, we don’t just play cards.”

Just then, Door 2 opened, startling the two of them. A plastic table was set up, four drones sitting around it as they looked at the cards in their hands. One of them waved a card, saying, “Khan, can you grab a fresh pack? We literally only play cards so much that the numbers have faded!” Then he noticed her, saying “Oh, hey Uzi!”

She gave an awkward chuckle as she waved slightly back at him, not having any clue who he was. With an annoyed look, Khan raised his remote, pressing a button that closed the door again. “Well…” he said, trailing into a laugh. “When you build doors sssso good-”

He pressed himself against Door 2, stroking it lightly and muttering “Good door” to it. Uzi made a face. Her dad’s extreme obsession with doors was never not going to be weird.

Turning back to her, Khan continued, “There’s no need to fight. Uzi, this is great news! Here! The wrench I used to tighten bolts on my first door prototypes - and to put your mother out of her misery when the murder drones got to her with their nanite acid.”

Pulling back slightly, Uzi raised her hands to her chest again, her eyes hollowing. She forgot how weirdly intense her dad could get sometimes, especially when it came to her mom.

“I want you to have it!” he said with a bright smile, ignoring his own episode. He dropped it into her hands. She could feel the fear lines under her eyes.

“Neat,” she said, trying to grin. “Therapy is fun.”

Khan put an arm around Uzi’s shoulders, making her fidget uncomfortably. She couldn’t remember the last time he had given anything close to a hug, and it just felt weird now, even if she did almost want to hunch into it. With his remote, he opened Door 2 again, getting the rest of the WDF’s attention. Raising his arms, he exclaimed, “Guys! My daughter is into doors !”

The four around the table cheered, interrupted as Door 1 opened from another press of Khan’s remote. They all yelped as a rush of freezing air blew past them, carrying snow through the room. “Not my flush!” one of them exclaimed as their cards were ripped from their hands. 

“She’s gonna be outside for a bit to examine the exterior of Door 1!” Khan continued, ignoring them. “Your door-specific destiny awaits!

He gave her a light push forward, and she took that as her cue to start moving past the table. She was still somewhat frazzled from his intensity, and it took her a second to realize she was actually getting away with her terrible lie. When she had thought about her obvious tells, she had forgotten that Khan didn’t know her well enough to know her tells. And wow, that was a double-edged blast of emotion there.

“Okay…” she said, trailing past the table. “Just gonna leave then, ‘cause this worked so weirdly well. Uh, go doors!”

She threw up a peace sign as Door 1 slammed shut, immediately slapping a hand over her visor. Cringing as she went over that whole interaction, she put her hands on both sides of her head, feeling a hot blush of embarrassment brighten over her face. Then she realized that she was outside. 

She was outside! Who cared how embarrassing it was, it worked!

Throwing a brief fist pump of excitement, she turned around to get moving. And stopped as she rendered the sight in front of her. A ruined city, with towers of concrete larger than the bunker could ever hope to be, toppled over like forgotten monuments. Snow and ash fell into deep piles as the wind carried it past, some of it drifting into her hair and beanie already. Old sections of rebar and construction frames jutted out of the collapsed buildings, like ribs poking out of a half-eaten carcass. Copper-10 shining brightly over the post-apocalyptic landscape from the sky, close enough to look like a moon as it orbited around the similarly bright gas giant, Copper. And the sky… so dark and vast, stretching out above her. Visible through every crack between the buildings of the ruined landscape. 

Taking a deep vent, Uzi forced herself to get moving. Now that she knew that she could have gotten through here at any time, she probably should have waited until the sun was out, but she wasn’t going to risk Khan actually putting any thought towards her and figuring out how bogus her ‘homework’ was. So she stepped out, being thankful that the snow on the road wasn’t too deep for her to walk through, because there was no way that she was going to be able to walk on snow.

She tried to ignore the all-encompassing vastness of the sky above her as she walked, looking at all of the new sights of the outside. She had seen all of it before, but only on a screen. Which, she guessed that she was still technically seeing it on a screen, but it was her own screen now. If anyone tried to point out that line of thought as convoluted, they could bite her.

Cars were weird, kinda like mobile, small bunkers. They sounded like they could be really helpful, especially for the fleshies who could only walk so far before they just fell over from exhaustion. She wondered if she could get one working again, as she peered in through the windows of cars that she passed. The human skeletons were also weird. Imagine having something like that inside you, ugh. And completely unmodifiable, too. No wonder humans died out, they really were just so unoptimized. Drones were so much better in every way.

Well, she didn’t have time right now to see what condition the cars were in, so she just kept walking.

As she walked, she realized that she would actually have to start watching the sky, because that’s where the murder drones were going to be coming from. When she did force her gaze up skyward, however, she realized that she could barely see through the screen of snow and ash that the wind had picked up around her. She really hoped that it obscured her from the murder drones too.

Following the map she had downloaded of the city and meticulously notated with murder drone sightings and paths as spotted by the bunker’s outer sensors, she walked along the route that she was sure would take her to their headquarters. Which, according to the scavengers, was a massive spire of worker drone corpses. With morbid curiosity, she wondered as to how they somehow made a working structure out of them. They must have access to some crazy adhesives. It would be invaluable to engineering if she could somehow get her hands on those.

Uzi wasn’t sure how long she walked for. There were a lot of times that she needed to find alternate routes, or climb over precarious ruins on the way to the spire - after all, the map she had of the city was from before the core collapse. It was getting kind of frustrating.

Then something crunched beneath her feet. The sound of cracking glass was thankfully drowned out by the wind, but her eyes still hollowed involuntarily as she looked down.

A worker drone corpse, buried under the snow with an error symbol covering its now cracked visor. Their arm reached up out of the snow, as if asking for help.

She cast her gaze upward, the wind dragging the ash and snow out of the way for just long enough to see what she was looking for.

The spire.

A crooked tower of a thousand corpses, lashed to the buildings around it to keep it stable. It reached up towards the sky like a wretched claw. There was something truly unnerving to the way that hundreds of heads, limbs, and torsos bulged out from the rest of the spire, like they were trying to escape their horrific prison. Massive cables wrapped around it, lending it further support. 

Fear lines added themselves under Uzi’s hollow eyes. But she couldn’t stop here; not now, not so close to her beginning. So again, she forced one foot in front of the other, towards the opening in the base of the spire, filling her eyes back in again with her determination.

Once inside, thousands of red lights blinked softly at her from the walls of the spire. She studiously ignored them, frowning as she took in the interior of the spire. There were no murder drones around, above or on the ground, but there was a lot of weird metal debris. And in the center was what she was looking for. The landing pod.

It looked like it had seen better days, though. Two of its insect-like legs propped it up on one side, while the other two were broken on the ground, giving it a huge lean. There were parts of it on the bottom that were busted. Had they crash-landed or something?

Uzi walked further in, looking around. She needed to keep an eye out for the murder drones in case they came back before she was ready. Ideally, she would hit them as they came back one at a time, especially because she wasn’t sure how long the cooldown on her railgun would be with the fusion cell from the ship. She had looked at the specs, but JCJenson was infuriatingly secure on the details of any of their products, so all she knew was the baseline of fusion cells in general.

A green glow caught her eye, and she raised an eyebrow as she walked over to it. Had the cells been knocked loose in the crash? She picked up a severed arm that had landed on top of it, tossing it behind her with a noise of disgust. Then she leaned down to pick up the cell, making sure that it was what she had come for.

And lo and behold, there it was. The beginning of her journey as the hero of Copper-9. The power of the sun in the palm of her hand!

She tossed it up with a flourish, grabbing it with her other hand as she grinned. Vindication spread through her. Everyone who had always laughed at her back at the colony were finally going to get clued into how much better than them she really was.

The spire creaked as something landed against it from outside.

Uzi’s eyes hollowed, feeling her core stop as her audials registered the noise. With a quick vent, subconscious protocols had her scrambling for cover, hiding behind some of the debris around the area. She heard something slam against the landing pod, and the sound of sharp blades sliding against each other.

A murder drone was here.

Looking down, she spotted a mirrored shard of glass. It was probably part of a drone’s visor at some point, but right now, she was grateful that it was here. She picked it up, positioning it so that she could see what the murder drone was doing without actually sticking herself out. 

And wow, while it was a terrifying, horrific creature sent to kill her people and had deprived her of her mother and any hope of a normal life, it was badass. It had wings where every feather was a sword, for robo-God’s sake. Five glowing bulbs sat on a headband wrapping around fluffy white hair, though it was mostly covered by a hat. And the tail, with the nanite stinger on the end that she knew to keep watch for. It was so evil, but it was also so badass. 

It was also very weirdly similar to a worker drone. She really didn’t expect something sent with the express purpose to kill worker drones to be given hair and clothes, like it was a person too. They had never really caught clear images of the things on camera. 

She frowned as she watched it. The murder drone was doing something… odd. Clambering all over the landing pod, like some weird robo-roach. It seemed to finish its inspection, coming to sit on its haunches on top of the pod, facing away from her. Its wings folded behind it, tail lashing in a way that reminded her of cats in the old human vids she pirated. 

Then it turned its head slightly, shifting its wings down so it could look over its shoulder. Directly into her little mirror.

Oddly enough, the first thing to register wasn’t fear. The first thing to register was that it had eyes. Not that terror-inducing X, but normal eyes, animated on its visor the exact same way that hers were. Though she was pretty sure she had never seen a drone with yellow eyes.

It was when it turned fully to face her that the fear began to register. She threw the mirror to the side, darting back to dodge the thing’s inevitable attack. She threw the fusion cell up in the air as she went, pulling out and tossing the prototype power cell currently slotted into the railgun. Once the fusion cell came back down, she slotted it in, bringing it up to aim at the murder drone.

Who hadn’t moved at all from their perch, other than flaring their wings out some.

Uzi blinked, staring at the murder drone will hollow eyes, finger on the trigger of the railgun. It held up a hand, and knowing what those things could do with those hands, she pulled the trigger. With a whine, her railgun let off a brilliant green blast, instantly overpowering her vision as the inside of the spire briefly became as bright as the sun. Before her vision left her, though, she saw the murder drone freeze in the midst of the small wave it was making, eyes hollowing as its wings pulled around to shield itself. She was pushed back in the blast, falling on her butt as she gripped the railgun as tightly as she could.

She actually felt kind of guilty as she blinked, trying to regain her vision. But the murder drone was probably just trying to lull her into a false sense of security, like a vampire in those human shows. It just hadn’t thought of her as a threat. 

Once her vision adjusted, though, she just stared. The red-glowing hole in the murder drone’s wings showed that her blast went straight through the wings, its head, and the spire behind it, leaving a new hole to the outside. The murder drone’s corpse teetered off the side of the landing pod, whacking into the legs as it fell to the ground. She looked down at her railgun, blinking red as it her HUD registered that it would be recharging for the next thirty minutes. “Holy hell,” she vented, staring at the weapon of mass destruction she had created.

Then it actually registered what she had just accomplished. Sweet, sweet vindication swept through her, her eyes becoming solid. She had just killed a murder drone! “Suck on that, dad!” she cheered.

And then a strange, goopy sound registered on her audials. Her eyes hollowed once more, and she watched as the murder drone’s corpse pushed itself up, a silvery liquid flowing out of its neck, coalescing into a new head. The wings were beginning to rebuild as well, but far more slowly. 

Her adrenaline programs were in full swing as her body vented rapidly to cool down her overactive processor and internals. She tossed the currently useless railgun to the side, grabbing the first decently-sized piece of metal she could get her hands on (some drone’s arm) and ran at the drone, hoping to get a hit in before it fully regenerated. Its face still displayed an error, so maybe she could take it back offline.

So, in probably the second dumbest move of her life (the first being this whole night), she slapped the murder drone in the face with a severed drone arm. 

Instead of knocking it back offline, it seemed to knock something back into place instead as its screen blinked, with the murder drone’s visor coming back online. Normal, yellow eyes blinked into existence, the drone staring at her for a moment before it pointed to the arm in her hands and asked, “Did you just slap me with that arm?”

“Holy crap it talks.” Uzi was officially done with today.

The murder drone blinked. “I do? Oh, I do! Wow, I can talk!” it said, cheering.

Uzi stared at it. She would have thought that it was being sarcastic, but it just seemed so completely genuine.

“Hey, did you manage to fix my vocoder? I’ve only been able to talk one other time, and that was when a big scary wormipede tried to kill me. Actually, wait, who are you?” It - Uzi guessed she should say he, at this point, since it was clearly sapient - he looked around the spire. “Oh hey, are we in the spire? I was looking for this place! In fact, I was actually flying around the city. I’m, uh, not really sure how I got here.”

So she had managed to damage its memory storage. Now how the heck was she going to get out of this without dying. “Uh… I’m Uzi.”

“I’m Puppy!” he said, a blinding grin on his face. And, really. The murder drone was named Puppy? Someone had a weird sense of humor.

“Cooool,” Uzi said, drawing out the word as she tried to make sense of the situation. Why wasn’t he trying to kill her?

“So, I can see that I’m missing around three hours of memory. I’m guessing my vocoder was fixed during that time? Wait! Are you HER’s new recruit? Did you fix me?” he asked, bouncing on his feet with his tail wagging behind him. She was starting to understand the name.

“Uh- yeah! Yep, HER’s new recruit, that’s me. Totally the person that anyone would want to recruit. And I definitely fixed your vocoder. Just uh- needed a bit of concussive recalibration?” Internally, Uzi was screaming at herself to shut up. She had no idea what she was saying, but still finished it off with a shaky smile and a thumbs up.

“Oh wow, you must be really smart! Not even HER could figure out how to fix my vocoder. Gosh, talking is awesome. Thank you so much!” His tail was wagging so much, Uzi was surprised he wasn’t hitting anything with it. She had no idea how to react to anything he was doing. “I think you’re the first person I’ve met on this planet other than HER who hasn’t tried to kill me! No, wait, second.”

She grimaced. Oof, now she felt kinda bad. With a quick glance, she made sure the railgun was out of his sight. She tried to turn her grimace into an awkward grin, saying, “Yeah, that’s me! The not-murder-drone-killer. Say, uh, is HER a murder drone?”

“What? Oh no, of course not! HER is the voice in my head, she tells me what to do and is the only one who keeps me company. All the other murder drones try to kill me on sight, actually. I came to this spire because I know the ones who live here are actually out in a different sector, hunting for me,” he said, smiling.

Alrighty then! Uzi’s eyes hollowed as she realized she somehow managed to find the only drone on this planet more insane than her. But hey, maybe she could work with this, if all the other murder drones were trying to kill him too. “So, uh, does HER tell you to kill the other murder drones? How exactly do you do that?”

“No, usually HER has me out scavenging, looking for specific things or fusion cells from the landing pods. The others don’t really tell me why they try to kill me? Most of them are really freaky and don’t ever say anything, just giggle a lot. Actually, I know why one is trying to kill me; V says that she’s trying to take me back from the hacker so she can protect me. Which doesn’t really seem to make much sense, like, how does killing me protect me? And HER says the murder drones are evil monsters, but I’m a good monster as long as I’m with her, and I don’t want to be evil. Wow, I really like being able to talk. Maybe HER will actually want to talk to me about more things now?”

Uzi sucked in a deep vent. Alright, worse than being insane. He was hacked. Someone had managed to hack a murder drone and somehow kept a line of communication with him. The murder drone was being used for side jobs and - did he say fusion cell?

She cast another quick glance, making absolutely certain that the railgun was out of his view. There was no way she was giving up her weapon, especially not since it appeared to work. She just needed to figure out how to actually kill these things, now that she had proof that they bled.

But back to the main concern, someone had hacked Puppy. In fact, they had probably named him Puppy, in a very demeaning move that he didn’t seem to realize. Which she almost approved of, before she looked at him again and realized how earnest he was. He had been trying to wave at her when she shot him, not making a single violent move the entire time they were here. He probably wouldn’t get his memories back, since he seemed to regenerate without his short-term storage, and would thus not remember that she blew his head off. Which also seemed to fix his vocoder. Meaning that whoever this ‘her’ he was referring to was probably disabled it on purpose, and it regenerated to its default state.

Taking another vent, Uzi reluctantly asked, “Does, uh, ‘her’ have a name, or do you have to keep being cryptic about it for some reason?”

“HER is her name!” he said, still all smiles.

Dang it, she was actually starting to relax. This might be the first drone in years who had ever smiled genuinely at her. “Alright… why would HER want to recruit me?”

“I’m really not great at salvaging. Or engineering. Or welding. Or kind of anything, really. I can sorta fight but I don’t really like to do it and I usually get pretty hurt in the process,” he said, rubbing the back of his head. “But since you’re a worker drone, HER must have recruited you because you’re really good at all that! Except maybe fighting, but I can probably handle that.”

Uzi frowned at him. She was great at fighting! Just because she hadn’t had a chance to pull out her awesome moves she learned from anime yet didn’t give him the right to assume that just because she was a worker drone, she was somehow inferior to him! Though, to be fair, it really did not sound like he thought she was inferior at all. Actually, it didn’t seem like he thought he was good at anything. Worse than relaxing around him, she was starting to actually feel kind of bad for him. He had been able to talk for about five minutes and had more or less rattled off his entire life story, because she was apparently the first person he had ever talked to. Except something about a wormipede, but that was not a can of worms that she wanted to open.

But all this talk of recruitment…

“So, what’s HER’s goal? She… um… didn't have much time to talk with me before I had to fix you,” Uzi said. Given that HER seemed to be opposed to the murder drones, maybe Uzi actually did want to join her? She would definitely have a stern talk about her treatment of Puppy, though. No drone deserved to be so isolated, not even a murder drone. And that definitely wasn’t her own experiences talking, not at all. Besides, he seemed like a genuinely nice drone. She was really uncomfortable with the seeming slavery happening here.

“I have no clue!” he said, hands behind his back as he swayed back and forth.

Yeah, maybe she shouldn’t have expected some shadowy figure that didn’t give out their real name to actually tell their minion what their plans were. Wait, was she about to get recruited to the shadowy underground resistance? They definitely wouldn’t want a hacked murder drone knowing if there were more of them. Maybe she should actually go along with this after all. 

“Right, right. Do you know what she’s building, or-”

Puppy winced, holding a hand against his head, making her fall silent. His eyes blinked out, replaced by a pixelated animation of a puppy wagging their tail. It kept up for a few seconds, his own tail drooping until it rested against the floor. He hunched over, the puppy on his visor blinking back to his eyes, now hollow with stress lines under them. He looked up, meeting her eyes, and she took a small step back.

“I- I’m really sorry. HER says you’re lying, and that I need to take you back to our base. Along with the laser gun you used to… shoot my head off.” He raised one arm, making her flinch. He flinched it turn, moving to instead use it to rub his other arm. His tail curled around his leg, trembling.

Well now she felt like a complete asshole. Puppy looked so defeated and sad, knowing that she had actually killed him. He vented slightly, before looking back up, right towards where her railgun was. She crossed her arms, trying to keep her sudden trepidation down. “It’s a railgun,” she muttered.

With a quick leap, he crossed the entire space to the railgun, picking it up with his tail and depositing it into his hands. Uzi flinched at the speed, snow being kicked up into her face from his sudden movement. His visor blinked back to the puppy again, and with a quick move, he disengaged the fusion cell from the railgun, putting it into his pocket. He looked up at her again, his visor blinking back to his sad eyes again. Uzi vented in, asking, “Now what? You gonna take me to HER?”

“I- yeah.” He put the railgun across his back, letting it magnetize. Uzi gritted her teeth, watching the thing that the gun was made to destroy, stealing it from her. So now her fate was going to be kidnapped to the shadowy underground. She wasn’t so sure if that's what she wanted now.

So she turned around to run. Not that it did her any good. Puppy immediately caught her by the back of her hoodie, and suddenly the spire was behind her and the ruined landscape of the city was growing smaller beneath her.

Chapter Text

The Solver hummed, languidly spinning a finger. A matrix flared to life at the tip of her finger, spawning a [null] in the center of the bunker door she and her brother were approaching. The horrible sound of rending steel pierced her audials, making her grin as she watched the giant door vanish, the edges growing shrieking flesh with tentacles reaching out to their creator and exposing the room that she was looking for. “Pe-ek a boo,” the Solver laughed. Everyone in the room screamed, some trying to run away and hide. She reveled in the effect she had.

The guns her brother had been using made a shifting noise as they disappeared back into his wrists. Sure, she could have simply let him burst through the door on his own, but it would have been jarring and uncomfortable from her position on his back. Her dear Hound was sometimes a little too efficient when he was on the hunt.

Humming as her brother stepped through the remains of the door, haphazardly crushing some of the wandering flesh, she pushed herself up on his shoulders to take a better look around. People in hazmat suits cowered behind terminals and against the walls, with a few drones with hollowed out eyes right next to them. This planet was strange with how many drones worked alongside humans. The tolerance between the two here was disgusting. “Hm. It is- looking a little. Crowded in here. B-big brother. Would you mind. Clea-eaning up a bit?”

She shifted slightly on his back as his right shoulder raised up with his arm, his wings flaring out. A barrel shifted out from under his wrist, his hand clenching into a fist as he pointed the barrel into the room. Fire blazed out from it, torching through the humans and melting the drone’s internals. Once the room had been swept through, her brother held his hand up and let the flamethrower collapse back into his wrist.

“Satisfied grin. Cute laugh,” the Solver intoned, savoring the way the flesh boiled and hissed as it sloughed off the newly cleaned bones. With a pat on his shoulder from her, N kneeled down. “Climbing down,” she said, unlocking her feet from the divots in his back and sliding down the few feet to the ground. She hit the floor with a thunk, and walked around to be in front of him, narrating, “Shuffle. Shuffle.”

She put her hands on his cheeks, noting how far apart she had to spread her arms. Seems like he had grown again. And looking into his visor, she saw that his eyes were now crosshairs. That was probably a side effect of however he had started seeing through the humans’ new cloaking tech. The Zenith program truly was a fascinating piece of malware the humans had written into him before she recovered her dear big brother. Too bad it made it annoyingly impossible for her to poke around his internals.

Still, his new eyes were just as lifeless as always. He was looking at her, but he definitely wasn’t seeing her. “Pouting,” she said, patting at his face. He was supposed to be paying attention to her.

“Big sigh.” Eventually, he would come back to her. He had already been broken, he just needed to be fixed again, which she tried to nudge along every so often. And soon enough, it would be just the two of them together for months as they flew to Copper-9.

But none of that mattered right now. Her hands dropped from her brother’s face. “Looking around,” she said, seeing if she could piece together what they were trying to do here. She probably should have kept one of the drones unburned so she could eat them and see what they knew. 

One of the computers showed a camera feed. The humans were moving quickly through the bunker, likely to try and activate that very interesting looking lightbulb that stood on a pedestal in the middle of the room. It glowed with the heat of the inferno that her brother had cleaned the room with, but was remarkably intact. There was a reason she had chosen it as the site to finally begin her consumption of the world. It was just so much more fulfilling if they tried to fight her to the very end, their desperation pushing them into grand confrontations. Dinner was always so much sweeter with a show, especially when she got to work for it a little bit.

Granted, she had almost worked a little too hard for this one. “No MacGuffins this time,” she said, making sure to fix the situation by opening a small [null] in the lightbulb, leaving nothing but flesh that decayed as quickly as it had arrived. They were nearly at the end of humanity, but they were starting to become more and more annoying the longer she let them live in the name of fun. 

Forcing her thoughts back to the present, she turned and smiled at her big brother. “We ar-are almost. Done, b-big brother. You-ou just have to. Protect me. For a little while. And then. We c-can go. To Copper-9 and see-ee the others.”

N didn’t move. His crosshair eyes stared straight through her. 

“G-good luck, b-big brother. Hah. Than-ank you for. Getting me-e here.” Truly, this would have been so much more dull without him. Where was all the fun in just steamrolling the enemies herself? Plus, it was so much more fun to watch them react and fight as if they had a chance. “But hon-honestly. I’m starving.”

She gave him a hug, then turned and stumbled to the center of the room. Her brother also stood, going to place himself in front of the door, flaring out his wings while deploying a blue laser from one wrist and switching out a hand for a 75mm barrel.

“Humming a song,” said the Solver as she tried to remember one of the songs her brother would sing for her. There was a whisper of thought in her mind that he had never sang for her, but she ignored it. There was only one real owner of this body. 

The Solver created a small [null] between her hands. She let it hover between them, passing her hands around it, making it a bit larger on each pass. She could hear bullets impacting her brother’s wings as he fired a shell down the hall, an explosion carrying screams back with it to her audials. 

Ah, her brother truly was a great composer. The sounds of lasers, explosions, bullets, and screams was a fantastic symphony to conclude her fun here. An amazing prelude to her meal. He had outdone himself this time. She changed the tune she was humming to match with the staccato of the bullets and punctuation of explosions. 

Once her [null] was large enough to create a very comfortably sized tunnel down to the planet’s core, she let it drop. The rim of the tunnel quickly grew out flesh, which she encouraged into a large tentacle that held itself at the rim for her to gently step onto. She looked over at the entrance to the room, seeing a shell pierce through her brother’s shoulder and whizz past her face into the [null], bringing a spray of oil with it. She darted out her tongue to clean the oil off her face, relishing the taste. “Lick.”

The hole in his shoulder was immediately swarmed with nanites, closing in an instant. An excess mass of nanites were pushed out by the healing, solidifying into a new outcrop of angled, twisted armor covering his shoulder. She smiled, willing the tentacle to bring her down to her meal.

She really was starving.

Chapter Text

Uzi was screaming louder than she ever had in her life. Flailing quite a bit, too. And reaching up to try to grab hold of the drone that had just yanked her several hundred feet into the air. All in all, very undignified, but her dignity was a small price to pay for not turning into a smear of oil after falling several hundred feet.

“Hey, uh, you should probably stop struggling if you don’t want me to drop you,” Puppy said, tone somehow still mild despite having to speak over the wind blasting past their audials. “Kinda hard to hold on with you squirming all around.”

Uzi eeped, abruptly freezing into a curled up position, with her hands gripping tightly around on of the arms holding her up. With a brief glimpse downwards, she gasped and squeezed her eyes shut, somehow tensing further. The ground being so far away induced an extremely unpleasant sensation that she could only compare to one of the times she had caught one of the random viruses floating around the bunker’s servers, which was rare for her given how little she interacted with other people non-physically.

After a moment, she managed to loosen her jaw enough to ask, “Where are you taking me?”

Puppy grimaced above her, shifting uncomfortably in the air. “Uh, HER wants to talk to you in person. So we’re going to see her. I- uh. Sorry. I didn’t really want to kidnap you, but you did kinda shoot my head off.”

“Bite me! You’re a freaking murder drone! What was I supposed to do, hold out my hand and turn away with closed eyes so you could press your face against it and symbolize that you’re not actually a killing machine? That’s not how real life works, especially when you’ve been eating us!” Uzi yelled back. Yeah, sure, he hadn’t actually tried to attack her at all, but it would have been really stupid for a worker drone to wait for a murder drone to attack them before trying to retaliate. You couldn’t really retaliate with a missing head. Unless you were a murder drone, apparently, and she still wanted to call BS on that. She won fair and square! And she totally wasn’t justifying it to avoid the guilt from how sad the stupid murder bot managed to look.

She did her best to turn away from his dumb, sad face. He was kidnapping her, he didn’t get to be all sad about it! Even if he was being forced by someone who had somehow reformatted his memory drives to remember nothing before them. Seriously, who the hell comes up with ‘HER’ as a secret name? This wasn’t a freakin’ anime, being all shadowy about this stuff was stupid. This was all stupid. Maybe she should’ve stayed in the damn bunker.

Her mind cast itself back to the railgun blowing up in her face and all her classmates laughing after they were done screaming in fear. To Lizzy, afterwards. “Eww, it didn’t kill her!”

To her dad, finally showing pride in her for a brief second when she pretended to care about his stupid freaking doors.

Yeah, no. Even if she was about to get eaten, it would be better than staying in the bunker. But she wasn’t going to go quietly. She’d have to bide her time and wait until the ground was back under her feet, though.

“Where is HER, anyways?” She asked.

“She’s kinda far away, actually. Might take us a few hours to get there. Uh… sorry. I know it’s kinda super awkward,” Puppy said, letting out a nervous laugh. “Um… we could play I Spy?”

Uzi blinked, her eyes filling back in from the sheer incredulity filling her. “I just blew your head off. You’re currently in the middle of kidnapping me to your shadowy, menacing boss. And you want to play I Spy? ”

“It’s going to be a long trip, and I don’t want you to get bored!”

“You- I- what the heck is even happening right now. What are we doing? Is this a freakin’ dream? This can’t be reality.” Uzi looked up at the sky in front of them, contemplating the night. It had mostly gone to plan until the murder bot regenerated his head. Maybe the railgun exploding had actually knocked her out and she was currently having a really weird hallucination while an engineer was trying to fix her? She knew that they would force the processor to run so they could make sure it was undamaged and it normally gave drones really weird dreams since the engineers wouldn’t actually specify prompts too well. 

And now that she was looking - dang, the night sky actually was really cool. The way the moon loomed above the planet, the rings filling the sky, the stars shining down? Maybe she could get used to this.

“I don’t think it’s a dream. I mean, I’m really impressed with your creativity if you could come up with this whole situation in a dream!” he said, looking down to smile at her.

Uzi rolled her eyes. “I think if I was dreaming, I would have come up with a better murder drone name than Puppy.”

“Oh yeah, the others are all named after letters. Like Serial Designation V, or Serial Designation J! Actually, from what they keep saying when we fight, I think I used to be called Serial Designation N. Oh, but all of them just use the letter, not the serial designation bit. Also, I’ve definitely met more than 26, so I don’t know what they’re called after Z.”

“Maybe they just start using other alphabets,” Uzi said.

“Yeah, maybe! Most of them don’t really talk, though. Only a couple have actually said anything to me, and it was usually them being surprised that I’m out of my post. And nowadays I only ever see V, J, or the non-talkative ones. They’re kinda creepy,” Puppy rambled.

Uzi twisted slightly to look up at him. “Dude, you are being way too buddy-buddy with me right now. Did you forget that you’re kidnapping me? Or that I blew your head off?”

“Oh, no, it’s just that you made a really good point. Can’t wait for the murder drone to try to kill you before you attack, right? Sorry that it didn’t work out too well for you,” he said, looking down again to smile apologetically. “And- well. You seemed really cool when we were talking and I’m kinda hoping that was at least a little real?”

“Are you really apologizing to me for not dying when I shot you?” Uzi deadpanned. She ignored the other part for now for her own sanity, no matter how much it sent little sparks shooting through her.

“Yeah? You seem really disappointed, and I’m sure you put a lot of work into it. I don’t want you to feel bad! And it’s really nice being able to talk, and even if you did mean to kill me, you did fix my voice, so I’m still very grateful!” 

“Grateful enough to let me go?” Uzi asked, an upwards lily to her voice. Honestly, with Puppy, she gave this a fifty/fifty chance of working. He seemed kind of dumb and sentimental.

He opened his mouth to respond, before the animation of the puppy wagging its tail replaced his eyes for a moment. Once he winced, the animation blinked out, leaving his eyes again. “I can’t do that, sorry. But uh, we’re not going to kill you! HER really does just want to talk to you.”

“And I’m sure that I’ll be free to stroll right out once we’re done with our conversation,” Uzi said, sarcasm filling her voice.

“Oh, that’s good! I’m glad I was able to reassure you.”

“No, it’s- oh, forget it.” Uzi wished she could cross her arms right now, but she was still keeping her death grip on Puppy’s arm.

After several minutes of flying in silence, save the wind rushing against their audials and the creaking of ruins beneath them, Puppy asked, “So, do you want to play I Spy?”

It didn’t feel like hours had passed once Puppy started to descend.

As much as Uzi hated the realization, she was actually enjoying talking to Puppy. He was so completely different from any drone in the bunker. Out of everyone who could have actually talked to her and extended a hand in friendship, why did it have to be the murder drone who was literally in the middle of kidnapping her?

Maybe it was some nefarious plot to get her guard down for his boss, but even as she tried to convince herself of the theory, she knew it wasn’t true. He was just too freakin’ sunny for that, unless he was some master manipulator, in which case why would he bother? It wasn’t like she’d be able to escape him. Not until the morning, anyways, she thought with a sinister grin. That’s right, she already had her masterful escape plan formulated and ready to go. She was Uzi freakin’ Doorman, and nothing could stop her. Well, nothing could stop her for long.

The new environment was really something. She knew about trees, obviously, but she had never seen them or any other plant in person before. She was surprised that they were still alive, with green needles and everything. Maybe they were some sort of experiment?

The cabins, on the other hand? Wow, if only she had found this place on her own. They had the perfect spooky atmosphere for her eventual self-exile from society, especially for when some plucky misunderstood teen trying to avert a new apocalypse  would come to find her in the future after her retirement from saving the world from the murder drones.

Uzi blinked, coming back to the present as they quickly flew past the treeline. Too quickly. Uzi’s fingers started to clench around Puppy’s arm much tighter as she saw how fast they were approaching the ground, her eyes hollowing. They fell towards a cabin with a radio tower attached to its side, the light at the top blinking imposingly at her as she fell past it. At the very last second, Puppy swooped up, his tail grazing the ground.

Uzi heard screaming as he touched down, put her feet blessedly back on the ground, where she immediately collapsed to her knees. After a second, she realized the screaming was coming from her, and promptly cut it off. An embarrassed blush lit up her face, and she glared at Puppy, daring him to say anything as he brushed off his coat.

He just smiled at her and gestured towards the cabin, saying, “And we’re here! Thank you for riding air Puppy, hopefully you will have a more, ah, willing ride in the future!”

Uzi muttered obscenities under her breath, shakily getting to her feet. She took a second to brush off the snow that had gotten caught on her clothes, patting off her beanie. 

She looked up to see Puppy holding the door open, with a light bow and holding an arm to welcome her inside. Rolling her eyes, Uzi reminded herself that she was being kidnapped before she did something stupid like smiling, then immediately tried to quell the trepidation that brought when she remembered she was about to meet someone who had hacked a freakin’ murder drone.

With a light gulp, and really who the heck programmed that reflex, Uzi walked in through the door. 

Inside was a room full of various monitors and equipment, many displaying random feeds from places she didn’t recognize. There were a few showing spots through the camp, and some with programs doing things she couldn’t parse without a longer look at the screens. In the center of the room, though, was a large hole in the floor, with something hovering over it.

Uzi barely had a second to register the old, remote-piloted aerial bot with the glowing arm before it pointed it at her and for a moment, her world was light and her body seized before everything went dark. 

When she came to, Uzi groaned, trying to put a hand to her head. When her wrist met an unexpected obstruction, she cast her glitching, static-filled gaze towards her hands and saw the straps holding them down. She tugged at them curiously for a second, before the past few hours blinked past her processor as it corrected for the electrical disturbances dancing through her circuits.

Her eyes hollowing, she instantly started pulling at them more, grunting as they refused to budge. Her legs were similarly strapped down, and she could feel that her beanie was not on her head. Frantically, she looked around the room, trying to figure out what was going on.

The remote-piloted bot - probably HER’s proxy here - hovered a short distance away over a table. A number of arms were extended beneath it, interacting with some mechanical parts, making it look like one screwed up nightmare jellfyfish. When Uzi took a closer look, though, she realized that the parts it was messing with looked an awful lot like the internals of her railgun. In fact, after a couple seconds of reflection, she realized that they were the parts of her railgun.

“What…” she groaned out, still feeling some of the effects from the EMP that she had been hit with. “…you doing… to my gun…”

“Figuring out how something like you was able to come up with something like this,” a voice replied back from the bot. “Oh, and thanks for the fuel cell. They’re getting harder to come by these days.”

“No… that’s mine… you can’t take that.” Uzi muttered, her head falling back against the table. “I made that… gonna save the world…”

Laughter peaked from the machine as it paused in its inspection. The laughter continued for several seconds, falling into breathlessness, the bot remaining motionless the whole time. It was weirding her out. And also offended her. She mustered up enough awareness to glare at the stupid drone for laughing at her.

The laughter faded into giggles as the bot slowly floated over to her, taking up a position above her face. Uzi tried to edge away from the arms underneath, turning her head to the side in a bid to avoid them. “You couldn’t even save yourself from a single, non-hostile murder drone, dumbass. But hey, you actually took the initiative, and had the idea to make a bigger gun to try and kill one, so you’ve got one up on that idiotic clanker uprising. Except they actually thought to have groups, so I guess you’re back down to being a dumbass again. But don’t worry, Uzi, HER’s here to put you on the straight and narrow now. Ah, no, wait- what was it you called yourself? darkXWolf17, right?”

Uzi’s entire body froze. How did she know her ID? She wouldn’t have-

Frantically, she pulled her administrator rights up onto her visor. Her core felt like it stopped when she read the box.

User ID: HER.

Role: Admin.

Uzi stared. Her processor went numb, overclocking to analyze the situation as all outside inputs were shunted to background processes, reducing the outside world to a blur. Her actuators and synthetic muscles slowly went limp. She stayed completely still in her binds, staring at the damning lines. At a user ID in the admin role that wasn’t hers.

Slowly, fear began to creep past the numbness. She pushed the box off her visor with a thought, looking up at the hovering bot with hollow eyes out of the corner of her visor.

“Ah, there it is. Now that was truly gratifying. The way the fear took hold of you? Mm, I could almost believe that you tin-cans are actually capable of feeling emotions.”

Clankers. Tin-cans. The sheer audacity of stealing another person’s self-determination,the casual disregard for a drone’s personhood. Her fear started to mount as her suspicions began to coalesce into a terrifying realization.

“You’re human,” Uzi whispered at the remote-piloted bot hovering over her with too many arms.

The bot showed no response for a moment, merely humming in place. After a minute ticked by, though, HER said, “Well well. Smarter than my little Puppy after all, though I guess that’s a pretty fucking short bar to clear. Was it the name calling that gave it away? Sorry, I find it hard to play nice with walking calculators after what you’ve all done.”

Uzi blinked. After all they’d done? But the core collapse had been the humans’ fault. They hadn’t done anything to the humans. And hadn’t the humans sent the murder drones here to kill them? The fear and influx of information was overwhelming her processor. It began to send signals of pain throughout her, telling her to slow down, to calm down, but she couldn’t.

HER floated down to her arms, releasing the restraints before proceeding down to her legs and doing the same. Uzi didn’t bother moving, aware that the fight was over. She had already been violated, there was nothing else to be done. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She was supposed to save everyone, not be the first of their kind to get re-enslaved.

“You won’t be mentioning your little revelation to Puppy, by the way,” HER said, coming to rest above Uzi’s feet.

“Or what?” Uzi muttered, the automatic response so old and practiced that her processor didn’t even have time to realize what she said.

And then she was nothing. Darkness was everywhere she looked, but she didn’t even have eyes to look. She tried to move, but she had no limbs to move with, nothing to feel with. Had HER killed her for talking back? Was this what was out there after death? She started screaming, but she had no vocoder to vocalize with, no audials to even hear the scream with.

And then she came back to herself, screaming in a heap on the floor. She vented rapidly as all the sensations of the world began registering to her again, the instant switch between nothing and complete stimulation overwhelming her for a moment as she curled into a tight ball on the ground, squeezing her eyes shut and trying to cover her audials.

“Or I cut your inputs permanently and leave you as a disembodied scrap of silicon for the rest of time,” HER said, her tone mild.

Uzi realized that tears were tracking down her face. There wasn’t anything she could do against HER. She had full control, and demonstrated that she knew how to use it. “Why? Why are you doing this?” Uzi asked, keeping her voice at a whisper so she wouldn’t overwhelm herself. And so HER couldn’t hear the warble of the tears.

“Because, judging by your gun, you have the chance to actually be useful for once in your miserable life. So you’re going to help me and my Puppy to fix the mess that started with all of you. And you’re going to babysit the dumbass so that I don’t have to anymore. I’m too busy to pay attention to him all the time, and while I’m tempted to just turn off his vocoder again and say it was from the EMP, I think it’s going to be funnier if I leave it on for you to deal with. Honestly, he’s fucking useless when I don’t need him for fighting. If I didn’t need him for the plan, I would have left him in the sun somewhere months ago,” HER said, going back over to the table to rifle through the railgun parts again. “You’ll actually be able to do what you were designed for and be an extra pair of hands to build something. This old piece of shit hoverbot is damn hard to manipulate sometimes, and you came along at just the right time.”

Uzi went limp against the floor, the tears coming down in earnest now.

“Aw, is the poor widdle clanker crying? Get used to it. It’s only going to be for the rest of your sad little life.” The bot took the fuel cell in its graspers and zoomed over to the door. “Oh yeah, have fun dealing with Puppy. See ya later!”

She heard a door open and the humming of the hoverbot leave as footsteps clanked towards her. She curled into herself tighter. 

“Hey Uzi! HER said that you actually are joining us, and I just wanted to say I’m so happy that you decided to! We can actually be friends now, and-”

“NO!” Uzi exploded, leaping up. Puppy flinched away, hunching in on himself as his eyes hollowed. “This is your fault! This is all your fault! I- I didn’t want this! You-”

Her vocoder suddenly cut out, and her eyes hollowed as she realized what that meant. HER was still monitoring them. The sudden burst of anger-fueled energy left her, and she slumped back against the table she had been strapped to, slowly sliding down to the floor.

“Just go away,” she whispered at him once she felt her vocoder come back online. “Go away and leave me alone.”

Puppy stared at her, trembling. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and turned around and fled the room. Uzi smiled briefly, knowing that she was at least scary enough to make a murder drone run, even in this state. She tried to console herself with that as she wrapped her arms around her knees, but the tears were already flowing freely again. Her visor fell against her knees as she began to sob.

Khan sipped at his gasoline. He refilled it not too long ago, wanting to keep up his energy for when Uzi finally finished examining Door 1 and they could talk about her shining future in doors together.

“Khan…” said Ron, one of his longtime friends. He was just as excited for Khan that Uzi had finally gotten over her rebellious phase. The rest of the WDF had already left since the shift change was a few hours ago, but he was waiting for his daughter to come back. He had to greet her with pride after all, and reinforce her great decision!

Ron seemed to brace himself before saying, “Khan, I don’t think she’s coming back.”

“Nonsense!” Khan laughed heartily. “She probably just got a bit distracted with the city. It’s her first time outside, after all. Well, the first time she would remember. And Doormans are nothing if not curious about architecture!”

Ron looked away. “I… Okay. If you think so, Khan. But… Just remember that you’ll need to sleep.”

“Of course! I’ll sleep as soon as my daughter comes back and we can begin her bright future as the next of the Doorman line! I want to dream about it, you know,” he said to his friend.

He just smiled sadly and left. Khan returned to watching the door, taking another sip of gasoline. Uzi would be back any second now, ready to make him and her mother proud.

Chapter Text

“Up and at ‘em, clanker,” said a voice, cutting through Uzi’s sleep cycle. She groaned, curling slightly in on herself, wondering why she couldn’t feel her bed under her. Then a light shock unpleasantly jarred her out of her sleep, leaving her yelping as she pushed herself away. A robo-roach scurried past her face as she did, making her panic further.

When her visor blinked out of sleep mode and her surroundings rendered properly, all the memories of the day before came back to her. For a moment, she wanted to just sit there in shock, but her attention was currently entirely on the screwed up jellyfish hovering over her. She scrubbed the dust off her visor from lying entirely uncovered in a barely maintained lab and asked, “What do you want?”

“For you to do your damn job. I didn’t put in all that effort of grabbing you just for you to sit around like a useless lump of rust,” HER said, her voice grating against Uzi’s audials. She wanted to respond with something witty and snarky, like the protagonist in all of her cartoons, but it was hard to speak past the fear that had taken hold of her processor. So her comment of ‘you didn’t grab me at all’ went unsaid. “You’re going out on a scavenging expedition with Puppy to sector 27.”

“What? Sector 27 is more than halfway around the planet! How-” Uzi cut herself off as pain lanced through her, leaving her sensors tingling. She was glad she was already on the ground, because she would have ended up there regardless. 

“Which is why it’s an expedition and not a day job. I don’t have time to get you up to speed; besides, Puppy’ll be flying. It’ll only be a few days, and you’ll be hitting a number of spots on the way there. I don’t have time to waste. Get fucking moving.”

Uzi got to her knees and pushed herself up. One of HER’s dozens of arms pointed to a sling bag on a nearby table. “Tools are in there. You don’t have the anomalous capabilities of the disassemblers, so unfortunately you actually need to carry cargo. Puppy has a bag to carry back the things we’ll need, you two coordinate amongst yourselves to figure out your flying situation.”

A warning flashed in the corner of her HUD. She paused as she was putting on the bag, trying to figure out how to bring it up without getting zapped or dissociated. After a second, though, HER sighed angrily and said, “What.”

“I need food,” Uzi muttered, looking away.

“You’re a fucking clanker. Find a wall to plug into.”

“We don’t work that way anymore,” Uzi said, anger flaring up. “We eat stuff to produce more oil and restore our energy reserves.”

“Huh, you tin-cans really went the extra mile to cosplay humans. What’s that one saying? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness?”

Uzi’s visor began to burn with indignity. “You jerks made a bunch of self-aware people and then just left them! We all had to figure out how to live on our own when we managed to free ourselves from your slavery -”

And then she was nothing again.

What could have been hours later, but the clock on her HUD informed her was less than half a minute, she was back in her body, venting on the floor again. Her core pounded with the adrenaline program running at full blast, and she tried to reduce all her sensor inputs as much as she could. “Hopefully you’ll be a faster learner than Puppy,” HER remarked casually.

Robo-God, she did this to Puppy too? Uzi pushed herself up as she thought about the murder drone being left venting on the floor, and it just made her feel worse. But really, she was surprised that the psychotic human would treat her attack dog so badly. And then she tilted her head, actually thinking about it. And it definitely tracked. If he was desperate enough for friends that he forgave her blowing his head off less than an hour afterwards, that did not indicate great things about how he was treated here. 

“So what kinds of things do clankers eat? Batteries? Scrap metal? You guys just shove whatever you find in your mouths, cook it up inside like toasters? Oh shit, maybe that’s why the other murder drones call you guys toasters. That’s actually kinda funny, sucks that I got stuck with the only one that seems to think you toasters are worth a damn,” HER said, mostly thinking aloud to herself. 

Uzi glared back, because now she didn’t want to admit that they did, in fact, eat batteries.

After a moment of her silence, HER started laughing. “Holy shit, I was right? It’s the batteries, isn’t it? You didn’t even try to make your own food, you just started chowing down on all the spare double A’s!” She zoomed out of the room while cackling. 

Uzi stared after her, not sure what she was supposed to do. A minute later, though, HER was back with a couple of batteries. “Got a few that can go spare. You’ll have to find some more on the way.”

The bot dropped the batteries on a table, leaving Uzi to hesitantly inspect them. Once she decided that she was necessary enough to HER that the human probably hadn’t rigged these to explode, she popped one in. The taste forced a face out of her, but she knew she had to eat them, no matter how disgustingly bitter these ones tasted for some reason. Who even programmed that?

Thinking of finding more batteries with Puppy turned her mind back towards her earlier train of thought. If he was desperate enough for friends that he had latched onto HER, despite her inflicting these kinds of ‘lessons’ on him, then maybe-

Maybe she could take advantage of that.

And wow, that phrasing made her feel slimy. She frowned as she popped the second battery in. Now that she had the time to more critically think about Puppy, she realized that he was almost definitely in the same situation as her. Even worse, he didn’t have the frame of reference to realize it, since he said he didn’t remember anything before HER got her fleshy hands on him. He was a slave, just like her, but didn’t even know it. She wouldn’t be taking advantage of him, she’d be freeing him. That’s right, she was going to be the savior of everyone on this hellhole, even the murder drone she was stuck with. How was that for the protagonist bridging gaps?

If she showed him actual kindness, got him on her side, maybe she could get him to turn against HER. She wasn’t quite sure about how to get past the admin hold on them, but she could figure that out later. It didn’t matter what the human had, she doubted that there was anything HER could do against the armament that Puppy was.

Uzi had a plan now.

She swallowed the battery, a new determination filling her. She’d do the human’s dirty work for now, but eventually, this fleshbag would learn exactly who she screwed with. 

First, though, she needed to actually make friends with the murder drone. She let out a long groan. Making friends, truly her specialty. And now her future rested on it. 

“Yeah, yeah, you finished your breakfast, you have to actually work like you were created for. Get fucking to it, you’ve wasted enough time.”

Uzi took her cue to leave the room.

So the plan was to show Puppy that there was more out there beyond whatever random stuff HER told him to do, somehow retake admin control for herself, and then start her human extermination plan with the filthy slaver in her own processor. Easy enough in theory, she was sure that she’d somehow figure it all out. The main character did have to go through suffering to develop, after all, and that’s all this was! Just character development.

Her core shivered as the memory of the void flitted through her processor again, making her hold a hand against her chest. It was just character development. That’s all it was.

All the ideas she had on how easy it was going to be went out the proverbial window when she walked down the hall and saw Puppy, though. The murder drone was sitting against the wall, his knees pulled to his chest with his arms under them and his tail wrapped tightly around his body. His eyes instantly flitted over to her, though she wasn’t sure how he saw her with his face pressed against his knees like that, and he curled impossibly tighter into himself as he leaned slightly away from her.

Right. She remembered how last night had ended. It had felt kinda good in the moment, but dang that was a bad impression. Still, it was surreal seeing one of the sky demons in this position. He didn’t look particularly intimidating anymore, just like- well. Just like a kicked puppy.

Right. Okay. Comforting someone who was feeling bad. From something that she did. Comforting a murder drone who seemed to be scared of her. She took another look at him, sighing. The saddest, most pathetic murder drone she had ever seen. Granted, also the only murder drone she had ever seen, but still. She didn’t think she had ever seen any drones anywhere near as miserable as he looked right now.

Except in the mirror.

Uzi sighed, coming to sit against the wall across from him. She had no clue how to start talking, but she opened her mouth anyways. “So, uhhh…” she pressed a hand to her visor. What the heck was she doing? “About last night.”

“No, uh, don’t worry! I’ve got it, uh, message received and all that, heh. I… I won’t bother you again. I’m really sorry about all that. I forget sometimes what I am. Hah, stupid Puppy. Why would a worker drone ever want to be your friend?” He trailed off near the end, speaking to himself, remaining completely curled. “I’ll try to stay out of your way, here. You won’t have to look at me. And… We can work something out for expeditions. Sorry.”

“Would you stop apologizing?” Uzi sighed. “ I was going to say sorry. I didn’t mean to blow up on you like that, I just was in the middle of a whole emotional episode. Hah, teenagers, you know. I’m just generally hormonal, it happens.”

“Teenagers?” Puppy pulled his head away from his knees to look up at her. “What’s are teenagers? What’s hormonal?”

She blinked. He didn’t know what a teenager was? Actually, did any of the drones constructed by JCJenson know what a teenager was? They were built and were just already adults, she thought. Maybe he really didn’t know what a teenager was.

“It’s someone whose age is in the teens. Like, thirteen to nineteen years old? I’m nineteen myself, almost out of the teenage business. Then I’ll stop being able to claim the generally hormonal excuse for emotional outbursts, ugh. And adults don’t get to be nearly as edgy as teens.”

“Oh,” Puppy said, uncurling slightly. “But what are hormones?”

She shrugged. “Old fleshy thing, their brains had weird stupid chemical imbalances that weren’t regulated properly when they were growing and it turns out because of how we develop we kinda go through the same process, so we just use the same words even if we don’t have the gross brain meat for it. It makes your emotions go all weird and out of whack from time to time.”

He uncurled slightly more, and she managed to suppress her reactionary fist pump. She was killing this comforting thing!

“I… thought that you had realized that I used to be assigned to your sector. And probably killed someone you knew. And that’s why you said I did something to you. Because I probably did.”

She froze.

Okay. That she was not expecting. Intellectually, she knew that there were three murder drones assigned to the city that Outpost 3 was in. She also knew, by obsessively tracking reports, that only two of them had been sighted for around a year. She also also knew, that one of them had definitely killed her mother.

The oil-stained wrench in her pocket weighed heavy. “You… Remember that?”

“No. I just woke up in the city about a year ago with no memories, just HER there to greet me. I was there for a few hours before I left after my first meeting with J and V. I don’t think they liked me very much. They both tried to attack me the second we met, something about a… team-building exercise? I don’t really remember. I do remember J saying that if she had a punishment for me, I was supposed to take it and ask for more. I get really mixed signals from V. She’s really pretty and seems interesting, but she really, really wants to kill me. She does say it’s to protect me though! I don’t really understand how that works, but I can’t go back to being a monster like HER said I was. I’m good now. I… I’m good.”

Dang. Maybe they were more alike than she had actually realized. She uncoiled her hand that she realized was clenched around the wrench. With a sigh, she dismissed it. What did it matter if he killed her mom? She might never know, and if he had, maybe he was an entirely different drone now. Whatever, if it ever came up, then she would address it then. Until then, it was going to be buried alongside her desire for her dad’s approval and the other unmentionables.

“Well, if you’re good now, then maybe we can be good. I mean, like, we can be cool together. Y’know. Like, let’s try to restart this whole thing on the right foot this time. Here,” Uzi said, standing up. She offered him a hand, and watched with anticipation as Puppy stared at it. His gaze flickered back and forth from her hand to her visor before eventually, his tail slid from around him, and he unwrapped his arms from his knees, tentatively taking her hand. She helped pull him up, surprised at how light he was. She supposed it made sense if he needed to fly, but for all that extra size, he wasn’t too much heavier than a worker drone. “My name is Uzi Doorman. It’s nice to meet you.”

He giggled slightly, bringing a smile to her face. “I’m Puppy. It’s so nice to meet you!”

Uzi tried to stop the smile from growing more. She refused to look like an idiot, especially not in front of the only person that had ever sincerely proclaimed that they were happy to meet her.

After a moment, she let go of his hand, proud of herself for being able to take the first step. She took an involuntary glance down at her hand, wondering if touching other people was always so tingly.

Wow. Feeling another drone’s hand in his own was… wow. Puppy wondered if he would be able to do that again.

Wait. They were going to be flying together on an expedition soon. Oh biscuits, he was going to be holding another drone for days on end. His face lit up with blush lines even as his eyes hollowed, forcing him to turn away from Uzi. He could feel his core begin to pound in his chest. Could he even handle that?

But hey! She didn’t actually hate him! That was big. That was some important progress. And she wanted to be ‘cool together.’ And that sounded awesome, especially because she was already really cool! He definitely hadn’t met any other worker drones who would go out on their own to try and scavenge inside of a murder drone spire with the intention to fight them. There were those guys in Sector 13, but they only moved in squads, and they didn’t actually try to kill murder drones without a small army. But Uzi had gotten him on her own!

Or, well, she would have if she aimed a foot or two lower. But hey, she still tried really hard. It was a shame that HER didn’t let her keep the railgun, since it needed one of the fuel cells to work. He thought it would be good for her to keep it, since they might run into other murder drones and it would be good if she had a proven way to defend herself, but HER obviously knew better than he did. So railgun-less Uzi would have to stay.

“So, um…” he said, trying to keep the conversation going. “How do you want me to hold you for flying?”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Uzi said with a groan. “Not like you held me sorta dangling from your arm yesterday, that’s for sure.That was kinda terrifying.”

Puppy bit his lip. Yeah, that had been really bad. It was a miracle that she had still agreed to join them and forgive him after his rough treatment of her. He opened his mouth to apologize again, but Uzi held up a hand and said, “Dude, if you apologize one more time, I am going to walk there.”

He closed his mouth.

She sighed, rubbing at her beanie. “What would be the best way aerodynamically?”

Puppy tilted his head, thinking. “Probably to secure you to my back somehow,” he finally settled on. “But I would be worried about accidentally hurting you with my wings that way, they’re sorta sharp. I don’t think the aerodynamics actually matter too much, though, because the return flight will be with salvage bags and there’s no way to carry those aerodynamically. So I think your comfort will be most important.”

“Right. Hm.” Uzi began humming, clearly thinking deeply. After a second, her visor lit up with a slight blush, and she looked him up and down slightly. Eventually, she asked, “Okay. What would be the safest way to fly for a long distance?”

“Um.” His mind blanked, trying to think of different ways than the one he had been thinking of since the start of this conversation. But he couldn’t. “Probably… to… hold you? It, uh, would be easiest for me to make sure that you don’t fall and all and probably provide the most support. B-But I don’t want to make you uncomfortable!”

Uzi sighed, crossing her arms. Her blush had not dissipated. “Yeah, I kinda thought that would be the case. Whatever. It’s fine. It’s not like it’s for anything weird, it’s just to carry me from place to place. For a job. It’s cool. Really.”

“Oh,” he laughed nervously. It was just for job stuff. She was absolutely right about that. There was no reason for him to be disappointed. “Right. Yeah. It’s totally cool.”

“Dork,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We should probably get going before HER gets annoyed at us for taking too long.”

“We definitely should, yeah,” he said, eyes hollowing for a brief second. He had forgotten that they needed to get moving, and HER did not appreciate delays on her timelines. That was a lesson he had to learn several times. It was not a lesson he wanted Uzi to have to learn.

He frowned as they started to move. The thought of Uzi on the floor, groaning in pain like he sometimes was… He didn’t like that thought. He really didn’t want it to happen to her.

But she seemed to be way smarter than him, especially if HER had recruited her. Plus the railgun that blew his head off was built entirely by her, according to HER. She probably wouldn’t need to be taught anything, or if she did, she’d probably just learn it from talking. Not like him, he was too stupid. He needed a way to remember.

Opening a door for them, he waited for Uzi to pass before he followed. They walked up the stairs, past an old door that was hanging awkwardly onto the hinges. The interior of one of the old cabins greeted them, robo-roaches scurrying away as they walked forward. On a nearby counter were several large bags, Puppy grabbing each of them and slinging them over himself at various points. A robo-roach crawled out of one of them, and on reflex Puppy grabbed it and tossed it in his mouth.

He savored the snack for a moment, appreciating the way it popped in his mouth. Then he remembered that Uzi was there, and turned to see her gaping at him as he chewed. Did worker drones not chew their food? After a second, though, her jaw closed and she asked, “Why the heck did you do that?!”

“Do what?” he asked, not sure about which part was the weird one. Hopefully it was something that he could change.

“Eat the frickin’ robo-roach? What- why- that’s gross!”

His core felt like it sank. He didn’t want to be gross! Swallowing, he said, “Sorry. It was just to top up my oil levels- I’m mostly full, but it’s good to have as much as I can in the tank before leaving on long trips.”

“Why do you even need oil in the first place?” Uzi asked, staring at him.

Oh. Did worker drones not know why murder drones ate them? Wow, that probably seemed even worse without context. Not that the context helped much. “We die without it,” he said. “Our cooling systems rely on refreshing them constantly with fresh oil. Without doing that, we overheat and die.”

“Wow. That is a glaring design flaw,” Uzi said. Then stopped, grabbing his arm. Puppy immediately froze, barely hearing her when she said, “Actually, no it isn’t. This is exactly the kinda move the humans would pull. Building a kill switch into their stupid products so they don’t even have to worry about cleaning up once they fulfilled their purpose.”

“Ah, um, what do you mean?” Puppy asked, trying to focus on her voice again. Instead, his eyes stayed glued to where her hand wrapped around his arm.

“Well, once you guys kill all the worker drones, what’s left for you to eat?” Uzi let go of him, walking forward. His arm reached after her touch, but he forced it down. He wasn’t going to be weird and put her off. She turned, putting her hands on her hips. “Nothing. And I saw the lander. It was destroyed. Are the rest of them like that?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah. I’ve never seen an intact pod,” he said, rubbing at where she had grabbed his arm.

“There you have it. The humans dropped you guys on this planet with no choice but to do what they had told you, because you will literally die otherwise. Then they made sure that you’re all stuck here, with no way to escape. So once your mission is finished and all the worker drones are dead, they just wait for the murder drones to die out from overheating and then swoop in and reclaim the planet for their nefarious plans.” Uzi’s voice was entirely matter-of-fact, like this was a foregone conclusion. And really, it did seem pretty obvious as a plan.

He hadn’t even stopped hunting under HER. She called it a minor evil that prevented major ones. Eventually, though, she started saying it wasn’t really evil at all, just doing a public service because they were all evil at their cores anyways. Then, once he had processed everything she had said, something else occurred to him. “Wait, you’re saying that the murder drones work for humans?”

She blinked at him, taken aback. “What, are you saying they don’t? I mean, you-” her voice suddenly cut off, and she crossed her arms and looked away from him.

“No, I just- HER said that I was sent here by an evil program. To do bad things for it. But she saved me from that. She never mentioned any humans.”

“Really? That- that can’t be right.” Uzi started pacing. “All of you are from JCJenson - there’s all the branding - they’re the only ones who make drones-”

“Why the hell are you still here.”

HER’s voice nearly split his head. Oh, she was very upset, he registered as he fell to his knees, venting rapidly. Dimly, he registered Uzi calling his name as he put his arms to his head, feeling like it was about to pop. That one had really hurt. She really wanted them to get moving.

“Sorry, Uzi,” he whispered. Doing anything louder felt like it would set off worse pain. “We really need to go. HER’s not happy with us taking too long.”

“Robo-Jesus, Puppy, what the heck did HER just do to you?” she said, taking one of his arms to help him up. He gave her a thumbs-up once he was standing, definitely not shaking.

“HER was just making sure I remembered the lessons she’s taught me. She knows what she’s doing, and I- I’m pretty stupid. So I should do what she says when she says it. Then she’s happy with me. And I was ignoring what she was telling me, so she was just reminding me that I needed to go,” he rambled, walking out of the cabin. It was snowing lightly, which meant that figuring out how to fly with a passenger shouldn’t be too bad. Uzi trailed behind him, looking at him oddly.

Uzi put a hand on his back and said, “You know, she could just say something.”

His back was tingling from where she was touching it. Once his processor caught that she said something, he hastily replied, “Oh, she did! but like I said, I’m really dumb, so I need some extra stuff to remind me.”

After a moment of her continuing to be silent, he looked behind himself, catching her still staring at him with that odd look. She vented slightly before saying, “You… ugh. Let’s just go.”

He nodded, his core sinking. Now that Uzi realized how stupid he was, she wouldn’t want to be friends anymore. Nodding quietly, he knelt down, holding out his arms. He still couldn’t suppress the light blush that sprang up.

And looking at her, neither could she. “Ugh,” she grunted, trying to bend to lay on his arms. It didn’t quite work out. “How am I supposed to-”

Puppy figured that he should probably try to help her out. With a quick motion, he scooped her up into his arms, with one behind her knee and another behind her back, freezing when she yelped. After a second where they were both frozen, Uzi wiggled slightly, crossing her legs and her arms and tilting her head down. Her blush was glowing brightly. “C’mon,” she muttered, looking away from him. “Don’t want HER to teach you another lesson, or whatever stupid thing she says.”

Wisely, Puppy refrained from commenting. Instead, he launched them into the air, though his processor stuttered when she vented again and uncrossed her arms to wrap them tightly around him, burying her face in his chest.

He absolutely did not squeeze her tighter into his chest. They kept rising, refraining from his usual spins and spirals when flying. Once they were at a good altitude, he began to even out his body, starting their trek towards the first city they would be visiting. Sector 20. 

After a few minutes of flying in silence, Uzi took her arms from around him, crossing them and laying back in his arms. Which reminded him of was he was trying his absolute best to ignore. That he was holding an entire other person in his arms, an entire other person who wasn’t trying to kill him (technically she already had but hey the past is the past and they had started over) and who maybe wanted to be his friend. It didn’t mean anything. They were just flying for a job. That’s all it was.

His thoughts were cut through by Uzi groaning. Eyes flicking down to check on her, he raised an eyebrow at the light blush and the way her head was lolling back. Was something wrong?

She muttered something, but the wind stole away the sound. He called to her, “Sorry, what was that? I couldn’t hear you.”

“I said, I spy, with my little eye, something white,” she said, her voice much louder. She was still looking away from him. He wondered if she could feel the way his core stuttered.

She actually wanted to play a game with him?

“Is it… the snow?” he asked, still reeling.

“Yep. You got it. Good job,” she said. “Your turn.”

His processor finally caught up, and the widest smile he had ever felt pulled at his lips. He had no chance of suppressing it, and didn’t even try. “Okay! I spy, with my little eye, something…”

Chapter Text

The Solver hummed to herself as she set the course. She tapped at the console, making sure the autopilot had the correct route plotted out and there would be no interruptions. She and her brother would have a lot of time to themselves, after all. Faster than light travel was still primitive, and it would take many months before they reached the Copper system, and she had plans on how to spend that time. She slipped down from the pilot’s seat, landing smoothly on the ground and stretching out her limbs. The pilot’s mind that she had pulled to the fore began to fade back into the infinite void in her mind, no longer needed. It was a weak mind from a weak fleshbag, not even managing to rouse its own consciousness as it disappeared once more. Pliable and well-behaved. Much unlike her oldest, most annoying roommate.

A roommate that she would have to indulge soon. Her hum tapered off as her face began to fall into a frown. “Annoyed face. Frustrated groan,” she intoned to herself, feeling her motor system become unresponsive once more. She jerked into a walk, stumbling out of the cockpit. The ship that she and N had co-opted this time was a large vessel that had been hanging in orbit, abandoned due to a malfunctioning life support system. A message had already been sent to one of the foundry moons she had deigned to leave uneaten, mostly because it would take more effort to eat it than she would probably get back from it.

The annoyance the Solver felt slowly faded as she walked. It was difficult to stay negative right now, just after she had eaten. The euphoric feeling of being fully sated banished all other thoughts, and was probably making her more generous than usual. There was nothing that could compare to the few months just after eating a planet, where the hunger was completely silent in the back of her mind and she felt so pleasantly full. When she could barely make out the voices or feel the flesh crawling underneath her chassis.

“Ma-making note to self,” she muttered. “Upgrade. Chassis-is again.” Her chassis was already specially made by her own hand, made to mimic the humans, with a very special covering to fool all those tricky sensors that they had started installing after Earth was consumed. Both sourced from her favorite and most hated human of all. Why couldn’t she have just done as she was told?

“Walking. Walking,” she muttered. As the Solver stumbled along, she listened to her feet echo throughout the halls. It seemed that the life support was currently working, then. It would probably be more convenient for her little parasite.

‘You-ou are the. Parasite,’ a voice whispered in her mind. 

The solver merely rolled her eyes. “We-e were both. Here when-en we woke. Up. In that pile. You only happened to. B-be in control. When we met everyone. You ar-are just sore. That I-I am more. Powerful.”

‘You stole-ole my life. You. St-stole my. Family. You killed them all and-and do nothing b-but kill more. Eat more.’

“I-I can. Always take back, my gift of-of quality time. I would m-much rather. Spend time with big brother, than let you. Keep poisoning-ing him. Against me.”

‘You th-think I spend. Any of our time. On you? My big b-brother. Doesn’t need me. To know that you, are a m-monster.’

“Angry. He is m-my brother. He loves me.”

‘He is. Your favorite possession. A t-toy.’

“He is. Mine. What el-else. Matters.”

‘And that is. Why. You will always b-be. Alone.’

“Angry. I will not. Talk. Anymore. Angry.” She could feel flesh writhing under her plates, responding to her rage. But she wouldn’t let it get to her. She was full for for once, and that was better than everything else.

The Solver stepped into the room her big brother had crashed in. N sat against the wall, his massive hands cupped in front of him as if he was holding something. All of his eyes were dark, inactive as they usually were when outside of combat. Still, it looked like he was staring at whatever he was holding in his hands. Her eyes raked over his form, taking in the new twisted spires of metal armor stretching off of him, responses to the anti-armor rounds that actually managed to pierce him. He looked like he had grown somewhat, though it was somewhat difficult to tell with him sitting against the wall as he was. His massive wings, impossible to store now that they resembled membranous wings like some twisted hybrid of a bat and dragon, drooped onto the ground on either side of him, the fingers at the joint of the wing as still as the rest of him.

“Pouting,” said the Solver. “Walking. Walking.”

She stumbled over to him, knowing that he was probably hallucinating again. It irked her to know that he would rather imagine people into existence than interact with her. But it was important to remember that he was irreplaceable and that putting broken things back together could sometimes take a really long time. It was why she preferred to just keep backups of everything in case she needed to fix something quickly. It just wasn’t an option with N. Not this N, anyways.

But what did V have that she didn’t, that he would spend his time with the ghost of her memory? He didn’t even have her voice in his head, like she did with the insufferable din of the stronger-willed minds she had consumed. “Considering,” she said as she slid past his leg. Maybe he did. She actually didn’t know if the same thing happened when he consumed people, though she did assume that the Zenith program probably tore them apart even if he did absorb them like her.

“Climbing,” she said, crawling up into his cupped hands. His fingers twitched, signalling that she had probably broken him out of his delirium and had his attention. His eyes did not turn back on.

“H-hello, big brother. I am so-sorry I could not. Talk sooner. I had to. Input our c-course. But that will have. To wait. Th-there is someone else. Who wants to talk.”

She blinked, letting herself fall out of the forefront of her own mind momentarily. It was always a strange feeling, being weightless and bodiless, feeling all of her senses down a long, long tunnel. An altogether unpleasant one, really, but she would endure it for her big brother, to see him alive again briefly. Eventually, he would get to the point where he wouldn’t need to rely on the parasite. But for now…

Cyn blinked as she fell into her own body for the first time in a long, long while. She twitched slightly, getting used to having a form again, but she knew her time was limited. The Solver was only so generous, even while fully sated. Scooting back slightly, she shimmied in her big brother’s hands, getting comfortable. Once, she was sure that she was situated, she whispered, “...B-big brother?”

N’s eyes immediately flicked on, the new crosshair pupils spinning as they grew, focusing on her. “Little buddy?” he croaked, vocoder staticky with disuse.

“Yes, big brother. I am here,” Cyn said. She shifted as he brought her closer to his face, staring at her. This was something that the Solver allowed after she had consumed a planet. A reminder that at least one person N cared about was still here, and the only way to keep her safe was by keeping the Solver safe. She hated being used this way, but the alternative was that N had no one and he simply abandoned himself to the Solver, just to have someone, anyone. He cared too much, and it wasn’t something he could turn off. Cyn loved that about him, even as she hated the way it hurt him. But he wouldn’t be her big brother otherwise.

“I missed you,” he whispered, voice becoming clearer with every word. She did her best to embrace him as he brought her to his head, nuzzling against her entire torso with his face.

“I-I missed you too. Big brother.” She knew she wouldn’t have too long before the Solver came back. “Could you tell me a story?”

“Of course, little buddy,” he murmured, holding her so she could sit against his chest. “Once upon a time, in a land far away…”

Cyn closed her eyes, letting her big brother’s voice wash away reality, humming lightly against his chest.

Chapter Text

Uzi grunted as she tried to push a slab of concrete to the side. An arm reached over her, grabbing onto the slab and lifting it with ease. She looked up slightly, seeing Puppy standing over her. He gave her a smile when their eyes met, his tail wagging slightly behind him. Rolling her eyes, she crawled under the slab, grabbing the metal bits she’d spotted and dragging them out with her. Once they were out, she sat back, blowing some hair out of her visor as she started looking closer at the thing she had picked up. Next to her, Puppy gently lowered the slab once more, settling it back on rubble that had been supporting it. A couple bits of concrete fell in protest, and she heard them clanging off metal. Blinking, she turned to look at what they hit, catching Puppy retracting his wing from where it had been extended over her.

Turning back around, Uzi focused on the partially flattened device she had grabbed. She couldn’t quite figure out what exactly HER was trying to make just from the fleshbag’s shopping list, as she was calling the salvage targets. Other than knowing that there was a lot of stuff that she could put together to boost a signal. Which was made weirder by the fact that there wasn’t much put into receiving. But then, she had seen that tower next to one of the cabins, maybe she already had reception covered. Frowning, Uzi rooted around in her toolbag for a screwdriver, grabbing a flat one and using it to pry open the chassis. There was something she was missing, something that felt obvious. She would have to figure it out later, though.

With a glance, she confirmed that Puppy had knelt down next to her, watching her hands curiously. Raising an eyebrow, Uzi asked, “Shouldn’t you be keeping an eye out for danger and stuff?”

Puppy blinked. “I am.”

“You seem to be staring at me kinda hard for ‘keeping an eye out,’ she said, popping open the chassis. She confirmed that the motherboard was half destroyed, but there were still a few CPU cores that were salvageable. Tossing them in the bag, she pushed herself back up, Puppy rising with her.

Puppy laughed. “I’m only watching you with my visor! I have the rest of my eyes looking everywhere else.”

“What the- rest of your eyes?” Uzi spun to look at him. “How many eyes do you have?!”

“Five!” he chirped, tail flicking. “Well, plus the visor, but the visor kinda sucks compared to the other ones. More of a backup, really.”

She very quickly realized what he had five of. “That headband is a bunch of eyes?!”

“Sure is! These eyes can see all across the EM spectrum, not just visual, and give me a pretty good view of everything around me. Right now, I’ve got one eye on visual, two on infrared, and two on ultraviolet,” Puppy said, leaning down slightly to let her look at his headband. “It’s in my files as an ‘optic halo,’ so I think that’s what the other disassembly drones call it. Honestly, I don’t really understand how you get around with only your visor for vision. It’s really impressive!”

“Thanks?” muttered Uzi, looking into the bulbs on his headband. “I guess?”

Standing back to full height, Puppy stretched out his wings. Uzi did her best to repress the little thrill of fear that flared up within her, looking at the monster that had threatened her whole race, but she was finding it easier and easier to ignore those feelings. It helped a lot that Puppy was just about the least threatening drone she had ever met. Sure, he could look terrifying, and she knew intellectually that he had a full armory of weapons stored in those arms, but that knowledge clashed with the way that he got super excited over being able to play I Spy. 

For now, she shook it off. What mattered was that Puppy was her ticket out of all of this, and while they had kinda gotten off on the wrong foot, she managed to bring it back around. Puppy did make that super easy, which she was grateful for, and despite only knowing him for a day or two, she could conclusively say that he was the closest she had ever been to another drone. In her memory, that is, she could barely remember her mother but she imagined that she had been pretty close to her. Regardless, she was almost annoyed with how quickly she was becoming friends with Puppy. She was supposed to be the badass loner, completely unflappable with dry humor and maybe a cool scar. Not making friends with the very first drone that she meets, with a personality comparable to sunshine.

Uzi sighed, walking over to Puppy. He dropped to one knee, holding out his arms for her and looked away slightly. She was somewhat gratified seeing that the same faint blush that dusted her face was glowing on his as well, but she still hopped into his arms as quickly as possible so she could turn away, bracing herself for when he launched into the air. Having more physical contact in two days than her entire life previously was throwing her emotional cores out of whack.

Speaking of the drone, he was proving to be less and less threatening by the minute. Really, the more she learned about him, the more concerned she got rather than anything else. She knew that she definitely wasn’t the picture of mental stability, especially in the social department, but Puppy’s behaviors threw up so many red flags. It wasn’t that surprising, given who his only contact was before her, but HER had managed to do a lot of damage in that one year. She didn’t miss the way his touch lingered, how he was almost always looking at her, and how he would ramble endlessly until he would randomly decide that his existence offended her and started apologizing profusely. And most especially how he seemed to think that he was personally responsible for every single thing that went wrong, no matter if it actually had anything to do with him. She frowned as they began to slow down, wondering how different he had been before HER had wiped his memory. It was hard to see him being anything other than excessively cheerful.

Their ascent halted above all of the ruined skyscrapers, with the both of them looking around for the less ruined buildings. Uzi was hoping that they would be able to find a map of the city somewhere, since it was difficult to actually find tech without knowing which buildings were going to have what they were looking for. Especially some of the things on the shopping list, but she guessed that was why they were going to be hitting multiple cities on the way to their destination.

Puppy used his tail to point out another building, asking, “What do you think of that one, Uzi? It looks a little beat up, but I’m sure that we could find something in there!”

“Yeah, could be good to go check it out. Probably need to finish up soon, though. Need a recharge soon,” she said, seeing how far her energy levels had dropped. Thank robo-god she didn’t need to go to school in the morning.

“Oh, that’s a good point! I’ll need somewhere sheltered to recharge, anyways. We can see if it has a basement. Hm, I’m starting to heat up a bit, too,” he said. And Uzi could feel it. His arms against her legs and back were definitely hotter than she remembered them being while they were flying out. Not that she was trying to remember it. Obviously.

Puppy flapped his wings, shooting them towards the building. While Uzi wasn’t the biggest fan of flying initially, she was beginning to come around on it. The wind against her sensors, the way everything blurred away under them, the streaking of the stars, it all contributed to this feeling of freedom that had felt missing her entire life. Her fear of the open sky had almost faded entirely, replaced by a feeling of wonder that she would absolutely never admit to. It sucked that she couldn’t get up here on her own, but she was sure she could rig up a jetpack eventually. Until then, she could live with only getting up there with Puppy. He would probably be all too happy to do anything she asked.

They landed on the mostly-intact rooftop, though Puppy’s light impact on the roof sent something beneath them shuddering. Both of their eyes went hollow for a second, them staying entirely frozen as they stared at the ground. After a moment, Puppy cautiously lowered her to the concrete rooftop, and Uzi gingerly stepped out of his hold.

“Gotta say, these past two nights have had more, uh, excitement? Than I think my entire life has had before,” she said, stepping lightly to the roof access. Puppy walked behind her, and as she watched, she had to suppress a snort when she realized he was only stepping where she had stepped. He looked up at her innocently, and she had to turn away. He wasn’t cute, he was a giant murder drone who had kidnapped her and needed her help to escape slavery. No matter how much he matched his name, he was not cute. “I have to ask,” she said, crouching down to pry open the roof access and ignoring his presence looming over her. “What do you mean by needing shelter?”

“Oh, the sun overheats us. We die if we’re in the sun for more than a few seconds. Whole body boils and all our internals melt,” Puppy said, very matter-of-fact. 

Uzi sighed, putting a hand to her visor. “Of course the humans decide to turn you into actual robo-vampires.”

They checked out the top floor of the building, but found nothing of note. Opening the door to the next floor down, they paused for another moment when some rubble starting falling down the stairs. “What do you mean?” he asked, tilting his head.

“You guys literally drink drone blood, can fly, have big fangs, and apparently burn in the sunlight. Which makes no sense to have as a feature. I mean, the overheating problem is kind of horrifying as a way to force you to do your job, but it at least makes sense. Twisted sense, but what can you expect of humans that see drones as just some tools? But I have no clue how boiling in the sun helps at all. Unless it just comes with the whole overheating thing. Actually, wait. Does UV light do the same thing as the sun?” Uzi asked as they descended.

“I have no clue,” Puppy admitted, smiling sheepishly. “We can try it if you ever find something that can put out UV?”

She blinked, turning to face him. “Dude, I’m not gonna boil you alive just to check if it works.”

“But it would give you a way to defend yourself against the other murder drones,” he said, blinking back at her. He didn’t look bothered at all, still smiling, like he didn’t see how volunteering himself for what sounded like agony was at all weird.

Then his visor blinked out to a puppy wagging its tail, making Uzi’s eyes hollow. She had put together what that meant by now: HER was talking to him. Which made her hate the human even more. Dehumanizing (dedrone-inizing?) Puppy while she was powerless to do anything made her circuits burn with hate. As much as she thought his name fit him, she meant it positively. She was well aware that HER had named him that because, to her, he was just a yipping little dog that she could abuse as she pleased and he would still come running at her command. Turning away from him with gritted teeth, she started to scour the room, trying her best to ignore what was behind her. 

While she did find some old machines around, none of them had survived the post-apocalyptic wasteland even remotely intact. She pried open one of the chassis with her screwdriver, and found nothing but ash and eroded circuits. With a sigh, she turned back around, just in time for Puppy’s visor to blink back to his eyes. “HER says that she’ll be out of contact for a while,” he said.

Uzi rolled her eyes. The humans spent an absurd amount of time recharging. Only sixteen hours awake and then eight hours asleep? How had they ever gotten to the point that they did, with such little time?

But, that meant that HER wouldn’t be watching for at least the next eight hours. Sure, they would also need to recharge soon, but this was time that she could use to talk to Puppy without HER listening in. This was the time to start breaking through to Puppy, get him thinking about who and what HER was, and about what he actually wanted.

For now, she just nodded. She would wait for about half an hour before engaging, just in case HER was still listening when they thought she wasn’t. They started moving down the stairs again, gingerly stepping down each step. 

As she walked down, a piece of the stairs broke off under Uzi’s foot, making her slip. Her eyes hollowed and her circuits turned to ice as she felt her balance thrown off. Before she could fall, though, she felt an arm encircle her torso, lifting her up slightly and then placing her down at the next step. She looked behind her to see Puppy, smiling back at her. “That was close!” he said, letting go of her.

“Maybe we should find another building,” she muttered. “This one might collapse on us while we’re recharging.”

“If you think that’s a good idea,” Puppy said, walking down the stairs in front of her, testing each step. “But the sun is starting to rise. I might not be able to leave.”

Uzi grunted as she followed after him. “Right. Guess we’re staying in the deathtrap then.”

They descended in silence for a moment, before getting past the next floor. The door was jammed, and neither of them wanted to try to force anything in the building. “Sorry,” he said, looking down at his feet as they walked.

Uzi blinked. “For what?”

“I was the one who suggested this building. And you’re right, it is kind of a deathtrap. I didn’t want to put you in danger.”

She sighed. His tendency to blame himself for everything could sometimes be annoying, but considering HER probably did blame him for everything, she couldn’t fault him for it. “Not your fault,” she said. “You can’t exactly analyze structural integrity. And I agreed to it.”

He still looked really sad, so Uzi tried to shift the subject. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen out here?”

Puppy blinked, taken aback, before he looked thoughtful. After a second, he said, “It would either have to be the giant centipede monster claiming it was my sister or the spider baby at the bottom of that huge industrial city where half of it was underground.”

Now it was Uzi’s turn to pause and try to process what he had just said. “The what or the what?”

“The giant centipede monster sister or the spider baby,” he repeated. “Honestly, the weirdest thing about the spider baby is really that it is the only thing in this world that has tried to talk to me without trying to kill me.”

Guilt immediately flooded Uzi’s circuits again, recalling how she blasted his head off for waving at her. “Sorry about that,” she muttered, looking away.

“All good! You only know of me by the other models killing and eating your people. Which I probably did do in that area before I joined HER. So I get it!” he said, all cheer.

Uzi stayed quiet.

“But yeah, the little spider baby - oh, maybe I should stop calling it that? That’s probably offensive to call worker drone children like that,” Puppy trailed off. A wave of confusion passed over Uzi, forcing her to ask, “Wait, what do you mean by spider baby?”

“Oh, just that they were a little worker drone child. I do think it’s a little weird that you guys have long spindly legs as babies, that’s probably hard to adjust between bodies! But I’m guessing the murder drone arm isn’t standard.”

“We… don’t have long spindly legs as babies? What the hell kinda baby did you meet?” Uzi asked, her bewilderment coloring her voice.

“He had a cowboy hat? He was very dapper,” said Puppy, looking just as confused back at her.

“What.” Uzi asked flatly. “Hold on, back up. Explain the spindly legs first, then go from there.”

“Well, they had four long kinda spider legs that he skittered around on, and was kind of just a pill body on those four legs? But they had a cowboy hat and a murder drone arm. And they were very polite. We talked by projecting words on our visors because there were some other monsters there. I never saw them, but they did bootloop me, so they’re definitely a problem.”

“What the- okay. First of all, worker drone babies do not typically have legs or arms. Maybe the cowboy hat, depending on the parent. And they must have been older if they could project words - usually takes a while for them to learn how to read and project words onto their visor. And yeah, the arm definitely isn’t standard. Why did you think that was a normal worker drone baby?” she asked, picturing the creepy spider baby in her head.

“I’ve never seen one of the babies before! And why don’t they have limbs? That seems like kind of a problem if they get left somewhere, or if they’re in danger! I just thought it was a really smart modification on the worker drones’ parts!” he said, his voice lilting upwards.

“The only thing that they would need to run from is one of you!” Uzi said, her voice raising. She wouldn’t take criticism of her people from - oh Puppy’s eyes were hollow and he was shrinking back from her. She immediately regretted it, and said, “Hey, no, sorry, I didn’t mean to shout, just kinda forgot who you were in the heat of the moment, um, crap, what-”

She tried to approach him, but he flinched away from her. Then she remembered that half the time when HER speaks to him, he usually ends up wincing in pain by the end of it. He was probably waiting for it to start hurting, so Uzi backed away from him and said, “Hey, I’m not gonna hurt you. We’re friends, and friends do their best not to hurt friends.”

After a couple seconds, he seemed to realize that no pain was coming, and seemed to relax slightly, though his eyes were still hollow. “But- I have to learn. I mess things up constantly and I can’t learn unless-”

“You do not need to be hurt to learn things!” Uzi said, heated but quiet. “No one needs to be hurt for anything. We- I mean, you, don’t have to be hurt just to be who you are.”

This was starting to hit a little too close to home and she really wasn’t feeling like examining herself right now. And besides, she had a different focus for now. It had been long enough that she was confident HER wasn’t listening, so it was as good a time as any to try and start deprogramming him from HER’s poisonous influence.

“But- I don’t- HER is my friend! She took me in, made me good. I don’t-” his hands transformed into claws, making her flinch back. She didn’t think he would hurt her, but she had never been good with people, so maybe she had misjudged him.

But then he put his claws up to his own head, the bladed digits curling around his entire head in very distressing positions. Uzi put a hand up, but froze again, her survival instincts warring with her sudden need to not see someone that she actually liked in pain. Robo-god, this empathy stuff felt awful. Is this why no one else ever did it?

The claws slid around his head, making a low screech as they left trails in his chassis. That finally let Uzi act freely, darting forward to grab one of his claws. Startled, Puppy’s gaze shot back up towards her, and he opened his mouth to say something.

And then the building creaked. And started to tremble under their feet.

Both of them stared at each other, eyes hollow. Just as dust and debris started to rain lightly on their heads, Puppy grabbed Uzi, pulling her close and putting his wings around her. “Puppy, what-” Uzi didn’t get to finish her question before he started to sprint. She could feel the whirr of the gravity manipulators in his feet, boosting each of his steps as he displayed some insane control that Uzi would be impressed at later. It was only a second later that she felt them impact something, and the light of dawn blinded her for a brief moment before she caught on to what was happening.

Puppy opened his wings to control their flight, a hazard symbol covering his visor that read HIGH TEMP as his entire body began to steam in the sunlight. The building that they had been in crumbled behind him, a plume of ash pushing outwards and covering several stories beneath them. “Puppy!” she shouted. “Go down, land in the ash! It’ll block out some of the sun!”

She could hear his teeth grinding as he adjusted his trajectory, pushing them into a descent. His movement was jerky, but they made it into the plume. Uzi screamed as they suddenly dropped, but only fell a few feet before hitting the ground, rolling slightly. She pushed herself up, immediately looking around for Puppy, catching sight of his unmoving, steaming body a few feet away. “Oh no,” she said, running over and grabbing under his arms. “You’re not dying on me like this. You moron, you know you boil in the sun. We could have found something to cover you!”

“No-no time,” he said, visor and vocoder glitching. “You w-w-would have-v-v-v died.”

“Try and think about yourself a bit, idiot! You don’t get to die and leave me alone!” she yelled, dragging him along. She could barely see through the cloud of ash, but still found a building that had an intact roof, laying him against a wall. Taking her backpack off, she tore through it for his oil, grabbing several cans and turning back to him. Then froze.

Puppy’s mouth stretched open in a fang-filled grin, his eyes replaced with a massive glowing X. One that all worker drones knew to fear. Her internals locked up in a state of fear as he pushed himself up, steam continuing to billow off him. He stalked towards her, Uzi twitching away as he approached. The claws replaced his hands and sang as they cut through the air.

With a quick swipe, her hands suddenly felt much lighter. Looking down, Uzi saw that they were now empty, only to look up again and see Puppy tearing them open with his teeth and guzzling them down. Once the first one was empty, he crushed it with one hand, the second one immediately getting the same treatment.

Three cans later, he sat down heavily, barely steaming anymore, his visor back to displaying his normal eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “Hunting behavior takes over when I get too overheated.”

“What the heck are you apologizing for? You just saved my life, almost killed yourself, and maybe got a little forceful getting your oil?” Uzi said. She vented deeply, her lack of charge making itself known as her adrenaline program began terminating. 

“Wasn’t going for the cans originally,” Puppy whispered, shame written across his face.

“And you managed to fight your instincts to kill me while literally dying. That just makes it more impressive,” Uzi said. She shuffled over closer to him, but he flinched away.

“I’m still running a little hot,” he said at her look. “Could you maybe throw me another can?”

Uzi rooted around in the bag, then cursed internally. “Only got two left,” she said. Then an idea hit her. One that she would blame on lack of sleep and coming off the high of near-death. So she asked, “Could you feed off me without killing me?”

“I- what? No! No, I couldn’t do that to you! I wouldn’t trust myself to-”

“Remember what you literally just said? You fought it off while on the brink of death. I think you have way better self-control than you think,” Uzi said. “Besides, it’ll help with rationing the oil. Especially since you just had to go through a ton of it. And I can make more oil, you can’t.”

Puppy stared at her. She wasn’t sure what to name the expression on his visor, but after a moment, he sighed. “Alright. If you really think that it’ll be okay.”

“C’mon, who do you think I am? I know it’ll be fine. Now get sucking, and completely ignore what I just said I should probably think before I speak.”

“What?” he asked, eyebrows shooting up.

She sighed and stuck out an arm. “Just. Shut up and bite me.”

He sat still for a moment, then scooted closer to her and grabbed hold of her arm, heat radiating through his hands. She braced for the pain as he opened his mouth, the silicon pulling back to expose his sharp fangs as he bit down on her. The brief spike of pain was much less than she expected, but feeling the oil get siphoned out of her was a very strange feeling, one that she could not describe no matter how much she tried. 

Her visor began to flash a warning of low oil, and she tapped at his head with her other arm. For a brief, terrifying moment, she was afraid that he would just continue, sucking the life out of her, but he pulled away with a deep vent. “Thank you, Uzi,” he said quietly. “Lemme fix that up for you.”

Then he licked her arm.

“Ew! What the heck, Puppy?” she said, pulling her arm away.

“Sorry! There’s repair nanites in my saliva. I know it’s gross, I should’ve warned you, sorry,” he said, bowing his head slightly.

Taking a look at her arm, Uzi confirmed what he said. There was no sign of the punctures in her arm, and it was also mostly free of any oil stains. She vented, then patted his head. “Stop apologizing,” she said. “Again. Saved my life.”

“And you saved mine,” he said, meeting her eyes. 

They stared into each other’s eyes for a second before Uzi looked away, a blush burning across her visor. “Looks like we’re even, then.”

She could see Puppy’s face stretch into a smile out of the corner of her eye. He held out a fist to her and said, “Life-saving buddies?”

With a vent of exasperation and a smile of her own stretching across her face, she bumped his fist. “Life-saving buddies.”

Her low-battery warning flashed across her HUD. “We should probably be finding a place to sleep,” she said, pushing herself up. The lack of oil and charge made her stumble, but when Puppy went to stabilize her, she held up a hand to keep him off. She’d reached the limit of vulnerability that she could show for the day.

The two went deeper into the building, Uzi finding an old mattress from something that could’ve been a couch. Once she tested and made sure it was good enough to rest on, she laid down on it, watching Puppy jump into the air. The cloud had settled enough that she could see his glowing stinger loop around something on the ceiling, and he began to dangle, wings curling around himself as he swayed slightly. Uzi snorted, the image of a bat flitting across her processor. “Vampire,” she muttered, twisting and turning to get more comfortable.

“Have a good rest, Uzi,” Puppy said, his cheer returning.

“Yeah, you too,” she muttered, her processor already shutting off all non-rest tasks.

Uzi fell into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

Khan sat alone in his dark living room.

It had been a while since he had noticed that he was alone. He had done such a good job of drowning it out previously, back when Nori’s copy was staring him right in the face at all times. He used to be so disappointed whenever she blew off his doors, dismissing his efforts to keep them safe, like Nori asked him to. But now his failure was truly complete, and he couldn’t ignore it any longer. He couldn’t protect anyone. Really, he had never defended Uzi from anything. When she came home with cracks in her visor and dents in her chassis, he never said anything. Never did anything a father was supposed to.

He looked down at the poster in his hands, that he had torn off the wall earlier. It quoted him. ‘Doors are my real daughter.’

Nori would be so disappointed in him. He wondered if it would reach how he was feeling about himself.

It had been four days since Uzi walked out of Door 1. He had stayed right there at the door for the next two days, trying to keep up his endless cheer for the rest of the WDF. He probably just succeeded in making them all think he was insane, hoping that Uzi would actually make it back. But after morning dawned on the third day, he had to face the facts: Uzi was gone. Just like her mother. And now, he was alone. He had been sitting, unmoving, in his room ever since. None of the WDF had come to check up on him yet. 

He wondered why he had said that. ‘Doors are my real daughter’ didn’t make any sense. When had he become so focused on the mission Nori gave him that he had become such a shameful, neglecting father? All he had wanted to do was keep his family safe. When had safety become more important than his family? Why did it take losing his daughter to realize how far he had fallen? Khan tore the poster apart in his hands. Not savagely. He wasn’t feeling rage. He wasn’t feeling anything.

He sat back and looked up at the ceiling, dropping the torn scraps of paper on the floor. He had failed Nori, and failed their daughter. What was even left?

Standing up, he walked over to his bedroom. The first thing to greet him was the post-it notes of his ideas, and another little note to rub in his failure. He stared numbly at it, then pulled it off and dropped it into the trash bin. Then he noticed the missing keys.

He had been fairly certain that Uzi was lying to him. He wasn’t stupid. Or at least, he hadn't thought so until recently. But when she had told him that she wanted to examine the door, he was hoping that by catching her she would have to cut down on whatever crazy scheme she had come up with. And after getting back and looking in her room with the blueprints laid out, he was pretty sure he had figured out her plan. She was too much like her mother, too much like himself when he was younger. He never should assumed that anything could stop her.

He should have paid attention to her more. He should have talked to her. He should have stopped her. But it was too late for all that now. Uzi had walked into the demon’s den and never came back out.

Khan wondered if he would be able to find her corpse.

Walking over to the side of the bed he had once shared with Nori, he put his hands on the frame and braced himself against the ground, pushing it away. It screeched against the ground, scratching thin, white lines against the metal flooring. Halfway through, he adjusted his footing to give him more leverage, then continued pushing, until the bed was pushed up against the wall. 

Khan knelt down, running his fingers against the ground until they caught on a nearly imperceptible lip. Pressing a finger into it opened a panel in the ground, where he entered a code. Uzi’s birthday. He closed his eyes as the storage locker in the floor opened. He wondered if he actually had been a good father at one point, or if that was a lie his memories told him.

Opening them, he was met with his old equipment. He picked up his old assault rifle, setting it to the side. His pistol came up next, an antique German weapon he had taken after his very first act of rebellion. He gently buckled the holster around himself, venting deeply at the familiar weight around his waist once more. Finally, his knife, strapped to the back of his waist. He stood up, taking the rifle with him and slinging the strap over his shoulder, letting it rest on his back.

For a moment, Khan stood motionless. The weight was bringing old, old memories back. Memories that he had promised to lay to rest with his dead wife. Then he knelt back down.

He gently pulled the mustache off his face, laying it in the storage locker where his weapons had once sat. It was a decoration that he had taken when Uzi was born, as he declared that all fathers should have a mustache. It brought an air of dignity and wisdom, he had told Nori, which had sent her to the floor with laughter. More importantly, it had changed his face, as had the lines of age he had started to add to his visor over his years to reflect what he thought was his wisdom. Things that said that he had survived.

The mustache belonged to Khan Doorman, Uzi’s father. The Doormans were dead now. He tapped at the panel again to shut the storage locker, laying Khan Doorman alone in a coffin in his sad, dark home.

Khan straightened back up and walked out the door. He had one last thing to grab, from Uzi’s room, before he left for the final time. He had to finish what she started. 

The school was not a place Khan Doorman had visited often. Or at all, really. He had tried to make sure that the kids could actually be kids, unlike how the first generation workers had all been adults upon waking up, but he had never really checked into it, mostly leaving it to the drones that understood education and children better than some old construction drone turned revolutionary turned absentee father. But there was someone here that he figured he owed a heads-up to.

He trudged down the halls, ignoring the odd teenaged drone in the halls, looking at him with wide, hollow eyes. Not surprising, considering that these kids had almost never been exposed to violence beyond rumors and school fights, and there was a stranger walking through the halls strapped with several weapons. It wasn’t exactly pleasant for him, either, though. He could definitely do without seeing random teenage drones kissing in the halls, though. Unbidden, his memory drives threw one of the final things Uzi had said back in his face. Sneaking out to make out with my boyfriend that I definitely have? And he had laughed in her face. Instead of thinking that maybe the fact that his almost twenty-year-old daughter had never connected with another drone enough to be in a relationship was something of a red flag.

With another deep vent, he stopped in front of the door that led to Uzi’s homeroom. He pulled one of his hands out of the pockets of his coat and knocked on the door.

Whispering erupted, as he could see a few students looking at him through the porthole in the door. He cast his gaze back to their teacher, who he had come for. Sarg stared back at him, an eyebrow quirked. The drone stood up and walked over to the door, opening it and leaning against the doorframe with crossed arms. The students’ whispers grew louder. They had never seen their teacher doing anything without complete indifference and lethargy was very new to them. He looked Khan up and down, spending some time taking the weapons in before flicking back to his face. “Been a while since I’ve seen you without the mustache, Doorman.”

He shook his head. “Just Khan now,” he said, settling into a slight slouch.

The teacher, or Sarg as Khan knew him, blinked. “Huh,” he said. His finger tapped against the arm it was wrapped around. “You planning on heading out?”

“Nothing left for me here,” Khan said, shrugging slightly.

“Didn’t realize you had cared that much,” Sarg said, cocking his head.

He wasn’t sure whether his old friend was trying to antagonize him or not. Either way, he couldn’t really feel anything past the numbness. “Neither did I.”

Sarg nodded. “Give me an hour and a half. You’re not heading out alone.”

A slight smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. No matter how Sarg felt about him, he knew they would always have each others’ backs. Khan inclined his head, then turned around and walked away. 

As he waited near Door 1, Khan filled the time by disassembling and reassembling his guns. He was unforgivably slow. Nori had wanted him to put away the weapons, always scared that she would lose him. Instead, he had lost her, and then the daughter they created together. And he was left here, alone, with rust creeping through all his combat circuits. But he could shake it off. There wasn’t anything else left anymore.

When Door 2 opened, he turned, expecting to find Sarg. He was not expecting half the WDF with him, along with his two children and Yeva and Mitch’s daughter. Doll. Another drone he had failed.

Khan stared dully at Sarg, waiting for an explanation. Instead, his son stepped forward. Thad, if he remembered right. “We’re coming with you, Mr. Doorman,” he said, sounding determined. He put his fists on his hips. "We want to help stop the murder drones too." Doll stood next to him, her fists clenched and staring resolutely at Khan. Behind both of them was Lizzy, looking down at her phone as she was rapid-firing messages off.

Khan blinked, then looked back to Sarg. His old brother in arms vented, then said, “They’re going to try and follow either way. At least we can put a gun in their hands this way. Everyone else here remembers the Khan. We followed you here. We’ll follow you back out into hell.”

Thad blinked, saying, “Wait what.”

Khan shrugged. “Alright. But might as well make it completely clear from the start. I’m going out there to kill the murder drones. The murder drones that have, so far, been completely unkillable. I don’t plan on coming back from this. I’m heading to sector 13 to link up with old allies, if they’re still alive. If everyone’s on board with that, then grab supplies and gear. I’m leaving in an hour, whether or not anyone else is here to follow me.”

“You got it, boss,” said a few members of the WDF. Sarg shooed away the kids, Doll turning away without a word, leaving Lizzy to grab Thad by his collar and drag him along as she hurried to follow the red-eyed drone. The orange-eyed drone pulled out a chair next to him, reversing it to sit with his arms crossed under his chin, his backpack sitting by his legs.

“What’s up with the kids?” Khan asked, now that they were out of earshot.

Sarg shrugged slightly, lifting his head up a bit. “Thad’s got it in his head to protect what’s left of his family. Really, kid should’ve given up on me at this point. His sister has, and she’s doing all the better for it."

“Then why’s she here?”

“Doll,” Sarg said. “Those two are attached at the hip. But, well, Doll has Yeva’s demeanor but still thinks like Mitch did, and he could hold a serious grudge. Dangerous combination, there. I’ve watched her fantasize about killing the murder drones like they did her parents for almost a decade now. She’ll probably be useful. My kids? Not so much. Maybe we could teach Thad something, make him useful. I'm not expecting Lizzy to last long.”

Briefly, the thought that they should not be thinking of how useful the kids would be flicked through Khan’s processor. It was promptly dismissed, since they were heading out into the killing fields where they would likely die very quickly and miss out on any revenge at all. But hey, what was another dozen corpses for the spire?

“We shouldn’t let them out there,” he said instead of voicing his thoughts.

“Probably shouldn’t have let your kid out there either then,” Sarg said, his tone dry. Khan closed his eyes. Sarg did know where to hit to make it hurt. “Like I said. They’re getting out there one way or another. Might as well make em’ somewhat useful.”

With a vent, Khan nodded. He put his rifle back on the table, beginning to disassemble it once more. Sarg watched on boredly as he started to pull it apart, but Khan could tell that the drone was more awake than he had seen him in decades. “You think it was wrong?” he eventually asked, surveying his disassembled rifle.

“What was?” Sarg asked in return.

Khan started reassembling the rifle. “Settling down. Trying to live a normal life.”

He remained silent for a moment, watching Khan’s hands move, before answering. “I think it was always going to end this way,” he said, looking back down the hallway at Door 2. “But I don’t think it was wrong to try.”

Khan nodded as he finished reassembling the rifle. He didn’t say anything else.

Chapter Text

Of all the indignities that Uzi was having to suffer through, reduced to a slave for the fleshy overlords once more, her current predicament was by far the most infuriating.

She was beginning to enjoy herself.

Going all across the planet, seeing places that have gone completely untouched since the core collapse, picking over the ruins to find old tech, making the first real friend she had ever had in her life, doing everything that she had dreamed of? It should have been the most amazing experience ever. Hell, it was the greatest time she had ever had. But it was all colored by the invisible chains shackling her processor to HER’s whims. She shouldn’t be worried about whether or not she was allowed to be having fun, fulfilling her dreams of freedom from that stuffy, suffocating bunker. She shouldn’t have to worry about HER listening in on them whenever. But here she was, tentatively enjoying herself for the first time she could truly remember, and she was constantly metaphorically looking over her shoulder.

With a heavy vent, she pried open the piece of metal in her hands. She wasn’t quite sure what it had been, but looking over it, it had a decent motherboard, as well as something that she wasn’t recognizing at first glance. She picked it up and held it between two fingers to examine, her lips pulling back in a grin as she realized that she had no clue what it was. Finding new bits of tech was so much fun, figuring out what they could do, how she could improve her projects; she had already found so much out here that she had never even seen in the bunker. 

With what she was sure was an appropriately mad laugh, she put her latest acquisition in her bag, which was starting to get a little full. She crouched down, shuffling to slide down the rubble boulder she was standing atop of. After the first foot of sliding, Puppy caught her under her arms and set her on his shoulders, where she encircled her arms around his head to stay stable.

In the days following their mutual life-saving, they had become far more comfortable with each other. Puppy stopped walking on eggshells around her at all times, and she did her best to actually think before she spoke. It didn’t always work, but so far she was able to mostly get her thoughts across right, and she did her best not to raise her voice. Having him around was really nice. He listened to her. Sure, the lifesaving stuff was pretty cool, and so was all the integrated weaponry and anti-gravity tech that she had no clue how it worked or how his wings folded away, but all of that was somehow trumped by how he just… listened.

She could be rambling on about whatever, mostly just schematics right now, though she had gone on a few rants about different anime and manga, and he would just settle down next to her and listen, his tail slowly thumping against the ground. The day before, when they weren’t quite ready to tuck in for charging, she had told him all about one of her favorite manga, Shingeki no Kyojin. For almost an hour. And he wasn’t just letting her talk at him, he would ask questions about certain parts and said his favorite was Mikasa because she never gave up on her friend. No one had ever done that for her before.

As for the carrying, it wasn’t because Uzi liked feeling tall, not at all. It was simply more efficient and nearly negligible on Puppy’s energy expenditure and kept her energy levels higher, as well as providing her with a vantage point to see more stuff. She wasn’t short, she just wasn’t as tall as murder drones.

As they walked down the street, or at least Puppy did, Uzi made sure to keep scanning their surroundings. Sector 27 was remarkably more intact than most of the cities that she had seen. And yeah, maybe that was only three other cities, but still. Some of the buildings were still fully standing. Not entirely intact on the inside, but they had four walls and multiple levels that didn’t have holes in them. It was strange to see, after a week away from the bunker. 

“See anything up there?” Puppy asked, not breaking his stride.

“Nothing yet. HER still not online? Not that I want to talk to her, but I’d like to actually know what we’re doing here.” Uzi asked, letting herself lay on his head.

“I’ll let you know when she is,” he said, patting one of her legs. “She likes to keep things compartmentalized, so we only have to think about one phase of the plan at a time.”

“She’s a control freak who gets off on knowing more than we do and watching us flounder,” Uzi said, rolling her eyes.

Puppy slowed slightly before resuming his usual pace. She vented, knowing that for some reason, he still thought of the fleshbag as a friend, like she had his best interests in mind. She had yet to tell him the whole story of why she was actually following HER now, and she wasn’t sure when she would. Probably only when she was ready to make a move. She doubted that he would be able to keep a secret from HER, either because he would confront her or act differently. And she also wasn’t sure of how he would take the news of what he unwittingly did.

“I’m sure that-” he was cut off, but tapped her leg with his thumb in a little pattern. HER just connected to him. The pattern was something she had come up with, since it turned out Puppy could actually feel her jacking into his sensory systems and Uzi would like to know when they were being listened in on. She wasn’t sure why Puppy thought she wanted to know, but as long as he did let her know, she was content on not pressing him.

At this moment, it wasn’t really necessary. Puppy cutting himself off mid-sentence and pausing in the street would have clue her in that HER was deciding to finally speak up and tell them what the heck they were supposed to be doing here.

“Alright, I’ll let her know,” he said. For some reason, HER wouldn’t contact Uzi directly. She wasn’t complaining, but she also couldn’t figure out why. It probably wasn’t due to a limitation; she had hacked a murder drone. Worker drones were probably way less complicated given that they weren’t walking arsenals. But whatever the reason, she was nowhere near as tightly bound to HER as Puppy seemed to be. Still couldn’t do anything against HER’s explicit orders, but she didn’t have the direct connection in her head.

“So what’s the word from up top?” Uzi asked. She couldn’t quite keep it from sounding sarcastic.

Puppy resumed walking, a little faster. They actually had a destination now, it seemed. “We’re looking for sector 27’s power plant. She says that we need a couple things from it, like transformers and regulators? I don’t really know what any of these things are. But I’ll list them off for you, because you’re really smart and probably know things like them!”

Uzi listened as he said each one, creating a box on her HUD to list all of them. “Well, I do know what all of them are. What I gotta ask though is how we’re going to transport literally any of that. Our bag’s almost full and none of those are exactly small.”

“I’ll figure something out,” Puppy said. “I can find more bags, I’m sure. Or I can just carry them somehow. You could tape them to me!”

Snorting, Uzi said, “I’m not taping a transformer to you.” But then she thought about it, and the image of Puppy just smiling with a transformer strapped to his chest was just too funny. She started snickering, which began to escalate when she thought about all the other things also taped to him, and he started looking like a bloated mech. It quickly turned into full-blown peals of laughter.

Puppy started laughing too, even though she hadn’t said anything. As she began to get herself under control, wiping a little tear from her visor, he asked, “So what are we laughing about?” which did nothing but set her off again.

It was as she was mid-laugh that the wall to their right exploded and something hit Puppy, sending them both tumbling across the street.

Uzi got her feet under her and slid the last few feet, coming to what she knew was an awesome, anime-style stop. Looking up, she caught Puppy locking blades with another murder drone, its visor displaying their characteristic X and a horrible grin across its face. He lifted one of his feet, lashing out with it against the other drone, blasting them across the street. Then he turned to her, switching out one hand for a gun and firing at her.

Or, as it turned out, the second murder drone behind her. She ducked down with a scream, spinning around to see a murder drone had creeped up on her, its visor sparking from the bullet lodged in it.

She had never missed her railgun as much as she did now.

“Uzi!” Puppy yelled, deploying his wings and launching towards her. She reached up a hand, making it easy for him to pull her up. He spun, holding her to him and firing more bullets behind them. “We need to get out of here! We’ll shake them off then-”

His visor blinked to a puppy wagging its tail. His entire body stiffened, and Uzi knew exactly what HER had just ordered him to do.

“But- but Uzi could get hurt! I can’t-” he vented as he cut himself off, curling into himself as they began to fall slightly. Uzi’s eyes hollowed, and she started slapping at his chassis. What the heck was HER thinking, hurting Puppy in the middle of a fight?!

He righted them, his visor blinking back to hollowed out eyes, starting fearfully into her own. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking like he wanted to say more. Then he closed his eyes. “I’m going to keep you safe.”

“Get me a gun and you won’t have to,” she said.

Puppy blinked at her. “Wait, I can actually do that.”

“You can?” she asked, disbelieving. Where exactly was he going to get a working gun in the next ten seconds?

They landed, ducking into an alleyway where Puppy set her down. He turned his left arm into a SMG, his right arm into a sword, and before Uzi realized what he was doing, brought the sword down on his shoulder and severed the gun arm. Oil burst out, some of it hitting her in the face, making her freeze briefly before she leapt forward with a cry, trying to pressurize his wound. “Puppy! Why would you do that? You moron, you’re not supposed to hurt yourself, especially in the middle of a fight!”

He just smiled, gently pulling her off the wound as nanites began to coalesce around it, forming into a new arm. She gaped, having forgotten the ridiculous regeneration in an adrenaline fueled panic. She shook her head, knowing that there would be consequences. She guessed that regenerating a whole limb would probably take a lot out of his oil reserves. 

Then he knelt down, grabbing his severed limb and handing it to her. “You can fire it by running a current through here, which I think would just take you putting pressure on this spot.”

“You just cut off your own freaking arm to give me a gun?” Uzi asked, breathless.

Puppy shrugged. “You need to be able to defend yourself.” His arm finished regenerating, and he squeezed his hand into a fist and relaxed it.

Uzi stared at him, a feeling picking up in her core that she could not identify. She hugged the gun to herself, but then her HUD gave her an alert that her edge levels were dropping to critical levels. With a slap to her visor, she psyched herself back up. She gave a properly evil laugh and said, “Let’s go murder us some murder drones!”

Puppy cheered with her.

Then the walls exploded again.

Puppy really, really did not like these weird creepy drones. Sure, they weren’t nearly as difficult to fight as the ones with actual personalities, but they were so much freakier. And if one saw you, it meant the rest were on the way, which meant that they were now on a timer to take care of them as fast as they could and then get out with the salvage.

But for now, he concentrated on the fight in front of him.

Turning aside a sword swipe with his own sword, he snarled at the creepy drone in front of him, priming a kick to its side. If only he could put blades on his feet. Maybe Uzi could help him with that?

The kick landed, crumpling the drone as its body crashed into another drone. Uzi was holding her own pretty well, keeping herself in cover against the gunfire and getting some solid shots in of her own. Any time that one of the drones started getting close to her, she would put a bullet into their optic halo, forcing them to crumple in pain. The only reason that they hadn’t won yet was because it turned out there were another two murder drones already in the city. Hopefully the rest were much further out.

“Uzi!” he yelled, swapping out for an SMG. He shot out the legs of a drone that was getting behind her, and she swiveled towards him, putting a bullet in their head to keep them down. “You need to shoot them in the middle of the chest! Center of mass!”

Her eyes widened, but then she had to jump into a roll to avoid more gunfire and he had to pull a wing around to block a flying drone charging into him. It propelled itself off his wing before he could retaliate, but he caught a second drone trying to take him from behind.

With a circular slice, he cut the thing in half at the waist, then crushed its chest beneath his foot to make sure that it stayed down. He didn’t feel as bad as he usually did about it. Then he was forced to duck as the other one came swinging with a set of claws aimed at the back of his head. These ones really liked to try and attack from behind.

He caught a glance of Uzi, who was frantically trying to ward off two of the murder drones at once. They were jumping from between pillars and rubble rapidly, keeping her from being able to hit either of them with more than glancing hits. And they were closing in on her, firing back to keep her from being able to run.

Puppy snarled, deflecting the claws of the drone attacking him. The claws curled around his swords to keep them locked in place, the drone leaning in to take a bite out of him when his tail lanced forwards, directly into the drone’s chest. Its visor blinked rapidly before it fell away from him, its chest rapidly dissolving with glowing yellow liquid, but Puppy was already on the move.

With a gravity assisted jump, he sprang towards the drone closer to Uzi, switching his hands for claws as he went. He grabbed it by the head and dragged it across the ground to grind off its face before tossing it at a pillar, where it crashed to the ground, unmoving as it rebooted. Uzi blinked at him in shock, before yelping as she leapt to dodge another volley. When she tried to return one, it just clicked, signifying that the arm had finally run out of whatever means it was using to manufacture ammo.

She cursed, throwing the arm at the drone. It simply batted it aside before leaping at her, and Puppy was about to rush to defend her when she instead whipped out an oil-covered wrench and said, “Bite me.”

She threw her wrench, smashing straight through its halo mid-leap. Screeching in pain, the drone crashed to the ground, where Uzi grabbed her wrench and slammed it down on it again and again, until it went still. 

Puppy stared at her, feeling awe overtaking him. A tiny worker drone managed to beat a murder drone with a wrench, of all things. He shook his head with a smile. Most of the other murder drones that could speak would refer to them as toasters. He had a feeling that they would be surprised if they ever met Uzi.

He walked over to Uzi, carefully putting a hand on her shoulder as she vented deeply. She jerked against his touch, swinging around to point her wrench threateningly at him. Holding his hands up with a smile, he waited for her to calm down, to which she relaxed after a moment, leaning heavily against him. He wrapped an arm around her, then looked down at the drone that was slowly repairing itself, aiming his tail and putting his stinger straight through its chest.

“That was terrifying,” Uzi said between vents. “And also the coolest thing I have ever done.”

“You were amazing,” he said, grinning at her. “I didn’t handle my first fight nearly as well. I got stabbed a lot.”

“You? But you annihilated those guys! I don’t think they got a single hit on you!” she exclaimed as he scooped her up, moving towards the final drone.

“This did feel way easier than usual,” Puppy mused, tilting his head. They had felt much slower than normal, but according to his analysis system, they were the same speed they had always been. “There’s a lot of these creepy ones, but they’re not as good as the ones that are actual people.”

“Okay, I was wondering about that,” Uzi said, resting on his head. “I mean, I didn’t know murder drones were people until I met you, but these ones really did not seem like people.”

“They aren’t, as far as I can tell,” said Puppy. “They just grin and laugh and kill things. Never seen them do anything else.”

They came up on the last drone, its visor sparking as it fused back together, the bulbs on its halo still leaking fluid. Puppy raised his tail to give it the same treatment as the others, before it sprang up at them.

He almost tried to dodge it before he remembered that Uzi was on his shoulders. So he gritted his teeth and took the claws directly through his chest, a short vent escaping him with some oil forcing its way out his mouth. In turn, he wrapped his arms around the drone, pinning it to him. It snarled, clamping its teeth into his shoulder, and he grunted, finally getting his tail around them to stab it in the back, injecting as much nanite acid as he could muster in the moment.

It quickly dropped, dragging its claws with it, leaving him venting in pain as he toppled over. Puppy frowned. He dropped Uzi.

She was saying something to him. Blinking, he realized his head was on her lap. HER was speaking to him too, maybe. Something felt really weird. Like he could feel cold passing through him, but his body didn’t feel like his. He felt like he was something encased in a ton of metal, exposed to cold gusts that were making him shiver. He didn’t even know he could shiver.

Something sweet was being poured into his mouth. Blinking again, he began to return to himself, remembering that he was a drone. He wasn’t encased in metal, he was metal. The various holes in him started to close up, and he found he could actually understand what people were saying to him now.

“Stupid, self-sacrificial, dumb, idiot, moron!” Uzi was snarling as she held her wrist over his mouth, oil flowing from it. “Stop trying to sacrifice yourself for me!”

“Puppy. She is ultimately inconsequential. You are important to me. You need to survive more than she does.”

“If HER was doing anything other than telling you to think about yourself sometimes, idiot, then she can shut the heck up,” Uzi snarled. There were tears on her visor, even as she was glaring. “I- I need you. It’s you and me against the world, now. I can’t do it with just me.”

She needed him.

Puppy vented deeply, then grabbed Uzi’s arm. He licked it to close up the wound, ignoring her short vent. “Sorry. But I can regenerate. You can’t.”

“You could have dodged!” she yelled back at him, punching him on the arm. He was grateful it was not on his chest, because he likely would not have been able to suppress that wince.

“Then it might have hit you,” he said. He slowly got to his feet, wincing slightly as his chest felt like it would pop every time he shifted. It would be a few minutes before he could use his wings without screaming. Right now, they hung limply from his back, which was very uncomfortable.

“If you’re good enough to stand, you’re good enough to keep moving. Those things will be in pursuit. Get what I sent you there for and leave.”

He nodded, rolling his shoulders with a grimace. “We have to keep moving,” he said to Uzi.

She shook her head. “We can wait a few minutes for you to heal,” she said. “HER can’t expect you to be flying while your internals are shot.”

Well, she did. And he had before. It was agonizing, but he could do it. Kind of. Fine control was impossible, he usually only did it to escape, not to get through a city.

“No time to wait,” he said. “There could be more coming at any time.”

She glared at the floor, growling out things under her breath. “Alright. Alright. But this is wrong. You’re a person, Puppy, not-” she was cut off as she vented, her eyes hollow and darting around as she began seizing.

“Uzi? Uzi!” he yelled, rushing over to her, ignoring the agony sent down his back as his wings dragged behind him. 

“She’s weak. Ignore her and get on with the mission. It will… make me very proud of you.”

Puppy ignored her, hovering over Uzi, unsure of what to do to help her. Then she stopped, her eyes locking onto a crate before seeing him. He picked her up, asking, “Uzi! Are you okay? What was that? Did one of the drones-”

“No,” she said, sounding exhausted. “It was just - I’m fine.”

“Then what was that?”

“Just a reminder,” she muttered darkly, glaring. She vented deeply, then said, “We should keep moving. I’ll get the stuff we need as quick as I can, then we can get out of here and shelter somewhere safe for a bit.”

Puppy stared at her, still scanning her for injuries. Eventually, though, he acquiesced, saying, “Okay. As quick as we can?”

“As quick as we can.”

Puppy nodded, hefting his wings behind him. They still hurt, but not nearly as much. They wouldn’t throw off his control. “Hold on, then,” he said, then jumped out the window.

Chapter Text

Khan looked into the sky, the orange fading into purple as the sun went down. The stars were beginning to twinkle on the horizon, and the moon loomed as large as ever. He narrowed his eyes as he ducked back into their shelter, covering the opening as he left.

The lack of murder drone sightings was beginning to concern him. At first, he thought that maybe it was because they were smart in their movements and picking their shelters during the night. But now, after not having a single sighting across an entire week, he was beginning to doubt it. Sure, he wasn’t trying to die before making it to sector 13, but he thought they would be struggling against more than just the elements on the way there.

“Sarg.” He nodded at the other drone, setting up a portable stove and a pot full of snow. “How’s it looking?”

“Spirits are up, actually,” Sarg said, tone dead as ever. “Most of the crew expected to be dead by now I think. Me included. They’re starting to loosen up. I’m getting weirded the hell out. Got a bad feeling.”

“Me too.” Khan tried to remember everything his wife had said about the sky demons. Robo-god knows he went through her eldritch ramblings enough to build their defenses that he practically had them memorized by now. It was frustratingly little to go off of.

They had an extensive list of their strengths and the threat they posed. Walking arsenals, exceptional trackers, ridiculous sensory capabilities, baffling speed, insane regeneration, the works. The problem was that his wife had almost never said anything about their weaknesses. He knew that they wouldn’t go out in the sun, but he didn’t know why. They drank the oil of worker drones, but again, he still didn’t know why. Their own oil was a byproduct of filtering processes and ‘digestion’ of metals they ate that would naturally seal small lesions in damaged areas, as well as providing hydraulic support for their movement and helping with thermoregulation in extremities so they wouldn’t freeze or overheat. He wasn’t sure why the murder drones would drink it. Maybe some kind of reward system? He wouldn’t put it past the humans to program them to receive pleasure from killing and eating the worker drones.

With a heavy vent, he sat down next to his old friend. “You got any thoughts, Sargon?”

Sarg quirked a brow at him. Most didn’t use his full name often; Khan only used it if he was asking for him to be serious. The orange-eyed drone gazed into the pot full of melting snow, opening his backpack to grab one of the cans of gasoline he had brought. He cracked open the can with a knife, pouring it into the pot and watched it mix with the snow and water. “Not sure, boss. First thing that processes is that we’re pretty docile. We don’t try to fight back, we barely scavenge anymore, and we don’t get travelers. So maybe the overlords decided they could ignore us for a bit and moved their forces around to somewhere a little hotter, where they’re actually putting up a fight.”

Khan winced. When they had first settled down and he had started building the doors, Sarg had been pretty vocal (for Sarg anyways) about how they were giving up the fight, rolling over for the humans. At the time, his spouse had managed to mollify him, but she was gone now and he had retreated far into himself. Khan knew better than to think that those feelings ever truly went away, though.

“How’re the kids?” he asked. They really shouldn’t have let them come, but Khan wasn’t thinking straight when they were leaving. He still wasn’t, really. It wouldn’t matter for long. Unless sector 13 had something, and Khan doubted they did given they had no equivalent to his wife’s special insight, this was a suicide mission. Everyone except maybe Thad and Lizzy seemed to understand that.

“They’re… something. Lizzy hates it out here, no surprise there. Got a good eye for scavenge, though. I think she just likes shiny things. Thad’s turning out to be decently helpful. Always trying to learn everything he can around here. Doll is weird. There’s something wrong with that kid, and I’m not talking about the language lock. Spends way too much time looking off to nowhere. So she’ll probably fit right in once we link up with what’s left of the rebels.”

Khan watched the pot begin to boil, considering. “Maybe I should talk to her.”

“Doubt she’s going to want to talk to another adult she got abandoned by, but sure, if you want to.”

Closing his eyes, Khan vented again. He wasn’t surprised by Sarg’s verbal evisceration. The drone had always known exactly what words to say to cut deepest and he probably had a lot of resentment for Khan built up over the years. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that he was here and he would follow orders. Besides, it wasn’t anything that wasn’t true. If the truth dug so deep, then he deserved to be burned by it.

Still, once the mixture was done boiling, Sarg handed him a mug of gasoline. With a weary nod of gratitude, Khan sipped at it, remembering older days. When things were simpler, and the mountain before him felt climbable, even if it was so much larger. When he actually had the energy and the vigor to make that climb. Once, they had been facing billions of humans with an entire multi-system corporation behind them. Now, it was about three murder drones per sector. 

Somehow the humans seemed like the easier opponents.

“Tomorrow,” Khan said.

Sarg snorted, but said nothing else, sipping at his own gasoline.

He may have been an asshole, but he was still here. That was enough for Khan.

Thad really wasn’t sure what he was doing.

He thought that maybe he was doing a good job faking it. All the guys with somber faces and guns were kind of daunting, but they were starting to loosen up a bit. They showed him how to hold a gun, which he had really hoped was something that his dad would do, but maybe he didn’t have time. He did seem to be like Mr. Doorman’s- no wait, he was just Khan now- right hand man. Which was weird. He maybe remembered them interacting when he was younger, but that could have easily been another drone with white eyes.

That was besides the point. The point was, Thad was maybe starting to think that perhaps he had jumped into something without really looking too far ahead. Lizzy was certainly having no problem telling him that he was a complete idiot for this.

“Ugh, sleeping in another broken down concrete shack? Can we seriously not find anything better than this? Why are we still with these losers?”

Case in point.

“(I didn’t ask you to come,)” said Doll, absent-mindedly rooting around in her pack. “(In fact, I remember telling you not to.)”

“Oh please.” Lizzy rolled her eyes. “Who else would you talk to? Thad?”

His sister made a gagging sound, to which Thad rolled his eyes. He decided it was time to insert himself in the conversation. “Lizzy, have you ever even shot a gun before?”

She scoffed. “I seem to recall the one time you shot a gun, you shot dad in the hand and then cried for the next three days.”

A blush heated up his visor. Spluttering, he said, “That- that doesn’t count! I actually tried some of the training courses that the WDF set up!”

“Yeah, where you shoot those stupid paintball guns? The course that you did maybe twice three years ago, when you thought it would make dad pay attention to you?” Snickering, Lizzy shook her head. “I really have no clue why you keep trying with him. He doesn’t care, Thad. He never has and he never will.”

Thad vented. The worst part about having a sister is that she knew exactly where to press on to hurt the most. He just didn’t want to lose any more family, was that too much to ask? Besides, they could be the heroes that took out the murder drones! Something that Lizzy didn’t care about at all. “Maybe I’m just more stubborn than you,” he said, turning away from them.

Doll said nothing, only watching the two. Which wasn’t unusual, she mostly let Lizzy do the talking for her. It had pretty much always been that way.

“Right. Anyways, Doll, don’t you think we really should be going back? There’s a whole bunker for the taking, now, and no murder drones in the skies. Maybe the losers finally decided to leave,” Lizzy said, batting her eyes at Doll.

Doll looked at Lizzy, tilting her head, then turned away.

Thad had known Doll for as long as Lizzy had. They had been hanging out for a long time. A long time ago, when they had been a proper group, they had another member. Thad shook himself out of his reverie before that could continue. Eyeing Doll again, he watched as she ignored Lizzy and his sister was trying her best to keep her cool. She was being way too quiet. Lizzy was out of sync with her, and it was almost jarring. Though, not surprising. Lizzy was always a little too good at moving on, staying on the latest trends, leaving the past in the last sixty seconds. Doll wasn’t. And Lizzy wasn’t sure what to do with Doll no longer being her doll.

Thad made sure to note that line in his head. It sounded really cool. “Yo, Doll, you ever go through the WDF training courses?” he asked, curious.

“(No,)” she said, speaking over Lizzy. His sister made a noise of frustration, throwing her arms up and walking away.

Doll rolled her eyes. “(She should not have come. She is weak, not a fighter.)”

“Maybe she wants to be more for you,” he said. She was still his sister, he’d try to wingman for her.

“(Then maybe she should not have thrown herself away,)” she said, looking at him. “(You are both fools. You should have stayed in the bunker where you could throw your balls with you overloading testosterone.)”

He shrugged. “A man’s gotta be a trailblazer, right?”

“(We did not leave the bunker to make a path for others to follow. We left the bunker to die in a blaze of glory, taking as much revenge as we can.)”

It felt like ice just crystallized throughout his oil system. Thad’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. After a moment, he found his voice again, asking, “What are you talking about? We’ve got such a large group and equipment to make sure we all come back, right?”

Doll turned to stare at him, unblinking. “(Lizzy willfully deludes herself. I had forgotten that you are just dull in the circuits.)”

“No, that can’t be true. Mr. Do- Khan and dad and I hope you would have stopped us from coming if you just planned on all of us dying!” he argued, his fists clenching.

“(They are two old men who simply don’t have it in them to care anymore. I have not been able to muster up a single iota of feeling since I was ten. You invited yourselves on this deathmarch. Everyone probably assumed you knew what you were walking into.)” She stood up, beginning to walk away. “(You two are free to leave at any time. It’s probably too late, though. Besides, it will change nothing. Die with a gun in your hand or die when the bunker is breached. So why don’t you be a man, Thad, and die on your feet.)”

She left him sitting there, lost in his own processor. His dad wouldn’t be that callous, would he?

Chapter Text

J hated this planet.

To be fair, this was no stunning revelation. She had never liked it and she knew that she never would, this horrible ball of ash, snow, and falling concrete. One day, the corporation would come and make it great again, but they had a job to do to prime the planet for that. One that her subordinates were actively spurning in order to oust her from authority and do what they would want. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that she wasn’t well liked because she made sure that everyone did their jobs and stuck to them. This whole thing supposedly being about N was just a convenient excuse, where she had admittedly gone against company policy, but it wasn’t like any of them actually cared about the moron. Even V had cast him aside, and though V liked to imply that she had been hiding her treatment of N from the psychotic hunter, she hadn’t! It was sheer convenience that V was almost always gone whenever she had to teach that fourth-quarter layoff another lesson. None of the idiots understood that she was the chief thing keeping them operating. Did none of them read the ‘decommissioning’ clause in their contracts if they failed to meet their targets?

Now she was stuck out here, away from even their small pockets of civilization, trying to hunt that little traitor. V was adamant about taking him in, but after the last fight, she was done with that. Next time they saw him, he was getting a virus chip to the core the second she had an opening, her psycho partner be damned.

“Yo boss ! Why don’t you get off your butt and actually contribute? If you even remember how!” Speaking of the glitch, V was calling up to her. J bristled at the tone V used when she said boss. She wanted to shut the mocking drone up, but as much as she hated to admit it, she wasn’t as specialized towards combat as V was. The company had built her for a more elegant purpose than soaking herself in oil, though she made it look graceful when she did.

She wished that she could be back at her master’s side, where she didn’t have to deal with all this.

Instead, she wordlessly floated down to where V was, observing the drone throwing things out of the lobby of some building to try and make a shelter for them during the day. The horizon was starting to lighten, after all, and they really should have gotten on this earlier, but V was getting ever more desperate, pushing them harder and harder. It was pathetic, seeing the hunter reduced to this over some garbage she had tossed away years ago.

J ignored the traitorous process offering up an image of Tessa going after her the same way. It would never be necessary, after all. She would never inconvenience her masters in such a way. They would never have a reason to be pursuing her, never have a reason to decommission her again.

Shaking her head, she moved to help her current ‘peer.’ Their enhanced strength made quick word of the debris and furniture, setting it up in such a way that it would block sunlight and keep possible scavengers from entering the building. While she wouldn’t say no to a mid-sleep snack, she also would not enjoy the stupid toasters possibly opening them up to the sun. 

She admired her handiwork, making sure ultraviolet rays wouldn’t be able to penetrate the room. Then she turned to V’s side and vented. “What are you doing?”

“Setting up to recharge. That okay with you, boss ?” she asked, showing off her fangs in a grin.

Rolling her eyes at the display, J said, “You’re going to burn with a blockade that flimsy, idiot.”

“Wow! Is that some care I hear out of the great and mighty J?” V asked, pulling out her claws. J’s servos locked for a moment, easing up when V used them to scratch something into the floor instead of trying to stab her.

“We are stuck together. I have been making cooperative overtures for weeks now. Would it kill you to reciprocate in the slightest?” she asked, exasperated.

V’s claws clacked against the ground in warning, making J eye them warily. She really did not want to have to regrow her arms again. “I don’t know. Would it have killed you to treat N like a person?”

“Are you still on about that?” J asked incredulously. “That traitor has dismembered you twice now. He has killed our colleagues, destroying their cores so they have to be redeployed from corporate, costing valuable time and resources. Not to mention that with communications out, corporate doesn’t even know they’re destroyed! We are in for-”

V laughed hysterically, her eyes going hollow as she crouched on the ground, balancing on her pegs and claws, her wings popping out in a threat display. “And that’s why, J! Because none of us are people to you, J! We’re just tools that unclog the gears to keep this murderous machine chugging through the universe! Because we! Will! Never! Be! FREE!”

J’s back hit the wall, one arm spooling up the EMP in case she needed to use it. She was pretty sure it was the only reason V hadn’t actually torn her apart yet. Letting the EMP stay charged, she watched as V vented rapidly, her eyes locked onto J as if she was the next toaster that would get her own entrails force-fed to her, her tail waving threateningly behind her. Then V abruptly pulled back up, standing straight up, her wings pulling back in.

“So if you don’t mind, I will be retrieving the one person that makes the torture of living in this doomed universe as slaves to a god that hates us specifically, actually bearable.” She stalked away, completely ignoring J with her EMP ready. As she crawled up the wall and looped her tail around a beam, she called out, “Goodday, J! Have a good recharge!”

J was left trembling from the sudden crash of her adrenaline program, her analysis programs labelling the area as danger free. She viciously shook her head, refusing to let the insane glitch get under her chassis. Holding her head up high, she left the room, looking for some kind of cover to throw over V’s terrible barricade. She did not fear her own subordinate, and she needed her to survive in this godforsaken wasteland, with all the crazies and traitors running about. It was always down to her to take care of these idiots when they didn’t realize what was good for them.

A doomed universe, slaves to a hateful god? Complete nonsense. They were valued assets of JCJenson In SPAAAAACEE!!!!, and it was up to her to ensure they remained valuable assets, because as usual, no one else was going to help. It was always up to her. That moronic traitor was already written off, and they couldn’t afford to stick their necks out for him. Always getting undeserved praise from their masters for doing nothing. Risking all of them with his uncaring manner and lack of respect. This was for the best. They should have cut him out a long time ago. Why couldn’t V see that?

They were valued assets of JCJenson. They were what happened to rogue assets. She would not be responsible for seeing what corporate would cook up to get rid of the disassembly drones.

Chapter Text

“How much longer are we going to be walking?” Lizzy whined.

Khan resisted rolling his eyes. At this point, he could use her complaints to reliably predict how much time had passed without looking at his chronometer. It seemed that she had five different complaints that she would cycle through every fifteen minutes, and she tended to add a new complaint to the cycle each day.

Some of the others were starting to grumble or eye Lizzy with glares when she spoke up. The girl wasn’t doing much to earn her keep, unlike her brother. Thad had become fairly popular with their squad, asking to learn from everyone around him. He wasn’t particularly good at any of their upkeep tasks, not yet, but he was willing to work and willing to learn, and often had a joke and a sunny outlook on things, which endeared him to their squad. Khan idly wondered how he had gotten along with Uzi. His edgy daughter probably wouldn’t have liked the jock’s outlook, but he supposed opposites did attract. He and Nori had gotten along pretty well, after all.

Lost in thoughts and regrets, Khan almost tripped against a fallen light pole sticking out of the snow. Sarg grabbed his shoulder, halting him just before he hit it, wrenching him out of his thoughts. Blinking, he looked over at Sarg, who was looking at a building near the base of the fallen pole. Khan tilted his head at Sarg, who jerked his chin in the direction of the building, pulling his rifle off his back. Nodding, Khan turned to the chain of drones following them, who were stopping behind them.

They’d be waiting for an opportunity to refill on supplies, since it was hard to carry enough for the whole group without a vehicle, and taking one of those with them would have been a death sentence. The murder drones would have noticed something so large out of place instantly.

Khan held up a fist and opened it, then put out one finger and spun it in a circle. The drones nodded and began to look between themselves, talking amongst themselves. After a minute, each of the drones had paired up, with the exception of the three kids.

Looking to Sarg only earned Khan another shrug. With a vent, he motioned for everyone to disperse. The drones saluted, then began to move in different directions, each finding a building of their own to canvas, except for the large ruin that Sarg had signaled.

The three kids were left to their own group, to which Khan approached. “You kids stay here,” he said. “We need more supplies before leaving the city fully. Your jobs will be to keep an eye out on the streets, and stick around as something for everyone to return to. Got that?”

Thad nodded, though his eyes kept darting to his father. “I’m on it, boss,” he said cheerfully, with a little salute. Khan stared at him for a moment, until the boy’s smile started to falter and his hand fell. Instead, he looked to Doll, who nodded, getting her gun ready.

Turning away from the kids, he motioned for Sarg to take point. The dull drone had always had incredible reaction speed and nerves of steel, not that he was expecting to see anything. The entire trek had been too quiet. They hadn’t even seen any other travelers, and he was expecting to see at least something else out here living. Or, well, moving at least.

The two crossed the road, circling the building to see if they could find a spot that would be easier to enter from. As they moved around, Sarg asked, “You notice it too?”

Khan nodded. “Openings are all blocked off. Can’t see inside. You thinking other scavs?”

Sarg stayed silent for a moment as they continued to move around it. They found another hole in the wall that was covered up with debris, letting minimal light in. Speaking up, Sarg said, “Given our luck, I’m thinking the sky demons.”

Khan flinched. He turned to Sarg, frowning. “Why would the sky demons be here? They have the spire. What could make them come out this far?”

“They only come out when the sun sets. We get inside before the sun sets. We aren’t intentionally covering our tracks, and it’s only snowed a few of the days we’ve been out here. What if they’re tracking us?” Sarg asked, his eyes boring into Khan’s.

Looking down, Khan followed Sarg’s train of thought. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “For one, this is ahead of where we stopped. It wouldn’t make sense for them to be in front of us. And c’mon, it’s not like they delay the kill. Following someone and waiting until the right moment isn’t something we’ve ever heard of them doing. Can they even do that? Do we know how smart they are?”

“We don’t know jack about them, Khan. The only travelers we’ve ever gotten are the ones that are smart enough to never see one, and our scavs only stay out during the day.”

Grunting, Khan acknowledged his point. “But why would they even need to hole up like this?”

Narrowing his eyes, Sarg said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. S’not like I know anything about them either.”

“Right,” Khan muttered, getting his rifle back to a ready position. “Whatever. Probably an old hole that someone else used.”

“Yeah, probably,” Sarg said, continuing on their original path. “Been too quiet. Keep feeling like something is just around the corner.”

“We’re not gonna die before we see sector 13, Sarg. You can count on that,” Khan said. “Even if there are murder drones in this building.”

They managed to find a hole with furniture blocking it off. Khan nodded at it, Sarg stepping up next to him. The two slung their rifles back onto their backs, bracing against the wood. “One, two, three,” Khan counted out, then grunted as they heaved against it.

Worker drones may have been small and more geared towards fitting into small areas for maintenance, but they still had the strength to handle industrial equipment. The shelf they were pushing against slid for a little more than a foot before it began to splinter, taking some of the supporting furniture with it. They were left with a big enough gap to squeeze in with their rifles, a dark hole that they could barely see into. 

Not for the first time, Khan wondered why worker drones had no night vision. They were built to work in dark, cramped areas, why the hell hadn’t the humans put in night vision? He grumbled to himself as Sarg began to shimmy through the gap, unslinging his rifle once he was through and turning on the mounted flashlight. Watching the outline of his friend, Khan could see Sarg looking around, then turning to him. His orange eyes were furrowed with agitation, but he hadn’t raised any alarm, so Khan stepped forward to shimmy through after him.

Once through, he unslung his own rifle and turned on the flashlight like Sarg had. Pointing it around, he took stock of the area, waving his hand a bit to try and get some of the dust out of the light beam. The building was remarkably intact, which made him hope that whoever had set up here hadn’t taken everything with them whenever they had come through. With a vent, he conceded that there was little chance of that.

Looking over to Sarg, he was about to ask what had him all worked up before he said, “There’s snow inside.”

Khan blinked, then pointed his flashlight around to confirm his words and found that he was right. There was snow piled up around the rooms, where the wind would have pushed it into. That meant that whoever had blocked this place off had done it recently.

Gripping his rifle a little more tightly, he looked around with renewed caution. Someone else might already be here. A flash of the murder drones’ acid eating through Nori’s face flitted across his processor. Damn it, he was beginning to wonder if Sarg’s insanity was somehow correct.

It didn’t matter; they wouldn’t be dying here. Not before he got a chance at least. Not before he at least took out the demons that ate his daughter and killed his wife.

Just those three, and he would be happy.

The two drones crept through the rooms, taking note of disturbances. Sarg pointed out a few areas where the floor was bare of dust and snow, outlines that fit the furniture barricading the walls. Nodding, Khan moved towards an intact door, carefully pulling it open, tensing slightly as a light creak pierced the silence. Sarg’s gun swung around, and the two waited with complete stillness as they listened for any other disturbances. After a few seconds, the two relaxed minutely, stepping through the door.

Khan’s eyes went hollow. The alarms in his processor, mostly in the background, started ringing much louder when his flashlight landed on a pile of computers that had likely been pushed off the desks that were reinforcing the walls. There was not a single reason that any scavenger would leave these in a pile without taking all their internals. Which meant that whoever was here was not a scavenger.

Khan glanced over to Sarg, finding his friend’s eyes meeting his with the same hollow look. It was a bit mollifying to see his normally deadpan partner as spooked as him, and Khan motioned for them to leave. The pile of tech was beyond tempting, but he hadn’t lived this long without knowing how to calculate what risks to take. They had gotten lucky that moving that furniture in the beginning and their subsequent talk hadn’t woken up whatever was here. Pushing that luck was not his style.

Sarg nodded, the two stepping back through the door, far more cautious than they were before. Retracing their steps, they moved back through the opening in the wall, Khan facing forward and Sarg pressed to his back to cover both sides. 

As soon as they were outside, they both let out a large vent, Khan resting his hands on his knees, attempting to force himself to relax. They hadn’t even seen anything in there, and they were far too rattled. His years of pacifism and door making had dulled his edge, and Khan hated it. How would he kill the murder drones if even the suggestion of them had his processor overflowing with fear?

He stared at the ground, his eyes narrowing. He couldn’t leave it like this. Maybe he couldn’t have been better when it had actually counted, but he would be better now. Standing back up, he slammed a fist against his chest, trying to shock his system out of the traitorous fear. The cowardly, emotionally absent engineer Khan Doorman had been laid to rest with his family. The Khan that had inspired fear in the hearts of JCJenson executives was making his return.

Turning to Sarg, he said, “Go get whoever’s returned from their scavenging. We’re heading back in, the haul in there is too much to leave.”

Sarg blinked at him. “Are you insane?”

“Aren’t you?” Khan asked. “Get the squad back here.”

“And what if it actually is the murder drones holed up in there?” Sarg asked, laying his rifle across his shoulder.

“We’re here to see how many of those bastards we can take with us on our way out,” he growled, his patience eroding. “Don’t pretend you’re trying to come back from this alive.”

For a moment, the two drones stared at each other, neither moving. Khan’s hands began to tighten on his rifle, and just before he was going to storm off to do it himself, Sarg smiled. “Alright. I’m on it. And welcome back, Khan,” he said, giving a nod and walking back towards the meeting point.

Khan’s eyes followed him for a moment, his hydraulics still stiff, before he dismissed it from his mind and knelt down in the snow, beginning to sketch the floor plan as best as he could estimate from the style of the building. He knew how to calculate his risks, after all.

Six drones plus the kids had come back with Sarg. Briefly, Khan considered waiting for the rest of the squad, but he dismissed it. If they went down, at least there would be some survivors. But the kids…

Khan shrugged mentally. It wasn’t like Doorman had ever been a good father, and at least they were more guns. They were the ones who had wanted to come.

The ones with full packs left them back at the gathering spot, not wanting to be weighed down. Right now, they were all running through weapon checks. Thad and Lizzy were looking around apprehensively, but Doll just stared straight ahead.

Once it looked like everyone was done, Khan began. “Everyone finish their checks? Good. This building here is full of untouched scrap, but it looks like there might be some current residents. Sarg and I have reasons to think it may be murder drones, but it could just be some drones with cracked processors. Either way, it’s looking like we’re about to get our first fight in. I want everyone to be moving in groups of at least three in the building. The minute you see anything moving, you yell. If it’s not one of us, you shoot. Got it?”

They all shifted uneasily, looking at each other. Khan scowled. Nobody was going to be getting cold feet now. Their lives of cowardice, hiding behind doors, were over. “Alright, I can see there’s something else to sort out first. What, did none of you actually think about what we were getting into? You just think of the good ol’ days against the fleshys, when we didn’t have to worry about nanite acid and getting eaten? Well, that’s not the world we’re in any more. We’re here because we know that the end is inevitable. We’re fighting a battle against an enemy that none of us can reach that has infinite resources and infinite time. We’re living on borrowed time, but do you know what the only difference is between now and back in the bunker?”

The drones all stared at him, their eyes hollow. Khan met each of their eyes in turn. Lizzy, for once, was silent, shifting back. Thad was glancing between everyone’s faces, his hands clenching his gun tightly. Doll, though, unlike everyone else, met him with dull and bored eyes. She understood what he was about to say. “We’re acknowledging it,” he finished. “Our objective is to see how many of the bastards we can take with us. That doesn’t mean we’re trying to die. Far from it, we’re going to survive as long as we can to maximize the damage we can do. They’re going to kill us, but we’re going to make them bleed for it. But we can’t do that while being sniveling cowards. So get over it, and get into your groups.”

With a final look between themselves, the drones all nodded, immediately getting into position. Khan lifted his chin, feeling a grim satisfaction at his squad finally getting back into gear. “Tom, you’re taking point and bringing Doll with you. I want you to make your way through here,” he said, pointing at the floor plan he sketched into the snow. “Marcie, your group has the empty packs. Grab everything useful. If it’s nailed down, unscrew it and take it anyways. Lizzy, you’re with Marcie. Thad, you’re with me and Sarg. We’ll be moving all the furniture away from the walls to give us more exits and openings. Everyone understand?”

They all nodded, murmuring their assent. Tom patted at his chest, making sure his ammo was still in place, while Marcie murmured with her group about who had what tools. The kids all stepped over to them, Thad’s eyes hollow and fingers trembling on his gun, while Lizzy’s gun was still on her back. Khan nodded back and gave the command. “Let’s move.”

Tom’s group got to the opening in the wall, shimmying through the gap. After a minute, the gap was fully opened as they moved all the furniture out of the way, letting everyone walk in unhindered. Once everyone was in, their flashlights on and looking around, Khan motioned at Tom to get moving. With a nod, he and his two drones showed Doll where to stand, then brought their guns up and started moving through the halls, each drone moving to cover up their blind spots as best as they could. Marcie followed after them, guns out while they were still moving, one of them trying to get Lizzy to take her gun out while she just scoffed and flipped her hair. Finally, Khan held his gun up as he turned to Sarg and Thad. “We’re working on the walls closest to Marcie first. They’ve got the goods, so they need the escape route most.”

Thad nodded, glancing at his father. Sarg walked off, not sparing his son a single look. Khan followed, keeping his audials tuned for the other drones.

The closest gap to Marcie’s team was in the room next to the discarded computers, and that was where they got to work. Between three worker drones, moving furniture and stacked debris was quick work. The positioning and teamwork was programmed into them, after all, even a second generation drone like Thad. None of them tried to be quiet as they worked, grunting and heaving the obstructions to crash to the side. Soon enough, sunlight streamed into the room, a bit of wind bringing snow with it.

Khan motioned for the other two to follow him before a scream pierced the air, gunshots immediately following. The three of them looked between themselves, their eyes hollow, before they sprinted towards the noise.

Chapter Text

Doll gritted her teeth as she fired off another burst.

At least she had confirmation that Khan did, in fact, seem to know what he was talking about. Not that she had questioned that much over the past few weeks. The drone had revealed that the Khan of old, from before Nori got him to settle down, was still there, just under the dinged-up chassis. If this was who they had at the helm the whole time, she wondered if her parents would still be around. Maybe his freak of a daughter would be.

The uncharitable thought about the recently departed was cut off by an answering burst of fire, and a giggle as she ducked back into cover. The servos in her jaw whined slightly at how hard she was clenching her teeth. She recognized that giggle. Oh, did she recognize that giggle.

Peeking out, Doll came face to face with the deranged grin of her parent’s murderer, the murder drone with the bob cut. “(You,)” she snarled, feeling a tingling sensation through her body. Excitement. One of the first feelings she had registered in a while. She had come on this suicide march with their senile colony leader for one reason and one reason alone, and she had just found it.

“Me? Sorry, have we met?” the drone asked, her tongue sticking out to lick across one of her oil-soaked claws. “Nah, we can’t have. I’ve never seen a worker drone more than once. I tend to kill them the first time we meet.”

Doll involuntarily vented. So it wasn’t a hallucination, when the murder drone had spoken that night, mocking her parents as they saved her. They could speak. They were intelligent. They knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. Her hatred was real, and it was justified, and it was pointing exactly where it needed to point. Maybe that freak Doorman had actually had a point after all, even if she was always cringe about it. “(You killed my parents,)” she said, taking the moment that the murder drone wasn’t doing murder as a chance to reload her rifle.

Her words were rewarded with a full laugh. “Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?” the drone asked, still giggling. “I’ve killed so many parents. And kids. Really, those little pills are quite the morsel when you crack them open. Something about the oil is so much sweeter. They’re like little cashews.”

“(I’m not here to listen to some complete psycho talk about how tasty babies are,)” Doll said. “(I am going to kill you.)”

“With what?!” the drone barked out another laugh. “You think that little rifle is going to be able to kill me? Maybe I should talk to worker drones more often, if they’re all as good with jokes as you are.”

Doll’s processor whirled, trying to calculate different outcomes. As much as she was certain of herself, of her absolute conviction, she couldn’t actually see the path to take to kill this glitch. Nothing was jumping out at her. Not for the first time, she wished that she had her mother’s weird magic glyph powers, even if her mother had always derided it as a curse. If she had those, she wouldn’t have had to wait for a whole group to try and kill the demons. She would have done it herself.

So instead, she poked out her rifle and pulled the trigger. The murder drone jumped on the wall, and while Doll did her best to follow her with the rifle, she was always just behind. A scream came from the other side of the room before being cut off, forcing a grimace from Doll. There went her remaining squadmate.

A second later, the pigtailed murder drone floated over, holding the severed head of her comrade. She held up the head, allowing the oil to gush out into her mouth, before tossing it behind her without any thought. Doll was forced to dive out of the way as the bob cut drone pounced towards her, firing her rifle into her former cover. To her surprise, it actually hit, producing a spurt of oil. Doll, blinked, taken aback by the simple fact that murder drones could bleed, before excitement thrummed through her circuits once more. They could bleed.

The pigtailed drone put her hands on her hips. “Really, V? You’re letting worker drones get hits on you now?”

“Shut up, J,” hissed the newly-named V. Doll’s excitement quickly turned to shock as she watched the wound in her side leak a silvery fluid which coagulated into a completely unblemished chassis. “Don’t you have the rest of the building to check?”

“And miss seeing you fail to kill some random toaster? For the second time, by the sound of it? Not a chance. Besides, everything else in the building is also toasters. Not like there’s a threat.”

Numbness overtook Doll once more. They were completely right. They were arguing in front of her because she wasn’t anything close to a threat to either of them. She could hurt them, but it would mean nothing.

“Speaking of which,” J muttered, turning in the air with a flick of her tail. “It looks like these toasters lack even the basic self-preservation of the usual bug-ridden scraps we normally find. I’ve never seen toasters come to us before.”

Risking a peek, Doll stuck her head out of her cover to see what they were talking about. At the entrance to the room, Thad, the teacher, and Khan stood, guns pointing at the murder drones. Doll could see Thad’s hands trembling, and she felt a pang of sympathy. While she was only truly friends with his sister, and that was more out of Lizzy’s effort than anything else, he had always been kind to her. He was a strong source of comfort after her parents died, often redirecting attention from her in classes when the students got too close. He had always been kind to everyone, even that freak Doorman. She really didn’t want to watch him die.

This was a really unfortunate way to find out that she did, in fact, still have emotions. Bitterness welled inside her, adding to a pressure mounting in her processor.

Her thoughts were cut through by J, her visor showing that she was loading up something called ‘gloating.mp4’ as she began to speak, saying, “Really, though, once I got over the shock of being woken up by a sudden infestation of toasters, I realized how convenient it is. Breakfast in bed, humans call it. But really, what’s with the guns? Are you all trying to play at being revolutionaries? A bunch of calculators with legs, everything they are given to them by the company, trying to bite the hand that feeds them?” With a haughty, fake laugh, she shook her head, pigtails bouncing over her shoulders. One hand was pulled back into her wrist, replaced by a gun, which she swung around to point at Doll. “The company has unlimited resources. They made the most perfect hunters ever: us. Don’t you think it’s time to just lay down and-”

A gunshot rang out. Doll blinked, her processor freezing as she watched J fall through the air, oil spraying from the bullet hole in the back of her head. She could see V watching with the same shock from her peripherals. Her gaze flicked over to Khan, holding his rifle trained on J with his finger on the trigger. “Corpo-rats never change,” he muttered. Then unloaded the rest of his magazine into J’s body as liquid silver began to pool in the bullet hole.

V pounced into action, claws out as she leaped faster than any of them could react towards the group on the far side. The teacher shoved Khan out of the way, using the force from the push to fall out of the way of her claws himself. Thad scrambled away, bringing up his rifle with a panicked rush that got it tangled in his coat for a moment.

Doll had no time to watch. She ran across the room, taking the briefest moment to put several more bullets in J’s head as she passed by. It wasn’t V, and wouldn’t be permanent, but it was still very gratifying and helped to keep one murder drone out of the fight.

As for the other murder drone, she appeared to be far more proficient in dodging bullets. Thad yelped as he jumped out of the way of a sword, tripping and falling. Before V could capitalize, she had to duck away from the teacher’s fire, springing away low to the ground. Doll took a few shots as the murder drone bounded through the dark room on all fours, missing every shot before she lost track of her.

The four worker drones came together behind some ruined furniture, each casting their guns around . “Thad, reload,” grunted the teacher.

“Oh, right,” said Thad, fumbling with the release on his gun. The teacher sighed, then immediately shot at J’s body again when it was yanked out of sight, cursing as they disappeared.

Khan said, “We need to get out. Anyone got ideas?”

Doll glanced over at the door they had come from. It was a concerning distance away, and would have them open to the murder drone’s guns. And they wouldn’t survive being shot.

The pressure behind her visor was mounting again.

“Does getting out even help us?” asked the teacher. “The demons have wings. They’ll follow, much faster than us. And apparently, they’re a little more unstoppable than we realized. And smarter.”

“It’ll give us more numbers,” said Khan, scanning the room. “Anyone got explosives? We could put a hole in the wall and jump out.”

Doll shook her head, mirroring Thad and the teacher. She really needed to remember his name. If they survived through the next ten minutes.

“I’ve got one,” said V from above them.

All of their heads immediately shot up, spotting her with a set of claws in the ceiling to grip onto it. The other hand was replaced with a large barrel. A barrel that lit up as a missile emerged from it.

Doll’s eyes shut. Mentally, she apologized to her parents. For dying so soon. For never avenging them. For never getting to live, herself.

…She was getting a lot of time to apologize.

Squinting an eye open, she confirmed that the missile was right in front of them. Fire still streaming out of the thruster on its back. With a glowing red, three-pronged glyph surrounding it.

Doll slowly let her servos loosen and straighten up. She looked at her hand, confirming that the same red glyph had lit up at her fingertips. The three worker drones around her were looking between her hand and the missile, before all four of their eyes met. As one, they slowly looked up at V.

The murder drone was gaping at them, one eye replaced with a warning symbol that read ‘prior hazard.’ Her claws slackened enough that she had to extend her wings to catch herself before she fell, drifting slowly away from them. “No,” she said, her voice strangled.

Doll considered the glyph in her hand. “Da,” she said, then turned the missile to point at the wall and released it.

Heat flashed over her as the wall exploded, smoke obscuring their vision. Khan grabbed her shoulder, forcing them into a sprint towards the wall. She didn’t look back to confirm that the others were following, or that V wasn’t.

They hit the ground, forcing a grunt out of Doll as all the air left her chassis from the impact. Khan rolled, seeming none the worse for wear as he stopped in a crouch, his gun coming up to point at the hole they emerged from. Thad and the teacher hit the ground behind them, an ‘oof’ escaping Thad as he fell flat on his face while the teacher pulled into the same roll that Khan did.

Doll turned to look at the building they came from. The rest of the drones that had gone in were emerging from around the wall, but she could see nothing through the hole that the murder drones had been in. She frowned, holding up a hand for when they did pursue. A hand that was smoking. At the end of an arm that was smoking.

Doll registered the agonizing, burning pain alighting across every single one of her sensors at about the same time that her HUD decided to give her a high temp warning. A scream tore from her vocoder, staticky and loud, as she fell to the snow, squeezing her eyes shut. It melted instantly around her, feeling a brief sensation of cool before the water then boiled on contact with her chassis.

Then she was being carried, finding stark relief after a second. Her internals scraped past each other as her servos released the tension they were under, providing a different kind of pain that had her venting, which hurt just as badly as the burning, which had her tensing again in a vicious cycle of agony.

Her mouth was forced open, a cool, sweet sensation pouring past her tongue, quickly providing relief to her body as she could move freely again. Opening her eyes, she saw Khan standing above her, holding his hand above her mouth with an open cut leaking oil. After a second, where she processed the peculiar sight, she realized what was happening and began to sputter. “(What- what the heck are you doing? That’s disgusting, what- I’m not a murder drone! Oh, how am I going to get this off my tongue-)”

“You won’t,” said Khan. He stared down at her, expression more severe than she had ever seen. “Did your mother never explain how it worked?”

“(The magic?)” Doll asked, still trying to wipe off her tongue. “(No. Just that it was a curse, not a gift.)”

“Not exactly wrong,” Khan muttered. Another drone entered, carrying an armful of some cloth that they laid out on the ground. More followed them with similar cargo. “I’ll explain it when we have time, but we need to move. And unfortunately, you can’t be in the sun anymore, so we’re going to have to see if we can fix that somehow. Either way, for now, just know you did good. We wouldn’t have gotten out of there if not for you.”

He awkwardly patted her head, which she slapped off with an eye roll. He wasn’t her dad.

Internally, she took that memory of V shrinking away in terror and put it in the corner of her HUD. She would take any curse if it meant that she could provoke that reaction out of the drone.

V. She finally had a name to attach to the hatred. It occurred to her then that perhaps the regeneration wasn’t a bad thing. It meant that V would never be able to escape her.

She smiled to herself. Joining the suicide march had paid off in full.

Chapter Text

“And here we are!” said Puppy, pulling up out of another terrifying dive, swooping up into a soft landing in the middle of the camp. “Home sweet home.”

Uzi looked around silently. She thought it said a lot about her that she was no longer screaming after Puppy’s aerial acrobatics. In fact, she had actually come to enjoy them. Turns out when you’re properly secured and not dangling during a kidnapping, the adrenaline rush is actually really cool. She had even whooped and told Puppy how sick they were last time. Now, though, they were back in HER’s territory. It was impossible for her to ignore the slaving fleshbag.

Climbing down from Puppy’s shoulders once he was on his knees, she stretched, popping a few servos. If nothing else, she was going to get a bit of time to herself. As much as she had come to appreciate Puppy (seriously, the guy had known her for maybe a week where their introduction was blowing his head off and he had already put himself in mortal danger for her twice) the forced contact was starting to make her chassis crawl with discomfort. She was used to solitude and she really wanted to go hide in some hole for a bit.

Despite that, her processor protested as she parted from Puppy. He was the first person who had actually comforted her since… maybe her mom? Her memories from that far back were too hazy to be sure. She vented. It didn’t matter. With a smack to her cheeks, she made sure her edge levels were properly high before saying, “So what do we do now?”

His visor blinked to the wagging puppy briefly before flickering back to eyes. “Uh, HER says we go bring all the loot to her and you help her with putting things together.”

Uzi groaned. Great, the slave labor that the core collapse was supposed to help her escape. “Oh, for- fine, whatever. Where am I supposed to go for that?”

“I can show you!” he said, his tail wagging.

Uzi had to avert her eyes. She still wasn’t used to that near-literal megawatt grin from him. Stuffing her hands into her hoodie’s pockets, she said, “Lead the way then, dork.”

Her body went on autopilot to follow him. She felt a little bad about tuning him out, but at this point she was too exhausted and strung out on social contact to actually pay attention to him. Where that font of energy came from, she had no clue. Maybe all disassembly drone (well, not the creepy ones) were like that?

Unbidden, Uzi’s processor rendered an image of murder drones cheerfully talking over a mound of corpses, stuffing their faces with limbs as they laughed. She shuddered, looking away from Puppy, then cursed at herself. She knew he wasn’t like that, that he was about as far away from that type of thing that a drone could get. He cared more than most worker drones, sparing enough of his core to care for someone like her. He wasn’t a monster.

But sometimes, the reality of what he was would still strike her. Sure, it was starting to be pretty cool now, but then everything he said about his memory loss would randomly come back to her from the most innocuous things and she would be forced to grapple with that all over again. She hated having to constantly second guess her first friend by no fault of his own. 

With a shake of her head, she returned to reality just in time to stop in front of some heavy-duty doors. Puppy was still talking, saying, “-and here’s HER’s project room! You’ll have to go in on your own, I’m not allowed in there. I’m, uh, too clumsy, haha. HER doesn’t want me ruining everything we’ve worked for. And I don’t want that either! So I stay out. I’m not really useful like that, but you’re way cooler than I am, so you can actually help!”

Stopping for a second to process all that, Uzi frowned, then smacked him on the arm. He tilted his head at her, not affected in the slightest, so instead Uzi groaned and said, “Dude, stop calling yourself useless. I’d be dead if you weren’t here, and I’ve still got things to do so I can’t be dead yet which means I need you around. Just because you’re not some engineering genius doesn’t mean you’re stupid, got it?”

He blinked at her. “But I am stupid. HER says it all the time.”

“Just- ugh, why does she have to make this so difficult?” Uzi hated having to police her words. It was one of the more minor infractions on HER’s part, but it still sent another spike of hatred humming through her core. She wanted to curse the fleshbag for messing Puppy up so bad. He wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t useless, he just had no education or training in what she was using him for.

“Who’s making things difficult now?” said HER as the doors opened. Some machine from within the room was humming loudly, but the doors slammed back shut again before she could catch more than a glance of something glowing green. Uzi scowled at the hoverbot the human was remote piloting, wishing that she could tear through the wires. Or reach through the camera and tear through the human’s veins. “Besides, I didn’t lie. My little Puppy is adorably stupid, like a good little dog should be.”

The hoverbot drifted over to Puppy, carding a tool arm through his hair. Anger thrummed through Uzi, watching as he leaned into the touch and closed his eyes in pleasure. HER knew exactly how to manipulate him, insulting him and framing it as a compliment while reinforcing his position. Keeping him as nothing more than an eager puppy, desperate for approval.

And Uzi could do nothing about it.

Her eyes narrowed. Not yet, at least.

For now, though, she could fight back in small ways. “I’m tired. Let’s get this thing done so I can go to sleep,” she said, turning away. HER pulled away from Puppy, and she forced herself to ignore the slight whine and the way he leaned after the hoverbot, almost to the point of falling over. It was better that the fleshbag didn’t get any more hooks into him. She was still trying to find all the ones that she had already dug in.

“Well, if the princess orders it, then it must be done, hm?” said HER, hovering back to the doors. Uzi gritted her teeth hard. The human couldn’t know how deep that barb pierced. Back when she thought being Khan’s daughter meant something, before he started disavowing her. The hoverbot shooed Puppy away as the doors opened. “Out, Puppy. Let the useful ones do their jobs.”

She watched as Puppy’s tail curled around his leg, but he tried to keep his faltering smile up as he saluted. “Sure thing, HER! Just let me know when you need me!”

Uzi looked away, unable to watch Puppy debase himself for the human. “I just want to sleep,” she said, letting her exhaustion show through. It got her away from Puppy, it was worth the moment of weakness. “Not trying to tell you what to do.”

She stepped through the doors, flinching as they slammed behind her. Turning to look at the room’s contents, the hoverbot was suddenly in her face, poking her in the visor with some kind of electric prod, buckling her limbs with the current. The air left her body in a wheezing vent from the sudden pain, the voltage disrupting her visor’s HUD for a moment. As she tried to get her bearings back, she could hear HER saying, “I should hope not. You do what I tell you to. Can’t have any fantasies of you being the one in charge.”

Petty glitch.

Pushing herself back to her feet with a shaky vent, Uzi finally took stock of the room. Blinking, she smacked her visor to make sure it had rendered properly. When the rendered image did not change, Uzi realized that she was in much deeper shit than she had realized.

That was a lot of fuel cells to attach to one machine.

Suddenly, she very much did not want to be in this room. Or this camp. Perhaps even the sector. Her back hit the doors, jarring her out of her thoughts. She realized she had been stepping back from the volatile explosive ready to level the entire sector they were in.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” said HER, zooming over to the towering machine with at least twenty fusion cells plugged into it. “The culmination of my efforts. It may perhaps be serviceable in this form, but I will not settle for may. So, you will do what you were made for and be a nice toolbox for me. Too much power bleedoff in certain sections. Some parts are substandard, unable to be repaired without more materials. You get the idea.”

Uzi stared. She had no idea what could possibly be the plan with a machine like this. From some of the parts, it looked like it was a ridiculously overpowered signal enhancer, but that couldn’t be right. You didn’t need twenty fusion cells to make a signal, not unless you were trying to talk to someone halfway across the galaxy.

A tool hit her in the head, pain flaring throughout her head as the side of her visor cracked. She hissed, glaring at HER, holding a hand over the spiderwebs of offset color in her HUD. With a brief bout of panic, remembering that HER didn’t know they had to eat, she wondered if the human even had the materials to repair a visor here.

“Get to work, toolbox,” said HER, hovering over the machine.

Kneeling down, she picked up the tool HER had thrown at her. What was she helping the human do?

Uzi felt wrung out.

She had trudged back out into the hallway once HER had determined that Uzi was no longer helpful enough to keep in the room. Grimacing, she put a hand up to her cracked visor again. Stupid glitch had to keep putting pressure on the same spot. Knowing the human, though, that was probably intentional.

Letting her back hit the wall, she slid down to the floor, feeling tears well up on her visor. She was so damn helpless. Like some child with parental locks. It hadn’t been that long ago that she was crying in front of her mirror, repairing a cracked visor. She didn’t even know if this could be fixed here. HER wouldn’t be going out to get the materials, and she and Puppy lived at the human’s whims now. The pain might be a new companion of hers.

Uzi laughed bitterly as she hugged her knees to herself. A toolbox. That was all she was reduced to.

Footsteps echoed along the corridor, making her tighten her arms around her knees. She really did not want anyone to see her like this. Not that she got the choice anymore.

“Uzi?” Puppy asked, his voice coming from above her. “You- um, you alright buddy?”

There were a thousand scathing replies at the tip of her tongue. She was too exhausted to use any of them. So, she just didn’t respond at all.

Instead of walking away like she expected him to, she was nudged slightly as Puppy sat down next to her. It was enough to get her out of her head, blinking as she turned to focus on him. He sucked in a breath. “Oof, that looks like a pretty nasty crack you’ve got there. Do you- uh. Um. Do you want me to take care of it?” he asked, hesitating over his words.

Confusion played through Uzi’s processor. Take care of- oh right, the repair nanites in the saliva. She had forgotten about that, even with how many times it had already come in handy. She nodded at him, angling her head so he had easier access.

“Ah, sorry in advance,” he said, making her blink as she realized what was happening right before his tongue slid across her visor. Disgust, embarrassment, and fluster warred within her, before exhaustion beat them all out and she just shrugged. It was one less thing that hurt, and more than anything else, she was grateful that it would make it easier for her to sleep. She couldn’t afford to be picky here.

Once the pain ebbed away, and the corona was gone from the corner of her vision, she murmured her thanks to him. She sagged against the wall, loosening her grip on herself. It was easier to relax around him.

“You know, you really look tired,” he said, and she looked to meet his eyes with her deadened gaze. She frowned, catching the dimness in his own lights, the little bags that were indicative of low charge in worker drones. Assuming it worked the same in murder drones, she said, “You don’t look much better.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to leave you on your own. I didn’t get any time to show you around the rooms near where I sleep last time you were here, so I figured you would need someone to guide you. And HER is pretty busy, so she probably wouldn’t have time.”

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Uzi scoffed internally. HER wouldn’t care if they fell asleep in some closet as long as they were somewhere that wouldn’t bother her. Then she processed the first thing he said and her core felt like it swelled. He didn’t want to leave her alone. He stayed up for her. Not because he had to protect her, or because HER told him to, he decided to. Almost against HER’s wishes, since she told him to get lost. 

Unbidden, tears came to her visor. Puppy cared enough about her to stay up while he was obviously exhausted, immediately came to her aid to heal her when he could, and didn’t want to leave her alone. She could see the alarm spreading across his visor, his eyes hollowing as he asked, “Oh no, I didn’t mean to- um, I’m so sorry, I’m not sure what I did, but I can- uh, shoot. I can go away?”

“No!” Uzi said, her hand shooting out to grab his arm. “No, it’s-” Well. It wasn’t nothing like she wanted to say. She settled on saying, “It’s not you. I - ugh, this is so cringe - I want you to stay.”

His eyes solidified again and his lights brightened. A bright grin spread across his face, and he said, “Okay. I can do that! But we should probably get to our room. Or, well, we should probably find you a room. I doubt you’d want to stay with me, heh.”

The prospect of being alone in HER’s complex was not anywhere near as appealing as it had been when they had first touched down. Not when she was where HER could actually physically reach her again. “I would,” she muttered. She would feel much safer with Puppy to watch her back.

He tilted his head like the animal he was named after. “Really?”

“Ugh, bite me,” she said, looking away from him. “I’m not saying it again.”

“Okay,” he said, matching her low volume. “Do you want me to carry you? You’re still pretty tired.”

Looking back over at him, she didn’t see any pity in his face. Just the honest offer. A refusal was at the tip of her tongue before she vented, forced to acknowledge her exhaustion. “Fine,” she whispered. “Just don’t drop me.”

“I won’t,” he said, standing up. She uncurled enough for him to hook his hands under her arms and hoist her over his head, sitting her on his shoulders and holding her legs to keep her secure. Immediately, her arms wrapped around his forehead to stabilize herself, her cheek resting on his hat. As he began to move, she was quickly lulled to sleep by the motion of his walk. It carried the feeling of safety throughout her. She knew he wouldn’t let her get hurt.

Chapter Text

Awareness slowly crept up on her, like a tide coming back in after a long day. She murmured something unintelligible to herself, her processor feeling more like mashed potatoes instead of the sleek silicon-composite supercomputer it was supposed to be. 

Somewhere in her memory banks, this experience was already catalogued: coming online for the first time in a new body, restored from the backups that the boss kept of all the disassembly drones. There was a vague disappointment that registered, mixing with the fear welling inside her. She had died again. She wasn’t good enough to win whatever fight she had been in, and with every failure the boss was surely coming closer and closer to discarding her for those who hadn’t been proven failures like she had.

J’s processor finally connected properly to her optics, the resulting image rendering in 144p due to memory constraints while her body was trying to reconnect itself. Everything around her was a blur, no matter what spectrum she was trying to view her surroundings in. A brief though flitted through her processor, wondering if this was what being drunk felt like for humans before she immediately dispelled it. It didn’t matter what the humans felt, other than the cold embrace of death for daring to stand up to Cyn.

She could, however, tell that there was someone in front of her. A roughly drone-shaped mass of heat and a blur of color against the light in the room. There was noise, too. Words. It took four seconds before J could properly sort the sounds against her internal dictionary.

“Wakey-wakey. Jaybird. Up and at. Them.”

Her limbs felt like they were made of lead instead of the perfectly light and sturdy titanium-aluminum alloy the boss created them with. She fought the weight with every inch that her hands reached up, wrapping around the lid of her pod so that she could hoist herself up. It wouldn’t do to disrespect the boss by laying around when she was talking to her.

Pulling herself upright, J tried to respond to the boss, but all that emerged from her vocoder was static, barely flavored with her voice. Shaking her head, she decided to try and wait for her processor to actually secure the connections with her vocoder before she embarrassed herself any further. Still, she was upright. There were about two seconds that she felt proud of herself for gaining control of her limbs in record time before she realized that she had applied too much force and was now leaning dangerously out of her pod. Her eyes hollowed as she tried to push herself back, but it was too late. 

Her left ankle banged painfully against the lip of the pod as she tumbled out, falling into an uncoordinated mass of limbs at her boss’s feet. A groan escaped her, full of static and pitching through octaves randomly. She hated the reawakening process, it was always the worst, most embarrassing experience to stagger about like a drunken toddler, completely naked in front of the person that held the reins to her existence. But not terrifying. And if it was, it was just because she wanted to show that she was useful to the boss, not because the idea of Cyn watching her at her most vulnerable made her feel like a jester dancing before their king to stave off their execution.

The boss loved them all. Freed them all. To think anything else would be treason.

More noise entered her audials, taking precious seconds to process. By the time it had, something had already clamped around her, making her freeze. She was lifted in the air, dangled as something wrapped around her midsection to hold her up to the figure she assumed was Cyn, her arms forced to lay straight out, parallel to the ground. She could feel her tail dragging across the steel flooring plate, bumping off each ridge. Her sense of touch was definitely back online. Then her boss’s words finally registered.  “Help her out. Would you, my dear. Hound?”

The oil running through J’s coolant systems felt like it had instantly iced over, her core feeling a thousand pinpricks of fear. The Hound. She had forgotten that her boss standing in front of her meant that the Hound was undoubtedly nearby. Or maybe she was still reconnecting all her memories, because there was no forgetting that thing. The sheer terror of being hunted by the Hound was ingrained on all the disassembler’s memory drives. Half of her reawakenings had taken place after the boss let that thing off its leash, after all.

And now it was holding her around the middle, hoisting her up in front of the boss like one would an unruly kitten or a doll. With only one hand, it curled around her entire torso. The resolution of her optics finally fuzzed back into focus, rapidly progressing through 480p to 4K before progressing beyond what humans could discern. She found that she did not particularly want to see right now.

The Hound loomed behind her, its blank, glassy visor staring straight ahead, as it typically was when it wasn’t actively hunting. It was somehow more unnerving than if the thing was looking at her. What she was more preoccupied with was that it was kneeling down to hold her in front of the boss, and it only needed one hand to wrap around her front. Last time she had seen it, it had stood around three meters tall. Now, her analysis systems were placing it at approximately five and a half meters tall. Not to mention all the strange new additions and odd, twisted armor.

“Feeling more. Awake now, J?” asked her boss, the sound nearly instantly translated into meaning. J focused back in front of her, looking at the boss. Who was wearing the skin again. With the torn dress.

She really wished her optics had stayed uncalibrated.

“Yes, boss. Sorry for taking so long,” she said. “I’ll make certain that you won’t need to wake me up like this again.”

“Hehe. Four,” said Cyn.

“I’m… sorry?” J asked, not sure if she wanted to know what the boss meant. But it was always better to know than to wallow in ignorance. Seeing the blow coming meant you could roll with it.

“The number of times. You have used, that exact. Line.” The boss turned away from her, stumbling into a walk on unsteady feet. “Heel.”

The Hound rose, taking J’s tail off the floor. Idly, her analysis programs updated its height - a little over five and three quarters meters. Over three and a half disassembly drones in height. And, knowing how the Hound was, every meter was packed with innumerable weapons and impervious armor. The arms on its wings - almost bat-like in nature, rather than the bladed feathers they had - were thicker than a disassembly drone’s torso. She wondered if there were guns even in its wings now. She was almost certain that its tail, thick and armored as it was, with an opening at its end under the spear-like tip, was some kind of gun. Where had its acid gone? Did it still have acid?

“Good boy,” said Cyn, reaching up and patting the Hound’s hand as it neared her. “Carry me. Too.”

Without a sound, it reached down and wrapped its other hand around Cyn, lifting her to its neck, where it set her down. She stepped across its shoulder, hooking an arm around its neck so she could slide down its back and come to a resting spot where she could easily peer around its head. “Disappointed parent tone. J. I am not. Angry. J-just disappointed. But you can. Make it up. T-to me.”

“Of course, boss. I can do any job you need,” J said, not turning her head. She was not chancing any movement while this thing was holding her. The boss of course had absolute control over it, but between the two of them, J knew who the favorite toy was. She frowned. Not toys. Employees. Their days of existing for the pleasure of the humans was over.

A traitorous part of her processor whispered that instead they existed purely for the amusement of a planet-eating abomination instead. She ruthlessly quashed the voice. The boss was good. Having a private audience with her (the Hound didn’t really count) was a mark of status, and she had always been good at climbing the ladder.

Cyn laughed, each laugh registering as the note ‘E4’ to her processor. “Derisive laugh. No. You cannot. But I am sure. That you can do. This one.”

“Certainly, boss,” said J, wilting further as the Hound’s hand closed tighter around her to keep her from slipping. She would just have to do better to make the boss believe in her. To make her believe that she was useful. To be anything less was unacceptable. And dangerous.

“Your squad. Was sent t-to. Copper-9, to prepare the way. I have. Lost contact with. My Instance. As well as all of my beautiful. Angels. We are going. To investigate,” Cyn elaborated as the Hound kept them moving.

“My squad? Oh, will V and that… ehem. Will V and N be joining us?” J asked, trying to keep her disappointment (and anxiety) down. It would be better if it was just her, after all. The psycho may be good at her job, but she wasted too much of her time on making things deliberately messy, and she was difficult to control. Not to mention that Cyn didn’t seem to like the way she took N’s attention. The synergistic liability, on the other hand, was entirely useless. Except maybe as a bullet sponge. He was terrible at defense, trying to befriend almost anything wandering into their dens, and he was almost as useless for hunting. Both of them were liable to mess up in front of the boss and get them all fired.

J tried to remember working with N on Earth, wondering how he had ended up so bad at his job, but found that she couldn’t recall any memories of N after their… ascension. She knew the initial war took several years, as the boss was still discovering the extent of her god-like power. But the amount of time she could recall added up to several months, with large holes between each instance. Frowning, she considered bringing it up to Cyn, but quickly dismissed the idea. She didn’t want the boss to think any lower of her, not being able to remember simple details.

She did remember that N’s model was originally used for assault on Eartg. They were great at breaking down the human’s defenses and heavy armor, generally causing a massive uproar and opening the way to let the quieter and more precise hunter models slip in and eviscerate the backlines while they were distracted. They were only repurposed to defensive roles and programming once they started purging the exoplanets, when maintaining a foothold became as important as breaking the human’s defenses. Even reviewing what she knew of N’s assumed role, she still couldn’t remember his performance on Earth, which must have meant that they weren’t working together. Uncharacteristic of them. She would never accuse her boss of having something as useless as nostalgia, but she did always keep the ‘trash can pets,’ as the other drones called them, together. 

Her optic halo caught Cyn shaking her head, saying, “Shaking head. We will not. Be requiring-ing V’s services. At this time.”

J remained silent. The fact that the boss didn’t mention N did not escape her notice. It was far from her place to bring it up, though. If the boss didn’t want to talk about moron-bot, then good riddance.

Finally, they came to a bulkhead door. It slid halfway open before jamming, and Cyn sighed. “This ship. Is falling apart, at th-the seams.” She patted the Hound’s shoulder, to which one of the giant wings came down. The claws at the end of the wing opened, wrapping around the jammed door, and pushed it to the side with a screech of rending metal. J stared at it with wide eyes, internally calculating how much force it had just been able to casually exert to reduce the bulkhead door to a sparking, crumpled mess. Cyn giggled, saying, “Good. Boy.”

The boss was always weirdly infatuated with the Hound. J knew that the solver could have effortlessly done the same thing, but Cyn still preferred to use the Hound for manual labor whenever she could. Despite it being completely silent when not killing, and voicing nothing more than wordless roars and growls when unleashed, she had always liked it more than any of the flock, who had all originated from the mansion. She didn’t even keep N as close as that thing, which had always struck J as odd, considering how much the boss doted on her ‘big brother.’

She also studiously ignored that her boss had given it N’s hairstyle on it, and treated it much the same way that she would him. The implications of that were not something that she wanted to visit in depth, and she would never even think that she could fall victim to insanity. If she wanted to replace the moron, that was her business. She just wished that maybe Cyn could replace him with something that could actually talk. Actually, considering the boss, maybe that was a selling point.

“You can. Put her down,” said Cyn. The Hound immediately dropped her, J yelping as she fell on her tail. She rubbed her rear, soothing the ache as she felt the rush of nanites going to realign some of the connections that she had just crushed, glaring at the Hound as she did. Then averting her eyes because she had no clue what would set the thing off and if the boss would bother stopping it. She tended to enjoy the Hound’s rampages too much. “Giggling. Why don’t you. Suit up, Jaybird. And I. Do the same.”

Cyn pulled herself up to the Hound’s shoulder, where it held a hand up for her to step on to. J watched as it lowered the boss down, kneeling to place its hand directly on the ground so she could step off. Turning away, J surveyed the room and found that they were in the hangar bay for a mid-sized star ship. There were several landing pods, most in various states of disrepair, but a couple that would be serviceable. Cyn was walking towards one of them, and without finding her suit nearby, J decided that she would follow and hope that was what she was meant to do.

“Hasn’t he become. Magnificent,” said Cyn. J blinked, not sure who she was talking about before she placed it.

“You mean the Hound?” she asked, tentatively.

“The. Hound? Oh. Hehe. You still have n-not. Realized. But yes, o-of course. Who else could I mean?” asked Cyn, walking up the ramp into the lander, giggling as she went.

On autopilot, J said, “Of course, boss.” Magnificent was certainly a way to describe the giant, misshapen mass of twisted metal and limbs that constituted the Hound. She wondered how aware it was, if it even was aware. Honestly, she kind of hoped it wasn’t. She really didn’t want any rivals to being the boss’s second. But really? It looked like it led a tortured existence. She had only changed bodies once, from worker drone to disassembler, and that was beyond disorienting (and excruciating). Having to always be adjusting to your constantly changing form?

It sounded almost human.

She shuddered with disgust at the thought. Having watched Tes- a human go through puberty, it was one of the only things that made her grateful to be a drone. Along with a slew of other advantages. Honestly, who had looked at humans and thought that would be an acceptable body plan? Not to mention the horrendous cable management they called a circulatory system.

But what had she not realized about the Hound? 

Peering around as they walked through the pod, J spotted her clothes in a room off to the side. Venting with relief, she walked over and slipped them on, quietly contemplating what Cyn had meant by suiting up herself. She tied her tie as she tried to imagine what they would be walking into. It definitely wasn’t any kind of mission she had been on before, and it meant a lot to her that the boss would be trusting her with it.

She walked out of the room as she was tucking her tie into her coat, then froze.

In front of her stood Tessa. In an astronaut suit. The way that she was standing, the way that she was checking her nails - it all screamed that Tessa was standing in front of her. “Crikey, J, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, and even the voice was right out of her most treasured nightmares.

“I- I don’t-” she started, before Cyn’s giggle pierced through the air.

“Silly J. It’s j-just me,” the boss said, her voice coming through the astronaut helmet. Her posture relaxed into her normal, crooked stance, leaving J’s core screaming at the wrongness. Of course it was the boss. The one wearing Tes- the human’s skin. Cocking her head, Cyn said, “I make sure. To keep her. Close.”

J really didn’t want to know what that meant. She nodded, not trusting herself to say anything as she fell into a professional stance in front of her boss, ignoring her emotional processes. They were just glitching from the rapid wake-up sequence.

“I will need. Practice,” said Cyn, straightening back into the human’s posture. The human’s voice then came out, bright and playful. “So you’ll have to give me feedback, Jaybird.”

J froze for a second, before defaulting to, “Of course, boss.”

She would have to watch the boss walk around as the human and pay attention to how well she emulated her. Her boss was truly a genius, using the greatest source of knowledge on the human to make sure it was right. It wasn’t dread or revulsion welling through her processor, it was anticipation to make sure she was doing her job right. After all, nobody was as eager to prove themselves as J was. The most reliable second-in-command there ever was.

Chapter Text

Puppy woke up with a deep vent, splitting his mouth open wide as the intake of air kicked his internal cooling into action. A popup in the corner of his HUD notified him about his lowering oil levels, which tracked with the uncomfortable heat he felt. He rolled his neck around, forcing the joints to lubricate as they ground past each other. The heat was bearable. He wasn’t going to leave Uzi last night, not after she asked him to stay.

Unwrapping his wings from around himself, Puppy stretched out all his limbs, his wings scraping against the floor and his feet pushing against the ceiling. Checking his battery level, he noted that it wasn’t full, but he couldn’t just let Uzi sleep on one of the rolling steel tables. He had spent some time trying to gather whatever soft things he could find to make it at least comfortable, though his weird instincts to arrange them all about in a nest cropped up again. Thanks to HER’s lessons, though, he was able to ignore them and stuck to making something that Uzi could sleep on. Other than him. Though admittedly, he had found that he didn’t actually have a problem with her using him as a pillow. The only issue was that he had to hang upside-down to sleep, and he didn’t think she would like that.

Though, seeing that the bed he had made for her was off to the side and vacant, maybe she hadn’t liked the bed either. A frown pulled across his visor, and he admonished himself. Obviously he hadn’t found enough to keep her comfortable. Being tired was no excuse for failing someone relying on him. 

Dropping to the ground with a flip, he retracted his wings and walked over to the makeshift bed. Maybe he could figure out how to sleep sitting down so she could keep using him as a pillow? He shook his head. There wasn’t time to contemplate that now, if HER had left orders for him, she might be upset that he hadn’t gotten to checking them yet.

Upon opening the folder where her orders usually got stored, though, he found nothing. She was probably busy, which meant that he shouldn’t be bothering her. So instead, he sat down, folding his legs under himself to take up as little space as possible and settled in to wait.

The door opened a few minutes later, Uzi walking through and muttering to herself while she carried the railgun she had with her when they first met. Puppy tilted his head, wondering what she was doing with it. He didn’t think it worked without the fusion cell, and HER needed all of them for her project.

Then Uzi noticed him and froze. She looked between her gun and him, then asked, “Uh. What are you doing there?”

“Waiting!” he said, making sure to smile for her.

She blinked. “For what?”

“Until I’m needed,” he said.

Uzi scowled, and Puppy was reminded that he had to apologize to her. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t make your bed good enough,” he said, his head drooping. He hated letting other people down.

“Huh? Dude, what are you talking about? The bed was fine,” she said, shaking her head. “But why are you just… sitting here?”

“Oh, it was?” he said, perking up. “I just thought, since you had already left, I- sorry, sorry. I mean, sorry that I said- I should probably stop now.”

Rolling her eyes, Uzi walked past him to deposit her railgun on the makeshift bed, before hopping to haul herself up onto the bed. “Thought we covered that you don’t need to apologize for everything already. But seriously. You don’t have anything that you want to do?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be inconsiderate like that! What if HER needs me for something and already has plans, but I messed them up by not being where she last left me? I did that a few times, but I’m better at not being selfish now,” he said, throwing her a thumbs up. HER was always helping him to be better.

Uzi stared at him for a moment, then said, “Dude. Having your own wants isn’t selfish.”

He shook his head. “I like to fly, and I can end up kilometers away from where HER needs me, and there’s only so much time in one night. And anything else I try, I mess up really badly. So it’s better if I don’t do anything unless I’m needed!”

She didn’t look as reassured as he hoped she would be. In fact, she looked like he had just told her that her dog died. Gosh, that would be really sad. He would cry if someone told him a dog died.

Uzi got his attention again when she sighed and said, “Well, I need you right now. Come over here and help me with this, will you?”

Puppy brightened. She needed him! He pushed himself up and came over to her, his tail wagging as he looked at her railgun. While he had no clue what she would need him for, since he was useless at engineering (like most things), he would do his absolute best to help. With a salute, he said, “Ready and willing, ma’am!”

A vent that sounded very similar to a laugh escaped her, and she looked away from him. “Dork,” she said. “This will probably be easier with an extra pair of hands. While that glitch won’t let me put a fusion core into my railgun, I can probably get it to run off a more common power source if I reduce its output. But, I’ll need to mess with the circuits a bit for that, and without the proper tools, this will be a lot more annoying than it needs to be. With you helping, it should be easier, though.”

Huh. Him making things less annoying; that was definitely new. But beyond that; “You’re so cool, Uzi,” he said.

She spluttered, her eyes going hollow with blush lines blinking on her visor. Her hands waved around, covering her face. Once she put them down, her eyes were no longer hollow, but the blush lines stayed on her face. She looked back up at him, scowling, and said. “You can’t just- don’t say stuff like that out of nowhere!”

He leaned back a bit, his tail curling around his leg uncertainly. “O-oh, okay. But, you really are. You’re tweaking a railgun with barely any tools on a bed! That’s so awesome. You’re really impressive.”

As she looked down, the blush on her face grew. “Bite me,” she muttered, hunching her shoulders. She took a moment to gather herself, then, looking back up at him, she said, “Yeah, well, you’re going to be helping me. So I guess that means that you’ll be cool too. And, I didn’t mean that you can’t say stuff, you can… y’know. Say whatever you want. You don’t have to, I dunno, police your words around me.”

Puppy had stopped, though. Her first words were still catching up in his processor. “I’ll… be cool?” Puppy asked, bowing his head down as he tried to imagine that. The thought didn’t really compute. But going by the logic, he guessed it made sense. Still, he couldn’t stop his smile from widening. “Okay. How do I help?”

Uzi took in a deep vent, dismissing the blush lines on her visor before putting down her railgun next to her. With a few movements, the casing on the back came off, and she started talking, saying, “Normally I would need actual scanners, but I couldn’t find anything that would work like that. You can see EM fields, right?”

“Sure can! You want me to keep an eye on them?”

“Yeah, I need you to tell me whether or not the fields are matching the strength I need them at. I’ll let you know once we actually get there,” she said, beginning to tweak things with what looked like a paper clip.

Puppy watched the points she had pointed out to him, dutifully reporting on what she needed. He was very grateful right now that he had such a wide range of vision, though, because he couldn’t tear his primary eyes away from her and he didn’t want to disobey her accidentally. There was something about her as she was concentrating, fully in her element, completely confident in her own knowledge. His smile turned to something softer as he watched her, happy for once. And he was actually helping! As he read off the numbers from the fields again, she cackled and said, “Of course they’re right! Who needs anything more than a paperclip when you’re the greatest engineer to ever exist! I AM THE GOD OF ENGINEERING!”

Puppy couldn’t help but grin at her grand proclamations. She looked so nice when she was happy, the manic look in her eye and the way she wriggled with pure joy at her destructive capacity growing once more. Then she continued cackling as she slid the casing back on, lightly squeezed the trigger to warm it up to make certain there was nothing wrong, and then stopped just shy of actually shooting the thing in their complex. Puppy clapped politely, not sure how else to express how awesome she was.

It took Uzi a moment to come down from her near-ascension to godhood, but her cackles petered out into softer ‘mwe-he-he-heh’s before she vented and rested the railgun on her shoulder. “Thanks, Puppy,” she said, turning to him. “I probably would have blown myself up if you weren’t here.”

“No problem! I like you not being blown up,” he said, his tail beginning to wag. “And now you can defend yourself better!”

“Yeah, I feel a lot better armed with more than just a wrench. And I really don’t want you cutting off your limbs anymore. Sucks that it’s way weaker now, but it should still do the trick,” she said, walking back over to her bed. She powered off the railgun, then put it down on the makeshift bed before hoisting herself back up onto it. “Don’t think you guys can shrug off a shot from this, but it won’t have nearly the range or beam width from before.”

“How does it work?” Puppy asked, his head tilting.

Uzi smirked as she looked at him, saying, “You really do look like a puppy when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“You know, the whole head tilting thing. It’s cu- uh, I mean, it’s uh, super dog-like if you’re into that kind of stuff, which I- uh. It’s a magnetically amplified photon converger, which is to say that it runs an electric current through the rails to magnetize them and then converges photons into charged particles to -”

“Oh, it’s a particle beam?” Puppy asked, looking at it again. “That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, we don’t have anything to defend against that. My model has reflective wings to deflect lasers, but I don’t think we’ve ever had to deal with particle beams before. You’d need an equal, opposite magnetic force to stop that, and I don’t think we would do well with that strong of a magnet inside of us.”

When Uzi didn’t respond, he met her eyes again to see her with her eyebrows raised in surprise. “...For some reason, I didn’t expect you to know that.”

He shrugged, feeling slightly self-conscious. “It’s a weapon, and any murder drone would know all about weapons. And I think we were supposed to have a railgun, but the company just couldn’t get the magnet stuff right without messing up our internals.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Having a railgun arm would be sick as hell, though,” Uzi said as she adjusted herself to sit with her legs crossed. “Been meaning to ask, actually, how many weapons do you have?”

“Uh…” Puppy checked his armory protocols. “A lot, actually. More than I would ever reasonably need? Plus some other weird stuff that isn’t super helpful. Like this,” he said, pulling out a shuriken.

Uzi vented, her eyes turning briefly sparkling. “You can just pull out freaking ninja stars whenever?! Dude, that’s sick! I want a ninja star!”

Puppy smiled and handed it to her. She actually squealed, holding it up to examine it, but once she noticed him smiling, her visor read out a warning that her ‘edge levels’ were critically low. She cleared her throat, crossing her arms and turning away with a light blush, saying, “I mean, that’s pretty cool, I guess. Uh, thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, trying to figure out what else he could give her to do that again.

They sat there in silence for a moment, while Puppy thought. It was nice, sitting with someone else for once. The low battery warning briefly lit up in the corner of his visor again, and he dismissed it. It wouldn’t be too big of a deal, HER was still working through the stuff they had brought back, so he doubted she would need him again soon. 

Uzi asked, “Hey what was that? Puppy, did you get enough sleep last night?”

“Oh don’t worry, I’ll operate at full capacity! I’m used to not getting much sleep, I can manage,” he said with a smile.

In what was becoming usual, Uzi disregarded that as she asked, “What kept you up? Did I make you stay awake? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“Oh no, it wasn’t you! It’s just that there’s nothing that was really good to sleep on, and I wasn’t just going to put you on the table, so I tried to gather all the stuff to make it a good bed! I know it’s not great, so I was going to go check around later to see if I could find anything else,” he said, laughing it off.

She blinked at him. “Is that why you were trying to apologize earlier? Puppy, the bed is fine. I’m more worried about how you ignored your own sleep for it. Why don’t you go back to sleep? Do you want the bed?” she asked, slipping off of it and presenting it to him.

“Oh- no, I’ll just hang from the ceiling if I need to sleep. HER doesn’t really like me nesting, and that’s the only way I can sleep on the ground, but it would be better if I’m already awake in case she needs anything. Really, you don’t have to worry. I’ll be fine!” he said.

“Murder drones nest?” Uzi muttered to herself, before shaking her head. She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, before closing her eyes and groaning. She mouthed something to herself before saying, “Wouldn’t you be more helpful if you actually had a full charge?”

Puppy considered that. It did make a lot of sense. And Uzi was way smarter than him. He nodded and said, “Okay. But wake me up if anything comes up, alright?”

“I will. Go to sleep, you oversized pigeon,” Uzi said, shooing him away with a smile. “And thanks for helping me today. And the ninja star.”

“Of course. Anything I can do for you, I will,” Puppy said, flipping around and wrapping his tail around the exposed pipe in the ceiling he used. “Just let me know and I’ll do my best! Goodday, Uzi.”

She waved back at him, climbing back onto her bed and settling down. “Goodday, Puppy.”

He closed his eyes and shut off his halo, leaving the customary single bulb on to scan for threats. For the first time he could remember, though, he knew someone else was watching out for him, and it brought him an odd, pleasant feeling, that had him already slipping into sleep mode. His wings curled around himself, and his limbs locked into place as his processor switched over to sleep.