Reconditioned Asset

Fandom: Murder Drones

“Sigh,” V says, tilting her head to the side and putting a hand on her cheek. “It would make me really happy if there was some warm oil waiting for me when I get back to the pod.” No sooner does she get the words out that N gives her a salute, flaring his wings so that he can stand at attention in the air.

“I’ll make sure there is!” And he’s off, wings propelling him further than his two teammates’ much more leisurely flight path. J, leader of the Disassembly Drone team one, can’t stop herself from rolling her eyes and letting out an annoyed sigh at how eager her subordinate is to please the other female drone.

“That idiot needs to remember who the actual one in charge is,” J says quietly, mildly reluctant to break V out of whatever thoughts are making her smile in a not insane way for once. Not that she disapproves of how she gets whenever they go out to hunt down the worker drones, it’s just annoying to J whenever she has to yell at him to get back to work whenever he gets dejected when V pretends to not know who N is. She knows that workplace romance is frowned upon by JCJenson in SPAAAAACEE!!, but it’s not against company policy which is the important thing! By the CEO, she’d even be willing to give the two of them a shudder day off if it would get V to stop pretending that she doesn’t like N as much as he likes her!

They fly the rest of the way in silence, V still with that soft smile on her face and J lamenting about how much more effective her team could be if her subordinates could just get their CPUs out of their chassis and-

Her thoughts are interrupted by the sight of a massive green light shooting off into the distance down low to the ground, from the base of their corpse spiral! Exchanging a wide-eyed glance with V, the two Disassembly Drones dive down to get a better look at whatever the company leadership retreat that was! She doesn’t even bother wasting time wondering if N was somehow responsible; not only does he not have a weapon that powerful, but he’s also not nearly competent enough to have made something like that on his own. Hell, if they had a weapon like that those damn doors the nearby worker drone colony is protected by wouldn’t stand a chance!

Speaking of the barely sentient toasters, when they get low enough to make out the situation on the ground J is surprised to see one of them on the ground in front of N… whose head is regenerating. She’s still too far away for her scanners to pick up the weapon that caused the damage, but given that the worker is… charging at N with a severed arm… instead of shooting him again, she can only assume that it has some kind of a cooldown. A shame she won’t be able to interrogate it after N tears it apart, but having the weapon itself should be enough for them to finally slaughter the colony!

Except after he finishes his reboot, he… doesn’t. J is so taken aback by the fact he’s casually talking with his food that she brings herself to a stop, still high above and out of sight of the worker’s inferior sensors. V isn’t much better, staring down at the scene with her mouth hanging open. A quick recalibration and focusing of her sensors lets her get a better picture of the situation and she can’t help but simulate a sigh of relief. “It looks like his sensors didn’t fully reconnect, probably his targeting sensors if I had to guess.”

J frowns. “Except that his head regenerated completely, not partially. Everything should have regenerated already connected.” Her frown deepens. “Which means the toaster hit him hard enough with that arm to knock his sensors offline…”

V gives her an incredulous look. “Are you kidding me? Worker drones aren’t strong enough to do something like that!”

J nods slowly, leading V in a gradual descent towards the pod, cautious of what sort of tricks the abnormal worker drone might have up their sleeves. “We’re going to try to capture this one, V. That gun, paired with that strength? We need to find out if this thing is an outlier or if the workers in that bunker have been experimenting.”

The duo fly down through the only hole in the upper reaches of the spire, weapons out and ready to tear the worker apart if they try to fight, but they’re taken aback when a small figure essentially rockets out of the pod and out of the spire at a speed that matches their fastest flying speed. Which is one hundred percent not supposed to be possible! What the hell!?

“Huh, I kind of want to practice making balloon animals with that drone.” J chooses to ignore V’s comment, familiar enough with the psychopath to know what she actually means by that. …Or she means that literally this time. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but the core of what prompted her to say that remains the same.

As much as she wishes she could just go after the worker right away, she saw the thing grab their weapon on the way out and J still doesn’t know what the cooldown on that thing is. Not to mention that she has to get the liability on her squad fully back online and question the waste of parts about what they were doing in the pod together. She lands in front of N, who just stares at her with his head tilted and a blank expression on his face. She scowls, not letting it show on her face just how unsettling she finds it on him when he’s always so… happy. Which honestly unsettles her too, but not as much as this does.

“Wake the hell up!” She shouts as she smacks him hard enough to prompt the notice of a reboot to flash on his screen. It only takes a minute, during which J takes the opportunity to focus her optics on the distant sight of the worker off in the distance. Far in the distance. Thankfully she’s slowed down from her initial speed, otherwise she might have managed to get out of sight already!

Before she has the chance to order V to catch it though, N’s reboot finishes and she focuses back on him, putting a hand on her hip while glaring at him. “Well?” He stays silent for a moment, his head swiveling to take in his surroundings before his eyes hollow into ovals.

“Ohhhhh!” He groans, heads reaching up to grab at his synthetic hair before turning back to his boss and gesturing wildly, his words coming out almost incoherently. “You know, I-I-I left an e-extremely dangerous wea-, uh, excuse o-outside!” Without another word he runs out of the spire before taking flight, sending snow flying from his take off. J can’t help but narrow her eyes at how basically ignored her and ran off, though she can understand his panic if he just went back over the recordings of what happened with the worker. That gun…

She glances over her shoulder at V and is greeted by the sight of her hand replaced by a flag with the words ‘Literally so insanely suspicious’ on it. She gives her an unamused look that she returns innocently, causing J to roll her optics. “Come on already.”

The two take off after her subordinate once again, though he has enough of a head start that J is forced to navigate from the beacons each of them are installed with to make sure they’re on the right course. She’s not surprised when the trail ends with them in front of the infuriating bunker that’s stymied all of their attempts to breach the doors for months. What she is surprised by is the fact that the door is open. Actually, multiple doors are open. She feels her optics twitch as she takes in as they glide down the hall, taking in the sight of recently killed drones.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” V questions aloud, her voice box filled with irritation. “Are you telling me that even if I had managed to break through that first door, there would have been more!?”

“Probably stronger than that one too,” J grumbles. “After all, they would have had more time to work on the inner doors while we were busy with the first.”

V opens her mouth to shout at how utterly bullshit that is - which J completely agrees with - when three drones come into view. N, obviously, is one of them, pinning the small worker drone they saw at the spire to the wall with a curved blade. The third drone is standing where J can tell a third door closes, staring at the two with hollowed oval eyes. “D-dad,” the short drone manages to get out. “P-Point and shoot! Trust me!”

Next to her, V’s wings flare, ready to rush forward and tear the worker apart before he has the chance to pick the gun up and fire it, but J holds out a hand to stop her, optics narrowed on the father of the drone that made such a weapon. J has killed a lot of drones over her twenty years on Copper-9. She’s seen drones beg for their lives. She’s seen drones flee in a futile attempt to escape. She’s had a very rare few try to fight back when they get cornered, ineffectually, of course. Hell, she’s had no less than seven drones throw their pill babies at her to try and buy time for them to escape! Those drones she gives to V for playtime while ending the infant programs as gently as possible. She can admit to not caring about the rogue AI, but even she knows that throwing your baby at a Disassembly Drone to get away is screwed up!

The point is, though, that she’s seen a lot of reactions from workers to Disassembly Drones showing up, and this one? He doesn’t have enough nerve in his programming to pick up that weapon. Even as she watches, the worker takes several steps back, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a remote. V once again makes a move to charge at the drone, to end him before he can do anything, but J continues to stop her. Her eyes are still narrowed on the scene, her synapses whirling faster than they ever have before as she considers the situation. “D-dad?”

The words barely reach them, as far as they are, but they’re still heard. And as the worker pushes a button on the remote, closing the door and causing red lights and alarms to go off in the hallway, things finally click together in her mind.

She can’t help the wide smile that stretches across her face, more than matching the one V would have while in the throes of an oily slaughter spree.

`~`

Uzi lets her hand drop from the blade impaling her shoulder, hollow eyes riveted to the door her dad just closed right in front of her, sealing her out of the bunker alongside one of the Murder Drones. She barely notices N’s eyes change from the Murder Drones’ typical cross and back to two dots, looking at her pityingly.

“Whoah, N,” she hears the greeting but still doesn’t react, too focused on the fact that her dad, the man who was supposed to be the only drone left in the whole damn bunker who gave a damn about her… left her for dead. She doesn’t even react when N whirls around in surprise at the voice and throws her into the opposite wall before she falls behind a couple of crates. She doesn’t feel the impact, she doesn’t feel the pain. She’s just… numb.

The only thing left for her is to wait until she leaks enough oil that she shuts down, if the Murder Drones don’t finish her off before that. While she waits for the end of her life her life flashes through her processors, her visor lighting up with the message {Playing Back Lonely Childhood} appearing on her screen.

It’s not really anything special, she thinks. At least up until her mother died. Before that they were a… happy family. Sure, her dad was just as obsessed with doors back then as he is now, but her Mom would make sure to drag him back home so they could all spend time together as a family. Even when she didn’t though, she would make sure to spend as much time with her daughter as possible. They would play games, talk about whatever, and compare their mad ramblings. (Though Uzi would readily admit that she doesn’t remember a lot of those apart from the fact that her ramblings were always about weapons and her mother’s about something that eats planets.) Sure, there was always too much difference between their ramblings for either of them to really connect over them, but the fact they both had them brought them closer. Uzi’s mother was always there for her, no matter what.

Until she wasn’t.

It was when she was killed by the Murder Drones that things took a sharp crash down. There was nobody to pull her father away from his door obsession, not to mention that he was focusing on them more than ever to cope with the loss of his wife. He wouldn’t even look at Uzi until a year after Nori died! Thankfully her mother taught Uzi how to prepare very simple meals, otherwise she might have starved. Then again, maybe her dad would have noticed her if she needed to be admitted to the hospital…

She essentially had to raise herself with how absent her dad always was, so she dived more into weapons research with even more zeal than she had when she used to talk with her mother. She learned everything she could all in the hopes of making better, stronger weapons. She made prototypes, those prototypes exploded. She improved the schematics and made more prototypes. Those prototypes also exploded.

Uzi became very adept at making repairs to herself, and her favorite place in the colony was the scrapyard where she could gather everything she needed without anyone harassing her. Which is something that started happening the first time someone asked her what she does for fun and she explained in a calm and not insane tone that she designs weapons to slaughter the Murder Drones! It didn’t take long for people to declare that there was something wrong with her and to start avoiding or bullying her.

It also didn’t take long before she got used to the bullying. It’s not like anyone she told cared enough to do anything about it. Sure, the teachers at school would make pitying noises and occasionally punish them, but nothing ever changed. By the time her class started learning middle school materials she’d officially given up on caring about anything her peers might say about her. Not that she would just take the abuse lying down, she fought back! …Which would often end up with her getting in trouble while her bullies got off scot free since there were always ‘witnesses’ who said she’s the one who started whatever the problem was.

There was literally one person in the whole bunker who even pretended to give a damn and didn’t target her, which she appreciated, but it’s not like-

“Oi! Tin can!” Her memories are interrupted by something tapping on her visor, the previous message replaced with the purple dots of her eyes. What she’s greeted with is a Murder Drone wearing a dress that comes to a stop midway down her thighs and her hair done up in pigtails held together by black ribbons. The yellow dots that make up all the Murder Drones’ eyes stare down at her with irritation. “Finally,” she huffs before grabbing Uzi by the throat and lifting her up. She kicks her legs at the stronger drone in a half-hearted struggle, the fighting spirit she’s carefully built up through the years gone in the face of the ultimate betrayal from her father. At this point she just hopes they kill her quickly.

Except instead of tearing her head off, the Murder Drone puts her on the crate and lets go, putting both hands on her hips in a no-nonsense pose before clearing her nonexistent throat. “Congratulations!” She says with obviously forced cheer while in the background N tries to pull a rusty bear trap out of the head of the other female Murder Drone. Uzi can’t help but get distracted for a moment at the sight, feeling a small burst of satisfaction that the booby traps she filled the vents with worked to stop them from just rushing in and killing everyone in the event they got past the doors.

Which is her fault.

She forcibly shoves that thought away, curious about why she’s not dead yet. It’s unheard of for Murder Drones to… not murder. Well, she did just find out that they don’t just murder after talking with N, but he did go right back to murdering after she ran away. But this drone clearly isn’t damaged like N was after she shot him, so what could possibly be the reason?

Uzi’s eyes dim before lighting up when the drone finishes her sentence. “You are hereby being reclaimed by JCJenson in SPAAAAACEE!! to be reconditioned into a useful asset to the company!”

Uzi just stares at her blankly for a minute that drags on into two, utterly uncomprehending of what she just heard. The words slip out before she has a chance to question whether or not she should say them. She shouldn’t, she definitely shouldn’t.

“Are you fucking drunk right now?”