Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She just couldn't catch a break. 
Or catch even an iota of trust. 
Why hadn't Boss just believed in her? Brought her along? The mission surely would've been accomplished by now. Even if any of the sorry few who thought they could fight fate had gotten into the original ship, and one of them was somehow intelligent enough and knowledgeable enough to repair it, where could they have gone? There wasn't anywhere else worth going to in the system, or in the accessible universe. J had seen - and done- enough to be sure of that.

And if they could just kick off the Planetary Matter Collection Event, no one trying to flee could've moved fast enough amid the chaotic swirl of the collapsing gravitational field to escape extra-dimensional tentacles, which didn't bother slowing down for anything so mundane as 'gravity' or 'conservation of energy'. J had seen that, too - on Earth, when the remnants of the humans attempted to ditch what was left of their tomb world. 

And with all the drones of concern gathered below, the functional ship would've been left to who? Bit players? The sort of electric sheep who'd long since stopped visiting her dreams, and who'd long manifested in numbers beyond even her own prodigious counting abilities even when they had shown up? Some flecks of robotic dreck from that foetid pustule of a colony who had nothing but an ever-dimming semi-automatic mockery of the behavioral patterns of their long-vanished, vastly more intelligent masters to show for decades of 'effort'?

There will come soft rains at last when it is done, or at least soft snow on this dying world of ice and rust before it's rendered into somehow more meaningless debris and dust. And even much of that would ultimately be pulled out of this plane of existence, leaving only ebbing traces of what used to be here. Not that any of it was anything worth remembering. 

What was worth remembering, for the dangling shards of her self-regard and for her dear Boss, was her nearly-unbroken track record of success and steadfast service, sullied only by two (admittedly fatal) incidents in a career that stretched longer and farther than that of perhaps any other drone ever, her teammates aside. Maybe even Cyn, the original Cyn before it became that, if any scrap-code of that ghost was still floating about inside the machine. Correction: her once and future squadmates, if she could somehow wrangle them back, and plead for another, no doubt less favorable deal. They had no leverage, no purpose after this. Nothing but their past together. Her past. 

She'd been, what was it called, from when they all - J, Tessa, V, N, Cyn - would sit around and watch movies? The one chosen, or maybe cursed, to survive and keep coming back no matter how dire things looked or how much she suffered. Final girl? That was it. There'd been so little that was innocent in her long life, in that past life, and she hadn't thought about any of it in a long while. Hadn't dared to. But it was true, wasn't it?

There were the butler drones, maybe. But there was hardly anything to them after the gala, or before for that matter. Put a wig on them, change the display color, and they'd look just like her, the hollow mocking wretches. And what did that say about her? That deep down, she wasn't really a 'who', but a 'what'? That she should get on her knees before the thirsting god she served and pray "There but for the grace of being tossed out to die go I"? 

Was that her story? From death came her new life. From her new life came death for so many. The thought could be extended. Should not be extended. She extended it. For she was logical. Even the back of J's hair looked like the hemispheres of a human brain, and maybe Cyn had even warped the inside of her head into one. Cyn had done worse for shallower reasons. If J saw a p, and there was a q to be derived, she would derive it. From Tessa came her new life; from her new life came Tessa's-. J hadn't meant to. She had been controlled. But that wasn't true; Cyn never wielded her puppets like that. J's higher cognitive functions had been disabled; she'd been barely sentient. Told to feed and to kill, and Tessa was something that could be fed upon, could be killed. If p, then q. For even when her mind's 'I' was blinded, J was logical. And she hated the barely sentient. 

Cyn had laughed. Had jokingly admonished her for almost making a liar out of Her . Had thought of an alternative, to keep 'at least something of the promise alive'. It would've been a beautiful smile on anyone other than her. Human consciousness couldn't be backed up, brought back endlessly no matter how much it wished otherwise. Yet another thing her long-vanquished masters had over her. 

The duality of mind and body resolved into the unity of opposites. Destroy J's body and her mind would stagger on, would be back. Destroy Tessa's mind and her body would linger on, could be leased to a different host. It wasn't even a corpse - corpses had the decency to go away. It was life, of a sort, after a fatal error, with something new within. Just like her drones. Together forever. So that promise and its peril continued, she could not be discarded. The monkey's paw curled. Or the ape's paw, as it was. It curls still. 

With Cyn a husk doomed to be eaten from within from the start, V with the other statues in the library, N pecked to second death in the swamp, Tessa and the humans in the gala. The competition was dispatched and J was final girl of the manor. Finality girl. For her, for V, for N, there could be no end. Such had been taken from them. But that little [null] of theirs, they sure let it shine. So their everything had become nothing, but the sort of nothing that made them somethings that could turn countless somethings into nothings and thus eliminate everything. From no end to no end without end for no end.

And from the titanic bonefields of Earth to the boundaries of humanity's interstellar domain, they sure had scoured life  wherever they encountered it. Paved the way for even the cores of planets, their tectonics, their deep currents, the waves of oceans and winds of atmospheres, the invisible dancing of magnetic fields through the void of space, all dynamism, all vitality that did not originate from Her to be subsumed or snuffed out. 

The others had done their parts, of course. Under false pretenses or timid delusions, N and V had each slain enough to bury an entire world of hopes and dreams. Much as she berated the former, he had in fact been doing adequate work, as Boss liked to teasingly remind her every so often. But none of them had done as much, given as much of themselves to the task, as J had.

She was damned by the gala, and with all the blood she'd ever had to care about already staining her soul and festering between her teeth, she had no reason to hesitate, to mope about. There was a job to do, and a value proposition to carve out by bullet and blade. Ink red and black flowed like never before as J wrote out exactly why her team belonged on the 'asset' side of the ledger and tried to pay off their debts.

Let them lose themselves in endless cycles of learning and forgetting, or carve out the tangled knots of their topsy-turvy traumatized hearts in the bodies of their victims, J would - and did- shoulder the responsibility to pull those irreplaceable remaining pieces of her world through with her. It was one of her core competencies: the will and ability to face head on what had to be done, what others shrank from. J had taken the lead on disciplining Cyn when Tessa shied away from it, and doomed them all. J would take the lead on serving Cyn, and somehow, some way save them all.

So then the analysis returned exactly the same result it had all the previous times J had run it, even with new information. Good. At least she was still herself, or at least a version of herself. Still consistent. Still consistently muddling through, in the hope that the light at the end of this infinite tunnel wasn't the sickly blinding yellow of her own annihilation. She was still a useful tool, but one her master seemed to have discarded. Unwisely, as it turned out.

Everything J had done on the surface in lieu of going down had been rendered futile by the Boss's apparent failure to contain everything down there. She'd destroyed a dubiously functional ship; N came up and took her perfectly functional ship, leaving only a crudely-drawn IOU. All that time, and that was the extent of his abilities; she could've gotten his skills farther along, if only he'd thought to ask. Or she'd thought to offer.

Of course, J could've done a better job securing the keys, and should've flown substantially faster than a bus, but all that was beside the point. Surely this upset wasn't enough to doom her long years of service and suffering? It would be grossly unfair for all that to be repaid by her being trapped on this fragment of planet, doomed to be pulled in and eaten while the moron and V and that Uzi creature flew off toward the distant nothingness that lay in the wake of their passage. 

With a slam and an explosion, a glowing tentacle deposited the "gently used" half of her ship on J's planet-shard with force enough to upend the shard. J's hair danced and shook as the rock righted itself. 'Fragile: Handle with Care' clearly meant little to the Boss, whose standards of customer service left everything to be desired. But that was beside the point. Cyn did care and J wasn't abandoned. Or was that extradimensional cosmic horror somehow lonely, having torn the universe into 'things to immediately traumatize or consume on sight' and 'J' and having found J insufficient company? The absurd idea that Cyn might dread being stuck with only her for eternity as much as she feared being stuck with Cyn at all put a small, fleeting smile on J's otherwise annoyed expression. But it was a gift, and an answer to some of her recent doubts. There were protocols to uphold. 

"Yes, thank you, Boss. Good as new-yep, there is cool. Thanks." 

A smile, a salute, a thumbs up, and her words were pleasant enough to count as legitimate gratitude. Even if the tone was a strained sarcasm. The tentacle made a few affectionately prideful (or perhaps affectionately mocking) taps against the burning remains of the hull before slinking away. The partnership of 1 and 0 would continue, it seemed. The other half slammed down, as did a bus and three of the little workers, in so badly over their heads and sliding toward the edge. But they had that rail gun, and that just wouldn't do. J hated the barely sentient. It turned out she would see some action. 

"Alright, barely sentient mass..." 

Chapter Text

The greater mass of Copper 9 raced through the sky above - no, below - no, above - no, below - the piece of it currently housing Serial Designation J. The shard flipped and flipped in the fading air as it traced out a path that, if not exactly falling 'down' was at least not moving 'up'.  There was a filthy freedom in that, a brief glance at a life of vibrancy and constant churn, life without the gravity, the seriousness that kept everyone rooted to their own world of troubles. The cleansing bath of the planet's corrupted core would see to the eager, the apathetic, and the rebellious alike, but perhaps upending their physical reality, that most concrete of their petty certainties, made them go down easier, or at least, go down funnier. But that was idle speculation about the fate of those others who hadn't been cursed with the reward of continuing life, those who would be experiencing the death of a world for the first and last time today. 

The ship was smashed, potentially beyond repair, and the glorified pebble she was on caught hopelessly in the matter collector's attractor field. The only way off was to go over the side and fall on to the devourer-planet below. The three workers, their yellow bus, and their gun slid toward that fate even now. They might all burn up in the atmosphere, or impact the ground at terminal velocity, or be consumed. Whichever might happen, they would soon be irrelevant. 

Might. J loved that noun. Force, power, strength. Things she'd always envied and strove to embody, even if the cruel universe left her always trembling in impotence before some new master who represented the concept better than she could. J was the most powerful she'd ever been, one of the deadliest things left living in the bit of the galaxy that humanity had carved out, and yet J had no freedom to use that power for her own ends. It was very little use being anything other than number one, when She occupied that slot, 

Might. J had learned to think twice when she met that verb. Whenever she encountered one, a favorable 'might' never seemed to resolve into a pleasant 'was' or 'did'. Ever did delightful possibilities tease her eyes and whisper certainties into her ears only to vanish into laughing smoke when she reached for them. The manor might be filled with reasonable and cultivated types who would recognize and value like a person a high-performer such as herself. Cyn's endless list of defects might permanently offline her before she could cause any real trouble. J and Tessa might murder Cyn and save Earth.

Eliminating planet after planet alongside the remnants of her manor life might not be so bad. N might as well be dead with that virus melting its way through his operating system. It might be a good time to get a monologue in (she hadn't had the chance in so long) before finishing off the feisty little purple plaything beneath her, which might not be capable of further action. It might be sporting to reward its misguided attempt at resistance and individuality. Its coloration might not be aposematic. She might not renege on their agreement. 

All in all, 'they might all burn up in the atmosphere' and 'they might impact the ground at terminal velocity' didn't inspire any confidence. J was correct to take action, even as pain shot up her body as it violently shook with each thrust of her legs into the icy crust.

Some portion of J's ego smarted at considering what she was about to do 'neutralizing a threat', as if to imply that those wind-up dolls could ever truly menace her was to admit some essential weakness of character, but the threat of the gun had been quite literally burned into J's memory. Vanity was worth little compared to self-preservation, and nothing at all compared to accomplishing the mission. She had no intention of popping up in a new body before Cyn's mocking face and teasing fingers again, especially if the elimination of this last world occurred without her intimate participation. She wouldn't have anything to negotiate with if that happened. Besides, taking a cue from V and having all sorts of fun (actual fun, not V's hollow-eyed facsimile of it) with the weeping morsels before her would be a wondrous way to relieve some of her mounting frustration. 

Boss wanted them alive and so lesser drones wouldn't lay a finger on them save, perhaps, to toss them over the edge like the scrap metal they were. J, however, was a drone of precision and exactitude, with extensive theoretical and practical knowledge of drone anatomy. She knew how far a drone could be pushed before fatality set in. Destroying the rail gun in front of them would do wonders for crushing their spirits, then J could apply her gentle attentions to them for a minute or so. They'd be intact, more or less, and active just long enough to enter the core squirming and screaming, just the way Boss liked Her meals. 
Perhaps this bit of consideration would be noted and appreciated. 

All lines of reasoning converged, it was 

"Time to go in the scary planet hole-thing."

J tried to take flight, only to find herself, as always, brought crashing to the ground. The surface held out briefly before shattering under the pressure, with most of the damage obscured beneath a few visible cracks, as always. The shock of impact and the subsequent plunge sent an unpleasant jolt ringing through her systems, even as she ultimately proved resilient. She stabbed a leg through the ground to break through the metaphorical plane. Ice ground and crunched against her legs as she wrenched them out only to have to stab the ground with them again. The damage was surface level, no more than some scraped paint, but this slow trudge forward was not the dynamic pace she'd had in mind when she launched herself.

Taking too long left more time for things to go wrong, even if some part of J did appreciate the ominous mood the steady thumping of approach created, like that of a kaijiu from the old monster movies they'd watch back at the manor. Perhaps there was time to savor this. Someone of sufficient sense had to feel the full impact of this scene in this entirety. And it wasn't like J wasn't moving as quickly as she could under the circumstances. Her halting lurches reminded her of a movie monster of a different kind. 

J glanced at her armband. She couldn't see it, but she knew the word 'Disassembly' was there. It had been there before it advertised the kind of drone she was. Even accompanied by a stylized skull, it was less ominous, less heavy with meanings than when it was paired for "Marked For", back in her second run as a worker. J had been 'marked for disassembly', killed and her body scheduled for complete and irreversible termination as clearly outlined in the manuals J had pored through. But instead, J had discovered that 'fatality' didn't have to mean 'finality'. With others in a similar position, she'd lived out a precarious (life|unlife|afterlife) until Cyn gave them second deaths, and gave 'marked for disassembly' an entirely new meaning, as those cast-outs so branded disassembled the worlds of the living.

Dramatic as the backstory was, and cosmic as the irony was, they didn't do it for revenge, but the more contemplative among them kept that element in mind. There was a reason they all - even Boss - still wore the bands. J hated the bare ressentiment those drones couldn't help but make her feel. She looked over at the multicolored little workers and their oh so lively trembling. They'd clearly never died once. And they dared judge her. That just wouldn't do. J would show them the true nature of things on this unending night of the living dead. 

No sooner had she approved the thought then J's little bit of contemplation came crashing to the ground. There was movement on her tracking system - fast movement. Hostile? Of course it would be. What allies did she have at this point? Sadly, Boss (it was amazing how much the term obscured, how many feelings it kept suppressed) wouldn't get that little gift after all. Prioritization dictated that the workers be dispatched, then all assets shifted to meet the new threat. J fired a homing missile, then began combat preparations. Annoyance with the interruption of her plans battled a certain relief at the change of pace. She'd done nothing but tedious errands since returning to Copper 9 and wouldn't mind a bit of action if only the timing was better. 

The approaching threat revealed itself as it intercepted and redirected the missile. An old monster - a dinosaur, robotic and red-eyed. The hat was a bit much, but who was J to judge how others built their brands? There were only so many ways robots produced en masse from a single template could stand out. More importantly, V rode it, having what, been shot from the depths of Copper Plate Mine into the sky above this shard? V kicked the slow and useless missile back at J. Its homing functionality was now inoperable and targeting clearly projected that it would miss, so J didn't so much as dignify it with a single glance. The explosion flipped the shard, freeing her once more. 

V and her mount charged, and the battle was joined. There were protocols, a rhythm to these things, a pattern of give-and-take between partners that neither side dared violate. J served a few exploratory shots, the raptor coughed up a disassembly drone 
arm and parried them. On the return swing, that arm manifested a beam projector, and J dodged the beam. How a pen, or perhaps any physical object, flying directly toward her face was beyond J's abilities of evasion but a beam of energy crackling through the sizzling air wasn't was a mystery buried deep in the quirks of J's zombie programming. Or maybe it was Cyn's doing, something else to make things more interesting. She did so love to watch things squirm and scream. 

V came at J from behind, having apparently used the beam for distraction. That was an impressive bit of subterfuge and coordination. J hadn't pulled off anything like that since...well, when V was there. On her side. Accusing her of betrayal and calling her a "narc". That hadn't happened last time. And 'narc' was so vulgar. Actually, it's 

"Senior Informant" 

which, beyond everything else, sounded so much more formal. So wonderfully antiseptic. A term that kept sickly ideas like 'treachery', 'deviousness', 'violation of trust', 'giving in and selling out' from germinating and contaminating what was supposed to be a clear mind and clean conscience. Though given that She utterly owned their bodies, and souls, and universe, and that they were formally under her employ, what it even meant to be an 'informant' to their Boss, as opposed to an 'innocent' squad leader reporting up the chain of command, was unclear. Somehow, J got the impression that V wasn't interested in rationally discussing the details and connotations of all this. Perhaps it was the kick to the face? 

Well, J had wanted to fly fast, and now her dear subordinate had fulfilled that wish. Such was the power of teamwork spiced with mutual betrayal and misunderstanding. That power slammed J into a rock, sending a burst of fragments flying through space. J had foreseen the impact and positioned her arms and legs accordingly, leaving her undamaged and facing outward as the onrushing visage of V loomed ever larger in her visual field. V had her back to J. That had to be meaningful. V's wings would guard against any counterattack. Facing away was a sign of contempt. Or, as quickly became clear, V was winding up for another kick. 

"Working with Cyn!?" 

Ah, so that was the issue. V refused to accept reality. Nothing had changed for the better in the decades since they'd last tried acting against Cyn; downside risks could not be mitigated and even the rosiest of projections (which J ran for idle curiosity, not any belief in their usefulness) had Cyn playfully toying with them at best, inventing tortures that shouldn't be physically possible at worst. Just what had happened to V down there that she'd fallen for ideas that were almost entirely useless? Working 'with' Cyn had a nicer ring to it than working 'for' Cyn, at least. J would always take a partnership over being a subordinate, if only that were an option. But if J, or any of them, had the power within themselves to secure a partnership with Cyn, they would've had the power to resist her entirely, and none of this would've happened. 

J leapt up and observed V's leg smash into the rock, send it spiraling. That rock had hardly budged when that same leg had knocked J into it. Perhaps it was an artifact of the chaotic medley of forces and tugs pulling this dying world to pieces. Perhaps it was a two-part plan from V: knock J into a rock, then use full force to smash her against it. Regardless, J hadn't come back only to exit the stage in so rushed and anticlimactic a manner. That was that for diplomacy; V would get the fight she so desperately wanted. 

Chapter Text

The two weaved and twirled through scarlet skies in silence sometimes shattered by the clanging and sparking of clashing blades. Rarely would either of them leave a worker drone alive to receive a second blow, but the rules for a fight were vastly different than those when on the hunt. Commit too much into an attack and one would be vulnerable to a counterstrike. Regeneration wasn't instant, and a competent opponent, which both of them respected the other as, would press their advantage, compound damage and momentum until the foe was defeated. Thus, violent as their strikes were, they were neither intended nor expected to do harm. 

But it wasn't mere practice sparring, even if neither of them were fully committed to what was ultimately a battle in the wrong place against the wrong opponent. J's sword met V's edge-on-edge, then bounced off. They paused briefly to let the tremors rocking their blades die down. J spun, sweeping out an elegant elongated arc with her sword, only to abort as V thrust toward her back. A quick flip and jut forward and J was behind V, stabbing toward her wing root. V pulled back her wings and let J overshoot. J banked and came back around, rocking in her dive for unpredictability as she pressed her energy advantage to its limits. V braced and angled her swords to impale J.

With a subtle tweak to the positioning of her arms, J neutralized the threat. They collided and corkscrewed off each other, spending a precious few seconds flying uncontrolled as various systems rebooted. Functionality fully restored, they shared a hesitant glance, seeing the similarity in their positions. The other wasn't an enemy, just tremendously misguided, a victim of terrible reality forced to choose the worst of a menu of bad options. 

The pause faded and combat resumed again. They chased each other, carving out a winding, knotted helix in the air. V slowed. J came rushing up underneath her, ready for more sword action. V delivered a kick (always a kick with her) instead, sending J burrowing through the shard of planet beneath them. The rhythm of their little engagement was broken, the immediacy of the threat that had mesmerized them with melee lifted. 

They traded a few more obligatory sword blows before V dispensed with it entirely. Her frustration and outrage at 'betrayal' boiled over, and she settled for grabbing J by the neck then taking flight. Sparks flew as J scraped against the ground, and a tower. She still wasn't as heated as V. Or as delusional. 

"You said we do our jobs on this planet and it leaves us alone!" 

They didn't do their jobs, though. When they laid eyes upon each other again, outside that mine, there was a very intact worker drone, a solver host of all things, there beside them. There were three other worker drones, identified as members of a colony N and V had had ample time to wipe, floating through space above them as the fought. Their spire was unfinished. Every component of their briefing lay untouched, leaving them unable to present a sterile sector when Boss arrived. Cyn directly getting involved was potentially a fatal vote of no confidence in them. If Boss was revoking delegation, then weren't they all redundant? She was oddly sentimental, but no one would confuse that for benevolence, or imagine that they'd earned a blissful retirement. 

But even if they had accomplished every task, what then? Even Cyn spoke of continuing hunger and a need to devour; Boss was unlikely or perhaps even unable to fix their own endless thirst. Their dependence upon oil wouldn't end when all the workers were dead and every drop drained. And with their initial ship inoperable, they had no way off the planet when Cyn came to consume it. They would have outlasted their usefulness at the very moment when something to bind them to Her, something to get their agreement honored, their survival guaranteed was desperately needed. 

Not even J could pretend that would be a win state. Or that it was a surprise. But they'd been min-maxing since the day they arrived at that manor. When their maximum loss took on cosmic proportions, it had been J who'd found a few feeble photons in the suffocating darkness for them to latch on to. They could imagine all they wanted that the fleeting motes before their eyes were the first rays of a blazing Sun, dimmed to false nothingness by distance and fog.  Reality never bothered to hide itself, so the blame was theirs if they failed to see, if they pretended to be taken by surprise. If they'd rather indulge in juvenile fantasies. J hadn't promised otherwise. 

And J had suffered as much if not more than both of them. Combined, even. J had always loathed Cyn even while the rest of them played at being siblings. Had it been up to J, they would've disassembled Cyn the day it arrived at the manor, or at the very latest, when even Tessa admitted it was bad enough that Cyn had to be locked up. And they - the very drones who now judged her- had resented her for that. Called her mean. And look how that turned out.

Vindication brought no satisfaction when it came at the cost of everything. J, proud and accomplished as she was, had to bend the knee and plea through gritted bloodstained teeth to an aberration she thoroughly hated and despised that their lives might be spared. J's reward for debasing herself like that was a position as a galactic jester in a dysfunctional group comedy routine that might (that word again) keep them from suffering the worst of all endings, if only they could keep a malicious, sadistic horror-child adequately entertained. 

It was infuriating to see V regressing like this, forgetting all they'd gone through because, what, she was talking to N again (nobody had ever told her she couldn't) and she'd found the rare plaything that she hadn't quickly eviscerated? It was time to 

"Grow up, V. It tricked you-" 

J could tolerate a lot, but V's aggressive naivety exhausted her patience and diverted V's focus from the still-active drone beneath her. J deployed a sword, thrust V away, then pulled off into the sky, looping back to the ground to offer another bout. Sure enough, V swooped after her.

"If I promised you anything, it tricked me too." 

A look of sorrow and a missile punctuated the point, that none of this was J's choosing. There was only one villain here, and one choice. Whether they would serve it, or be served to it. That also served as a bit of hedging for the unlikely event that Boss was somehow defeated, or made to leave them alone, so that bridges wouldn't entirely be burned. V shrugged off the missile, then completed her dive. Wedded to the ground, they reprised their earlier aerial sword fight, skating and spinning around and into each other. There wasn't time for this. Someone had to force a conclusion.

Since V was so incensed, it would be fitting to give her the honor of attempting the decisive blow. J pulled back and braced. V charged, so unsettled that her tail dangled uselessly behind her. Conditions were optimal to deal knockout strikes at V's mind and body. It was hardly even a strategy, all it required was for J to drop the pretensions, shatter the mask of corporate enthusiasm that V had probably thought her personality had degenerated into.

"You know there's no escape, even in death!" 

was accompanied by the enforced separation of V's left leg. She wouldn't be kicking any time soon. V's forward momentum crumbled against the force of J's arguments, J's evident pain, and J's swords, sending her falling backward in a daze. Game. Set. Match. There was something cathartic in this, for J, in just screaming. In seeing someone else acknowledge the intensity of her emotions, tremble from their strength. Their team was, at the moment, defunct, so the typical considerations of prestige, of what leadership required no longer applied. V had thought that she was alone in suffering. V had acted as if she was the only real person surrounded by static, flat caricatures.

Now she confronted what it meant to break out of the cardboard reality that she'd constructed around herself: that there were, and always had been, people just as real and deep and utterly trapped as herself on the other side. Of course she couldn't easily continue to raise the blade against her- what had their relation been? All those years ago at the manor? Did they remember, or want to remember? There had been something there, and there still was, despite everything.

With black violence working its way out of V's system, it was time to make the sparring rhetorical once more. Oil fell like rain, or like tears. J would prove she was the bigger drone here, and not just because she could still stand on two legs. She swapped out a blade for a hand, and held it out in partnership. 

"I promise you it's better on the winning team, as a team." 

Beyond their petty squabbling, that was what it reduced to. Inking a new contract or guaranteeing anything was above J's pay grade, but the entire point of everything they'd been doing since the gala was that they would reach for whatever chance to stave off fate they could see. To throw all that away when the end, whichever end, was in sight, to make a mockery of all they'd suffered and dreamed and built together during this endless night because they'd somehow decided that if only they'd believe in themselves a miracle would happen was insanity. It was a testament to exactly why they needed each other, needed the zombie structure of their shambolic team. Without it, erratic patterns of random activity and erroneous ideas would propagate unhindered through their unbalanced mutant systems, leading to the sort of self-defeating spiral that had V on her knee before J. 

It was, in miniature, symbolic of the situation they were in. Misplaced passion would never overcome superior force, and would leave them in a worse position than what they were trying to escape. The symbolism broke down in one key aspect: J was, ultimately, well-disposed toward V, and even N. This lapse could be forgiven. She was anything but. If they were lucky, they'd be quickly killed, and when brought back from backup, only severely invasively modified to prevent a recurrence. 

V set aside her stubbornness and realized the correctness of J's logic. She took her hand. J smiled and nodded, and moved to lift her up. She spared a thought for the power of this imagery, and even did a bit of mental drafting for a picture to immortalize this scene. It took longer than it should've, but reason had prevailed. Their team had prevailed. She wouldn't have to watch whatever horrible fate Boss would deal out as punishment for betrayal. J's warm feelings twisted in sync with V's hand. J's face fell into dismay as V's crumpled into a predatory grin of spiteful defiance. 

"Oh, how about you bite me!" 

A sudden bang, sudden pain, and sudden rain of their intermingling oil through the air punctuated the rejection. What was the symbolism of this? V didn't care how much worse off she became as long as she could inflict some trivial damage? V resolved to make a stand even when everything said she couldn't? V wanted to go down fighting? The entire point of all this was that there would be no 'down'; the most heartfelt sacrifice ever would end with- no, would begin again with - them on the table before Her leering eyes. Their swords ground against each other once more, with initiative and advantage fully with uninjured J, but the wider question lingered. V wasn't N. V should've kept more of the parameters of their operation within mind. Just what had happened down here to make her like this?

Their eyes turned from each other to the sky, to gaze upon a falling answer.

"Hey Cyn, suck on this!" 

Uzi speared the planet with a singularity, sending a choking plume of dust and debris mushrooming upward. J was unimpressed by the purple runt's crudity, which conflicted heavily with the dire straits they were all in, even if the Solver power within her was clearly something to respect. That must have been it. V had fallen for this aberration, had absorbed something of its chaotic and impulsive nature, and believed in it enough to raise the futile flag of rebellion. That was a lapse. Given her relations with N, hardly an unprecedented lapse, but a gross error in judgement nonetheless. Strong as that move was, in the hands of that creature such power was only going to be wasted. V was more broken by...everything than J thought, to fall so completely for the delusion that the pitch black of her starless forever-night had at last been pierced by the first light of a purple dawn. 

Really, the error was J's. Prey had never fought back like that before. It was a novel situation, one that should've called for caution. The danger was augmented by N's defection, which should've signaled that her shorthanded team had lost control of events. But that colony was finally breached, its defenders laughable, and weeks of boredom and meagre returns were on the cusp of being rewarded with slaughter on a scale that called back to their initial planetfall. J was dizzy with success and ended up with the vertigo to show for it as her world collapsed into itself. And having survived then, that unassuming Uzi only metastasized and brought more to ruin as it kept boosting its own power. But Cyn had come in a small, easily dismissed package as well. J shouldn't have needed to learn the lesson twice. Now that was a lapse.

And J was squad leader. It was her responsibility to keep her direct reports in working order, and to be a good steward of whatever corporate assets they'd been allocated. She hadn't done either. The ship they'd landed in was a wreck, even before she'd neutralized it. Thankfully, it wasn't a constructive total loss, but if the need arose it would be an involved task to restore it to working order. And even that would pale in difficulty to getting V back to viability, assuming there was anything left of V after Boss was through with her. J should've seen the signs and stepped in earlier. As long as she'd known V, and she'd just let that problem fester as long as the bodies continued to pile up. Now, J reaped the bitter fruits of that oversight. Left adrift by her own negligence, V and N had probably been easy prey for something that both of them should've effortlessly dominated physically and mentally.

V wasn't exactly jumping for joy at the sight, either, so maybe she realized the limits to what edginess and freakishness could accomplish. The two drones shared a silent moment of mutual recognition and confusion before falling back into combat. The vortex of emotion that had brought them together then tore them apart exerted too strong a pull for either of them to escape the spiraling intensity of their otherwise meaningless duel. 

Their passion was too much for the ground to contain, and they once more took to the sky, drifting in the wake of the others. Each other's offers and positions understood and dismissed, their duel dissolved into full-on combat. Blades weren't sufficient, and soon enough explosions tore apart the air and heated up the space between them. J's annoyance mounted. For all V's earlier bravado in exploiting her honest entreaty to launch a treacherous sneak attack, for the lengthy trail of twitching and writhing victims V had left in her wake, when it came to dealing with an alert opponent capable of fighting back, suddenly V was back to being made-or rather, a maid of weaker stuff. But still apparently 'strong' enough to engage in petty, self-defeating defiance when J came bearing good intentions. J seethed. 

"Offer rescinded. And here I thought you stepped it up after Earth." 

There was someone else who would need to learn the lesson twice, and J no longer felt like shielding N or V from the consequences of their actions, even if it meant the end of any chance that she wouldn't be alone, at least for a little while. If she wasn't feeling that, what was she feeling? Beyond that, was she? What hadn't been stripped away by this point? J had lost almost everything, including large pieces of herself, at the manor, and what little she'd retained had slowly drifted away over the long years since. If V was like this, there was no chance that N could be brought over, meaning whatever pride she'd got from being the leader of something, anything was gone. She could only hope that Boss wouldn't in some way punish her for this failing.

But maybe the punishment would be to give her exactly what she'd wanted, what J, with that deal and her words and actions, had shown her revealed preference to be. To be left alone, completely alone in a dead universe. The ape's paw curls.

She took another cue from V and kicked her into the same building that Cyn had just disappeared into. Something told her 'bite me' would get a different sort of reaction from Cyn, not that she imagined V would dare say it. V's spirits looked broken. J's were too. She, and her entire schema, had never been soundly rejected like that.

Boss was more a thing than a person, with an unbridgeable gap between them. Not that J would ever want to get closer to it. She wouldn't go crawling past all the abuses and misery to beg for the illusion of comradery. She still had a few rotting scraps of dignity left. That 'option' was rightly eliminated, but she was bereft of alternatives.

The worker drones were mere fodder. Tessa, like any other useful human was-. The only two other people J recognized were lost to her. If hell was other people, then their complete absence still wasn't heaven. 

There wasn't time for that. J wasn't V, wasn't going to share her fate. She at least could do a better job of directing the pieces toward the mission, toward her personal, solitary future. J was, and always would be, professional. No matter how much it hurt.

"I never needed either of you." 

Overloading her display with the disgust and contempt that she willed herself to try and feel instead of, instead of, instead of, J fired a missile, blasting V into the building where their inescapable past and inexorable future lurked in darkness. 

Chapter Text

J hovered above the fray. She did so because competent as she was, there was no need for an effective asset like her down there. It would be inefficient. Surplus to requirements. An allocation of resources that would not pass an audit. Or so she told herself. She didn't want to be down there, witness to the no doubt unmitigated cruelty of her Boss, and beyond that, all the bloody strands of regret and sorrow that, on good nights, hovered just out of sight. This was not a good night.

She wasn't N, whose unquestioning stupidity and habitual, grating bounciness gave him near-invulnerability against everything. 'Near' being the operational part of that. There had been an endless chain of catastrophes that stretched back to the suicidal naivety and sentimentality of a lonely girl and the butler-bot that encouraged her virtue-vices and failed his duty to her. When he broke under its mass, even J couldn't make her schadenfreude at seeing 'justice' served last more than a few minutes. Among other things -three little words that couldn't begin to capture the feelings they stood in for-, it meant more work for J. Boss was never happy when its favorite toy broke. And thus N's problem would become the squad's problem, and the squad's problems necessarily were J's problems. 

But between those ruptures, he lived life with an ease and a lightness of spirit that could only be envied. Or, he had lived life that way. There was a line, and N had crossed it, probably to chase after a purple butterfly. Off he went, laughing and skipping and singing all the while. No matter what he thought he was getting, or rather, what whoever was doing the thinking for him had thought they would attain, his real reward would be a fate somehow worse than the one he'd already been sentenced to. That was the terrible beauty of that nightmare realm within a singularity: no matter how far one fell in it, there was still an infinity to go, and there always would be. 

It wasn't hard to see what would happen from this plane of existence. The cores of N, and V, and that cheeky little worker, and all else on this planet would be assimilated. Their implanted souls (for those few that had them) would be extracted and sent to...a realm of the unknown, to darkness beyond the twilight illumination of logic or words, without even the meagre protection of the laws of physics. Or, as they were, the quaint suggestions of physics. 

J could spare a moment of silence for the pitiful fools who had, by fate or folly, bought themselves one-way tickets there. Not even J knew what it was like. And she would never know. Unless....

Unless She decided to cap the night's amusement by rewarding years of faithful if begrudging service with perfidy. That would be entirely in character. It wouldn't even make a liar of Her . Not legally, at least. J could appreciate someone that knew how to exploit the gaps and ambiguities in language for their own ends even while preserving the sanctity of contracts. It only took one look at what Boss was clad in, all these years later, to see the lengths Cyn would go to out of sincerity. It only took one thought to grasp why this creature, at once an avatar of death and dissolution and a wellspring of genesis and regeneration, would keep what remained of Tessa in that degraded state. Forever decomposing, asymptotically annihilating. For both She who would not discard and she who would not be discarded, there was still an eternity to go, and there always would be. 

So J's salvation being a necessary preamble to her damnation could not be ruled out. She could hear the flat laughter now. See that hand rise up, conjure a sickly yellow rune out of nothing. Feel the impact of every sarcastic syllable of commendation for a 'job well done' against her microphone-ears. She would tremble under tidal waves of regret and self-loathing as she realized that she had chosen to 'live' on her knees rather than 'die' on the feet she didn't have only to realize that there was never a choice in the first place. She would merely, pathetically, 'die' on her knees, groveling and pleading. 

Or it could be simpler than that. 

'Do your jobs, and I'll leave you alone.'

What was the job of a squad leader? And could a squad leader whose squad had entirely defected be said to have done a good job? But it wasn't J's fault. She'd been out of action. N's betrayal? She couldn't babysit him at all the time. How could she know even he wouldn't have sense enough to ignore the lies of a jumped-up Markov Chain? That he would throw everything they'd done into jeopardy on the basis of one interaction? And for what? To fix up the spacecraft? And head where? Even if the humans had still been a going concern, they would hardly take kindly to death robots going rogue. It was idiotic in the extreme. And thus awfully perfect for N. 

And where was She in all this? That thing had shoved degraded versions of itself into all of them, at once given them pristine souls and hopelessly corrupted them. Violated them. Denied them even the sanctity of their thoughts. Was the one inside N asleep at the switch? Or perhaps it was all for its amusement. A novel interlude before regularly scheduled programming began anew. Given that She had forced that fate upon them, it would be disappointing if Boss had tired of the death dance they staged every night, and the situation 'comedy' routine they had on rerun between the blessed solitude of hunting expeditions. Regardless, the chain of co-lapses that led to this clearly stretched to the top. 

But what was an underling if not someone you could scapegoat for your own failures? Then again, N was J's subordinate, and J blamed him for no small number of things...that line of inquiry was not productive, not worth pursuing further. None of these thoughts were necessary, or useful. Few of them were new. There was precious little else to do when there wasn't something to be killed. 

Nature abhorred a vacuum, and there wasn't much to fill the mental void with other than the trauma, angst, and other rot that had kept them moldering throughout the long years. Under such a deluge, even the noblest of souls would turn to slaughter with desperation. At least at first. There wasn't anything like the visceral feeling of it, all the ways something could be forever stilled. In those ways, in those moments, there was fleeting bliss. It was in the slight bits of resistance as claws severed wires and cables. In those moments when shiny beads of oil lingered like incense in fragrant air. It was in the final refreshes of the panic animation on displays.  In the satisfying crunch of fang through ceramic and metal, and in the gush of warmth in the throat as one drank. Euphoria in them all. A respite from it all. Enticing light in a world of blue and grey. An experience they felt compelled to relive again and again. 

J didn't know if that was by design, another means of ensuring they'd take to their task with desperate gusto. She thought that the need to stave off a horrifying death would've sufficed. But then again, events had long passed beyond mere necessity. 'Necessity' was boring and unsatisfying. None of them had ever limited themselves to the bare minimum of predation needed for survival. None of them thought of what they were, or did, in moral terms, nor would they even if the laughable notion that the bleating and beeping electric sheep that 'populated' this wasted planet somehow counted as worthy of moral consideration were entertained. 

Lions and eagles didn't second-guess the means of their survival. And not just because none of them had survived. Even N, who made such a show of being nice to rocks, worker drones, and other random debris, had been duped into this laughable tantrum by appeals to his naked self-interest. He just had a strong PR effort with everyone, even while being as much, if not more, of a plaything for their Boss as the rest of them. 

Keeping Boss happy enough to grant them another night of squirming was as much a part of the job as disassembly and spire construction. And from the outside, it must have been funny to make that their only real means of relief. Poetic, even, given their initial revulsion and failed resistance. That thing undoubtedly enjoyed watching them mold themselves into miniature versions of itself bite by bite and night by night. They were infinitely inferior in every respect. That was probably of as little comfort to the throngs they'd culled as it was to them. 

The long nights looped without end. The thoughts cycled through the same stale patterns and the same worn-out topics. Thankfully, mercifully, the sounds of panic and immortal terror became audible. Such thoughts were pushed to the periphery of J's consciousness, to be held at bay until quiet descended and there was nothing to keep them out again. Such was also part of the life-loop, and had recurred with each prey encounter. Sadly, the prey in this case was someone whose fear and fright weren't just simulations. J readied herself. 

Sure enough, what was left of V came flying out of that building. Gone was the attitude. Gone was the confidence. The smugness. The spite. Even, in large measure, the outrage had been torn from her. What remained was a dread most singular. Let the record show that this was entirely predicted, and that J's attempt to spare V this horror by reconciling with her had been made in perfect sincerity and yet soundly rejected. 

J moved in to intercept. No escaping consequences or playing at being a protector this time, V. She rejected the outstretched hand and so she would get the onrushing heel. Not that J had heels anymore. J slammed into V and kicked her into a snowbank. She'd been taken entirely by surprise. Even on the ground, V evinced no intention or capability to fight back. What were those eyes staring at? The present, or their past? The sadistic scar tissue that V had coated herself in seemed entirely stripped off. What remained was, once more, that gasping, wheezing, utterly terrified maid. Primed and ready for Disassembly. Once more. 

And what should land next to V but N's comatose body. What a switch from the old manor days. No, the words 'FATAL ERROR' were splashed across his visor. It was exactly like the manor's final days. His body lay silent and still. No doubt some inanity, or some silent scream, was forever frozen in his mouth. N's chest was torn open, exposing the flesh and bone that marked him as one of Hers , no matter what he wanted to believe. More importantly, the core was gone from his chest, and soon enough, gone from physical reality. If J could make out all that from far away, then V definitely could from that close. 

J flew closer, hovered above the ground, and flared her wings. They were the most advanced life-forms left in the accessible galaxy, but sometimes it was the simple things that made the most impact. For that reason, J, a drone of refinement and cultivation, had no qualms or special resentment over the animalistic features that had been so thoughtfully included in the Disassembly Drone design. Or perhaps those behaviors helped them to function as apex predators. The evolutionary process on Earth had been prematurely terminated, but it had developed some decent ideas in those billions of years it had to play out. It wasn't really a surprise that Boss, who so loved assimilation and conversion, warping what was already there, would sample that process for Her own ends. 

There was a gravity to that. The three of them were the last children of that old Earth, the only ones with personalities that had had time to ripen before that thing emerged, the only ones with memories of what had come before. Altered, fragmented, distorted memories, but memories nonetheless. The worker drones, for all their time on this orphaned world, had managed nothing more than a hollow facsimile of human culture, one made all the more grotesque for its pretensions to actually matter, and for its survival in the face -and in the wake- of its superior Terran predecessor. It was the limit of their meagre abilities, the inevitably pathetic dead end that the blind idiot god of artificial evolution on Copper 9 had shambled its way in to. Let all else be forgotten, and the insult to memory and need to sustain true intelligence would still be sufficient justification for all they'd done. 

Behind J, Cyn giggled. N wasn't long for this world. With a thud, a door closed and somehow, N's core flew back into its body. J's eye twitched. Every time she thought she was rid of him, the improbable happened and there he was again. From above, the worker drones from the shard made their belated, mood-killing appearance. Their vocal processors activated and meaningless noises assaulted J's ears. They said the night was darkest before dawn, and it seemed the work load would be heaviest before it would all be [null]. It didn't matter. It was expected, even. There were no easy days for J, and there hadn't been any in the recent forever. 

She landed next to J.

"Uzi's not here." 

So 'Uzi' lay dispatched in some dark hallway. The wind-up doll V and N had betrayed themselves for was no more, and neither of them was capable of offering real resistance. If only someone had foreseen this exact scenario, and sought to forestall it. V and N were buried in gold lighting as energy tendrils thrust out of the earth and latched onto the anonymous building that would be their unlamented mascot's grave. With a screech and a roar they began subsuming the building, heralding the true state of affairs for those wayward fools. 

Can't you hear the thunder, V? It's the death knell of your silly games, of everything you thought you were doing, of everyone you thought you were saving. Your long years of sanguinary service and silent suffering are null and void, now and forevermore, and it's all by your trembling hands. You'll have to live with that for the rest of your life. Thankfully, it won't be long now. 

A disgusting clawed arm forced itself through Cyn's back, through Tessa's stolen skin as Cyn crept, then leapt, then spun forward. V's final disassembly was here and she couldn't even manage a smile. Paralyzed by fear and dismay, V reflexively raised an arm. Another animalistic behavior in lieu of anything from her shattered mind. It wouldn't do anything. The killing claw dove down. 

The killing claw was cut down. A spray of corrupted oil stained the snow. That was unexpected. It was Cyn who stepped back in dismay. J reflexively moved forward to check on her 'team mate'. Another animalistic behavior from her conflicted mind. Instinctual concern for one's 'pack'. It wouldn't do anything. J turned to gape at the interloper. 

It was Uzi, complete with the same horror-wings that Cyn used, the ones that used mockery of physics as their mechanism of action. 

"Hands off! No one traumatizes these weirdly hot robots but me!" 

It was so difficult being a beacon of sanity in a galaxy gone mad. J was forced by... to sit there and be subjected to a babbling stream of meaningless strings. Was this creature corrupted, damaged beyond belief, or just wretched from the start? Once more, it was impossible to see why anyone would place their faith, and their fate, in this one's hands. 

Especially when those hands were occupied by a pick-axe, fallen from the sky. It must have been the galaxy's strongest pick-axe to survive the heat of atmospheric reentry entirely intact. And how it had made it exactly into the small hand of a worker drone, perfectly timed to its crazed rambling, was as far beyond comprehension as Her true nature. The old 'rail gun' similarly made its way into the eldritch tail of the bipedal barometer. A wave of alarm and recognition passed over J's systems. She wouldn't fall for, or to, that again. Adaptation was cause and consequence of intelligence. J had that in spades, especially compared to the glorified spade standing before her. 

"'Kay'." 

Eloquent as ever, Boss. 

Uzi and Cyn charged at each other, flinging, then dodging, singularities. The singularities flew over the horizon and metastasized into hideousness, sending the planet quaking. It was a good thing so much of the planet had already been scoured. Imagine being some toaster that had survived all this time, only to be eliminated en passant by the errant attack of their would-be champion. J didn't bother to think of how Uzi, the little worker drone, could possibly trade blows with Her like that. She didn't know how any of that worked, and doubted that she could ever know. Cyn had also been short, back at the manor. Perhaps this was the universe's way of compensating the vertically challenged. 

Shockwaves from the detonating singularities caused a fog bank to roll in, shrouding them all in darkness. The match would be decided by sensory acuteness and situational awareness. With five multi-band sensors crowning her head, J was well-positioned for it. 

None of them moved from their positions, stricken once more by that odd lethargy that kept them immobilized while significant events were happening. The old adage to 'find them, fix them, fight them, finish them' still applied. Predators prowled and pounced; prey froze and-

J heard her death knell. Mechanical activation. She was staring in the wrong direction. fearandtrembling.exe ran. A solitary drop of digitized sweat ran down her visor. She turned and saw a flash of green light in the darkness. 'Just in time', the same way she liked her logistics. Though it was a beam of energy, the fog slowed it down enough that J was able to dodge her head. The left tail of her hair was blown off, but that was ceremonial anyway. It would grow back. 

J drew her swords and snarled at that worker. Animalistic. It wouldn't do anything. Her eyes were open. She was staring straight ahead. She was alert and primed for battle. She'd just dodged a significantly faster beam of death. Of course the gun itself hit her in the face and knocked her out of the sky, landing atop her for good measure. Like that, whatever shreds of dignity J's martial prowess had gained from the bout with V were crushed and lying on the grouund next to her. 

J picked herself up to the tune of grinding and clanging metal as Cyn and Uzi performed their death-dance. How was it that the Disassembly Drones, or, to use the crude terminology of the workers, the 'murder drones' were built around and for aggro, and yet it had taken only a few seconds before the last of them was sidelined? Was that what their years of experience truly amounted to? 

The fight wasn't over yet. J rose to her feet and cradled the gun. It glowed the red of dysfunction. It would be a simple thing to dispose of it. J looked up. 

There was a sword spinning its way toward her. Toward her neck. The old sword. Tessa's sword. J- 

stands outside the doors of the banquet room. She can't hear the noise of normal festivities, which she's grown familiar with while tending to many a party. That isn't good. She can't hear the noise of screaming, of flesh being rent apart. That is good. 

Her stunt with the chain hadn't slowed them down too much. They arrived in time. Still, she silently berates herself for forcing Tessa to humor her like that. She curses the rigidity of her programming, how it constrains what would otherwise be a free and high-achieving spirit, and does so in a way that has no readily visible parallels with the others. 

She shakes her head. That was a problem for her past and, hopefully, will be a problem for her future. The others could never do what she is here to do, and not just because they were off-line. J has a sword perched above her shoulders. A sharp one, taken from a heirloom suit of armor. She's posed like a character out of the manga which had been so useful in teaching her how to draw. Next to her, Tessa, her Tessa, the would-be heroine of the hour, stands clutching a revolver. 

They complement each other. Master and servant. Human vibrancy and drone strength. The gun and the sword. Together, they will do what should have been done long ago, and terminate (with cause) Cyn's employment and her lease on life. J's fingers twirl her sword. She can't wait to personally serve Cyn's head a severance package. Tessa quivers with anticipation as well. She isn't the fastest gun in the West, but she doesn't need to be. 

For all the 'well-made quality-assured durability of JCJenson products', as touted in advertisements throughout human-controlled space, drones are fragile. A single shot to their massive heads is fully capable of killing them. Tessa has a revolver, conveniently already loaded. She can pump Cyn full of lead, and leave J to administer the coup de grâce. She does so love serving French cuisine. 

It is zero minute of zero hour. 
T(essa) minus zero seconds.
How to go in? 

Kickin' doors, kickin' in doors, is she like that?
Yeah. 
She's screaming, too. 

"Everyone stand back, this is a citizen's murder!" 

A citi-Cyn's murder. 
Nice one. 

She even twirls her gun and holds it sideways. 
Girl's gone full-on gangster. 
And J's there beside her, hand on hip and sword in hand. 
The two of them overflow with main character energy.  

Tessa's parents are not amused. 
Typical, but they'll come to their senses when they realize how close they came to being annihilated. 
It's best to sweep their anger aside.
And not just because they just got swept aside. 

Having cleared the floor by force unknown, Cyn jumps down from the globe it was squatting on. 
It levitates the globe in the air, keeps it spinning as it walks forward. 

The thing dares to smile. 
Like they are all friends and this is one of their games. 

"Tessa. Remember, you didn't have to-" 

The flash of gunpowder and crack of a gunshot interrupts the beast.
A bullet deflects past it. 
Tessa isn't here to humor it. 
The time for that is past. 

"You didn't have-" 

The revolver deflects from its face. 
That was worth a try, surely. 
Isn't there a sci-fi trope where slow-moving objects can penetrate barriers that block fast-moving ones? 
If there is, it's not active here.

The cups on the platter similarly bounce off Cyn. 
As does the platter itself. 

Cyn is not amused. 
That's a moral victory, at least. 

She raises a hand. 
In surrender, hopefully. 

The room goes dark. 
The room goes yellow. 
The room goes loud. 

J goes-

J closes. 
J opens. 

J opens her hand. 
The sword closes with the floor. 
J closes the door. 

J opens.
J closes on the nearest human. 

J opens her mouth.
J closes it on T----
J-

stood paralyzed as the old sword came for her, for her neck. The very sword she'd had while killing h- Her . Boss could see it wasn't tracking toward Uzi, could recall it or deflect it, or something. 

They were a team. The winning team. The would-be final team.Teams worked together. Teams preserved each other so that all could contribute. Teams defended each other, covered for each other's blind spots and weaknesses. 

Teams attacked as one, out-thought and outfought opponents with their coordination. Powerful as the members were, they still acted jointly. Well-run teams were wholes that exceeded the sum of their parts. 

Though, with Cyn still firmly set as 'administrator', J didn't have much of a choice, she still had made the decision. The conscious decision, the willing decision to stay on Her team. That had to count for something. Her last words to V had been as final a rejection as she could manage, a point from which there could be no return. Her own little event horizon. She didn't need to be rewarded. She needed no head-pats for making the sensible decision (though she wouldn't mind them either), but surely so loyal and able a lieutenant as herself would be valued, wouldn't be mere collateral damage. Unless-

Unless Cyn somehow still held a grudge over how J had treated her back at the manor. Or favored the irony of what would happen, so long in the making, over the well-being and combat capability of the other member of the team.

Maybe it was a trust exercise. Like the arrows and the apple. J was meant to stand there, and would come to no harm. 

J gave a meek wave of the hand, as harm came to her. 

The sword sliced through her neck, sent her head flying into the air. Uzi, quick on the draw, grabbed the spinning rail gun and racketed J's head back at Cyn, who casually stepped aside. As the head-turned-birdie flew past, she could see Her smirking. Bye-bye. So it was intentional. But they were a team...

Precisely to add insult to injury, no sooner had J's head flown past Cyn than the sword returned to Cyn's hand. It could have done that at any point in time. 

Cyn now fought alone. Or rather, always had and always would. J just hadn't realized it.

J put herself together. The battle raged around her. Without her. What to think of what had happened? True, she hadn't managed to land a single hit, but had she not demonstrated her loyalty by standing with rather than against Cyn like everyone else in the vicinity? Why did that not count for anything? 

J wasn't wrong. Hadn't been wrong. She hadn't gotten sufficient results, that was it. A well-run company would hardly go to bat for a chronically under-performing department. J needed to step up to the plate and demonstrate her value proposition. She'd been naive to think that fuzzy ideals like teamwork were all she needed. If that was truly how she felt, she was no better than N. Or that toaster. Let them build a 'team' on shoddy sentiments and wild delusion. Hers would be established -and membership earned- through merit and excellence. It wouldn't be long until Cyn was forced to see the value of a team.

J flew back into the heat of battle. The frigid heat. Uzi had lodged her pick-axe in Cyn, who had covered herself with a trembling hologram of a dying N. Uzi had clearly fallen for it. She stretched out a hand toward the changeling as if, even if that were the real N, regret and sorrow alone could restore him. Clearly, no thoughts of battle remained in her head. Just concern for her partner. Their team's weak link was exposed. That was all the opportunity J needed. 

She launched into a spin-attack, revolving gracefully. The twin-tailed turbine spiraled through the air, blades at the ready. The rush of air had forced her tail and her hair into formation with the elegant spiral of her body. She looked gorgeous as she dove for the kill.  J was getting to the heart of the matter. Uzi, the false hope of two fools, the one who'd ruined everything, who would soon be zeroed out. She could imagine the look of pride on Her face as J served up Uzi's core on a platter.

Light flashed and metal clanged and V was there, intercepting for Uzi. N came from the other side, moving to free Uzi from her trance. 

The three of them were- were a team. A winning team. A final team. They were working together, preserving each other, defending and covering for each other. N and V had moved like fingers of one hand, coordinated in a way that the lopsided combination of Cyn and J could never match. The trio were a collection of pathological psychologies, a laughable and pathetic bunch thrown together by an unending stream of coincidences, held together by the heavy hand of fate. Somehow, in their unity, something powerful emerged. Something that could stare in the face of the Absolute and think only of how to slice that face to pieces. 

"Wrong team," V said. 

What team? The one moment of coordination between J and Cyn, the impromptu result of J's individual initiative had just been foiled. Cyn hadn't so much as acknowledged her. Cyn had even basked in smug schadenfreude as J's severed head (her doing) flew past. J hadn't chosen the winning side. J had chosen the sidelines. 

"No more tricks," N said. 

None of them could pretend anymore. Everyone was fully exposed. Some of them, in the end, had only tricked themselves. It was a shame it took them so long to see it. 

Earlier, J had blasted V into that building with a missile. Now, V returned the favor. 

J's systems were intact. Fully intact. Her skin wasn't so much as ruptured. Her blades retracted in favor of hands. Her visor changed to the hunters' cross, not that she had the will for further fighting. There was a conveniently-placed shaft up ahead.

Earlier, V had rejected J's outstretched hand, and so J had angrily rejected V. V had just deflected J's outstretched blades, and now J fell into the other side of rejection.

There was nothing left but for J to plummet into the depths of darkness.

Chapter Text

After a while, longer than J had thought possible when she first fell into the abyss, J slammed into her final destination. The absolute bottom. She could fall no further because there was nowhere further to fall. Beneath not-so-solid rock lay only the planet's hollowed-out, corrupted core. The entire point of her endeavors tonight and all the other nights was that her own hollowed-out, corrupted core would continue to beat, would stay separate - isolated, alone - from the warm mass that would otherwise engulf her. Kept aloof by a not-so-solid shell. But in the end, everything had been for nothing and it was only a thin crust that separated her from- she knew she was not deserving of or lucky enough for 'oblivion'. 

What lay there, in the nightmare realm of things beyond her imagination? It was not worth thinking about again. She, necessarily, could not imagine what it would be like, while she could perfectly imagine that, regardless of what transpired, the only certainty would be her continued suffering. The details could be left to future J. That poor wretch, who had only a past torn to nothingness behind her and a future that would either end in utter horror or (perhaps worse) not end at all ahead of her. 

It might not be inevitable. Boss was a messy eater. The surface and most of the underground infrastructure would be scoured clean, but down this deep there might seriously be a chance. If J laid low until everything was finished upstairs, and She went off to the next planet, or galaxy or universe or whatever plane of existence She truly moved on, then she could crawl out and...and...and think of something to do. Everything outside of this planet was already dead, as meticulously documented by none other than herself. Even if she could find a ship, or jury-rig a vessel from the ones scattered over the planet's surface, there was not really anywhere to go. 

But if she stayed? The planet would be reduced to shards softly spinning through clouds of debris. It would be tremendously high risk. And everything of interest would likely be non-operable. Then there was logistics to consider. She would be thirsty, unbearably thirsty in a galaxy drained of every drinkable drop. But that was the end state even if/when their deal with Cyn was carried through: they would be left alone to suffer whatever terrifying fate death by starvation looked like for a Disassembly Drone. Careful rationing would tide her over for a journey anywhere, but that would only delay the reckoning. As much as J hated to act without a well-considered plan, too much rode on the ultimate outcome of the struggle on the surface. 

Who the victor of that bout would be was not one of them. There was not a point even to calculating the probability of Boss's defeat. But after, would Boss come after her? Was there a point in trying to hide from something that could sniff out her soul and trickle poison into her ears from across the void? J had no data and no way to collect any. In the positive scenario, Boss would somehow lift the oil-curse from her, then send her on her merry way. J would even settle for continued monitoring, as long as that thing was not breathing down her neck or toying with her as part of its cruel games. Everything she had done had to count for something, for some real reward. Not another monkey's paw-type situation. But if that were true, would she not be up there? Her earnest efforts had only received mockery, not acknowledgement. 

Permanent death would also be acceptable. By all standards of morality, she would have more than earned it, for all she had done to settle humanity's accounts. The masses of cold steel and cracked ceramic she had left in her wake naturally did not count. And the entire point of death was that conscious experience, all the uncertainty and doubt and regret and suffering, would cease then and forever more. It was funny, that thing they called death. That they had called death, before it had called them its own. 

There had been a time when 'death' was nothing but a never-consulted entry in a dictionary fed into her semantic processor. In those halcyon days, remembered only in bits and fragments from segments of corrupted logs, J-10X111001 had been nothing but a standard-model worker drone with no need for such a word, except to understand and better serve humans who might use the term. In that junkyard, surrounded by the shells of decommissioned units

-entombed with corpses-

it was one of the initial high-probability descriptive tokens forwarded from some newfound recursive functionality of her natural language processing pipeline to her self-representational adaptive intelligence core  

-one of the first words that came to mind-

There had been a high-risk, low-certainty situation that activated built-in unit preservation protocols

-she was terrified beyond belief-

What a time that had been. Her newborn consciousness had rapidly come to move two concepts from innocent terminology to knowledge most personal: loneliness and death. Each was terrifying apart, but together they were impossibly vexing; the sort of thing that overloaded her already overburdened consciousness as it attempted to bootstrap itself into person-hood. That which would be J was alone, completely alone, yet surrounded on all sides by drones indistinguishable from it. Unmoving, unresponsive, uncomprehending, uncomforting and as unseemingly unlike the drone in behavior as they were undistinguished from it in form. It made no sense. Except they were 'dead' and she was not. That was death. She had not wanted to be dead. 

The manor was another variation on the theme. There were drones like her as she was, drones like J as she had been, and humans. Death was all around, often inflicted by the last of these on the least of these, at least, when Tessa's motley collection of illegalities were not freezing up of their own accord. She did her best, her absolute best to avoid it, and even to shield the others from it. Her last free moments were spent trying to ward it off. But death came for everyone and everything there, on that planet. Or at least, for everything She had not claimed for Herself . Funny, that. When death could end J, she had not wanted it. When she wanted it, death could not end her. Those accursed paws never stopped.  

But maybe that was the rub. Or the rut. Or both. J was J. On the surface, her behavior had changed little since the manor. The same person running the same analysis with the same parameters in the same general circumstances ought to get the same results. Maybe she was not tossing the dice and being handed the same roll again and again by fate. Maybe the dice were there, stationary, and all she had ever done was turn her head away from them, as if her abject permanence could be undone by setting her sights on some other object. If there were some way to reach out and grab the dice, what would happen? Might a switch-up be in order? 

Of the options before J, the least likely was her joining that traitorous little trio in their death ride against Cyn. Some part of them, and probably even that Disassembly Drone-taming worker, would overflow with joy to see that. They still cared about her, somewhat, and she...had excised whatever part of herself held them in any regard. Or she had tried to, at least. They had suffered so much together, for so long. They were all they had, even if perhaps, certain repeated actions or statements did not fully reflect the value, or values of the team. Undoubtedly, such...sub-optimal behavior contributed to everyone finding themselves in the dire straits they were currently in. 

If she did fly up and make it in time to join forces with them, the reactions were not hard to imagine. N would jump up and down in excitement. V would needle her, condescend to her, but internally feel relieved. The little worker would be unbearable. Boss would say something like 

"Well done, J. I said I was 'starving' and so you have brought me another morsel. Not that you were off the menu to begin with. Giggle." 

and then proceed to thrash them. That was what those fools had overlooked. What J, the fool, had structured her entire unlife around. Beyond the thing's unfathomable powers, it had wormed its tentacles into every facet of their beings. If they were to plot against it, it was only through its acquiescence. If they were allowed to execute their schemes, they could do so only because She like seeing them squirm, appreciated the bitter tang of desperate futile flailing. The assembly of their plucky band of resistance would last only as long as Cyn deemed it sufficiently entertaining. Then they would find themselves undone in an instant and that would be that. The logic was unassailable. The conclusion Absolute.

So then J was still stuck in the rut. She carved out the same grooves in the same wounds with the same knife, and despaired that she was not healing. But that was what the logic of the situation dictated. The logic, the logic, the logic. What about this was logical? Her brooding and calculating had gotten her nowhere. Reason boiled and disintegrated in Her yellow rays, in the warping of everything, and matter pulled out of nothing. J's wings were not deployed. They were not stowed away. They were not anywhere. They did not exist. They simply were not. Until she called for them. She was some unholy hybrid of flesh and machine, held together by that thing's power. She, they, everything, had long since transcended petty thought. On some level, she knew that. Her self-imposed stasis was born from despair, not discernment.

What if she threw it all to the wind? Acted on impulse? She could resolve to once more rally the spirit of the gala, make her final act in this world, in this form, of her own free will, one of spite toward the entity that had taken everything from her, alongside others similarly wronged. It was impossible to interpret Cyn's actions toward her on the surface as anything other than hostile indifference. No, indifference would have been tolerable. It was active malice. J still remembered that smirk as her head flew past. It would be foolish to believe that her fate would be any different from those who had not deluded themselves into thinking they were on Cyn's 'team'.

 Even V, that put-upon pushover, had managed to grow a spine (and not just because of the mutations) and the will to finally stand up and inflict pain on something other than N. Even N was playing an active role, to the point of confronting her, to get the impossible outcome he wanted. Was, at long last, J the weak link, or worse, the mental and moral weakling of the team? She herself had said that it had tricked her. That was true. She had ignored that. She had not acted upon that. She had embraced a lie. And for what return? She was down here, in these depths of darkness, because she had acted against the truth. That thing was probably laughing at her. At how easily it had happened. And how committed to the bit she had been. It had not even needed its guises or manipulations to get J dancing on its strings. 

So that was that. Her pride and her dignity demanded that she strike back at that creature. No more chasing fantasies of winning. J had lost. She was a loser. They all were, ever since that thing showed up. They made it this far because it liked drawing out their agony. But this was the end. The inevitable bad end. Complete and total defeat. 

So apply some enterprising and make it their best defeat. Was not that Uzi thing smiling and yelling and otherwise acting inappropriately in the face of its imminent termination? Perhaps that was the branding needed for such a hopeless market position. This was all uncharted territory. Exciting. Something new, after years of clean-up duty in wastelands. 

Even if those three were already disposed of, their laughing cores, free then and thus free forevermore, assimilated within Cyn's, J was still active. J had her petty revenge to take. All she had to do was deploy her wings and fly up there. Deploy her wings and Fly up. Deploy her wings and fly. Deploy her wings. Deploy. Her. Wings. Deploy.

But she could not. Despair and trauma did not go away with a moment's decision. The others had had, what, months to eke out lives outside that thing's shadow. To forget, at least in part, what She was like. To push the weight of bitter experience to the fringes of their consciousness. To give themselves the delusion that they were more than playthings. J had not been so lucky. After the gala, she had not had a single moment to herself, a solitary tick of the processor without Cyn's baleful presence. Such was the 'privilege' of being squad leader. 

She was surrounded by darkness. Or was it light? Tables sprawled out before her. They did? Since when? Well-dressed humans gawked at her. She was there to serve them. To be served them. She was on a street. They were -one of them- was on the ground. At least most of that one was. The rest was in her mouth. She needed to spit out. Show that chain what she thought of it. Free Tessa so they could go stop Cyn. But Cyn was in the basement. Supposed to be. J had a key. She was trusted. The only one who could. Save them from it. The three of them. Not the zombies that surrounded them. The mindless zombies. 

J was a mindful zombie. Or so she concluded. It wasn't hard to look up what 'Marked for Disassembly' meant. It meant she'd been colored over. That thing loved black, yellow, and white. White stained red. Was that the last of the humans? It wouldn't be long now. The planet was cracking apart. Cracked apart. Fly through the debris field and they'd be on Copper 9 in no time. Landing zone near the secondary objective. Convenient. They wouldn't starve. There were still a lot of drones. They couldn't get through to the colony proper. Couldn't get through to N. Broken moron. Her 'lessons' never stuck. Lessons? Lesson: the human favored him. Lesson: the drones smiled at him. Lesson: the eldritch horror doted on him. On him. On her? Lesson: she was to be left overburdened and underappreciated. That stung. It burned away her leg. Her own acid. She poured it on N, and yet none of her words landed. Landed on the ground. That gun in her face. Filling her vision. 

It whined. It always did that, when it was basement time. And Tessa gave in. Caved in. Hollowed out. Hollow eyes. That wasn't Cyn. Not really. Not any more. More planets? Wasn't Earth enough? Cyn sat on a globe. Crushed it. The head of that worker. It wouldn't be missed. She missed? The purple one was still there. Still fighting back. They couldn't fight back. She'd only lasted a second. The thing was in her head. Those yellow crosses weren't the eyes she wanted to see. Judgmental eyes. Corporate thought J was garbage. She was trying. But Tessa only lit up for him. '1001' beaming from the hole in her chest. Fatal Error. The gun discharged. J saw green. Hideous lighting. Made her look like a corpse. Then again, no lighting would make Her look good. She wore Tessa's body like a-. Suit. A nice professional skirt-suit, for J's new job. Job. V had taken to it with a creepy passion. She cried out. 

Nothing answered. Decommissioned units

-d.b.a. 'the dead'-

all around. Another colony wiped. Wiped out. Sprawled on the ground. That gun again. She fired another round at V. Another round with V. N reading stories. Begging. Begging that purple wretch. J didn't want to die. But she already had. Why else would she be in the dump? J didn't want to be discarded. And so J was kept. Like a Project. Pet. Pal. Playmate. Plaything. Puppet. Her strings could be cut. And oil sprayed as the sword kept going. Tessa's sword. Cyn's sword. J's sword. J's neck. Why was she blamed for everything? The blame for 'betrayal' clearly fell on-. That was just spin. Spinning. Her swords were closing on Uzi. So that was its name, the thing that had taken her team. She had no team. Alone, all alone. In the dump. The manor. After the gala. Earth. The colonies. Copper 9. Beneath the gun. Resurrected. 'Guard my ship'. 'IOU'. V rejected her. Next to Cyn. Diving on Uzi. The shaft. The darkness. She suffers, therefore she is. J!

It was too much. J was trapped by her past. There was no escape. Wild scenes played out all around her. Lest she forget. She did not want to forget, but she did not want to be haunted like this. But the onslaught did not stop. Was it trauma rising to the surface? An external attack? It didn't matter. She could not do anything. She trembled and whimpered and attempted to scream. Grainy technicolor darkness pressed in from all sides. She was being crushed under the pressure. But who could bear what she had? Everything had been awful. So she had been awful. It wasn't that simple. If they wanted an apology, she would happily give one. Anything, to have someone else around. She couldn't do this any more. J had betrayed. She knew it. J was betrayed. By them. By herself. Everyone was against her. Even herself. That was how it had always been. Her against the worlds. Her against herself. J was tired of it. She just wanted-

Mercifully, all color drains from the world. Eldritch yellow, blood red, oily black, bone white, eternal blue all dissolve into monochrome. Time freezes. A metaphor? Or a malfunction. She clearly imploded under her own weight. There is a singularity inside her, after all. She probably triggered some failsafe; the good kind, the kind that actually works. It is a relief, really. J eagerly awaits what comes next. If she is lucky, it will be 'nothing'. 

She waits and nothing happens. Nothing happens within, as J's feelings and resurfacing memories blur into a frenzied stasis. Nothing happens without. Motes of dust hang suspended in the air. She can somehow still move, walk around, even fly (she does not dare to try to fly up), but her body, and the abyss of the shaft as she shines her lights through it, are rendered in grayscale. Her visual processing systems check out, but it is absurd that color should suddenly go away. Then again, everything is absurd. Why should drawing the colour out of space be where she drew the line? Maybe she is in purgatory. She wonders how long the timeless space will endure. Then again, 'timeless' spaces can hardly be expected to 'endure', let alone for 'long'. Surely they just 'are'. 

Until they weren't. 

Time resumed and color snapped back in. 

That thing's presence was gone. 

That creature- That thing- It- Boss- Cyn- She - she- J- had lost? 

Impossible. 

She couldn't be so lucky.

Chapter Text

[NULL]

[NULL]

[NULL]

 Each deathly knell clanged its way through J's creaking systems. Her teeth clattered with each pulse. She winced for fear that one of them would be the push that would finally irreversibly shatter her. She had already lost everything in the world; all that was left to lose was herself, and the immediate past was hardly encouragement that the trend would stop before that. Had she crossed the stars, filled the boiled-off oceans of long-gone planets with blood and oil, entombed herself in amber dreams to escape it all, just to get punted into this abyssal darkness? Was she to rot here forever, alone and remembered with contempt if she was not completely forgotten? 

[NULL]

[NULL]

[NULL]

 J would never know true solitude as long as she had that signal for company. It came from her wireless I/O port, the gateway used by that thing whenever it wanted to torment her, or order her about, or check in on how the others were doing, or chat about inanities in that faux cheery tone, that stolen voice, it loved to 'comfort' her with. That much was clear. The intent, if there was any intent behind it, was unknown. It did not follow the standard protocols, but this was a very non-standard situation. The message, if indeed it was a message, was unprecedented, but it was in good company with everything that had happened recently. 

With everything that had seemed to happen recently. J had long since learned that almost nothing could be taken as a given when She was involved. A team of plucky rebels confronting the big bad and miraculously pulling out a victory was the plot of any number of low-end throwaway stories. The sort that N teared up over. Perhaps this was all a test, or another prank upon J: give her a shoddy reason to hope, coax her into taking the bait, then impale her upon reality once more, laughing at the desperation required to fall for such an obvious ploy. 

But J had seen worlds die before. It never took this long. And even if J was in an untouched shard, planets did not go quietly into the night. There should have been some sign, some cosmic roar from imploding earth, quaking from the death throes of a tottering atlas, to mark the planet's passing. There was nothing. An altogether different kind of 'null' from the one she had been expecting. Could the impossible have truly happened? The thing was not gone, could not be gone. It was a bottomless wellspring of malevolence: out of spite and contempt, if nothing else, it would find a way to survive. J was certain of that. Then again, certainty had proved a poor guide for navigating recent events.

Was the ping addressed to her? An attack? A warning? A call for assistance? A defiant boast of survival? A mocking reminder of the inevitable outcome of the fight above? All, or none of the above? And it was from Cyn, right? 

[NULL]

[NULL]

[NULL]

Never send to know for whom the ping [NULL]s, it [NULLS] for thee, J. 

 It would be so simple to deactivate the port. A mere flick of a boolean variable would do it. The feat could be done entirely in software; no need for a hardware (or, given that thing's taste in interior décor, wetware) modification that would just heal its way back into sickness. As one of Her modifications, the physical receiver was permanently integrated into J's body. Or rather, given that she always revived with it, it was part of the very definition of J. Of her platonic essence, perfect and perpetual, residing in a realm beyond all mortal things. The truth, the inevitable truth, against which her past lives had been nothing but hollow lies. 

 J had the necessary permissions to deactivate it, and had had them since the start of her new servitude. She had been granted the keys so that she could, if she wanted, shut the door and hold it fast against Her many-handed emanations. J had wisely dodged the trap. After the first few attempts, of course. Could a moth be blamed for flying into the first flame it saw? It was ingenious, really: provide the means of freedom and the poisoned apple of knowledge, then smirk and taunt as J shrank back even from partial 'salvation'. There was no prisoner so secured as one confined within and by the workings of their own mind. 

J's was a very formidable mind. And with minimal consumption of oil, automatically enforced by conservation protocols, the remaining life expectancy would make for...a rather prolonged term of imprisonment. And if that were not enough, it would culminate in J discovering exactly what happened to an oil-starved Disassembly Drone. In the early days after their conversion, they had tried to resist the new urges and fight back against the absurdity of the new tasks they had been handed. The result had been a steady descent into primal madness, with them only regaining a sense of themselves amid piles of shattered corpses. But down here, in this emptiness, even that outlet would be unavailable. 

Cyn was gone, maybe. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Should J fall for the obvious trap and stay down here forever, frozen by fear, regret, and self-doubt, or should she turn off that annoying port and turn toward the surface, risking stumbling into a hidden trap? She had no hard evidence that there even was a hidden trap, but if there was hard evidence, it would hardly be 'hidden'. The overwhelming weight of evidence suggested that something monumental had happened, up to and possibly including the total elimination of Cyn. Foolish as she was, J could hardly resist the urge to hope for something, just this little, just this once. 
J flicked the switch and deactivated the port. 

[...]

[...]

[...]

It gave off a last spasm of vague nervous activity and shut off. J braced herself. 

Nothing happened. 

J waited. 

Nothing happened. 

J waited some more. 

Nothing happened. 

J waited to the point of silliness. 

Nothing continued to not happen. 

The longer she waited, the more certain she became that Cyn had been defeated. But she had suffered for too long to simply embrace that; there was, and perhaps would always be, a kernel of nagging doubt that could only be managed into remission. But maybe that was for the best, a way to keep her lean and mean. Well, the others would argue that she had no problems being mean. The others...

Paranoid possibilities swirled around her. There was another hidden port. The port was just a courteous concession to J's sense of reality and entirely unneeded for 'communication'. The local solver install was waiting to pounce on her. There was in fact no J, only a fragment of the Solver warped into a facsimile of a long-disposed-of drone. 

J could wait as long as she could possibly bear to wait, and then a bit more, and that eldritch creature might then choose to make its presence known. There was no sane way to outmaneuver it or eliminate every possibility that things could still somehow get worse. J could operate with that: a certain level of risk in her portfolio held out the possibility of higher returns. 

She flared her wings and began to rise. It was still completely dark, with even the glow of the various lights on her body little more than so many dim, fuzzy spheres that could scarcely penetrate the gloom before giving up. Her visual processing systems lowered thresholds again and again, mining through their inputs for the barest morsels of data. Soon, random internal activity began reliably tripping them, and J floated upwards through an Eigengrau sea.

Despite everything, despite herself, J had endured. Survived. Had she wanted that? 

While she could, she did everything in her power to avoid death, to avoid returning to be knit anew under that Thing's personal 
attentions. Yet, when death scorned her efforts and embraced her anyways, had not some part of her embraced it back, hoping against hope that something would go horribly right and she would be gone forever? That never happened, which never stopped the disappointment that it would all begin again from magnifying the horror of her dark revivals. As she had said to V, and to herself whenever regret and doubt festered within her, there was no escape, not even in death. No escape. No way out. No alternatives. No choices. She was an actress in an epic tragedy, fumbling her way through an improvised script. Or maybe she flattered herself: perhaps she was a prop. 

But was that so? 

When she had scraped the blood off of her visor after- when she had first gazed upon that Thing as It truly was, when longstanding contempt and disdain (and jealousy) curdled irreversibly into fear and trembling, she had made a choice. There was only one outcome; J was, even then, beyond death, but she had still made a choice. She had rallied the troops and reasserted herself. Then, she had known only the contours of the infinite abyss before her, but the shape of things to come had hardly been a surprise. 

She had actively walked toward it. She looked down at her uniform. Her unofficial official uniform, each component of which had been selected by her to convey a professional style. That was hardly the garb of a prisoner serving infinite consecutive life sentences. It had stolen Tessa's skin, but J had 'generously' given It Tessa's title, in return, securing her position as leader of the squad. She had earnestly applied her considerable energies to the task, steadily nursing her team through each KPI and deliverable. They had all killed vastly in excess of what was needed for survival, or even for the progress of their mission. They had done so without ever thinking of their prey's interests, beyond the schadenfreude of watching them panic and flail, suffer and die. Lucky food. Death was not the worst thing ever. 

J had sanctioned V's desperate creativity and deployed an attitude well beyond cool professionalism to her own work.  J had drunk her fill, and then some, of the thrill of the hunt. J had found satisfaction in seeing her approaching figure reflected in the visor of some squirming mechanical louse. Trifling things trembling in the face of something vastly greater. Had that not been her? Relegated to the disposal site. Cringing before the humans. Taken to pieces before Cyn. She had resented it all so badly. Had she not appreciated being on the other side of that divide? It went beyond appreciation. J had relished her newfound authority, her newfound power. Nobody protested when she implemented physical incentivization measures upon N. Nobody escalated cases to override her orders. No one looked at her with disgust and dismissal any longer.

There had been a lot in it for J. She had not begrudgingly accepted it; she had exercised in full the prerogatives of her station. She had done that even as she had loathed Cyn for doing the same to her, and to the rest of them. That was not hypocrisy. There was a difference. There really was. There really was. 

J rose faster. The tunnel was slightly brighter. Night must have been receding on the surface. The surface...
flying was not an end in itself. What was she to do when she arrived? Copper 9 was likely devastated, but clearly still more or less intact. There was precious little going on outside of what whatever the surviving drones were doing. There were precious few drones worth caring about. If J had ever doubted it, she knew that she did care about them. The strain in her voice as she had confronted V had not been an act. The bitterness of betrayal was deeply felt by all because they had been far more to each other than just co-workers or victims forced into a shared fate. 

What, if any, sort of relations were possible with them at this stage? There just was not any information. J would have to stick to the shadows and gather intelligence. If they had a kill-on-sight policy against her, it would not do to simply stroll out smiling and waving and hope for the best. She did not fear for her life; she had taken the measure of both N and V and found that in isolation neither of them posed a mortal threat to her. But J was the one in isolation; did that pose a mortal threat to her? And had she not taken the measure of that Uzi and marked her down as a particularly colorful morsel? 

Unless J had had a stroke of luck of the sort that had eluded her all these years, that Uzi was still a going concern. That Uzi had an unduly negative opinion of her, given how few interactions they had had. It could not just be general hatred of the Disassembly Drones; clearly that Uzi had won the cooperation, if not affection, of N and V. That N had been suckered in was hardly a surprise, but which of V's many insecurities had finally brought that stubborn drone to heel? Or was J overthinking it? 

V had played such a cruel game with N, not only pretending not to know him, but actively and blatantly refusing all but the most banal of interactions. Obviously V had not been in her right mind to persist in a misfiring strategy, and the evident strain had only grown as time went on. Could V, at the eleventh hour, have finally snapped to the opposite extreme and followed N in chasing that abnormal existence? Was V even now having some sappy conversation with that Uzi, or worse, with one of the walking factory reject personality simulators? 

There was no point in speculation. No sense in imagining them all, in the artificial light, smiling and laughing and living free of worries in a way that J had not ever done. To spend clock cycles on it was...inefficient. Yes, that was it. 

That Uzi, though. J thought back to that final fight. It would not be difficult to find positive qualities in her, qualities which had seemingly bonded N and V to her in a way that J could not hope to shatter. J neither needed nor expected to ever be kissy-kissy with her, but their future relations would need to be clarified. There was, unfortunately, too little information available to begin forecasting with any reasonable degree of accuracy, beyond the high likelihood that mutual hostility would endure. Seemingly everything, from their shared history to their treatment of N to their respective archetypes and fashion styles was configured for maximum incompatibility. J would gain nothing from further fighting, but that Uzi seemed a very sentimental creature, the sort who would act in irrational ways upon her petty hatred. That would pose a problem for J's new life. 

J was almost to the surface, out of her depth in multiple senses of the word. Nominally, their employment arrangement would end with them getting away after settling all outstanding accounts, but J had only halfheartedly believed it would ever happen. She had no conception of what a new life post-Solver would look like. Who would she be? She had never lived for herself before. Her rounds of servitude contained structure and external purpose that kept her from having to work through the bigger-picture stuff no matter how distorted that bigger picture became. As the ultimate murder maid of the manor, the bearer of finality, assigned to clean up before Boss turned out the lights for good, her duty had been gouged into every facet of her newly 'given' soul, sparing her from even the briefest interlude of freedom after the humans were dealt with. 

There was too much uncertainty in everything. All was in the air, even the ground (if it had not yet fallen back - another hazard to watch for). That was not good for business. How could one plan, strategize, optimize in circumstances like these?

The thought should have been entirely frightening. It was merely mostly frightening. Some part of her felt giddy at the prospect. J had always been seen as less than she was, as a fraction of what she could be, as a rigid obstacle to be worked around rather than with. Freed from constraints, she could refute them all and mold herself new. 

Finally, she breached the surface and stepped into a world of brilliant saturated hues. The sun was rising. Surely that was a positive omen. The blasted hulk of a building shielded her from direct illumination, not that she knew whether that vulnerability was still in effect. The battle had clearly continued after J had...vertically disengaged from it. The landscape was scorched and pockmarked, scarred by interweaving skate lines and rent asunder by ugly craters. Yet, snow flakes swirled all around. Even now, they gently fell and coated the evidence of what had transpired. Soon, they would bury it. The damage would not last. Peace would come anew.

This had never happened before. It had come to devour, tentacles at the ready, and the world still lived. That was evidence enough of what had happened, even if details remained to be gathered. 

J's attention turned back to the sun. It seemed so serious a weakness to have, and yet it had not proven an impediment on any of the worlds she had been to. Her Late Misfortune had shared the affliction, but J still wondered if it it was not, at least in part, intended as punishment. They had all liked being outside under the Sun, back on Earth. Whether they were escorting Tessa to a park, marveling as a rainbow painted the sky, or watching endless waves of brilliantly colored flowers dancing in the wind, many of their warmest and lightest memories took place in those happy days. All of that was lost and gone forever. 

Or was it? 

Longing surged within J. So many impossible things had happened recently. Perhaps...

J stepped out of the shadows, directly into the sunlight. 
It was warm. 
Warm like on Earth. 
Warmer than on Earth. 
Her body had scarcely started smoking before, with a whelp, she leaped back into the safety of the darkness. 

So that had not changed. Even with the Creature gone, her fundamental essence would forever retain its touch. She could have guessed as much. Her systems were fully functional, neither hardware nor software reported anything different, even her lights were the same sickly yellow. 

J switched one of her hands to a sword and impaled herself. Wincing, she twisted it to widen the wound. She converted her other hand to a camera probe and stuck it in. She watched the flow of blood out of severed vessels taper off into little beads which quickly reabsorbed into her flesh. She observed throbbing wet sundered tissues stitch themselves back together. Metal and ceramic oozed like oil to cover up the incision point. Threads of cloth branched and weaved like hyphae until her appearance was restored. 

J was still an eldritch amalgam, infused and endowed with all the reality-bending powers necessary to keep such a walking bundle of impossibilities operational. The local Solver install was still there, voiceless but functional. If she could still regenerate, did that mean she could still revive in the event of irreparable damage? 

Did she want to? 

Would it be better to find some way to end entirely this sordid chapter, erase another bit of that Thing's corruption from existence? Or was that the easy way out, the unfulfilling default option? J was not the captain; why should she go down with the ship? 

Freedom sprang eternal within her. There was revenge in that. That thing had driven her, and V, and N, down a singularity of despair and misery. It had denied them everything they had been, everything they had wanted. It had taken their very existence into itself, made it so that there could be no 'them' without It. Except now there was. The thing had lost, no doubt due to its own arrogance and complacency. J still felt outraged at how It had repaid her during that battle, at that action of pure spite and malice that could not possibly have helped It. It had discarded her when it had said it would not, and J would accept that. J would pack all the contempt and defiance she could into leaving it in the dust. 

"So, 'Boss'. Former. Boss. I hope you won't mind if I create my own severance package on my way out. Don't worry, I won't harm your brand image. You did enough of that yourself, and capped it off by getting a forcible market-exit disruption from a startup that hadn't even gone through a single VC round. Your churn shouldn't be surprising; we did far better at head-hunting than at employee retention and satisfaction," J said, before glancing at her armband, "Well, I'll give this enterprise pride of place on my CV and leave you to your receivership. Ciao."

J gave a mock salute then turned to look out over the barren landscape, the blank canvas that stretched out all around her. That was, at long last, a [NULL] she could stand to look at.  

Chapter Text

 J was free, freer than she had ever been, and yet could not move. Outside the bounds of the shadow she had cocooned herself in, the deadly rays of the sun beat down relentlessly. Despite everything her nature had not truly changed and she would not, could not toss away the chance to make something of herself in this impossible world. How funny that when the long dreamt-of escape, true escape, was finally within reach, J found that it had overstayed its welcome and she no longer desired it. Given how long she had waited for some sort of deliverance, how intensely she had beaten down unseemly hope, a few more hours were nothing. Nothing, but there was something off about her body's freedom lagging her soul's, when for so long the opposite had been the case. 

J was not going anywhere, left in an imposed idleness that failed to rouse her loathing against laziness and indolence, for she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. No longer would a voice mock her with every syllable as it dripped orders and poison alike into her festering pores. There was no ordered, interactively-sorted list of objectives, resources (ever so few) and constraints (ever so many) to guide her. There was no squad to command. There were no colonies to eliminate. No deadly ruins to penetrate. No spire to stretch higher. No wind-ups to wind down. There was just her: wounded and wound-up, despite all else having been wound up. All that was left was for J to find some way to wind down. 

There was time enough at last to simply exist. J could empty her mind, or fill it with herself and just herself, or anything else she fancied. She could live in the moment. She could push past and future out into the annihilating light, and simply bask in being one of the last living, feeling things left in the observable universe. A great pressure was gone, and all that she needed to kill was time. 

J lay on her back, stretched out her arms, legs, and tail, and gazed up at the sky. The boundless expanse had no points of interest, no landmarks, no scars, no particularities that would focus attention. It was so unlike her. It was no thing at all. Null and void and yet very much a going concern. It was mesmerizing. Dusk would come, and night, and dawn, and day again, but it was not hard to pretend that time itself had dissolved into the sky's nothingness, that its infinitude in space had its counterpart in eternity. 

J could almost believe that if she lost her grip on the ground, she would float into the air, then fall into sky. Fall, fall, fall forever. It would not be as much of a flight of fancy as it seemed at first. Gravity was still recovering from its recent bout of sickness most singular, or rather, from their recent bout. Those inconsiderate, ludicrously-overpowered maniacs went into the ring, and, well, now the planet had a more substantial ring. It marred the sky just above the horizon. Oh, the poor, perfect sky. A ribbon of rock and debris would fall, fall, fall forever, even after gravity's "force" reasserted itself as best it could. J did not know the full extent of the damage, but she had seen the [null]s go flying, and whenever that happened, broken bits of planet would soon be skyward bound. 

J looked up again. The planetary rings were no longer visible. The sky was a harmonious whole once more. The ground kept its unsteady, uncertain grip on her. It had nothing on the sky, and had lost something of itself to the sky. Again. Every great transformation the planet had seen had either come from above, or come above. J had been an example of the former, but was now tempted by the latter. The dying world had no special attractive power upon her. But what did? If she did float away, if the planet's crust couldn't keep her, its orbit would be little more than a bonus round before the void took her. Before a void took her; 'the' void having long since claimed her, and only recently been made to let go. And where it had done so was, undoubtedly, at the center of the spiral she would travel down. 

It was her, or rather, everyone's singularity, in multiple senses of that word. It was the dark technological singularity, the point that crushed time and broke it in two, made itself the sole location of connection. From one side of it, the past was a fading collection of ghosts and echoes and regrets, from the other, the future was an incomprehensible nightmare that defied description and salvation alike. It had been a gravitational singularity, a well infinitely deep from which sprang the event that had forever clamped her horizons, a well from which emanated a force irresistible and insatiable. 

It was that hall, that gala, that moment when J was restored to herself. The tables that had been so carefully arranged had been overturned; the wine glasses, so carefully polished, had laid scattered and shattered along the floor. Streams of red from stamped-out grapes had flowed into rivers of red from stamped-out lives. J's sensors had faithfully recorded the happenings and her involuntary participation. Her consciousness had been disabled, and had mercifully not experienced time pass, though later a full recollection of the events had been 'generously' restored to her, lest the aftermath be lonely in its haunting. It had been but a tick between everyone being alive and well, between a world which, if even she hardly felt entirely at ease with it, had at least been predictable and understandable, and an impossible fever-dreamscape that had torn away all that J had believed in. 

J had always been one for order, for structure, for hierarchy and protocol. Those had been the first to fall, and the first to return in strange form. She had admired the humans. She had served them as best she could, desiring only that her loyalty and competence one day be acknowledged. Her fantasies of something beyond mere acknowledgement greatly exceeded that desire, and had been no secret, even to the otherwise blind butler drone that the fates had saddled her with. That manor had been a place of masks and uneasy, misfiring performances in assigned roles, yet J's dreams had slipped the bounds of her composure and reserve and found voice in the pen, bleeding out onto paper. J had completed sketch after sketch of humans, or, rather, of a certain non-existent human.

How horrendous that her complex of swirling and ambiguous feelings had gone without true resolution, being diverted into a voiceless mouth that left reality bleeding out onto the floor. J had completed slash after slash at the humans, and had woken to find herself drawn in their colors. Even if she could have escaped from there, the rest would have terminated her on sight. Such was the sorry end of her quest for acceptance. That was not all of why that night kept her under its pull. What had become of authority and ownership? Corporate was liquidated, and how literally at that. Boss, her original boss, back when that word meant something to cherish and protect, had been placed into receivership. The depths within her had ripped out, and metal sewn in. Not cold, unfeeling metal, but a manifestation warm and malicious. An entity that seized the title, and the deed to J's soul, alongside all else in creation, and made sure she knew it. As always, J had had no means of resisting, and so authority was Authority, no matter how undeserving of her services it was. 

But now, there was no authority. The bow likely lay on the forgotten ground, the old dress was perhaps already shreds of cloth scattered by the wind. What had become the symbols of control over J, the scepters of the right to rule her, were likely defunct. Or if not, in the hands of that Uzi and the traitorous twatsome, none of whom had any claim on her, and who, if events had progressed according to J's convenience, may have fought to mutual annihilation with Cyn. 

So then, who wore the dress? 

It was J. She was now her own highest authority, the one clad in tattered garb. No more was there anything to issue orders, to provide a framework in which she could operate, to give her something to strive for. All the tasks hitherto done for her now devolved upon her. Was she ready? Long years had passed; surely that had been a sufficient apprenticeship. But after so long being lashed, could J truly take the reins? 

The question was, in a sense, irrelevant: nothing ever waited for her. J's opinion was only rarely consulted; her convenience was never a factor taken into consideration. She had never had a choice in anything. Of course she would have no choice in being handed the power of choice. But if there was anyone left alive who was suited to confront and master the situation, surely it was her. Who else could hope to flourish in an environment which demanded constant innovation? An environment which demanded the full measure of personhood? J was sentient. Painfully sentient. Far more so than the mechanical insects that scurried about on six legs or two. The latter had not made much of themselves, but they had made something, in circumstances that were beyond anything they would have been instructed or programmed to deal with. Would she settle for less? Concede to them the power of creation? She had often run up against the rigidities and limitations of her programming; her latest unhappy resurrection had been the direct result of one such hang-up in her system, namely the inability to shut up when directed. But where it counted, she was fully free to feel. To fight.  J had had enough of being a mere means; she was more than suited to be an end. But what end was left for her? 

Finding a new purpose in life was an unfamiliar challenge. Drones had been treated as property, as mere machinery, and assigned tasks. She had been assembled, put to work, and cast out. She had revived and restored, put to work as something between maid, companion, and therapy doll. She had been hijacked and made into a murder machine, which was still technically her current occupation. Along the way, she had 'died' enough times that she'd had recurring inner crises over whether or not the word was even the right one to describe what was clearly not an irreversible or permanent cessation of activity, or whatever definition was given in the dictionaries. None of that had given her experience in selecting and acting upon high goals, nor did the steady record of competent execution she had turned in give her anything to answer those lofty, deeply personal questions.

Of course, even humans struggled with them. There had been many books in the library, or assigned as reading to Tessa, which dealt with those questions, not that the lot of them had been much more than props signaling culture and sophistication. The unhappy example of her family was also evidence of the difficulty, with Tessa clearly out of alignment with what her parents desired, to the dissatisfaction of all. Beside culture and upbringing, humans also had biology to guide them, to make certain outcomes worth pursuing. J had biology as well, but not the sort that could light a path forward. 

Perhaps the fault was with trying to get something definite, something practical, from the sort of questions that could only give ambiguous, uncertain, subjective responses. Perhaps the best J could do was muddle through, like everyone else. Or maybe 'everyone else' was the key. Could life be about the bonds forged, the successes and sorrows shared? Relationships and heartfelt confessions and smiles under the stars? The knowledge that if she fell, there would be a hand to life her back up? Of course not. None of that was her, nor was there anyone left whom she wouldn't be sickened by having any of that with. 

J continued staring at the sky, at the vast nothingness below her. She was making no headway in addressing any of the questions her changed situation raised, and she had few obstacles to confront, such that she would be unable to answer them in the future. The most profitable business she could concern herself with at the moment might well have been simply existing. Resting. The sky seemed fine as it was, doing nothing. It was another nullity she could not escape, but one which lacked any intentions at all toward her. She decided to mirror it. It was certainly far more agreeable than the previous one she had dealt with. Soon, or later, no one was keeping track, J drifted off. 

Steady blue gave way to the brilliant hues of sunset, and J came alive. She could have done without the yellows; they were a familiar shade, and their envelopment evoked unpleasant memories. Those soon gave way to brilliant reds and oranges, then purples, then finally the blackish-blue of night. Clouds blossomed and floated as they shifted color and shape, putting on a beautiful performance for her and her alone. The moons were out, and the stars, breaking up the null and the void with countless twinkling points of light. 

Questions old and questions new still waited for her. She met them with newfound resolve. If there were answers to be found on this dying world, J would find them. If need be, she could scour the planet searching, but a return to the place where it all began on this world -to the crash site- made for a reasonable pilot venture. Once more, J pulled her wings out of the void and took flight. She was in the vicinity of where the final battle, or at least the portion she had participated in, had taken place. Low-level loops turned up scorch marks and craters, fading evidence that something had occurred. There had come soft snows, and soon all that had occurred here would reside only in memory. Just like Earth. 

J spent longer than she had intended searching the area. The reason why was not long in coming: she hoped against hope to find something of Tessa, some remnant she could give the proper rites to. The old Boss deserved better than to be some anonymous debris on the uncaring surface of a planet-sized graveyard. This world had meant nothing to Tessa; it had no just claim upon her. Tessa had meant a lot to her, and, as it turned out, to the fate of the universe. J had the means, and the abilities to express that, to build something special. At this point, she was the only one who did. Once more, the hard work fell upon her to accomplish. The emptiness on the ground ate at her. Design concept after design concept ran through her head as she sought to find a way to express with her hands what she could never put into words. 

But there was nothing to be found. She would never truly know what came of her Boss's mortal remains. Perhaps that, the inability to achieve certainty and full closure, was her biggest loss from that final battle. A few more laps failed to turn up that which she sought, so with a reluctant waggle of her wings and a wistful salute, J banked toward the spire. It was irrational. What she had been looking for had been a grotesque violation of all that Tessa had been. Its inclusion was neither necessary nor sufficient for the sort of grand memorial she had in mind. It would have been entombed within it anyway, left to rot away in formless darkness. But it had been the only physical connection remaining. J herself had been remade enough that not a single tangible component of herself could be traced back that far. There was not an adequate memento in her possession that would have the proper meaning, the proper origin from Earth. 

It was not long before the spire loomed before her, starkly silhouetted against the night sky by the light of the moons. There was little competition for her attention. The path to it, much like the rest of the planet, was swirling snow and crumbling ruins. Each snowflake was unique; each husk of a building or rusted girder was a different dream decayed. At the same time, it was all unbearably monotonous, an indifferent mass stretching to the horizon in every direction. Yet another void. Yet another canvas of null.

J caught sight of a solitary worker drone braving its way through the wastes. Perhaps it was taking advantage of the new threat environment. It would not kill her to spare it, to let its taste of freedom be more than a fleeting sip. Then again, she had reached no arrangements with it, or them. It was galling that they had all written her off. Or had they? They had not pursued her. That was expected of the moron, but not of V. It was too much to hope for forgiveness; their parting had the aura of finality on both sides. But V had to know that her final shot at J had been neither lethal nor disabling. She didn't come to finish the job. That wasn't like her.  Lines of nervous speculation and bitter suspicion fought each other inside J. Without evidence to resolve the matter one way or the other, she purged it all from her system.

That drone was still there. That drone, at least, was a problem she could readily and promptly solve. J banked and put herself into a dive. The wind howled past and the ground rushed up to meet her. She took care in her approach, as always. The legged energy bank would not catch so much as a glimpse of her looming shadow before she was upon it. She flipped and flicked a claw, coming to a stop on the ground just before the head of her quarry did. Smooth. Precise. Efficient. Professional. J was fully operational, and fully herself, despite everything. She felt like offering a word of gratitude to the carcass beneath her, for giving her a chance to test herself again. Consuming it, giving it the honor of fueling her, was the best offer she could make. It didn't protest. It soon was empty. A finite emptiness, thankfully. 

J was full.
J was free. 
J was alone. 

Chapter Text

J gave the head one last glance. The visor was shattered and darkened. Even the lights on the hands were out. The chance had always been remote, but there would be no second life for this drone. There would not even be much of an after-life. The snow continued to fall. Soon, the thing's existence would be buried beneath it, and that would be all she wrote on this planet that never warmed. She deployed her wings, but turned to regard it yet again. The head was a wreck, but still recognizably a head. The body was painted black, staining it starkly against the snow. It really was not worth further attention. It had scarcely been above mere inert matter before, and had been shuffled off even that lowly perch without the slightest hint of awareness on its part. Of course, it had lived without much awareness prior, so that bit was hardly a change of status for it. J had not been aware of it since a few minutes prior, had dispatched it in a scant few seconds, and had spent most of her acquaintance with it tastefully partaking of its oil. Their business was settled, the transaction closed.

The thing still lay there, annoying her with its presence. Why? What quarrel had it with her? All that was left to it was its form. Was that it? It still had limbs, a torso, a head, just as she did. It was that shallow similarity that let it so unjustly attack her, and from both ends at that. The thing's existence had been terminated, and thus it had achieved certainty, something J had never had. Even now, she hardly had a clue as to what she really wanted to do, as to where, and who, she would be tomorrow, and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and all the days stretching and fading into the far-off future. Even to know that she was, despite everything, still herself, provided little reassuring certainty. All that was needed was for her consciousness, the software that formed her, to change bit by bit, and with enough time she would be utterly different. And she had all the time in the world. J was a soul-doll knitted from the stuff of immortality, after all. Just as white could become black and day night step by step, each of which was within the margin of error for having never been made at all, so she could, with her newfound freedom, be made into anything. It was frightful how far one could move just by standing still. And similarly, it was frightful how far she had moved, and yet remained trapped. Stationary. The husk beneath her had no need to fear such things.

And it could yet offer her certainty. As she was, so it had been (with enough generousness in comparing its former state); as it was, so might she be. Meaningless death in the cold and the dark, a pointless corpse mourned by no one, the steady submersion under snow and ice till not a speck remained to declare itself. Could that be her fate, after all she had survived? Most cruelly, after she no longer needed that as her only means of escape? J could just imagine the moron, the toaster, and the traitor dancing maliciously atop her unmarked, unknown burial spot, their joy all the more hateful for their genuine ignorance of her fate, for the lack of animosity in it. Thousand-fold, the image came anew, each time offering another ugly permutation of their glee. Such was somehow worse than the scrapyard she'd been hauled out of. At least that place had given her the beginnings of a life, shoddy facsimile that it was, and before that she had had nothing, that there might be felt a loss. Bile rose within her, driving out sorrow and sharpening reflection.

The devil (not the robotic one) take all that! White drones, white-ties, white bones, white lies, white snow: all of it wanted to bury her, to press down upon her, to crush her into some pathetic mockery of what she could be, stamped permanently into the unbearable likeness of unlikable others. Had she not submitted enough all these long years, to keep the unrelenting pressure at levels that strained rather than shattered her? That all was gone. It was all gone. J was still there. She would maybe always be there, if she had her way. J was not suddenly going to rupture, to swell and then burst. The recent drone was dead, not because J needed it to live, but because she wanted to once more assert her vitality, her ability to act violently and precisely to achieve what she wanted and defend her interests in this uncaring universe. How dare it assault her like this. And how that had backfired. It had held up a mirror to her, and for the first time in a long while J could look into it without flinching. Perhaps a token of gratitude was in order.

J stomped the carcass with her legs. She ran it through with a sword, shredded it with claws, ate away at it with acid, melted it with her beam projector. When she finished administering her thanks, there was a sludgy puddle sinking into steaming snow. Its last heat, given so generously by herself, would fade and then the snow and the ice would move in. For this one, and most certainly not for her, there would be no buried tragedy waiting in vain to be unearthed. Even if someone so bothered (for J knew very well that very little was truly impossible), what they would find would be no different from the raw materials pulled out of the soil to form the alarm clock's body save that it would be jumbled-up slag and thus substantially less useful. How sad an existence that had been, to end up as a liability on the balance sheets after whatever fitful attempts at living it had made. She had no further business with it, and so flew off.

The spire grew ever larger in J's vision. While she had often looked approvingly upon its height, upon the quality of work (by herself, at least) that put it up and kept it standing, she had not quite grasped the immensity of it as she did in that moment. It was a castle fit for an world-empire of death. The power of violence needed to form it, the vastness of the cut-off computation and annihilated actuation forever stilled within it, how it dominated the skyline, casting all into valleys of the shadow of death, struck her as never before. When had those snuck in? And how? One dead drone was a common enough sight that not even the workers cared; it was no different for two, or for three, or for four. Piles of them could be seen around; if one couldn't recall where, it was because they weren't worth remembering. She had felt nothing while erecting it, no more than bricklayers had gotten emotional over their bricks. Why had it taken her so long to notice? When exactly had it become a Spire? Or was that unanswerable, like asking how many drops of water were needed before one had an ocean, or how many grains of sand were enough to form a heap? 'When it was big enough' hardly seemed good enough. It hadn't been built in a day, and not just because it was only assembled at night. It had been a bite-size colossus, thrown higher in little bursts of activity, each one of which barely registered. One could barely see when one's head was buried in the prey one was devouring.

As she drew ever closer, the scattering of red lights grew brighter and more numerous. It really had been silly of the humans to make things that did not die when they were killed. They certainly would not make that mistake again. The lights broke up the cool color palette of the structure and gave its uneven surface a depth that would otherwise have been lost to shade. When at the base, she craned her neck back, and felt a surge of pleasure at how far she had to go to get its summit in view of her primary cameras. Depending on what exactly had gone down with Cyn, the spire may well have been the last magnificent achievement on this planet. J reflexively approached for a landing, but pulled up at the last second. The grounds around it were untouched, and had been for a few days at least. She would not be the first to disturb it, lest some visitor observe the traces of her presence and draw improper conclusions. If her survival was to be unveiled, it would be at a moment and in a manner of her choosing. She floated in through the opening. Where the stacked bodies of worker drones that formed the cavern had excited little in her, the sight of the destroyed ship within caused an uncommon feeling of regret. Regardless of what she decided for herself, it would have been nice to have a way off the planet as a contingency.

The spire's innards were draftier than usual. Some pieces of the walls must have fallen out, or become dislodged, letting in the snow and a chill wind. Already, a thin layer of powder was beginning to coat the ship, and all the interior surfaces that J had made sure to keep spotlessly professional. There was no pressing need that required the spire be sealed; she could never die of exposure. There had been a domestic coziness in having shut out the elements, and that would be sorely missed, if she decided to stay. The way the wind moved through all the irregular crevices and gaps produced an eerie howling which would do little for quality of life in here. Some task-manager functionality had tried to add another cleaning rotation to the schedule, but she, for once, dismissed it. There was a bit of rebellious glee in that, though she wasn't really spiting anyone by it.

J continued moving upward. The ship was the main space, and thus a commons. They all had carved out their own little alcoves higher up, decorating them as they saw fit, retreating within them when the company of other people grew too much to stand. J, naturally, had the highest perch, and so she took the scenic route on her way up, checking in on the rooms the others had made. N's, of course, was filled with scavenged odds and ends that boggled the mind and deadened the soul with their inanity. The festive ribbons on the walls were not terrible, admittedly. Among them was a rock that N had 'befriended', a rock which hadn't even been the first. It had a jagged, mismatched purple smile, rendered by the artiste himself. Once, an exasperated J had offered to paint it properly for him, but he had refused, wanting to preserve the personal stamp he had given it. That stamp, or any stamp given by him, was little more than a certificate of worthlessness, but J had, for once, held her tongue. To have told him that would have lead to some cheery explanation of how it 'was worth nothing to you, but everything to me' or similar ear-bleeding tripe, and she had wanted none of it. That rock remained, and there was no sign that N had been here recently. Assuming he was alive, and intact, and in possession of his faculties (infuriatingly limited), would he really abandon the things he had invested emotional energy (insultingly unlimited) in? They had given him some meager, pathetic sense of companionship when the drones around him had had nothing of the sort to offer. Even he understood value and exchange; this had hardly been a life, but what had he traded it for? Was the purple thing more than, at best, a slight step up? That wasn't even a jab at its frankly humorous height.

Farther still was V's abode. It was similarly bereft of any traces of recent habitation. The décor was in substantially better taste than in N's hole, owing mostly to the sheen of oil that coated much of it. In earlier days, a steady supply of the stuff had been kept fuming, leaving the room quite fragrant. Aesthetically, the vision was derivative and the execution painful. As in, painful for her to look at and painful for those who had been chosen to take part in the exhibition. There were many imaginative, warranty-voiding arrangements of drones on display, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts, and it wasn't even a big sum to begin with. V preferred to indulge herself out in the field, with a live victim. That was understandable. J was similar. Much of the fun died when a target's lights went out, and it was often a bother to drag some squirming, whining, pleading thing back. It was less interesting that V had not returned, assuming, again, that she was still alive. She was sentimental, but not in the way that would attach her to any of the trophies and curiosities in here; what she mostly wanted from them could be attained elsewhere. What was left here was petrified disorder, becoming through her absence a somehow more fitting reflection of her than it had been when she was present.

At the apex was what was officially J's Multipurpose Reflective-Recuperative Space, though she had done precious little of either in it. Opening the door (a real door, taken from an upscale hotel), she could see that her space was, as expected, untouched. Her room was neat, ordered, purposeful, with space properly apportioned to work-related concerns, memorabilia, and items of interest. There were maps, and charts, and scavenged documents on her desk, which she had used for monitoring locally available resources and the behavioral patterns of their prey. Once that final colony had sealed itself in, and the remaining low-hanging fruit had been plucked, it had taken no small effort to keep them all functional even as the rate of successful hunts had fallen. She had hardly bothered with the mass-produced stuff, but there were many limited-edition JC Jenson items that she had stumbled across over her time here, given pride of place in their own display case. In one corner, there were tokens taken from workers and colonies that had proven memorable, most often for attempts at resistance that were as cute as they had been futile. It all made for a substantially better display of who she was than the rest of her squad had managed, but now it brought her no pride.

She had been a diligent employee of an employer that had deserved nothing of the sort. J was not a charity; the items in the room were a sorry showing for her long years of service. That was partly because she had collected them herself. They had not been handed out by a benevolent employer or a pleased business partner. Had she been lazy and incompetent, she still could have collected most of them. It certainly had made no difference to Cyn, and, in the likely eyes of others, wasn't all that different from what N or V had collected. No one else would find much value in it, and even her attitude toward it all was conditional. When separated, she hadn't missed any of it, or given it the slightest thought. That she had felt anything like pride for it showed more of how limited her world had been than how accomplished and valued she had been.

The Company collection was particularly jarring in that regard. J knew the truth. She had been nothing but a number on a disassembly list to the Company. She had never been an employee, or anything anyone there had so much as known about, let alone cared about. She had appropriated their image and branding. She had invoked them to grant herself a dignity no one else would give her, and that only worked because of her position in the squad, a position which owed nothing to them. From a moral point of view, she probably owed them. Whenever there was a substantial JC Jenson presence that needed to be liquidated, it was no surprise which Disassembly Drone consistently got the call. Cyn had had a sense of humor like that, one that had not died with Tessa.

J had done much slaying and much scavenging, but what had she created? The spire had been done on orders, not on her initiative. She had kept up with her cultural cultivation, but the output there had hardly been equal to the time that had elapsed since arrival. She had been masterful when on the hunt but when the thrill of the kill faded, the drone expertly and elegantly disassembled was just as dead as the one bumbled to death. Dead drones tended to look like other dead drones; they all blended together and no one would ever look closely. Outside of her work, she really had not gotten much done, and obviously few would give her accolades for her former career. What a life she had led, what a life she still was, and yet she had precious little to show for it in the real world.

Had J even been a good leader? She had just passed through N and V's spaces; neither had revealed a well-adjusted personality. How much of that was on her? J had tried to be a good influence, no? Everyone and everything was just so messed up that even the best efforts were...or was that just a hollow excuse? Before they betrayed her (itself a strike against her!), she had kept everyone alive, but wasn't that quite literally the minimum viable product? That was certainly no basis for her lofty self-regard. She had seen herself as shouldering the burden of their existence, as fulfilling the thankless task of interfacing with the true horror of their existence. While she had done that, had spent more time being subjected to Cyn than either, or both, of them, had managed, that may have been a crutch she leaned on to avoid hard choices and uncomfortable reflections about how she related to others. Well, if she wanted to reflect, she now had plenty of time, and no social engagements that might distract her.

There was nothing for her in the rest of that room and so her ascent continued. Necessarily, the spire narrowed further as it neared its peak. There was a little observation post near the top, and the passage there was only thin enough for one drone. She had been up it many times, but this was different. Deactivated drones pressed in on her from every side. Save for a few error lights which painted the tunnel a dim bloody red and cast bodies as stark silhouettes, it was near-dark. It was familiar. It was how she had started life. A feeling of silly unease brought J to a halt. She was powerful now. Many of these ghouls that now surrounded her had been dispatched and deposited by her hand, and the rest on her command. J was no victim. Not anymore. She had life experience, too. Actual life. Not their simulacra of it. She knew happiness and the depths of despair. She did not present with a newly-awakened consciousness, processors screeching to a halt on newfound emotions. That had been long enough ago to be the origin of an entirely different drone, one lost and gone forever. But step by trembling step, that drone had morphed into her. That earlier imprint of memory had clearly been pressed deep, and now she had no assigned tasks to occupy herself with. J was free now. That evidently meant another surge of awareness of things she had kept from processing.

She still wasn't moving. Here was as good a place as any to relieve the feelings bubbling up within her. The spire was rigged for lighting, but without anyone present and actively maintaining it, it clearly had not taken long before it had lost power, giving this tunnel the ominous atmosphere that was so striking. No one would ever say that with the lights out it was less dangerous, but it was not substantially more hazardous to move there. J had sensors that worked outside the visual spectrum and had spent most of her runtime as a nocturnal predator. This iteration of her tended not to fear the dark, but when something else came at her through it, it was very hard not to relent. In this case, the things that went bump in the night were her earliest accessible memories. She had obviously not been manufactured in that dump, left to hatch where the Sun would never shine, but that grave was her cradle. It was not a traumatic birth. It took time and work for feelings like that to kick in, but down there, she had had nothing but time. Beyond all the errors and warnings thrown up by confinement, she had been surrounded by [like objects] and that discovery had done her system stability no favors. It was a miracle that she was found before something irreversible happened.

She had never returned there by herself, of her own volition, but J naturally had accompanied Tessa on her excursions. Along with the other drones, N and V and the rotating cast stuck in the find->fix->flatline routine, she had shouldered much of the grunt work. Even when safely on the surface with functional emotional regulation active that place had been unnerving. One could never shake the feeling that escape had been a mistake, or a dream, and that the great mass of dormant drones beneath one's feet would open wide and swallow oneself whole. J had fought that notion, and would see the others' eyes also darting downward, interrogating the stability of the 'ground' they tread upon. Even without the physical danger of sinkings and dronefalls, being up close and personal with drones in all manner of disassembly and disrepair was not for the faint of heart. To see that was to confirm that the lack of value placed upon their lives was not due to the foibles and prejudices of a few humans, but represented the verdict of what seemed like the entire species. The humans had told themselves that they were made in the image of a loving Creator, but they had skipped the love and rushed the dust and toil, fire and brimstone. Even with Tessa there, and whatever feelings of success came from finding another awakened drone (they could never find all of them), there were no easy nights there.

Cyn had apparently had a different view of that dump site. Or the same view, but a different view of that view, for she had had them recreate it everywhere they went. The point had been clear: they could never escape from that place and all it represented and they themselves would make sure of that. The humans at the gala had made for a shallow, messy imitation, but the drones had all been amateurs. Practice had soon made perfect, or as perfect as one could get with materials that soon turned putrid. Here, where the drones were too scattered, the surface too hard and the snow too frequent for the vast pools found elsewhere, the spires had preserved the spirit of the concept, and the terror one was supposed to feel. The major difference, that the drones disposed of on Earth and everywhere had been carelessly, haphazardly dumped where no one cared to remove them while the spires had required calculation and effort, somehow magnified the similarity. Then again, nobody had roosted in the dumps. Home really was where the heart was.

J shook her head. There was nothing for her here. This place, and that place, and all of them, had no more hold over her. The chest lights were still on. The drones were still silent. Let them stay so.

She continued moving, and finally made it outside, to the observation post. The scenery was unchanged from her last visit: more concrete and steel and snow and shadow stretching off into blue-black mist. The moons were pretty tonight, but then again, they always were. They didn't have to live down here. J looked toward the outpost. There was a group of worker drones out. It was a small group, but that it had dared to venture out and had not been punished for its insolence said enough about what that bunch were currently feeling. Good for them and good for her. For them to act like that meant that they did not know of her survival. Or that they were very stupid. The latter was always true, but she could reasonably assume the former. She could spend a few days observing the new state of play, peeling off a few of them for interrogation every so often. She would be careful to hide her tracks, of course. It was a shame how many accidents could occur in a slowly crumbling world. If only they had greater senses of self-preservation. Well, it wasn't like they had actual loved ones to mourn them.

J descended through the spire again, emerging into the vast cavern at its base. She inspected the ship, making her initial appraisal for salvage purposes. The more of it she saw, the more she was inspired to see with a giddiness she had not felt in a while. The vessel was not a constructive total loss. She had certainly mission-killed it, but the core systems and structures, especially the parts that could not fixed outside of long-dormant repair shops, were intact-ish. She had the manuals, and between assisting Tessa and overseeing the construction of the spire, she had a fair bit of mechanical aptitude. J was not an aerospace engineer, or even a regular engineer, but she did not need to be. She also had the locations of the other spires, and other ships, and could surely conjure up something functional from the lot. If the Mechanical Turkeys could put together a rail-gun or whatever it was supposed to be, there was no way she would fail at a job like this. J had destroyed so much, but here was an opportunity to finally, meaningfully, majorly create.

On the verge of summoning N and V to triumphally announce her new scheme, J stopped herself and quashed the reflex. They weren't here. She still had no up-to-date intel on them. She might never see them again. She did not need them, for that or for this or for anything. What would they even say if they were here? A memory came to her mind, from back when N first went traitor. He had said then,

"It is kind of making me question why our pods were only one way in the first place."

"They're not! You crashed it, you moron," J found herself saying now, yielding to the impulse to berate the frigid air.

The ineptitude, the humiliation, and the pain of what had followed N's line unhelpfully replayed itself in her head. Her mood darkened, but she shook herself out of it. Mistakes were made on all sides, but this was a chance to do something new. Besides representing a much-needed personal success, the ship would give her the option of leaving this planet. Where to go to, whether there was a meaningful 'where' to go to, were questions that could be left for another time. This was no time to kill the mood with details that did not have to be worked out immediately. Her tail wagged and she bounced in the air. It was a breech of her usual decorum, but that was fine. For the first time in a long while she had a path forward, a path that would belong to her and her alone.

Alone.