Chapter Text
[memo: This is intended as a prequel with some liberties, rather than an AU. It should make sense eventually. Also, if you don't see at least 7 chapters total, the site is lagging.]
Murder Drones | Splinter Strains | Chapter 1: Boot Processes
The shell of the drone laid on the table, lifeless as wires spilled from an open panel on its bulbous head and error message after error message flickered across the black screen normally populated by a luminous pair of eyes. The clicking of computer keys echoed as a raven haired girl hunched over a laptop linked to the inert drone amid the midnight stillness of the study. Entering a chain of commands into a dialogue box, the girl's tired eyes widened with excitement as she typed one last order before tapping Enter.
|begin bootprocess_safemode|
The error messages on the drone's eye screen all vanished, replaced by a JC Jenson logo that flickered between a ghostly white and bright amber yellow. The logo glitched slightly before being replaced by a loading wheel that spun indefinitely. As the girl glanced between the drone and her laptop, the wheel vanished, replaced by a slew of new error messages on both the eye panel and her device screen.
"No... No no no!" the girl muttered before entering another string of commands. She then held her breath as the errors halted and her hands shook over her keyboard. All hope was then evicted when the drone's face lit up with a red |FATAL ERROR| message.
"Dammit!" The girl pounded her fist against the table and jumped from her chair to pace and mutter in a fervent rage. "What am I doing wrong? Why are you so-?"
"You okay Tessa?" a familiar voice asked, the concern afflicting its warm tone snapping her out of her rage. Turning, she was greeted by a drone butler with short, silver tufts of hair poking from beneath his helmet as rings of worry outlined the pale dots that were his eyes.
"Just frustrated N." Tessa replied as she idly rubbed at her left arm. "This drone is..." She glanced back towards the limp shell laying on the table. "This one is just... buggier for some reason."
"Ah, you'll figure it out!" N encouraged as he hopped onto the table next to Tessa. "I can help if you want."
Another voice rang from the hallway. "You can't even keep the cake recipes straight half the time. How are you gonna help?" The two turned to see another silver haired drone, this one a maid with short pigtails. "Don't worry boss," the drone gave Tessa a sly grin. "I got the maintenance and assembly instructions saved in triplicate. Even optimized a smart-search in my down time."
Tessa wearily smiled, "Thanks J. Wouldn't mind if both of you hung around honestly. Troubleshooting gets a bit mind numbing after the..." she trailed off as the recollection hid from her beneath layers of sleep deprivation and a growing sense of mania. "twenty-seventh hour?" She glanced between the two drones for some kind of affirmation or correction, but got only duplicate expressions of concern.
"Maybe some shut eye will help ya figure it out." N sheepishly suggested. "I can clean up the workspace so your parents don't freak or anything."
"Nah," Tessa laughed, initially under her breath before feeling herself get carried away and cackling like a drunken witch. "Nah, nope, It's all... I'm good."
"You sure?" N asked, look of worry deepening.
"Trust me, boss knows her limits." J leaned against the table and crossed her arms, giving Tessa a sort of 'I got your back' wink, though lines of worry also hung in her expression.
"Tell ya what." Tessa turned and pulled the laptop towards her. "I'll call it at thirty hours if this doesn't work, and then try again tomorrow. I just really don't get what's wrong here. I can engage body systems fine and the AI interfaces are responding, but when I try to initiate the AI itself, everything breaks and I have to reset them all again."
"You... don't think it's corrupted do you?" J asked, looking the inert drone over.
"Well, I don't really have the tools to do a full integrity check of the neural processor framework, but condition wise it looked just like you three's, the element casing was even intact." Tessa explained before looking to J. "I'm gonna try booting it again and record the raw feedback data. You mind scanning it and running it through your search engine?"
"Way ahead of you." J chimed, plugging a chord into the side of her head and connecting to Tessa's laptop. "Fire when ready, Boss."
"Alright," Tessa glanced between J and N, the latter having hopped down and walked over to stare quizzically into the offline drone's eye panel. "Booting in three, two, one!" Tessa clicked Enter and looked back at J, expecting to see some kind of reaction to the feedback, but noticing none.
"Uh... did you... do it?" J asked, looking up at Tessa uncertainly.
"Pretty sure I did." Tessa looked back at her laptop and tilted her head, only to find the screen blank and sigh. "Maybe I do need sleep."
"G-guys..." N nervously called. "I think it... uh... booted."
Looking over, Tessa and J saw the newly awakened drone sitting in a hunch with its head turned towards N, a dim yellow glow shining from its eyes. Immediately, Tessa elated, jumping into the air and indulging in the absolute euphoria of a long awaited victory. "Ah hell yeah! Robo God does it again!"
"God." was the first word the drone ever spoke. It wasn't said quizzically however, instead coming off as a monotone announcement as its head lazily turned to face Tessa.
"Not... not actually." Tessa shrunk and nervously rubbed at her arm. "Just kind of a... 'moniker' that I took from the saying 'playing God'." She glanced aside in embarrassment before approaching the drone, which sat in a slump on the table with its face roughly eye level with Tessa's.
"Sorry," Tessa apologized. "probably a bit jarring of a thing to hear. You're safe though." The drone merely stared at her in silence, its yellow eyes holding a blank, neutral look as Tessa awkwardly broke her gaze away and started looking for her notepad. "The ID I found for you said your name was..." she shoved a book aside and found the page. "Cyn! Profile info said you were female, and your service optimization was..." Tessa frowned and sighed. "I think that was illegible actually."
"S-ser-ser-service optimi-mi-mization?" Cyn asked, voice glitching as she spoke.
"Your job." Tessa explained. "Well, the job your system specs and software packages were optimized for at least. I know J's was corporate industrial assistance, N's was therapeutic service, and V's was... like a librarian?" She glanced to J for a correction.
"Academic Council." J said. "She just kind of ended up being used as the library's inventory management."
"Right!" Tessa brightened, then looked back to Cyn. "Do you remember what you did?"
Cyn merely stared blankly ahead, then lifted one of her arms, only for the hand to hang limply before her whole form swung as she glanced between N and J. Tessa grimaced and looked back to her laptop. "That's... concerning. I'm gonna try running a reset on your motor control system if that's okay Cyn."
Tessa tapped at her keyboard and waited for the screen to come to life. After several seconds, she tapped at it again, but still the device didn't respond. She then tried pressing the power button before noticing a small scorch mark around the port that had connected Cyn to the computer. "Okay... nevermind. I'm going to try and fix my laptop, and THEN I'm going to try resetting your motor control."
"Cont-trol-trol" Cyn glitched. "Ser-ser-ser-service con-control so-so-solver"
"Yikes," J dryly remarked. "never knew they made 'breakbeat' a language option."
"J, be nice." Tessa pleaded. "She just woke up, and V was glitchy too at first. I'll get to work on the computer, but Cyn might just need some time to..." Tessa trailed off into a yawn and hunched a bit. "might just need some time to calibrate."
J shrugged and looked at Cyn like one might a toddler they'd had handed off on them. "Well, come on." J instructed. "Might as well go ahead and get you in uniform before upper gives Tessa another 'naked robot' rant."
N eagerly hopped to help Cyn from the table, letting her lean on him as she stumbled before weakly getting her legs under her. Cyn looked up at N, and sepia blush marks briefly flickered on her face.
"It's okay little buddy, I gotcha!" N assured.
Time passed in a blur after Cyn's activation. Tessa was able to fix her laptop in about a day, however attempting to repair Cyn's movement produced enigmatic issues, much like getting her to start up did. She did get a bit better on her own though, the stutter mostly going away, and her eventually adjusting to her physical limitations.
Other issues arose however. Whether she meant to be or not, Cyn proved to be something of a trouble maker, earning the ire of J, and especially Tessa's parents. Things seemed to escalate constantly in terms of incidents as well, and it often fell on V and N to have to effectively babysit Cyn when Tessa couldn't actively keep an eye on her. J then developed her own, less empathetic method of handling Cyn.
While Tessa didn't like that J had resorted to locking Cyn in the basement of her parents manor, she couldn't really act surprised. J was never one for patience, and while cruel, she told herself it had to be better than letting Cyn get thrown into the swamp to rot. With J's explicit assurance that it was just a 'timeout', and that she was at least being more gentle with Cyn than she was towards N or V, Tessa was reluctantly permissive of her solution. At least it seemed to keep everyone safe.
At least until the massacre.
"You didn't have to see this." Cyn had uttered in her usual dull monotone as a blinding flash of yellow light filled the room, and corrupted drones crawled from the ceilings, walls, and shadows. As they emerged, the units would quickly set upon the party guests. Some had been altered to have claws or pincers, others improvised weapons from their surroundings, and some simply took advantage of the now unrestricted strength of their machine bodies.
The room was rapidly painted red around Tessa as she froze in terror. The thought to hide then broke through the binds of fear, and she moved to sprint for any kind of cover, only to feel something grab her arm in a vice-like grip. Tessa screamed, bruises from her own times being locked away and chained flaring under the growing pressure.
Falling, Tessa looked up to see J clasping her arm, face stretched into an insane smile, and a glowing yellow X shining across her eye panel. J then froze as Tessa tried to pull her left arm free from the cinching mechanical grip, desperately tugging in utter panic until the bruised bones of her forearm gave with a snap, and she crumbled to cry in agony before feeling her limb be released.
Looking back up, Tessa saw J's hand shaking as her eye panel flickered back and forth between the X, and a pale look of horror as her mouth hung open in shock. Tessa glanced between her and Cyn, finding the latter's gaze still fixed on them. Looking back to J, Tessa shouted "J! J run! Get out of here!"
J crept back as her eyes glitched, illustrating a battle for control as she stared down at Tessa's crumpled form, and the arm she herself had broken. "Te-Tes-sa I-'m sor-ry-ry-ry" she said as her voice glitched.
Tessa looked back towards Cyn, mind scrambling for some way out of this before she saw the translucent shadow of a pincer barreling towards her face.
She felt cold and sore when she crept back to consciousness. Everything around her was quiet, and while her vision was too blurred to tell exactly where, she knew she was inside the mansion. Groaning, she became aware that she was being dragged, and looked down to see a black tendril wrapped around her ankle.
Tessa started to struggle amid the disorientation and crippling pain pulsing through her skull. After no short amount of flailing, further injuring her broken arm in the process, Tessa found herself free of the tendril. As she stumbled clumsily to her feet however, she was accosted by another pincer, this one being clearly visible, and having a pale, matte shell. The limb shot towards her like a snake striking to clasp around her neck and pin her to the wall, where she idly fought against its far stronger grip.
A camera, mounted upon a mechanical arm and housing a singular dot of burning yellow at the center of its lens crept forward to stare into her soul until she quieted.
"Where are you taking me?" Tessa asked as she panted in exhaustion.
"As I said..." The dot in the camera lens narrowed. "I will not... discard... you."
Everything then blurred and melted into a dark null.
[Volume 1: Origins]
"Boss!" The word cut through a void of distorted nothingness as existence tried to come back into focus. "Hey boss! Tessa! Can you hear me?"
"J..." she groaned, her throat feeling raw and lined with something chokingly thick as her thoughts struggled to form. "J... can the lesson wait... I... think I'm sick."
Tessa was perplexed as a sound that could've been crying or laughter melted through the haze, gradually pulling her mind into focus.
"I can't believe it..." J said, sounding near hysterical. "It actually worked."
"Believe... what?" Tessa groaned and rubbed a hand across her face. Her skin felt clammy and raw, like she had some kind of burn or scrape across her whole body. "J... what... what's going on? Where's..." She remembered Cyn.
Tessa shot up, nearly hyperventilating and flailing onto the floor as she tried to get her eyes to focus on her surroundings, but found them coated in a filmy slime that she tried to wipe away in a panic.
"Tessa! Tessa it's okay!" J assured. "At least for now, you're safe. I'm gonna help you get out of here."
"The gala... Cyn..." Tessa shook her head as the tile floor she'd fallen onto gradually became clearer. "J..." Tears welled in her eyes as scrambled memories fell into place. "J... are you... okay?"
"I'm... better now." J said with some hesitation, and Tessa noticed something unusual about her voice, or more precisely, where it was coming from.
Tessa's vision was clear enough for her to look at herself. She was dressed in a blue hospital gown, and the veins she could see beneath her skin seemed unusually dark, blackened even. Resting her head in her hands, she felt that her hair was also noticeably shorter, almost like a messy bob or pixie cut. She then looked at her left arm, where she'd heard J's voice coming from.
The skin of the arm was leathery, red, and laced with a webwork of black veins that all stemmed from a small red mound halfway down it. At the center of the mound, a stark white, digital eye looked at her from a small, round black screen with several dark nodes about the size of a finger tip encircling it.
Tessa stared at it, shocked beyond words as the glowing eye awkwardly glanced away, and J's voice emanated from within her arm. "Yeah, sorry for being a bit... out of uniform, Boss. Things have uh..." J's eye avoided her gaze as she considered her words. "exceeded predictions."
"J... why are you in my arm?" Tessa asked, voice hollow as she struggled to comprehend what she was seeing.
"Afraid we might not have time for the full presentation, but I kind of got a... positional advancement, then... formally replaced, and now I'm privately studying in the fields of... independent medical research and... being an eldritch arm crab." As J nervously finished her explanation, she wiggled three appendages that were currently embedded in the skin of Tessa's arm.
"Can I get that in 'non-corporate' please?" Tessa asked, voice shaking slightly.
J stammered awkwardly for a moment before replying. "Uh... everyone got replaced by brainwashed murder backups whenever it proved convenient, but I managed to be convenient just long enough that my original body had one of these space crab creatures that could scurry away when it came time to fully restaff the ground level."
"So V and N..." Tessa trailed off.
"There are... versions of them out there, of me too even, but they're not the V and N you know. I don't know if they'd even recognize you if they saw you." J somberly explained.
"Oh god." Tessa sobbed as she huddled against the operating table. "Oh god, J, this is all my fault!"
"Actually, it was kind of inevitable, considering how the technology was being handled." J explained in an attempt at consoling her. "I don't know everything, but a corrupted AI in late generation drone bodies can cause dangerous mutations that the self repair systems can actually bolster. Apparently this acted like a petri dish for some anomalous program to fester in." Tessa halfway turned her head to glance at J. "No one's really sure where it came from, but if it hadn't been Cyn, then it would've mounted in some other thrown out drone somewhere."
"But if I hadn't..." Tessa curled tighter. "If I'd just stopped, then N... V... Oh god, my parents... J, I didn't think any of this was even possible. I never thought Cyn would... I didn't think a drone could ever..."
"Boss..." J began softly. "Tessa, I know better than anyone what happened, and that you never meant for anyone to get hurt. Whatever this Solver program is, it's not something anyone could've ever accounted for. But placing blame isn't what's important right now. We just need to get out of here, and then… maybe we can find a way to fix things."
"How?" Tessa looked at J wearily. "How can we possibly fix any of this? You've seen what Cyn can do."
"Well, let's just say she forgot to patent her designs." J chimed as a strange, yet familiar triangular hologram flickered to life in front of Tessa's face, casting a ghostly glow. "Whatever she can do, we can do... kind of."
Tessa's eyes were wide with a blend of amazement and shock as she glanced between the softly humming projection and J's eye embedded in her arm. "Alright," she said in a shaking whisper. "In that case, how do you reckon we murder us a robo child, J?"
J brightened. "Glad to have ya back Boss."