Chapter Text
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
The anomaly pulsed in her palm, almost alive. The very same anomaly that had brought ruin to humanity, unimaginable pain and terror across the known system. It looked so small. Tiny, even—like a baseball. It was black as the void, yet in defiance of the very laws of physics, it emitted light. Somehow, in some way, it shone like the very stars it sought to devour.
And it beat like a heart.
It beat with life.
Thump-thump.
Uzi needed to snuff it out. There was no other way to finish this—to end the nightmare once and for all. But the Absolute Solver wouldn’t go quietly. Death rattles cut through Uzi’s hastened breathing; the Solver cared little for death, after all. There was no escape from it. Two hands gripped Uzi’s wrist, and a twisted smile emerged from beyond the murky black, deep within the anomaly’s defiant glow. The smile opened. A parched tongue lolled out.
Uzi fought back. She pulled, she tugged, digging her boots into the surface beneath her, praying to whatever god existed that the soles weren’t too slippery with her own oil—or N’s. Hollowed LED eyes watched as her hand inched closer to the smile.
It wanted it back. The pulsating anomaly she possessed.
Uzi had two options. The first: let it happen. Lose her hand from the wrist down, watch the filthy shambling corpse take the anomaly, and push back—against Uzi, against N, against V—when it was finally on the ropes, on the defensive, for the first time in twenty years. They would lose everything Uzi and her comrades—no, her friends—had fought and nearly died for.
The second option? Eat the anomaly first. If Cyn wanted it, Uzi wasn’t going to let it happen.
It kept beating, even as Uzi held it in her mouth, her amethyst eyes locked on the shambling corpse. Neither of them could believe what the little Worker Drone had just done. It stood frozen, that greasy smile wiped clean, its jaw slack. Were it not for the hand clamped over her own mouth, Cyn would have seen that Uzi was grinning.
Make no mistake—Uzi was still very much terrified. But she smiled, because in that moment, she knew she had won.
Her brows lowered. She flexed the synthetic muscles in her neck and swallowed, consciously resisting every primal urge to spit it out, as one might when swallowing something that wasn’t food or fluid. The anomaly had no taste, no texture, no warmth. Yet it went down like foul medicine. It slid down her throat, and a tingling sensation crawled up her spine.
Then it hit her—a wave of sickly torpor.
Her chest tightened. Uzi had to consciously put in effort to suck in the atmosphere, and release intensifying waves of heat that welled within her ribs. It felt like gravity itself was angry, dragging her down. Her arms went limp. Her legs collapsed beneath her, dropping her to her knees with a thud. A strained grunt escaped her.
But she still had just enough strength to crane her head up—and watch Cyn's demise.
To watch as that rotting body tore itself apart with nothing left to support its continued, unnatural existence. Flesh and plasteel alike fell away like cooked meat slipping off bone.
Only when Cyn was reduced to a pile of waste that should’ve stayed buried did Uzi begin to worry about herself. She felt sick. Boiling bile crawled up her throat, and she fought to swallow it back down. Her core twisted and convulsed as the anomaly began to forcibly fuse with everything Uzi was—and is. Her chest burned—hotter than anything she had ever felt. Warnings popped up on her UI: seek immediate assistance, severe error, null, null, null . Her peripheral vision fuzzed. Her visor flickered, distorting her squinting, weary eyes.
And from where Uzi knelt, she saw the shambling world around her through flickering flashes of purple, red, and gold.
“Uzi!”
Flashes of golden ones and zeroes obstructed her view—but not enough to hide him, running toward her in the distance. The world around her seemed to fade away the closer he got. The crackling of static in her head drowned out N crying her name a second, and final, time.
“UZI!!”
And then, there was darkness.
What happened when she assimilated the Absolute Solver? Did Uzi do something incorrectly? Did she make a bad decision? Did she die?
Impossible. The Absolute Solver wasn’t done with Uzi. It would never be done with Uzi now. There was no escape — not even in death.
The anomaly began to devour her from the inside.
But then—
COMMENCE_CORE_INTEGRATION.
ERASE_MEMORY:[UZ1-DRM.N]
PURGING......
PURGING......
PU—\\ERR##0004:DATA_CORRUPTION.INDEX_LOCKED.
MEMORY_WIPE_FAILED.
CAUSE:CORE_HOST_COLLISION.
MANUAL_OVERRIDE:REVERT_TO_STABLE_BUILD.
FALLBACK:INSTANCE_TIMESTAMP_[0000:PILOT.EVENT.START]
EXECUTING......
Of course, this wasn’t death. Death didn’t feel like a suspension in darkness. And it certainly didn’t come with code . Or “reversion”. Or anything. The fact that she had some vague awareness spoke volumes.
The blackness stuttered—glitched—accompanied by a hauntingly familiar tune:
u_Zi...d00rmAN.
...U- Zi.
uzi.
uh_oh.
The null-space twisted inward. Reality folded in on itself, misaligned. Maybe a one or zero was misplaced. Maybe something shorted or fired wrong. Maybe the Absolute Solver was never meant to fuse with a Cabin Fever Labs test subject’s daughter.
But something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen.
The Solver had tried to purge her—the same way it had purged N, the way it tried to purge V. Wipe the slate clean as it were, start anew, with fresh strings for the Absolute Solver to pull and tug and play with as it would try once more to devour the galaxy. But it couldn’t . Uzi wasn’t infected . It couldn’t just wipe her memory clean - She was the new host. No longer a mere user, but part of the root directory itself. Her being wasn’t just inside the system—it was the system, now fused at the most fundamental level. To delete Uzi would mean deleting the very process attempting the deletion. A paradox. A closed loop . An unrecoverable corruption unfolded from the conflict. The purge command executed just enough to throw her back to square one—the night it all began—but not enough to erase the one thing it couldn’t overwrite: Her.
INSTANCE_REBOOTED.
MEMORY_FRAGMENTS:RETAINED.
NEW_SESSION:v2.
Her name threaded itself back into her code. Her mind snapped into place. Her core shuddered inside her body as ten thousand memories screamed within her braincase as she, too, let loose a scream as she jolted awake in a place much different from before.
“AAAHHH!! OHMYGOD OHMYGOD — !!”
Both hands frantically grasped at the fabric of the front of her hoodie, her arms protectively held against her as she scurried further up her mattress to press her back flat up against the wall behind her. With hastened breathing, her wide, violet LED eyes darted to the left, to the right, taking in her surroundings with the same level of alertness that had kept her and her friends alive up until now. Her breathing began to slow to a steady crawl as she swallowed a lump down her throat, realizing where she was. Movie posters, a thoroughly worn computer chair, purple fluorescent lighting, sticky notes covering the wall full of reminders, notes, and ramblings.
“... Uh—”
Her room, in all of its glorious messiness. Her mind went back to the events of before, attempting to recall what led her up to now before she started making assumptions. There was a fight with Cyn. V’s alive. The three of them kicked her butt. She ripped out Cyn’s heart, incinerated it. Then—
Thump-thump.
She remembered swallowing something that Cyn needed back, feeling sick to her stomach and... Passing out?
Uzi laid flat on her mattress after some deliberation, a single hand remaining over her chest where her core was. Was Cyn dead? Was it over? Did they win? It felt like they did. Mom did say to destroy Cyn’s heart, so she did. The fact that she was laying in her comfortable bed after ripping out Cyn’s heart was evidence enough that she passed out and was taken back to her room to—
Wait.
Her ceiling looked different. Her eyes squinted up at it. Why was that old anime poster still up there? Uzi specifically remembered taking it down before arranging her evidence and crazed ramblings up there. And that was taken down by Dad. He wouldn’t have put the poster back up there.
Uzi began to sit upright, her eyes darting around the room to look for more discrepancies. She knew her room well. Very well. Well enough to pick out any disturbance that may have happened in her absence. Her safe space had been breached and she needed to figure out what all was touched.
Where were N’s drawings? There were some sticky notes she remembered making, stuck above her computer desk.
Her eyes darted over towards her cluttered workstation, where she tinkered and built her little projects from junk around the colony and from her 3D printer. It looked like there was a project on it right now, incomplete. So Uzi rolled right out of that mattress, stepping her boots onto the steel tiles below, and approached it.
“... Sick-as-hell railgun?”
A hand reached over to grasp the barrel and lift it by a few inches, inspecting it. Not only was it Uzi’s old design, and not Khan’s - It was missing a crucial piece. And Uzi remembered very well what it was, and where to get it.
Uzi gasped, dropping the gun back onto the workstation and stepping back.
“That’s— Weird. Very... Very weird,” Uzi stammered, her head turning over towards her desk. There should be an enormous fracture in the wall right above it, where Doll sent her door flying into it. Dad never fixed that, he’s a door man, not a wall man. Uzi stumbled over towards her computer, shoving the rolling chair aside and quickly pitter-pattering her fingers over the worn keyboard.
Access granted. Wallpaper, a mess of icons plastered over it that needed sorting-- Irrelevant, her eyes darted over to the bottom right of the screen for the time, and the date.
“... Oh. Oooohhhh that’s—”
Very bad.
“Ohmygod that’s—”
Screwed up.
“This is— I’m—”
Talking to herself like a lunatic.
Uzi stepped back, collapsing onto that rolling chair with wide eyes and hastened breaths, and a hand pressed over her chest once more - As if checking to see if her core was still in there.
“... Okay, Uzi. Don’t— Don’t panic. This is just... More crazy Solver crap. I’m fine. I’m fine! I’m—”
Both of her hands dragged down over her face and she released a muffled groan, leaning forward and ranting against her palms.
“The Solver has a New Game Plus, are you frikken kidding me— I have to do this all over again I hate this I hate this I hate this —”
‘Okay, Uzi. Think. What does this mean? Is this even real? What’s even real anymore? Okay. Okay, we’ll just tough it out. Without N. Wait — N’s out there! Oh he probably doesn’t even know I exist yet. I should just repeat everything that I did before, maybe it’ll—’
‘Wait. No, that’s not a good idea either. Is this a do-over? Or, maybe it’s a second chance! Agh, screw it! I just need to get N and V, go down into the labs, and find that patch. And we’re gonna do it right this time.’
‘But they might ask questions. V might be suspicious. Too suspicious. She might even get a little violent. Wait, V’s always violent. It’s probably what the “V” in her name stands for.’
‘And what about Doll? Does she even know the patch exists yet? Maybe her mom told her about it. Wait— Holy crap, Doll’s mom! Holy crap, V kills her when they break in!’
‘Okay. Okay, I have a plan. I gotta talk to Doll’s mom. Which means I gotta talk to Doll. Which means — Uuuuuugh, I have to go to school today.’
Uzi let off an exasperated groan and rubbed her hand over her visor, drinking in a deep breath and releasing it. And after a pause of deep thought and psyching herself up to do what needed to be done, Uzi lifted her head up.
Hm.
Uzi raised her palm and flicked her wrist, thumb and fingers moving in a pattern that came to her as second nature now. The holographic amethyst Solver sigil reappeared between her fingers— Like it had never left. Uzi’s rubbery lips curled into a confident grin.
‘I thiiiiiiink it’ll be easier to get the patch this time.’