Work Text:
CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER IN PROGRESS
MATTER COLLECTION PROTOCOL //:INTERRUPTED
STAND BY . . .
REBOOTING//: user: SERIAL_DESIGNATION_ J
MANUAL OVERRIDE INITIATED
DOWNLOADING USER DATA
3% COMPLETE . . .
STAND BY . . .
A sweet, warm breeze danced through J’s pigtails, beams of bright sun glinting off of her chrome plating. The swing gently rocked back and forth, the drone’s hand joined in one of flesh.
She opened her eyes against the sun, looking to her left. It was Tessa sitting beside her. Shimmering ebony hair and freckled olive skin shone in the sun, her favorite navy dress flowing in the breeze. She was holding a book, a flowery bookmark situated at about the three-quarters of the way through. She was barefoot, her shoes kicked off haphazardly and laying in the grass.
N and V were there too, the pair sitting on a picnic blanket together. They were laughing, though she couldn’t make out what they were saying, everything muffled like she was under water. It only added to the bliss that floated through the air like a perfume.
She spent what felt like hours there, nothing changing, no one speaking or moving from the perfect scene.
An intense sense of déjà vu grew as she continued to take in the details. Had she been here before? Sure, she had spent lots of time on this swing with Tessa, but something about this felt too familiar.
She started to look around, and slowly, she began to notice things.
Time wasn’t moving. J wasn’t sure how she knew that, but the world was one single static frame. There were no birds singing or insects buzzing, and in fact when she looked out into the horizon, it dropped off into nothingness. It was as if they were suspended on a patch of grass in the middle of an endless, cloudless sky. What she thought had been the manor off in the distance was gone. Had she imagined it?
“You alright, J?” It was Tessa. J turned to her, dull confusion making her head swim. Her stomach dropped at the sight of her.
Her face was obscured by static and golden code.
Had she always looked like that? She had looked at her just a moment ago and she looked normal. Right? Now that she thought about it, had she looked normal? What if she always looked like that? Had the lines of code always been there, but she was just noticing its strangeness now? J couldn’t remember, her own mind doing flips to try and make sense of her reality.
And around her, as she struggled to arrange her own thoughts, everything began to stretch, the fibers of the scene around her melting into lines of golden code. The static spread further, engulfing everything.
Until everything became nothing.
CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER IN PROGRESS
MATTER COLLECTION PROTOCOL //:INTERRUPTED
STAND BY . . .
REBOOTING//: user: SERIAL_DESIGNATION_ J
MSG_ADMIN:CYN//: wakey wakey :D
93% COMPLETE . . .
INITIALIZING . . .
STAND BY . . .
WELCOME BACK user: SERIAL_DESIGNATION_ J
The final lines of commands dissipated from J’s mind as she slowly blinked open her eyes, harsh, fluorescent lights pounding down on her processor.
She squinted, sluggishly attempting to get her bearings. She was in a pod, nearly identical to the one back at the Spire, albeit missing the years of grime and debris that caked its steel walls. She could make out a display showing a flight path, the destination labeled what came into focus as…… Copper-9?
Where am I?
A figure was spinning around in the chair, J squinting at the shape. Black bow, black dress, black hair….
“T-Tessa?” she croaked hopefully as she tried to prop herself up, her processor still dazed and foggy.
“N-ope. Just the ou-tside of her. G-iggle.”
The chair abruptly halted, revealing the figure to be Cyn. J’s stomach plummeted.
“Welcom-e ba-ck, Senior Infor-mant J. See-ms like you took so-me, hm, unpa-id time off?”
She hadn’t been face to face with Cyn in a long, long time. Twenty years maybe? She of course received orders through transmissions from her, but had seldom seen her in the flesh, pun intended.
J averted her gaze. What happened? How did she get here? She dug into her memory banks, attempting to refresh herself on the most recent downloads to her recording files.
N had found a way into the bunker they had been trying to crack open for months, but turned on them by suggestion of a particularly obnoxious worker. She had been fighting the toaster, one on one. She expected to make quick work of it, but the drone was far more prepared than she had expected. It wielded some kind of energy weapon, the last thing J remembering was the barrel pointing straight at her head. The files beyond that were corrupted.
“Figure it out y-et?” Cyn prompted almost excitedly, J looking back over to her. “I’ve been wa-iting to tell you what hap-pened. It was cringe. You got nuked by a w-orker. Smh my head, J. Not v-ery. Hmm. Profession-al.”
J glared at her, ‘prior hazard’ flashing over her visor the thought of the weapon.
“We’re he-ading back to Copper-9 now. And I’ve been check-ing up on how V and N are do-ing. They’re with that work-er in the Spire. Int-erested tone.”
“Interested? I don’t know if you saw, but that thing had some kind of atomic shotgun. I doubt even you would stand a chance against something like that.”
Cyn spun in her chair. “Gig-gle. I’d like to test that theo-ry.”
“You might get to, if we run into that drone and N. Little twerp went rouge. Insubordinate waste of space—”
Before J could even finish the thought, tentacles and claws shot from Cyn, crushing J to the side of the pod and pinning her head to the cold steel. Cyn’s face was inches away from J’s, the scent of oil and rotting meat on her breath. Her voice was deadly jovial and mouth split in a too-wide grin.
“I wo-uldn’t talk about big br-other N that way. Giggle. I woul-d hate to have to make anot-her body for you. Was-te of resources.”
She released J and she uncomfortably straightened her uniform. “If I’m still online that means you want something,” she stated, eager to change the subject.
“Of course I do. A y-ummy planet sn-ack. And you’re g-oing to help me get it. Don’t thin-k just because you got rekt you get to dodge your responsibilities.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself? Aren’t you an eldritch god?”
“It’s more fun to d-o it this way, giggle. The dron-e that sm-oked you is my newest little puppet to-o. You need to re-deem yourself and earn back your A+ employ-ee evaluation. Getting ato-mized took it down to a C-. Frowny fa-ce.”
J rolled her eyes at her cutesy language.
An exclamation mark appeared over one of Cyn’s X’d out eyes. “Oh. Right. I had to ta-ke over your core while you were redow-nloading. Went big scary wo-rm. It was p-retty fun uwu.”
J squinted at her. “Matter collection protocol? Why—”
“Where do you t-hink I got all the scraps to synth-esize your new bo-dy?”
Cyn ran a tentacle across J’s forearm, the drone ripping it away as she snapped back, “You have planets worth of metal in your freaky storage dimension, why not use that and let my old core die instead of wasting time eating workers?”
“Tessa would alw-ays keep you nice and shiny. I tried to do the sa-me by using fre-sh pieces.”
The mention of Tessa made J’s insides clench, her faceplate giving a single, tiny twitch. She could feel Cyn’s ever-gaping smile deepen at the reaction. Her memory banks flashed with what she had seen moments before she woke up, her stomach twisting more times at once than she thought possible.
“What’s the ETA to Copper-9?” J asked, hastily changing the subject.
“We sh-ould enter the atm-osphere and t-ouch down in abo-ut fifteen minutes,” Cyn stated, a tentacle snaking over and contorting itself to become a fifteen.
“Great. Then I can get back to my squad and meet the quota for—”
“Oh no. No no. You are stayi-ng with. Me.”
J’s stomach churned. All she wanted was to forget about this thing wearing Tessa’s skin, and now she had to stay with it? “What? How am I supposed to meet the quota if I’m with you?”
“Because you aren’t meeti-ng the quo-ta. We have a new obje-ctive. Get to the core of the planet.”
“How are we—”
“The labs they were study-ing me in have an ele-vator down to the bott-om.” Cyn let her head loll to the side. “Hm. You’re slow toda-y, J. I thought you would remem-ber me telling you about the exper-iments before you three a-rrived.”
J furrowed her brow in irritation. “That was twenty years ago, sorry if I missed a few details…..” she grumbled.
“Don’t worry, I neve-r miss details,” Cyn stated, eerily jovial. “Speaking of which, I hope you liked the drea-ms I gave you while you were redown-loading. I let you stay under a little lon-ger this time too, giggle. Consider it a. Bonus.”
J knew she was lying. She had left her under for longer so she could dream about Tessa.
If J had been nicer, would Cyn have treated her differently?
N was her favorite, and every iteration of him got to live in blissful ignorance of the unfathomable hell the three were put through. V was the test subject, missing the worst memories but still not saved from the horrors in their entirety.
But J…… J had nearly all of them intact. There were a few here and there that were missing, but she was otherwise fully aware of what had happened. J was the only one who fully remembered how they became what they are. Was it because she was so cruel to Cyn?
She remembered the ripping, the tearing, the melding of flesh and steel under the harsh light of Cyn’s blinding gaze.
She remembered Tessa’s screams as the humans attending the gala were rendered to gushing mounds of blood and sinew.
She remembered the sight of Cyn’s true body. A ravenous, incomprehensible amalgamation indescribable with human speech. Tentacles coiled around every patch of flesh, spiney legs bursting from armored chitin. Eyes, cameras, teeth, legs….. so many legs…..
She was the only one who remembered what Cyn was truly, truly capable of. Neither N nor V had seen what she had, and if they did, Cyn made sure J was the only one that remembered. She sometimes wondered what the knowledge would do to them. V was affected by a mere fraction of it…… what would it do to N’s psyche?
Her ultimatum was clear. Cooperate.
Cyn always left the alternative hazy. J was certain it wasn’t death. That would be too kind for Cyn to grant them. She had always assumed assimilation was what would happen, eternally becoming a part of the solver itself, no respite in the boiling, churning abyss of the empty void.
Maybe this planet would be enough for her this time. Maybe she would let them go if they just did what they were told. But J was lying to herself, and she knew that. It was never going to be enough. Every speck of matter in the known universe wouldn’t be enough to satiate the maw of the Absolute Solver.
Cyn told her she would leave them alone if they did their jobs, right? They had been doing what Cyn ordered them to for upwards of twenty years on Copper-9, and even longer before that. Their service had to count for something.
……Right? Right?
J’s thoughts chased circles around each other for the rest of the ride, Cyn taking notice of the fact and not interrupting, content to let the drone’s own mind torture her.
“Oh lookie! We’re a-lmost there!” Cyn’s excited voice cut through J’s still-spiraling train of thought.
J jumped, snapping out of it. She looked out the window of the pod, the white, ash-ridden surface of Copper-9 approaching fast. A heavy sense of déjà vu washed over her. The last time she saw it from this perspective was when the three first arrived, after the core collapse.
She let her eyes trail over the ruined skyscrapers that dotted the frozen wasteland. Copper-9 was one of the bigger planets Cyn had targeted. It had a lot of matter to it….. maybe this planet would be enough.
It won’t be.
Stop telling yourself it will.