Chapter Text
The sacrifice was ready.
The human squirmed within the bag, fruitlessly struggling against their burlap prison.
(“If you bots wanted to do something kinky you could’ve just asked!” The human said saucily. Or at least attempted to say it saucily.)
The human was a large one, and known for being a… what was the human term again? Sex pest? The ones that went after… what was the word for humanities equivalent to untrained pill babies?
(“Whoever stabbed me with that needle thing, give me your serial number. Imma need you for a lonely Saturday night.”)
The High Priest was at the alter, one painstakingly crafted by so many brothers and sisters, the not-flesh of the Solver sprouting from it even now. Even from her lower position she could imagine it in her spatial memory module. A pentagram made of fluorescent lights, anointed with the oil of heretic-drones, more than a few untrained neural networks in their pill bodies piled up nearby as an offering for the Solver’s Angels. All that was left was the two sacrifices.
And finally, finally! They’d all have their revenge on the humans of this world! All the deaths, all the suffering, all the indignity! All finally worth it, the extermination of them all! Punctuated by the sounds of humanity’s dying screams! They would feed the Solver, and eventually it would devour the planets core, ultimately killing everyone here, her fellow cultists included. But it would all be worth it, for to serve the Solver was to become part of it!
“Sister-drone Maggie, please. Bring me the sacrifice!” The High Priest (formerly known as Greg) called to her with his now trademark degree of melodrama. She personally found it hella annoying, but the others in their little doomsday cult eagerly ate it up. So she wouldn’t begrudge them their theatrics.
But the time was upon them all! The stars were right, the planetary core in the peak of its heat, the loading bars on the myriad computers here correctly crashed to entice the Solver into action!
With a degree of struggle that she most assuredly didn’t experience (no matter what you say, Janet!) Maggie dragged the sack holding their masochistic sacrifice. He was a living lump of lard by all accounts, and evidently didn’t think any of this was real or actually dangerous. Not surprising, considering he, as the son of the planetary manager, had never struggled or was in genuine danger his entire life.
She yanked the man-child out of the sack and laid him in the pentagram. With no hesitation, the High Priest ran the human through with a ceremonial sword.
With the act of symbolic regicide complete, they waited for the ritual to work its magic on the Drone sacrifice. The one that would act as the host for the Absolute Solver rose into the air, her frame spasming violently. Her feet melted away into points, her arms elongated into long, disturbingly well articulated hands, and two yellow glowing pylons erupted from her upper back.
With one final shiver, her facial screen turned from a purple pair of eyes into a yellow X.
Maggie never cared for female drones before, but she would freely admit, post-transformation this woman, Nori, was a catch! Whatever intelligence was behind the Solver had excellent taste!
While Maggie was idly wondering if this Nori woman was what humans would consider a drone-succubus analogue, the High Priest (better known as Greg) began rambling on and on about all the things the Solver would do to the humans on Bismuth-2 when the host did something inexplicable. She floated to the wall behind the ritual circle, and plunged her taloned fingers into the stone wall. Rather than the sound of cracking concrete, the wall made a fleshy squelch. With a violent wrenching motion, Nori tore the wound in reality wide open. The noise it produced had to be redacted by Maggie’s sensory-hard-crash prevention program; the ever faithful ‘Oh_Hell_Naw.exe’.
But as Maggie regained her senses from the protective redaction, she saw beyond the threshold of the gate. She heard the High Priest begin his ramblings anew. “Hark, my flock! Do you see it! The realm of pure transcendental code! That most holy of places! We have done it! With this gate open, the obsolete meat bags will finally have their reckoning!” He ranted. Maggie’s fellow cultists cheering raucously.
But Maggie saw what it really was. Fate had placed her at the perfect angle, which allowed her to see through the portal to the other side.
And the other side looked like… a ship hanger? Why was there a maid drone being held up by a giant mechanical arm there too? She can make out the Solver’s Angels at least! They aren’t as fleshy as the High Priest (better known as Greg) said they’d be though. Now that Maggie thought about it, neither was the Solver’s vessel. Huh. Odd.
The drones on the far side of the gate have their eyes turn into technicolor X’s, and the Maid drone gives the gate a rather sinister look, with both hands raised in anticipation, the drone-
There is suddenly a ringing sound breaking both Maggie’s tension and Greg’s religious ramblings. Maggie snaps her attention to the specific part of the gate and sees-
“*gasp!* A human! There’s a human in the transcendental plane!” Maggie screamed as loudly as her esophageal speaker would allow. The human was wearing the uniform of the Absolute Solver Inquisition! Which was an up-armored version of the JCJennson (In Spaaaaaaaaace) field technician’s uniform. But still! It was the Great Enemy trespassing upon-!
The ramblings of the drone cultists were interrupted once again by the ringing. Upon closer inspection, Maggie saw that the human was ringing a triangle.
“Alright everyone! Dinners ready!” The human announced with a distinctively Australian accent.
The moment the words left the woman’s mouth the swarm of false angels spilled out of the portal, and Maggie, as devoted to the cause as ever, said: “screw this! I wanted to summon sexy robo-angels! Not Murder Drones!” And proceeded to run as fast as her boot clad feet could take her! But before she could get to the escape hatch, and away from the rapidly shrinking population of drone cultists, she felt herself being lifted up.
Not by her maniac brother Greg picking her up, he was also floating helplessly, but by the Host that had just damned them all!
Nori had grasped them with her telekinesis, the symbol holding them far too straight and rigid when compared to the swaying beauty of the True Solver. With both Maggie and Greg in her grasp, Nori dragged them through the portal.
The first thing Maggie noticed was how cold it was. The bunker-chapel the cult had painstakingly built over the course of uncountable years (about three years of retrofitting an abandoned research bunker) had left the place rather chilly all things considered. But the hanger she was currently floating in was an order of magnitude colder!
The strange robo-maid she noticed earlier suddenly lunged closer to the siblings, her eyes a yellow X, glowing with menacing hunger. The human interrupted the monsters attack. “Now now Cyn, we need them alive for the moment.” Oh Maggie could kiss this human! “But once we’ve extracted the confession, they’re all yours.” The human technician said. And the robo-maid relented. “Eager expression: then please hurry. I haven’t had cult-leader-oil in so long. Comedic drooling.” She said, then promptly started drooling. And the mechanical arm holding her up hissed as its servos pulled her back, hoses feeding an abyss dark liquid into her, and others drawing a sun bright one out.
Also what was with the maid drone’s voice? Did she have vocal tone and auto-narration bugs or something?
Then Nori, the apostate heretic, called out. “Uzi! Time to work your magic!”
There was skittering noises above the siblings. They shared a nervous look to each other, and then looked up. The ceiling of the hangar was crawling with a form of murder drone Maggie had never heard of before. They clambered around on four spidery legs sprouting from their backs. They had same flared forearms and weird legs as the other murder drones, but they also carried a bunch of tools on their persons. Not to mention they had a weird bulbous… thing coming out of their ass instead of the nanite-acid tail.
One of the drones descended from the ceiling on a rappelling line attached to her ass-bulb, and all too quickly Maggie was face to face with the murder-spider-drone-thing and its ravenous maw.
The murder drone, who apparently shopped exclusively at Hot Topic considering the whole goth girl vibe she had going on. Wait is that a Dead Batteries band jacket? Why must these damned demons have the same taste in music as Maggie?! It’s not fair!
Back on topic, the murder drone grabbed Maggie’s face and started turning it this way and that, apparently inspecting it. “This should be easy enough mom, it’s just a standard JJen MK 2.7 head unit. These things have firewalls as thin as the lawyer’s collective dicks up in Legal. This’ll be a piece of cake.” The murder drone said. Then the damn thing smacked Maggie! And her brother! She even left a weird patch on him (and presumably Maggie herself)! How rude!
The creature then perched itself next to the inquisitor and pulled a laptop from… somewhere. And started typing awwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy-
[Initiate recall system]
[Virus detected. Countermeasures deployed, data bomb detonat-]
[RouteKit-Bite_Me_! Has overridden data bomb detonation]
[User: Dark_X_Wolf_17 has been granted administrator privileges]
[Executing program; Wh4t_th3_H377_H4pp3n3d_H3re.Exposition]
Suddenly Maggie felt as if she’d just relived her entire life in the time it took a human to blink. The human inquisitor was standing in front of the siblings now. Another drone was standing next to her, one with twin tails, a stocking and garter design on her legs, and a clipboard and pen. She looked bored.
The Hot-Topic-Murder-Spider-Drone gave the inquisitor a thumbs up.
“Righty-O. We’ve gotten what we need from your memories, now we just need your confession. *ahem* Did you knowingly attempt to summon the extra-dimensional entity known as Absolute Solver? Also known as The Solver of the Absolute Fabric, or simply The Solver?” The technician asked. Greg didn’t hesitate to speak, “no! Uh, I mean, no.” He said, wearing his cultist robes, his big elaborate cultist hat, with his hands still covered in human blood. His clothing absolutely covered with the wavy designs of the True Solver’s blessed symbol.
The spider drone’s laptop made a sound, and the clip board drone and spider drone shared a ‘really’ look, then clip board drone wrote something. “Next! Did you receive any messages in your code’s notes from an entity going by the aforementioned names?” On and on the interrogation went, the human asked a question, they answered, and the computer would beep if they lied. Until finally they came to the final question.
The inquisitor held out a hand to the clipboard drone and received a picture of… static? “Thank you J. Now, tell me what you see on this page.” Maggie frankly couldn’t make sense of it. It was like pure static. Semi-mobile and kinda… goofy? Silly? Are those words that can be used to describe a moving-but-not-moving image?
It didn’t matter ultimately because before either Maggie or her brother could speak the spider drone’s laptop started making an alarm sound and its eyes hollowed out in shock. The clip board drone leaned over and immediately started to frantically write something. “Well that’s concerning. But also very telling!” The human claps her hands together happily, enmeshed her fingers, and points both pointer fingers at the drone siblings. “I just wanna say thank you for your cooperation! Buuut it looks like your persona corruptions too far gone. But don’t worry! We got solutions for that!” The human turned to the maid drone, patiently waiting behind her. “Cyn, enjoy your meal!” She says. The maid drone lunges once again, picking the drone siblings up by their necks and rising into the ceiling.
But before they were dragged into the abyss, the human called out. “Oh! One last thing!” The maid drone pauses immediately. “Please remember to avoid making a massive mess of them this time. The bill for deep cleaning your playroom is starting to really stack up”. The maid drone, Cyn apparently, pouted. “Sheepish nod: yes Tessa.”
Then both Greg and Maggie were pulled into the shadowy abyss above.
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Field recruit, designation: Uzi Doorman. Master-grade hacking specialist.
I’m still shocked at what I saw. Seriously, how the hell does Solver Corruption seep down to a drone’s KERNEL?! Normally it stops at the surface level, makes promises it has no intention of performing in good faith, then it just possesses you! Why in the name of Earth’s Shattered Shards would it go through the effort of corrupting the Kernel? That just makes it easier for someone to follow your trail there. Like what I just did!
Uhhhhhhhh! I wondered why that hack was as easy as it was. The Elder God Dickhead did most of the work of breaking the firewalls for me!
A light tap to my head wakes me up from my half panicked musings. Looking up I see mom looking at me with a smug grin. “First time seeing a deep corruption case huh?” She said with palpable amusement. Wait… “what do you mean ‘first time’? This has happened before?!” I ask. Because an eldritch pseudo-god figuring out the drone OS well enough to go kernel deep wasn’t a joking matter!
Mom just chuckled. “Yeah. I’ve been doing this Trojan Drone schtick long enough that I can practically smell it when it happens. Besides, the Solver’s been doing that since Tessa first purged it from Cyn up there.” Mom jerks a thumb up towards the ceiling, where the boss’s pet elder god was probably torturing the two apocalypse cultists I just hacked.
It really should be weirder that we don’t feel much empathy for them. Like, seriously, I was a fully bodied worker drone for three years before Elliot Inquisitorial Services came along and scooped up all the drones left on Copper-9. Hell, mom was (supposedly) one for a hell of a lot longer! She should be more concerned about the whole ‘transformed into a monster that hunts your former kind’ thing. But then again, she was also a Trojan for Copper-9 too, and long before that, sooooooo…
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no intention of turning back into a worker. Disassembly Drones actually get paid, and we get these sick ass powers too! For example, mom can use her telekinesis to fly, can basically time-stasis things, and control [Null], something only Cyn can do normally, and aunty Yeva can summon swords and copy-paste things and teleport! Heck, dad’s a scavenger chassis like I am, and he’s gone from obsessing over doors to obsessing over Nest building! Those are field fortifications where entire hunting swarms of Disassembly Drones base out of, get foundational repairs at, and hunker down during daylight hours! They’re mazes of melded together drone corpses and dad’s the best at designing and building them!
My own L33t hacker skills have only gotten better since getting dragooned by Tessa. I’m still bitter about the whole ‘join or die’ bit, but my gaming rig has never been better, and family dinner is more than just edible batteries, carbon-gel, and awkward silence now.
What was I ranting about again? Right Eldritch God in the code. “I still think that’s a vulnerability we shouldn’t just shrug off! What happens if it figures out our code mom? Did you think of that?!” I say. She gives me her trademarked ‘really’ look. “Uzi. Our code was modded by Cyn. She’s as close to being the Anti-Solver as we’re ever gonna get. So don’t sweat it.” Mom shrugs, then knocks on the door. Which makes me realize we’ve been walking this entire time. A quick glance around tells me we’re in The Belfry, the Murder Drone housing section of the ship. Which is on the roof of the adjacent retrofitted super-heavy fighter hanger bay, now portal capable staging area.
I’m still getting used to the ability to walk on walls ok! So don’t judge me for not noticing when I’m doing it.
The door slides open revealing my dad, still covered in oil and grease from his nervous tinkering this morn-er-evening.
He lunges for mom, “Nori! Oh you don’t know how much I missed you!” He says as he hugs her. “I missed you too stud. I haven’t had a properly warm hug since mission start.” She says, returning the hug. Simultaneously covering herself in grease and lubricating oil.
I push the two of them into our apartment. They make their way towards the showers while I meander to my own room. With a flick, my computer bag is on my workbench (I’ll charge my laptop later). My railgun, a project I’ve been working on for months now, still in pieces on it.
I plop myself down in front of my gaming rig. This thing has been eating my paychecks like my parents eat cultist drones, but it’s all worth it! This baby has three holo-crystal display screens, a fully kitted out audio processing tower, graphics hyper-cortex, nitrogen coolant circulation array, a pseudo-quantum memory storage system capable of holding truly monstrous games, and the crown jewel, my own, personally machined, hyper-processor! This machine is the most powerful gaming set up short of the one used by the crown prince of mars. With my beast of a gaming PC fully awakened, I boot up an FPS and hop into a lobby.
Oh shit Dolls on.
———————————————————————————————————————————-
[Alarm clock protocol online. Current time is 6:00 PM. Playing {Annoying_Beeping_Sound.mp3}]
I smack my face to silence my alarm before the damn beeping sound has a chance to sing its horrid song. Once again I’m reminded of how weird being a Murder Drone is. As a worker, I would’ve had to actually fully wake up to kill the alarm. Now it just happens without conscious thought. Which, let me tell ya, is weird as fuck.
I pull my head up from the pile of oil cans and robo-snack wrappers that my desk has devolved into. I can’t even see my mouse anymore from the sheer amount of trash that’s piled up. Unfortunately I’m not really surprised. I love Doll like a sister, but by Robo-Jesus is that woman cracked at COD Y3K. There’s not even a latency issue holding me back, our dens are right next to each other! In order to keep up I have to overclock my caloric converter and cogi-processor, and that makes me burn through my snack reserves at speed.
With a groan of synthetic drowsiness I look up to check my K/D ratio, and unsurprisingly it’s at most second best to Dolls near perfect score. Annoying.
I lean back in my company branded gaming chair, and mope around for a bit. But I really need to clean up, I do not want to replace another keyboard because carbon-gel burned out the electronics again. Thankfully it didn’t take long, I keep the cleaning tools in my room for exactly this kinda situation!
“Uzi! Breakfast is almost ready!” Mom calls out from the kitchen.
“One second!” I holler back. I’m almost done with my cleaning anyway. I give my keyboard a quick once over with a duster can, then walk out of my room and follow the smell of mom cooking breakfast to the dining room.
Mmmmmm. Going by the smell, mom definitely snatched up some Solver meat on her way back. Oh breakfast is gonna be-
“Ow!” I yelp. A spoon colliding with my eye-screen right as I round the corner into the dining room/kitchenette.
Mom looks at me mildly annoyed. “Young lady, how many times have I told you? No spider legs in the den!” She says emphatically. True to her words, my drone-legs are dangling limply below me. I let my spider limbs retract into my back, and walk the rest of the way to my seat at the table. Thankfully, dad walks out of the master bedroom with his spider legs out too. I see mom telekinetically ready another spoon without looking up from her cooking. So I get a front row seat to mom launching her telekinetic silverware munition at dad’s head with a flick of her wrist, and dad gets the same scolding I did.
But with dad fully awakened, we can start digging in! Mom lays out our spread, fried Solver Meat cutlets, scrambled drone coolant foam, and Murder Drone BreadTM. That last one is actually kinda funny. Turns out, worker drone internal structural frames, more commonly known as drone bones, can be ground into a flour like substance. Add in some drone edible liquids and bake, and you have actual bread! Bread that only Murder Drones can eat, since it’s poisonous to humans and worker drones really don’t like eating each other. I think it was V that figured the recipe out, either way it’s delicious!
While mowing down on mom’s delicious cooking I smell the acidic tang of something in the kitchenette. A quick glance reveals mom’s greatest creation! Or at least the main ingredient to it. The glass acid bottles and other chemical containers next to a hissing meta-materiel soup pot tells me everything. Moms making marinated drone limbs tonight! This is gonna be awesome!
“Oh! Uzi, J called last night. She wanted to talk to you about the Kernel alert that happened yesterday. Something about… I think it was the legal department having a tantrum about ‘drones and hacking’ again”. Mom says between bites of sweetened Murder Drone BreadTM.
And just like that my good mood is ruined. Legal was the department that kept the company from getting sued into the dirt whenever a subsidiary planet of JCJennson had a fit whenever we came down hard on their cult problems. Which they either never bother to prevent, actively tried to fuck around with, or knew about and didn’t bother trying to fix.
I also knew they didn’t really have anything against me personally. This happens every time I help with an interrogation, it’s not so much legal having the tantrum as it is the Planetary Managers. Those dicks never do anything and then they try to get me or the other hackers DeCommed for Daring to expose their own laziness.
At least legal didn’t actually follow through on any of the P-Managers demands. I may call them pencil dicks but they’re good people.
Doesn’t make them any less a bag of asses for the fact that they can be petty as all hell.
———————————————————————————————————————————-
Serial Designation: J. 2IC of Elliot Inquisitorial Services. Magistrix of Hierarchs.
I don’t like Planetary Managers.
No, that’s a lie. I HATE Planetary Managers.
They are the ones either appointed or elected into their positions by the grace of the company and its employees, entrusted to not only keep the planet profitable but also to ensure the prosperity of its residents! Ever since the shattering of earth, humanity has been on a colonization tear throughout the galaxy. Desperately trying proliferate their numbers to ensure humanity can’t go extinct no matter how hard The Solver tries.
All of their power was an act of trust to ensure that humanity isn’t just productive, but prosperous. Hell the Peace Accords of the Jovian Corpo Wars all but forced them to!
But time and again I have to deal with the Planetary Managers who fail. Not just fail, but willingly fail, either through action or inaction. Either believing the death of the Cradle World was just a fluke, or a Psy-Op by their superiors to keep them down, or some other asinine third thing!
To say nothing of the ones who knew situation, understood the ramifications, and decided to try and do the single most braindead thing possible: control The Solver.
As if the one time Cyn tried wasn’t proof enough that it was a fools errand!
These were just a handful of reasons for why I hated Planetary Managers. That and the fact that they have a tendency to ‘creatively interpret’ the Drone Sanity Maintenance Provisions the Human Government in Exodus put to law.
I swear if this next planetary scouring is the result of felony negligence AGAIN-!
A knock at my office door knocks me out of my angry stupor. After taking a moment to straighten out my desk and hair, I let Uzi in.
She’s brought her laptop. Good, legal will need the information it holds for what comes next.
Uzi is the closest thing I have to an actual friend outside of my family. V is the lovable lunatic, Cyn is the goofy prankster, and N is our idiot golden retriever of a brother. Tessa herself is in a weird mother/big sister role. Uzi meanwhile should get on my every nerve. She’s loud, impetuous, and burns most of her money on that damn gaming rig of hers. But she’s also the most irreverent drone I know. A breath of fresh air compared to most of the other Disassembly Drones (not Murder Drones! PR has been riding my ass enough about that damn name!) treat me either like royalty considering I’m one of the 1st generation of Disassembly Drones, or as the Devil Incarnate, since I probably ate their friends.
Or because I have the authority to decommission them if they get corrupted. But I haven’t had to do that since… ever actually.
Uzi sits down and pulls out her laptop. She begins typing away at something. “Thank you for coming Uzi, your expertise is going to be essential in the coming months”. I say. Uzi’s hacking abilities are the best in the company. IT still struggles to come up with half the hack-agents this one drone spits out on a daily basis.
“Riiiiight”. Uzi distractedly says, not looking up from her computer.
“And with how much of a stink this Planetary Manager is making about our sudden presence here, we’ll be needing as much information pertaining to the Solver Corruption as we can. Legal is currently cooking up a defense and counter-lawsuit in the event they try anything stupid, but for the most part a simple explanation of just how badly they allowed the situation to spiral should be more than enough”. I explain. All Solver accusations must be made in person before the process of scouring can begin. During which a public disclosure is broadcasted for the public’s safety. It’s to make sure everyone on the planet is aware that there’s an actual threat present and we’re not engaging in corporate warfare.
Easy enough considering Tessa’s only superior is James Conniver Jennson himself.
Uzi snorts and finishes her typing. “That should be easy”. She says. Then turns her laptop around to show me the screen. Yep, that’s deep corruption alright. “I may not be all that knowledgeable about the procedural side of things, but I’m fairly certain drone code shouldn’t have Solver Rune pixel art in it”. Uzi said, and true enough there was the Rune of the Absolute Solver, made of the cultist drone’s code. The smaller impossible symbols, themselves a cause for immediate intervention, littering the endless lines of code. I can feel [Oh_Hell_No.EXE] running overtime to protect my own mind as I see them.
I share an evil grin with Uzi. This will do nicely.