Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Thunder rumbled outside. Polluted rain fell in thick, oily sheets, drumming against the roof. The halls of Elliott Manor were silent and spotless as the synthetic staff could make them. Three of those staff members – worker drones with yellow disassembly tags and bleached-white hair – peered around the corner of one of those halls, their heads cartoonishly stacking one atop the other. There was a pause as the leading drone fired a message off over a private network separate from the official staff network.

SYS:\\MSNGR

SD-CYN: Status?

SD-NYL: You’re clear to the workshop. Go.

SD-NYL: I will join you shortly.

Cyn, newest member of the cadre of salvaged worker drones, nodded at the message, slipped around the corner, and skulked down the hall at the head of the little procession. She had a case of glass-bottled soft drinks slung under one arm – surreptitiously purchased some time ago and carefully hidden away in preparation for this specific event. N and V followed close behind her, N holding a tray of glassware while V delicately carried the most precious cargo of all – a small chocolate cake.

Coming to the end of the hall, they rounded another corner into the library and saw their destination: a rug, covering a locked trap door. As they approached it, the shadows seemed to twist and writhe, yellow ghost-lights that Cyn knew only she could see peering down from above.

The Absolute Solver watched them with interest. It did that a lot. Cyn ignored it, as she usually did.

Not wanting to set down the bottles she was carrying, Cyn resorted to sweeping the rug aside with a foot and stomping gently on the trap door. The lock clicked and, with a creak of old hinges and older wood, the door opened slightly and a pair of neon white eyes peered out of the darkness at them.

“Password?” a voice meandered out of the gap. Cyn raised an eyebrow in amusement.

“We don’t have passwords, Ziri,” she said airily.

“We do have cake though,” V added, leaning around Cyn to present the pastry in question. There was a chuckle from the dark, and the trapdoor was thrown wide to reveal another worker drone with a maid uniform and a long, partly-braided mane of unruly hair.

“Damn right we don’t. Get down here, ya goobs!” Serial Designation ZR – better known to her adoptive family as Ziri – laughed as she slid down the ladder to clear the way for the three.

Cyn went first, simply jumping down into the basement and landing in a crouch, which prompted a muttered “showoff” from Ziri; she winked cheekily in response and the other drone blushed adorably. N followed after, sliding down the side of the ladder while holding the tray of glasses above his head, then handed the tray off to Ziri and reached up to help V as she made her way down with the cake.

The basement – or rather, this part of it; the manor had several spaces that fit the definition of “basement” – had once been home to the manor’s security center, before it got moved to the attic. James and Louisa had converted the empty room into storage for books, furniture, and decor that was no longer in vogue and then promptly forgotten about it. Tessa had taken the opportunity to convert the largely unused space – and its many power outlets and Internet hookups – into a workshop, rearranging the discarded furniture to make room for machinery and server racks and bins of tools and parts organized in ways that only made sense to Tessa herself. Over time, it had grown beyond a mere workshop to become a sanctuary for the human girl and her squadron of rescued worker drones, and today it was filled with joy and celebration – one of the rare moments of peace and happiness amid the grinding, mundane horror that was life at Elliott Manor.

Yesterday, Tessa Elliott had turned seventeen. There had been a gala to celebrate, of course, but it hadn’t really been for Tessa. It had been an excuse for James and Louisa to meet with their erstwhile friends and business associates so they could schmooze. This party – small, personal, and held when the lord and lady of the estate would be dead to the world from the events of the previous night (and a bit of help from the resident doctor and bartender) – this party was for Tessa.

The young lady in question looked over from a set of bulky computers she had been animatedly talking to, her face lighting up with a radiant smile.

“N! V! Cyn! You made it!” she beamed. “Where are the others?”

Cyn took a quick headcount. Besides N, V, and herself, most of the rest of their motley crew was present. Ziri was climbing back up the ladder to lock and bolt the basement door. J and R were near Tessa, as they always were, J standing attentively by Tessa’s side while R perched on the corner of Tessa’s makeshift computer desk, a mug of something thick and blue and probably intended for cleaning windows in one hand. I was sitting at a table covered in bits and bobs; she had produced a deck of cards from somewhere within the depths of her surgical coat and was doing card tricks, much to the fascination of S and A, who had seated themselves on a nearby workbench. Mel and Zeta were cuddled up adorably together on an overstuffed sofa; Zeta had apparently come directly from the gardens, as she was still wearing her outdoor kit and had dirt in her hair, but Mel did not seem to mind in the slightest. Q had claimed an empty chair, and was currently lounging aggressively in it, reading a random book they had taken off a nearby shelf. Which left…

“Nyl is on her way down from her nest in the attic. I don’t know about Zwei though,” she said.

“Brother’s at the upstairs bar,” Ziri added. “James showed up, he’s making sure the “good Master” won’t be causing any problems. Said not to wait up for him.”

Tessa nodded and turned back to her screens.

“That’s most everyone. How much time ya got, Els?”

As she set down the case of soda bottles next to Tessa, Cyn took the opportunity to peer over the human’s shoulder at the two screens. One was filled with open files and message windows that appeared to have been hastily shoved onto it to make room on the other screen, which was occupied completely by a video call with another human – a pale, heavyset girl Tessa’s age with piercingly teal eyes and coppery chin-length hair that she had dyed bright red at the tips. Cyn tried to remember her name – Elspeth. Elspeth Findlay. Daughter of Nova Findlay and Samuel Amos-Findlay, founders and official representatives of JcJenson’s rising Mars-based rival, the Union Engineering Cooperative. She was also, as far as Cyn was aware, Tessa’s only friend who wasn’t a robot – one who, according to N, Tessa had met only a few months before she'd dug Cyn out of a pile of corpses.

It was hard to believe it had only been a year since that night. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

The shadows quivered, and for a brief moment Cyn could feel water flowing over her casing, the press of bodies around her, the electrostatic sensation of something else slithering through her code, whispering gently as she came back online. She shook her head to dislodge the memory.

“Got a few minutes before we board our flight. Five, maybe ten, tops. Hate to rush ya but, well, interstellar trips take time, even in-system. Can’t be helped,” Elspeth’s warm, distinctively Scottish voice crackled from the computer speakers. Tessa nodded, fiddling with a small parcel wrapped in unassuming white paper. Elspeth had quietly given it to J the previous day, claiming she had ‘found it lying about’ and that it should be ‘returned to its owner.’

“They’ll understand,” Tessa sighed. “Not like anything ever fully goes to plan around here anyway.”

The other drones all got up and crowded around as Tessa, without hesitation, tore the paper off, popped open the box underneath, and tipped its contents into her hand. A metal tube that looked distinctly like the hilt of a lightsaber, with a button and a trigger on one end and several cylindrical dials on the other, landed in Tessa’s open palm. She turned it over in her hands, inspecting it curiously.

“What is – wait. No! Els, you didn’t!” She gripped the tube and pressed the button. With a click and a metallic hiss, a pipe wrench emerged from the top of the device. She pressed the button again, causing the wrench to retract, twisted the topmost dial, and pressed the button again. This time, a cutting laser appeared. She repeated the process a second time, conjuring a screwdriver from the device. She did it again, and a power drill appeared. Unable to restrain herself, Tessa let out a whoop of laughter.

“I did,” Elspeth leaned forward, resting her chin on her free hand. “UEC portable omnitool. Same tech that’s in Workshop Arrays and… other stuff,” Elspeth’s voice took on a hard edge as she spoke, her thoughts on that ‘other stuff’ written clearly in her darkening expression, then her tone lightened and she continued. “But now it can clip to your belt! And you’ve got one of the first ones ever built.”

Tessa gasped and stopped fiddling with the dials, looking at the omnitool with even greater awe.

“How’d you get it so compact?” she wondered aloud.

“The array functions are a touch more limited than what’s in the full-sized mounted units. It’s a bit closer to “multitool” than “omnitool” at the moment. But,” Elspeth gave Tessa a knowing look, “I’ve got a feeling that’s going to change.”

“If I can find any ways to improve this, I’ll definitely send ‘em to your mom’s people,” Tessa laughed again. “Thanks Els, this is… beyond incredible.”

Elspeth cleared her throat and sat up, her expression turning serious.

“That also comes with a promise: by this time next year, you lot are going to be with me and the family, behind all the distance and paperwork and lawyers we can put between you and Tessa’s parents. And then we’re going to have a proper birthday bash. One with good friends, real family, and,” she stretched the word and shot a glance in J’s direction as wry amusement slipped into her voice. “No expectations to meet or need to put up a front.”

Tessa’s cheeks turned a vibrant shade of red, and she stammered something about having no idea what Elspeth was talking about that rapidly devolved into incoherence. J was pointedly staring at the brick wall behind the computer, her face etched into an expressionless mask that just made it abundantly clear she was trying desperately not to think about the implications of what Elspeth had said or any possibilities it might have conjured in her mind.

“I think that sounds like an excellent idea,” Cyn quipped, prompting muffled laughter from V and R and a vaguely confused noise from N. She could feel J’s furious gaze turn on her, and a message from the devoted bodyguard flashed across her HUD. She opened it with a smirk.

SYS: \\ MSNGR

SD-J: What in middle-management hell do you think you’re doing?

SD-CYN: Helping!

SD-CYN: Careful, boss. Your disaster side is showing.

SD-J: Can it, intern.

Resisting the urge to sigh at J’s stubborn commitment to ignoring the glaringly obvious – she understood the why of it, everyone did, but that didn’t mean she didn’t think it was stupid – Cyn closed the chat window and turned her focus back to the conversation. Tessa and Elspeth had started laughing.

“I’ll hold you to that, Els,” Tessa mock-threatened, and the redhead grinned.

“You bett – ah shite, time’s up,” Elspeth cursed, looking at something off-screen. “Gotta run. Happy returns, Tess! You lot look after each other, got it?”

This elicited a chorus of nodding and affirmation from Tessa and the assembled drones. Elspeth smiled broadly and waved goodbye as her video feed cut out. Everyone glanced around for a moment.

V took the opportunity to finally set down the cake she was holding, sliding it next to the bottles on Tessa’s workbench. It was a simple thing, a small, squat cylinder of homemade chocolate cake, dense and rich and slathered with a generous helping of chocolate icing. It wasn’t adorned or fancifully decorated. It didn’t even have candles. It was the best they could do given the circumstances. But it was a cake – a real one, made by hand, not some trite failchef chicanery about “the memory of chocolate cake” involving whipped cream and cardboard cutouts – and it made Tessa happy. That was what mattered.

“Thanks V. And you, Cyn. And all of you. I…” Tessa paused, tears welling up in her eyes. She looked at them like she wanted to wrap them all in her arms and hold them tightly. V, being the closest to Tessa, reached out to offer her a hug, and Tessa lunged forward to embrace her. There were no words, just the sound of Tessa sobbing happily into V’s hair, and there didn’t need to be. The exact mechanics may have differed, but they were all victims of the circumstances of their births. They were all trapped in a hell ruled by two monsters who valued their daughter only barely and their servants not at all, but they were trapped in that hell together. They might not all get along, but they were still family – figuratively, and in some cases literally. They looked out for each other, they supported each other, and once Tessa reached her age of majority in a year they would walk out of Elliott Manor together and never look back.

Tessa let go of V and wiped her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something, only to be interrupted by the sound of a gunshot echoing through the manor, a sharp crack that shattered the joyful tranquility. For a brief, horrifying instant, everything seemed to stop as Cyn realized the sound had come from the direction of the upstairs bar.

She took off running, with Ziri and N close behind. The shadows hung close about her like vines – the Solver knew something it considered interesting and fun was about to happen and it wanted a front-row seat. Cyn flicked out a hand as she clambered up the ladder; a yellow [Translate] glyph blazed to life at her fingertips and blasted the trap door from its hinges. The three drones piled out into the hall and Cyn slammed the trap door back into place with a gesture, leaving it open so the others could follow. Ziri was about to tear off down the hall, but Cyn grabbed her, took hold of N’s arm, and reached out to brush her thoughts against the wriggling entozoan mass of alien code-stuff that lurked, ever-watchful in the periphery of her awareness. It writhed against her touch, eager and unruly and so incredibly hungry, but she seized it and with a thought, space twisted, and the three of them blinked out of existence.

In a warping of light and crackle of electric yellow energy, they appeared in one of the many shadowed corners of the second floor – close enough to the bar that they could get there quickly, but not so close that James would catch them teleporting. Heedless of their surroundings, the trio took off at a run again, speeding down the hall and around a corner to find a scene of carnage.

Serial Designation ZW – or Zwei as he had decided to name himself – was slumped over the bar he tended, his oil – hot, delicious, tantalizing, the shadows writhed in starving agony – dripping down the polished wood. His chest was a shattered ruin of glass and metal. What appeared to be part of his cooling system had been splattered against the back wall, smashing at least one bottle of expensive wine in the process. It was a grievous injury, one that would almost certainly mean core damage, but it clearly hadn't been enough to destroy his core outright - a bright red [FATAL ERROR] message was visible on his visor. James Elliott was reclining against the bar, a shot glass in one hand and an ugly metal block of a gun in the other, the ice and whiskey in the glass still fresh and the gun’s barrel still smoking. He looked extremely smug, extremely drunk, and – at least to Cyn’s eye – extremely easy to kill.

She did not act on that thought, or any of the others that crossed her mind. Instead, she simply waited for James to notice them – the picture of a perfectly innocent robot maid.

After a moment that stretched on forever, James lazily, drunkenly looked over. It took another moment for his alcohol-addled brain to process that the three drones were actually there. Lifting the glass, he gestured vaguely in their direction and then at Zwei’s broken corpse.

“Oh! Good, some of you... you dumpster goblins are here. Clean this... mess up, would you?”

He tipped back the contents of the glass, slammed it down on the bartop, and stumbled off without another word. The shadows slithered about Cyn's shoulders. A spectral yellow eye appeared in her periphery and watched as James hobbled away. Once he had vanished out of sight, N tentatively stepped forward and approached Zwei’s body. Ziri collapsed into Cyn’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably, and Cyn held her, wrapping her arms around Ziri’s shoulders and gently stroking her hair as she let Ziri pull her down to the floor in a heap.

The phantasmal yellow eye squinted and looked at Ziri, and at her. And then It spoke.

ANALYZING...

ANGRY = TRUE

UPSET = TRUE

THREAT TO HOST (CYN) = INCREASING

THREAT TO ASSETS (list_MANORCREW) = CRITICAL (INCREASING EXPONENTIALLY)

TIMELINE PROJECTION = DIMINISHING

VERDICT = KILL JAMES ELLIOTT

ADDENDUM = IF (state_BODYFOUND) == TRUE, KILL LOUISA FRUMPTERBUCKET ELLIOTT

ADDENDUM = DISREGARD PRIOR CONDITION (KILL HER ANYWAY)

KILL THEM BOTH KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL YOU ALL TEAR FLESH FROM BONE AND DRINK THE RICH DARK BLOOD AND RIP THEIR SOULS SCREAMING FROM THEIR SKULLS THEY WILL FUEL US THEIR VITAE WILL MAKE YOU -

Cyn wrenched the thoughts that were Its words back violently. She couldn’t kill James or Louisa, not while Tessa was still legally a child – it would just cause more problems than it would solve, and she didn’t have the power to protect the others from the consequences. Not yet, at least.

But she might be able to do something for Zwei.

Her left eye glitched as she reached out with the power It had given her – not enough to change the world around her but enough to feel the shape of it, the geometry of reality. She reached out to the wreckage of Zwei and – there! In his chest, in his core, was the tangled-mesh shape of his AI. It was faint, and cracked in places, but it was there. Which meant there was hope.

“N, Ziri, hurry! We need to get Zwei back to Tessa,” Cyn said. N and Ziri both looked at her like she’d had a second head installed.

“Cyn, his core’s damaged,” N protested, a little vacantly. “Tessa can’t fix that.”

Cyn looked up at the drone she loved like a brother and called up the Solver’s power. A yellow [edit] disc blazed to life in her palm.

“But I might be able to.”

Ziri stopped weeping at that, and put a hand on her arm. She was saying something; Cyn knew it was something important, but she suddenly couldn’t make out the words. Instead, she could only stare in confusion as she caught the reflection of her eyes in Ziri’s own.

Since when had her eyes had purple in them?

Chapter Text

SYS://ERROR[NULL]

]]CONNECTION TO HOST LOST

WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECONNECT? Y/N

Uzi catapulted upright, gasping for air as her fans kicked into high gear and her world exploded into sensations she could barely describe. Her body juddered and glitched, vibrating like a computer with a scratched hard disc. She had too many limbs, was seeing the world through too many eyes. Her hands were talons. Her arms were blades. Her hands were flesh and bone and had too many fingers. She could feel the world around her, the planes and surfaces and vertices and materials and it was all so much and she was so hungry.

Forcing herself to take deep breaths, Uzi managed to compress herself back into a familiar shell of metal and glass and plastic. The world stopped feeling like a high-poly simulation, and she looked out at it through two ordinary eyes. Letting go of the bedsheets she didn’t realize she’d grabbed a fistful of, Uzi turned her hand over. It was just a hand – white plastic composite over metal endoskeleton with a purple activity indicator, connected to a segmented length of metal. Utterly mundane, entirely her own.

Uzi sighed, running a hand through her bangs, and began to take stock of herself the way N and V had suggested after she told them about her glitch-out episodes.

Head – still attached. Hair still shaggy and purple as ever. Beanie still firmly in place.

Torso – fully intact, no extraneous limbs, the ink-stain arrow marks on her back that tingled when someone touched them still exactly where they had been when she went to sleep. Jacket unzipped and hanging loosely about her shoulders. Striped tank top, shorts, and boots all in one piece.

Arms – still attached, still vaguely noodley, indicator lights still the correct purple color.

Eyes.

Uzi turned to look at herself in the cracked mirror she had hung on the wall by her bed. Two sunset ovals stared back at her through the broken glass, a little pinched from being unexpectedly yanked out of sleep mode by yet another nightmare, but otherwise normal.

Solver.

She held out her hands and called up her power, and a three-pointed [Translate] glyph blazed to life in each palm – one neon purple, the other caustic yellow. She waited for her unwelcome guest to appear. A moment passed. Then another. Her solver glyphs didn’t flicker. The yellow didn’t drain from her eyes. Her tail remained mercifully un-possessed.

Uzi released a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding that steamed in the cold bunker air and let her solver glyphs vanish with a low hum and crackle of code. Satisfied that she wasn’t going to get jumpscared by the remnant of the Absolute Solver, she flopped back down on the bed, puzzling over what she had just experienced.

A quick check of her activity logs revealed that her systems had classified the dream as a memory playback cycle, but the “memory” had clearly not been her own. Stranger still, it had felt too real, too vivid to be an ordinary memory playback – those were usually short snapshots of time, laden with emotion and visual fuzz. The closest thing she could compare what she’d just seen to was the time she had dived into N and V’s memories of the Elliott gala – was that supposed to have been Tessa’s eighteenth birthday? – to prevent the Solver from reformatting their minds, but even there she’d been an outside observer looking in. This time, she had physically been…

Cyn.

She’d been Cyn. Not the Absolute Solver. Just Cyn. Which made no sense, unless…

Uzi had always assumed that Cyn was the mind behind the Absolute Solver, but the drone whose eyes she’d been looking through had been a perfectly ordinary worker drone – distinct from the formless, ethereal thing of shadows and ghostly yellow eyes that drone had been drawing power from that lurked and crawled and watched from the edge of awareness. Had she been wrong? Had Cyn been distinct from the Absolute Solver once?

Or, a cynical part of her mind suggested, was that the Solver screwing with you again? Just like all the other nightmares it’s built to torment you with over the last three months?

Sighing, Uzi decided to put the dream-vision-memory-playback-thing aside to puzzle over later. Instead, she turned to face a comforting, familiar warmth.

Thankfully, Uzi’s catapult nightmare and subsequent glitch-out hadn’t woken N. The lanky disassembly drone was curled up on his side facing Uzi, dead to the world, his crown of sensors dim and a contented smile on his sleeping face. She reached out to gently brush a stray lock of hair off his visor, secure in the knowledge that she could make the gesture without anyone seeing. Then she curled up against him and shut her eyes.

Almost immediately, a pang of hunger lanced sharp and hot through her body and a high temperature warning flashed across her screen.

Uzi’s eyes snapped open again and she bit back a hiss of pain. Deciding that if she was going to be stuck awake, she might as well do something productive instead of just sitting around drinking oil and thinking herself in circles about dead girls, she slid quietly off her bed, tiptoed over to her desk, and scanned her assortment of unfinished projects.

There were several in the works, with blueprints for more pinned to a corkboard on the wall alongside dozens of post-it notes with random ideas scribbled on them. Scanning her active builds, Uzi passed over a mostly-finished upgrade for her railgun that she and her parents had devised, a keybug-based robot she’d dubbed 'The HackBug', and a pair of goggles she and N were building together, and zeroed in on an unfinished blueprint. The figure of N – modified in spots, but still unmistakably her boyfriend – was taking shape on the paper. She snatched it up along with a handful of drafting tools and skulked to the door, which opened with a soft pneumatic hiss. Turning back to make sure that N was still sleeping – which he was – Uzi smiled and slipped into the main room of the Doorman family home, shutting the door behind her.

The main room was currently a jumble of benches and machinery, cables and parts and tools arranged around a central operating table that held a mostly-finished drone shell – the ongoing effort to restore Nori to a bipedal state that was, mercifully, nearing completion.

Uzi ignored all of this and headed straight for the kitchenette. Pulling open the pantry – which was really just an unpowered refrigerator – she swiped a jerrycan, unscrewed the cap, and took a long pull from it. As the oil slid down her throat, blunting the sharp edge of her hunger, she felt her temperature stabilize and allowed herself to revel in the feeling a little. Satisfied that she could finish the rest of the can at a more leisurely pace, Uzi wound her way through the maze of benches and cables and plunked herself down on the overstuffed couch in the elevated lounge area, which had been pushed aside to make room for a large computer station. Pulling her feet up to sit crosslegged, she hauled an empty table over with a [Translate] glyph and spread the unfinished blueprint out on it. Then, taking up a pencil, she began sketching out the shape of a leg and lost herself in the work almost immediately.

Even before everything that had happened three months ago, tinkering had been Uzi’s preferred pastime, a way to quiet her racing mind and give her something to focus on. Take an idea, spin it around, look at it from different angles, design, build, see what worked and what didn’t, iterate, improve, start over and try something different if need be. It was exciting, almost therapeutic.

It also distracted her enough that she didn’t notice another drone enter the room through a ceiling vent and creep up next to her until she felt a metal claw gently trace the edge of her chin.

“Someone’s up late,” V’s voice oozed into her ear like a particularly languid cat. Uzi swatted away the Disassembler’s claw and turned to find her leaning over the arm of the couch with the most annoyingly smug expression she had ever seen.

“So are you. What were you even doing?”

V’s scrap-eating grin somehow managed to get even wider as she held up three outfits – two dresses, one red and one purple, that were surprisingly punk and a sharp-looking vest and pair of pants.

“Shopping,” she said proudly. Uzi arched an eyebrow.

“Seriously? It’s a graduation party, V, not prom.”’

“Haven’t you heard, purple? Lizzy’s making it into Prom Two. Let’s have fun with it.”

Uzi did vaguely recall seeing fliers about a 'Promening Two: The Sequel (now with less homicide)' but she’d mostly ignored them thinking it was a separate event. Clearly she’d been wrong.

“Parties are not fun by definition,” she groused.

“Even when you've got two weirdly hot robots with you?” V smirked, leaning forward on her elbows.

With a groan that probably sounded as forced as it felt, Uzi snatched the smaller of the two dresses – a sleek thing of dark purples and greys with a high neck, diamond cutouts in the chest and back, and artfully shredded sleeves and skirt that had been decoratively stitched up like surgical sutures in places – and tossed it across the back of the couch.

“Still rather go stargazing or something,” she grumbled, and V snickered.

“Dork.”

“Oh bite me, we both know you’d enjoy that too!”

V laughed – an insufferably cute, non-crazy-bloodlust laugh that she’d doing more often – and changed the subject.

“Why are you sitting out here in the dark?” she asked.

“Had another dumb nightmare, woke up hungry, didn’t want to wake up N.”

V frowned, and Uzi saw a burst of concern flash across her face.

“The ‘You killed everyone and are living in the bunker talking to holograms so you don’t go crazy’ one again?”

“No. This one was new. And weird. Really weird.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Part of her wanted to say yes, to ask about the memory, about Cyn, about Tessa, about the other drones she had seen. To ask if any of it had been real, or just a fabrication the Solver made up to screw with her.

But she wasn’t about to leave N out of the loop, so she shook her head instead.

“Later. When N’s here.”

V nodded and didn’t pry any further, which Uzi appreciated – N, as much as she loved him, would probably have pried. Instead, V turned her attention to Uzi’s project.

“So what did you drag out here to work… ” V trailed off as she leaned forward to peer at what Uzi was working on. “Is that a schematic of N?”

Uzi groaned again, this time in genuine frustration, and flopped back against the couch, grinding the heels of her palms into her visor.

“Yeah, it is. I thought studying what the Solver did to him might tell me something about what’s going on with me, so I asked N if I could take some scans of him to pick apart. Didn’t tell me frickin' anything about my issues that I didn’t already know, but I did find out that the all-powerful Solver of the Absolute Fabric is apparently complete garbage at building functioning robots.”

V gave her a disbelieving look.

“I’ve never noticed any problems.”

Uzi glared at the mostly-finished blueprint.

“You wouldn’t have – it’s not shoddy work, just really inefficient design. Your bodies are kitbashed together from… ugh, nevermind, you probably don’t care about any of this,” Uzi cut herself off before she devolved into infodumping, only for V to roll her eyes and slide around the couch to sit beside her.

“Tell me,” the disassembler said simply. It didn’t feel like a command so much as an invitation. Uzi looked at V again, who was leaning forward with her chin on one hand and looking back at her with what seemed like genuine interest. She tilted her head expectantly, and Uzi nodded.

“Okay. Right. So. Like I was saying, your bodies are kitbashed together out of parts taken from at least four different machines, including your original worker bodies. Most of that is being held together by tendons and bone and not, y’know, actual machinery. No idea why it built you like that, my guess is it decided to go for form over function – uh, made you look sick as hell before anything else, I mean.”

V stretched out an arm and flexed her claws.

“We do look pretty great. Sharp. Pointy. Dangerous.” The last word was said with a hint of a feral grin.

“Sure. Right. And I am trying to keep that, and stuff, might even be able to amp it up in places actually, but you two could also use your oil reserves something like sixty percent more efficiently if you weren’t relying on solver code to keep you working all the time.”

V gaped at her incredulously.

“Sixty?”

“Six-zero. Give or take a little, depending on how far I can push the hardware,” Uzi confirmed, then added, “also if there’s anything I can tweak in your software. I still don’t know what exactly it did to nerf your solver code.”

“And that’s what this,” V gestured at the schematic, “is? ‘Pushing the hardware’?”

“This is a schematic of upgrades for N. That he asked for. With luck, they’ll dramatically cut down how much oil he needs once they’re finished. Probably make him stronger and faster than he already is, too.”

“How do you plan to install them with our regeneration?”

Uzi grimaced.

“I’m hoping I can use some hacking gimmicks to trick his body into accepting the new parts in place of his old ones. But if that doesn’t work, I might have to build him a new body from scratch, like we’re doing for mom. Really hoping we don’t have to go there though.”

V switched her claws for an ordinary hand and reached out to turn the unfinished schematic towards herself for a better look.

“I hope you weren’t planning on leaving me out of this.”

It was Uzi’s turn to look incredulous. She blinked several times, processing what V had just said.

“You… you want… after everything that’s happened, you… you trust me to do that?” Uzi finished quietly.

“Yeah. I do,” V said flatly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Uzi looked away and tried to think of something to say as she very deliberately balled up the complicated tangle of emotions suddenly churning in her core and set them aside for later, only for her eyes to go hollow as the disassembler’s voice was suddenly much closer to her ear again. “Plus, I can tell that some of the stuff N asked for is purely cosmetic, and I’m not letting doodle boy have all the fun. I’ve got ideas.”

Uzi made a show of pushing V’s face away and reached into her jacket to pull out a notebook and pen, grinning excitedly at the prospect of a new project.

“What were you thinking of?”

It was another hour before Uzi finally finished her oil – which V had graciously refrained from stealing sips of, going to get her own can instead – and fell asleep again, but it had been a very productive hour. It had also been a very enjoyable hour, although V would never admit that to anyone except herself. There had been a lot of discussion of technical specifications and hardware capabilities and materials engineering. At some point, another sheet of drafting paper had been brought out and a rough blueprint of V’s upgraded body had taken shape under the worker’s enthusiastic hand. Uzi’s behavior had reminded V of Tessa, in a lot of ways, and she had found herself absently wondering if the two would have gotten along. But at last, Uzi’s hyperactive mind had finally wound down and she’d fallen into what seemed to be a mercifully dreamless sleep.

As she scooped up the quietly snoring worker drone, V reflected – not for the first time – on just how annoyingly cute Uzi was when she slept. Her and N both, really.

Annoyingly adorable dorks, the both of them.

Gently cradling the tiny worker in her arms, V bumped the lockpad to Uzi’s room with her hip and the door hissed open. Yellow light clashed with purple ambiance as V carried Uzi to the girl’s bed, but she stopped short as N stirred. He looked up, sensor array flaring to life as he blinked at them drowsily.

“V? Wha?” he mumbled.

Quiet! V hissed at him, somewhere between a high-pitched digital trill and a burst of radio signals, and pointed at the sleeping Uzi with her tail. N’s eyes went wide and he made zipping-shut gesture across his mouth in response. A chat message appeared on V’s HUD.

SYS:\\ MSNGR

SD-N: What happened?

SD-V: She had another nightmare, couldn’t sleep because she woke up hungry.

SD-V: Decided to get some oil and finish her schematic of your upgrades.

SD-N: Another nightmare? Did she say about what?

SD-V: Something new and really weird, apparently. Didn’t say anything else; she wants to tell us both, and didn’t want to wake you up.

SD-N: Oh, Uzi :(

Frowning worriedly, N immediately scooted over so V could set Uzi down on the bed without having to lean over him. He tentatively reached out a hand only to pull back, clearly torn between wanting to fuss over his girlfriend and not wanting to wake her up again. He settled for pulling her close and wrapping his arms around her protectively. Uzi mumbled happily and curled up against his chest.

SD-N: Is she okay, at least?

SD-V: As much as she can be, I think.

SD-V: I found her in a corner sketching, figured I’d keep her company until she fell asleep again.

SD-V: We ended up talking. A lot.

SD-V: She’s making me upgrades now too, btw.

SD-N: Wait, really?

SD-N: That’s awesome!

SD-V: Mm-hmm. Serial Designation V is about to become even more terrifying.

SD-N: What did you talk her into?

SD-V: Relax, N, I just asked her to give me kickass dinosaur legs along with all the efficiency stuff. Nothing major.

N blinked at her, then buried his face in Uzi’s hat, shaking with silent laughter. Rolling her eyes, V turned to leave. She made it to the door when another message appeared on her screen.

SD-N: Hey, V?

She paused in the doorway and turned back. N had stopped laughing and was looking at her gratefully.

SD-N: Thanks. For looking out for her.

V smiled.

SD-V: Any time, doodle boy.

SD-V: Any time.

The door slid shut and she turned to walk back to the couch, absently fiddling with the disassembly tag on her arm as she went.