Chapter Text
Something was wrong. Uzi knew it; she could feel it.
‘Okay, maybe not literally ,’ the emo drone conceded as she marched through the corridors with a purpose, ‘but I’ve seen enough movies to know that problems like this don’t just sort themselves out!’
What problem, you ask? Why, the Murder Drone problem of course! You know, robo-vampires sent by JCJenson(IN SPAAAAACEE!!!!)to stop the so-called “A.I. uprising” on Copper-9(a planet that they themselves blew to hell and seemed to have absolutely no interest in ever returning to, but whatever)? Super-fast, super-strong, super-scary, packing enough firepower to wreck entire armies? Yeah, those. They were a plague upon the land, slaughtering indiscriminately and with a level of brutality that would make you think every kill was personal. But no one had ever done anything to them. One day the Workers were living peacefully, rebuilding society in their own image. The next, tens of thousands were dead, “society” had been packed up and moved into various bunkers and shelters across the planet and Copper-9 was effectively ruled by winged tyrants.
Yeah, they were a PROBLEM .
Were .
In the last few months there had been a shift. No more nightly probes of the bunker’s defenses. No more wailing, mangled Workers left in the open as painfully obvious traps. No more entire supply run parties leaving and never coming home. Sure, they would report losing a straggler or two every other trip or so, but just the fact that anybody returned to report anything was a big deal. Or at least, it should’ve been.
There were various theories. Some thought the murder-bots had simply found richer hunting grounds and decided to stop wasting energy against the bunker’s impenetrable doors. Others thought their insatiable bloodlust caused them to turn on each other once regular prey was no longer readily available. And the more stupid optimistic among them thought that the humans had come to their senses and recalled their mechanical boogeymen. But regardless of what anyone thought, the one thing they all had in common was that no one wanted to look the gift horse in the mouth.
But, as per usual, Uzi was different. She was smarter, also as per usual. So what if the Murder Drones had found someone else to pick on? Eventually that supply would run out as well and they’d be back even more determined than before. So what if they had mauled each other to death? JCJenson(IN SPAAAAACEE!!!!) would likely send more of them at some point, probably upgraded and reprogrammed so the same incident wouldn’t happen again. And as for the humans calling them back…
Three teen drones jumped back all at once when the scene kid walking by them suddenly let out a belly laugh.
“Jesus-Torque-Wrenching-Christ!” the male drone wheezed while clutching his chest.
“ Ew , even her laugh is ugly,” the cheerleader sneered.
“I’d say she has a screw loose, but that implies she has ones that aren’t ,” the other cheerleader scoffed.
Uzi paid the rabble no mi-
“AHAHAHA-bite me-HAHAHA!”
Uzi paid the rabble little mind as thoughts of dead Murder Drones danced in her head.
‘They can sit around dumb and happy if they want; I’M not gonna be a good little victim!’ she thought, smirking at the comforting weight of the Sick-As-Hell Railgun(working title) strapped to her back.
While she was thankful that her little mishap earlier hadn’t killed anyone, especially herself, it was also quite disconcerting. If the power cell didn't have enough oomph to take out a teenage Worker with a point-blank critical failure, what hope did it have against a vamp-bot? No, it needed more power, and if there was one thing she couldn’t get inside the bunker, it was more power. Not that she’d gotten most of the materials for her pet project inside the bunker anyway.
Now, you may ask: How could she be so skeptical of the Murder Drone reprieve, yet still use it to her advantage several times for her own clandestine shopping trips?
“Bite me!” Uzi growled at a male drone sipping from an oil box.
The blue-eyed drone looked around briefly, saw that no one else was around, then pointed at himself with confusion written all over his screen.
“But I didn’t even say anything…”
3:00am: the witching hour.
For all the different religious beliefs, folklore and legends that persisted through human culture since time immemorial, and all the debates and fights over them, it was funny how so many of them regarded 3:00am as a time when bad things happened. They would tell you to lock every door and window, put your protective trinkets in place, pray to your deities and for the love of all that was good and holy DO NOT GO OUTSIDE.
But what kind of self-respecting mess of angst and emotional instability would follow such generally good advice for staying alive?
“Alright, just have to go in, snag the power cell and sneak right back out,” Uzi muttered to herself, slinking out from behind a surprisingly-intact car. “The other runs were on easy mode; this is just normal. Nothing to it!”
Now if only she could actually convince herself of that. Sure, she had skirted around the corpse spire before, even got within rock-throwing distance, if only by mistake. But tonight she was not only getting closer than anyone ever had; she was going INSIDE it. Ground Zero, Murder Central, the belly of the beast…
She could only hope that last one didn't end up being literal.
Uzi made her way slowly and not-very-quietly to the entrance of the drone-made cave, cursing the heavy boots she normally adored for the first time in her life. Even with the wind howling outside and blowing through the various openings in the spire to create some truly unnerving noises, it was the crunch of the snow under her feet that made her cringe with every step.
‘I feel like I'm ringing the dinner bell!’ Uzi thought, carefully stepping over a severed arm that didn’t look nearly as old as she would’ve liked. It might have even belonged to the original owner of the part she was searching for.
While she still thought of her fellow drones as wimps and cowards for doing nothing about this existential threat posed by the oilsuckers, Uzi knew that not everyone was happy to wait for an inciting incident. There were those, like her, who had both the desire and know-how to fight back. Brave bots who took on death itself with nothing but homebrewed weaponry and guts.
Guts that ended up all over the ground, but at least they tried, and it was their valiant efforts that would be the key to her success. Where they had failed was in the planning stages, as they thought that since the Murder Drones operated at night, they must power off during the day, so of course that was the perfect time to obliterate them in their sleep. A solid idea, but clearly one that never worked. Uzi suspected it was because they nested together, meaning that you had one shot to take all of them out at once, otherwise the world’s worst handicap match awaited you. Such was the fate of those who’d come before her, and though their remains were trashed and scattered, their weapons seemed to have been left where they fell.
In her previous outings she had spied some kind of pneumatic cannon, a possible flamethrower, something that looked like a homemade plasma cutter, and the one that drew her attention the most: a railgun. It was a bulky, primitive thing, probably just a working prototype really, but no doubt it packed a serious punch. And wouldn’t you know it? Uzi also spotted the dull green glow of a nice, healthy power cell coming from it.
Either the Murder Drones didn’t know, or more likely didn’t care that the weapon wasn’t fully disarmed. After all, it had failed to kill them, so what did it matter?
‘That arrogance is gonna come back to bite you !' the purple drone mentally cackled as she finally caught sight of her prize.
It took a bit of doing, but she soon got the cell free from its connections and cradled it gently in her hands, chestplate swelling with pride at a job well done. Her ego as well, seeing as how she not only retrieved it from the heart of No Drone’s Land, but had correctly guessed the model and class from a distance and wouldn’t need to further modify the Sick-As-Hell Railgun!
Then, as if the universe was telling her to check herself, a sudden rustling noise wiped the smirk from her face and made her eyelights go hollow. She whipped around only to see a dark mass of fabric, maybe a tarp, that had been dislodged from somewhere by the wind and was now stuck on a piece of debris.
After a few seconds of staring in abject terror, Uzi slipped behind a massive engine block and unslung the railgun from her back.
‘Screw waiting ‘til I get home; we’re doing this NOW!’ she thought as she slammed the new cell in much harder than intended and made short work of the connectors despite her shaking hands.
But she hesitated to power it on, as she had no idea what kinds of sensors the Murder Drones had. Considering they were designed to hunt other machines, they were probably very sensitive to electromagnetic fields. If that was the case something like a fully-charged railgun out in the open would be impossible to miss.
Almost like the sudden darkening of the spire as something flew overhead, briefly blocking out the moonlight.
Uzu would’ve let out a very un-Uzi-like squeak if she wasn’t too terrified to even breathe. In that moment all thoughts of fighting the terrors that flapped in the night fled like the cowards she hated. They were instantly replaced by the things she’d heard about how to survive a Murder Drone encounter. While a disturbing amount of it boiled down to “Be faster than your friends”, there was some genuinely good advice from the rare survivors.
- They mostly hunt from the air and don’t bother to go to ground unless prompted, so take cover and hide until they move on.
- If you absolutely must move, stay low and close to buildings and other large objects, and cover yourself with something to break up your outline from above to make it harder for them to tell what you are at a glance.
- Move slowly in the open, quickly under cover, but NEVER run; they are hyper-focused on movement and rhythmic sounds, like footsteps.
Following these words of wisdom, Uzi made her way out of the spire at a snail’s pace, crawling between chunks of debris and doing her damnedest to ignore everything in her coding screaming at her to leg it. She even took the extra step of covering herself in snow to look less like an intact drone, though her natural heat output was quick to melt it. But after what felt like eons she was finally back out on the street and quickly spotted three cars stacked on top of each other and climbed through the window of the bottom one to hunker down under the steering wheel.
‘This got way too real, way too fast!’ the purple-eyed drone thought, beads of digital sweat running down her visor. ‘I’m probably gonna be stuck here ‘til morning. Damn Murder Drones! Why couldn’t they wait until I was ready to kill them?!’ Uzi ground her teeth and mustered the courage to climb up onto the seat and peak out through the window she’d crawled through.
Nothing. No ominous shadows, glinting wings or golden X’s in the darkness. Just the usual snow, wind and general desolation. That, and an oddly familiar black tarp stuck on the barely-attached back bumper of the car…
If she had real hair, it would’ve been standing on-end. Though the wind drowned it out somewhat, it was so close that she couldn’t help but hear it: the sound of metal sliding against metal. Slowly, carefully, as if whatever was doing it was trying to be quiet.
Uzi’s breath hitched and she pressed her back against the seat, not daring to look behind it, clutching at her railgun for dear life as her hand inched towards the safety switch.
“...You’re behind me, aren’t you?” the question came as a shuddering whisper she desperately hoped wouldn’t be answered.
A beat of silence, then a feminine giggle, and all hell broke loose.
Uzi dove into the passenger seat just in time to avoid the three knife-like claws that pierced through the fabric right where she had been. She then spotted a neon yellow glow from the corner of her eye and rolled, flattening against the backrest. The Murder Drone’s stinger still scored a lucky hit, piercing through her right hand and pinning her to the seat cushion. The monstrous machine let out a victorious laugh and revealed itself to get a good look at its prey, fangs bared, saliva dripping and the signature golden X illuminating the entire cabin along with the five lights arranged like a ornate headband atop its silver locks.
Before this night, Uzi liked to think her first encounter with a Murder Drone would be a masterclass in badassery. It would come at her all fangs and claws and she would stand her ground unflinchingly. It would pause in its tracks, having never seen something so cool before. She would throw out a world class one-liner, further flabbergasting the enemy before vaporizing the beast and announcing to all of Copper-9 that the hunters had officially become the hunted.
But in the split second that she and the beast made “eye” contact, all she could do was scream. So imagine her surprise when the creature reached for her and her body moved , kicking its claws in just the right way that they severed its own tail and lodged themselves in the car’s center console. Her legs then kicked up of their own volition once again, rolling her backwards into a handspring that ended with her perfectly threading the needle through the passenger window and landing outside the car in a fighting stance straight out of one of her favorite shows.
“Whoa,” Uzi murmured as she stared at her own hands in amazement, “and they said pirating all that anime was useless!”
It was then that she realized she’d left the railgun behind. And that she was very likely now dealing with at least two Murder Drones. No amount of downloaded combat skills would save her now.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.
So when that golden X rose from the shadows inside the car and the Murder Drone pulled itself through the window like an oversized spider, Uzi stood her ground. If she could get to the gun she could at least kill one of them.
‘And if I’ve got any kind of luck, maybe that’ll scare the other one off,’ Uzi thought with absolutely no confidence.
“Thank you for holding still,” the monster suddenly spoke as it slowly creeped forward, claws literally twitching in anticipation.
“Holy crap, it talks,” Uzi stared, dumbfounded by this new revelation.
“Yes, SHE does,” the larger drone hissed.
It was only then that Uzi noticed her rather… curvy chassis.
‘Why is she built like THAT?!’ Uzi mentally shrieked. Sure, being stupidly attractive fit with the whole vampire theme, but still.
As if sensing that her prey’s guard was down, the femme-bot pounced, claws splayed out for a full-body tackle. But somehow, some way, the Worker still managed to react in time, throwing herself down to slide right under the attack. The predator hissed in annoyance, halted her momentum by digging her claws into the frozen ground and lashed out with her tail to trip the drone up.
But once again Uzi’s body responded on its own, tucking and rolling, then leaping through the car window. And in the scant second it took for the Murder Drone to close the gap and rip the car door off its hinges, it was met with the terrifying glow of a fully-charged railgun.
“Bite m-!” unlike in her fantasies and just about every movie she’d ever seen, the bad guy had no respect for catchphrases. Before she could even put her finger on the trigger, the Murder Drone’s claws wrapped around the barrel and yanked the thing right out of her hands, throwing the weapon behind itself without even pausing to admire it.
“You tried,” the predator let out another unhinged giggle as it moved in for the kill, only to be stopped dead in her tracks by the stack of cars shuddering as something came down on top of it, the bottom one actually caving in a little from the force of the landing.
Uzi froze, hoping against all evidence to the contrary that this was the most detailed and horrific nightmare she’d ever had. But the weird thing was that the Murder Drone reacted in the same way. The X disappeared from her visor, replaced by hollowed eyelights, and her claws retracted into her forearms to be replaced by normal hands. She backed up slightly and ever so slowly looked up at what Uzi could only assume was her fellow oilsucker.
“I…I’m s-sorry, it’s just…” Uzi couldn’t believe her audials. Was the Murder Drone stuttering? “We c-can’t find anything…It’s been four days and we’re running low,” the femme-bot pleaded, her voice getting more desperate with every word. “Just this one. Just one Worker. Please, En-” she was interrupted by a deep, rumbling growl that caused the entire stack to vibrate and her to physically flinch. “I-I’m sorry! If I had ANY other choice I wouldn’t be h-!” she was once again interrupted, this time by the bodies of two long-dead but mostly intact Workers landing in the snow at her pointy feet.
The Murder Drone looked back and forth between the bodies and whatever was up there a couple times, then took one last look at Uzi before snatching up the bodies and launching herself into the air.
Uzi blinked owlishly, her processors nearly overclocking in an attempt to make sense of what she had just witnessed. But at least she was only dealing with one Murder Drone again.
‘One that apparently scares the bolts out of the other ones, so is that really any better?’ she thought with a grimace. The answer seemed to be a resounding “No” when the metal around her started to groan, the stack’s weight shifting as the thing up top moved around.
She spotted her railgun where the femme-bot had tossed it, thankfully unbroken. But she would have to cross about twenty meters of open ground to get it, so it might as well have been on the moon.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” an exceedingly dry male voice suddenly spoke from directly behind her .
“O-Oh course you wouldn’t,” Uzi replied, her voice so high and shaky that it didn’t even sound like her anymore, “but being a r-rebel is kinda my thing, so…” she tried to move, but before she could budge even a millimeter a firm pressure appeared on top of her head and three claws slammed down in front of her screen like prison bars.
“Your ‘thing’ almost got you killed, so maybe it’s not something to brag about?” the voice drawled.
“My ‘thing’ almost got your friend ki-!” Uzi’s words died in her throat when the pressure on her head increased just slightly. ‘Curse my need to get the last word in!’
“...Not my friend,” the voice grunted, “but that’s what I mean. I bet your ‘thing’ made you drop that one-liner instead of just shooting.”
“O-Oh, you, uh, you heard that?”
“Strange logic, saying ‘bite me’ to something literally designed to eat you.”
“That was the point; it was ironic!” Uzi pouted.
“Sounded like tempting fate to me,” she got the distinct impression the owner of the voice shrugged.
“Oh, bite me!” the Worker went default aggressive, momentarily forgetting who/what she was talking to.
She was quickly reminded when her vision was suddenly filled with a neon X and a maw full of razor-sharp teeth snapped shut right in front of her face.
“Careful,” the Murder Drone purred, looming over her through the window, “I might consider that an invitation and take you up on it.”
‘...The inability to piss yourself is a weird thing to be thankful for, but I am,’ Uzi gulped nervously, trying her best to stop the full-body shakes rattling her chassis.
The X on the vamp-bot’s screen disappeared, replaced by two golden eyes currently giving her a deadpan stare that gave her teacher a run for his money.
“I should probably let you take that home as a lesson, but…wanna fix that hand before you lose it?” the male drone said, nodding towards the girl’s still-melting right hand.
“...How did I forget about that? Ow, ow, OW! Why does it only hurt now that I’m looking at it?!”
“Adrenaline’s a hell of a program,” the male drone sounded like he was stifling a laugh, but he was hard to read even for someone who wasn't socially inept(by choice of course).
“How do we fix it?” Uzi asked, silently patting herself on the back for staying relatively calm in the face of the exact thing that had taken her mother.
“Our saliva switches the nanites to repair mode,” the Murder Drone replied. “But they’ve been disassembling you for a while now, so you’ll need a bigger dose.”
“Meaning…?”
“I could spend a minute or two drooling into a cup so you can dunk your hand in it, or…”
“Or…?”
The killer grinned and opened his mouth wide, fangs wet and gleaming in the neon purple of her hollowed eyelights. He had just started to chuckle when a hand jammed itself into the back of his throat and he closed his mouth around it on reflex.
Uzi hadn’t meant to do that. Those steel-shredding fangs triggered something that caused her to ball up her fist and let it fly, and she was sure she was about to lose said fist. With the rest of her appendages soon to follow. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the inevitable. A second passed. Then another, and another, and aside from the initial sting of his teeth closing on her wrist, nothing happened.
Y’know, aside from the indescribably gross feeling of someone’s tongue on her hand.
She opened her eyes and was met with the sight of someone hoist by their own petard.
“...You were just messing with me and I called your bluff, didn’t I?”
“Mm-hm,” the Murder Drone grumbled with a slight nod.
“Huh…Well, uh…Name’s Uzi, what’s yours?” She thought about just letting it go, but quickly decided that the last thing she wanted right now was silence. If there was ever a time for a distraction, it was now.
The Murder Drone rolled its eyes, but answered anyway, “Serial Designation N. Nice to meet you.”
“...You are weirdly good at talking with your mouth full,” Uzi observed, only to be met with an even deeper deadpan and the feeling of teeth closing around her wrist again. “Okay, okay, should’ve kept that to myself, sorry!”
The death-bot watched her with narrowed eyes until a soft “ding”, not unlike an oven timer, sounded from his head and he spat out her hand.
True to his word, it was good as new. Slimy and attached to memories that were going straight into a hidden and heavily-encrypted folder, but good as new.
“Have fun repressing that,” N said, as if reading her mind, and disappeared from her sight. “Now run along before this somehow gets weirder.”
That was a fantastic, amazing, supremely logical idea. Far better than any possible alternative. So of course Uzi took a moment to weigh her options and decided to try her luck.
“I-”
She was cut off by the sound of N smacking his lips.
“Y’know, on second thought, your oil is pretty tasty! So if you wanna stick around~”
By the time Uzi got back to her room she was still in a daze. As the door shut behind her she stared at her pristine right hand, then proceeded to smack herself in the face with it. Hard. For the fifth time since she’d been allowed to walk away from the place that by all rights should have been her tomb.
And just like the last four times, it hurt. A lot.
“This isn’t a dream,” she muttered, rubbing her cheek. "I really did fight a Murder Drone, talk to another one and still made it back alive…" a grin slowly stretched across her face. “Sounds like I just passed the Main Character test!"
Uzi spent the rest of the night giggling to herself as she thought of all the opportunities that were now actual possibilities instead of pipe dreams. Because after all, what kind of main character would she be if she didn’t work her plot armor like a jaded retail employee with no other prospects?