Leviathan Rising: A "Murder Drones" fanfic

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Chapter 2: Reflections of Evil

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Uzi 2.0's cutting laser struck Suzi squarely in the chest. Such was its force that Suzi was knocked backward, as if from a kinetic energy particle beam.

Suddenly, the rock Uzi had placed over her head, as a roof for her hiding place was ripped away. Uzi whipped around, to bring her laser to bear, but before she could even complete the turn, she felt something wrap around her, tightening up, pulling her arms and legs into a near-fetal position. Shit! Tangler net!

N and V dropped down. N grabbed Uzi's arm, the one the laser was extruding from, and kept her from aiming it at anything other than the open sky, while V darted around her and slapped something onto her back.

Instantly, Uzi felt her strength fade away, and her inbuilt weapon systems powering down. The tangler net tightened still further, preventing her from moving at all. She could barely move her head.

The two disassembly drones knelt over her. "Nathan…what the hell? " For some reason, the female looked slightly sick. What was their damage quotient anyway?

But it didn't matter, thought Uzi 2.0. She'd gotten in that all-important one good shot; the Abomination was dead. Now these Murder Drones would no doubt drain her oil, but that was okay. She'd managed to do what daddy wanted her to do. Whatever happened to her from here on out was unimpor-*

Out of the corner of her vision, she saw the corpse of the Abomination suddenly sit up. "Dammit, that hurt. " It got up.

"Uh, Suzi?" Without looking away, one of the Murder Drones, the male, addressed the thrall, which was standing up…

Oh, no. Not…the thing must have been so dead already that it couldn't be killed. But…but it still should've been cut in two…

"C'n I take this stuff off now?" The walking corpse reached up and pulled something off its chest, some sort of clear substance that made a crackling sound as it was pulled. "It itches."

"Suzi…you might not wanna see this."

"See what? What're you-?" Uzi heard the thrall, now standing over her, gasp.

For her part, Suzi had moved close enough to see who / what had taken a shot at her. It was a disassembly drone, obviously, or…at least, it seemed at first to be, but…

…but the head, and the face, was identical to her own. It was even wearing one of her caps.

…

Later: Suzi sat at the conference table inside the pod, holding her head in her hands. She didn't remember getting in there on her own. She had a vague, cloud-memory of Nathan carrying her. "Suzi?" Cheryl pulled up a chair beside her. Such was Suzi's distress that she didn't even notice, didn't hear her name. At first. "Suzi? I guess I can skip the 'Are you alright?' question, can't I?"

"Yeah, doc, I think it's a given right now that I'm not." It hadn't taken a PHD in advanced rocket science to figure out what had happened, that had led up to this point. "I mean, I knew he didn't love me, Cheryl, but this…!" And Cheryl Serniglia could see what she meant.

The disassembly drone (which insisted on being called "Uzi") had been cached in one of the empty rooms until they could figure things out. She'd ardently resisted any questioning, giving no replies to anything except her name and purpose, the latter of which was reasonably self-evident. In-between, behind, and around those statements she set the all the bulkheads of the pod to ringing with continuous declarations about not becoming a monster, and they should either kill her or let her go, one of the two, she didn't care.

"Horrified" wasn't too strong a term for what the drones-all of them-had felt upon looking at her. For Suzi, there was the simple skin-crawling fact that the creature was wearing her face. There was absolutely no frikkin' way that could possibly be accidental. And for N and V…while neither of them had been all that close to the now-dead disassembler known as "J," they could nonetheless see certain parts about the creature that were familiar in a sickening sort of way: a left leg and a right leg.

Even though she'd tried to kill him, N found himself fervently hoping that J had already been dead when those organs had been harvested.

V had once referred to the humans' megacorporation, "J. C. Jensen in SpaaaAAAaaace!"'s decision to eradicate the worker drones as part of something she'd called "the Frankenstein Syndrome," referring to an old book from Earth about a mad scientist who'd fashioned a living humanoid from moldering parts of dead bodies. She'd had no way of knowing, at the time, that, somewhere on Copper 9, someone had been literally doing just exactly that.

And that had been a horror story. Now it seemed life had imitated art.

Suzi stirred. "Good idea," she said, "covering me with that laser-resistant lacquer like that."

"Yeah. It eventually wears off the inside of the fusion exhaust tubes, and we have to replace it, so every ship carries a good supply of it. After all, a space ship without a drive is called a 'rock,' and usually isn't good for much. Except holding Mark's undone paperwork down, that is. Though I would usually look for something heavier." She tried for a light-hearted tone, but Suzi didn't even hear it. But she saw what Suzi was trying to do: distract herself from thinking too much about recent events. She couldn't blame her.

Regardless of how she'd felt about him, her father had basically designed and built what, to other worker drones, was considered a monster, endowed it with her face and mind, and sent it forth to kill the original her. And she wondered: could he possibly have made that experience worse for Suzi / Uzi? Seriously. Was there some way?

How he must hate her.

Why?

"How's she doing?" N-Nathan, she reminded herself-had come up to her other side, concern bright on his facial LEDs.

"In a word, crappy," said Suzi, before Cheryl could reply.

"N?" said Cheryl, momentarily forgetting his human name. "You mind staying here with Suzi? I need to run some tests on our…guest, upstairs." I hope I'm wrong, but I bet I'm not.

"Sure, doc."

…

The upper chamber: "You keep back! I'm not giving you anything, and I'm not saying anything!" Uzi kept on struggling against the ties.

Cheryl was undeterred. She had V and Mark standing by. "I have to do this, er, Uzi. You are, after all, a disassembly drone now, and you'll need oil soon. I have to know what kind. Twenty weight? Thirty? Synthetic? Extra Virgin Olive?" She paused, looking at the trapped creature in the chair, who stared at the wall. "Do you even know?" Uzi remained silent. It must've been a really interesting wall. "C'mon. No matter what you believe, we sincerely are trying to help you here. All I need's a little of your oil to see. That's all."

"I won't be turned into a monster!"

"Right, no monsterization. Got that, V? Check. Now, c'mon. V?"

Shortly, in the pod's small laboratory: "That…bastard. " Unsatisfied, she hit a button, brought up a virtual board, typed in command, hit "Enter." Immediately, words began to scroll down her screen:

Arse.

Git. ...

Bugger. ...

Sod. ...

Bloody. ...

Crap. ...

Damn.

None of those were nearly strong enough. Maybe I can find some more, some better ones once I've had time to devote myself to it.

"What is it?" asked Mark. Then he saw the screen. "Cheryl! I had no idea your vocabulary was that impressive!" V, N, and Suzi stood with them, with the scanner in front focused on the sample, the display showing its magnified image. They looked at each other. Nathan shrugged. Humans.

"Believe me, it wasn't nearly impressive enough. Hence the search. Here." She directed his attention to the scanners.

"Take a look. That's oil, yeah. But that …" she pointed to other…objects floating on the screen, "...is not. "

He squinted to get a closer look. "Hm. They're not nanites. I've never seen anything like 'em."

"Me, neither. But look how they're interacting with the oil molecules. See? They're bonding with them, altering their chemical function. While I can't be sure without more tests, it looks like they're involved with sending and receiving signals, I guess you could say, between her mechanoneurotransmitters."

He looked at her in surprise. "You're kidding."

"There's lots of things I'd kid about, Mark, but that isn't one of them. Somebody-three guesses who-has essentially drugged her, pumped her full of some sort of what is, for her, a psychoactive agent." She stopped, shaking her head, leaning back in her chair. "I don't know what state she'll be in when this last batch wears off, but I wouldn't want to be her when they do. I doubt we'll be able to synthesize any of these things in time."

"You're likening these to human psychoactives. What happens to humans when they run out?"

"Sometimes nothing much. Sometimes…well, it depends. Depression can be a result. Chronic pain, anxiety, sleep disorders, schizophrenia, hyperactivity, appetite issues, and dementia." At his look of alarm, she hastened to add, "Mind you, these are just potential side effects. I don't know if there's a perfect point to point analogy here, but, in humans, the most common symptoms-such as depression-usually pass between twenty-four to seventy-two standard hours. But for her, too much is unknown. It could still be a pretty miserable time, for her.

"What burns me up is, the bastard was probably using that to, to program her, in a way. Condition her, at least. He gives it to her, probably in her oil, her superefficient circulatory system reroutes it superfast, and whaddaya know: she gets a rush. She feels great. For a little while. During that time, they talk, share, maybe give her the idea of being, y'know, a family. So…he conditions her to see being in his presence as the happiest time of her life. Naturally, she'll do anything he tells her to do. 'Specially, if any of these chems act in ways analogous to dopamine in humans. That's involved with motivation.

"The problem I'm seeing is that she's not a human being. V, N, I don't mean this in any demeaning way, but she-just like the both of you-are built differently from humans. Similar in many respects, yeah, but different in several crucial ones. In a human, this might be a minor thing that'd go away in a couple of days. But those chemicals are bonding straight to the oil." She turned and looked at them. "I can't swear that just giving her oil is gonna really help anything. It…it might not. In fact, it probably won't.

"If this is the way she's been all this time, given this, this spiked oil all this time, her body may have adapted to it so much that without those chems, she won't get the necessary chemicals for proper brain function routed to the correct areas of the brain. And without that…

"Things could easily go from bad to worse.

"Without those additives, whatever they are, she could be dying, right before our eyes, and there wouldn't be anything we could do about it."

"And, for all I know, that could be deliberate. Like the disassembler drones' auto-kill switch…if she doesn't fulfill her purpose by a certain time, away goes the chems, here comes, well…you get the picture."

"Hey!" said Suzi's voice from the second level. N and V looked at each other. Neither of them had seen the short worker drone leave. "Everybody! Up here!

"Something's wrong with her!"

To be continued...