Leviathan Rising: A "Murder Drones" fanfic

Chapter 4: You Can Never Go Home Again

Uzi 2.0 trudged along the ground, until she came within site of the workers' hive city. The massive doors were closed, but that didn't alarm her; it was night, and this was standard operating procedure to fend off the Murder Drones. Of which I am now one, she said to herself, then banished the thought as fast as she could. No, she was not a Murder Drone, especially since all she needed was a little oil. As long as she got that, she'd be okay. No murdering for her.

And daddy could surely give her a better weapon or something-maybe repair her laser which the Murder Drones had disabled. Then she could go right back, and this time make no mistakes: she'd bring daddy the head of the thrall, this time, for sure.

So she walked up to the great doors and rang for admittance. "Yes?" said a familiar voice. "Who is this?"

Her oil pump heart leaped. "Daddy! It's me, Uzi! Let me in!"

"What-Uzi? You're back?"

She was crying now, LED tears running down her face. Everything would be alright now. He'd let her in and fix everything.

"Did you succeed? You remember, I needed you to bring me the zombie's head. I wanted to run some tests on it, maybe see what caused the problem."

"It…er…not exactly."

There was a pause. "'Not exactly'? What do you mean, 'not exactly'?" I mean, you either did or you didn't."

"It…they, uh, sorta tricked me, daddy. I…didn't get the monster's head."

There was a long pause, and she began to get very uncomfortable. Then, "Oh, daughter. That's…very unfortunate news."

"I know, daddy, and I'm sorry. I'll do better this next time around, I promise! But, but could I get a better weapon, maybe one of those proton beam cannons I've heard you talk about?"

"Daughter…listen to me. I…really wish I didn't have to tell you this, but I do.

"I can't let you in. There's been things happening since you left, the Board of Directors has undergone a policy shift. They want the city to become totally self-sufficient, with every hand working. Even your fellow students at school have been forced to take jobs after school. Population growth has been cut to as close to zero as possible. Everyone must be counted and everyone must be productive.

"Had you brought back the head, I could have presented it to the Board and said, 'hey, look! My daughter did this! She's productive and useful!' But that didn't exactly happen, did it?

"Surely you can see the train of logic that would run through their minds. Not only a Murder Drone-and that's reason enough for many of them to hate you, all by itself-but a failed Murder Drone. I can't think of any positive spin I could put on that."

Uzi thought the world would fall out from underneath her. In a sense, it already had. "You-you can't let me in?"

"I'm sorry, darling, I just can't. But look: go back and try again. If you can just bring me that head, I can work with that.

"But otherwise…"

"But, but…! They disabled my laser!" She looked around nervously. It would be morning soon.

"Maybe you can find something out by the corpse wall. Or, barring that, use your other inbuilts. That drone that used to be you doesn't have any of those things, so you're still head and shoulders above it. And you'll have to go out that way, anyway, to get some oil. I'm sorry, but you wouldn't believe the restrictions they've put on the oil supply in here.

"So just run along out that way and do your best, okay? Bring me that head, something I can present to the Board, and I'll see what I can do, okay?

"Go on now. You don't need to stick around." And there was the peculiar click and cessation of sound that signified the termination of an electronic conversation.

Uzi couldn't believe what she'd heard. Was that really daddy? But…it had certainly sounded like him, and, after all, who had access to the master controls for the doors? Only him. Any call regarding the doors had to go through him, and him alone. So it…couldn't have been anybody else.

He'd turned her away.

She turned and headed back the way she'd come, towards the pod graveyard, and the corpse wall. She didn't have long; morning, the deadly light of the sun, would be reaching over the horizon shortly.

…

Suzi had taken her rifle and gone for a walk. In truth, she doubted she'd need the gun, but what the human Vespa had said had rung a bell: better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

They'd already determined that there were no other disassembly drones, why, exactly, nobody knew. It would have been typical for the Company to send wave after wave of them to exterminate the worker drones…and then die themselves from oil deprivation. According to the two humans, that was pretty much the way the Company felt about all drones. So shouldn't they have launched some more before the destruction of Hudor?

And the disassembly drones weren't good for anything but destroying worker drones. They wouldn't last long enough to do anything useful.

Humans, thought Suzi. They deserved extinction themselves.

Well, except for Mark Vespa and Cheryl Serniglia. They were okay. But all the others…she imagined drawing a finger across her throat.

The sound of sobbing took her completely by surprise.

Without even thinking about it, she whipped out her gun, priming it in one smooth, practiced move. She'd only get one shot before it would need recharging, so that one shot would have to be good. Now. She looked around. Who was out here crying?

There. Over by the corpse wall…there was a shaded area. Uh oh. "Shaded areas" = "disassembly drones," in her personal book, and she knew of only one other disassembly drone who might be out here, crying. "Uzi?" It felt weird to say her own name. "Uzi? Is that you?"

Suddenly, a figure boiled over the rocks by the trailway, heading directly for her. It slashed at her with a blade extending from its left hand, swiping away her gun. "Kill you," it muttered, even while it sobbed. "Kill you dead."

Suzi dodged, and brought up a large piece of rock just in time to block the other's killblade, but the blade sliced through it. She rolled, jumping for her gun-and the sunlit area just outside of the other's reach.

Just as it looked like she was about to commit to a run for her gun, she rolled, and Uzi slid past her. Suzi brought up a fist-sized rock and slammed it into the frenzied disassembly drone's head, once, twice, three times.

Uzi rolled away, holding her head, sobbing all the more. Her blade retracted, then slid back out, and Suzi realized she was seeing a reflex in action. She managed to reach her gun, which by this time had fully charged, and pointed it at the other-and realized something odd.

Uzi 2.0 was sitting, kneeling, in the middle of a sunshine-lit trail, holding her head. Her eye LEDs were slightly out of focus, and she was beginning to smoke around her joints. While Suzi had never really been briefed on or seen this sort of thing in action, she realized she was seeing a disassembly drone in the process of overheating, such as happened to them in sunlight. Their internal engines were of such high performance that even a little additional heat could be fatal.

If something didn't happen soon, Uzi would be dead.

What to do? She, herself, was in the shade. If she put the rifle up or took it off Uzi for even a moment, she could be extremely dead the next. "Uzi! Get over here! You're burning up!"

"Leave me alone! Go away!" More sobbing, and Suzi had an epiphany.

"Let me guess," she said, lowering the rifle slightly, yet never taking it off the killer drone, "He wouldn't let you back in, would he?"

"How-how did you-*" By now, she was exuding great clouds of black smoke from every joint.

Suzi sighed. I am so gonna regret this but oh well. She sheathed her rifle and walked out into the deadly rays of the sun, and gripped Uzi by the collar, dragging the larger drone into the shade. Uzi protested, her joints squeaking and grinding. "No! Just go away! Let me alone! Or, or shoot me with that gun, I don't care anymore!

"Just…let me…go…" And with that, consciousness left her.

…

The pod: the two humans and two drones were completely surprised to see Suzi reentering the pod after such a short walk, but not half as surprised to see who she was dragging. "Hey, everybody. Look what I found."

Uzi moaned slightly. She was still smoking. "Quick," said Cheryl, "Bring her up here," referring to the part of the pod they'd come to think of as "medical repair." She broke out some tools and probes while the others watched. Mark readied some more oil; she'd certainly need it.

She certainly did. Cheryl grimaced as her fiber-optic probes scanned Uzi's interior: black, encrusted oil was everywhere, and there were scorch marks on some important working parts of her interior. "What was she doing, out in the sun or something?"

"Exactly," replied Suzi, "And probably went a long time without oil, too." She told them her suspicions. "That's the only reason I can think of for her to be back here, so, well, so unprepared. Her laser's still non-functional, and she certainly had no oil rations."

"I see," said Mark, in a dry, flat tone that none of them had ever heard him use before. "Well, we'll just have to see about fixing her up." He went over to the medical cabinet. Cheryl watched him with concern. She'd heard him use that tone of voice before.

Exactly once.

"Cher, you're better at these sorts of things than I am. Would you?"

Dr. Cheryl Serniglia, late of the megacorporation called J. C. Jensen in SpaaaAAAaaace! cracked her knuckles. "You know it, Mark."

Hours later: N, V, and Suzi were still watching the procedure, but they were held up only by their mechanical resistance to fatigue. Drs. Serniglia and Vespa, however, were running on sheer mission-power.

First, they had to restore enough oil to Uzi to assist her in basic functioning. Not too much; they'd have to give her more later, and giving her too much now would be wasteful. So, a touch here, a dollop there…

They'd managed to find some deep-reaching nanofiber brushes, polishers and were using those to sweep away the detritus from within her. They had to wear masks during the whole procedure, largely to keep the rust-dust from getting into their lungs, even though the tools they were using came equipped with vacuum devices to minimize this. "Minimization" did not mean elimination.

Repair, polish, lube, repair, polish, lube, repair, polish, lube…

Each joint, each moving part, had to be tested, scanned for severe burn / scorch marks. If any were found (and there were several), they could, in the worst cases, be replaced, or, in milder cases, polished down a bit. This was, needless to say, an extremely delicate procedure.

Also extremely intimate. N had a hard time watching, as did Suzi. Vickie assisted the humans in the operation and didn't seem bothered by it.

Finally, Cheryl pronounced Uzi to be as repaired as they could get her. "If we had a full-scale repair shop, I could maybe do better, but as it is…" She trailed off. The others saw what she meant. The only "full scale repair shops" currently in the solar system were now part of the drifting slag that was once Hudor. "Now," she said, "To fill up her tank."

V and N worked together to get Uzi positioned just so, and Mark started the oil drip. They'd made sure she had no obstructions, and just let the oil pump freely into her, keeping her monitored, of course, in case there were roadblocks along the way. But Cheryl had done good work, and soon the monitors around the room were showing Uzi's primary systems coming online, and her internal temperatures stabilizing. The others could see the damage Suzi had inflicted on her with the rock, outside, repairing itself as Uzi's healing nanites came back online. "You swing a mean rock," joked N, to Suzi, "Remind me never to get on your bad side."

"I only swing a mean rock on people who're trying to kill me. Just don' ever go there, an' we'll be fine." She leaned her head against his arm.

V turned her head away to hide her expression.

….

Uzi woke slowly. Everything about her hurt but not as much as she'd thought it would. The last thing she remembered: fighting the thrall outside, and…?

The sun had been so bright. Had she been out in the sun? But… She knew disassembly drones couldn't get out in the sun, they overheated and died. But what else…?

"Thirsty?" That thrall, the one she'd been sent out to kill. "I brought you some oil." She was carrying a cup emblazoned with the older J. C. Jensen in SpaaaAAAaaace! markings on the side.

"NO!" Uzi tried, weakly, to scoot away from Suzi. "Keep that stuff away from me!"

"OH FOR-* NOW LOOK;" Suzi, hotly, "I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF YOU! WE DO EVERYTHING TO HELP YOU, TO KEEP YOU COMFORTABLE EVEN, AND THIS IS HOW YOU ACT? FYI, 'Uzi,' WE'VE BEEN GIVING YOU THIS SAME STUFF EVER SINCE I DRAGGED YOUR CHASSIS IN HERE! YOU SEEMED QUITE CONTENT TO SIT OUT THERE IN THE SUN AND FRY! MAYBE I SHOULD'A LET YOU?"

Uzi looked at her curiously. "You saved me?"

"Who else? You were trying to separate my head from my shoulders out there. I had issues with that."

Uzi was looking up, seeing, for the first time, the tubing connection that led to the input port on her arm. "But…but won't this…won't this make me…like you?"

"What, you mean short, hot, and awesome?" Suzi strutted just a little, theatrically. "No way. The universe has all the me's it needs."

Uzi actually giggled slightly. How could this…this thing be so much like a real person?

Will I be like that two years from now? A horrible suspicion was beginning to burble up from the dark recesses of her mind. She firmly shoved it back down. Still strapped down on the gurney, she turned her head away from Suzi. "Well, anyway. Now what? You let me go last time. Guess I killed any chance of that happening again, huh?"

"That depends. We're convening a meeting over it now."

"Can…can I come?"

Shrug. "Don't see any reason why not."

Shortly, Uzi found herself, bound, of course, seated with the others around the conference table. She didn't really care about the meeting or what the others decided, actually; it was just something to do. They'd probably kill her, well, okay. Maybe she'd at least get some…peace.

Maybe she'd quit remembering that daddy had turned her away.

"Uzi?" She jumped. The human Vespa had addressed her. "I understand you've…had a bad experience."

LED tears were running down Uzi's face. "I guess you could say that."

Mark Vespa thought for a minute, then got out of his chair and went around to her side of the table. Pulled a nearby chair over closer to her, locked it magnetically to the floor. He put his arm around her. She looked surprised. "Uzi? You know what this means, don't you?"

"It, it means…it means I'm a failure," she whispered, looking down at the floor. She found herself leaning, quite unconsciously, on his shoulder.

"No. It means you're not an assassinbot. It means someone tried to make you into something you aren't. If you can't hammer a nail in with a wrench, that doesn't mean the wrench is a failure. Only that it's not a hammer.

"So tell me: who's really made the mistake here? Hm?"

To be continued…