Chapter 2 Misappropriated Assets
After fucking around in space for a millennium, humanity wasn't the only species out there anymore. None of them were aliens though, just machines they'd built along the way.
At least some of those machines were known as Jenson model Worker Drones. A type of humanoid android, just a few inches above four feet tall, and manufactured by a corporation known as JCJenson (IN SPAAAAACEE!).
The base model were all identical. A vaguely spherical white upper core and white cylindrical hip section separated by a black load-bearing artificial muscle that comprised their stomach area. Their limbs were all silver metal moveable conduit, with white four-fingered hands, and feet usually hidden by working boots. The head was overly large but not unsettlingly so, and also divided; with the lower section being a white mouth with a single, unbroken, blade like tooth for upper and lower jaws, with lips that could either be so small as to be imperceivable, or stretched into an ear-to-ear smile. The upper portion of the head was a black visor which hid the optical cameras, but did display false glowing eyes that allowed the drone to express a variety of emotions by changing the shape of their eyes or displaying status messages or error messages.
It was definitely a design-by-committee approach to making a robot appear as human as possible while still obviously being a robot, and never truly crossing anywhere close to the uncanny-valley. To that extent, the droids could be called cute, as though they were large dolls.
In their standard, corporate approved configuration, the Worker Drones were genderless, and wore clothing consisting of a hard-hat and some other job-appropriate apparel. For the drones of the exoplanet Copper IX, that had been orange work vest.
Unfortunately, the humans had mishandled a large fusion core on Copper IX and caused it to implode with catastrophic results. The resulting endothermic reaction destroyed all biological life on the planet, and left the humans as little more than frozen-upright skeletons. With nothing better to do, the Worker Drones committed the most peaceful rebellion in known history, going rogue to create their own society.
The first-generation drones, that is all the robots manufactured by humans, began to personalize themselves, though for their case that was limited to making a binary decision on gender identity, changing the color of their eyes and jackets, wearing wigs for the "female" drones, possibly adding facial hair for the "male" drones, or even arbitrarily worsening their vision optimization in order to wear glasses.
The second-generation drones, drones built by other drones, had a slightly more interesting development cycle. The first gen drones decided it would be fun to build the second generation intermittently, starting them as untrained neural-networks shaped as large eggs, and progressively adding their components over the course of several years, giving them a pseudo-childhood. After choosing an identity to match their parent given name, the second gen drones were much more open about their personalization, choosing more exotic colors or designs for themselves.
Uzi was one of these second-generation drones. With her personality core set roughly to eighteen human years old and with the emotional maturity of an "angsty-rebellious teen", she choose to wear a black hoodie and black striped beanie, whilst wearing a short cut, dark purple wig and having her eye's RGB setting on neon purple. As far as she could tell, she was the first drone of her species with enough introspection to recognize them for what they were. The entirety of her species of artificial life form could be summarized into three words: Cowardly. Expendable. Stupid.
She knew this, because for more than a decade, her species had been hunted with genocidal intent by another JCJenson product. They were apparently called Disassembly Drones, but her people had another name for them: Murder Drones.
A full foot taller, the Murder Drones only had three things physically different about them to set them apart from Worker models, other than their yellow eyes and height difference. Their limbs were segmented like a human, with a hard white metal separated at the shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, and knees; unlike the dozen or so segments of a Worker's limb. They had a second set of five glowing yellow eyes mounted above their head along a headband like structure. Lastly, they had a ten-foot-long tail, tipped with a syringe filled with Nanite acid. (Unrelated but notable, the female Murder Drones had peglegs and wide hips.)
However, to assist in their objective of genocide against Uzi's colony of rogue drones, the Murder Drones had other tools and motivations. They were armed with a variety of deadly blades and weapons that could be stored in their forearms. They had a set of retractable bladed wings with a twenty-five-foot span. And they had an insatiable appetite for the inner components and oil that filled a Worker Drone.
So, essentially, robot vampires. The three Murder Drones that plagued her colony had even taken to piling the corpses of their victims into a skyscraper spire in the center of the nearby city, likely for dramatic effect.
And what had been her people's response? Build three large doors and hide in a bunker.
For herself, Uzi had plans, dangerous plans and desires. She had even built a magnetically amplified photon converter…a kind of plasma railgun, to possibly kill the Murder Drones. There was just one problem. Headshots didn't work.
Though, that had allowed her to learn more about her enemy, as the one she had shot in the head had been temporarily blinded and had part of it's short term memory wiped, allowing her to learn the names of her enemies. Such as N.
"Oh, hi Uzi!"
Which lead to the current predicament. After getting information out of N, she'd…lost track of time. Now, looking around her current surroundings, she didn't know where she was.
It looked like a cargo bay, drab and darkly lit, and filled to the brim with her people…and her enemy. All of them locked into contraptions that kept their legs and arms stretched, less like people, more like cargo.
"What…what's going on? N?" Uzi tentatively asked, somewhat fearfully.
N, the male Murder Drone, was the tallest of the three that they knew. He wore a black coat that extended down to his knees, and a pilot's hat on his short silver hair. Her people had another name for him though. The Stupid One, since a whole one-in-four of his victims managed to escape and survive, as opposed to one-in-twenty for the other two. Still, having talked to him recently after he had regrown his own head, he wasn't a terrible person. It even seemed he was disrespected amongst his own kind.
"Haha, tell you the truth, I don't know either. I'm kind of terrified." N laughed as he answered. It seemed to be how he handled stress.
"N, stop talking to the enemy." One of the female Murder Drones growled. J. She was the shortest of the three, wearing a short business suit and skirt, with her silver hair parted between two pigtails. Besides the yellow armband all Murder Drones wore on their left arm and caution tape at the end of their limbs, she had her shins painted in black, giving them the impression of knee-high stockings. Uzi's people called her The Mean One, because she had a tendency to go on long, meaningless tirades to demean her prey before killing them.
"S-Sorry J." N bowed his head.
The other Murder Drone in proximity was also…interesting. She was known as V, and she was currently trying to bite her own arms off and escape her confinement. She had neck length silver hair and was dressed in a black crop coat with a fur collar and had her legs painted to look like thigh-high stockings…but not much else.
Though since no drone possessed genitalia, no one ever questioned that most drones never wore pants or skirts when there was nothing to cover up. Clothing was more an accessory item and less about modesty.
V also had a nickname among the Worker Drones. The Crazy One, since she was often laughing maniacally while tearing them limb from limb.
"V, stop trying to bite your arms off. It's not going to work." J ordered.
"MmmMmmMmm!" V growled back.
Also within the cargo bay were several other drones that Uzi recognized, such as her classmates from high school…yes, a robot high school, as well as her father, Khan. Khan wore a set of red goggles on his hard hat and had a mustache glued to his face. Otherwise he had simple white eyes with simulated wrinkles to imply age and wore a blue work vest.
As much as she didn't want to associate with the Murder Drones, Uzi realized she would probably need their help to get out of their shared predicament. Looking up the side of their contraption, she noticed how their tails had been wrapped around the top with wire, not exactly free, but not secure either. Plus, on the side of N's contraption…
"N!" Uzi realized. "There's a control panel near your tail! If you can flip it you could get out!"
"Oh? Hmm. But I can't see it?" N complained, wiggling his tail randomly.
"Okay. I'll help you, but let me out too, okay?" Uzi reasoned.
"Alright. Seems like a good plan." He agreed.
"Uzi! Are you trying to help out the Murder Drones?! Stop this instant!" Khan shouted.
"Well I don't see you doing anything useful to escape!" Uzi argued. "Okay N! A bit more to your right…no, your other right!"
"Sorry, I'm kinda twisted up." N struggled, swinging his tail back and forth. "Oh, I hit something? Was that it?"
"Yes! Just push on that control a bit more!" Uzi encouraged.
With a bit of help, N managed to strike the release for his restraints, letting his hands and feet free.
"Whippe! I'm free!"
"Nice work, maybe you aren't so useless." J mockingly cheered. "Now come on over and help your squad out."
"N, let me out! You promised!" Uzi argued.
"N, don't let that toaster out." J ordered back,
"Oh…well…I did promise. Don't worry J, V, I'll get you guys too." N assured them. He then reached up and released Uzi.
"T-Thanks." Uzi hesitated. Murder Drones were very fast. Should he so choose, he could rend her apart in less than a second.
"Oh, you idiot N." J shook her head.
"Hey!" Uzi walked over to J, confronting the confined drone. "You know you don't have to be mean to him!"
"I'm not having this conversation with a barely sentient toaster." J turned her head away, trying to ignore her.
Uzi sighed. "Look, I don't like you guys much either, but we have no idea where we are-!"
"We're on a ship." V spoke up.
"We…what?"
"Yeah. There's a gentle rumble. It's a fusion drive on a one-G burn." V confirmed.
"Okay…well…we still have no idea where we are going or why we are going there! For all we know we've been repossessed by the company." Uzi argued with J. "So, are you really going to bother with all the murder if you don't even know if your orders are still valid?"
"…" A buffering circle appeared on the corner of J's visor, while her eyes went hollow with digital wrinkles. In this instance her expression meant she was unsettled but also thinking hard. "Fine…we won't wipe out your people until we get a better idea of what's going on and where we are going." J reluctantly agreed.
Uzi and N let V and J free, to which J immediately pushed Uzi to the ground.
"But…If I find out my original orders are still standing, then I'm killing you first." J purred.
"Bite me!" Uzi shouted back. "Now help me let everyone else out."
"Very well. It's not like they could escape since we're in a ship." J agreed. They released the first couple of Worker Drones in their proximity.
"Wow, Uzi, you got us out!" Thad, a green-eyed drone wearing a backwards baseball cap with a personality core set to "high-school jock", praised her. "Awesome."
"Cool. Thanks freak." Lizzy, a blonde, pink eyed drone wearing a red cheerleader outfit with a yellow bow on her helmet, with a personality core set to "popular girl", thanked sarcastically.
"Thanks…" Doll, a purple haired, red eyed drone also in a cheerleader outfit who exclusively spoke Russian, thanked meekly, averting her gaze. For whatever reason, Doll was almost always in some state of minor distress, with her eyes hollowed. As for her Russian, all the Drones had auto-translators for old-Earth languages, so she was never misunderstood.
"Uzi, you're working with the Murder Drones now?" Khan accused.
"Until we can figure out what's going on or where we are going. Why? What were you going to do, dad? Build a door across the room and forget they're trapped with us, too?" Uzi argued back, annoyed at her cowardly father.
"Right, that's enough for now." J dismissed. "Let's get to the bridge and see if we can question the crew."
"Okay." Uzi agreed. Opening the door out of the cargo hold, there was only a very short hallway leading to a tall ladder. "What…?"
"What? Never been on a spaceship before?" V gestured. "Hope you're ready for a long climb."
"Yeah…" N signed. "Ships are built like towers. It's supposed to make navigation easy during long burns."
"Eh, well I've never been to space, so lead the way." Uzi dismissed.
After several minutes of climbing, they found the bridge, hearing the sound of pleasant humming of some song they didn't know.
"Uh…hello?" Uzi called out.
"Hmm, what?" A new voice in a Texan accent answered back. "Who's there?"
Walking around the bridge of the ship, there was no one other than the four drones.
"Where are you?" N questioned.
"Oh, I'm over here." A black cylinder the size of a thermos popped up from a central console, before sinking back in. "KA-31, at your service."
"What…are you?" Uzi questioned.
"Why darling, I'm this ship's AI Core." KA-31 answered.
There were many other, more specialized AI that existed across the cosmos now. This tiny machine was one of them. Supposedly, there were even machine gods that existed, brilliant minds with computing power beyond comprehension. But those were only a myth. Supposedly.
"I take it y'all are my cargo?"
"Hey, where is this scrap bucket taking us?" J threatened, deploying a laser cannon from her arm.
"Aww darlin don't be like that." KA-31 whined. "I'm just a workin stiff here. And hey, don't call her no scrap bucket. This ship here is the Canterbury, on course to Rubicon III."
"Rubicon. That's a human colony, but my files are incomplete." J complained. "What happened, why were we taken off of Copper IX?"
"Well, fraid I can't answer that." KA-31 would have shrugged, except that he didn't have a humanoid body. "I was just contracted to do a job."
"C-Can you take us back?" Uzi begged.
"No can do little lady." KA-31 explained. "Burned up all my reaction mass inserting to the Rubicon system. Gonna have to touch down and refill. Less you got a hundred thousand tons of re-mass hidden under y'all skirts, we are already in Rubicon's grav-well, and we are goin down."
"Okay…who contracted you?" V decided to ask. "What is your cargo?"
"That would be…JCJenson, to transport two million drones from Copper IX to Rubicon III. I imagine it has something to do bout the war."
"Aha! See! It is under company orders so you can't kill us all!" Uzi yelled at J. "Wait…what war?"
"Ha!" KA-31 laughed. "Imagine y'all not knowing bout the war."
"…" Uzi, N, V, and J all looked at each other uncomfortably. They had no knowledge of any war.
"Oh…oh…You don't know." KA-31 realized. "Well, that's probably for the best. Especially considering it's been over for a while."
"Okay…what war?" J demanded, redeploying her laser cannon.
"Hey, now, unless you know how to land a kilometer long super-freighter ass first into an atmosphere, then quit it." KA-31 snapped back. "I don't want to talk bout it, alright?"
"Hey…no need to be mean, J." N pushed J's arm down. "So…how close are we to Rubicon?"
"We'll be hitting atmo in ten minutes. Six minutes after that we'll touch down." KA-31 answered.
"Umm…hello?" Khan had arrived on the bridge, getting their attention. "Uh, you guys need to see what's in the last cargo hold."
"Hmm? What's down there? Mr. KA?" Uzi questioned.
"Hell if I know. Not all of the cargo is drones, I know that though. I think that bay was used by Jenson for some random objects they took from the planet." KA-31 added.
"Okay, then back down the ladder!" N cheered, leading the now five drones to the last cargo hold.
There wasn't anything that immediately stood out to them in that cargo hold, not as Uzi, N, V, and J scouted out. But Uzi did notice a long box with an interesting marking.
"Oh…?" She hummed, tentatively opening it, only to find her sick as hell railgun she'd made back on Copper IX. "Oh sweet! Hahaha!" She cackled madly, then checked the recharge timer. While it's charge was full and ready to fire, the recharge would take…
Her face morphed from excitement to one of confused horror. But that amount of time…The decay rate…
She was distracted as the door to the cargo hold closed and locked behind them.
"Hey, what the heck!" Uzi shouted. "Dad?!"
"I'm…I'm sorry Uzi." Khan bowed his head on the other side of the door. "But we can't trust those Murder Drones to keep their word."
"You freaking traitor!" V accused.
"Dad, what the heck are you doing?" Uzi shivered. As she watched, her dad accessed the "purge cargo" controls near the door.
"I'm sorry…but if I have to choose between you and our people…well." Khan frowned as he hit the release. "Goodbye Uzi."
"Dad! No Dad! No!" Uzi screamed as their cargo hold was ejected from the ship, tumbling against the upper atmosphere of Rubicon.
N, V, and J screamed in confusion while Uzi just shivered, betrayed and terrified.
"Well…I didn't see that coming." KA-31 called from the radio, his voice emanating from the control panel of the cargo hold. "Just damn."
"KA?" Uzi called out.
"Yeah. That was a dick move. If I had known what he was doin I would have warned y'all. Mostly because I don't like people ejecting parts of my ship without my permission. Really messes with my reentry calculations. But anyway that's not what I'm calling bout."
"What is it!?" V screamed back, tumbling against the walls of the cargo hold.
"That hold has airbrakes, retro-thrusters, and a parachute." KA-31 explained. "If y'all can access this panel, you can deploy them and not burn up and die."
Uzi tried reaching out for the panel, but couldn't as the hold kept tumbling through the air. "I can't reach it!"
"Well, y'all better figure somthin. I'm counting three minutes before you burn up in the atmo."
It took Uzi just another few seconds to come up with a plan. Reaching out, she grabbed N, holding onto his chest.
"N! Deploy your wings!"
"What?!"
"Just do it!" Uzi screamed back. "Get them lodged into the sides of the hold!"
"Okay!" N opened his wings, stabbing the blades at the tips into the sides of the cargo hold.
Forcing her feet against the side of the hold with N as an anchor, she was still just too far from the panel.
"Okay, V! J! You idiots too! Open your wings into the side of the hold and pin yourselves! Then give me your tails! I'll use them to pull myself closer to the control panel!"
"Fine!" V shouted back, lodging herself into one corner.
"Don't tell me what to do!" J screamed back, but did as she was told.
Tying N's tail around her waist, Uzi reached out and did the same with J's tail. Then she grabbed the end of V's tail and pulled herself over to the panel.
"Hey! Careful idiot!" V yelled at her.
"Okay! I'm at the panel!" Uzi cheered. "Opening Airbrakes!"
The hold stopped tumbling against the upper atmosphere, settling with it's bottom facing the rapidly approaching ground.
"Activating retro-thrusters!"
There was a loud hiss as emergency rocket motors burned their mass, slowing the cargo hold to a speed that wouldn't burn them up.
"Deploying parachute!"
Lastly there was a bang, then a clunk, followed by a whole lot of nothing.
"Hmm…" KA-31 called. "Ya know, I don't think that was supposed to happen."
"What?!" The four drones screamed.
"Well…space is a cold bitch. That parachute? Just a block of ice ejected out your ass. Eh…it happens." KA-31 reported somberly. "Good news is you are no longer going to die burnin up. Bad news is it's going to be a nasty landing. But y'all look like a pretty tough bunch. If y'all survive, hit me up! I'll be here a while! KA-31, out!"
"…" Uzi, N, V, and J stared at each other, then started screaming for the next few minutes as they fell out of orbit.
Four Minutes Later
Slamming into the ground at an angle is what saved them. Without windows or any other kind of feedback, all they could do was wait for the impact, screaming hopelessly all the while.
While it did come, it also did not. Suddenly they were back in freefall, screaming all the while, as the cargo hold tore itself apart around them.
They hit what had to be the ground again, but kept falling, and with a new rate of tumble. Still screaming but now confused, they tumbled down to the ground one last time, the cargo hold breaking up around them, letting in the light from outside. Uzi, N, and J stayed under most of the wreckage, while V was ejected a few feet away, outside, under the light of the sun.
V started screaming, and seeing her out in the sunlight, N and J started screaming too.
"Ahhh!" Uzi screamed along, but noticed that nothing was happening. "Ahhh…?! Why are we screaming?!"
V stopped screaming, and looked around herself. She shivered uncertainly, looking at her hands, how the light left her shadow against the sand dune she'd landed in. Grasping at golden rays between her metallic fingers, something not touched in so long she'd almost forgotten the feeling. Tentatively looking up, her eyes hallowed with uncertainty, amazement, and fear.
With similar uncertainty, N and J slowly stepped out into the light, standing by V, basking in the cold waste of the sun, as they looked up at the frightening world around them.
Lastly, Uzi stepped out of the ruined cargo hold, standing near the three Murder Drones. Their cargo hold had come to rest at the bottom of a great artificial valley, in the middle of a vast wasteland. Huge megastructures towered seven kilometers above them on all sides. It was as though someone had decided that the surface wasn't enough, and lifted a second surface up into the sky. Utterly massive metal and concrete structures that stretched across the horizon. An entire industrial city covering half the planet.
Directly over their heads, a dozen long train lines connected distant sections of the upper surface, crisscrossing at random intervals.
And far above that, bright golden-red clouds glowed against the sky, like a churning fire spilling with light.
"You guys…okay?" Uzi reluctantly asked. While V and J fearfully played with the sunlight between their fingers, N turned around, equally unsettled with eyes hollowed.
"We…burn up in sunlight." N explained simply. "It kills us."
"Oh…right…robot vampires." Uzi remembered. Then realized…if they burned in sunlight, why were they not burning in sunlight now? "That's…not the only weird thing."
"What…?" V asked reluctantly. Anything to get past the fear and uncertainty of her newfound freedom.
Uzi unslung her railgun, holding it to the side with a downcast expression. "I…built this gun to kill you guys…but that's not important." She gestured to the recharge timer. "When I built it though, it only took thirty minutes to recharge. It now takes sixty-four hours."
"That's…what?" J knew that something was wrong, but couldn't explain it herself.
"It uses an isotope to recharge, and judging by the half-life…" Uzi did the math quickly in her head. "We spent over a hundred years on that spaceship."
Lost and scared, four little machines found themselves trapped on the worst planet in all the cosmos. What came next, could only be dredged up from their worst nightmares.
The year was 3175. On Rubicon, there was only war.
Author's Note: "But Blackout_..." I hear you asking. "Why crossover Armored Core with Murder Drones? Don't you know the power scaling and the themes don't apply? What the fuck are you doing?" Well, drugs, for one. I'm addicted to suffering. I crossed over Armored Core and Doki Doki Literature Club for crying out loud, I think I have a good idea of how to make things that seem completely unrelated interact in a believable and fascinating way. It's my mental illness, I get to choose the coping mechanism.
Now, for some bad news. I actually like Murder Drones. "Why is that bad news?" I hear you confused Murder Drones fans asking. Because the more I like something, the more I want to see the characters suffer. And let me tell you, I like the whole damn cast.
Chapter 3 and 4 to be posted in the next few days. Chapters 1-4 account for one day on Rubicon. Chapters 5-9 are the second half of the introduction. This is going to be a big, long project, and I hope you are prepared. Stay tuned!