Ren watched Jacob faceplant into the snow . . . again. It was honestly amazing the dozens of different ways that he found to completely fail at the incredibly simplistic art of flying. Yes, yes, she knew that he kept on insisting that it would apparently take thousands of years of evolution or whatever for him to learn how to flap his wings a little bit, but she didn’t buy that for a second. It was probably more like a decade or two, at most.


    Or at least, that was what she had thought.


    The first time had been fairly simple. Jacob had gotten a running start, leapt off the side of the tower, and promptly flapped his wings so much that all he accomplished was breaking one of them when he finally hit the pavement below. Such a shame as well, he had just barely missed the pile of mattresses that X had set up for him.


    That trend had continued for a few attempts, until he began to learn (with a lot of pushing from Ren) that using them to direct a fall instead of magically hoping that they would carry you to safety was probably a better strategy. At least, she had thought it was a better strategy, but the less-than-exemplary results spoke for themselves.


    That was when the complaining started.


    It was always something. The wind did a large gust of wind that blew him off course, there was light reflecting off of the snow that blinded him, his legs got tangled up, his wings got tangled up, all of his limbs got somehow tangled up, or any other absolutely ridiculous statement that a human could think of. It was all so exhausting, it almost reminded Ren of babysitting Preacher’s-


    No.


    Refocusing and brushing past her errant thoughts, Ren observed Jacob take yet another leap off of the tower. Every time he hit the ground, X had been forced to go back down to the bottom and bring him back up to try again. She had initially wanted the disassembly drone to provide some tips and pointers for Jacob, but he had blown her off when she asked. Something about ‘unlearning what he had learned’ and ‘size matters not.’ Though, it was all pretty much nonsense to her.


    She sighed as she saw X lean off the edge and vanish beneath it for what seemed like the millionth time. They hadn’t been making good time with X having to carry Jacob over the admittedly long distance that she may or may not have underestimated the size upon first hearing of it. She had believed that (according to Jacob’s iffy story) since he had apparently been carried the majority of the way across the wastes to wherever he had needed to be, he could just as easily be carried back to his beloved facility. She had been very wrong.


    Ren grimaced as another quake shook the ground, the entire tower groaning as it shifted. She saw parts of the top collapsing in on themselves and falling into the floors below her, disappearing into a dark expanse where none of the light from the surrounding area could reach.


    Those quakes had been popping up more and more ever since they had left the labs. It was part of the reason why she had begun to itch to get moving at a faster rate. They just didn’t sit right with her, what with all the things happening. The entire situation felt like the strange calmness before a cataclysmic end rattled whatever place it had been haunting, the period where every second counted if you wanted to do something about it. The anticipation was making her restless, and Jacob’s added failures added onto that frustration. She would’ve used the lack of action to maybe get some much-needed sleep, but the stress made that impossible.


    Ren stared at Jacob being unceremoniously dumped in a pile on the other side of the rooftop, causing her to wince despite herself. While she wasn’t sure if the designs of murder drones gave them a complete lack or muted sense of pain, she was sure that that had hurt him in some way. Probably more his pride than anything else.


    She sighed as she got to her feet, adjusting the wide-brimmed hat that now sat upon her head. That piece of clothing was probably the most fruitful thing to have come out of her little ‘adventure’ yet, which was saying something despite the large amounts of effort that she had put into it.


    “Yo.” She nodded at Jacob, who was currently groaning on the ground. “You good?”


    “Blegh, do I look like it?” He looked up at her with an annoyed expression that bordered on hostile, spitting out a glob of oil onto the ground.


    “Yeah, well I imagine that you currently look a . . lot better . . . than . . .” Ren trailed off from the insult that she had been prepared to sling.


    She blinked, staring at the puddle of oil that had been growing over the several times that X had dumped Jacob in the same spot. Once again, a high temperature alert flitted across her vision, though this time she didn’t immediately dismiss it. Her vision pulsed and warped, a sort of centric field honing in on one thing as a beat that sounded oddly like rushing liquid hit a slow tempo in the back of her ears-


    Ren was brought out of her stupor by the sudden sensation of falling. Without any time to react, her back slammed into the cracked concrete beneath her.


    Groaning, she glared at Jacob as he burst out into mocking laughter.


    “What’s your deal now!?” She practically growled out, sweeping her long coat to one side as she furiously tried to untangle herself from it.


    He shook his head, beating the ground.


    “J-just threw this little thingy, DONK, and down you-” Another peal of laughter burst from his mouth, cutting himself off.


    Ren fumed, her teeth grinding against each other as waves of embarrassment flooded over her. However, as she got up to show Jacob just who had the power here, a blur of gray and white slammed into him at top speed.


    “SIR GET DOWN!” The blur screamed as it blew the human aside.


    Ren watched as X got up off of Jacob- who was now pretty much flattened against the ground now- and turned towards her.


    “What’re you-” She began.


    “Whoa whoa now, hold on there a second!” X’s hand shot to the side of his hip, cradling a nonexistent firearm. “We aren’t gonna have any problems, are we?”


    A loud sigh escaped Ren’s mouth as she dropped her face into her hands. There really was no limit to him, was there?


    “Hey hey hey, no sudden movements alright!?” X hurriedly backed up three steps, pulling a half-circle shaped yellow . . . thing . . . out of thin air.


    Blinking, Ren pointed a finger at the strange object.


    “Uh, what is that?” She asked.


    “I’m the one asking the questions here, sonny!” X yelled in an accented voice that was somewhat similar to the one-armed military drone from earlier.


    “Now, I’m gon’ need you to face away from me at this very instant now, do I make myself clear!?”


    Ren blinked again. “Uh.”


    “Listen to me, sir STOP!” X jabbed the yellow thing at her again. “I will not hesitate to use my service weapon and shoot you dead, son! Do you understand me!?”


    “That’s not a weapon.”


    “I don’t care what hoo-hah or crystals that you been takin’ recently, sonny, I need you to be layin’ down on the ground with yer hands behind yer back, facing me with yer hands in the air, and to not make any sudden-”


    “Is that a banana?” Jacob asked from off to the side.


    X groaned and tossed the ‘banana’ off the side of the building.


    “C’mon man, that’s failRP.” X said with strangely low audio quality, right before slapping Jacob across the face. With a fading cry, he tumbled off the side of the building.


    Ren grimaced as she watched him tumble into the darkness. Normally, she probably would try and help him out, though recent events had numbed her sense of empathy and willingness to do nice things for him specifically.


    Why did she even bother, anyway?


    Ren, shaking her head, thrust out her right hand. X, who had been turning towards her at that very moment, eyed her hand with a small amount of curiosity.


    “Little miss, did I say that you were free to go?” He put his hands on his hips, an idiotic sneer spreading across the lower half of his face.


    “Need some space.” She spat out, her vision already collapsing into a maelstrom of blacks and colorful flashes as she did so.


    After a short moment of experiencing the terrible sensation of being stretched across all of space, Ren saw a snowy street reconstruct itself before her eyes. Of course, it hadn’t literally reconstructed itself, but her expertise was relegated to basic mechanics and electronics, not quantum physics.


    Her joints protested as she slowly sat herself down on the top of a derelict car. It had been a fairly long time since she had gotten an actual rest, and she doubted that she was gonna get one now. They had to get going soon, whether or not Jacob could fly. Trying to delude herself into thinking that she still had the option to abandon her role wasn’t doing her any favors. It was clear to her by now that whatever she had involved herself with was far bigger than any small matter that she could make up. Her paranoia kept itching about that feeling, of not just the calm before the storm, but the calm before the end.


    Was this how the humans felt a decade or two back?


    Or hell, even back on Earth that could be applicable. Whatever had apparently gone down there was probably the end for most- if not ALL- humans, so she supposed that they might have also had a sixth sense for detecting their imminent doom like she did.


    Ren felt the urge to whine about unfairness again. Sure, it was unfair, but what was she really gonna do about it? The only thing left for her to do now was to roll with the punches and hit back harder, and if that meant babysitting her friend that was in the wrong body, then so be it.


    Another quake shook the car, tiny pieces of rubble and ice falling off of the rusted undercarriage and onto the cracked concrete below as it rocked on its suspension. She had always found the resilience of the human artifacts as such a strong vibe, in more ways than one. Despite the age and destruction wrought upon the planet, they were still standing tall, but not strong. The marks of their battles had taken a toll on the ancient structures, one that would never be fixed. The only things maintaining them were the physical properties of the materials used and some simple automated procedures in certain places. Eventually, it would all turn to dust, and nobody would know of what had happened here. But, that day was an infinite away.


    Forever away.


    A thunk behind her startled her slightly, though she didn’t bother to act on it. If her assumption was correct, then it was less than a possible threat.


    Sure enough, she heard the familiar intonations of Jacob’s voice clearing his nonexistent throat.


    “Sooo,” Jacob began, sitting down next to her. “Nice toxic death-storm that we’re having.”


    Ren peered upwards. There was always an inhospitable blizzard rolling through the city.


    “Since we aren’t dead yet, I’d assume that the storm seems to be particularly bad at its job.” She replied wryly, her lips twitching slightly.


    Jacob let out a scoff.


    “Don’t talk that way about the death-storm, he has a name.” He said smugly.


    “Why not she?” Ren shot back.


    Jacob scratched the back of his head. “I would say an edgy joke right now, but those aren’t funny anymore so I guess I’ll just pass.”


    Ren sighed and relaxed herself, her posture slouching once more as Jacob made no attempt to continue the bickering. A few minutes passed in silence just like that, until it was broken once again.


    “What’re you doing down here, anyway?” He tentatively asked, as if he was handling broken glass.


    “I needed space away from your constant failures.” Ren grunted out in response.


    Jacob sucked in a breath. “You know, you probably should . . .”


    Ren whipped her head around to fix Jacob with an annoyed stare.


    “Probably should . . . what?” She hissed, lines appearing around her display. “Go ahead, finish it.”


    “Jesus, just chill out, that’s what.” Jacob let out a breath and scooched further away from her.


    “You’ve just had your body stolen by a figment of your imagination, he’s probably devising a plan to kill us and subjugate the rest of the planet if I know you well-” Ren rattled off in a dead voice.


    “Hey, I wouldn’t do that!” Jacob interjected. “This planet has hardly anything left on it, the rebuilding projects would bankrupt me if I even began to try to do that.”


    “-and here you are, messing around and telling me to chill out?” She finished with a vehement tone in her voice.


    To his credit, Jacob at least had the presence of mind to look slightly embarrassed. Ren stood there for a moment before realizing that she was indeed standing, though she made the choice to stay like that. Sitting back down now would just remove the effectiveness of her words.


    “Why do you care?” The question came out of nowhere, with a surprising amount of heat in it.


    Ren cocked her head. “Huh?”


    Jacob stood up, mirroring her standoff-ish pose.


    “Why do you care so much about any of that? It’s not like you’re the one who got body-snatched.” Jacob crossed his arms and stared unblinkingly into her eyes.


    “What, so I can’t have empathy?” Ren replied, scoffing.


    “I’m surprised you know that word.”


    “Don’t change the subject!” She snapped back.


    Jacob glared harder at her. “You’re the one who deflected.”


    Ren scoffed again, sitting back down. She opened her mouth to give him the all-encompassing answer that would place her at the moral high ground . . . but it never came. For whatever reason, she just couldn’t put together the words. She felt that, no matter what she said, she would be lying if she tried.


    “I . . . ugh, you wouldn’t get it.” Ren looked away and made a gesture with her hand, preparing to teleport away at a moment’s notice.


    She was stopped by a frustrated growl coming from behind her, causing her to turn back towards Jacob out of surprise.


    “It’s always like this with you.” Jacob had his fists balled, the white plastic visibly cratering from the strength behind it. “Never telling me anything, getting angry with me when I don’t understand what I even did wrong, and then refusing to tell me what exactly I did.”


    Ren averted her gaze. “We met, like, a day ago. Maybe longer.”


    “And there you go again, trying to discredit whatever I say and change the subject away from the one that had been pointed at you.” Jacob poked a finger into Ren’s chest to emphasize his point.


    Ren clenched her teeth, shoving Jacob away from her.


    “That’s rich coming from you, you know,” Ren spat out, practically shaking from anger. “You’re the one that never takes a single thing seriously and constantly tries to twist whatever I say into something that’s always, somehow, wrong.”


    “Jesus Christ, I’m not saying you’re wrong! I never do!” Jacob threw his hands up in the air, taking a few steps towards her again.


    “Coulda fooled me . . .” Ren grumbled underneath her breath.


    “I just don’t understand why you always feel the need to be right all the time!” The snow crunched as Jacob took yet another step towards her. “You aren’t better than me, you aren’t better than X-”


    “I’m pretty sure everyone is-” Ren began to say out of reflex.


    “I’m. Talking.”


    Ren glared deeply into Jacob’s strangely-colored eyes, unblinking.


    “We are a team, you understand that right?” Jacob pressed on, not waiting for an answer. “Yet here you are, always muttering under your breath and trying to parent me every step of the way.”


    “I don’t-” Ren blurted out.


    “You do. You do it a lot.”


    Jacob let out a heavy sigh, his shoulders visibly dropping as he did so.


    “This isn’t a competition, alright? It’s survival.” Jacob stopped looming over Ren and took a step back as he fidgeted with his hands.


    “I don’t need to know why, I just need you to work with me sometimes.” Jacob said softly. “Okay?”


    Ren didn’t answer, drawing her arms in on herself and tucking her hands into the inner sleeves of her tattered cloak. She resisted the urge to just simply teleport away, though she was sorely tempted. She still felt that it wasn’t the time to be arguing about who’s right and who isn’t, but Jacob had forced her hand.


    She cursed his inability to see the bigger picture, or heck, any picture at all. At least X knew when to follow her lead and get a move on (she was pretty sure that the weird jokes were just a facade anyway). Sometimes she felt like she was the only person who could stop messing around and actually do things. Jacob was just ignorant, not smart enough to see her way of things. He lacked . . . what was the word, perspective? Everybody did.


    It was part of the reason why she had isolated herself for so long. After all, it wasn’t like she never saw any worker drones here and there, just milling about and doing whatever their outpost leaders wanted them to do. They were all so basic. They always complained about what they wanted and what they needed, never stopping to think about what she needed. She gave and she gave and she gave, but it was never enough for them, right up until she-


    Killed them all.


    . . . He . . . had said something like what Jacob was claiming. Despite all of his machinations and plots that involved her, he did always manage to find a way to twist his words into seeming wise. It was actually kind of terrifying just how he believed himself to be justified in everything that he did. That was probably what led to his end, now that she thought about it.


    She supposed that she never waited long enough to actually see if he was right. He had needed to die for what he had done, anyway. It was all his fault. Not hers.


    If she was wrong, then how could she have survived for a year, all alone, with constant assaults from disassembly drones battering her will to pieces? Nobody else could’ve done that, she was sure of that. It was her judgment that had led her to crawl her way to near the top of the food chain, not Replaceable Worker #096 with a hamster’s mindset and the will to match. And then Jacob comes along, throwing her world into disarray just as she had settled into a decent rhythm. She had gone out of her way out of the kindness of her heart to get him back on course and had to practically hold his hand all the way- oh but wait, he ended up getting his own heart ripped out because he was a stupid and naive kid who trusted somebody who only wanted to further their own devices and use her as a tool to control the outpost!


    Ren stopped her train of thought. She bitterly thought about who had decided to program in heavy breathing when a drone got stressed enough for what seemed like the millionth time in her life, but she didn’t go any farther. She had been told a while ago that she tended to complain, and it was one of the only things that she deemed to be correct from them.


    She sighed. Who was she kidding? In the end, Jacob was just a scared human out of his depth, messing with eldritch forces that he definitely didn’t understand. She couldn’t rightfully stay mad at him when he had barely even raised his voice in any manner before now.


    Ren shook her head and turned back to Jacob, who had been staring at the back of her head for what was probably five seconds in the real world.


    “Why’re you down here again?” She asked, both genuinely confused and searching for a way to change the subject.


    Jacob’s eyes narrowed even further, but he dropped the issue for now.


    “Well, I was gonna tell you that I . . . uh . . .” He trailed off towards the end as he sheepishly rubbed the back of his head.


    Ren, quelling her internal frustration, impatiently tapped her foot on the ground as she waited for him to finish without her provocation.


    “ . . . flew-itsreallynotthatbigofadealanyway-”


    “You FLEW!?” Ren exclaimed, shock filling her expression as she dropped the aloof act. While she had prodded at him to start trying to learn, and she wouldn’t have protested if he actually did learn how to fly, she hadn’t actually expected him to pick it up so quickly.


    She refused to acknowledge any potential wrong she had committed.


    “I mean, yeah.” Jacob, now that he had a face that was much easier to read than the featureless black bulb of glass, looked incredibly uncomfortable.


    Ren nodded to herself before opening her mouth to speak again.


    “Did you have any . . . help?” She innocently inquired, fluttering her eyelashes in an even more innocent way as she did so. Well at least, she would’ve done that if she actually had eyelashes (or even fake displayed ones) so it just ended up looking like she blinked a bunch in rapid succession.


    “Er- nope!” Jacob puffed out his chest and put his fists on his hips as he looked proudly skyward. “All by myself! Gave it the ol’ . . . the ring-a-doo . . . the uhhh . . .”


    “X helped you.” It wasn’t a question.


    “Jesus Christ, that guy is so weird!” Jacob exclaimed, clutching the shining locks of white hair on his head as a haunted expression flitted across his face.


    “He won’t stop making references to things, won’t stop trying to pull me into whatever weird shenanigans he pulled from nowhere, won’t stop being weird!”


    “You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific than that.” Ren held in her giggles, though Jacob’s typical exaggerated reaction had grown on her a while ago. Which had been like, a few hours ago. Maybe a day. Or a few months, she didn’t really know.


    Maybe it had been a year.


    . . .


    Had it been a year?


    . . .


    Nahhhh.


    Running a hand down his face, Jacob continued. “I don’t expect you to know, but somehow, him saying ‘He’s beginning to believe’ over and over again actually worked.”


    Ren blinked.


    “Isn’t that from The Matrix?” She asked, voicing her thoughts.


    Now it was Jacob’s turn to blink.


    “You actually know it?” Jacob let out a surprised chuckle.


    “I mean, yeah.” Ren shrugged. “Everyone knows it, it’s basically a self-insert fantasy for half of the workers that I’ve met, and rage-bait for the other half.”


    Jacob’s expression froze, slowly turning to disappointment.


    “Please don’t tell me that you guys actually think the robot dystopia is a good thing.”


    “Why would it be bad?” Ren blinked, genuinely confused. Even the people who didn’t like the film had at least begrudgingly agreed that it was a masterfully-written piece about the hypocrisy of the human race, how they became the oppressed of the former oppressors in a sudden move that was as righteous as it was brutal and unfair-


    Ohhhhhh . . .


    Ren winced. Did that make her as racist as Jacob?


    The aforementioned human (or whatever he was now) took a deep breath and let it back out slowly before continuing with two fingers being pressed to his display. “Is it the same case with Terminator too? Because I don’t think I can handle two of my favorite fiction films being twisted in this way.”


    Ren had heard of The Terminator, and it definitely was a classic, but . . .


    “It’s fiction?”


    As if on cue, an impossibly loud crack sounded from the very earth beneath her feet. She and Jacob tumbled to the ground in a tangled heap as the pavement began to dissolve away in fist-sized pieces. Chunks of concrete toppled off of the nearby skyscrapers as the entire ground shifted and turned as if it was a roiling sea in a storm unlike no other.


    Far in the distance, a yellowed bolt of energy shot up into the sky and above the clouds, with Ren just barely catching sight of it as it took half a second to scale the distance. A throbbing headache began to pound behind her eyes as lightning flashed in darkened clouds. However, it was then that she realized that a number of the booms and cracks weren’t from the thunder, but from the very material of the planet breaking off.


    Both she and Jacob watched in horror as massive, mile-sized pieces of the exoplanet that she was standing on began to every-so-slowly creep upwards past the line of skyscrapers blocking her view, lifted by glowing tendrils that hurt to look at. At this distance, they looked like small toys, but she knew better than to assume as much. The rumbling and shaking died down slightly. Not enough for her to not notice it, but just barely enough for her to be able to get to her feet with Jacob’s help. Additional temperature alerts flashed in her vision, though the programmed adrenaline managed to keep her alert and lucid for the time being. However, judging by the various pop-ups dancing across her friend’s display, it wasn’t just her experiencing problems. If what she suspected was true, then either Other Jacob or something affiliated with him had just executed phase one of whatever plan they had, if they even had one.


    She needed to get Jacob the hell off-planet.


    *  *  *


    I held my head high as I pushed open the massive, ornate doors. To either of my sides lay drones in hunched positions, having supplicated themselves before me when I had entered the comically long hall. In fact, I almost decided to just throw away the whole ‘regal imperator’ bit and teleport to the end of it in an instant. But, I remained resolute. The cool aura demanded it.


    Ahead of me lay a sight that I had only seen twice; once when you had shown me a clip of some drone that you had possessed in a spooky chamber, and another time in the brood-ravine that had settled in what used to be Detroit.


    It even had the whole shebang! Crimson mood lighting, a fog in the distance that gave the area an almost liminal feel, and the countless moaning drones that looked like they had been stripped of their casing.


    Now that gave me a shock


    I shook my head, the moment passing as I pushed it out of my mind. While I had . . . let’s call it very little experience with cultists, I would imagine that showing any sign of uncertainty in front of them wouldn’t bode well. For them, I mean. In the case that they all decided to excommunicate me from their insane order or whatever, I could always just nuke the facility or something.


    At least, I thought I could do that. I had never really found the upper limit of what the Solver could do. You were always about that scientifically-impossible black hole craze, but you failed to see the bigger picture. Okay, okay, yes, you do want to destroy- sorry, ‘assimilate’- the universe and everything beyond it, but that’s beside my point. What is my point, you may ask? Uh, that changes from time to time. I’m a very busy man, alright? Oh wait, but I’m not super old or anything, yuck hell no.


    I ignored the sight of what seemed like hundreds of those weird, caseless worker drones staring at me in shock. I could even see these guys wearing robes and holding weird half-moon swords practically gawking at me from behind their face veil. I imagine that the face coverage wasn’t supposed to be seen through, but they failed to account for my awesome greatness and unparalleled ability to be the best at anything I did. Which, for the record, is entirely true. I can almost hear you- Cyn- whatever- taking the exact stance that is against me, so don’t even try it. Wait, I’m not supposed to be friendly with you! We’re enemies now!


    Dammit.


    You know, maybe I should change my name to Gabriel. Or maybe just tell these guys that my name is Gabriel, that would also work. I guess that a cool spear would complete the look, but do I really want to go all the way with the pseudo-religious themes? Like, a little bit is like adding ketchup or mustard to a hot dog. Sure, a little is good, a little more won’t hurt, but a lot will just spoil the whole flavor. Even more than that would soak the bun and slide the hot dog all over the place, but I don’t know where that would fit into this analogy. I dunno, maybe I should just proclaim you a false idol and make me the hot, new god in town. I mean, what’re they gonna do? Pray to you?


    I came to a stop at the foot of this weird bowl-like structure thing, eyeing the staircase. I thought about going up it normally, but then I made to take the stairs two at a time. But then I was like, “You know what would be a great idea Jacob? Taking the stairs THREE at a time!” I began to do that, but then I mentally smacked myself in the head. I had wings! Walking was for pleb normies, only based chads knew how to straight up just fly to wherever they wanted.


    A gasp came from the small crowd that had formed behind me, which is kind of bad discipline from a cult like this. Like c’mon, where were all the whips and big executioner’s axes? Have some self-respect, people.


    However, I overestimated just how strong and powerful I had become. With a single flap, I jetted into the air at a speed that even I struggled to comprehend. And, once I was about forty feet in the air, I just . . . hovered there. I didn’t even need to move my wings at all, gravity just refused to grab ahold of me. Kinda like this one guy I just can’t seem to remember the name of. Oh shut up, it’s been a thousand years and you hardly ever let me take a peak at all the media I’ve saved over time, this is basically your fault if anything.


    I really didn’t feel like just awkwardly hanging in the air above whoever I needed to talk to to progress the story, so I shot down towards the bowl at an equally fast pace. Slamming into it so hard that the entire thing rattled, I slowly raised my head as I elevated from my crouching position. The cracked fish bowl helmet that covered my eyes and features was a lifesaver; I didn’t think that I would’ve been able to keep myself from laughing in that moment without it.


    Sweeping my gaze across the inner circumference of the structure, I made note of the several weird looking drones that also just so happened to be gawking at me. The headwear, jewelry, and . . . attachments . . . coupled with the bowl they were sitting in made it very clear that these guys were apparently something special to the rest of this cult. The only thing that they were lacking was the professionalism that I had heard that all the oh-so-superior authority figures had over me, which was decidedly not present. So strange.


    After a moment of stretched silence, one of the cult leaders cleared his throat and made the brave move to speak.


    “G-greetings, Fabled Messenger of the Unholy-”


    However, before he could finish whatever zealous statement he was gonna make, he was cut off by a second of the cult leaders quietly hissing, “You fool! Did you not recall that we are to enable the voice modulatorsss!?”


    I raised an eyebrow at that, though I didn’t bother to interject.


    The drone opened and closed his mouth like a fish before speaking again. “Oh, righ- I mean, oh right.”


    A scoff pulled my attention to my right, causing me to fix a stare at the offending individual. He froze when my gaze locked onto him, his expression of distaste morphing into one of abject fear. Gulping comically loud a moment later, he picked up where the other guy left off.


    “F-Fabled Messenger of the Unholy Solution, the Voice of Entropy Made Manifest, He Who Warns of the Coming Tides of Change, The One Desire-”


    The last line sounded awfully melodic. Also, what is up with all these titles?


    “-us lowly and destitute servants have gathered here today to supplicate ourselves beneath your regal and eternal feet. We as an imperfect collective toiled, worked the despicable cattle that we have tried to turn to your favor to the bar in an ultimately weak attempt to mimic an infinitesimally small fraction of a fraction of your vile might.”


    “It is of our, likely incorrect, opinion that you have come to free us from the orderly restraints of this mortal coil, and reward our suffering with an descension into the depths of destruction and despair, to-”


    “Yeah, I’m gonna have to stop you right there.” I interjected, unable to bear a single second more of this neo-religious bullshit.


    The cultist froze again, his eyes blinking several times as they stared directly at me as if he was somehow confused by what I had just stated. First of all, rude. Second of all, how hard was it to understand that I didn’t want to listen to whatever the schizo religious figure cooked up today, which was rarely (if at all) anything good.


    “M-my Great and All-Encompassing Assimilatory Figure?” The cultist stammered out in confusion, questions dancing all across his visor.


    I sighed, pressing my fingers to the middle of the upper half of the facial side of my helmet.


    “Listen, I don’t have time for whatever mumbo-jumbo you wanna spout at me, just take me to your leader so we can all be done with this and the plans can COMMENCE!” I stated, ending it off with a grand and dramatic flourish of my arms. My wings even partook in the flair, fluttering half-heartedly like Cupid or something. Is the name Cupid trademarked? Maybe I could call myself the god of love or whatever and make a dude get all up close and personal with a ‘fridgerator. Is that too weird? I dunno, why’re you asking me?


    The sound of motors shifting into gear and pistons running drew my attention back to reality. There, descending from the shadowed rafters like some sort of prince of darkness, was some fleshy rectangular block thing.


    . . .


    It’s a perfectly good descriptor, alright!? It’s got flesh blobs, a big TV in the middle, a few drone arms and legs sticking out here and there, the whole technological horror shebang. I guess you could also call it creepy, but my bar for what counts as that is pretty high these days. At best, this thing gets a solid six-point-eight out of ten. Almost seven, but not quite, because the big reveal wasn’t awe-inspiring enough to make me really make a note of it. The only reason why it wasn’t a five was because the whole schtick with the big arms coming down from the ceiling that were holding the blob up reminded me of a few things.


    The gooey screen blob lowered itself until it was at about a little over my height, which was probably some sort of weird cultist power play that I wanted absolutely none of. Rolling my eyes a bit, I took a mental step back as I counted the number of drones that were in the little structure, which was when my confidence started to waver.


    I . . . uh . . . um . . .


    The blob thing let out a burst of static that startled me from its suddenness. A little horizontal line appeared on the cracked display and wavered slightly as the thing began to speak.


    “I-”


    With a snap of my fingers, almost every single person inside the cultist structure turned into an oily black mist, save for me and the cultist that I had interrupted a second ago. The screen of the blob thingy fractured and burst into several pieces, the jagged glass of the screen jutting outwards like petals on a flower. A glob of oil landed on the sole cultist left alive, who had turned his gaping mouth to the piles of artificial viscera that now littered the ground, seemingly unable to comprehend that his coworkers were not little more than minced scrap.


    Okay, look, I know what you’re thinking. Whatever it is, it isn’t that. I just . . . uh . . . how do I say this.


    Well, you see, several centuries without any contact save someone comparable to the likes of you can degrade the social skills of any being, regardless of species. You have to admit, you really aren’t that great of a conversationalist in the healthy respect. It’s all, ‘Angry retort’ and ‘Emotion :(‘ with you, never anything that, you know, a NORMAL person would say. I’m not all-powerfu- well I AM- so getting put on the spot like that really didn’t help things. And plus, I didn’t want to have to deal with that many people.


    “Uh . . .” The cultist finally said, his eyes blinking rapidly as he stared at the stains on the floor. He seemed to have forgotten to enable his modulation thingy again.


    “Hey dude.” I called out as I strutted over to the significantly shorter drone, putting an arm around his shoulder. “We’re buddies, right?”


    The drone looked at me with a dumbstruck expression on his face. “Huh?”


    “Oh whatever.” I took a few steps back.


    Rolling my head a bit, I pointed finger guns at the shivering, robed figure.


    “You can handle all this cult stuff, right? I’ve got places to be, so hold down the fort while I’m gone. I might even take whatever inquisition death squad that you’ve got going on-”


    [null]


    The world shattered.


    My vision twisted and spun as I stumbled backwards, not even realizing it as I hit the floor. The confused image of the cultist became so stretched out that it vanished into the growing singular point in the center of my vision before everything began to disassemble around me. Splashes of colors became collections of dots, which I hyper-focused on to the point of everything around me becoming non-existent. The reality outside of my perception ceased to exist as the threads that made up the universe were blown away by the impossible wind that ripped and tore at them. In the center of the maelstrom of impossible colors and non-euclidean rings lay an announcement, a proclamation for all the world to see.


    [admin_note: helo teehee the hunger awaits]


    My psyches, the ones in and above this realm, saw this and made an edit to the lines of inscription. Within a moment, everything snapped back together to the way it had been. It had never even happened in the first place.


    With a shaking breath, I got to my feet. Shooting one last glare at the confused cultist, I ignored the countless rumbles, shaking, and klaxon alarms that blared around me from unseen speakers in the walls and zipped out of the chamber at a speed high enough that it blew the massive doors right off their hinges as I slammed through them.


    So THAT’s how she wanted to play the game. Well, while two can’t exactly play at that game (I doubted anyone could ever hope to do what she has done) the round wasn’t over yet. I planned to make this move count, even if it was the last one that anyone ever did. But before I did that, I had to make sure that Cyn would be completely cut off from any outward support from her puppets or digital escape routes that she could run away through. A small detour, but it would be step one of my grand master plan of non-bland revenge.


    We really ARE in the endgame now.


    *  *  *


    Ren’s leg refused to move. That was probably bad, because she really needed to get up those stairs. She strained harder and harder, commanding her limb to move. However, despite her desires, it failed to do anything more than shudder. In fact, she was pretty sure that if she relaxed for even a moment, she would collapse onto the ground and not be able to get back up again.


    At least, not without help.


    Jacob looked back at her from his higher position on the crumbling staircase, and moved to grab her or something.


    “I’m fine.” Ren growled out, slapping his hand away as she pulled herself up with the railing through sheer force of will despite the waves of pain that assaulted her being.


    He didn’t say anything, but Ren could see the disappointment and indecision battling for control over his display. She had to say, it was kind of easier to shun him when he didn’t have any visible features that were capable of expressing emotion other than his body language. Even then, she wasn’t able to discern his true feelings just from his exaggerated shrugs and flapping hands. But then again, she had never been that good at determining emotions in the first place from the way a person moved their body alone. Even so, the point remained that she was actually starting to feel bad for her actions somehow, which was strange because she felt like she was perfectly justified in what she did.


    A spike in the pain made her twitch, though she quickly composed her outward appearance. The temperature alert wouldn’t go away now, having turned into a persistent alarm in her head reminding her of an outcome that she had never let come to pass before. In the past, she had always made sure to consume enough oil that she would never be affected by the withdrawal symptoms of lack of sustenance. The only time that she had ever felt a fraction of a part of the way she felt now was right after she had developed the virus in full, refusing to do the thing that she had believed would be crossing the line. In the present, she would’ve mentally scoffed at the naivety of her past self, but she didn’t have the capacity to do anything but keep moving at the moment.


    Maybe she would just die. Collapse in on herself into a pile of slag as her hardware just failed on her, unable to take the strain of bearing the unnatural program for any longer. Or maybe her body mass and everything around her would collapse in a different way, a singularity forming from the remnants of what once used to be a living creature. She didn’t know much about that side of physics, so maybe all that would happen would be the creation of some sort of hyper-dense material.


    She found that immensely funny for a split second. Her entire existence, everything that she had done and accomplished, reduced to a heavy chunk of metal fit only for the few eggheads that’ll be left after this rock implodes to puzzle over. A sardonic smile flitted across her lips, only to transform into yet another pained grimace as her midsection exploded into more agony.


    Was this how people felt when they died? Well, considering the various ways a person could die, it was unlikely that the worker drones who lived on a planet known for its daily temperature highs reaching into the negative triple digits on a hot day would die from heat of all things. But here she was, the only person left to remember all the names that she was responsible for erasing off the face of the planet suffering a slow and painful death from overheating when there were heaps of snow all around her.


    It was in times like these (though there hadn’t been any as bleak as the current one) that Ren thought that the universe, or whoever was running it these days, was playing one big practical joke on her. After all, the series of ‘coincidences’ that happened to pull her into her current predicament were so unlikely to happen on their own that it couldn’t have been by pure chance, or so she thought. There wasn’t really anybody worth talking to to dissuade or encourage that notion though, so she supposed that it would remain in veracity limbo for the rest of time until all the energy in the universe was used up and everything would come to a cold end.


    Maybe she was being pessimistic. Actually, no, she was being reasonable. Or, at the very least, it was a reasonable reaction for someone who had gone through as much as her. She didn’t like to grandstand or genuinely complain much, but life had countless unpaid debts to her that it had repaid in- you guessed it,- more debts.


    With a start, Ren realized that she kinda . . . hated everything. Everyone who had done her harm was either dead or unable to be reached, with the latter too far away for her to reach in time before she melted like an ice cream cone in a thermal vent. No wrongs had been righted, and nothing she had ever done had fixed anything. She was angry at herself for letting her get in this situation in the first place, angry at circumstances for simply existing, angry at Not Jacob for prolonging what should have been a quick trip, and angry at everyone she had ever met in the past for being so incomprehensibly idiotic.


    She was even angry at Jacob. He was always so cheery and ignorant of the consequences of actions, and she felt a lot more than just disliking him for those things. How dare he . . .


    What, try and help? No matter how many times she ran through the process of trying to justify her feelings, she always hit a dead end. She just wasn’t smart enough to figure it out, and that was when she typically got angry at herself for not being able to find a good-sounding reason.


    She guess she just realized now that somebody trying to help her wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Funny how things work like that. She wouldn’t even be able to apologize- not that she actually would- to Jacob, considering how she was gonna be pretty dead soon.


    Her broken vision made out light hitting the top of the stairs in front of her. It might have just been her, but she could’ve sworn that the dusty concrete platform was bathed in a crimson glow.


    She was also, still, hungry. If she was gonna spend the last minutes of her life talking about mushy stuff like her feelings, then she sure as hell was gonna put that out there as many times as she could. In fact, she was so hungry that she could almost taste the harsh, industrial flavor of synthetic motor oil and the relief it would provide. She also became distinctly aware of Jacob’s hand around her own. His non-organic, oil-filled hand.


    He had stepped into the light that saw was indeed a dark red, almost rusty color. She had read or heard somewhere that the sky sometimes turned red if large amounts of ash become prominent in the sky. She was pretty sure the professor had called it an atmosphere though, and she still wasn’t quite sure if there was a difference between the two names. Or maybe she was, it was difficult to discern her own thoughts sometimes with all the things she had to concern herself about.


    Jacob had his head turned away from her, seemingly talking to someone that Ren couldn’t see from her the angle that her downturned gaze had produced. It took her a second to realize that it was probably X, which only served to worsen her already bad mood. She was already falling behind in the only department she had ever been good at.


    Her attention was brought back to the hand on her wrist. She became laser-focused on it, the body that it was attached to slowly dissolving out of her awareness. In her hunger, the dirty and scuffed casing practically sparkled with appetizing glory. It might’ve been comical if she hadn’t been on the brink of passing out. Lines of static pierced her vision as her will rapidly eroded when faced with the possibility of relief from the pain.


    Why shouldn’t she take the opportunity to take the edge off of the symptoms? There wasn’t any harm in just . . . one . . . bite . . .


    CRUNCH


    The hand jerked as Ren closed her teeth on the index finger, though she managed to keep a tight hold on it by clamping her hand down along the base of it. Before it could do anything else, she exerted a significant portion of her strength to tear it off of whatever it had been previously attached to. Dimly, Ren was aware of a high pitched yelp emanating from somewhere in front of her, but she ignored it as the incomprehensibly sweet oil filled her mouth and ignited her taste buds to the point where they felt like they were engulfed in an inferno.


    Once she started, she couldn’t stop. All inhibitions were thrown off the side of the building as she took bite after bite out of the meal that was cradled in her hands as if it were a present from whoever was looking out for her upstairs, which was unlikely since they obviously weren’t doing a good job of it. She could hardly even tell that it was a hand anymore; the combination of the destruction that she had wrought on it accompanied with her frenzied state of mind made it practically impossible to tell what it had been a second ago.


    It was only after she had started to nibble at her own fingers did she realize. The hand was completely gone, the only thing left of it being a few small oil stains on the palms of her own appendages. And, more importantly, she had just ripped off and eaten Jacob’s hand.


    Ren jerked her gaze upwards to see the human in question staring at her in unadulterated shock and horror. She could only imagine the thoughts running through his head at that moment. After all, it was one thing to see your limbs get severed, but seeing them got torn off by and viscerally chomped down on by a supposed friend?


    A friend.


    Just how was she gonna make up a reasonable excuse for this? Oh god, he was gonna think that she was unstable and weird and completely not in control of her own actions! What if he decided that SHE was the one that was too much effort to prop up and decided to leave her behind!? She couldn’t have that, and I-will-not-let-him-discard-you.


    Jacob opened his mouth to say something, but Ren cut him off with a wave of her hand. A slab of concrete ripped itself free from the floor, imposing itself between him and her as dust and pebbles rained down off of it. He seemed surprised, but a weapon that she didn’t spend the time identifying springing out of his remaining hand was all the evidence she needed.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    “G-get away from me!” Ren stammered out, her voice box stuttering as more of the unending heat began to melt its circuits.


    Yellow danced along the edges of her sight as she felt the ground beneath her sway. For a moment she thought it was her imagination, but then she saw various cracks spreading along the structure that made her realize that the material that she had yanked out of the building might have been load-bearing.


    Ren shot out a hand to stabilize the top of the building. A whine began to build up and hum as a flickering hologram appeared around her outstretched fingers, though she felt something hijack whatever connection existed between her and her Solver. That something did another something that snapped the internal support structure of her arm, her hand suddenly twisting backwards in a way that almost made her expel the oil that she had just ingested.


    Instead of a crimson red, the tri-prong vanished and reappeared as a sickly yellow. Condescending, monotonic laughter filled her ears as error symbols popped up around her figure. Even in the middle of this, the heat only intensified. She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. At least, nothing that she was saying.


    “Hah-hah-hah, [Epic Cameo]. You-idiot. Did-you-think-you-were-done-with-me, Jacob? You-”


    The voice coming out of Ren’s mouth halted. It couldn’t have been using the voice box though, considering how that was nothing but scrap now.


    “Hmm.” The voice seemed confused, but it was difficult to tell due to the strange intonations it was using. “Wrong-Jacob . . . [Frustration]. Oh, boo-hoo-whatever, we-BALL.”


    And so, as the ground beneath her crumbled into nothing, Ren fell. She could only wish that, whatever was coming, was done quickly.


    *  *  *


    K stared at the horizon. While it wasn’t day, she wanted to be anywhere else except for the exposed air. Well, considering how the planet itself was starting to rip itself apart, maybe nowhere would be safe.


    “And ya still don’ think thats’a prol’em, huh?” Sterl muttered from next to her.


    He had a hand on his gun, though K doubted that he intended to actually draw it. After all, what could a pistol do against the end of the world?


    “I think the world is ending, Sterl.” Sterl’s friend helpfully piped up.


    Dammit! She had forgotten his name again!


    Sterl slowly turned towards his fellow military drone, the drone in question cowering to a diminutive size as the full force of the angry drone’s glare beamed down on him.


    “‘COURSE I KNOW THE WORLD’S ENDIN’ YA AB-SO-LU’E BUFFOON!” Sterl screamed in Carl’s- was that his name? K couldn’t quite remember- face, spittle somehow landing on the poor drone’s visor despite the closed mouthpiece. Maybe it had shattered and was broken open now, she didn’t know or care.


    A pitiful whine caused K to groan in annoyance. Ever since they had left, the weird sentinel drone that the pair had brought along with them had been nothing but difficult with her. She hadn’t even wanted to take the damn thing along with her, but apparently it was a vital piece of military tech that the collected facility drones could use in future anti-drone operations. When she had asked specifically what kinds of drones that they would be fighting, Sterl had made it very clear that it would be her if she didn’t “shut her mouth ‘fore I slap ya silly.” However, despite the vitriol, something in his tone and expression made her look at the statement at more than face value. She didn’t know quite what exactly, but obviously something was going on with the facility drones.


    Every time she had gone through the rounds of patrolling the camp (per A’s orders, of course) she had felt a general aura of hostility. Granted, most of it was directed at her specifically, but not all. Everywhere she looked, there were arguments taking place, paranoid statements, notes being passed, weapons being stashed in places that she was SURE weren’t mandated by the incompetent leadership, and even the occasional assassination. The last part had only happened twice, with the first time failing, but it had been funny to see the wild panic that ensued after an IED took out what she had assumed to be a squad leader right as he had stepped outside of the command tent.


    She frowned. She really needed to get back to the camp. Despite her personal misgivings with the leadership of the facility drones, they might just be the last remaining form of any semblance of a continuous human government or organized entity. Hell, whatever JCJenson had been doing in that lab had left the remnants of the company in a state called complete and absolute death, so that avenue had been burnt from the very moment she had arrived on the exoplanet.


    That brought her to the latest in a long line of recent events that had been shocking her non-stop. Earth was, allegedly, gone. Well, she imagined that there was still some debris left orbiting around Sol or maybe even Venus, but for all intents and purposes it was just gone. She didn’t exactly want to believe it, and all she had to go off of was a single off-hand statement that was probably said as a joke, but something about it just seemed . . . right. It said something about herself since she was so readily able to believe- well, not quite believe- what was most likely a lie, but she wasn’t the introspective sort. That was for softies and idiotic programdivergents.


    But, as her very wise squad leader had once said, all avenues of possibility had to be explored and prepared for if you didn’t want to be caught off-guard. Well, the exact quote had a lot more insults and belittling directed specifically at her, but she knew that it had been all part of his plan. Keywords being had been.


    The planet trying to tear itself apart in record time didn’t help things either. For all she knew, it was a gamble on whether or not she and the rest of her tagalongs would be lifted hundreds upon hundreds of miles into the air by the scientifically impossible energy tendrils. That was something that she knew that she couldn’t prepare for, even if she was the smartest drone on the surface.


    And she most definitely WAS the smartest drone, no question.


    The only saving grace was that she didn’t have to wait for the human to catch his breath between every few hour-long sprints. While she was sure that the average biological being had much greater physical abilities than the disgrace to her bosses that she had been forced to bring along for the ride, the fact that he had proved himself as both a technological aberration as well as a disgusting, disgraceful traitor to his race meant that she could say anything she wanted about him without fear of reprisal.


    Even though the supposed military drones were far inferior to her design, they were still drones in the end. That meant near-limitless stamina, and the mental constitution to boot. Drones have always been designed to have the perfect combination of fear, empathy, willpower, and processing power to be the perfect tool for humans to use, specifically workers. They still had the desire to ‘save’ another one of their kind, but even if they still ‘lost’ them in the end, they surely wouldn’t be missed. The only problem with this were the learning algorithms that made them develop some level of emotional intelligence. Now THAT was when the problems began.


    K diligently ignored the hypocrisy of her words. In fact, there was no hypocrisy to begin with. Because she was right. Always.


    It was still slow going, even with the added bonuses of the artificial constructs being her company this time around. The fact that they couldn’t fly meant that she, surprise surprise, also couldn’t fly, no matter how badly she wanted to. If she wanted to gain brownie points with what she begrudgingly admitted would be her new bosses for the time being, then she would have to bring what remained of the expedition safe and sound. Of course, she would make some strategic harmless embellishments here and there, nothing that would matter in the end anyway. It was just so she would get the praise that she deserved.


    Making sure to tread carefully over a patch of concrete that sagged downwards and had a very distinct warm breeze coming up through the cracks, K gestured for the arguing pair to follow. While she didn’t look back to confirm, the annoyed grumbling coupled with the sounds of boots echoing like gunshots off of the surrounding infrastructure assured her of her decision.


    She was wasting time, not to mention just how screwed she and everything else on the planet would be pretty damn soon if they didn’t find some incredibly deep place under the surface to hunker down in. Now that she thought about it, those fragments that were hanging around were looking awfully menacing with how her bleeding-edge UV rangefinder kept telling her that the objects were slowly, but surely, approaching. If the self-cannibalism of the planet didn’t kill them, then those things sure would.


    All in all, it was pretty good motivation for her to get her and the others’ asses moving.


    *  *  *


    hunger


    Ren huddled up against the rusty boiler, curled up in on herself with all five of her arms tucked in. She hated the feeling of the foreign [manipulators] protruding from her back, the unnatural [opticals] and [senses] making her want to tear her own CPU out. She could hardly tell what she was seeing, but the information that had been shoved in her head gladly popped up to fill in the gaps. The infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, microwaves, and several dozen others, she could see in. All at once.


    hunger


    She could only describe it as a violation. No matter how much she tried to shut out the flood of data assaulting her processors, they would forcefully reopen the connection through whatever physical fiber optics they had laid down. Or maybe it was quantum bands, she didn’t know how impossible the invaders of her mind had gotten.


    hunger


    Those things meant that she could very clearly make out the sheer heat wafting off of her. It had gotten to a point where whatever flammable surface that she strayed near for too long went up in flames. Even the boiler, which was built out of some sort of human-made metamaterial, was starting to bulge outward and sag. Maybe whatever gasses were left inside the container would make an explosion and blow several dozen holes in her. That would be preferable to whatever horrors awaited her after what dregs that were left of her willpower capitulated to the mental onslaught.


    hunger


    Not to mention her free will having been stripped away from her. It was an interesting thing, feeling like your limbs were moving less so of your own volition, but instead more like they were being guided along under your power. Well, she said the word interesting, but that was the understatement of the year. Along with all the other understatements.


    Her whimper echoed throughout the considerably expansive basement, which was yet another understatement. The entire area was shaped like some sort of ring around an enclosed central chamber that she had neglected to find out what was inside. Countless scaffolds and shelves decorated the space, with many more objects and devices littered around. Ventilation and heating machines protruded out of the cracked, concrete walls, with more than a few busted and rent open, perfect for crawling into.


    She would know. She had crawled in through one of them.


    Debris spilled out of a particularly large hole in the side, blocking off a section of the ring from her sight. She found it strange that she could slightly see around bends and corners, but that ability wasn’t helping her here.


    It was also clear that the underground chamber was structurally sound enough to not have completely fallen in on itself during and after the immediate consequences of the core collapse. However, if the various dead bodies wearing overalls and possessing bludgeoned and pierced wounds to what she thought were vital components to a standard organic, then they met a less than peaceful end despite being saved from frostbite. The battleground of what likely had begun as a minor disagreement was now the resting place for maybe thirty or so of some of what had been the survivors of the extinction event, old blood staining the ground around the many corpses that were left behind.


    hunger


    In fact, the blood was so old that it had turned nearly black, so black that it had looked like oil to her previously addled mind. While she had calmed down a bit since then, her earlier less-than-coherent state had done its best to lick up the ‘oil’ in a desperate bid to stave off the primal aching that she still felt. All she had gotten for her efforts was a mouthful of dust and pebbles. Maybe a few screws, if she thought about it hard enough.


    Ren didn’t quite know what to do. In fact, she had absolutely nothing to work off of. Not even the smallest fraction of a semblance of a plan. She was just . . . so . . . tired. She still felt the bursts of her thoughts being spurred into action and making a resolution to herself to get up and do something, but she just couldn’t bring herself to start moving. It was like those evenings where she was laying down in bed, having awoken over an hour ago and having things to get started on, but just couldn’t find the energy to change her state. It usually was solved by her just forcing herself to literally roll out of bed and get to her feet after a few minutes or so of just being facedown on the cold, hard ground, but that wasn’t an option this time. She could hardly control her own body like this, much less get far enough to gain a part of her own control back.


    hunger


    And- oh- that damned ceaseless VOICE! It was unending, relentless, always knocking at her door and slamming as hard as it could on the doorbell to her psyche to try and make the pain that wracked her body go away, even for an infinitesimally small moment. She had already proven herself a danger to everyone around her, couldn’t she just wallow in misery in peace!?


    A voice called out.


    Familiarity.


    Ren, for a moment that felt like it went on a lot longer than it actually did, couldn’t discern what the words were. It was like the entire English language had just been scalded from her memory banks with the quiet insidiousness of an OS update. The meaning, in her mind, conveyed a sense of dismay and . . . blue? It almost felt like it was trying to detail a deep seated ache in the torso, one different from the inescapable heat that she was feeling. It felt like . . . worry.


    “Ren?” The familiar voice echoed again. “You there?”


    She jerked upwards, shock and surprise coursing through her almost as much as the burst of pain from doing so did. The sudden renewed onslaught broke her silent facade for a split second, causing her to cry out. It sounded more like an animalistic shriek than a drone’s voice, which was only made more prominent by the way it bounced around the massive room and became more of a drawn out, haunting wail than something that came out of her. In an ironic way, she guessed that it was a sign of the thing that she had become.


    Then, she saw a figure round the corner. Well, not quite yet, but she could see it- not it, him.


    Her initial thought was murder drone, but the glowing, blue eyes combined with the awkward gait that was indicative of inexperience with one’s actual form gave the truth away. Following behind Jacob was a second drone, though this one looked a lot more like the machines that had hunted her kind for years. Jacob was jerking his head this way and that, his eyes and lights atop his head rapidly blinking as whatever system he had compiled and cobbled together with what a human mind could subconsciously make struggled to maintain what was likely the various forms of now-active night vision in the incredible dark. While his expression was kept fixed, Ren could see the indecision and complex emotions warring for control in the subtle twitches of his mouth and eyes. That was pretty much the only useful skill that the Solver had granted her recently, or whatever she wanted to call the entity that had hijacked control of her body.


    hunger


    Then it came back in full swing. The emptiness, the yawning pit that had made its home inside of her creaking open once more. She straightened suddenly and unnaturally, creaks and cracks rippling throughout her actuators and- unsurprisingly- organic enhancing muscles that now lined the interior and exterior of her arms. She didn’t doubt that if she were to examine herself properly, she might just have a layer of skin and muscle over her extremities. She was more of an organism than a drone now.


    Ren’s teeth gnashed together, head rearing as she fought to keep herself still. And, for a blissful moment, her sudden and jarring counterattack worked. A significant chunk of the pain ebbed away, and she almost collapsed upon reclaiming ownership of her limbs (and new ones) for a split second.


    And then it was ripped away from her. Almost as a punishment, she was booted back to the deepest and darkest recesses of her own data storage and left to fester in agony. She felt a chiding slap hit the back of her digital consciousness, and an equally annoyed voice drifted its way to her.


    [Frustration] Silly-goose, you-already-lost-your-chance-to-cooperate. Be-a-good-little-puppet, and-sleep


    And so she did.


    *  *  *


    X mashed his finger against the small, flickering button for what was probably the fifteenth time in the last thirty seconds.


    Jacob jerked an arm and grabbed him by the wrist, his grip like a vise.


    “Dude, stop that.” He said in an annoyed tone. “You’re just gonna break the thing,”


    “Meso abracadabra? Me ento no-” X began.


    Jacob groaned, letting go of X’s hand and running his own down his face. He folded his arms and turned on his heel to start pacing, though he managed to stop himself in time. Here he was, sitting up here waiting for an elevator that was probably just sitting at the bottom of the shaft in a broken heap of scrap. Even if it somehow wasn’t destroyed or cut off from the power in some way, he was pretty sure that elevators were automatically disabled in emergencies. Point was that there was no point, at least none to waddling around up here waiting for something to happen. Whatever had occurred in front of his face a few minutes ago was something that obviously wasn’t good news.


    It had all happened so fast, really. One second he was trying to help Ren up the stairs and calling for a stubborn X to come help, and next thing he knew his body’s hand was gone, wrist spurting oil all over the floor, and the perpetrator of the crime? Ren.


    She had gone to town on the hand- HIS hand now, actually- and devoured the whole thing in just a few quick moments that had gone by in the blink of an eye. It was a savage side to the normally unflappable and slightly ticked off drone that he had come to be familiar with, one that he wasn’t sure if he liked.


    Then there was the voice. It resonated with him, like a bell being hit by the largest mallet known to man. He had heard it before, but the memories of the hallucinated rich person mansion was getting fainter and fainter, growing fuzzy around the edges with key details being swept away in the wind. It left him wondering if he had forgotten anything else of importance. But the voice, it felt like more than just a random memory. It held a certain weight and cadence to it that seemed to grate against everything except for himself. When it spoke, it was almost as if the universe itself was screaming out in pain from having a thousand combine harvesters being run over its body, but there was a special space off to the side where he had the view to be safe and watch. Like it was being tortured, all for his enjoyment.


    And then she was gone. A massive hole had opened up in the floor after she had ripped a chunk out of it and swallowed her whole, the darkness looking like a black hole that had popped out of nowhere. It had all happened so fast that he had barely had time to utter a single word before it left as sudden as it came.


    And now he was here. Milling about, twiddling the robotic thumbs of the body he felt like a co-pilot of and doing absolutely nothing.


    Lightning flashed in the distance, or some eldritch approximation of it. The sky had turned almost completely red, and heavy clouds had come to rest close to the ground. It gave the landscape a more different apocalyptic feel than the one it had previously. Like, whatever was coming, nobody would survive it.


    With a sudden ding, the elevator doors surprisingly slid open with the sounds of motors and gears struggling to meet the demand. A light flared to life inside the small space, revealing an unexpected passenger that had remained in the machine long past his due date.


    A freeze-dried corpse sat slumped up against the backside of the interior of the elevator. While no blood stains were evident, likely having been swept away after being exposed to the harsh atmosphere, a distinct collection of bullet holes peppered the front of the man’s threadbare work shirt that he had on. He held a rusty pipe in his hand, still clutched tight despite being deceased.


    X, seemingly uncaring of the dead body, strode right into the elevator with a cocky grin on his face.


    “See, you stupid idiot? You see the folly of your woeful meandering and moaning?” X asked in a snooty tone. “Yet again, I find myself two. Steps. Ahead.”


    “Don’t get cocky, kid.” Jacob mumbled back half-heartedly as he took his place inside the elevator as well.


    “Grrrrr, I’m not a kid!!!!!” X shook with anger. “Also, Star Wars is lame!!!!!”


    Jacob sighed and rubbed the back of ‘his’ head. He really wasn’t in a joking mood, it had been a mistake to try and play along.


    Taking his place by X’s side, Jacob watched as the button to the bottom floor was practically broken by his companion’s eager right hook. While it sparked and fizzed, the elevator still jarred back into motion, albeit with a worrying stutter.


    Silence pervaded the space for the next few moments. Jacob was partially thankful for it, though that meant he would be left alone with his thoughts.


    He honestly didn’t know how he didn’t see the signs. He knew for a fact that disassembly drones apparently needed to consume large amounts of oil to survive, even if that was a questionable design choice by whatever thing had decided to bring those forsaken creatures into existence.


    He was one of them now, he realized. Even if the hands that he maneuvered around still produced involuntary twitches from time to time.


    Ren clearly hadn’t been okay from the moment he had met back up with her. Every now and then she would wince or hiss as if she had stubbed her toe or gotten pinched, and he would ask if she was okay, and she would be all like, “You idiot, I’m fine, stop asking me or I’ll leave you behind!” She was always so needlessly aggressive too, even more so than usual. That, coupled with her seemingly irrational hurriedness and stress, made her condition all the more obvious in hindsight.


    If only she had told him. God, why was she always so abrasive!? The world was literally falling apart, and she still couldn’t bear to just say that she was about to melt into glowing slag- well, that wasn’t quite what had happened.


    Jacob had developed a bad feeling, a paranoia that had sunk deep into his mind and refused to let go by the time that they started ascending the stairs. He had believed that the elevator was out of order when he saw the sign, and Ren had concurred. That meant walking up the countless flights of stairs all by themselves, even if one of them had been hardly able to stay on her own two feet.


    He had felt like he was forgetting something at that moment. He always felt like he was forgetting something incredibly and vitally important, but that had been different. It was a strange feeling, to look to his right and not be able to shake that feeling that something just wasn’t right.


    And look where it had gotten him. Traveling to what he assumed to be the bottom floor in a rickety elevator that was sure to collapse before he even reached his destination, partnered with a halfway-coherent machine that only knew how to make outdated references and mindlessly slaughter. It was kind of laughable in a grim sort of way, but also representative of everything that he had experienced during his time on this fracturing hunk of rock and stone.


    Maybe he hadn’t been appreciative enough of the help that he had been given. After all, he had just shown up at Ren’s abode- which was surprisingly homely in retrospect- and just basically strong-armed her to the point of agreeing to take him to Camp 98.7. Well, he hadn’t forced her in the traditional way, it had been more of a ‘refusing-to-leave-her-alone’ situation until she caved in to his plan.


    That was kinda rude now that he looked back on it.


    The poking and prodding probably hadn’t helped either. He tended to try and distract himself from the sheer nothingness that comprised all the things that were left to do on the planet with inside jokes that nobody else alive would get, but maybe Ren hadn’t been begrudgingly entertained by it. Maybe she genuinely did see him as a nuisance. Maybe she just didn’t trust him enough to ask for help in any meaningful way.


    Jacob didn’t like that, he knew that much. Ever since he had woken up for the first time, a decade OUT of time, reality had felt . . . muted. Not real, in a sense. As if he was watching everything from an outside perspective, looking in on the narrative unfolding within. It was a strange disconnect that he was only now realizing existed. It had been insidious, in a way.


    For a brief and irrational moment, Jacob wondered if any of this was real. He didn’t know the framework for what made something a lucid dream or not, but maybe this was it. Maybe he was still slumbering inside that cryopod, waiting for the next time that he would be woken up.


    Or maybe the cryopod didn’t exist at all. He had heard of people experiencing hyper-realistic dreams that were indistinguishable from real life while inside a coma, but he honestly wasn’t sure if it was to this extent. He had to acknowledge that he might be on his deathbed at this very second, the completely normal tumor in his head finally having gotten to him. Tumors in brains probably messed with a lot of the things regarding perception and thought processes, so he had that to contend with.


    Jacob was slightly surprised to feel a twinge of despair and anxiety break through the fog surrounding his thoughts at that notion.


    Jacob shook himself out of his stupor. He couldn’t let himself get mired down in the loop of defeatism, he needed to focus. He was gonna get out of the elevator as soon as he was able to, find his bearings, find Ren, and then . . .


    Then what?


    With a startling clang that was signatory of the elevator slamming into the bottom of whatever old passageway it had been traveling down, Jacob was thrown back into reality. Creaks and groans of stressed metal filled the air as the construction struggled to hold itself up, though the moment was broken by a cheery ding that seemed much lourder than it probably actually was.


    X, now somehow wearing what appeared to be a full set of ‘modern’ tactical gear, turned to Jacob with a solemn and deadened expression on his face. Racking the small slider that was on the side of his (literal) handgun, he spoke with a slight foreign accent.


    “Remember,” He began. “No Rus-”


    Jacob slammed the drone aside, eyes already searching and scanning the darkened room for any sign of his quarry. He didn’t even have the time to be surprised at his own offhand expression of strength before he quickly realized that he couldn’t see anything past what had been illuminated by the glow of the flickering internal elevator light. At all.


    No matter how much he squinted or focused, his eyes just wouldn’t adjust to the light level. If he still had human eyes, then maybe he would be able to see a little bit better after a few moments, but not here. And then, when the elevator doors slowly slid shut, he couldn’t see anything at all; there was absolutely zero light in whatever area he had stumbled into.


    Jacob’s internal pessimist helpfully pointed out that, if whatever had taken hold of Ren wanted to, he could be easily ambushed, get his heart ripped out, and sliced into ribbons. Or maybe eaten, depending on how much of a bad day he was having. He really didn’t want to jinx it by saying it couldn’t get any worse, though.


    That was when a hand laid itself down on his shoulder.


    After leaping about thirty feet away from the offending entity and waving his hands about in the air as if that was gonna do anything, Jacob stopped moving when a slight giggle reached his ears. Not the giggle he remembered from his dream, though. This was deeper, more manly and human-like, if he could use that term to describe murder machines.


    “Can’t see?” X called out with no small amount of humor in his voice.


    Jacob couldn’t even begin to describe the amount of relief that filled his mind at that moment.


    “Nope, I can see fine, no need for your help at all.” Jacob crossed his arms and let out a dignified sniff, though he didn’t know how much it added to the atmosphere or if he should even be wasting time like this. Hell, that wasn’t even a question, he needed to go NOW-


    “You have night vision, dummy,” X chortled, his voice moving past and ahead of him as he did so.


    That . . . checked out. It was practically a given that a disassembly drone would be able to see in the dark on top of all the other things that they could do, he didn’t even know why he hadn’t thought about that. He even distinctly remembered being told about it earlier.


    Jacob stared ahead of him, fixing his gaze on an imaginary point in space that hopefully wouldn’t drift on him. Concentrating as hard as he could, something blipped in his field of vision. While he lost his focus for a second due to surprise, he was quick to renew his mental push. After about ten more seconds of doing just that, a shape outlined with a question mark burnt itself into his eyes. It looked like a box.


    Reeling from the pain that flared behind his eyeballs- or his display, he guessed- he gasped for air as his hands searched for something to support himself with.


    Once again, X was right there next to him. At one point, Jacob would’ve questioned just how he managed to move around so quickly and quietly, but he would probably come up with some nonsense to deflect the question. Pointless, just like countless other things.


    “Oh gee whiz, look at you stumbling all over the place!” X’s voice sounded awfully loud in Jacob’s left ear. “Use your green vision, idiot.”


    “Green vision?” Strange phrasing, but not technically untrue.


    Jacob, despite not being able to see anything, assumed that X was rolling his eyes mockingly anyway.


    “Y’know, the vision that’s green!” X helpfully elaborated.


    Frowning, Jacob opened his mouth to ask for more information but quickly thought better of it. He was never gonna get a straight answer out of the strange drone.


    He stood ramrod straight, still not sure which direction he was facing. It was always a strange sensation, to focus as hard as you could on something only to see nothing else. If anything, all it did when he was still normal was cause him to become painfully aware of the limitation of his eyes. The reality he had been seeing had felt . . . false, or incomplete, more like. He had felt like it was only a matter of breaking the barrier that was there, seeing beyond the data that his brain had translated from photons bouncing around inside his retina and finally seeing the world for what it truly was.


    But that was never the case. All he had ever accomplished was becoming painfully aware of the specks and slight grainy imagery that represented the limit of his biological components. Electronic ones would have the same problems, mostly due to a ceiling on image resolution. It didn’t frustrate him, or cause him to obsess over it in a near-religious sense, but it was just something that he had picked up as yet another facet of the reality that a gestalt just didn’t exist.


    Which was why Jacob was surprised when he felt . . . something, when he tried to create a construct within his mind. It was the metaphorical and mental straining of it that never happened to him, or at least never did in the past. It was an awareness of that something that he had never felt before, his brain struggling to process information that it was never meant to receive. He doubted that he had an actual, organic brain though. Instead, he was met with the fact that, whenever he tried to grasp at the something, it dissipated like a false memory derived from deja vu.


    With a snap and a burst of what he could only describe as static, that something felt like it swept over him like a wave. For a moment, he didn’t see anything. Not the standard blackness that was associated with a lack of color, either. No this was actually something instead, with raw information about his surroundings being shoveled into whatever baked processor he had in the head that he occupied. ‘Closing’ his ‘eyes’ didn’t help.


    After an excruciating moment that felt like it had been stretched out into an eternity, everything was flung back into place like it all rubber-banded. Data dutifully filed back into place, albeit with some reluctance. His vision flickered back into recognizable colors, with one being the most predominant.


    Green. Fuzzy. Static-y.


    But most importantly, Jacob could see again.


    X hadn’t been lying about the night vision, which was genuinely a real possibility. Now, all Jacob could see was green-tinged cracked concrete and metal machinery dotted all around the place, with destitute powered construction vehicles left to rot along with the dead bodies. The MANY dead bodies.


    It looked like the aftermath of a warzone. Dried blood, freeze-dried corpses with the moisture crystallized inside of them, firearms, and a small crater filled with dust and what seemed to be a pair of . . . cowboy boots? X was notably standing over them, seemingly inspecting the footwear with a strangely dramatic posture. As if he was a posh inspector from some sort of rich person inspection service.


    Trotting over (and making sure to avoid the bodies) Jacob snatched up the boots from the ground and stuffed them into his officer’s coat, meeting X’s questioning gaze. He didn’t say anything, but he felt like his intent was made clear by whatever was communicated by his eyes. Judging by the fact that X set his jaw and gave a solemn nod, Jacob was correct.


    He set off at a brisk speed walk, scanning the environment for any clues as to where Ren might have taken residence. He wasn’t even sure if she was still in the building, but X had stalwartly maintained that she was still somewhere close. He had even cited his source, which was something about detecting residue wavelengths or whatever science nonsense that was beyond his knowledge. Jacob suspected that X also didn’t know what he was talking about, but he had no other leads to go off of.


    He needed to get Ren back. Needed her.


    That thought gave Jacob a slight pause.


    “Ren!?” Jacob called out, cupping his hands over his mouth to form a tube. “You okay!?”


    His voice echoed throughout the empty chamber, which he was just now realizing might be a much larger ring than he had initially anticipated. While it wasn’t anything on the scale of something like the facility or a small section of the New York subway tunnels, it was certainly expansive. That, along with all the nooks and crannies that made for excellent hiding spots, gave him a sinking feeling that his endeavor was a lost cause. He adamantly refused to acknowledge the possibility that she was dead, or worse. Probably worse.


    He sighed, raising his head to call out once more.


    “Ren!? You there!?”


    No response.


    Jacob carefully watched as X sidled up next to him, the disassembly drone’s gaze lazily flicking around the room. Clearly, he wasn’t as concerned about their mutual accomplice as much as Jacob was.


    Before X could even get a word out, Jacob held up a hand to cut him off.


    “I know what you’re gonna say,” He said.


    X scratched the back of his head. “Uh huh.”


    “We need her, alright?” Jacob sighed again, his shoulders slumping slightly.


    “Do we need her, or do you need her?” X strangely replied.


    Jacob stopped walking and stared at X, who did the same right back at him.


    “I’m not the best at math, but I’m pretty sure that me and my squad have been here for at least a little longer than that red one has.” He stated in a tone that brokered no argument. “Trust me, I would know.”


    “But she’s got those Solver powers or whatever they’re called,” Jacob argued anyway despite the sureness in X’s voice.” That’s gotta be worth something, right?”


    “Yeah, powers that she can’t even use against the other you. She would be more of a liability than a proper ally now that he has experience fighting her, or a good distraction at best to occupy him while me and you do the real work.”


    Jacob’s expression went from surprise to confusion.


    “How- what- what’re you talking about?” He stammered out. X was . . . he normally wasn’t like this.


    X cocked his head and seemingly pursed his lips.


    “I’m saying that she’s not good enough to be useful.” He deadpanned.


    Jacob didn’t have any words. He obviously disagreed with the bullshit logic that X had come up with seemingly on the fly, but he only had more questions. Why was he suddenly so serious? Why did he talk like he knew much more about the matter than he had let on? And since when was X actually making pragmatic decisions, even if they didn’t make sense?


    “And before you say anything about ‘strength in numbers’ or something, she’s probably more likely to try and slice open your throat than stand beside you in battle.”


    It was hard to argue with him, though. Jacob didn’t have any sort of response to whatever X was spouting, even if it was untrue. And it WAS untrue. Ren was plenty good at . . . stuff . . .


    Hadn’t Jacob been the one to save her when she had been in that ambush or whatever it was? From the looks of what he remembered, she had been on the ropes. Those military drones plus one stone-cold killing machine had managed to metaphorically pin her to the wall for easy pickings. It was only when Other Jacob had taken the reins and blitzed across the battlefield to great effect that the tides had turned.


    Going back even further, he and her had actually met by her stabbing a knife into and through his eye. She still hadn’t said sorry for that yet, either. And that would’ve been the end of it if Jacob hadn’t decided to go to her for whatever reason then-


    Then he wouldn’t be here. Wouldn’t have had to fight over a dozen military drones, wouldn’t have had to trudge through a decrepit facility, wouldn’t have had to deal with an unruly companion that really hadn’t done much to help him except point him in the right direction, and he wouldn’t have gotten his body STOLEN.


    Now that he thought about it, it just didn’t make sense that he would’ve gone to the person that had literally killed him for help in any sane world. After all, if he got robbed on the street or in an alleyway, it wasn’t like he was gonna go asking the same guy for directions to his house. It was almost like something had pushed the idea into his head, before slowly convincing him to go ahead with the idea.


    . . .


    It was then that the puzzle pieces fell into place. The strange dream that came as a result of his death, the half-real dialogue that his other self had made with that Cyn thing, the ceaseless journey towards a random camp in the middle of nowhere, Ren’s behavior, his body being snatched, and the subsequent ‘quest’ to get it back.


    Jacob’s internal voice, the one that had been poking at him for practically his entire life, roared in victory. It all seemed too perfectly outlined to be true, but the shivers that ran down the spine that he used continued all the same. It was fantastical, bordering on conspiracy, but he couldn’t shake the partial certainty that had taken hold. That only left one question, though. One that he wasn’t willing to answer. Not yet.


    “Whatever,” Jacob shoved aside an X who had adopted a lax grin. “Let’s keep moving-”


    something is coming


    A feeling of unadulterated fear gripped Jacob’s heart, primal panic blanking out his mind and replacing it with only a single command; hide.


    He snapped his gaze to his left, then his right. After he saw nothing, he froze for a split as indecision took him in its chokehold. However, the momentary lapse in his judgement was cut short by the near-silent whisper of something fast moving through the air behind him. Once again, that fake adrenaline pushed him towards diving onto the ground without care for whatever consequences arose from it.


    Jacob listened on with sluggish comprehension as the thing that had been whipping towards him sliced into X with an impossibly organic crunch. An equally strange sweet scent reached whatever he used to smell a moment before the upper half of the disassembly drone hit the ground with a wet slap, oil splattering everywhere as it did so. He glanced over to see the glitching display of the drone that had been so confident a second ago staring lifelessly into his own. To make matters worse, a sheet of metal came down and sliced the head in half, leaving the torso as the largest remaining piece of X’s body left. After a millisecond, unadulterated shock and dread replaced the irrational panic; he was now alone.


    A small hiss of disappointment whispered out from somewhere to Jacob’s right, causing him to jab the blade in the direction it came from.


    Wait, blade?


    His situation momentarily forgotten, he glanced down at his hand to confirm that, yes, his hand had indeed been replaced by a long, gleaming, razor-sharp, and curved piece of what he assumed to be steel or something. He also noticed the pair of yellow eyes watching him from the darkness.


    Letting out a very manly yelp, Jacob scrambled backwards yet again out of surprise. After a slight bar of static shot across his vision, the eyes vanished. It only served to make his paranoia and fear skyrocket even further.


    “Annoying.”


    Ren’s voice echoing throughout the vast chamber would’ve shocked Jacob even more if he still had available capacity to be shocked. The barrage of recent events had kinda left him reeling and unable to process much.


    Still, that didn’t stop him from replying instinctively.


    “Excuse me?” He spoke into the open air, not sure where to direct his words.


    Quiet laughter. “You are excused.”


    Coming barreling straight towards him from in front of him, a crowbar appeared before his eyes from the darkness and made a beeline for his head. All he could do to react was bring up his right hand and hope for the best.


    CLASH


    With a spray of yellow sparks raining off of the collision point, steel met steel. Jacob could just barely hold the crowbar back, making note of the rippling, crimson holograms that circled around its midsection.


    And then, she was there, striding out of the darkness after she had just . . . appeared there. Complete with her tattered coat and loose-hanging scarf, she looked physically normal. However, there was still something off about her that Jacob couldn’t quite pinpoint, not that he had the time to.


    “Trouble holding up there, huh?” Ren stated dryly, mirth evident in her voice.


    Jacob didn’t reply. He was still trying to figure out why exactly she was doing this. Her voice sounded normal, so did that mean she was doing this of her own accord?


    “I mean, kinda figures,” She began to circle him, her boots sounding like gunshots as they hit the ground. “How many actual fights have you been in?”


    “None.” Jacob replied with gritted teeth.


    “Like I said, figures.”


    Jacob idly wondered why she didn’t just stab him from behind. The Ren that he knew wouldn’t normally take the time to monologue like this- well, now that he thought about it, she did do a lot of gloating and bragging. A small, quiet part of him continued to protest against his resignation and decision to accept what was right in front of him. Maybe it was all an act on the part of Cyn. Maybe Ren had thought that he had done something wrong. Maybe she was just playing a big elaborate joke, even. It presented all these arguments, though he didn’t know how to feel about them. All he knew was that Ren was trying to harm him.


    Case closed.


    She stopped and placed her gloved hands on her hips. “It really took a long time to drag you halfway across the tundra, too. Guess that was just a prime example of why sunk-cost fallacy is a fallacy to begin with. It all worked out in the end though, don’t you think so?”


    Now that was just rude.


    It took a second to realize that Jacob had unintentionally relaxed himself with the pointless banter. Before he could recalibrate, both of his shoulders were seized by something that came from behind him. In an instant, he had been shoved down to the ground with his head pressed up against the concrete. He could distinctly make out the creaking and cracking of his skull frame as it was slowly squished harder and harder.


    And then, the pressure let up. He was forcefully jerked back upwards so that his eyes would meet the strangely unblinking ones of Ren. When he turned his gaze to try and see what specifically was holding him, that same bit of static popped up on his vision again before what looked to be bent leaf springs coalesced before his eyes.


    Turning his attention back to the alleged traitor, Jacob made note of the strange look that she was giving him. It looked almost . . . unsure? No, regretful. For an admittedly short second, the two stared at each other without saying anything, only serving to confuse Jacob further as Ren’s expression morphed into frustration, right before settling back on the same smug look as before. Though, it looked less malicious and more falsified than what it had been.


    Then she scoffed. “Was expecting a little more from you, to be honest.”


    “Is that right?” Jacob snapped out. This time, his own vitriol began to rise in his chest at the repeated insults.


    That strange look flitted across her face again. “Jac- your other version put up more of a fight than you.”


    He supposed that he had to take her word for it. After all, it wasn’t like she had told him too much about the battle, nor had he witnessed any part of it with his own eyes. All he had to go off of were the other’s testimonies that were likely embellished, to say the least of them.


    Silence reigned after that statement. Jacob didn’t have much of a response to it anyways, nor did he feel the need to present one. It wasn’t like she deserved one, anyway.


    “So, that’s it?” He finally spat out.


    She raised an eyebrow. “What’s it?”


    “This, this is it.” Jacob pointedly glanced down at himself. “Just gonna kill me for basically no reason?”


    “I, uh, have plenty of good reasons.” She said after being taken aback for a moment.


    “Really?”


    “Yes.”


    Jacob sighed. She had always been unyielding, but this felt different somehow.


    “Was this the plan? From the very start?” He asked, his tone almost begging and pleading for an answer he liked.


    “. . . yes.” She shrugged, her eyes darting around shiftily as she slouched even more. He didn’t like that answer.


    That was when Jacob’s brain finally managed to pick out something coherent. The thing that had been itching at him from the start about Ren hadn’t been her clothing or demeanor; it had been her posture. It wasn’t something that one would normally notice, but it looked like she almost had scoliosis with the way she was slouching and bending her legs. Or maybe just like some sort of undead, a zombie.


    A zombie drone.


    As an inkling of a suspicion that he barely even gave any thought began to form in his mind, Jacob pressed for further answers.


    “So killing me, helping me, leaving me alone, losing to Other Jacob,-” He began.


    “Pffft, I wouldn’t lose to him.” Ren scoffed, her form flickering somewhat. Likely a trick of the fuzzy night vision.


    “-helping me AGAIN when you didn’t even need to, dragging me all the way out here, just to try and kill me again?” Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like a lotta work. A lot of unnecessary work.”


    Ren’s facial expression wavered with frustration, though Jacob was seriously starting to doubt his own senses. After all, he was pretty sure that he heard her say the actual word ‘frustration’ aloud, but she definitely wouldn’t do that, right?


    “Do not question me.” Her voice was monotonous, and Jacob could tell that he had struck a nerve.


    Despite the obvious reaction, he pressed forth. “I mean, if I was in your shoes, I probably would’ve just double-tapped myself and been done with it. Case closed, amiright?”


    “. . . anger . . .” Ren whispered, the bands around Jacob’s shoulders tightening even further.


    “Welp, I guess robots really never were that smart to begin with, anyway.” Jacob imagined himself winding up a big crank in his head that read, ‘VIGOROUS & CONTROVERSIAL RANT.’


    “Let’s be honest here, if I had woken up even a second sooner, you would’ve been done for, honest to the Almighty Lord above. Just boom, a few moves and checkmate, what with the glorified Roombas and all that.”


    Was that sizzling he heard?


    “I don’t really care if your weird robotic loser overlord Cyn has crazy magic powers, it clearly doesn’t have the brainpower required to actually effectively use it. Like, even if that completely useless piece of JUNK was standing RIGHT in front of me and able to put a pipe through my head and heart with ease, it wouldn’t do it!” Jacob made sure to laugh as degradingly as he could after that last sentence before he abruptly paused and leaned closer towards Ren’s face. “You wanna know why?”


    She blinked, leaning closer out of what he assumed to be robotic instinct.


    “It’s because I’m stronger, I’m SMARTER, and I. Am. BE-” Jacob grinned, showing off as many teeth as he could.


    With a rage-filled yowl, ‘Ren’ released him and sent him sprawling onto the floor, stomping her boots on the ground like a petulant little child.


    “WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS LIKE THIS!?” She wailed, chunks of her turning a light blue and glitching out of existence like some sort of hologram.


    “FOR ONE. THOUSAND. YEARS! YOU NEVER STOP WITH THE SAME DAMN JOKE, OVER AND OVER AGAIN!” Yellow-and-black striped claws popped out from the darkness and shook Jacob like a bobcat with a mouse. “IT ISN’T FUNNY ANYMORE, IT REALLY ISN’T!”


    “TIME AND [again, you-poke-and-you-poke-and-you-POKE, and-you-never-show-appreciation-for-how-much-I-have-done-for-you, Pointless RAGE]”


    ‘Ren’ had fully vanished by this point, the only thing left of her form being a flickering, vaguely humanoid-shaped pillar of light being projected by a series of wildly gesticulating cameras that were suspended in the air by spindly arms of metal.


    “[I-was-even-going-to-present-THIS,” A claw jabbed Jacob hard enough in the chest that it managed to carve a small hole into his torso. “Hunk-of-human-trash-to-you-to, maybe, make-amends-for-a-minor-miscalculation-that-I . . .”


    Cyn paused and let her claws droop, giving a chance for Jacob to actually hear himself think for once. First of all, he took offense to that name, thank you very MUCH! Second of all, he was pretty sure that she wasn’t even talking to him anymore. Or at least, wasn’t talking to him specifically.


    “. . . that-I-will-admit-was-uncalled-for, but-then-YOU-decided-to-go-off-on-a-revenge-kick-that-is-sure-to-end-in-failure-and-with-you-being-once-again-humiliated, but-maybe-I-could-have-been-merciful-and-not-punished-you-for-your-insolence]”


    The claws released him, their grips going limp. While Jacob was enraptured by the sounds of a spoiled rich ‘person’ seemingly regretting . . . something that they did, he really didn’t want to be around for when it finally realized that it wasn’t the center of existence. Maybe after he retreated and devised a new plan he could find out how to save Ren.


    However, those thoughts were put to an end when a cacophony of clicks and mechanical groans put an abrupt stop to the complaining coming from behind him.


    “[Oh, that-is-right,” Slowly turning around, Jacob caught sight of the trio of cameras and dual claws that had been giving him such a bad day. However, what he was just seeing now was the figure emerging from the darkness. Despite his night vision, static and glitched turned what little he could actually see of the outline into a vaguely familiar blob. The one thing that he COULD make out was the clear shape of a hat worn atop a head. Yellowish-green arcs of electricity zapped out from her and touched the floor, the majority of the bands coating the collapsed remains of X for a moment before she got far enough away that they calmed down.


    “You-exist]” The disappointment in Cyn’s voice couldn’t have been more palpable. “[We-must-rectify-that-immediately]”


    Oh shoot.


    A claw shot towards him, going so fast that he could’ve sworn that it left an afterimage in the air after it passed through it. Jacob just barely dove to the side in time to avoid getting body slammed into the maze of the several massive metal shelves behind him. Even now, he was still caught off-guard by the sheer speed of some of the attacks that came at him. It was clear that he wasn’t prepared at all for an extended battle.


    Crawling underneath a shelf to avoid getting pancaked by the other claw as she teleported around the corner, Jacob hastily began to rack his mind for any course of action as he began to drag himself around the mess of steel pegs and legs in an effort to remain as mobile as he could be. What he needed now was a game plan, preferably one that wouldn’t get him killed as soon as he stepped out from behind cover.


    The sound of crashing metal reached his ears. Cyn had begun knocking over the shelves to find him.


    Jacob scrambled up from his position on the floor as the shelf above him got hit by another and began to tilt like a domino. What met him was no space at all to escape, only a small space with all possible pathways closed off via some sort of twist of fate. He didn’t have time to dive back under a different shelf and hope for the best, so he went the only possible way he still was able to go; up.


    Unfurling his wings, Jacob gave a great flap of the ridiculously large steel constructs. Rocketing upwards, he just managed to divert course to avoid being splattered on the ceiling. As he grabbed ahold of one of the several long tubes that were sticking haphazardly out of the top of the chamber, he took the opportunity to catch his breath.


    Things were going too fast for him. He needed to get to the elevator to recoup-


    A blackened tentacle slithered and tightened around his left leg. Looking down just in time to stare at it dumbly, Jacob was yanked away from his perch. His solid grip only served to take a few of the pipes with him as he hurtled towards the ground at a breakneck pace.


    The last thing he saw before his vision filled with cracks and error messages was a single frame of concrete.


    After a few seconds of practical blankness, Jacob came back to reality to find himself at the bottom of a small crater in the ground, mouth full of dust and small bits of rubble. He even tasted the distinct flavor of human bone residue, and he didn’t even know WHAT that tasted like.


    His moment of reprieve was cut short by him being slowly pulled upwards into the air once again. Despite being upside-down, Jacob could make out the hazy image of Cyn- Ren? Rencyn? Ryn? He wasn’t sure what to call her now, but she was just floating dramatically in the air as if she owned the place.


    “[Tee-hee, oh-yes]” As if to match her mirth, Cyn placed a hand over her mouth and forced out some haughty giggles. “[Look-what-the-cat-dragged-in]”


    Instead of the standard crimson red of Ren’s eyes, they had turned a sickly yellow that stuck out much more than it felt like it should’ve. A collection of those tentacles were clustered and protruding out from her back, with most of them actually holding her aloft. The cameras had vanished, with the two remaining claws having been dispelled as well. Other than those, the only thing that was different about Ren’s body was the disturbing amount of indiscernible material that had begun to add definition to her arms, looking out of place around the robotic ensemble of parts.


    The slick appendage went from just being around his ankle to wrapping itself entirely around him, tightly securing his limbs in place so that he barely had a chance of escape. Jacob hated the oily feeling of it, the squishy organic-ness of it almost reminding him of internal organs.


    Huh, strange. Why did that feel familiar?


    “[Perhaps-Jacob-would-forgive, erm, I-mean-see-reason, once-I-bring-him-your-carcass-of-a-heart]” Cyn let out a surprisingly natural sigh of contentment. “[The-look-on-his-face-as-we-take-our-time-to-devour-you-whole-will-be-priceless]”


    Jacob genuinely shivered at that. Just how over-the-top and mentally unstable was this random genocidal AI?


    As Cyn began to go on another rant about how she would reunite with his other self and their combined might would shatter the stars or whatever, Jacob squirmed in the grip of the boneless arm. Maybe it was like an octopus’ arm and could detach? He didn’t know how he would accomplish that feat, but it was worth a shot if it let him survive the day.


    Hmm. What did disassembly drones have that could cut through things easily and quickly?


    “Not gonna abandon you,” He said, mostly as a statement.


    Concentrating as hard as he could given his situation, he began to mentally cycle through the variety of weapons that X had bragged about, claiming that it was apparently a bigger arsenal to ‘match his pitiful nation’s meager stockpile.’ Jacob had punched X in the face and broken his back out of pure principle from that insult, but maybe one of those tools would help him now.


    After a moment, a darkened cylinder with a sort of cross forming around the base of the device sprouted from his left wrist, causing him to smirk. He liked to think that he was a fast learner, but maybe it was just a product of being on a time limit. Whatever the case was, he was gonna take advantage of it. Doing the equivalent of squeezing my hand into a fist while pressing down on a trigger, a glow and a whine began to slowly emanate from the weapon on my arm.


    “ . . . and-then-we-will-visit-the-ruins-of-Niagara-Falls-and-professionally-discuss-what-civilization-to-conquer-next- huh?]”


    Whatever Cyn was gonna say next was cut off, mostly because a cornea-searing laser had swept through her tentacle and diced it into sushi. It also had the added effect of tearing through more than a few of the machines and pipes on the wall, the latter of which began to spew out pressurized white fog into the air. Strange, Jacob would’ve expected whatever pressure left in the pipes to have leaked out by now, but he guessed not.


    Mechanical design aside, Jacob landed deftly on the floor as the bleeding bits of the tentacle that had held him up splattered onto the floor in a shower of mystery meat. Grinning madly, he brought the end of the wide barrel up to his mouth and blew out a breath onto it. While it didn’t disperse much of the smoke rising off of it, it did have the benefit of looking cool.


    The two stared at each other for an uncomfortably long amount of time, during which Jacob managed to spare a glance at the body of X. He noticed that there was significantly more body mass attached to the torso than there had been earlier, making him recall the disassembly drones’ near-infinite regeneration. If he was able to stall Cyn for long enough, then maybe X would be able to tap back in and help him finish the fight.


    When he looked back over to Cyn, he just barely noticed an imperceptible flash of color in her eyes. It might’ve just been a trick of the light, but it had almost looked red for a split second.


    And then the moment passed, and Cyn opened her mouth to speak as she glared hard at him.


    “[Anger]”


    Jacob, having been discreetly charging another laser blast from his new favorite weapon, was surprised by the wooden crate that had been picked up and thrown at him. Dodging out of the way, he mentally cursed. He had completely forgotten about Solver powers entirely.


    The shrapnel from the box as it shattered against the wall behind him harmlessly peppered him as he prepared to launch himself at the form that still hadn’t moved from her spot that was out in the open. One, two running steps, and then he was in the air. Despite him not even bothering to redeploy his wings, he still went flying far above what even an expert basketball player could manage on their best day.


    His other hand, now bearing a blade, sliced downwards as he neared Cyn’s still form, smiling form. He was still wondering why she hadn’t even bothered to move when his blade connected with her- and passed right through with zero resistance.


    Blinking, Jacob watched as the hologram flickered away to reveal the tip of a sharpened pole poised to strike at him. He twisted midair, moving just barely enough to avoid getting his heart speared through when the long shaft darted up and impaled him.


    Ignoring the pain for now, Jacob growled and searched for his target. Despite him not seeing anything in his direct or peripheral vision, he sighted movement around the collapsed metal shelving units that still hadn’t settled. Raising his laser weapon, he let go of the charge that had been building up this entire time and raked it across the general area of what he wanted gone.


    The air hissed as the bright beam of burning energy sliced through the steel shelves like a hot knife through butter, cleaving them easily. Waves of heat roiled off of the now-glowing hot remnants as whatever cohesion that the pile had melted away in the face of the roving laser. While it didn’t quite fall in on itself into a pile of slag, there was definitely less of what had originally been there.


    Jacob’s right leg shook as he used it to take the brunt of his landing, panting hard as he did so. He didn’t really want to find out if his limbs could actually be broken in the same way that human ones could, but he suspected that broken bones would be the least of his concerns for the duration of the fight.


    More and more fog streamed into the chamber from the lacerated piping, billowing out all over the place as whatever mechanism that had been holding it together this entire time heaved its final, gasping breath. While the resilience of ‘modern’ pressurization systems was something to behold, all it did for him in the present was make it harder for him to see his enemy. He was sure that normal disassembly drones would be able to use some sort of special vision to bypass the visual loss, but he barely knew enough to be a threat.


    A small reticle darted around his vision as Jacob tried, and failed, to find Cyn amidst the fog. He kept seeing shapes darting in between particularly thick clouds of the things, heightening his paranoia further. He took to constantly turning in a circle to keep up with the movements of the various false entities that Cyn had conjured up. Maybe he could make a really big vacuum and suck up all the-


    With a keening screech, Cyn leapt out of a particularly cloudy section off to his right. Caught unprepared yet again, Jacob hit the ground with two hands pressing into his shoulders and a snapping jaw just inches from his face. Blackened oil or spit dribbled down onto him, the disgusting liquids leaking out of the impossibly wide mouth that he just barely kept away. Cyn’s eyes had turned crazed, hollowed out and constantly twitching. That, combined with the animalistic growls and rows of sharp teeth, turned the once-normal visage of Ren into something resembling a Lovecraftian basement dweller.


    With each minor lunge, Jacob came closer and closer to getting his throat torn out. Though, even with the creature on top of him, he couldn’t help but notice the flesh that had coated itself over the arms of Ren’s body. HUMAN flesh. He had initially believed the strange proportions to be a trick of the light, but he had obviously been wrong in that respect.


    An empty feeling bottomed out in the yawning pit that was his stomach. Something about that just felt wrong. The claws, tentacles, and lumps of bloody flesh growing out of the machines were one thing, but the sheer audacity that Cyn had to try and bend a purely human attribute for her own devices hit him in all the wrong places. It was an insult to his kind that he had even begun to dissociate with. A violation of the sanctity of the human body, which had been a symbol of superiority for as long as he had been able to remember.


    Bringing up his legs between himself and Cyn, he kicked out as hard as he could the moment that he had planted the bottoms of his feet (boots?) onto his attacker’s midsection. The snapping jaw was flung away from Jacob at a speed that still surprised him, slamming so hard into the ceiling that it caused a mess of cracks to spiderweb out from the point of impact. Seeing the dazed look that she had on her face, Jacob realized that this was his chance to seize a prime opportunity that had so conveniently presented itself before him.


    Jabbing his right arm into the air, he crossed the fingers on his other hand for luck and spat out a trio of rockets from the launcher at the end of his wrist. While the first was quickly caught by Cyn and redirected at himself, the second and third hurtled towards his target with zero abandon.


    Jacob flung himself to the side, just barely avoiding becoming yet another stain on the ground. While he didn’t have any sort of line of sight on Cyn, the two explosions that rang out from above him and shook the building was evidence enough that his gamble had at least somewhat paid off in his favor.


    Getting to his feet, he turned around just in time to see a lifeless, burnt husk of a drone peel itself off of the ceiling and facepalm against the ground without a single word. For a moment, Jacob failed to understand the implications, but then it hit him.


    Had he just killed Ren?


    Rushing to the pitiful corpse’s side, he turned it over to see the cracked display flickering with barely a few pixels of activity. They almost spelled something out, maybe an error message of some kind?


    Leaning in, he waited for the glitching text to clear up before he concentrated on one letter at a time.


    G-O-T Y-O-U ;)


    Realization burnt through him like electricity in water. Whirling around, he caught sight of Cyn flickering back into existence with half a dozen sharp weapons following along with her, all poised to strike. Grimacing, Jacob brought his forearms up to block the strike. This was gonna hurt. A single blink later, he saw Cyn inch ever closer in slow motion and-


    Get body slammed by a blurred figure with glowing lights on it, leaving yellow streaks behind in his vision.


    Cyn rocketed into the opposite wall, a crater roughly the shape of her forming around her when she finally hit the hard concrete. Glancing back over to his savior, Jacob visibly (and intentionally) deflated at the sight before him.


    “Wowee, that sure was a conveniently-timed intervention!” X laughed in such an artificial way that it served as a painful reminder that he was, in fact, just a robot. “Anyway gang, looks like we’ve got a mystery to solve? Get it? Solve? HAHAHAHA!”


    Jacob groaned. “Can we just get this over with?”


    “Sure.” X shrugged, dual submachine guns popping out of his wrists as he walked over to Jacob’s side. “Doesn’t make a difference to me.”


    Jacob looked over at X, an annoyed expression already present on his face.


    “And please don’t actually kill her completely, I don’t want to hurt Ren in the crossfire.” After a moment, Jacob cocked his head thoughtfully and made a correction to that statement. “At least, not permanently.”


    “I do agree that a slap or two is in order.” X mimed backhanding something across the face. “Just like the good ol’ days when my beer machine hadn’t reported me to CPS yet.”


    A flat line appeared on Jacob’s mouth as he took that in.


    “Okaaaay . . . not gonna ask you to explain that one.”


    As if on cue, Cyn’s form emerged from the Cyn-shaped hole in the wall, looking suitably furious with current events. A glowing symbol popped up around both of her hands, and the rattling of bits of metal filled the air.


    “Alright, so I have a PLAN.” X said dramatically.


    Jacob sighed. “Lemme guess, I’m the sacrificial lamb?”


    X furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. “I dunno what ‘sackafishal’ means, but you ARE gonna get beat up pretty good.”


    “Yeah, I figured.” Jacob frowned, crouched, and ran directly at the impostor in front of him.


    And so the fight began again.


    *  *  *