Just Another Body

::: subchapter J had made schedules and kept minutes for enough meetings. She knew management, she had flowcharts, and she'd applied that skillset to team organization. The conclusion of a mission, certainly one so... eventful, warranted an analysis, a retrospective, a breakdown. A postmortem. Metaphorically speaking, of course. And yet J still hesitated. The routines were primed --- now back at the spire, all threats eliminated, the only thing the mission required was a debrief and report written. J loved writing reports. Her pen scratched letters on a piece of notebook paper, and then crossed them out and started again. And yet. What would J write? She had the thought enough times. J could let it sit unamended in her internal monologue, she could even admit it to N: she ~~liked~~ valued her Uzi. But could she log that in her filing cabinet beside years of reports meticulously detailing her impeccable disassembly track record? No one read her reports --- except J herself. And J could already analyze the prospective drafts her language model had autocompleted. Well-worn excuses had carried her this far, after all. Her Uzi was an asset, a trade-off that meant more dead workers. The mission was suspect, the relay compromised, their directives (potentially) lacking the authority of the company. And besides it all, J was a drone with emotional needs --- was one worker really so big a deal, if it made her feel less lonely? N had his rocks, V her balloon animals. J could have a pet. Rephrased in the objective language of her reports, parsed with dispassionate logic, the arguments fell apart. J couldn't convince herself, not from first principles. It only computed with a new axiom amended --- with the admission that she had changed. That V was right. "If last week you'd seen what you're doing now, you'd be horrified." [Maybe it was better if AbsoluteSolver had created them --- then J had simply always been corrupted.]{.quiet} J kept her room spotless, but the walls were repurposed from worker scrap. She yanked out an old drone's hand, ready to channel the anger and anguish these thoughts would provoke into the satisfying crunch of breaking something. But the only thing that came out of her next was a sigh. "I still want you to rebel and stuff, y'know." There came an upward tug on her lips, but she didn't let that out. Uzi would be amused at her inner contradictions --- no, she would be smug. She'd flash some obnoxious smirk that'd need to be corrected with a threat ~~or a tease~~. Better to have something to correct than this blank state of disrepair. (J's pen had kept moving, and she was startled to see that she'd drawn Uzi on her page, purple brows knit in determination.) J mirrored that expression. She would have something to correct --- soon. That was why she couldn't do a postmortem. The mission wasn't over, Uzi wasn't dead, and J's work wasn't done. J's eyes flicked up to the blank-faced drone, and her thoughts ground to a halt. What am I doing? What is the plan? Where do I start? If the goal was Uzi's revival, she had five data points to build a model with: J and N had neutralized four 'Worker Defense Force' drones, and Doll received a 9mm SIGTERM to the back of the head. Doll's situation had the simplest explanation. That drone had already repeatedly executed the Solver program. J retained some doubts of Uzi's shared program theory --- but Doll closing her bullet wound had looked so much like V's body pulling itself back together. Though simplest to explain, it seemed least useful --- what could she conclude? That any drone running AbsoluteSolver could execute it to return to life? But had Uzi ever executed that code? Something unusual dwelled in her programming --- she cracked a mirror, broke out of her hibernation, and N claimed he'd seen the glyph on her screen. (Why hadn't J pressed him for details?) But Doll had revived herself in minutes. For her Uzi, it had already been days. Next, consider the WDF grunts. Doll did something to them. Patched their systems with Solver code? In battle, Uzi had seen the schemer 'cast' to no apparent effect during the battle. (Her ally's terminology was deeply unserious. This wasn't magic. Instead of 'casting', J would call it... executing corrupted solver functions. No, if Uzi needed to... a better term: anomalous solver functions.) Anyway, she thought Doll had manually 'activated' the grunts' revival. Could J 'activate' Uzi's revival? Except, under this hypothesis, that would require an anomalous solver function J had no means of executing. If J needed to get Doll's help for this... could she? What incentive would the scheming toaster need? Given her implied goals... ...this line of thought had gotten off-track. Back up. J in fact had more data points to work with, she realized. Second hand, granted. N'd recounted his disassembly of a drone executing solver functions, even retaining some functionality after V's headshot. In that unauthorized factory mission. Given the presence of the teleporting roach, that drone must've enjoyed the same patch as the grunts. With more time to grow familiar with the functions, but strictly less than Doll... could that explain its incomplete revival? But the WDF grunts underwent complete revival --- was this evidence of Doll's manual intervention, or proof J didn't have all the information? J slapped her head. She missed something big. So much had happened that she overlooked how this mess all began --- the corpse under the church. With a command the memory is reconstructed, interpolated and fuzzy. ::: {.boxed .italics} A door lay at the end [of the hall.]{.blur} J and V glanced at each other, [then took the last steps forward, pushing open the final door.]{.blur} [The room overflowed with worker]{.blur} drone corpses. [Or rather, worker drone parts. Piled to the ceiling. No screen showed an [error]{.pain .quiet} state; each one was rendered nonfunctional with damaged and discarded parts. Up]{.blur}on the floor, a centimeter thick layer of oil [sat, cold and thick.]{.blur} [One thing existed in the room, besides plastic and metal. A slab of stone rising from the center of the floor, [symbols]{.pain .quiet} etched into it, and spikes ringing it ---]{.blur} the only word that came to mind was altar. A drone lay on it, [the only one not in a state of abject disrepair, though]{.blur} the chassis's front was left popped open. [Inside, the wiring and motors that belonged in]{.blur} a worker drone's internals mingled with blood and organic sacs. [After a moment paused and staring]{.blur}, J tapped the drone. The screen flickered on. A [symbol]{.uzi-from-beyond} appeared, [faintly, barely discernible past visual artifacts and glitches.]{.blur} A hexagon with three prongs[, the same symbol that had]{.blur} transfixed V [in the tower.]{.blur} [V froze.]{.pain} ::: J paused on that last frame, reading between the pixels on her squadmate's face as if they were ledger lines concealing fraud. V knew something. Everything she saw that day and today only reinforced that. J was sure down to her wiring --- and the current that flowed in those wires was rage. (This time, she snapped the disassembled hand into tiny fragments between her clenched fingers.) One conversation with V would dispel this mystery. Did she know why drones came back to life --- did she know how? Error code 13: Permission denied But J had no means of persuading her. Their fight had proved that. J didn't need her for this, though. The most effective drone was of course the cleverest. She compiled and sorted the data. Instance Initiation Biology Result ------------------ ------------- -------------- -------------------- Doll autonomous bloodless(?) complete revival WDF Grunts assisted(?) bloody complete revival Factory Cultist autonomous bloodless(?) incomplete revival Church Sacrifice assisted(?) bloody incomplete revival Even with the margins for error, the picture that emerged drew worry-lines under J's eyes. Her inference computed one plausible line that could connect all these data points. Hypothesis: Operating AbsoluteSolver required skill or experience --- and revival simply came down to user ability. Of them, Doll had the most potent ability, granting her the cleanest revival. The WDF grunts had the weakest ability, but Doll could shore this up with her own ability. The factory cultist had intermediate ability and with no assistance from Doll, granting them a middling revival. Did that mean her Uzi was doomed? Dead ~~because of J~~ because her ~~corrupt~~ anomalous powers didn't come online soon enough? J had to keep thinking. The effortless slaughter proved no one in the church had access to solver functions. Meaning the corpse in the catacombs resulted from the application of the least skill J had observed. It could've been down there for months. And yet, that J and V witnessed anything at all down there --- a most pathetic reaction to stimuli --- gave J steadfast hope. That sacrifice on the altar, more than anything else, had to be her working model for how to bring Uzi back. Doll, the grunts, and the cultist were back online within minutes. But Uzi had already gone cold. The others all had access to a drone capable of executing anomalous functions. For better or worse, J could not. J knew little for sure, but this last lead was the most promising by far. If only the church still stood. Anything she could study had gone up in flames. A sound in the office --- J realized it was her own impotent groaning and grinding. After she recovered, she was going to rip V apart. Wrench the arms off before they transform, gouge out the row of optics, slice off the tail. Should J kick in the visor, or leave it and watch the expression contort? If nothing else, J knew exactly h