{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/hostile-takeover/02",
  "path": "/posts/hostile-takeover/02",
  "publishedAt": "2023-11-11T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "::: subchapter\n\n[04:50]{.timebreak .div}\n\nSerial Designation J needed a roadmap.\n\nNot literally --- her memory banks held a topologically mapped\nreconstruction of her surroundings.  But figuratively?  Where did she\ngo from here?\n\nWhen would she fly back to the spire?\n\nThe disassembly drone paced the parking lot of the Church of the\nElectric and the Divine.  Metal and glass glimmered while her shadow\ndanced and flickered faster than she moved, the bright fire still\nburning the church.\n\nNearby, in a heat-slicked pile of snow, lay her squadmates.  N was\nhalf-buried, his jacket taken off and lain beside him.  V, meanwhile,\nleaned against the mound as if sitting.  Sleep Mode shined upon each\nvisor, though that indicator obscured their true state.\n\nJ knew N's systems still busied themselves regenerating from the heat\ndamage (whose fault was that?  His.) In contrast, V systems\nthreatened to cause heat damage, processors still spinning deep in\nmemory consolidation routines J didn't have the means to terminate.\n\nBoth of them were useless at the moment.  So, where did J go from\nhere?\n\nThe faintest stars already were fading above the horizon.  Less than\nan hour from now --- 05:49 --- the sun would rise.  Unless they\nmoved, they would die.\n\n[04:55]{.timebreak .div}\n\nJ's pacing soon carried her several meters from the unconscious\ndrones.  Thoughts cycling through her processor, she drifted toward\ncooler air, farther from the burning church.  She neared the edge of\nthe lot.  From behind, the entrance sign was blank.\n\nJ glanced it, then in place of one eye a lightbulb icon flashed.  The\nsign wasn't exactly a curtain, but this wasn't exactly powerpoint\npresentation; J just needed to get her thoughts out, look at them,\nevaluate them.\n\nHer left gauntlet transformed into a projector while J fiddled with\nher window manager's display options, then a map of the the local\ngeography glowed on the blank sign's rear.  Bright yellow projections\nrendered outlines of frozen rivers and snowcapped mountains.\n\nSectors --- as defined by J --- comprised roughly the region corporate\ncould expect a disassembly drone to cover in a single night, a circle\nformed around their base of operations: the spire.  It would take a\nthree hour flight to reach the edge.  Time enough to go out, complete\na mission, and return before the sun rose.\n\nUpon the projection, J outlined the perimeter of their sector with one\nthick line, encompassing hundreds of square kilometers.  Within it\nstood one end of a mountain range; a (now frozen) lake surrounded by a\ndead forest; and the entirety of a city for which this was an\noutlying suburb.\n\nIn the center, a star marked the spire, and a cute pictograph of a\ndrone with pigtails indicated J's estimated current location.\n\nVisuals made it clear: tonight's mission hadn't taken them far.  The\nchurch lay northeast of the spire, not even halfway to the perimeter.\nWhy else would J have cut it so close?  She wasn't careless.\n\nAn hour's flight and J'd be back.  Half that if she pushed extra\nspeed.  Judging by the time --- 04:57 --- she'd indeed have to\npush it, but returning safe to the spire tonight would be as simple as\nexecuting the command.  Starting right now.\n\nThen J glanced to the snowpile behind her, yellow expression a glare\nsurrounded by worry lines.  Yes, J could make it back, but when would\nN and V wake up?\n\n(\"You left N to overheat.\")\n\nIt wasn't J's fault N hadn't kept an eye on his own reserves.  It\nwasn't J's fault seeing a dead drone --- of all things! --- deadlocked\nV's CPU.  J had come first and done fine before N, before V.  Of\ncourse she'd be the last, and she'd do just fine without them.\n\nWait.  J had come first? Where had that thought come from?  They\narrived on Copper-9 together, as a squad.\n\nShe started to run a stack trace, but---\n\n[05:00]{.timebreak .div}\n\nShe didn't have time to run deep introspective scans, not now.\n\nI won't leave N and V to die, she decided.  It'd be criminal\nneglect, for sure, unacceptable sabotage of company property.\n\nBut the logistics were a nightmare, worse than tax season.  How do you\ntransport two sleeping disassembly drones halfway across a sector?\n\nCarrying was an option, sure --- disassemblers carried corpses back to\nthe spire, after all.  Sometimes entire cratefuls!  But disassembly\ndrones were heavy.\n\nOf all the special disassembly functions, flight consumed the most\noil.  Now that she's cooled down to the warm & clear, J operated with\nabout 14 liters of oil --- flying back to the spire fast enough to\nbeat the sun would guzzle 9 liters at minimum.\n\nFlying back in time carrying N and V?  Simply impossible.\n\nJ stopped pacing, and kicked the pavement hard enough to leave a\ncrater.  The damage to her peg leg healed half a second later.\n\nCould she hunt a drone?  Her models shot down the possibility.  Over\nthe years, the number of worker drones remaining trended predictably\ndown and their caution only grew more obnoxious.  Could she find a\ndrone, if she spiraled out for a few miles?  Certainly.  Would it save\nher any time?  Absolutely not.\n\nJ didn't want to let her squad die, but if she had to pick who\nsurvived...\n\nNo.  Her calculations were circling around a possibility, shutting it\ndown preemptively.  But if it was a matter of her squad's continued\noperation...  J couldn't carry them back to the spire because she\nsimply lacked the requisite oil, and she couldn't hunt a worker drone\nfor fresh oil, and the nearest concentration of workers just went up\nin flames --- by V's own request.  (Why did J listen?)\n\nNevertheless, that didn't mean J had no sources of oil left.\n\nJ turned around, and regarded V.\n\nThe other female disassembly drone wasted plenty of oil in her hunts,\nbut J knew V had shutdown more drones tonight than J.  (It didn't mean\nV was more effective --- true effectiveness was delegation,\nintelligent management!) V had even began the night with more oil in\nthe tank (as was necessary for her role in the formation).\n\nJ walked forward.  Purely in terms of volume, J stood before an oil\nmother lode.  And the objective now was survival, with sunrise\nimminent.  Every second counted.  (05:01) Only one effective\nchoice, right?\n\nJ sat down, folding one leg over the other, and leaned closer to V.\n\nLimp against a mound of snow, her short hair wet, strands a mess, V\nsat statue-still.  Earlier, beneath the church, J'd shunted her into\nsleep mode suddenly, and her mouth still lolled open, as if in\npersistent surprise.  (Even unconscious, would J have ever dared look\nso undignified?)\n\nSome of V's repair nanites dripped out of her mouth.  That crossed the\nline.  J reached out wipe them away, then closed V's mouth for her.\nThen J caught herself.  There were more important matters (05:02).\n\nForced into sleep mode, processors hanging on inexplicably high\npriority threads, V wasn't waking up.  Even from J's touch.  Okay.  J\nanimated her eyes closing, and shut off her optics.\n\nPretend it's a worker drone. J groped forward blindly, hands\ngrasping onto warm plastic before she lunged forward, mouth agape.\nAnd J bit.  Warm liquid surged forward, and J drank.\n\nThen she flinched back and spat out the oil mixture, retching even\nafter her mouth emptied.  Already, her plan melted to sludge.  Forget\ndrinking one mouthful of that, let alone enough to fill her tank.\n\nA clever design, really, J thought.  Make disassembler oil\nunpalatable to consume, and even defective or compromised disassembly\ndrones would have no option but to fulfill their purpose.  As to be\nexpected of the engineering genius of JCJenson..!\n\nBut again, this was a matter of survival.  Of continued operational\ncapability! J said she wouldn't let her squad die, and if that meant\nenduring this wretched parasitism...\n\nJ leaned forward to drink more, only to be stymied.  The bite she'd\ntaken out of V had already healed.  Oh. This was bad.  Not only\nwould her regeneration be fighting J's efforts, that was itself a\nspecial disassembly function --- meaning V would be burning oil even\nas J tried to reallocate it.\n\nJ transformed her hand.\n\nCombat options comprised to overwhelming majority of their\ntransformation presets, but a few exceptions, utilities such as her\nprojector, did exist.  J produced a tool corporate had trained her to\nuse, but not without lectures' worth of warnings.\n\nA clamp held a bright blue serial debugging cable.  She released it\nand deftly unfolded the cord.  Retransforming her hand, she touched\nV's neck, searched the surface under her head...  There.\n\nDepressing the cover of a hatch on V's chest, it popped open,\nrevealing a few ports.  J kept her optics shut off, operating by feel.\nShe took one end of the cord and missed the correct port a few times\nbefore the debugging cable clicked into place.  Haptic sensors caught\nthe unsteady thumping of V's core pulsing with oil, felt even from an\ninch away.\n\nUnconsciously, V curled toward J, hugging closer.  J pushed her arms\nback with a huff, flush lines creeping onto her visor.  Between that\nand the beating core, it reminded her of one of corporate's dictums.\n\nNever connect two cores online.  A technician manipulating an active\ncore was a foolish as an electrician handling a live wire.  And J\nwasn't a technician; she was made of electricity.\n\nJ pressed the button to kill power to V's core.\n\nWith the solace of a rule followed, J popped open the hatch on her own\nneck, plugging the other end of the cable into herself.  Still\nflushed, J looked away, attention instead directed toward an inner\nconsole.\n\nJ began sending commands to V's operating system, housed in the\nmotherboard rather than the core.\n\n[05:05]{.timebreak .div}\n\nAfter a false start, J was in, the lines of commands scrolled through\nstandard output on her internal console.  She paused there, and\nfrowned.  What was the invocation, again?  It had been years since she\nhad to configure her disassembly functions by hand, rather than a\nleaving a background process to manage it.\n\nA quick search through her memory brings up the name, an",
  "title": "The Abhorrent Rays"
}