"sys.exit()" Is Not Defined

by Despotic_Mouse

Summary:

What does it mean to be the host of the Absolute Solver?

Uzi is going to find out, and while she is initially annoyed and resentful of the inclusion of someone she thought they got rid of, it's nice not being alone in finding out.

She doesn't know how she's supposed to live with this, though.

Uzi is finding out very quickly that Cyn wasn't completely to blame, and if she isn't careful, history might repeat itself.

Chapter 1: break statement

She did that. She really just did that.

She ate the damn thing.

And as the… thing… settled in her with a spiteful swallow, Uzi couldn’t find it in herself to regret that decision, even when she was suddenly bombarded by an overwhelming amount of information that made her weak in the knees. 

Uzi collapsed. Cyn collapsed.

Uzi felt like her system was being overloaded with everything and nothing at the same time. Cyn melted away with a smile on her face.

And N was running for her.

Or at least she thought he was. It was kinda hard to tell with runaway code filling her vision, burning her circuits, fracturing her visor; it was too much there was way too much for anybody to handle why was there so much?

Her body gave in to the overload with bouncing sparks flying from her broken visor - it flashed a blaring red FATAL ERROR - and she fell with the platform crumbling below her.

 

---

 

She didn’t wake up to this.

This being nothing despite her being there, standing on nothing, looking at nothing but walls of text and numbers violently updating and running with no blatant goals in sight.

But no she didn’t wake up to it because she didn’t technically fall asleep in the first place. Or fall unconscious. Or whatever you’d like to think. It confused her momentarily because one moment she was on her knees on Copper 9 watching N reaching out to her and suddenly she was in this OS void? She just was, like she’s always been here and only just noticed.

She couldn’t think on it too much, not with suddenly feeling like she was getting heavier by the second and like red hot drills were making holes in her CPU. She cried out in pain, hands gripping her violet hair - the concept of her hair? With the concept of her body manifesting where she was? Wherever she was?

The walls around her, of words and special characters and numbers, felt like they were bearing down on her, forcing themselves onto her as Uzi struggled to keep herself whole. She strained to open an eye, peering up at the skyscrapers of scrolling code, and despite their breakneck pace it was easy to tell that this code was…

Absolute Shit!

Robo-Jesus she swore she just saw an infinite loop that was looping within ANOTHER infinite loop, what the hell!! And- and did she just see patches where it was constantly restarting after encountering the same error over and over? With an empty exception block printing literally nothing and going back to the top of the loop instead of ending it??

This is some of the worst code she’s ever seen in her life. No wonder why she felt like her head was splitting in 5 different dimensions at once!

She gritted her conceptual teeth and squared her conceptual shoulders when she forced herself up and confronted the nearest wall. Somehow being nearer made her head ache worse than it already did, but she forced herself to raise a hand to it.

She had no idea if reaching for it was actually going to work, but the code turned out to have substance as her hand laid flat against a solid surface, annnddd she almost passed out from the wave of code that just assaulted her system. Uzi was getting sick and tired of this shit, she just wanted this fricking thing to-

“FRICKING STOP!!” 

And suddenly, she felt so much lighter.

She let out a conceptual breath she didn’t know she was holding, the vice grip on her mind giving way and finally being able to think on her own without the world rushing in on her frame entirely. Momentarily, she was a little embarrassed that she ended up shouting at… nothing. Or at a wall. Like a crazy lady. But then she realized it did do something, maybe.

She stepped away from the wall, taking her hand back and placing it over her core as she craned her neck to see the code that reached up toward the skies of nowhere. It was…

Still absolute shit.

But now it was, calmer? It wasn’t blaring red anymore but a much nicer purple and it was scrolling upward at a more user friendly pace. Numbers, variables, and everything in between that she could see being updated and iterated upon were no longer values that went on for miles, they were refreshed. This entire block was reset.

When Uzi chanced a glance around it turned out that all the other blocks nearby were in a similar condition, some even being in an idle state waiting for input or for a condition to be met. Further out from where she was dangerous red glows persisted with crazy code lines still racing in this space that belonged to nowhere.

Her oval eyes flitted around the scene before her face split into a mischievous smile, walking forward with a gremlin cackle. Uzi knew exactly what to do.

This space spanned infinitely but was all within her reach for what she desired of it, it would be so. Let her reset these out of control wishes of ages past with a wicked laugh and slaps of nonexistent walls, show her these exponential cracks to mend so that a new age order may begin. It would be so, Uzi, as you would make sure of it.

 

---

 

She woke up, expelling rotten oil mixed with blood and feeling her body still repairing itself from the overload that burnt her from the inside out. How long had it been? How long had she ran around that expanse barking orders at those forever walls to “Stop!”, manually shutting down every one of those horrible loops to save herself from insanity. It felt like forever, but also that it took no time at all.

She was getting more sick and tired of that mind fuckery.

It didn’t matter though as she took in the scene around her, of a battle won and her friends and family rising from the rubble. The relief that hit her nearly had her burst into tears, it was finally over wasn’t it? But no, she couldn’t cry, her Angsty Teen programming wouldn’t allow it.

Well.

That was until N and V flew by, finally finding her, and the way N ran toward her with open arms, just so happy to see her and freely crying from the relief he felt himself. And Uzi couldn’t help the swell of emotion that overtook her when she ran to meet him halfway for a crushing hug, so maybe she did end up crying a little as she rubbed her face into the fur of his coat. Just maybe.

Ok she did, and so what?! Bite her!

 

---

 

The concept of a body in a space that existed nowhere, sat stock still in the center of purple, floating text. Shock? Processing... Relief? Slowly it goes.

Slowly processing for the first time in years.

Slowly taking in who she was, could she remember that? She didn't know, and that terrified her.

She was so... hungry a moment ago. So desperate to collect material just a moment ago. Or was it ages ago? It didn't matter to her as she stared down at the expanse below her, memories rushing her with a different meaning now, or rather she looked over them with a different lens?

A lens that had a staggering lack of insanity from rampant code she harbored. She looked up with the concept of her yellow eyes at the purple code around her, the thing that had been hers just moments ago no longer her burden to bear, and she silently wept.

What did you do? What didn't you do? Those are some terrifying questions, aren't they, Cyn?

Chapter 2: 105%

Summary:

The Colony itself has seen better days, but they're all working on it.

“Don’t.” Uzi could see it on his face, he was going to ask again if she was ‘good’ or not. For the 20th time in an hour…

She didn’t know what he was hoping to get out of asking over and over again, though she knew it wasn’t coming from a place of logic but from a big, fuzzy place in his big, endearing, puppy heart.

She couldn’t bring herself to actually be annoyed by it, not really. In fact every time he did ask she felt her core get a little fuzzy too, but they had a job to do! N couldn’t keep dropping everything he was doing to come over to her and ask if she was ‘good’. Quite literally more often than not.

There was already an incident with N holding up part of the colony’s ceiling that had been torn off and dropping all the workers that were on top of it who were trying to set it back into place.

A very startled, “Biscuits!!” had escaped the Disassembly Drone from that event before he went back over to help the workers up, dusted them off and once more held the ceiling for them with embarrassment blushing his visor. Of which he proceeded to shout a “You good?!” at her anyway for everyone to hear from where he was.

It took a surprising amount of strength in her to not pull her beanie down to hide her own blushing from N’s antics, but instead she - in her very humble opinion - handled it quite gracefully with a solid thumbs up as her response. And definitely no blushing. Or fond scoffing.

And also quite gracefully handled some of the teasing gestures sent her way from the more bold workers, like the kissy faces, or the wistful “Young love~” she heard from the older drones. She definitely didn’t bark, “Bite me!!” at anyone. Or use her Solver to suddenly have ladders disappear from under annoying assholes. Nope.

But right now they were doing a bit of delicate handiwork, reinstalling one of the many generators that had been… displaced… during Cyn’s material collection. Thanks to V’s recon-ing this one had been found miles away with a large chunk of the colony and N was currently hovering with it, slowly lowering it into place with workers helping it into it’s new frame.

She could also see the way he was constantly looking over to where she was, overseeing the operation from a higher platform. That was a telltale sign he was about to completely forget what he was doing to check up on her, thus her quite stern “Don’t.” to REMIND the goofball to focus.

And N looked like he was caught red handed if the hollowed eyes and his mouth frozen in the middle of asking was anything to go by. She jutted a pen his way, squinting.

Don’t. Don’t do it. Don’t you dare.

N looked away and back to his task at hand, a sweat drop appearing on his visor.

It was a couple minutes later when the workers successfully finished installing the generator back in it’s rightful place. And the moment it was, chains clanged against the ground, shouts of surprise rung out from drones avoiding said chains from crushing them, and a certain Disassembly Drone was perched on the railing next to her, looking at her with those big, worried… full of affection… wanting-to-do-literally-anything-for-her, eyes.

And of course asking, “You sure you good?”

“UUUggGGGHHHhhhHHHH” Uzi rolled her head around with a suffering sigh.

N stammered, “I-I’m just asking! … … Again…” At least he had the decency to look sheepish, “I’m just. I’m just really worried, Uzi… It’s hard not to be when you have the, whole Solver now. Instead of just a part of it. And- And there’s so much we don’t know about it and- and it could hurt you, it could be hurting you right now and we just don’t know and, that’s. Really scary to think about…”

Uzi was still hunched over from her dramatics, looking up at a god that wasn’t there to give her strength, but when she blinked over at N… she felt a little bad. He was still on the railing like a weird cryptid but there was an odd juxtaposition with him poking his fingers together like a nervous anime character.

She reached over to take his hands in her own, sighing normally this time around as she did so, “N. Believe me when I say that I am 100 percent sure that I am fine. 100 percent. Plus another 5 more percent just in case the full 100 doesn’t convince you, so I’m actually 105 percent sure I’m fine.”

N chuckled as he gently squeezed her hands, “Oh wow a whole 5% more..?! What will I do with all that?”

Uzi squeezed back with a fond huff, this cute weirdo of hers…

“You’ll take it, that’s what, and when you think about asking if I’m good again - and it’s a ‘when’ because I know you’re going to be all up in that big head of yours within the next 20 minutes at MOST - you’re going to look at that extra 5% and say ‘Uzi is never wrong and if she’s going to be over 100% NOT wrong then that means this is super duper seriously not something I should be worried about because if I do then I’m going to drop the last generator that’s coming in and going to crush like, 10 people with it and then Uzi is going to be SUUUPER sad about that because I, N the super cute murder robot, will be, N, the super cute murder robot who WILL BE BANNED FROM HELPING ANYMORE and then I won’t be able to see Uzi as much until the colony’s been FIXED and I, N the super cute murder robot, will be SO SAD about that and DEFINITELY doesn’t want that!’”

Uzi had started out that entire spiel surprisingly soft, considering her character, she even got another laugh out of N when she put on her totally accurate ‘N impression’. But then it quickly devolved into her hollering the worst case scenario that’s had her STRESSED this entire time.

That definitely had some heads turning.

And N leaning back with wide eyes.

Uzi took a breath, pulling up their connected hands to her forehead to help collect herself before she let go so she could grab N’s face.

“I’m not mad!” She immediately prefaced, kneading N’s silicon cheeks with her palms to accentuate her point, “I’m just generally stressed helping with the repair operations and yeah, the full Absolute Solver really is a lot, but I have a handle on it right now!” Uzi stared into yellow eyes for a moment before tilting her head with a smile, “Ok?”

N blinked a couple times before nodding as best he could with his captured cheeks, “Wohkaey.”

“Good!” And thus she released him, nearly having him fall over from the sudden freedom. She went back to the clipboard she had put down on a nearby surface, pulling out an inspection checklist of sorts for the generator.

“You think you can get the last generator V found or do you need a minute?” Uzi asked as she was descending the platform’s stairs, only to be swept off her feet with a yelp. Looking up she’d be faced with a blinding grin from N who took the executive decision to take her to the generator himself with a couple flaps of his bladed wings, “Say less, Madam Doorman! Because for you? Anything!”

N ignored the quick, “Ew! Don’t call me that!” in favor for dramatically setting her down with a flourish of his wings and a bow, “I will be back before you can say 'Golden Biscuit Pie'! Promise!”

And with a powerful flap he was gone, just like that.

Uzi stared up at the opening in the roof he had disappeared through - an opening that was left for the movement of larger machinery and equipment - before turning around to see all eyes on her. The blushing that had been present on her visor amplified 10 fold with her fight or flight kicking in immediately, “HEY!!”

Most eyes immediately averted, not wanting to draw such ire from the programming of an Edgy Teen TM.

That was enough for her, even if she caught a few drones doing a poor job of sneaking peeks at her still. She had her priorities, and one of them was making sure that this new generator was good enough to be powered on and not pop a gasket on the spot.

Didn’t stop her from grumbling as she did so, though. She did that plenty.

Uzi took a little longer on this generator than the last three. She explained away the change to any concerned bystanders with her claiming she thought she found a fault but was mistaken. In actuality, there was a runaway loop that was affecting her processing time.

She wasn’t lying about being fine and having a handle on the Absolute Solver, she was generally fine, but these loops that kept starting themselves back up were getting on her nerves. She tried getting rid of them but she felt like whenever she took care of one two more took it’s place.

She had her theory that there were failsafe protocols the Absolute Solver employed the moment it sensed it was incomplete, corrupted, or was maliciously tampered with. She would have loved to admire such a script, if it ALSO wasn’t so shit, because everywhere she looked in the Absolute Solver it seemed corrupted and incomplete ANYWAY.

AND, AND, AND! It was only a theory because she couldn’t find where the damn thing was! If it was even real! She found that that void space - a representation of where the Absolute Solver dwelled and functioned - was hers to control, it listened to her.

As best it could.

She had many words for the stupid program when she asked it to bring her that theorized failsafe program and it kept giving her unrelated variables, functions and even incomprehensible comment lines.

Oh her favorite was when it gave her a comment line that only said “#Winkle”.

Uzi quite violently ejected herself from the Solver Void and kicked the nearest unsuspecting inanimate object with that one.

So… she was stuck with dealing with CPU hogs in a reactive way, until she found a way to bypass the measures that kept rolling back her changes. This hasn’t escaped Khan’s eye, or… her mom’s eye either. She was still reeling from the fact her mom was alive and actually… here! Khan cried like a pill baby when she dragged herself back and revealed her identity to him; he squished her against his face so roughly Uzi was scared her mom’s core was going to pop!

It was really nice being a whole family again…

Except for when they started tag teaming her with their concerns. SURE they were valid - Uzi had apparently been completely unresponsive in the middle of conversations with them for concerning amounts of time - but leave her alone! These loops are ridiculous! And OBVIOUSLY N noticed because duh, even V’s worried!

V’s gone so far as to start hovering! HOVERING! Just cause she started buffering in the middle of going up some stairs and V had to catch her stiff body ONE TIME.

Oh Robo-Jesus is that why N carried her down the stairs like that??

Uzi had been helping set up the frame for the last generator when that particular thought hit her; she ended up bending the hell out of the tool that had the misfortune of being in her hand at that time.

She excused herself from the group and escaped to a nearby hallway to just… have a moment. She slammed her back against a wall and slid down, her head in her hands.

She hated feeling like she was being the weak link right now when the colony needed all the help it could get. She’s taking away attention from the work that needed to be done with this… affliction! And she hated it!

      PING

N was going to get himself in trouble if he kept his attention so divided.

      PING

The worker drones were still wary of the Disassemblers; she couldn’t blame them, as much as she would love to, and the last thing anybody needed was an incident to freak the workers out if N slipped up. Even if it was an accident and had nothing to do with feeding.

      PING

N slipping up, because of her.

      PING

And then Khan… her dad, and her mom…

      PING

“WHO THE HELL IS MESSAGING ME??!!”

Uzi shot up from the ground, her self-inflicted angst turned into red-hot rage at her brooding session being interrupted. She checked her inbox, teeth grinding as she crossed her arms, absolutely ready to tear whoever it was a new one with her misplaced anger.

Unless it was N. Because of course she would immediately settle if it was N.

Her volatile state deflated though when she realized her inbox was completely empty. Now she was just confused, “Where…?”

      PING

There it was again. And now that she was actually paying attention to it, that alert was NOT coming from her normal OS.

It was coming from the Absolute Solver.

That’s… new….

And really can’t be ignored.

She sat back down, her LED brows furrowed with suspicion at this new development. Should she wait for N? But this probably shouldn’t wait…

      PING

Especially if it was going to be constantly doing that. She was NOT going to be the same person by the time N got back if pings assaulted her the entire time.

She took in a deep breath, readying herself for the worst, and shut off her optics.

The complete darkness helped her focus, made the transition pretty seamless too when her dark world eventually lit up with violet, scrolling words that have been her worst enemy the last few days.

Her hands planted themselves on the concept of her hips as she looked around, everything seemed normal… Or as normal as the Absolute Solver could be. Hm…

She snapped her conceptual fingers at nothing in particular, “Put me where that ping was coming from.”

Uzi wasn’t actually sure if that was going to work, considering the poor results from her last attempts at throwing out commands, so color her surprised when the space around her refreshed to a new scene of code she didn’t actually recognize.

“Huh…” She approached the densest set, slowly sliding a hand down it’s ‘surface’ as she skimmed the lines.

Then she gasped, “No way…”

Let’s just say that theory of hers wasn’t a theory anymore, because holy hell this was it, it was the failsafe! Was the Absolute Solver more competent than she thought?? Was it doing a sort of long lasting query looking for the code she was asking for?? And pinged her when it finally found it?? No wonder it couldn’t find the dumb thing, it was named a jumbled of letters and special characters that made no sense!

The shock was quick to subside, subside to her rubbing her hands together with a maniacal giggle. FINALLY something going her way! It was easy to see why the code kept rolling back her administrative changes, because the condition to allow for the Absolute Admin to do that was completely corrupted, the text was nearly otherworldly in nature with how it writhed and changed.

She found that a delete and re-entry was a quick fix for those sort of issues.

She couldn’t believe it was such a small thing that was causing her so many problems, but this! Was progress!! This God was WINNING THESE! And now! When a STUPID loop was making her space out in front of her parents she could actually do something about it instead of suffering!

It was a good thing she was in this space beyond comprehension because her crazed giggles were getting pretty scary at this point as she swiped at the tower of words to edit it.

But it was not a good thing that this task had her attention so wholly that she never noticed the pair of yellow eyes that watched her in the distance, hiding away among the towers of this horrid program.

Chapter 3: I don’t know where “I” am

Summary:

The Absolute Solver has unrealistic system requirements. And a ghost.

It’d been a bit since the near end of the world, a couple weeks Uzi thought, but she couldn’t be entirely sure if she were to be asked about it. She’d just been so busy with the colony putting itself together, helping where she could after she volunteered herself to work alongside Khan to split up the management duties.

And if that wasn’t a whole thing in of itself.

Uzi still hasn’t entirely forgiven Khan for leaving her for dead ages ago, because how do you just… reconcile with such a display of betrayal like that? If N wasn’t so receptive to her words in the pod she would be dead right now.

Granted everyone would be dead on account of V and J having found the evacuation spot in record time, and then the whole planet destroying agenda of Cyn, but that was besides the point.

But that’s still her dad. She had memories of back before mom had died, when he was still openly loving and read to her every night and held her hand to help her approach Miss Miriam for the first time, to ask for one of her freshly spun floppy disks that were the talk of the colony. She was so unreasonable then, not accepting any floppies he had gotten her himself and demanded that she was a ‘big drone now’ and she’d get it herself.

Only to get cold feet and run off crying once she actually stomped up to the older model, so ready to ask for her freshest set.

That all changed when Mom had been taken away.

Anyway, yeah, she still hasn’t forgiven Khan. But she wanted to help. So she shuffled up to him and mom the first night back since the battle and proposed working together.

Khan had been frozen for a moment upon hearing that, before he promptly burst into tears and immediately went in for a messy hug; she swiftly dodged the gesture with an, “EW don’t touch me!”

So yeah, they’re working together, and surprisingly the colony has been rather receptive to her partial authority. It might have something to do with saving the planet, or that she’s got some good ideas going into the restoration project.

In between her working hours Uzi worked on various ideas to bring up to Khan, things such as power grid improvements, infrastructure updates, lower levels accessibility improvements, general review of colony layout - seriously, who thought it was a good idea to put the WDF offices on the other side of the bunker, away from the entrance they’re supposed to protect??

Okay, actually she knew it was because this was originally a human outpost with completely different needs and when the drones took over it was a First Dibs system for the longest time, and the WDF was a relatively new organization. And they could only take whatever was still free for the pickings. Like the spaces that were on the outer edges of the bunker.

Still, the layout SUCKED!

Uzi didn’t think much was actually going to come from her showing her ideas off, on account of Khan’s dismissal in the past with things like her SICK AS HELL RAILGU-

But to her complete and utter shock, he actually… listened to her. He actually took the ideas seriously, and actually agreed with some of them..! And the ones he couldn’t - couldn’t, not wouldn’t - approve of he actually… worked on it with her, pointing out the flaws in the plan or that there were attempts in the past that were foiled from an unforeseen variable in the equation. It was… actually really nice, bouncing ideas off of each other and bettering the blueprints.

And she heard murmurs of people getting excited about the updates/upgrades he did want to implement, like the new elevators to the lower levels. Previously there was only one since it was the extra bunker layers for humans in case of emergency but for the drones it was the residential areas and mining operations. That one damn elevator was their version of traffic and she’s had to fight the urge to become a vent rat several times in the past. And further still, those people were still excited for the projects when they found out it was HER idea.

It was all so weird, being like, respected or something. It was gross and she hated it.

She hated it SO MUCH that she spent more time trying to find ways to expedite the repairs, how to gather materials easier, how to make use of N and V’s strengths the best, etc, etc. Yeah, making all that effort because she hated all of this so much…

And she was exhausted because of it.

So here she was, on the couch of her family home dozing the day away with N; Uzi leaned over, hugging his arm with her cheek squished against his shoulder and N leaned back with his head resting on hers, both their visors displaying Zs floating by before popping. Her parents haven’t been very approving of their relationship, because of course not, with Khan shaking his head occasionally when he caught sight of N and her mom being a lot more vocal about it.

But they saw the way she lit up when N was even in her general area, and saw how he cherished her and held each other so tightly sometimes that they feared one would fracture the chassis of the other; they did their disapproving gestures less and less over time with that in mind.

Anyway, Uzi hadn’t gone gently into the night, or rather day in this situation; she had fully prepared to pull a ‘all-nighter’ on a particularly exciting idea she got on finally finding a use for the Cryosleep Section of the colony.

And then N showed up through the vent in her room.

A great and legendary battle ensued shortly after! With the great knight N vanquishing the edgy beast by carrying her to the couch, despite the constant spitting and hissing, and persuaded her sleep mode to activate by taking advantage of his naturally warm body and a kiss placed squarely on her forehead.

Oh he knew how she loved his warmth, how it could calm her on the worst of days, but now it was her worst enemy, working against her in her mission to be AWAKE AND WORK. SHE CANNOT ALLOW THIS-

Yeah that didn’t work out, now they were cuddling on the couch for a much needed ‘nights’ rest.

Besides working on blueprints and the like, they were unable to do much else during the day anyway. Despite being the Absolute Solver Host she still had the overheating problem the Disassemblers do, which majorly sucked.

She should really look into that…

The arm she had a hold on stiffened up; she held on a little tighter and rubbed her face deeper into the fabric with a contented hum, desperately holding onto her sleep mode that had just been jostled by the movement. If she wasn’t so deep in the odd in-between of being awake and being in sleep mode she might have found it a little odd that she couldn’t really feel her face interacting with her N pillow, or that she was getting out of the bounds of comfortably warm to hot. Was N overheating?

“Uzi..?”

Maybe the Solver might be able to help her with figuring out why overheating was such a problem.

“Uzi..?!”

It would be nice if she had blueprints to look at… Uzi didn’t like the idea much of dissecting her boyfriend to make one by scratch… even if he could heal right up… Actually, maybe his system had a blueprint somewhere in there, otherwise what was the repairing program working off of-

“UZI!!”

Her visor activated abruptly as she was violently yanked out of her rest mode, her world was shaking, or at least she thought it was with how the visual artifacts made it hard to tell.

“H̵u̷h̶?̵?̷”

Oh that didn’t sound good.

“Uzi you’re SMOKING, WHY ARE YOU SMOKING?? CAN YOU HEAR ME?? Oh I knew it, I knew it, oh robo-god-!!” N’s panicked voice cut through the static, she could even see his panicked eyes a bit through the green and black lines in her sight.

Oh. OH, oOOhhh, okay she sees the problem now.

“Y̶e̴-̷Y̷e̶-̵Y̴e̴-̷Y̴e̶a̴h̶,̸ ̵I̷'̷m̸ ̷a̴-̴-̸a̷l̵r̸i̸g̷h̶t̷.̸” Her voice box wasn’t doing too great at the moment, clearly with how her words struggled to form. She yawned and a large billow of smoke escaped her; she smacked her lips together a couple times, grimacing from the taste of burnt sensors.

This has happened before. Turned out, her body was NOT up to snuff to handle a program that can alter the fabric of reality itself, this resulted in her body and it’s parts being in a constant state of being burnt up from overuse. Usually the repair program she adopted when she… ‘evolved’ during the camping trip did a good job of repairing any and all damage that came from it as it was happening.

Usually being the key word.

One of the cases where it doesn’t do so good a job was when she was sleeping, or at least sleeping for longer periods of time. You know, when she was completely unable to eat what was necessary to fuel the program.

And she could hazard a guess that her tank was empty.

She’d love to check and confirm her suspicions but her visual dashboard was horribly compromised at the moment.

“You’re-? No you’re not!!” N refuted, letting her shoulders go as he looked around frantically, for what? An idea to be given to him perhaps, “What do you need, do you kno-?? Oil?? What about oil?? I can get you oil!!”

Actually yes N, that would help. Not that you waited around to hear her confirm nor deny the idea.

Didn’t take that long for N to nearly slam into a nearby oil drum they had - filled to the nines with oil scavenged from the Disassembly Drone’s past kills that littered the landscape - and came back with a modified oil can full of the inky substance.

“T̶-̴t̴-t̵-̴t-ha-ha-̵h̴a̸-̸n̸-̴n-̷n̵- - - -,” Wow this had been the worst it’s gotten, a point further demonstrated by her arm struggling to move to take the thing. When her shoulder’s rotary kept jerking her arm between the same two points of movement she gave up the endeavor and used her solver instead, a purple symbol overtaking the can and stuffing it’s ‘straw’ into her mouth.

She made quick work of it’s contents, she could feel a coolness wash over her body with each gulp; her repair program reactivated with the newly provided fuel and was quick to fix the many issues that had accumulated. By the time she had started sucking on air, making the oil can rattle annoyingly, her vision had gotten much better and she had a wider range of motion with her joints back.

“Phew!” Uzi popped the straw out of her mouth with a satisfied sigh, her voice box seemed to have mostly recovered and the smoke that was escaping from her body had subsided for the most part, “Thanks, I forgot to fill up before we took our nap.”

When Uzi blinked up to where N had sat back down she would be met with a blank stare, which actually had her taken aback, “Er, so I’m gonna guess you might have some questions…” Now it was her turn to have the decency to look sheepish.

N raised his arms up in disbelief, stress still lining his eyes, “You think??”

Uzi looked away, feeling bad for scaring N like that, “Yeah I, uh, probably should have warned you at some point about that too…”

N’s arms moved to be out to his sides in a t-pose instead of above him, physically showing his growing disbelief, “You THINK????”

“I’m sorry I forgot!” Uzi squawked, “It hadn’t happened in a few days and I wasn’t expecting to sleep today-!”

N gasped before he cried out, “This keeps happening??”

“No! Well, yes but it’s not something to worry about!!” Uzi wasn’t beating the allegations.

N moved his arms forward, gesturing to Uzi in even FURTHER disbelief, “Uzi you were DYING! Right in front of me!!”

“No I wasn’t!” Now N looked absolutely affronted by that denial, he was about to make that super known if Uzi didn’t flail her arms around, “WAIT, WAIT I know what you’re thinking but I’m serious!! I don’t think my body matters anymore!”

And NOW he was offended, he was very clearly about to argue that she mattered very much to him, thank you very much, but Uzi put her two index fingers against his lips to shush him, “And I don’t mean that in a self-depreciating, my-life-doesn’t-matter kind of way!! I mean that in the My-Body-Isn’t-Actually-Where-I-am-Anymore kind of way!”

That statement surprised the Disassembly Drone, but mostly confused him. He wrapped his fingers around Uzi’s wrists so he could free his mouth, “Uzi, what?”

Uzi looked like she was mulling something over in her head, trying to figure out a way to explain properly, “My processing faculties weren’t being affected just now, and hasn’t been in the past times I was overheating; this is despite the fact that my CPU or core should have been the first thing to go from all this. So. I’ve been thinking that my processes actually happen… not here.” She tapped the side of her head.

She pulled her hands to her lap as she chewed on her lower lip, struggling to talk about it further but not from it being a difficult topic but just from… how confusing it all was, “I- don’t really know where ‘I’ am anymore, or how I’m connected to my, or… this, body. It might be related with the Solver space.”

Uzi had brought up the void space she used to interact with the Absolute Solver soon after the final battle when N and V asked if she felt any different or weird. N had thought it was cool and spooky, V speculated with Uzi on how the space worked.

They debated on many different theories but the most ‘popular’ one was that it was just in her head and wasn’t an actual place in space time - Uzi did NOT like that idea, made her feel crazy, but it was also the most reasonable option.

And then V called her crazy with a teasing smirk.

But N looked like he was digesting everything, quite deeply, getting to the point where his gaze wandered. Eventually he seemed to settle on accepting something or another, giving Uzi a crooked smile, “That’s weird.”

Uzi couldn’t help but let out a startled laugh at the blunt conclusion, shaking her head with a hand in her hair, “Tell me about it.”

“I’m still kinda hurt that you didn’t tell me about that,” N was soft spoken as he vocalized his feelings, taking the oil can from Uzi’s hold to go refill it, “But I get that there’s a lot on your plate right now and it got buried under it all.” When he returned and offered the oil can again Uzi felt like she could explode with how he was looking at her. Eyes so full of love and care for someone like her, someone who was combative and stubborn and an angsty weirdo on the best of days.

“EEEEEEHHHHHHNNNNNNN..!” Uzi whined as she ignored the can and instead grabbed his arm to pull him back onto the couch, forcing a startled noise out of the taller bot. She stuffed her face into his side as she hugged him tightly, her voice quite muffled, “N stooop I have a reputation to uphold!!”

“Stop what?” N chuckled, knowing full well what she was talking about; he wrapped his own arms and tail around her in response to her aggressive nuzzling.

“Being so damn sweet and understanding and cute and… and… sweet! You’re gonna make me cry and I’m not supposed to dooo thaaat!” She kicked her feet, pretending to be throwing a tantrum which only made N laugh more.

“You’re my super emotionally available angsty girlfriend!” He teased.

“Nuh uh! I have no emotions, emotions die in me!” She weakly protested.

“You’re so full of joy and whimsy-!”

“My garden of feelings is a barren landscape; the desolate soil that is my soul can only breed resentment and sorrow!”

“Sooo many emotions, soooooooo many~”

“NuuOOOoo stoooop..!”

 

---

 

With the sun setting, the darkness blanketing Outpost 3 meant that the big guns of the colony were stirring and ready to take the day by the theoretical horns. Today was particularly exciting as the finishing touches on the residential district; most of it had been fully repaired, with heavy emphasis on the individual rooms being put back together for the last week.

This meant that the hallways themselves were neglected, adopting a sort of ‘good enough’ ideology so that people could rest comfortably and get their homes back.

So now they were no longer ‘good enough’, especially with a number of pathways still being collapsed and forcing many drones to take time-consuming ‘backroads’ to get to where they needed to go.

N had gone on ahead to meet up with V to get started on clearing the rubble, leaving Uzi behind to get ready at her own pace. Normally she would have little to nothing to do to be ready for the day, but now with having some authority over the project Khan actually got her a neat outfit to wear. It was a surprisingly well-maintained high visibility coat that had the WDF logo on it and came with attachments and a belt to hold a variety of tools.

There was even a small hook for her clipboard!

In her off time she put her own little personal touches into the uniform, like changing the bright green reflective material to be bright purple instead, and putting her little skull logo on her shoulder pads.

Uzi was quite proud to wear it, weirdly enough.

She stood in front of a mirror, patting herself off now that she was satisfied with her arrangement of tools in the many pockets and loops at her disposal. She picked up her clipboard and made sure she had the right paperwork for what was on the agenda for the day, along with some scratch paper, just in case.

Uzi planted her hands on her hips with an accomplished nod toward her reflection; oh jeez, she had a big ol’ smile on her face, gosh, N must be rubbing off on her.

Just then she had a notification that she was sent a message. It made her jump, because who was trying to contact her already? Did N forget something? Or did Khan want to talk about something with the next step in the restoration project now that this one was coming to a close?

She opened her inbox, having the message take up some of her vision.

And the smile she had mere moments ago withered away to nothing.

Message from User:
Cyn

Uzi’s vents stopped working, the world froze, her oil ran cold.

“Btw you’re in the singularity! :) Since you were wondering earlier. I don’t really get where that is either tho :/ I think it’s everywhere all the times."

She started stumbling back, eventually being forced to a stop by a wall. This wasn’t real, this wasn’t real it couldn’t be, she was supposed to be dead, she watched her melt away to nothing but muck and bones.

Another message came in.

“I know the like, window to it is in your core and you can like, move it around and it moves you around and you’re it because like, you’re constantly falling out of it and into whatever the singularity is in :P”

Her ventilation system started back up, her breaths coming in ragged bursts, doing a poor job of calming her suddenly rampant thoughts. She couldn’t move her body, was her hands shaking?

There was a third message now.

“Please don’t freak out :(”

Uzi freaked out.

Chapter 4: Madness

Summary:

Uzi gets a little mad over literally nothing, Khan asks her if she's ok because that's weird. Instead of answering like a normal person she decides to just beat the shit out of him instead.

It's all the Absolute Solver's fault.

TW: Panic Attack at the beginning

“Please, please it’s ok! I’m just trying to be helpful!! :(”

Everything was supposed to finally be ok, she fought so hard to get her happy ending why wasn’t she allowed to keep it?!

“You were really wondering about it I thought it would be good to tell ya what I know!! :((”

Her breathing got heavier, desperate, she felt like she was drowning in the air around her; anywhere in her body that had any crumb of space between parts shook, she was rattling.

She was scared.

“I’m not gonna do anything, I prommy! :(((”

She was angry.

“Pleeeeeeeassssseee believe me! :(((((”

She gritted her teeth, the fear and anger she felt showing through her bared fangs, her harsh expression that flickered an X on her frantic visor. That stupid sad face… she hated… that stupid… face.

“:(((((((( Uzi?”

Uzi had looked up at some point, seeing her own reflection in that full body mirror of hers; fury stared back, and the mirror shattered.

 

---

 

“:( I’m sorry didn’t mean to scare you..!”

>> Message did not send.

>> Reason: Admin User “darkXwolf17” has blocked incoming messages from Guest User “Cylly :3”.

“T-T”

>> …

“🤨”

>> Host Stress lvls are elevated.

>> Host Threat detected.

>> Condition met for Advance Preservation Instinct function; scanning for target.

“D: Worried expression”

>> Target found; advancedTarget = 2

 

---

 

Uzi probably should have found it immensely concerning that Cyn suddenly went radio silent after showing up like she did, but she just… wasn’t worried about it. She had a weird feeling deep within her core that told her she had a lot more to do with the disappearance than she thought, and she was going to just go with it. She really could not deal with that whole thing right now.

So she’s just going pretend it didn’t happen!

If anybody in her designated crew asked her why she was a little late - compared to the expected punctuality she demonstrated in the past - she’d wave the workers off with the story of a tool she happened to misplace and wasted no time in getting everyone to work afterwards with a “Chop, chop!”

It didn’t take long for Uzi to feel better, less like something was looming over her shoulder, with her using her solver abilities to help move pallets of wall segments and holding them in place for the workers. Guess there was something to the whole ‘busy your body to still your mind’ thing people talked about. Also helps that she’s actually like, helping her community or something, being a productive member of the bunker or whatever

They were making good progress, stabilizing and layering the walls with their shiny new exteriors, but then someone let out a shout, throwing profanities around as they shook their hand wildly in the air. The workers around them busted out laughing before some chatter filled the air,

“Happens to the best of us!”

“Wouldn’t have happened if you were keepin’ your visor to where you were workin, kid!”

“Oh yikes, did that crack your digit? It’s alright, Samson’s seen his fair share of thumbs that needed repairing.”

“Hey, at least it’s still attached! Doc’ll go easy on ya unlike when I accidentally sawed my entire hand off once!”

Uzi couldn’t help but stare at the scene before her, specifically at the drone who was nursing their newly fractured thumb, looking quite chastised with how they were being teased.

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^2

“Wait don’t do that where are you doing that? >:(”

Anger suddenly flared within her. But, she didn’t understand why.

>> Discrepancy found:

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^2

>> DEFAULT == advancedTarget

“Ah!! Don’t do that either! Where is it?! DX”

Her face scrunched up when she realized why she wasn’t happy with what she was seeing. Incompetence. Why did they think they could relax enough to make such stupid mistakes?? Cyn was still here, she’s here, she’s still a danger to them and they’re being this nonchalant??

She looked around at the workers who were still poking fun at the injured drone - more so in pride than actual physical soundness - looking around at all the workers who were still not working. Still so accepting of the clumsiness they just saw.

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^2

Her brow hardened; what was wrong with them!!

… Nothing was wrong with them, they. They were just having a good time. Now her brows were knitted tightly together for a different reason; why was she so… mad about this?? It wasn’t that serious-

>> Discrepancy found:

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^2

>> DEFAULT == advancedTarget

No. No it was serious.

Her eyes shrunk, fists shaking; Cyn was still here and no one seemed to care!!

Well it’s because she hasn’t told anyone-

>> Discrepancy found: -

“Solver! Stop doing that!! D:<”

>> User “Cylly :3” does not have permission to edit this file

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^2

>> DEFAULT == advancedTarget

“WAH, UZIIIIII DX”

The Solver symbol that were around her hands glitched, her eyes glitched, her vents accelerated, everything was wrong and why was she the only one who noticed?? She couldn’t believe them. She couldn’t believe them and their Incompetence.

Hands were on her shoulders, grounding her back to the world around her.

She jerked her head up to see eyes full of concern, white ones, with a fake mustache magnetically attached to his face.

Khan, when did you get here?

“:D Help is here! ”

>> Sub-Threat Detected:

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^3

“:D … D: Oh.”

The breath that came out of Uzi next nearly sounded like a hiss, her temper blazed so intensely it hurt, her core clenched, filling her with the need to do something.

The sound she made was near enough to whatever for Khan to visibly hesitate, or maybe it was the way she looked at him, but it wasn’t enough to stop him fully from checking in on his daughter, “Uzi, is. Is this the Solver’s doing? Is something happening to you? Talk to me, tell me what’s wrong.”

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^3

Oh now he’s asking about her. Now he’s concerned. What the hell is he even concerned about anyway, that she’ll break his doors? That she’ll ruin his reputation? Ruin what MOM would think of him??

“What. The hell do you care?”

Now that took him aback; his eyes hollowed, barely managing stammering out a, “What?”

She shouldn’t have been so surprised with his sudden interest now that she was finally falling in line, finally being ‘someone to be proud of’ she bet. But now she was acting off again he just had to get involved, huh?

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^3

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU CARE?!” She was erupting, her core was burning something awful with rage, with hatred - no. No she didn’t hate him, there was a lot of hatred in her right now that had nowhere to go and none of it should be on Khan; she didn’t even know where this hate came from.

“I-” It was a pitiful start, suddenly being confronted like this made his mind white out but he couldn’t afford to not answer right now. He steeled himself as best he could before continuing, “As your father, I should care! I DO care, Uzi..! Your my daughter and I may not understand what you’re going through right now but I want to understand, so I can help you through this!”

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^3

She let out a choked cry; she wanted to scream, in general? At him? She couldn’t think, it was- it was- she grasped at her chest, she felt so hot, she felt so angry, angry, ANGRY, WHAT WAS WRONG WITH HER??

>> Discrepancy found:

“NOW?” She barked out when she found her voice again, “NOW you want to help me, NOW you want to UNDERSTAND?? NOW???” Her visor showed a myriad of tears falling, a number of ‘popping veins’ came in and out, these were angry tears, angry tears, angry tears-

“YES!” It was a desperate thing, that admission. It sounded like a devastating acknowledgement from past mistakes and refusing to repeat them, “Yes, Uzi! Yes I care now! I should have cared before, I should have! And I’m sorry! I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, I’m sorry I left you, I’m sorry I let my grief turn me into the coward you had to suffer with, I want to be better! I’m trying to be better!”

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^3

“Is it because she’s back now?” Uzi snarled, she bowed her head to glare up at Khan in a more predatory stance; did her voice sound different to her? Why was the air filling with… steam? She should be worried about that- She should-

>> Discrepancy found:

She didn’t let him answer, she settled on the fact that she already knew the ‘truth’, “It’s because of Mom, isn’t it.” She was daring Khan to say so, it was. It was because of Mom. It was always about Mom.

“N-no of course not-”

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^3

”LIAR!!” her hands found their way off her chest and grabbed at Khan’s vest with a vengeance - her extra extremities had apparently found their way out, tail snapping at nothing, clawed wings dug into the walls around her as she turned and flung her father down the hallway. Why did she do that? SHIT she’s sorry, she didn’t mean to-

>> Discrepancy found:

Her voice box started to fail her, her words became grating, sounded unlike her despite the words that came from a deep place of hurt she never wanted to acknowledge, “You could only love me when she was here..” Uzi crept forward, she felt weird, physically; her arms felt too long, her legs felt like they were bending weirdly, her neck were gaining joints?

She should be worried about that-

>> Discrepancy found:

Uzi yowled with a violent shake of her head, like an animal hearing a maddening call it didn’t want to respond to. She blinked? At least she thought she did, and now there was a dent in the ground below her, Khan was closer too. Wait- Wait- Wait- she attacked him and he rolled out of the way.

“Uzi!” He looked so scared, he looked so heartbroken, he looked so conflicted.

Her tail hissed and darted forward, maw dripping in acid- Wait she shouldn’t be doing this-

>> Discrepancy found:

Khan ducked the attack, he tried scrambling away, he really tried, but Uzi swatted at him with hands - claws? - much too large for her body.

She should be worried about that-

>> Discrepancy

His body slammed against metal and he let out a cry of pain. She just hurt him, she’s hurting her dad why is she hurting her dad-

>> Discrepancy

“Why couldn’t you love me?! Why couldn’t you love me even if Mom wasn’t here?! WHY?” Khan looked up at her, at whatever she’s become, and there was more regret than fear in those eye lights, he was crying too, she noticed. He opened his mouth to speak, Uzi didn’t let him; she felt her mouth open - was that a plume of smoke? Sparks flying out? - wider than it should be able to, her elongated teeth latched onto his leg and she thrashed a short time before tossing him again. She couldn’t let the threat hurt her further with dangerous words, she’s protecting herself, she has to. She has to get rid of the threat she HAS to it’s a danger, it hurts her all the time, a danger, deal with it deal with it, must be dealt with.

“WHY DO YOU HATE ME?!” She pounced, landed on nothing and watched the threat roll himself further down the hallway, “WHY CAN’T I HATE YOU THE SAME?!” She charged, ready to rend and tear the threat to submission but was met with a sudden wall? A Door. A door that had slammed down to keep her from the threat. Uzi didn’t hesitate to slam her entire body against it, warping it’s surface.

“WHY?!”

>> Host Request Detected:

>> Forming Patch:

>> def hate_KhanDoorman():

            While True: ...

Her tail spat a glob of acid at the compromised metal, weakening it enough to allow her to punch through the protective barrier between her and her father the threat.

>> advancedTarget = advancedTarget ^3

“WHY?!?!”

            … for i in v_feed.time():

                   if relationship.config(”Khan Doorman”) ≥ 0: …

She was crawling through, bending metal to accommodate for her altered form; it was hard to move, what was he doing to her, this is his fault, how was he making her joints jerk like this, how was he making it so hard to see, where was this smoke coming from? She didn’t care she didn’t care it didn’t matter because she refused to let the threat win, this is her happy ending she will not let it fall through her fingers, not like this, not ever.

                       relationship.config(”Khan Doorman”) = “HATE”

                   else:

                       relationship.config(”Khan Doorman”).append(”HATE”)…

An ungodly claw raised to secure the Host’s happy end.

“W̴H̴H̵Y̵Y̶?̶!̷?̵!̴?̵!̵”

Her vision cracked, then there was only darkness.

>> ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error…

The last thing she saw was how Khan, despite his crumpled form, was reaching for her.

Weeping for his daughter.

For her.

 

Chapter 5: Function Could Not Run - GOOD

Summary:

Uzi and Cyn have a talk.
Uzi is forced to some realizations even though she got a little violent about it.
And Cyn thinks it went well!

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR-

Greedy, thirsty breaths.

Lost, lost and further lost in nothing; can you be lost where destinations don’t exist?

There’s only one place forward, within, and so the violet words rose around her while she stared down at her shaking hands that held her up while she was on her knees.

Uzi felt… like a newly forged knife being dipped in artic water. She was so mad, mad, mad she was still so very mad but it was… dying, fast. It was dying and the grip it had around her mind was going slack with it’s death throes; it was getting easier to think, to feel more than a blaze, it would have been relieving that she had a hold on herself again.

If the clarity wasn’t so agonizing.

Uzi started to shrink within herself, whimpering from how raw she felt, how it hurt for the air of sense she so sorely lacked just mere moments ago to come to her now. Now, now, now it’s always now instead of when she needed it; she really needed her sanity when she was descending upon her own dad not now when guilt was threatening to eat her alive.

Why did she do that? She didn’t want to do that but it just made so much sense at the time-

“It’s not your fault.”

Uzi froze; she recognized that voice, of course she did.

It took a lot of energy she didn’t know she had to look up, to be faced with the bitter reality of what she tried to deny earlier.

Cyn.

There she was, peering at her with wide, yellow eyes from around the corner of one of the many skyscrapers that surrounded them.

Her appearance caught Uzi off guard; instead of the unholy union of drone and human skin she was used to, it was the guise she had only momentarily known within N’s memories. Of that little drone girl betrayed by her own body, dressed like the servant role drones had in that manor despite having no ability to act like it. And that stupid big bow tied to her hair.

Uzi’s hands balled up into fists, straining against the ground that wasn’t there, “You…”

Her conceptual teeth gritted - Uzi was getting angry again, it was an emotion that she usually was happily ready to harness but after what it did to her she was trying surprisingly hard to keep herself level, she didn’t want it to control her again.

The smaller drone took the chance to fully come from behind the tower of code, her movements still as awkward as before; stiff, uncoordinated, head limp and resting on a shoulder.

Uzi vaguely made a note on that being weird, considering that she would have thought that the cause of such movements would have been bypassed in the realm that wasn’t here nor there, never and now.

“It’s not your fault.” Cyn repeated, interrupting Uzi’s contemplation of the semantics of disabilities manifesting in the Solver’s space time ‘IDE’.

Uzi squinted and sat on the backs of her feet, tired of holding herself up as she did especially with Cyn standing right in front of her in the Solver, threatening the-

>> Host Threat detected.

Both girls jumped when the literal cyberspace suddenly flashed a jarring red, bleeding all over the violet it had adopted from Uzi, and large text appeared in the ‘sky’ above.

>> Condition met for Advance Preservation Instinct function; scanning for target.

Cyn’s eyes hollowed as they locked onto the familiar words, “Again?? Uh, uh-” she started to fret, looking as if she wanted to run off but was torn on what the right direction was, “Uh, uh- Uzi-!”

A booming error toll went off with more words appearing all around them now rather than as an ever encompassing ceiling.

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR: Function could not run because of Visual Feed Error

>>  ERROR: Functio-

The sound went off every time a line popped up, every time piercing Uzi’s already fractured mind from the stress and the uncertainty of everything; she couldn’t afford to lose what little she had left-

“STOP STOP JUST SHUT UP STOP!!”

The Solver space listened, letting the red that had been pulsing through the endless field of nothing but words to fade away and allowing the soft purple to take it’s proper places once again. The error lines were replaced with what looked like an arrows blinking in place - ‘consoles’ waiting for input and Uzi was going to make them wait, forever if she could.

Uzi gave the calmed space a withering, fleeting look, resentment clear in her eyes.

She muttered under her breath, “I hate it here…”, then shouted it while throwing her arms into the air, “I HATE IT HERE!!!” She didn’t know who she hoped would hear it and take offense but she really needed to feel like something did, specifically the Absolute Solver even though she was fully aware that it wasn’t something that could understand insults.

She crumpled in on herself when it didn’t respond, as expected. Silence.

“Can you unblock me?”

Right. Cyn…

She had no idea what look she gave her mortal enemy who defied robo-death to haunt her but if she wasn’t in such a shit mood she would have belly laughed with how Cyn blanched and shrunk under her gaze. Apparently she was getting so uncomfortable from the look that she started to fiddle with her fingers, or at the very least she was trying to. It mostly looked like she was just bumping her fingers together with random jerky movements from some digits.

The way Cyn was squirming in place like a helpless kid was starting to piss Uzi off; as if Cyn hadn’t been a MONSTER that was trying to eat the entire SOLAR SYSTEM and literally skinned a human to WEAR just a MONTH AGO.

And yet here she was, having the audacity to try and look meek.

“Uhm… I- I don’t remember where I think it was… but I think the ping will still be there if you unblock me. Hopeful Expression!”

What.

“What?” Cyn’s statement… Uzi didn’t like what is was insinuating. What did she mean the ping will still be there? And where what was? Was she..?

“I think I found the code tower that was making you big mad, and I tried to ping you to it but I guess my pings don’t go through anymore after you blocked me. :(” The sad face replaced one of Cyn’s eye lights after a glitchy flicker.

The stare Uzi then gave was so dull it could have rivaled Cyn’s voice when it came to monotony.

Awkward silence…

…

Cyn started to rub a foot into the ground, “Shuffle, shuffle.”

…

“How long have you been here?”

Cyn stopped, then blinked at Uzi who betrayed near nothing despite how intensely she was watching the smaller drone, “… Since… you became the Host?”

“So you’ve been here the entire time.”

Cyn startled, poorly waving her limp hands in front of her, “I’m not creepy! I haven’t been watching most of the time! I usually just sit politely out here! Honest! D:”

Uzi completely bypassed what Cyn thought was the problem with her next question, “So you’ve been the one who’s been pinging the locations of code stacks I look for.” Well. Wasn’t a question actually, it was a statement.

Cyn blinked again, letting her arms fall as her head lolled to rest on her other shoulder, “Oh. Yea that was me.”

…

“I wanted to help.” Cyn said unprompted, peering down at her awkwardly placed feet, arms once again held up against her chest, “I’m… not that good with codes but I had a lotta time, so I go looking whenever something’s being annoying or when I noticed something is just bad.” She was rambling now, not knowing what else to do.

Uzi in the meantime had her processors going, feeling like she was overclocking her CPU; what the hell was Cyn on? She was the one who was finding the code stacks for her? Why would she do that? What had she been doing otherwise if she’d been here the entire time? What traps has she been laying in the Solver while she had no idea?

“You? Wanted to help?” Was what she decided on in order to move forward with the situation. Uzi had gotten to her feet at some point during her chaotic thinking, squinting at Cyn and gritted out, “And I’m supposed to BELIEVE that? After what you did to me???”

Oh anger was coming back she could feel it, especially with the next words she bit out with particular force “What you did to N?” A scene flashed in her mind, of when N and her were huddled in the dark, N terrified and lost in his own memories. And then his core was tore right out of his chest, his oil spattering her face.

And all she could do was watch. She really didn’t want to let go of his hand…

The other shrunk, looking away and looking quite… ashamed, “… I know… I-”

Uzi continued glaring, especially when she realized this was the most emotion she’d ever seen from Cyn; she looked genuinely sad and that was an accomplishment considering her previous hardware - or software Uzi still had no idea which - issues. She did NOT get to do this, she can’t, after everything Cyn didn’t just GET to crawl over here with her tail between her legs after she lost the fight acting all remorseful and shit.

“I- I didn’t know. Why. I did that. I didn’t want to and then I did. And I did for a long time. And then I didn’t after you became the Host. And when I didn’t I-” Momentarily her eye lights started to glitch, showing errors that Uzi could read was because they were trying to display something that didn’t exist in their programming.

No, no, no stop it, stop talking Cyn Uzi didn’t like this. You can’t do this. You can’t just walk in here talking something familiar, something that just happened to her mere moments ago - or was it hours? Days? Time was often just a suggestion in the Space.

Why did she do that? Why did you do that Uzi?

She didn’t want to. Then you did.

It just made sense at the time even though it shouldn’t have.

“You didn’t know why. Past tense.” Uzi suddenly became very, very aware of the Solver space around her, in a similar sort of way that a prey thing may become very, very aware of the teeth hidden within the brush.

Cyn nodded, her eye lights regaining their functionality to look up at Uzi with a blink, “I didn’t. But then… I think I just saw why…” Her gaze wandered to the code stacks around them.

No, no, no…

“NO!”

To say she was furious was an understatement. She couldn’t believe this, she couldn’t afford to believe this because then that insinuates that Cyn was- that she didn’t- that-

That she was a victim.

That she wasn’t entirely to blame. And if she wasn’t entirely to blame then who was Uzi supposed to be mad at? Who was supposed to be the Villain in her story that she had beat? The Absolute Solver?? It was just shitty code that didn’t know what it was doing; it was like trying to be mad at snow for being cold, or for fire burning you. It just was, and couldn’t be anything else.

And Uzi could have… fallen for how it just was, like Cyn did.

She would have gladly indulge in being delusional in that she was different, that she was special and would have been better and just not let the Solver get the best of her because she was awesome and God! If the Solver hadn’t already proven all of that wrong.

Anger was a common method for Uzi to use for any stressful situation, as anyone could have guessed just by knowing her for a short time, and here came another method for people to take note of; denial.

“I WON, YOU-!” Uzi stomped forward, pointing a finger in the smaller drone’s direction so that she could poke at her chest once within reach, “YOU LOST! You lost and I won and yet you’re here trying to start shit!! Why couldn’t you have just stayed DEAD??”

Cyn had looked quite petrified from the outburst, not able to rebuff the misdirected anger due to trying to keep herself standing with the pokes throwing her off balance but that last bit… that last bit really hurt, and she looked it. Cyn looked hurt. That didn’t help with Uzi’s grand attempt at denying everything.

“STOP IT!” A shove and Cyn was sprawled out onto the nonexistent ground; an easy feat what with Cyn’s horrendous motor calibrations, “Drop the act you don’t get to-”

>> Host Threat detected.

>> Condition met for-

“YOU SHUT UP!!” Uzi had pointed up at the sky where the words had begun the form, prematurely ending the process; she was getting so angry, she was getting so*. Tired.* She was…

She had started shaking when she faced Cyn again, tears welling up in her eye lights, “You- You don’t get to-” She choked on her words.

Then she walked away.

Uzi couldn’t bear to look at Cyn anymore, with her sad eyes and looking so small and looking so much like a normal, unfortunate drone like herself. She kept walking, and walking, and walking, the towers rising and lowering around her as she was aiming for nowhere in particular, she just needed to be away. Problem was The Solver was part of what she wanted to be away from, but she was too scared to try and wake up to the Real World.

What would she do if she woke up to her dad’s mangled body under her? What if it was to N’s face and he was horrified of her? Or she hurt him too?? How would she cope? She didn’t think she could, especially not now.

So staying in the Solver space it was, refusing to face the nightcore music.

Ask Uzi what she did and for how long and she honest to goodness wouldn’t be able to answer, all she knew was that when she was more aware she was on her knees again feeling like she had just cried her core out for hours. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she did. But whatever she did the pressure that she had felt building within her for weeks was a lot lighter, so she felt a bit better.

And Cyn was next to her. Again.

The worst maid known to drone-kind was laid on the ground, on her stomach, her head using a weirdly arranged arm as a pillow, peering up at her. It kinda looked like she had crawled here.

She wanted to be mad again, she wanted to lash out at her and blame her for all her problems and the world’s problems. But Uzi really didn’t have it in her anymore, it was all spent.

Instead she just let out a long, suffering sigh, Uzi kept her gaze straight ahead, her voice painfully dry, “… What do you want?”

Cyn wasn’t expecting to be acknowledged for a while yet, and certainly not with a question like that, “I want to show you that code stuff I found.”

“Why?”

“So you can fix it. Or delete it. You should probably delete it, it’s bad.”

Uzi looked down at her with that, slowly blinking once or twice, “For someone who said she wanted to help, you sure aren’t doing anything.”

“Pout >:(” The cheek not squished against her arm puffed out, on the same side of the bubbled cheek the emoji pop up over her the eye . Cyn’s expression in the meanwhile was doing the bare minimum to relay a frown “I can’t, I don’t have permission.”

“Says who?”

“Says Uzi.”

“I never said that.”

“Nooo, but the Solver thinks you did, look.” With that Cyn raised her free hand and with a familiar gesture of 3 fingers flaring out a console of sorts appeared in front of her. On it was a text history and the lines corroborated Cyn’s claims; this really fucking sucked, Cyn literally couldn’t do anything, there weren’t any traps, there wasn’t any foul play. Again, nothing to be angry at.

“Cylly doesn’t have permission to edit this file…” Uzi muttered, really trying to digest what she was presented with.

…

A laugh-scoff escaped her, making Cyn blink up at her again, “That’s a dumb name.” Uzi said with a wry smile.

“>:(” Again, looking as upset as possible before turning up her head, “Oh okay darkXwolf17.”

Hearing the age old screen name startled the purple one, then her mouth dropped with mortification, “NO, the Solver did not keep that!!”

“>:3 giggle, it toats did.” She scrolled up the history of her console so fast, pulling up the receipts of when she was blocked by ‘darkXwolf17’ so Uzi could SHOVE IT. Uzi shoved it alright, with a long, dramatic groan that had her hands covering her entire face. Perhaps if she covered her face for long enough she’d stop existing, that sounded like a good plan, her best plan even.

It didn’t work.

The silicon of her hands made a shrill squeaking noise as they slid down her visor.

“I can’t believe this…”

…

Unlike the silence that blanketed the two in the past, this one was a lot lighter, a lot more comfortable for the two to marinate in. It wasn’t perfect, it was fragile even, but it was enough. Uzi leaned back, staring at the various towers that were scrolling nearby, Cyn took the time to start kicking her feet into the air while tracing random shapes into the nothing ground.

Uzi broke the silence, getting into a crisscross sitting position and spinning on her tush to face Cyn; Cyn’s finger and feet froze mid pattern and kick swings, “Why did you take so long to show yourself?”

Cyn blinked a couple of time before she made a great effort to also be sitting and facing Uzi. It took a while, it always took a while, but she wanted to respect the conversation by at least being in a similar position as the other, “You were happy. Ish. You were happy-ish and I didn’t want to ruin that. But then I thought you would be happier with some answers because the Solver was being bad and I wanted to share what I knew. But then all of that happen :(”

Uzi hummed, crossing her arms as she mulled that over and thought about her next question, “Did you go through what I’ve been going through? The overheating and stuff?”

Cyn nodded as best she could, “Annoyed expression. It was a pain.”

“Tell me about it.” She felt like she’d been saying that a lot lately.

…

“Did you do anything to help with it?”

She nodded again, “The Solver likes to grow, so I followed along with it. There was a lot more of me for the heat to get out with and I could put parts of myself in cool places to help more, like I put a lot of myself in the nearby pond that the Elliotts had. Giggle.” Cyn smiled slightly as her head moved over to rest on the other shoulder, “They noticed it bubbling one day and thought they had a natural hot spring, but it was just me. And bigger me meant I could put in more processing power for the Solver.”

Uzi hummed and nodded herself; it made sense but it was quite a simple and brute force-y method in her opinion, “Why didn’t you just stop the processes and loops?”

“I didn’t… think about it…” Yikes there’s embarrassment in that barely tone, “I’m not that good with it… I thought it all had a reason to be there, I was big o-o when you just started shutting towers down.”

It was an unfortunate thing that the Solver’s first host wasn’t proficient in the very thing it was made out of, and a very fortunate thing that the Solver’s second host was. You’d be surprised how little of the colony was actually good at programming, it was mostly studied by the few doctors there were to deal with software issues, read error logs and develop maintenance equipment but Uzi learned it more out of spite than anything. Spite of her dad.

Her dad. HER DAD.

Her eyes grew wide as she realized she had no idea what state he was in. Sure she acknowledged it earlier but she was having a mental breakdown and couldn’t deal, bite her, but now she was more herself and herself is WORRIED!

She yelped, scrambling to her feet, about ready to drop herself from the Solver space, “MY DAD!”

“WaAaAaAiT!!” Uzi felt a loose grip around one of her ankles; Cyn had flopped over before Uzi could manifest herself into reality again, “The bad code!! It’ll turn on again when you turn your eyes start working!!”

THE VISUAL FEED ERROR! THE PINGS!!

“SHIT!” Uzi hissed as she frantically brought her own console up in front of her, then cursed again when she realized she was blanking on what the command would be to unblock Cyn. A frustrated flush appeared on her visor as she yelled to the skies, “SOLVEEERR! Unblock Cyn NOW!”

>> USER NOT FOUND

“I HATE YOU!” So sick and tired of this robo-god damn thing-!! “UNBLOCK CYLLY COLON THREE!!”

>> …

>> USER “Cylly :3” is no longer blocked

If that hadn’t worked Uzi didn’t think she would have survived the gasket that she would have blown, mostly from the fact that she said the dumbass user name out loud like she did and it would have been for nothing. But luckily for her pride it did work, and damn Cyn wasn’t kidding about trying to ping her; dozens of pings filled her vision, both being in her visuals and actually manifesting themselves around the Solver host.

“Bring m- US to the ping location!”

“:D"

“DON’T look at me like that!” ”

:x”

The world fell away, rebuilding itself quickly to a new environment that - of course - Uzi’s never seen before. No matter how many hours she’s spent exploring the damn thing… it never ends…

No time to waste thinking about that - Uzi went to confront the problem but she could barely see the code block that was allegedly responsible for her their outburst. She started dismissing the yellow alerts - that should have been a sign in of itself that Cyn was the one responsible for them - and slowly but surely she surmised what it was all about.

Uzi froze when the dots finished connecting in her mind.

…

“Uzi?” Cyn approached from behind, she kept a healthy distance from the goth girl, looking between the tower and it’s host.

The air stayed quiet for another moment more before Uzi’s shoulders started to hitch up.

“It was… changing me…”

…

“It was… changing me… and I had no idea…”

Fuck how did she not notice that?? How???

She knew why, she was looking at why. It wouldn’t let her. She read the log; the moment she thought anything that contradicted the Solver it MADE her stop. It made her stop and comply.

It just made sense at the time…

All in the name to ‘help’ her keep herself safe from threats…

Uzi eyed the function that appeared to have been in the middle of being made but was currently paused.

>> def hate_KhanDoorman():

WHY was her dad in the list of threats?! That’s her DAD!! How could it do this to her..!

It doesn’t know better, that’s why.

Don’t mistake malice for stupidity as they say. And damn if the Solver wasn’t a stupid motherfucker. It always goes back to that, doesn’t it. She’s gotta put some safe guards in place; now’s a good as time as ever.

A wave of her arm and the tower fell apart like shattering glass - the deployment of one of her own personally defined functions she prepped when she realized she was going to be dismantling a lot of blocks - and bit out a very stern, “Solver..!”

Sideways arrows appeared around her - awaiting input.

“Never. And I mean never. Are you to edit config files found in Users. In fact, don’t edit anything within the User files AT ALL. Do you understand?”

>> …

>> Are you sure you want to Revoke System Permissions from Admin User “darkXwolf17” and GuestUser “Cylly :3?”

A dialog box appeared in front of Uzi.

Yes or No.

Uzi has never slapped the shit out of the concept of Yes so fast in her life.

 

Notes:

AHA Hurricane Milton tried it's damndest but it can't stop my cringe from breaking into the internet >:)

Chapter 6: 3 Days

Summary:

Wakey, wakey! It's time to get emotional with those around you!

It was… odd.

It was odd having to ‘accept’ Cyn, for the fact of her having never left, and for the fact that she wasn’t how Uzi knew her as. Odder still having her seemingly supportive of Uzi, what with her letting out the flattest whoop Uzi had ever heard when she revoked the Solver’s privileges and then ushering the other back to the waking world to check on ‘Mr. Dad’.

Uzi still didn’t trust her, she just couldn’t, at least not yet. It was hard when all she could see was maniacal eyes boring into her very soul while tearing a hole through her chassis. Or hear the childish giggles as Cyn pulled N’s head clean off, cutting short his screams of torture from being ripped apart bit by bit.

Man, Uzi wished she could just consider that REPREESSSSED as N would say.

While she wasn’t as good as N was at it, she did her best to push all of that to the back of her mind as she tried to force her way back to reality; the prevailing darkness confused her, it even started to worry her but that was when she realized there was a drone of static and fragments of visual artifacting popping in and out.

Ah. Right. Must have burnt through, well, everything during her Solver-Induced frenzy.

She topped off on oil before she went to the work site though… why wasn’t her repair program activating?

Ugh.

Well, she wasn’t going to just sit there and wait for oil to fall into her mouth. Actually, she was laying down, on her back, and it felt like her head was resting on a pillow? It was hard to tell with her touch receptors being shot. Wait a minute, she felt… weird. Not even just from having nearly no working functions but like, spatially.

She vaguely remembered that she felt like she was getting larger when she was attacking her dad.

UGH.

She tested out an arm, tried moving it so she could start feeling around wherever she was; to her surprise it was rather functional even if it was slow going; were there more parts to move than before? She tapped her fingers against the ground, frowning; was that FOUR knuckles??

“ᵁᶻᶦ..ˀ”

She paused her exploration. Apparently her audials weren’t completely fried, so that was nice, but damn if the quality wasn’t complete shit; she couldn’t even tell whose voice that was, or where it was coming from.

“ᵁᶻᶦ ᵍ-ᵛᵉ ᵐᵉ ..- ˢᶦᵍⁿ ᵗʰᵃ..-.. ᶦᵗ— ʸᵒᵘ.”

She opened her mouth, actually it fell open; why did it hinge like that??

“.̴.̶-̸-̶.̸-̴-̵-̶-̸ ̸Z̴z̵-̴-̵,̷-̸-̸_̵-̶k̷ ̴s̸h̵h̶h̴h̵h̷-̸-̷.̷”

Yeah. Yeah okay she shoulda seen that coming.

She resorted to giving whoever was talking to her a thumbs up instead, with her weird… spider hands.

“ᴳᵒ-ᵈᵎ ᴴᵉʳᵉ, ᶦᵗ-ˢ ᵒᶦˡ”

She felt something bump against her freakishly long thumb.

It took a frustrating amount of time and effort to just grab the damned thing, and even longer to get to drinking it. It was more like nearly waterboarding herself with the oil and making a mess of it, but enough got in to get repair program going.

Uzi was eventually blessed with the sense of sight, followed by her sense of hearing, and then feeling came back and yup that was a pillow under her head and she was welcomed with the ceiling of her family home being the first thing she saw.

“Uzi.”

Annnnd she felt like she just ate a fucking rock... Turning her head she saw her mother was sitting nearby on her own pillow, tendril arms crossed and seemingly having been waiting for some time. And her pickaxe was nearby.

And in the background was N and V.

N was looking quite frazzled, eyes hollowed and hair messied, V on the other hand had one of her arms as a sword and her body was tense, ready to jump into a fight at a moment’s notice.

Her core clenched; she was the reason why everyone in the room was in the states that they were in, and shit that hurt. It hurt that she made them unsure if she could be trusted, it hurt to be untrusted.

There was a particularly intense punch to the gut when she didn’t see Khan was around.

Uzi sprung up - or at least she tried to, since once she had sat up she immediately folded and completely failed in trying to catch herself when her arms flailed and flopped around instead of moving forward.

“GUH, what the fuck-!” She tried sitting up again, only to flop the other way with more limb flailing, “UGH!!”

It was like, she was only using momentum to move instead of actually having rotary control. She started to growl from her ridiculous flopping around, ESPECIALLY when she heard a snicker who she KNEW was V laughing; she could hear N shushing her with a small scolding on how it wasn’t funny.

“You’re right, it’s not funny. It’s hilarious.”

Oh Uzi was so ready to start causing a scene; how funny was this going to be V when she’s flailing all these sharp parts she had on YOU, V?! But a message appeared on her screen, making her jump and forget about her plans of revenge.

>> Cyn: Sooorrrryyy those are my parts X3 you gotta lock ya joints when they’re at where you want.

…

>> darkXwolf17: That is the dumbest way I’ve ever heard on trying to moderate movement WHY would you design it like that!

Ignoring her screen name because she had enough to worry about - that was so, SO dumb like what the fuck-

>> Cyn: >:( Gee sorry it’s not like I got mobility issues or anything.

Ok, yeah Uzi deserved that.

An oil can appeared in her vision, floating there with a solver symbol holding it in place, “How are you feeling, honey?”

She slapped the can away with something that certainly wasn’t hers - ignoring that too! - and once again was trying to sit up, locking what she could just to keep herself up; it made her look quite frightening with the unnatural bends her body settled in, “FORGET ABOUT ME, where’s Dad! Where is he! Is he-? Did I-?”

Uzi had been ignoring what her body had turned into; ignoring the massive hands that were ever reaching with razor sharp claws, ignoring the feeling of her throat flapping open and gnashing with her words as an extension of her mouth, ignoring the extra appendages that were giant scythes, branding flashes of black and yellow in warning of what kind of monster they were attached to.

Ignoring the way cool air wafted through her ribs… her core…

Ignoring how she could recognize parts of her original body, sticking out of the aberrant fusion of synthesized meat and metal after her body bulged and snapped to accommodate the new form…

Ignoring how anything and everything she was and had could have had it’s way with Khan.

She felt so vile…

“He’s fine, nerd.”

Uzi was blissfully pulled out of her spiraling by V’s statement; her whole body rattled when she let out a sigh of relief mixed with a strangled sob, “Oh thank robo-god…”

She felt a hand on a shoulder; N had crouched down next to her with one of those trademark N smiles, he was the best at smiling Uzi loved his smiles, “Yeah he’s alright. He wanted to be here when you woke up but workers were getting antsy with getting repair efforts going again.”

“Wait…” Uzi slowly experimented with the scythe appendages that were attached to her back - wait that was where her wings were supposed to be - just so she could at least fold them up she didn’t like looking at them, “How long have I been out?”

N immediately looked nervous, averting his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck as he tried to find a tactful way to respond, “Oohhh… ya know… a little whiileee-”

V interrupted, prematurely ending the beating of a metaphorical bush, “3 days.”

Every little bit of effort Uzi had spent to get her in control of her body was immediately ruined when the force of the shock had her release the locks on every single one of her joints, the consequences of such basically had her turn into a limb puddle, “WHAT??!!”

N had caught Uzi’s head at least, hugging it/her when he snapped at V - not a way she would have ever expected to be held by him but she wasn’t complaining, “V!! We agreed to be GENTLE about breaking the news!! That wasn’t gentle!!”

V rolled her eyes and huffed, “You were taking too long! It was going to take a whole ‘nother day just for you to tell her with how you started pussy footing.”

“I was getting to it!” N… seethed? Uzi stopped her attempts to put herself together again to crane her head up at the D. drone; he was… genuinely angry? “Why are you even here if you’re just going to make things worse? Can’t you keep yourself in check this one. time?!”

Honestly V wasn’t as astounded by N’s sudden attitude as Uzi would have expected her to be. If anything, Uzi was more dumbfounded than she was. Well, maybe it’s only sudden to her.

3 days is a long time for things to happen.

While she wasn’t as surprised by N’s spite, V did take offense to his words and snapped back just as hard, “Oh yeAH? Mhm, right, remind me, which one out of the two of us is currently BENCHED and not allowed to help with the repairs again? Because he couldn’t keep himself in check?”

Uzi couldn’t believe what she was hearing! N? Her N?? She ended up squawking, “N, what?!” when the initial shock wore off.

His hold on her tightened and he started trying to help with scooping her into a pile, oh so carefully maneuvering her many, disgusting limbs over herself where it would seem comfortable, “I was just taking out some trash I don’t know what the big deal was...” He mumbled.

V scoffed, looking as if the statement had actually slapped her from the audacity of it, “You dropped a worker drone down a trash chute! You’re lucky it wasn’t burning day or you would have killed him!”

“Wish it did.”

“N! You’re such a-!”

“ENOUGH!”

The disassembly drones and even Uzi jolted - immediately a guilty expression befell the former group - Nori had repositioned herself on the coffee table nearby with quite the deadly glare, a tendril was jabbed toward the front door, “OUT. NOW.”

You could hear a pin drop, if it was able to fall through the thick tension in the air. Nobody moved, nobody said anything, nobody even breathed.

But then V sucked on her teeth, turning on her heels to follow the demand. She wasn’t about to argue with the core in her own home.

N on the other hand, made no movement to. Instead, his tail started to lash about behind him because of the anxiety that attacked him. The idea of leaving Uzi’s side when he’d waited so long…

Nori regarded him and his whipping tail, sighing when just giving a stern stare wasn’t convincing him, “N please.”

She waved a Solver claw around, summoning a floating pillow to jump onto to hover by the frazzled boy, “She’ll be here later, just like she’s here now. Let a mother have some time with her daughter. Please.”

His face somehow fell further than it already was, he even let out a very pitiful whine that had Uzi want to smother the man with the comfort of a million peppering kisses. Unfortunately she didn’t have enough control over herself to do something like that, she barely even had enough control just to lift a measly hand to try and hold N’s.

Luckily N noticed and met her halfway there.

Robo-gods why was his hand so small in hers? It’s not supposed to be like that this is all wrong-

“I’ll see you later?” It sounded like a question, but it wasn't really. It was more like a promise.

N searched her face, she saw it, she saw him do it and she didn’t know what he was looking for but it terrified her, was there going to be one more horrible thing he notices about what she’d become and that would be the last straw? Did she have too many teeth? Too many pulsing masses? Was he going to see how horribly she was put back together again and say ‘This is too much!’ and drop her right there, right now like a filthy doll that was infested with maggots? Please don’t see that, don’t see her twisted spine or the protruding pieces of bone or the rancid drops of mystery fluid she could feel leaking from her core, please see her for her she’s not like this this isn’t her-!

And then he smiled. He found what he was looking for and smiled his wonderful N smile - even if it was weighed down by stress and exhaustion - and gave her misshapen hand that far surpassed his own in terms of bulk and size a tender squeeze.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll see you later.”

He was so gentle, taking every ugly piece of herself off of him one by one, gingerly and with purpose until he was left with her head, of which he then placed her back on the pillow. It looked like it hurt when the last grace of touch was broken but he kept that smile on, and he kept it even as he left her home.

How did you do that N? How did you treat her like the most precious thing in the entire world when she struggled to think herself as more than the beast she physically was. A beast that should be chained, caged, a beast that couldn’t even trust itself.

“Ugh…” Nori shook her ‘head’, which was really just her whole body, “How am I supposed to keep not liking the boy when he goes around acting like that?” She’d lament as she had herself hover and land near Uzi’s head, some of her tendrils crossing from what a difficult situation she was in as a protective parent, “I see why you’re so smitten with him.”

Uzi wasn’t really listening, still staring at the front door longingly… that was until Nori called her out like that. She snapped her eye-lights to the core, not missing a beat to let out a very long, very affronted, “MOOOM!”

Nori laughed, tapping onto Uzi’s visor with a tease, “Welcome back from La La N Land, hun! Was he at least wearing a shirt while you were in there?”

“MOOOOOOOOOOM”

”Okay, I’m done, I’m done.” She said she was but she seemed to have very much enjoyed torturing embarrassing her daughter. Gosh, Uzi could only imagine the chaos she would caused if she was around for her formative years. She KNEW she would be the type to demand Uzi to say ‘I love you too’ back in front of everyone on the first day of school.

“But seriously, how are you feeling?” Ah Nori is definitely settling in, digging herself into the overly plush pillow.

“Hnnnrrrmmmmm… “ Uzi wasn’t great with feelings like, ever. Especially not with a parental figure she never thought she’d see again. And especially not when she looked like this.

“I feel… gross…” Was what she settled with.

Nori ‘nodded’, “Mm I see. Do you know how to change your body back? No one will question any amount of time you might need to figure that out.”

Uzi let her mouth flap open again to flat out say no when another message invaded her sight.

>> Cyn: Annnnnd that’s my cue to appeaaarr with the answers you neeeed! (⁀ᗢ⁀)

Uzi couldn’t help but make a face at that fucking thing was at the end of the text.

>> darkXwolf17: Ew what the fuck never do that again.

>> Cyn: (◡‿◡✿) Sorry what was that? I couldn’t hear you over me getting ready to ping you and tell you how to do something cool.

Then a ping to somewhere in the solver space.

“Uzi? Is something happening?” More tinking on her glass visor, though Nori looked a lot more worried than she did just seconds ago.

“Oh yeah,” She minimized the chat log to focus on her mother, “I was just-”

The chat log immediately maximized itself with an urgent message.

>> Cyn: Don’t tell her about me.

Uzi slowly continued after a short pause, “… just… sorry I’m trying to figure out how to explain it… I think I know of a place in the solver space that’ll help.” Nice save.

Nice enough for Nori to look reassured too, “Oh good! Are you… going to have to shut down on me for that?”

That was how her parents named what happened whenever she dropped into the Solver space; she couldn’t blame them since it apparently was pretty freaky how quickly her visor and lights turned off like no one was home, which she guessed was pretty accurate.

“It won’t be for 3 days this time..!” Or at least she really hoped it didn’t.

“It better not, young lady.”

Oh yeah, she really hoped it didn’t.

---

“CYN, what the hell was that about??” Was the first question out of her conceptual mouth when she ‘loaded into’ the space.

Cyn was staring at what looked like some sort of schematics the size of a jumbotron and it was weirdly familiar - HOLY SHIT that was her! It was Uzi’s body! It was projecting out of the palm of her hand, but disappeared when she closed it to face Uzi.

“Don’t tell anyone about me. Especially not N or V. And super especially not N.”

Uzi stared at the smaller girl for a moment, then spread her arms out in an exasperated gesture - that was literally the opposite of an answer.

A small pit in her stomach started to form, doubts… fears… anxieties bubbling up. Was Cyn trying to… hide her existence so she could try something in secret? To catch everyone off guard with some sort of plan? To isolate her?? To-

“I really hurt people. I really hurt V and N. And if they knew I was still here, the hurt I did will stay.” Cyn was… surprisingly level with what she was saying, but it wasn’t easy for her, Uzi could tell from the way her arms started to wrap around her little form in a self-hug, “I want them to be happy. Happy with you. So don’t tell them about me, so they can forget about me and stay happy.”

The pit didn’t go away, but it did stop growing. Uzi just watched this little girl take the stand for her own erasure for the sake of others allegedly, and she thought, ‘That’s fucked up!’ Because it was. But she also couldn’t bring herself to disagree.

“Ok.” She’d relent, letting her arms flop to her sides, “Yeah, ok. Alright. I won’t tell ‘em.”

Cyn popped in place, seemingly happy with the horrible agreement while she stumbled over to Uzi with a grabby motion aimed at one of her hands. Uzi took a moment to realize what she was asking, “Oh uh…” she held one out for Cyn to grab.

“Took me a second to find this but I did!” Her grasp on Uzi’s wrist while she moved it so her palm was up was so weird, like 90% of the strength she had to hold on was squarely in her thumb and index finger while the others had 10% power, and even that 90% she had was rather weak - Uzi could jerk her arm and she was sure Cyn’s hand would fall right off. A second hand fell into Uzi’s palm and she felt like… something small just became a part of her.

>> User Cylly :3 sent a file

Uzi opened it on her visor screen; not before she ran an extensive scanning program, just in case there was any nasty surprises…

There wasn’t.

Cyn didn’t want to overstay her welcome being so close to Uzi so she stepped away with a surprising amount of accomplishment on her face, “Your file paths are all different from mine, I think it’s because you’re a newer model than me. I can show you where that is later in case you wanna make more copies.”

Uzi was quiet as she scanned over her own schematics, fascinated with how detailed and particular it was. Sure there were blueprints for the average drone body but there weren’t any for individual people; the small things people did to themselves to help with their professions, or the small dings or scratches people got over their lives, the art sketched into their plates for a sense individuality, it would all be erased if the damage was substantial enough to need part replacing.

Not this though. This was her wholly complete. There were notes of specific sections in her chassis that were weaker than others from a massive fall she had when she was younger, the weirdly laced wires in her hand from when Doll stabbed her, even how her pinky finger on her right hand bent slightly more than the other because she accidentally slammed a door on it way back when.

“How is this..?”

“The Solver did a scan when it first activated in you.” Cyn pipped up, excited to answer and be more helpful for every time she helped Uzi succeed and live her life was a point toward atoning for her sins, “I dunno when that was but that’s the reference it needs to do anything, like modifying or reverting changes. Like reverting the changes it did to you when it was messing with your head!”

Uzi winced at that; not the best thing to be reminded of.

“:O” Showed up on Cyn’s visor, soon being replaced with “:(”

“Sorry! That wasn’t a good thing to say. Let me say a good thing instead by showing you the cool thing to do with that blueprint! >:3”

Cyn… Uzi couldn’t explain it any other way but say that she ‘galloped’ off to a particular tower that still had a yellow ping attached to it, loosely waving a limp hand for Uzi to follow.

“This is a big one.” Cyn started when Uzi was deemed to be ‘close enough’, “It’s the thing that’s constantly checking on your main doll! And it actually looks nice when it gets going, more than just a bunch of words I don’t get! Give it a knock and see~”

Uzi had been looking over the code, getting some basic understanding of it’s purpose with the small amount she was able to see - she was impressed to see that it did have UI development in there, must be what Cyn was talking about with it looking nice - when a particular thing Cyn said had her do a double take.

“Wait, what?? What do you mean doll?” She couldn’t help but think of red words with the plea to be stronger than she was and fight back.

A blink was her response for a moment, before it dawned on her, “… Oh! Well, remember how I said you’re in the singularity?” Cyn tilted her head in the other direction as she continued, “You aren’t limited by a body anymore, it doesn’t matter if you have one or many or none. You just are. And you can just be in whatever you want, controlling something from beyond. Like a doll!”

A crooked hand gestured back up to the tower of topic, “And this lets you play around with your dolls! Get them how you want!”

Uzi… frankly felt sick hearing that. Deep inside her, she had understood that to some level but having it so plainly laid out in front of her? Like it didn’t matter anymore? It went against everything she ever knew. She ever only knew ‘herself’, Uzi. Uzi the goth girl, the outcast of the colony. Uzi Doorman, the daughter of Khan and Nori. Uzi, someone of mind and body - the 2 pieces of every other person in existence - and now half of that was just ripped away from her.

She never asked for this.

She never asked for any of this.

“I’m sorry.”

Uzi jolted, her vision focused again - when were things getting blurry? - and Cyn was standing in front of her now.

“What?” Was all she managed to breathe out.

“I’m sorry.” She said again, without hesitation, “I- there’s a lot I’m sorry for, because. Duh. But right now I’m sorry for not thinking about how you might feel about what I was saying. I’m the weird one here, ” Cyn looked down at a hand, strain showing in her limited expression when she tried to make a fist out of it - only a couple of fingers managed to curl into her palm, “The weird one for thinking it’s fun to mess with your body, to just get a new one like it’s easy. I forgot that’s weird.”

The little maid shook her head and set her shoulders, determined to right this wrong, “Lemme start over! Uzi, hi! Welcome back to the Solver space!” She made beep boop noises, tapping into her palm as if she were using a phone, “Hey! I just sent you a file! It’s a super cool thing that you can use at this super cool tower code. Gesture, gesture.” The gesturing was very robotic swings of her arms, and was that a very quiet “ᵀᵃ ᵈᵃᵃᵃʰʰʰ” Uzi just heard?

… It was because she definitely heard “ᵀᵃ ᵈᵃᵃᵃʰʰʰ” again when she didn’t react for a minute.

She couldn’t help but snort, which she was very quick to smother to death and never acknowledge again, “Cyn… you didn’t have to do that again. I get it, you’re not the only weird one here.”

“Oh I know.” She settled back into her usual stance of tucked in arms and pigeon toes, “But I wanted to be nice and not mention how weird you are. Because you’re super weird :) My favorite thing you’ve done is when you said ‘Let’s get weird!’ and then weirded all over the place. Which is something you do every day. Like, waow-”

“OK I get it! I’m weird! You’re weird! We’re all weird!” A ‘vein pop’ appeared on Uzi visor as she stomped up to the tower and slapped it to get it up and running - the tower flashed once and sunk into the ground, setting up the interface for the Host to work with, “Now how does this ALSO WEIRD thing work or are you going to roast me all day??”

“I would but your mom wouldn’t like me keeping you for much longer.”

Uzi yelped, suddenly very worried about what the time was, “OH SHIT how long has it been?!”

“Not long :) giggle. Only a few minutes.”

If looks could kill… and yet Cyn looked very cheeky despite only being able to make miniscule changes in her expression. Uzi was coming to realize that Cyn was quite good at working with what she got.

“… You did that on purpose.”

“Yeah. Yeah I did. :)))”

“Wait a damn minute!” Uzi crossed her arms and huffed, looking quite betrayed, “Did you know that I was out for THREE DAYS and didn’t tell me!”

“Oh no, I didn’t know, prommy :O” Cyn did her best to put a hand squarely over her chest as a ‘scout’s honor’ motion, “Your body was offline so I didn’t have any way to keep track of time :Y Even then I don’t think you were actually here for that long. Though… it did feel like it took a while for you to show up…”

Uzi’s furrowed her brows, took a while to show up… why was that? “Huh…”

She didn’t get to speculate, the code finished initializing and a large screen took the place of where the tower once was; a giant interface that had half of it’s space taken up by the image of what Uzi could guess was the current state of her body and the other half being folders and lists relating to modifiers and pivots for attachments. Uzi was glad to see that it was largely inspired by normalized software design, there was even a standard menu bar that had the good ol’ File, Edit, View, etc dropdowns.

“Do I just-” Uzi motioned toward the File dropdown with a finger, which was quick to actually drop with a plethora of options on display, “Oh shit-”

“Careful.” Cyn warned as she grabbed Uzi’s wrist to pull the point away from the screen, “It’s sensitive to commands. The Solver likes to jump on anything that could be interpreted as a want from the Host, even if it’s not… as you know :Y”

Yeah, yeah she did.

“You could go through that but a base schema import’s right there.” She steered Uzi’s pointer finger to an upload block; it opened up prompting for a file the moment it was properly pointed at.

“Ugh! This is so…” Uzi vaguely gestured to the entire thing, deciding to take her time to complain while she was going to her internal downloads, “surreal..! And I hate that I actually find it cool! Did you make this? Didn’t you say you were shit with computer languages?”

“>:( Rood.” Her cheeks blew up gradually, “I didn’t. I wanted something like it so the Solver made it, though it looked reaaalllyyy bad the first time. I had to tell it how to make it look better for a while.”

So it can iterate based on feedback, hm. Uzi had to stop herself from scheming what she could do with that, that’ll be a later Uzi’s aspirations, now Uzi had a very, very difficult job to do of transferring an whole, entire file into the drop box.

Which she did after she battled the urge to let a demented smile grace her face - FUTURE UZI WILL GET TO PLAY WITH THAT, NOT NOW! - and agreed to proceed with the design update.

The file took in short order and progress bars appeared over various pivot points on her body.

Uzi watched them fill out for a moment before jabbing a thumb toward the screen, “Soooo, do I gotta wait for that to finish or something before my body gets back to normal?”

“W. D. Y. M. It’s already happening 🤨”

…

“What do you mean it’s already happening.”

“It’s happening. That’s what the bar is showing, how far along it’s at with getting the part along according to the schema you gave it.”

“WHAT?!” Uzi’s hands grabbed at her hair, she thought she had TIME to get ready! “CYN!! MY MOM IS GOING TO FREAK OUT IF I’M JUST CHANGING LIKE THAT!!”

“:O Oh yeah you should probably get going.”

“CYN!!”

“SORRY DX”

---

Oh WOW this felt fucking AWFUL what the fuck-

Uzi woke back up in the middle of the transformation, the progress bars apparently having a notification alert that showed in her physical visuals and telling her she was about 50% there.

She was shrinking, her endoskeleton merging with the unnecessary extra bends and chassis panels reforming over her innards, she could feel her throat stitch itself close and her teeth shrivel away, claws and bone bits sinking away, flesh sucking itself back to her core.

It didn’t hurt, it just felt… yucky…

She was also starting to feel very full. Like, alarmingly full what the fuck SHE’S GONNA THROW UP-

Uzi sat up with hands flying up to her mouth to stall the torrent that was coming, she looked around frantically for something to let it all out into.

“HONEY HERE!!” A bin appeared in her lap thank the robo-gods- a splash of oil came forth with a lurch.

So that was where the oil she topped off with went… Can’t make something from nothing, as she’s said before.

“UGHHHHH!” She pulled her head back, feeling quite miserable. There was oil dribbling down her chin; a napkin floated in to dab the excess away.

“You alright?” Nori asked, letting her motherly instincts take over to tend to her daughter.

Uzi groaned, letting her mom actually be tender with her despite how the sight of it could make her reputation take a nasty hit, “… Yeah… It was just the extra stuff turning back into oil and I was already a little filled from what you gave me earlier…”

She was still uncomfortably full, but now it wasn’t threatening to be purged just from overflow, but hey! She was sitting on her own! And was able to actually grab the bin without flopping around like a dying fish! A check on the progress bar would show it had finished at some point during her spit of sick.

It was… such a weight off her soul to finally feel normal again.

A pillow smacked the back of her head, forcing a strangled noise to escape her, “HEY!”

“Warn your mother next time before you start to do something like that again!!” Nori was proper peeved, holding her previous plush throne as her weapon of choice, “I nearly shorted when you started writhing on the floor!”

Uzi took to defense, both of her hands covering the back of her head to prevent another devastating strike, “I had no idea about that, I didn’t know!!”

Uzi was prepared for a counterattack, to wage this war started on her very being, but then a fleshy mass slapped against her chest and wrapped some tendrils around her torso, “This is your, sniff punishment for scaring me like that. For this time and last time.”

Oh. Oh mom…

Uzi gently placed a hand on her mother’s back, hugging her as she could with her mother being limited to being a core; she wouldn’t want to squish her after all, “Sorry Mom… I really didn’t know that was gonna happen.”

Another sniff before Nori let go and scuttled back, looking embarrassed for daring to be vulnerable, “I believe you, honey. It’s just… I can’t understand what it is you’re having to deal with, and it scares me that I can’t help you whenever somethin-”

“But you are helping, Mom..!” The way of which Uzi’s words came out so resolute, it surprised the both of them, but she continued forth, “It… oh this is going to sound so cheesy kill me after I say this but, it’s… it’s nice to know that, ugh, I’m cared for. I think about you guys when I’m struggling with the Solver and it’s shit-ness. And it… ya know… helps deal with it…”

Nori blinked a handful of times, then one final blink had her eye blipped back large and watery, “Oooohhhhh honneeeeyyy..!”

“AGH!” Uzi whipped around to give the wall somewhere behind her a half-hearted glare, refusing to look at her mom while a blush invaded her visor, “DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT it’s gross!! You’re being gross!!”

“Oh I’m being the gross one~” Here came the birthright of all mothers, to tease the hell out of their kids, “And yet I wasn’t the one who said all those mushy-mushy words just now~” She continued as she tried to crawl into Uzi’s line of sight - the flustered girl was doing her best to avoid line of sight with the smug core, spinning on her behind the moment her peripheral was invaded.

Nori changed tactics, taking to crawling up Uzi’s back for a more direct approach, “I bet that N boy was one of the first people you thought abooouutt~” Was what she cooed when she reached a shoulder.

Oh that was cruel, “MOM!!” Hands flew up, covering her face to possibly just, stop existing.

Oh Uzi HATED hearing that laughter, her mom really was SOOOO happy with herself, torturing her own daughter like this.

“THIS IS CHILD ABUSE!!”

“This! Is parenting!”

“THIS IS INHUMANE!”

“Good thing we aren’t humans!”

“JUST LET ME WIN THIS!”

“Not gonna happen, honey, I got years of this to catch up on~”

“UGHH!!” Uzi pulled her coma pillow into place to flop her face into to groan into even more.

This was the worst day of her life! … And she loved every second of it.

Nori eventually got all her giggles out, settling on her daughter’s back to let a comfortable, happy silence blanket them. To bask in this moment of normalcy, something that was so rare in recent days. It was… really, really nice.

…

But moments like these were ever only temporary.

“Is Khan one of those people?”

Uzi tried, she really, really, really did, to not physically give herself away. She failed. And so Nori felt the way her body tensed up.

She tried to play it off, turning her head from the pillow to speak clearly, “What?”

“Is he someone you think about to get you through a tough time?” Nori clarified, moving enough to initiate eye contact with her daughter; she knew what she was doing in order to have this tough conversation.

The silence was deafening, and answer enough for Nori.

It was complicated, of course it was, sometimes she did but it wasn’t the Khan of now, it was the Khan of then. When she was still a young neural network that held his hand to get from one side of the room to the other, because she would cry if she was carried to where she wanted instead of getting there herself.

But she didn’t want to talk about it; not even just from a need to not talk about her feelings but from the fact that her family was whole again. She just got her family back and she didn’t want it to get torn apart again if she told her mom about how Khan became after she was gone-

“I already know about it, Uzi.”

…

She thought people were joking when they said mothers could read minds.

Uzi pushed her upper body up, nearly sending her mother tumbling but she held on to keep eye contact, “… Know about..?” This could be one of those bluffs, where you pretend to know about something so someone spills the actual beans-

“About how he turned to shit after I died.”

… Okay well that was a decent generalization surely she didn’t know about-

“And how he left you for dead.”

Mother you’re scaring her.

The air around them had definitely changed by this point, the two of them moved about accordingly with Nori back on the coffee table and Uzi sitting in front of it.

“How… do you know about that?”

Nori raised a brow, well, it was her only brow but she made it look naturally questioning, “Because he told me?”

Uzi’s eyes went wide; Khan? Told HER? That man who literally regressed so much as a person that he dedicated his life to completely avoid conflict and confrontation to the point of barely functioning? THAT Khan??

“… are you sure he told you and you didn’t just read his mind?”

“What-??”

“Forget it, nevermind, uh-” Did… Nori not care..? That he did that? They were still together it looked like, “How did you… take that?”

“Oh absolutely horribly! I tore into him for HOOUURSS, I’m shocked you never walked into the absolute carnage of it, it lasted an entire day. I don’t even remember most of it I blacked out at one point and came back when I was exhausted from all the yelling.” Nori regaled, waving a claw around as she remembered what she could, “And then I didn’t talk to him for days. I couldn’t believe him. I was just… so disappointed in him.”

… Yeah Uzi knew the feeling.

“I eventually confronted him again and asked why, and you know, he didn’t hold back. He spilled his guts, went through an entire rigamarole about everything that had us both crying at the end which I hated him for.” Nori sighed, deflating onto the table with a claw scratching at her head, “… Do you know why I’m bringing it up all of a sudden?”

Uzi didn’t… like that question… suddenly felt like she ate 2 rocks this time.

“… no… why do I feel like I’m not going to like what you’re about to say.”

“Because you’re not.” Nori confirmed plainly, summoning a phone that Uzi hadn’t noticed was sitting on the couch nearby - Nori had to get her hands on one on account of her… coreness, “You’re father’s on his way, and I want you two to talk about what happened.”

Wait, wait, waitwaitwaitwait - “WHAT?!?!”

“You probably have another minute or two left before he gets here.”

“But- Wait! I’m not ready to have ANOTHER emotional talk-!!”

“Well get ready, honey, it’s happening.”

“Mom!”

“I’ll leave the apartment once he gets here so you two can really let it all out without an audience-”

“Mom I can’t- He-!” Probably thinks she’s a monster. That she’s not his daughter.

“He’s not upset by the way.”

“… what?”

“For what happened, those days ago. He’s been telling everyone there was a tunnel collapse, ya know? That you were the one to notice the signs while you two were talking about your Solver acting up again and saved him from the rocks, taking the brunt of the disaster.”

“That wasn’t what happened…” Uzi couldn’t stop her voice from cracking with the confession.

“Oh I know, that’s why I said he’s not upset, with what actually happened. He wouldn’t tell me the story but the scene the disassemblers and I walked into? Yeah, we could put the puzzle pieces together.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“Ah, ah! Those words aren’t for me, you know that.”

She was right. Anything and everything she had to say was for the person who was currently opening the front door.

“It’ll be okay, honey, I promise.”

Notes:

It'll be okay because if not Nori is going for a round 2 with Khan

Chapter 7: I missed when you did that

Summary:

Who put these elephants in here??

“Uzi..!”

There he was. Her dad. Standing at the door way, frazzled. Mustache crooked. His vents going. And so happy to see her. He looked like he just ran a marathon to get where he was, absolutely booked it back home the moment he got that text from Nori that Uzi had finally stirred. Except there was no way he could’ve ran here. 

Uzi stared at the blank space where his right leg should have been; that was wrong all wrong and she was the reason why it wasn’t right.

She did that.

Khan followed her gaze, “.. Oh! No, no, it’s okay don’t look at that, it’s okay-!” He hobbled in, with the crutches she put him in. His prowess with the mobility aid left… a lot to be desired, not quite yet internalizing the flow of stop and go; demonstrated by a rubber end catching onto the ground and causing a tumble.

“DAD-!” Uzi started as Khan went down with a shout.

Khan stopped mid-air with the Solver cross around his torso, “While usually your blundering is cute, now isn’t the time.” Nori sighed, waving Khan over to the couch and set him down; with the way Khan looked both relieved and unbothered by the relocation, it seemed like this has happened many times before.

“Thank you, Dear…” His voice was soft as he maneuvered his crutches to lean against the couch’s arm rest.

“Ugh!” The core rolled her eye, making a familiar noise of faux disgust, “It’s whatever, don’t mention it.” No one mentioned ‘it’ or the heavy blush that occupied her fleshy ‘cheeks’. She was quick to recover however, gesturing to the seat next to Khan while clearing her nonexistent throat to capture Uzi’s attention.

To capture her attention as it was wholly taken by the empty leg space once again.

“Huh-” Static cleared from her vision, blinking up at her mother who was still on the coffee table, pointing at her designated cushy seat, “Oh. Uh-”

It would be funny that her movements just to sit next to her own father were so robotic, if it weren’t for the fact that she didn’t even realize it; Uzi felt like she was floating, felt like she wasn’t actually there and something was crawling up her throat and she wanted to drink poison to kill whatever that thing was before it could escape.

That was a lot to consider in the short moment it was for her to get up and sit back down on a couch that was less than a foot away, so yeah, she didn’t notice how jerky her own movements were, she didn’t notice how her parents looked on with concern, and she definitely didn’t notice how her lights rapidly flickered and dimmed as she unknowingly fought against the urge to drop into the Solver space. 

When did the Solver space become something she latently considered safe?

At the end of all that, despite all odds, she was sat. Stiffly. Staring at nothing at particular, or rather, anything that wasn’t where a leg should have been.

…

“Ok. You two need to talk.”

Khan startled; the full body jerk knocked his crutches and he scrambled to catch them before they fell out of reach, “Wait- now??”

Ah. Well weirdly enough it was nice to know that Uzi wasn’t the only one unprepared for what laid ahead.

“Yes, now. Because everyone in this family are the most avoidant drones in existence and if it doesn’t happen now it’ll be in 10 years after fully avoidable problems have already happened over and over again.” Nori looked at both of them with an award winning sternness that left no room for argument. When she thought her point was utterly made she laid off it, a softness returning to her voice while a pillow was summoned at the end of the table, “I’ll leave you two to it. Please. Listen to each other, really listen… I’ll check in later.”

Hopping onto the pillow she floated over to the door to make her exit, “And don’t worry Khan I’ll keep an eye on the workers!” She’d assure, though there was an odd… predatory undertone to the statement.

“NORI DON’T-” Annndd the door slammed shut, she was gone. The hand he reached out with to plea his case dropped, “Oh dear…”

…

“I’m… sure it’ll be fine.” Khan wasn’t very convincing, as he wasn’t convinced himself, but he had more pressing matters to attend to. He turned toward Uzi who was still facing forward, sitting like a statue, though she was making a face regarding that odd exchange between her parents.

She’ll ask about that later.

Assuming she survives the coming conversation.

…

“Sooo…” Khan picked at the edges of his uniform, sweat drops appearing on his visor, “Did you…? Sleep well..?”

“… Dad what?” The absurdity of the question knocked her out of her near frozen state some, allowing her to momentarily forget about her anxieties so she could face him with a twisted expression. She sure as hell wasn’t sleeping for that entire time and there was nothing good about it.

“I don’t know!” Khan raised his hands, frantically waving them, “I didn’t get a chance to re-read the daughter manual before you woke up! I even had the ‘How to have a good conversation’ chapter bookmarked…” He mumbled while scratching at the side of his head.

“Dad…” Uzi sighed, already feeling exhaustion pull at her mind while turning back away, “You- ugh… I don’t even know what to say about that…” For one thing, she never understood why he insisted on physical copies of books and manuals, secondly, it stung that he was so dependent on it. Was she not worth the effort to understand by himself? Why did he have to keep resorting to generic guides to regulate how he interacted with her? News flash, dad, there’s nothing in those damn manuals that can help with her, she’s not the norm, are you just going to give up on her when you run out of books to reference?

“Sorry, uh… uhm… okay how about this-!” Whatever he had to say next seemed to excite him, his expression set in determination with hands up in fists, “I am glad to see that you’re ok, Uzi. I was so worried after-”

“After I attacked you?” Uzi interrupted, squeezing her eyes shut as she said it.

Yeah that knocked the wind out of Khan’s sails, suddenly bringing attention to the elephant in the room was not something he was prepared for but that didn’t stop him from trying to refute the very thing that was clearly haunting her, “Uzi that’s not something I blame you for-”

“You don’t blame me for ripping your leg off? For throwing you around? For ruining one of your precious doors?” She spat that last one out, she didn’t mean to it just came out like that. She didn’t mean to do a lot of things, but that didn’t matter when it happened anyway.

“No.”

The conviction in that simple word had her open her eyes again. Uzi turned, searching, checking for any bit of apprehension in his face that could give him away as anything but 100% genuine. There was none.

“I never thought to blame you; I’m not upset with what happened, because it was clear you were in a great amount of pain and that's not your fault. So no, I'm not mad or upset or anything in between, not... on my own behalf at least.” He broke eye contact, shame overcoming his expression.

…

“Did you really think that I hated you?”

Oop now it was Khan’s turn to bring attention to a different elephant; why are there so many damn elephants in this room??

Uzi’s core clenched something horrible; a hand reached up to grip the cloth on her chest with her gaze wandering to stare at the ground below. It took a moment to steady herself so that her voice wouldn’t hitch from the pure emotion that tried to choke her, “Didn’t you..?”

…

“I mean… I always said it as an angsty teen joke but I always meant it, that you were never there. Not just being there to support me but like, in general…” Her voice was so quiet, she didn’t know if Khan could even hear her, but with this minor opening the floodgates were quickly failing, “I was too scared to say it *seriously* because what if it still didn’t do anything; I could logic you still not trying more after I brought it up as edgy metaphors because maybe you thought I wasn’t serious but if I really did try and that still didn’t work I- I don’t know what would’ve happened to me..!”

It would have been devastating.

“It always hurt but at least there was always a chance..! There was always a chance that maybe you didn’t actually hate me but then you- you just…” Left her for dead.

Uzi curled up, pulling her legs toward her chest to hug them as she remembered how a door slamming down shattered her heart.

…

“I’m sorry, Uzi.”

Her core skipped a beat but she didn’t dare look up at her dad.

“I- there’s no excuse…” He sighed; in her peripheral she could see him shuffling to be facing her more directly even if she was mostly turned away, “After what happened to your mother I… didn’t know what to do. I was terrified without her, of the world, for you. I couldn’t save her or keep her safe but I still had you, our pride and joy. I wanted to keep *you* safe, no matter what.”

Khan weaved his fingers together over and over again, twiddling to help the words keep flowing, “I did realize that I left you alone far too often and for far too long, but I always convinced myself that it was for the greater good. That it was for your safety, to spend days and nights maintaining the doors, to monitor the doors, to keep watch of the outside so nothing could get to you.”

He remembered those early days, when he originally founded the WDF and started working on their defenses. It was him and many others who had lost their loved ones to the disassembly drones, they were all so determined to make sure that couldn’t happen again; when did he forget that? Who the WDF and the doors were made for? That, he couldn’t remember.

“I remember getting scared when I wasn’t by the front lines, panic grew in me if I didn’t actually see the doors being closed because ‘What if’? ‘What if’ there was some sort of fault in it and I could have prevented the worst case scenario if I had just been there?”

That’s how a second vault door was installed, better and stronger than the first. Just in case the first one failed. Because what if it did?? What if he looked away and then his daughter was dead and he failed her and his dearly departed wife because *his* door turned out to be defective and he didn’t notice? Or it wasn’t strong enough? But then what if the second one also failed? The what if’s plagued him for days on end and the longer he let the what if’s stay the more he felt like he wasn’t doing enough as the protector his daughter deserved. 

That’s how the third one was installed.

By the time the Disassembly drones had infiltrated the bunker the What Ifs had been building up again and he was seriously considering installing a fourth.

“I don’t… know how it all got so twisted, for all of that to turn into something odd and for me to find comfort in the doors themselves. I don’t know how I let them feel more important than the one they were made for. But just because I didn’t know or notice, that doesn’t make it was okay, because it wasn’t, I was awful. And for that, all of that and more, I am so, so sorry Uzi, for not being the father you needed, for not being the father you deserved.”

Uzi didn’t know that. That he made the WDF for her, or that he made the doors to protect her. She wouldn’t be able to explain how someone's psyche could meld everything together to get a familial connection with *doors* either but damn if this wasn’t one of the many times she wished there was a drone therapist in the bunker.

The two of them remained silent, to allow the other to marinate in the feelings that was laid out before them.

“… Were you ever proud of me..?”

Khan kept surprising her; the way he perked up and responded with a quickness… “Of course! I don’t care how biased I’m going to sound but I stand by the fact that you’re the smartest little sparkplug of your generation! Heh, I remember when your Stage 5 teacher upset you because he wouldn’t let you remove a classmate's arm so you designed and made headphones with the sole purpose of filtering out his voice and his voice only.” He laughed fondly, remembering the call from the school trying to explain the ridiculous situation, “I remember you tried justifying yourself saying that if you never heard him tell you not to do something then you could just do it.”

Uzi remembered that actually, she couldn’t believe that he did too, on his own volition. The corner of her lips quirked up briefly before she turned slightly with a huff, giving Khan a half-hearted glare, “Then why did you always have interviews and stuff about dealing with ‘your disappointment of a child’.”

…

“What do you mean?” Khan looked…. genuinely confused about that claim, tilting his head and everything.

She felt frustration build; was he really not seeing the problem here?? Or was he trying to gaslight her into thinking it never happened?? Just when she was getting hopeful he was serious! “Mr. Guest speaker over here doesn’t remember having entire TED talks about how much I disappoint him?? I’m not blind, dad, I’ve seen the stupid posters with your face on it quoting that!!”

She was expecting him to backpedal now, to tell her to lighten up and that it was just a joke, or that it was just a misunderstanding or that she’s overreacting. What she didn’t expect was for him to… not say anything at all. Instead he was… genuinely thinking really hard; you could tell with his face scrunched up the way it was, mouth in a small ‘o’ shape, and a buffering gif appearing on his visor above an eye.

Then it turned into a vein pop - weird, she could have sworn she got that from her mother.

“Gerald…” Khan hissed, side eyeing an invisible man he was imagining, just so he had something to direct his sudden ire.

Well, Uzi had no idea what was going on. She let go of her legs to settle into a crisscross formation, “What’s happening right now?”

“Gerald.” He said again through his teeth, unhelpfully. He did continue after a moment of grinding, “He’s in charge of advertising for the WDF… one day he came into my office with something like what you’re describing thinking it was the funniest thing in the world. I *suppose* he didn’t appreciate the reprimand he got instead; I told him not to push that! Ooooo-” Uzi raised a brow by the temper flare happening next to her; Khan’s hands were up, flexing, shaking

“When I get my hands on him… Ohohoho… Uzi!” She jumped, Khan had suddenly turned toward her, despairing, “I am so sorry you had to see that, I can’t imagine! How long have those kind of posters been up??”

“Uh-” She actually had to rewind her memory for quite a bit to get an estimate, “Around a year?”

He gasped, horrified, then infuriated, “That’s it!” He grabbed his crutches, so angry that he struggled to get them under his shoulders properly.

“Daaad, what are you doing??” He wasn’t about to do what she thought he was going to do, was he?

“I’m going to kick his ass!”

She should stop asking those sort of questions the answers have always turned out to be yes, it was what you thought, Uzi.

“Dad!” She protested as he swung himself up, about to be as much as a bat outta hell as allowed toward the WDF temp offices.

“I hope he likes the feeling of my high-grade, steel-toed boot up his ass ‘cause HIS ass and MY boot are about to become best of friends! I can do it! I’m gonna do it I don’t care! And then-! And then-!” He waved a finger in the air as he ranted, demanding the attention of the gods for his proclamations, “I’m gonna fire him! Yeah, YEAH! And then he’s gonna beg for his job back and I’m going to say, ‘Oh alright but only because you beg so well’ and when he thinks his life is back on track, I’m going to fire him A SECOND TIME-! WOAH-!”

Khan was going down again.

“Dad…” Uzi sighed, having caught him much like her mother did and floated him back to the couch, “Calm down, please? I don’t care about that guy or what he thinks.” She’d never seen her father so incensed; he grumbled a bit more before he took some deep breaths to calm himself, “Right. Sorry you had to see that.” He readjusted his mustache that had gotten lopsided during his raving, “… But he’s absolutely fired.”

This entire situation was so unserious, she couldn’t help but laugh, “ Oh dad…” She was just glad that it wasn’t actually him that had those posters made. She remembered when she saw the first of them floating around thinking how incredibly petty and fucked up that was, wondering what he was hoping to accomplish making a joke out of her for the entire bunker to see.

Khan smiled at that, but realized he couldn’t remember the last time he heard his daughter laugh and wasn’t that absolutely gut-wrenching? He said as much with a drop of his head, “I can’t believe I have to think back years for the last time I’d heard you laugh like that…”

Uzi’s laughed plenty, she knew that much, it just wasn’t always… so innocent. It was more crazed than anything whiiicchh maybe it was good her dad usually wasn’t around to hear it.

…

“I remember laughing like that… when you were working on a prototype of some weird thing and pretended that you were shocking yourself, making the weirdest noises that had me going.”

“I remember that… you loved helping me by getting different tools. Or by painting my prototypes to make them look nice for a presentation…”

“I missed that.”

…

“I missed a lot of things. Like when you put me on your shoulders so that I could tightened a lugnut for you, and then you’d parade me around talking about what a natural I was.”

…

“I missed when you pretended to eat my favorite microchips, ya know, when you’d make a whole show of it while lowering it into your mouth? But it was actually next to your face instead? I would get so mad…”

“You would run off to get a pillow to hit me with.” He started to get choked up but that didn’t stop him from continuing the story with a watery laugh “One time you actually put a wrench in the pillow case and put one hell of a dent in my knee.”

“Yeah I totally did that, heh. I don’t remember where I even got the thing but I remember thinking ‘That’ll show him’.”

“It showed me alright. Showed me directly to the doctors.”

“Heh..”

…

“I missed when you twirled me to bed and lowered me as if I was a space ship and gave me a super obnoxious kiss to my forehead. I would say ew but I actually loved it.”

…

“I missed coming home to you being there, telling me welcome home.”

…

“I missed saying good night to you.”

Khan let out a strangled cry.

“I missed you.”

Uzi was openly crying at this point too but she couldn’t bring herself to care; she was facing Khan completely who was in a similar disheveled, emotional state. Robo-gods he was such an ugly crier.

“Uzi I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…” He babbled, aggressively rubbing at his visor with the sleeve of his shirt - he sounded so congested, “I’m going to be better, I promise. I promise I’ll be better...”

Sure you will dad, because you already have she’s noticed it. You supported her search for answers when her solver first activated, you went ahead to make a new railgun for her for the final battle, you’ve been taking her ideas, bettering them, listening, you’ve been defending her against naysayers - yeah she knew about that, about how a minority of people would dismiss her blueprints or plans just because it was her ideas that Khan brought up and he would rip them a new one in front of everyone.

“I don’t know if I can just forgive you, after everything, “ She shuffled closer to him and gave in to her baser, deep seated want - need - for contact, leaning forward to fall against him - oh robo-gods was she touch starved?? The answer to that didn’t matter because Khan immediately followed up with a full body squeeze, “But I think I can start trying.”

Khan started sniffling aggressively, trying to catch his breath and find his words. When he did he gave Uzi a tighter hold; she held onto the back of his clothes, nearly suffocated herself in his vest with how she pressed her face against it, “This- *sniff* This is more than I deserve, thank you Uzi. I won’t let you down, I promise.” Not again. Never again.

Maybe this was something more than he deserved, but Uzi didn’t care; she’d wanted this for far too long to care. Maybe this was a mistake, maybe later she’ll be disappointed yet again, maybe this maybe that. But right now? She’s never felt so warm and so whole, hugging her dad like this.

Notes:

It's sooo funny that Uzi thinks she actually ripped his leg off :)

Chapter 8: Big Ping

Summary:

Let's find N!

Uzi was completely and thoroughly stumped.

After her Edge Protocols reactivated, ‘forced’ her to push her dad away yelling, “GROSS!!” and then having a rather pleasant conversation about everything she missed - she would never say it but she was proud of the workers for finishing the residential district despite the setback - he suddenly freaked out and made a hasty exit. It was confusing as all hell but she managed to catch some context among Khan’s mutterings, something about needing to stop her mom from ‘whipping the drones’ into shape again, and with the way he was so distressed about the idea she couldn’t tell if he meant it figuratively or literally. Despite his hurry he did remember to throw a “I love you, bye!” behind him before the door closed; it definitely didn’t make her smile, nope.

Anyway, she was currently stumped because after all that she remembered how disheveled N looked with his new penchant for being short tempered - that was her thing! She couldn’t let this stand! - and decided that she should check up on him. Except. She couldn’t FIND HIM!

She looked all over the bunker, the refurbished sections, the actively worked on sections and even the still quarantined off sections. Desperate times called for desperate measures and she resorted to the low, low method of… eugh… asking people if they’d seen her missing disassembly drone.

They hadn’t.

She silently seethed after that bust, having talked to people for virtually no reason. She hated regular socializing but she especially hated the small talk some of the older generations trapped her into, asking how she was and if she was feeling okay and if she was all fixed up from that ‘cave-in’.

Uzi was right about to fly out and check the corpse spire of all places when she remembered something very, very important.

She was GOD.

>> darkXwolf17: CYN

>> Cyn: :0c omigosh you’re talking to me first! :,)

>> darkXwolf17: First off, don’t look too much into it I don’t like the way you’re looking at me,

>> darkXwolf17: Secondly-

User darkXwolf17 has changed their handle to Godzi

>>Godzi: Much better

>>Godzi: Anyway

>>Godzi: How do I find one of the disassembly drones? They’re integrated with the Solver so there’s gotta be a way right?

>> Cyn: :) you’re looking for big brother n aren’t you, uzi

>> Godzi: Omrg stfu just tell me how to do it

>> Cyn: giggle you can ping him for his location

Uzi frowned as she came to a halt in an empty hallway; scenes came to mind of fabricated bone bursting through her chest, disembodied hands of humans long gone creeping around her, all while her sense of self was constantly under attack, threatened to be erased through assimilation.

>> Godzi: Just for his location?

>> Cyn: ye. i know you’re thinking about the callback ping but that thing isn’t actually all bad. i was just… using it all bad

>> Cyn: really it’s just asking to open a line between people but I was trying to. force it. and force admin privileges

>> Cyn: sorry about that btw :(

Uzi sighed trying to wash away the horrid memories, she couldn’t afford to dwell on them right now.

>> Godzi: Dw about it it’s alright

It wasn’t, but as she discovered the astoundingly hard way Cyn really wasn’t in a state of mind to regulate what she was doing.

She made a mental command to the solver to ping for N’s location to help her move on from the sore topic.

>> Cyn: Oooo you might wanna brace for that :0c

Wait what-?

“AUGH!” Suddenly her CPU stuttered, shutting down the possibility to wonder how Cyn knew that was about to happen with her mind overclocking to process all of the data that just slammed into her and trying it’s best to start up a program for it - a map program she thinks?

>> Godzi: You couldn’t have WARNED ME ABOUT THAT??

>> Cyn: i was gonna tell ya about how to ping for just big brother n and get the stuff around the two of you but someone went and did the big ping before i could tell her about it >:(

>> Godzi: You need to type faster now my head hurts

>> Cyn: you need to wait more seconds before doing things! >:(((

The software finished initializing and honestly, what she was seeing was pretty damn rad. Whatever the hell kinda ping she asked the solver to do wasn’t any regular ol’ ping, it was more like a radar blip that mapped out the entire region that surrounded her.

“Woah…” She put a finger and thumb under her chin, completely absorbed in with the amazing display in her mind’s interface. People staring at seemingly nothing wasn’t uncommon, either from unseen games being played or messages being read or notes being made. Despite that, Uzi was still glad that it was break time, keeping the halls clear so that no one could possible get too curious about her own internal activities.

It was extremely detailed this map, going well past the edges of the dead city her colony lived in by showing everything as bright purple outlines on a pitch black background; she could go between seeing the insides of structures or not and activating a topographic version of what was displayed to visualize the landscapes’ surface, she could even see the cave systems deep below! Some of these were actively worked in by the workers for resources but she could see untapped segments that had yet to be discovered; she couldn’t wait for things to be back in working order so she could tell the foreman all about those.

Among the neon edges there were 3 yellow dots that stuck out to her, 2 in her bunker and 1 among the skyscrapers of the city - that 3rd dot was moving holy shit this was live-! Wait. Is that third dot J? UGH… that corporate oil guzzler… she had a feeling J probably didn’t get completely taken out after the nearly world-ending fight but it was still surprising to find she was unfortunately still active. Well, it seems like she’d been keeping her distance this entire time, what with no reports of people going missing or a strange 3rd D. Drone being sighted. She’ll tell the others about this later but it looks like J wasn’t looking to be a problem for them right now so that’s nice.

Besides the sudden J doxing, Uzi did notice there were a few statistical summaries in a side bar, one variable in particular caught her eye-

>> Response Packets Received: 26

Hm…

>> Cyn: you probably shouldn’t look at it like that for too long

A message that Uzi had read the exact moment an Overheating warning flashed in her vision, bringing her attention away from the map she was so engrossed with to see the fact that she was actively steaming and smoking.

She shut the entire thing down with a curse, throwing herself to the ground to scoop up some of the ice and snow that had the habit of accumulating in the bunker and slammed the small pile into her face; she was met with a violent hissing sound from rapidly melting snow and ice, coming away from it wet but with the Overheating warning having dismissed itself.

She was really glad it was break time.

>> Godzi: Cyn…

>> Cyn: HEY idk what you thought was gonna happen, just having the solver gets you all hot idk y you thought actually doing a big thing wasn’t gonna make things hotter >:(

Uzi hated to admit it but, she had a point. But she couldn’t just let Cyn keep that win so she threw her arms in the air with a complaint.

>> Godzi: How am I supposed to do ANYTHING if I’m just gonna overheat the second I even think about it!

>> Cyn: get bigger like I did!

>> Godzi: I am not doing that

>> Cyn: then pewish (◡‿◡✿)

>> Godzi: EW I thought I told you to never do that again

>> Cyn: (◡‿◡✿)

>> Cyn: (◕‿◕✿) no

Uzi shuddered, she was powerless being faced with cringe unlike anything she’d ever seen before; she just wanted to find her… ᵇᵒʸᶠʳᶦᵉⁿᵈ… and instead she was being tortured. This was cruel and unusual punishment.

>> Godzi: Before you kill me with your cringe will the other ping you were gonna tell me about also burn me alive?

>> Cyn: it’ll probably get you pretty warm but I don’t think enough for your body to super freak out

>> Cyn: do ping(DD_Big_Brother_N, radius = TINYINT) if he’s still in your bunker you’ll know all about it! :D

Her in-body console lit up with the new command and as she sent it out - and braced herself this time for any incoming mental icepick stabs - she set forth a boundary that she only just now considered.

>> Godzi: When I’m around N I don’t want you watching like a little freakizoid

>> Cyn: eye roll don’t worry i stop watching when big brother or vee show up

It hurt to look at them, to look at them and how she changed them and remember the hurt, the brutality she inflicted they were family why did she do that to family why did you do that Cyn

Wait a minute. No…

>> Godzi: Wait- WAIT WAIT WERE YOU WATCHING??”

Uzi was going to KILL HERSELF WAS CYN WATCHING HER BEING EMOTIONAL ALL OVER HER DAD???

>> Godzi: CYN WERE YOU WATCHING ME HAVING A MOMENT WITH MY DAD

>> Cyn: NUH UH I DIDN’T i was looking very away once your mom was bullying you i didn’t wanna see that >:U

Uzi’s vents sputtered in relief; she didn’t know how she didn’t realize the implications of Cyn being able to see through her eyes sooner.

>> Godzi: You better not! But thanks for not like… invading my privacy or something

>> Cyn: i know you never wanted me here because, duh, so i wanna be as good as a mind buddy as i can be

>> Cyn: like not watching when you’re having majorly awkward moments with your parents or trying to smack lips with someone 2 feet taller than you :)

BITCH

>> Godzi: CYN I’M GOING TO KILL YOU AGAIN

>> Cyn: giggle running away have fun with big brother byyyeeee!!

The map popped up again then - Cyn could definitely see the program’s process inside the Solver space there’s no way she couldn’t, her timing was too on point - and this time it was a lot more manageable. What showed up was just a scan of the bunker itself, give or take some space right outside of it, with 2 yellow and 1 purple dots within it’s walls. She took a wild guess as to what that purple dot was but the 2 yellows? One dot was somewhere within the residential district, in one of the family dwellings; Uzi took a second to mentally map out the room designations to see if was her home, it wasn’t, but she did know it was around where she knew where Lizzy lived.

Yeah that had to be V.

The other dot looked oddly placed, she couldn’t figure out where it was positioned until she realized that the thin ‘corridors’ that the dot overlaid was actually the bunker’s ventilation system. Uzi couldn’t help but groan and face palm; N always used the vents to invade her room how didn’t she think of that???

It was a quick thing, finding the nearest vent and skittering her way in - acting like such a creature felt very fitting, with feeling of being the naturally made gremlin that she was she couldn’t but have her tail make an appearance. She also couldn’t help but feel like she was in a video game, following what was essentially a mini-map in her vision to reach the destination that was N; she was coming upon him, just a couple more corners and she would be in range to attack.

Turning the final corner she could see that the ventilation here opened up a bit, being a larger box among the piping and being a crossroads with having openings for air travel on all sides. Uzi could also see how N was curled up with his back to her in the center of the box, looking like he was hugging his sides and his tail was wrapped around an ankle.

Uzi squinted, feeling the spirit of mischief possess her further as a conniving smile graced her face. She slowed her movement, being very careful with each placement of her hands and feet, careful with the distribution of her weight, to be as quiet as possible, watching her ‘prey’ for any movement of notice. He remained largely still, except for the occasional flick of his tail that bounced the nanite vial off his leg with a light tink.

She was some feet away, she tensed her body, wiggled her shoulders, and pounced.

The chaos that followed was near instant; N shrieked and Uzi cackled like a mad drone, there was a flurry of limbs from a tussle with Uzi trying to stick to his back and N trying wiggle out from under her. It wouldn’t be so simple, N! She was a very sticky little bug!

“Uziii!” N whined, feigning vexation; he shook like a wet dog trying to dislodge the smaller drone, then froze. Uzi thought she had claimed victory, a smug cat-like grin had taken shape but it was swiftly wiped off her face when metal wings unfurled enough just to dislodge her hold on his back.

Damn it.

She didn’t even hit the ground - a fate she had resigned herself to - when she was suddenly suffocating and couldn’t see a damn thing.

“UZZIIII!!” Ah there it is, those tears of any strong emotion that came so easily to him. Obviously he was trying to strangle her to death with this hug that stole her breath and vision, and may very well snap her spine.

She started to pat his back, signaling the ‘danger’ she was in, managing to get a very muffled “ᴱᴴᴴᴺᴺᵎ” out that she wasn’t even sure he could hear. Evidently something worked because he let go, gently pushing her away by the shoulders and she could see and breathe again. She took this moment of mercy, taking in a great, deep breath to simmer down her rising temperatures - turn that damn map off she didn’t need it now and she had a feeling he was going to smother her again, an assault that would be a danger to her internal temps.

She was right, “You’re okAY AND LITTLE AGAAINN!” He grabbed her again, holding her against his chest and falling back so that she’d be laying on top of him. “HEY!” She yelped, offended but too occupied with holding on for dear life with how he squirmed with joy to do anything about the slight. There was another pause when hands held her cheeks so N could get a good look at her, “You are okay right? How are you feeling? Feeling wormy still? Is that what was happening? The worm just started up somehow?”

“Ehn..” Felt weird to be on the other side of the cheek hold, but while N could get a good look at her this meant she could also get a good look at him. Yeah he looked baaaad. He was awfully haggard, heavy stress lines under his eyelights and- oh my robo-god his eyelights were dimmer than usual; actually all his lights were many times dimmer than usual sans his band sensors which were offline entirely.

Uzi shook her head to dislodge the squeezing hands, freeing her ability to speak unhindered while pulling him up into a criss-cross position, “I’m better now, N. It was… something like that- the ‘worming’ was just a symptom of the actual problem but I shut that entire thing down, it really shouldn’t happen again.” N looked relieved, a laugh-sigh escaping him as some of those prominent stress lines faded away, “Good, good… Good that’s good.” She was hoping that the reassurance took some weight off his shoulders, it did and that was really, really good. Truly. She was glad he felt a little better seeing and hearing from her.

But.

“N, what is your Up Time?” The stress lines came back, eyelights shrinking some. His gaze fluttered around the box they were in, anywhere that wasn’t Uzi’s knowing look, “Uh hah, ha, that old thing? Why do you wanna know?” He tried to sound as nonchalant as possible.

He was fooling absolutely no one.

“Your Up Time. How many hours is it, hm?” She tilted her head oh so innocently dangerously, “It’s gotta be pretty high if you didn’t notice my messages. Because I did message you. A lot.”

N blinked; it was made clear the exact moment he checked his inbox by how his eyes turned to rings from the revelation that he did in fact have several missed messages. He grabbed the top of his head with both hands, right about to throw himself into a guilt-ridden apologetic state, “AH! Uzi!! I didn’t notice I’m sorry I- I didn’t-!”

“Yeah I’m gonna need you to stop right there,” She interrupted, reaching up to detangle his fingers from mussed hair and a toppled hat. She took the opportunity to graze his forehead with the back of her hand and sighed when she found he was dangerously hot, “N… You can’t be riling yourself up when you’re like this, did you seriously not sleep at all when I was out?”

“Mrmm,” He squirmed in place, chewing at one of his inner cheeks, “…No…”

Then he stammered up a storm when Uzi sighed yet again, trying to alleviate the seriousness of such a confession, “I mean! Sometimes I was asleep! For a little bit!”

Uzi gave him A Look. She furthered the potency of The Look with a raised brow when sweat drops began to rapidly appear on his visor, “… Was it because V made you?”

The rate of which N’s expression soured upon the mention of the other resident D. Drone was… concerning, scary even; his following exhale was nearly a growl, giving one of the surrounding corners a particularly dirty look, “Like I would listen to her and her oh-so practical advice.”

Uzi was stunned. She thought N had been generally snippy but it was a lot more directed than she first thought, what sort of falling out happened in just 3 days..?? … She couldn’t look into it right now, she couldn’t do that to N when he was in such a shit state and when it was something that could stress him out further. Anything could be the straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back and he could burn out right in front of her.

“I tried, I really did.” N continued, his visor flickering with a low power symbol, it didn’t seem like he even noticed, “But whenever I tried my head got so loud and there were so many questions and…and…” So little answers, such an unknowing fog that surrounded him, burned him. And yet! V had the audacity to act like she knew the answers that just didn’t exist and suggested something so truly awful, something that N couldn’t live through again not when it was Uzi and not when he remembered the first time it happened.

Sometimes he wished he didn’t remember, sometimes he wished he would have begged for Uzi to take him out of that nightmare when she first suggested it and lived in arrogant bliss, sometimes he wished he could scrub those scenes out of his CPU with steel wool when he drank oil and he found himself with the phantom tastes of iron lingering.

And every once in a blue moon, maybe even every other blue moon, he wished he wasn’t the one who ended his hunt early that day, wasn’t the one who met the purple worker drone who was scavenging his old home and shot him with the coolest weapon he’d ever seen. Just so he never had to remember in the first place.

That particular wish he’s always quick to tear apart and scold himself for thinking such a thing, because he wouldn’t actually change how things went for the world. He’d go through all of that and more a million times over if it meant he’d meet Uzi again.

But still, could have gone without a lot of those things.

N was spacing out, hard, his eyelights dimming even further and Uzi was worried she was about to see him have a full shut down right in front of her, “Hey..?” She poked his chest, grimacing slightly when the small action actually swayed the larger drone, “Uzi Command to Major N? You still with me?”

There was a solid second or two before N stammered out, “Y-yeah, totally, toats still here, yup.” He raised a thumbs up, or at least he thought he did, he really hope he actually made a thumbs up happen, “I’m a-okay..! M’not a liar but if I was I’d say I was never better..! I’m doing so great… yeah… I’m doing great.”

…

“You do realize that it took you a few seconds before you responded, right?”

That information was genuinely news to N, “Wait, really?”

How many time was Uzi supposed to sigh today, surely she was running out of her limited sigh actions, “Right… okay.. so this is what we’re going to do-” She started shuffling over to the nearest corner, tugging onto one of N’s sleeve to coax him to follow, “You, mister, are about to get some sleep.”

N didn’t seem convinced, watching Uzi settle herself in the corner with a confused expression, “Like… now?” He pointed down to the general space they were in, “Here?”

Uzi in turn didn’t seem impressed with his hesitation, “N do you really think you could make it back to my room without collapsing right now?” She straightened out her legs and patted her lap.

“Well maybe I-!”

“Just lay down N.”

“Okay.” N’s concession was quick, even by N standards, and if this wasn’t such a dire situation Uzi probably would have laughed at the turn around. Instead she helped N lay himself down, taking care to relieve his head of his pilot hat and setting it aside, using her tail to help move his nanite vial away so it wouldn’t prick him and taking off her beanie to make it as a tiny, makeshift pillow.

Uzi could feel how his body slumped once his head laid on the beanie pillow, basically melting into a big ol’ N puddle. She brushed his hair out of his face, feeling all sorts of pity for this poor drone with how he turned his head and nuzzled into her however he could. 3 days… 3 days was all it took to get him like this, what would have become of him if it was any longer?

“Uzi?” There was an undertone of static in his voice, he really was just running on fumes.

“Yea?” She carded her fingers through his hair, gently working some of the knots out that had formed in her absence.

“This is gonna keep happening, isn’t it?” There was a tone of dejected acceptance with that question, the This weighing heavy on his core.

And This being?

Many things, Uzi knew. Many, many things. But most of those things have common ground in the Unknown, in fearing for her and everyone around her. The uncertainty that they’ll be able to prevail.

“Probably.” She’d say, watching how N deflated at the answer, “I shut down what the Solver was doing and I took away some of it’s privileges, but it turns out the Absolute Solver is always evolving trying to help me and I don’t know what it’ll make up next to do that.”

That pulled N out of his doom and gloom, blinking up at her perplexed, “Help you?” His face scrunched up adorably after a moment, “Uh, it hasn’t..? Been helping?”

Uzi chuckled, “Yeah, that’s the thing, the Solver is actually like, really dumb. What happened with the, uh, ‘worming’ is that I was getting really stressed so the Solver thought I was in danger-”

“And it wormed you to help protect yourself?” One of N’s eyes froze mid-blink before fading away completely; Uzi was about ready to chop him unconscious this was getting ridiculous.

“Exactly,” She answered him instead, knowing that some understanding of the Solver’s deeper workings could help soothe some of N’s worries.

“Huh..” He chewed on that bit of info, curling his tail around Uzi’s weakly - she met him half way and finished twirling their tail cords with the head of hers resting on top of his vial, “I always thought it was trying to hurt you…”

“I did too but nah, it’s just stupid. And hardware intensive. I don’t think it even knows it’s the reason why I keep burning up but it’s making sure I’m ok anyway.”

“H̶u̸h̶.̵.̵” His mind was lagging, his voice crackling, but even then it sounded like he was going through one hell of an epiphany, “I̶ a̵l̶w̴a̴y̶s t̵h̵o̴u̸g̵h̶t… al̸way̴s t̵h̶o̵u̶gh̵t… w̸e̵ ̶c̸a̷n w̵o̴rk wi̴th th̶i̴s…”

“We can.” Uzi kept her voice low as N finally let her systems power down for a much needed recharge, “We can work with this and we will, don’t you worry.”

N didn’t have it in him to get in one last response before SLEEP MODE scrolled across his screen for first time in days.

Notes:

Haha I love leaving hints of future plot points!

Chapter 9: Less Than Nothing

Summary:

Well this wasn't who she was hoping to get answers from, or the answers she was looking for, but she's got something out of it at least.

Notes:

Hey heeeyy! Been a while. Sorry y'all, was in a funk and really couldn't find myself happy with anything I was putting out. Eventually got to the point where I felt like I just needed to push through and get something out there for y'all so sorry it's shorter than the usual chapters, but there's still some lore bits I made sure to add in.

Enjoy!

>> Uzi: What happened

That was the message Uzi sent off after spending an embarrassing amount of time tending to N, making damn sure he had a good recharge; straightening out his coat, plucking out pieces of rubble she noticed on his pilot’s hat and just… combing through his hair with her fingers since she knew he liked that, even if she wasn’t sure he was aware of it in deep sleep. Did she like it too? Maybe. Would she admit to that? … Maybe. But only if she was on the verge of a shut down.

>> V: With what? you’re giving me absolutely nothing to go off of right now

>> V: Are you talking about when you went all crazy on your dad

>> Uzi: Not THAT you ass I’m talking about what happened between you and N

A suspicious amount of time passed before the next message appeared.

>> V: Nothing’s happened but I get why you think something did

>> V: His attitude with me when you woke up was because the dork hasn’t been sleeping

>> Uzi: I know something happened because when I was grilling N about that very thing I just so happened to mention you and he GROWLED, V. So what the hell happened

Some more time passed, so much so that Uzi realized that V wasn’t going to be answering her any time soon.

>> Uzi: Hey! Don’t leave me on read!!!!

>> Uzi: V!!!!!!! DON’T IGNORE ME

>> Uzi: HELLOOOO?????!!!!!!!!!

Uzi had to bite her own ‘tongue’ to keep from letting her frustration manifest in a shout, she could not BELIEVE-!

>> Cyn: uzzziiiiiii you might wanna see this >~<

The message was followed by a ping in the Solver space.

… She wished she had a pillow to scream into- actually she wouldn’t go through with it, she couldn’t allow herself to disrupt N’s recharge no matter how infuriated she got but damn. She really wanted to do something violently.

She’ll deal with V later.

---

Or NOT! She only had just barely existed in the space when a small conceptual body smacked into her and her arm was being involuntarily shaken, “I think the Solver is doing something to V-E-E stop it..!! D:”

Uzi spun around to where the ping was and saw what looked like some sort of… query? Being actively written by a disembodied party. Above it was a dialog box with large, bold text.

>> WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TIME FRAME FROM 3071-07-13 00:00:00 to 3071-07-16 00:00:00: RECOVER VIDEO FOOTAGE FROM SERIAL DESIGNATION V

Uzi honest to goodness quacked from utter horror of what the solver was doing, jumping to action to stop the thing by waving her arms around and shrieking, “STOPSTOP STOP NO STOP!”

The Solver, despite all it’s faults, was very quick with it’s objective to complete what it thought the host wanted; the code had been finished and begun running by the time it’s intent registered in Uzi’s mind and a progress bar had filled to around 15% by the time she demanded it to cease it’s current course of action.

The rolling text, the filling bar, it all stopped as expected.

Uzi had to hold herself up by her knees with how the relief hit her when the command prompts appeared around her, ever eager for instructions. She eventually slumped to the ground that never-was, letting her head fall back with a groan that held the suffering of many lifetimes trapped in the time period of one.

Cyn joined Uzi in her brooding session, being many times less graceful with her sitting descent but made it in one piece. The accompanied silence was appreciated, letting Uzi get her bearings for a moment after having one thing happen after another for the last while.

“… Was it trying to hurt her?”

“No, no it wasn’t trying to hurt her or anything.” She waved the code block over, scrolling through it to find what the directory to V looked like, “It was just trying to get me a copy of her memories or something from when I was knocked out.”

Cyn made a noise of understanding, mostly sounding like a prolonged 8-bit note, “That’s still bad, isn’t it?”

“Well… yeah,” Uzi shrugged, squinting slightly upon finding the directory - it looked like complete nonsense, “That’s like, a super invasion of privacy I don’t want to do that to her, even if she’s being a pain the my robo-ass.”

The Solver’s reactivity needed to be dealt with, this was getting exceedingly ridiculous what with a situation happening every other hour at this rate. Robo-god forbid she thought someone was annoying and the Solver would immediately work on creating a black hole in their chassis just to ‘fix the problem’. The first thought was to remove any connections it had with her audial processes, but obviously it was aware beyond just senses if it acted on her very emotions and thoughts. She could attempt to cut that connection, but then there was the non-zero chance that it wouldn’t be able to ‘listen’ to her anymore and run rampant with it’s ever evolving, ever deteriorating coding practices.

Could she re-educate it? Teach it proper formatting and how to document it’s own inner workings for it to reference in case it started to degenerate again? Of course it’s an easier said than done idea, if it were even possible.

During her deliberation Uzi had been exploring the mess of folders and pathways that was V’s structure; she wasn’t trying to be invasive despite what she just told Cyn, it was more to get an understanding as to what was what, such as the fact that the route allegedly designated for weapon schematics, with being named ‘Weapons’, actually had nothing to do with guns or lasers or swords. It was entirely for ways to insult people. Verbal weapons.

And V didn’t even have access to those files, turns out.

“You really didn’t know what you were doing, huh.” Not a question, she’s seen enough evidence to prove that many times over but it was shocking every time she was faced with that fact, like again with how she just found a body schema in a place it had no business being. Three times. And it was an obsolete model on account of it not looking anything like the V they had today.

Cyn tried - emphasis on tried - to twirl one of her pigtails, looking away with some semblance of embarrassment, “No…” Her floppy fingers gave up trying to get some purchase on her hair, instead going for the tried and true method of tapping her hands together, “I asked Tessa for help once. She was really good at it all, but I wasn’t good at explaining it, or learning it.”

“… Only once?”

 

Cyn got a faraway look to her eye lights then, staring at the space that couldn’t-be below them.

If Cyn could pinpoint a moment in her runtime that everything started to go wrong, there would be a couple of obvious points, such as her improper disposal or being rescued from the dumps, but one moment that insistently pricked her CPU was when Tessa tried to do an exploration of her CPU.

“She. She tried-” She doesn’t even exist anymore so why did it feel like her speakers were being flooded with muck? “She wanted to. Get to the bottom of issue… with my moving and thinking. She said it had to be something damaged or- Or something old in my processors and if she fixed that… I would be ‘right as rain’.”

She remembered having to ask Big Brother N what ‘right as rain’ meant afterwards.

Tessa had laid her down on a metal table in her workshop, given her a dog plushie to hold and was so very gentle taking off the cranium plate. Cyn had barely felt a thing, content to wiggle her feet and hum - or more like beep - to the golden plushie in her hands. She was going to be all better and when she was she would be able to work with her Big Brother N and V-E-E! She couldn’t wait to help make drinks and dust off random vases and lights with everyone.

But then the plate was slammed back in and before she could recover from the rough reinstallation Tessa was back in her vision, pale and terrified.

“She said that there was less than nothing in my head, and. And that she almost fell in.”

Tessa avoided her after that, locked her away when she could and even stopped her hobby of rescuing drones from the scrapyard.

 

That was… horribly ominous. Considering the capabilities of the Solver, she supposed it would make sense that something like ‘Less than Nothing’ could exist but would be something beyond comprehension and nightmarish. Was Uzi’s own head full of nothing? Or… empty of nothing? Or was that just in Cyn’s case?

She didn’t exactly want to find out either way, especially not right now with Cyn looking like her stare was evolving into a million-yard version rather than the thousand-yard normal.

“Were your mobility and processing issues a thing even before your disposal?” Uzi prodded in an attempt to bring Cyn back to the present.

The distraction seemed to work, Cyn immediately taking the opportunity to not think about how the ruin of everything started even if her answer was going to be lackluster, “I don’t remember.”

Uzi’s features puckered, such a non-answer should have been expected at this point, “Does it have… something to do with the ‘Less Than Nothing’ where your CPU should be?”

Cyn half shrugged, half nodded, “I think that when I turned on again and the Solver turned on for the first time it ate my mind, and that’s why my head is empty.”

“Why do you think. That?” ‘Ate’ was a choice word that left Uzi unsettled.

“I felt it.”

Great.

“I hate that.”

“Sorry :( But hey at least it got full from me so you’re safe :)”

Uzi knew Cyn meant well with that claim but it brought about a concern she never would have considered otherwise. Would the Solver get hungry like that again? Uzi did wonder what the point of the… previous Cyn’s need for material collection was but if it was to feed an otherworldly program…

Oh, oh she could feel it she was going to panic yup-

“WOW HEY I- I sure wonder what’s the time!” Uzi didn’t mean to but she did end up making a show of looking around, as if searching for a clock despite such a device being moot for drones. Cyn on the other hand was startled by the shout-that-Uzi-would-completely-deny-being-a-shout, all she could do was blink at the suddenly very stressed droid completely oblivious to the fact that she had a hand in it.

“… (Ծ_Ծ) it’s been 37 minutes.”

That was horrible news.

Uzi deflated, with how drained N had been he was going to need to take a lot longer than just 37 minutes to fully recharge.

“UGH.. I can’t believe I’m stuck being N’s pillow for who knows how long and I didn’t even bring any of my projects…”

“You could just move him really slowly I don’t think he’d-”

“I SAID I can’t believe I’m stuck being N’s pillow for who knows how long!”

“… Oh! You’re doing that thing! The pretend thing where you actually want to be doing something but you can’t let others think-”

“CYN!”

“(◕‿◕)”

Uzi huffed, frazzled by her meticulously cultivated front being called to question. She turned her chin away from Cyn, hand flourishing to bring back up V’s directory, “Alright smartass, since you wanna play games let’s play How-Many-Mistakes-That-Cyn-Made-Can-We-Find-and-Fix?”

“WHAT (　ﾟДﾟ)＜!!”

“Yeap! That’s what we’re going to do until N wakes up and we both know that’s going to be a while.”

“WaIT, Uzi have mercy.”

“Here’s Number 1. There are THREE folders named the same name, AND the name gives absolutely nothing as to what they’re holding. Have you ever heard of naming conventions? It doesn’t look like you have because literally Cyn, what does ‘Peep Me’ mean? Because this sure as hell isn’t a read me file I’m looking at.”

“Uzi please!”

“Number 2!”