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fennoske · 1 year

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THE DEITY HAS CASTED JUDGEMENT! IT FINDS YOU WANTING!

MURDER DRONES HEADCANON #4: Mémoire Morte/Absolute Solver

Crack.

Snap.

Metal brushing metal. Jitters crawling down the left arm. Metal brushing cloth. Metal brushing something else. Then, a jolt – skimming the nape and jerking the eyes awake. Burning hands still clamp her to the floor, scorching every inch of the torso, stinging her head, her neck, the bearings of the servos in her joints, damage/pain warnings right under the outer plating of her chest, sending little shocks across her movement controllers, still limbs shuddering intermittently–

Before her emotional processors can output a panic signal and demand her to move, the inner racket all goes still at once. It’s flushed out of RAM in just a few cycles, and as the final consciousness programs initialize, Uzi is left in complete silence. An uncomfortable warmth in her joints stays behind to keep her company.

What is it now, the third time today?

Uzi checks the time. 26:07:19:8817. Copper-9’s sun just began to set. Way too late to try for another few hours of sleep-mode, way too early to throw stuff at N until he falls from the roof of the spire.

She shifts around, groaning. Power is at 40-something percent. Too high to justify oversleeping, but low enough to warn her early that a nap is in line at around midnight. Worse yet, she’s guaranteed to spend about half of today in low-consumption mode, with all the ill temper and slow processing that implies.

Eh. No point staying still then. She swings both legs back, then forth, levering herself up. The gray, dirty patina covering the inside of the landing pod reminds Uzi to dust off her hoodie – a necessary morning routine she’s had little time to get used to. Maybe she shouldn’t. It’s not like N ever cleans up that greasy coat of his. Though well, that much old oil won’t ever wash off now.

She stretches her left arm, pulling her elbow to her chest, holding it there, then releasing it and extending the arm as far as it’ll go, and going at it again. When it finally feels comfortable, she gets up and kicks the spinning chair right beside where she’s sleeping. No reason for it, it’s just good to get those CPU cycles going.

When making her way up the pod’s ladder, her hand brushes the wall behind it. It’s so dusty it gets inbetween the joints of her fingers, threatening to get stuck inside and irritate her servos for the rest of the day. She tries to ignore it and climb a few more steps. She can’t. Her right eye jitters. She clambers up the rest of the ladder and leaps outside, shouting into the darkness of the corpse-spire.

“N, for robo-Christ’s sake, do you things have a duster in those hands of yours?”

Nevermind the dust, she feels even dirtier after saying that. Geh. Cleaning. Worth the try at getting N to wake up though – not like she can tell where he is without his visor or eyes glowing.

No response. Another groan escapes Uzi’s mouth. A scan for literally anything else to do that isn’t cleaning returns zero results, and she doesn’t feel like rewatching anything in her anime catalog. She shakes her fist at the dark.

“How aren’t you at full battery yet, you lanky oilsucker?!”

Yeah; far too early. Maybe not having anything to clean the pod with is a good enough excuse not to do it for a few more days? The specks of dust still stuck to her fingers answer with a clear “no”. Though… Maybe enlisting robo-Satan’s help will make it easier.

She holds her left hand up, then pushes it forward, like casting a spell. Then again, but really hard. Again, putting her whole soul into it. Another time, going nnghhh as if pushing a boulder. A few more times in quick succession. No luck at all.

Uzi stares at the hand, sighing and turning it over to examine the palm, as if something will come of it. Nothing does. Wiggling her fingers one by one reveals nothing new, though they feel unusually numb. Having magical powers isn’t awesome at all if they don’t work when you want them to.

Really, the only thing to come out of stopping that bullet was the night jitters, and managing to make the chairs in the pod spin a few times. Absolutely not what Doll cracked it up to be.

“And I still haven’t managed to teleport even once…”

Way too much silence. On second thought, even a rewatch of Naruto will do, as horrible as that pile of slop is. But maybe it could still work. Maybe just one more try…

She holds her left up again, and gives a half-hearted push. Nope, definitely no luck. Maybe when N comes back she’ll–

CCCRRAAACCCCKKKK.

The entire arm comes apart.

From one second to the next, hinges, wires and bellows are torn asunder from inside. Something else tears and squirms its way out – black, or dark gray, with a hint of an oily sheen –, crawling like a bundle of caterpillars against the cloth of Uzi’s hoodie. More of it keeps blooming from intact spots, mangling what’s left of the limb before Uzi can process a reaction.

The arm shakes for a few moments longer, maybe due to the few remaining servos choking up mid-movement, trying to force their way through the black mass that’s now squeezing them beyond their designed resistance. It bends outward and keeps bending, ripping some more wires in half and finally silencing the dying mechanisms than once made it move. What was once a limb is now a bundle of unrecognizable scraps of metal spread across a squirming black surface, close to twice the size of the original thing.

Somehow it doesn’t hurt, even though it really looks like it should. Or maybe it does, but Uzi can’t keep her attention off a new sensation flowing to her processors right from what’s replaced her arm: little pinpricks stinging its surfaces over and over and over, sparing no square centimeter, like this new thing is burning but also growing numb as an unoiled mechanism left in the cold would.

Holy hell.

Uzi tries to turn it over, or maybe wave it a little. A surviving contact around the middle of the mass sputters and dies, making a lone metal finger twitch, then go forever still. She tries again, and this time it answers – kind of. It only follows her orders with around a second of delay, lazily undulating as she pictures the movement it should take in her head.

“N! LOOK AT THIS THING THAT’S MY ARM NOW!”

She doesn’t have time to process its appearance before an anxious urge takes her over. The other hand shudders in place as she’s figuring out what that is; lick the oil.

Copious amounts of the stuff are dribbling from the metal cobbles still hanging onto the new arm, and it really seems like this bundle of black stuff (tendrils?) is covered in a thick film of oil. She grasps them with her right hand and brings them to her face.

A tinge of disgust hits her mid-motion, but there’s precious little time to think it through as her tongue is already skimming the underside of the tendrils, where the thicker currents of oil have assembled and are about to fall off. Both arms tremble. She trembles.

The crawling anxiety doesn’t let up: its grip numbs her upper processors, blocking off everything between cache to DRAM memory, leaving space only for the strange itch that the shuddering tendrils respond with to the intermittent visits of the tongue. It only lets go once there’s pretty much no more oil to be found, even in the tiny wrinkles between one tendril and another.

Robo-Jesus, robojesus, robojesusrobojesusrobojesus. What’s going on?

Well. That’s her good hand gone. Guess that ambidexterity program from the other day will start coming in real handy right about now. Handy. Hah.

She stumbles across the snowy field looking for any trace of anything hanging from the spire’s ceiling, trying to figure out just how the hell this thing is supposed to work. No trace of N anywhere yet. Shouts for him meet no reply save for their echo.

The tendrils only move kind of how she wants them to, and slowly at that. The pinpricks don’t stop. Once, she stumbles and the tendrils catch her before her remaining arm can. The parts that meet the snow hurt until she gets up and keeps walking. She holds them close to her chest in a reflex: the pinpricks slow down and cease when they’re there, somehow. A bit like holding up a puppy to calm it down, if you could also feel it like your own skin.

Something else is happening meanwhile. Uzi tries to ignore it, focusing on the weird jitters, twitches and undulations of the tendrils. Something else that sinks down to the stomach, up to the head, taking a home behind the eyes, sliding and creeping, slowing down her processors again. It hurts, but without direction, like it’s bursting from inside and/or crushing from outside.

She stumbles again. A little hit of pain from the tendrils wakes her up (was she sleeping, or just that lost in thought?). Must have moved some ten meters without noticing it – or the low-power alert flashing on the corner of her vision. This feeling, which she has no name for, pulsates together with the symbol of a depleting battery. When it lights up, strength abandons her legs, and when it goes dark, weakness leaves instead. This is new. She takes entire minutes to process it, trying to wrap her head around that new thing – that need – she’s now feeling.

In some dictionary file somewhere in Uzi’s hard drives, there’s a word that might fit what’s haunting her: “hunger”. The act of naming it helps a little, pushes it back into a tiny box of language where she can study it. Hunger. She’s never felt hungry before.

Is this what they feel like? A little angry thing inside freaking screaming for oil? All of a sudden it makes sense, huh. No wonder N would ask for a bit of mine.

She kicks something under the snow. A little extra push makes a limp torso, one arm and head still attached, emerge.

The hunger pangs inside her.

Is that a bit of oil still on the neck?

Without thinking, she licks her lips.

The tendrils spring off her chest and drag her down with an insane amount of force, like a big dog pulling at a leash. They practically throw her at the ground, clambering until she’s facing the corpse, just a few centimeters away from its frozen arm. They wrap around the torso, then arm, then the joint between them, suddenly more like a pair of tendrils rather than a bundle of them, covered in sharp barbs cutting effortlessly at the metal skin.

Shudders. Trembling from legs to head. This corpse looks less like a corpse and more like a solution. The tendrils raise its arm to her mouth. Before she can even realize the sense of worry that’s settling in, her face curls into a smile, lips receding and freeing two rows of sharp, sharp teeth, then leaping forward and digging into the solution with glee.

Wait a minute – sharp teeth? Since when?

The progress they’re quickly making lets her know just how sharp they are, and that there’s two fangs that weren’t there before, or at least weren’t that long. The sense of worry stirs up and turns to panic. No time to think. Pressure increases and the teeth meet with a little vein of oil that pops into Uzi’s mouth, soothing though cold.

Everything lets go at once, except for the feel of oil flowing over her tongue, so suddenly and completely she can hear the almost total silence surrounding her, intruded only by the faint whistling of a breeze grazing the spire. The low-power alert disappears, and her processors build up to full performance again.

I’m eating a corpse.

There’s a gap between seeing a corpse, even between being innately familiar with corpses, and sinking your teeth into one. This thing caught between these sharp jaws – they feel like an other, not like her –, it’s a person, or it was once. She can’t just break into Death’s home for a quick meal. That’s wrong.

As soon as she tries to retreat, everything washes back and crushes her under a wave of sensations. Panic. Hunger. Low power. The tendrils squirming. She just doesn’t have the strength to pull her mouth back more than a few centimeters, and even that is an inconceivable task. She can only hold for four painfully long seconds before the jaw snaps shut again, pressure letting up on her as it builds up on the bite.

She’s caught in a tug-of-war. Every inch she takes from the hunger goes to the panic, and every inch she reclaims from the panic, the hunger takes. But this is far from a stalemate – hunger’s winning. She can tell from how the metal making up the corpse’s arm screeches and creaks every so many agonizingly long seconds, whenever the moments of clarity granted by the soft taste of oil fade away.

Between these moments, a thought comes to her: the low-power alarm fading in and out. 39% crumbling to 6% and bouncing back to 39 a moment later. That makes no sense. Her battery can’t be rising and dropping all of a sudden that quickly, even if the oil was somehow restoring power. Something must be denying her that power, then giving it back when she bites.

It’s denying her that power… To force her to feed on the corpse.

Stop. Stop it.

The metal creaking gets more acute. She can see the arm bending upward on her periphery. It’s about to snap.

Stop.

Two precious seconds come and go. It doesn’t take many calculations to realize it will certainly break soon.

Stop! Stop!

One second. Her logic circuits say maybe one more and it’s done.

STOP.

Crack!

A fountain of oil flows from the broken-off piece of limb. Uzi jolts upright, violently clutching the arm by its wrist the same way you’d hold a cup of water – angled up to get every last drop as quickly as physics allow. The tendrils unwrap from the corpse and wrap again around her torso, warmth sending jitters down her back. A flush of laughter takes her over, briefly interrupted by bursts of coughing from the oil she’s still drinking.

Did I do that? Did I get up to drink that arm? Is that me laughing?

Uzi tries to cry, but then she laughs again.

The arm is now dry.

Her hand drops the arm. She can’t tell if it did that by itself.

And she goes down for another bite.

—---------------------------------------------------

The wind’s pretty gentle today. It lets N glide left and almost effortlessly between buildings, which is really quite convenient as he’s gulping down one last swig of oil. Last time he had to make a quick turn going against the wind with oil still in his mouth, he could neither finish the gulp or make the turn.

N extends his wings and rises up in the air, then slowly glides down onto the spire of corpses. It takes a bit of crawling to find the entry-exit hole – it’s slipped his mind on which side it is again –, but at the same time he gets there, he also swallows that last swig right on time and lets his face settle into a smile.

The glide down is long and playful, spiraling upside down all the way to the pod before finally landing with a soft thud. Is Uzi awake? Nah. No way. N quietly and slowly opens a hatch, peeking inside only as it stops creaking and finds its stop. He’s wrong. Uzi isn’t there. Did she go somewhere? Hope she’s not worried. He just didn’t want to ask to nibble on her neck again.

Crack- Snap!

A metallic noise alerts him, and other sounds suddenly become noticeable, pretty far away. Laugh - cry - metal creaking. Uzi’s voice. That sequence of sounds is very familiar to him, but it takes a second for it to register it’s Uzi making them, and a fraction more to realize that shouldn’t be happening. He bolts for the source of the sounds as soon as it’s done registering.

She’s right there, just on the verge of a ray of light leaking through the spire’s roof. She’s hunched over, munching on the side of a dead drone’s head.

A little glint of light reflects onto his eyes. Those are teeth. She’s smiling

But there’s also marks of sweat on the side of her visor. Her eyes are wide with something unpleasant – fear, stress, panic, or any of their siblings.

“Uzi?”

Such a stupid thing to say that he curses himself immediately. She jolts up and turns to see him, smile immediately fading as their eyes meet, then raises her right hand and pulls the head out of her mouth, somehow struggling to get it off her jaws. Isn’t she left-handed?

Uzi stumbles back and crawls away, dead silent. Panic paints her eyes. N sprints to her – then stops dead in his tracks. Her left hand is a heap of black, barbed tendrils glistening with the sheen of oil. A soft “biscuits” escapes N’s mouth, and he hopes she doesn't hear.

No time to think. N walks the rest of the way and kneels to her left side, trying his darndest not to look at the tendrils writhing right beneath his sight. She’s still trying to crawl away, mouthing something. Something like “get away”.

He doesn’t. The tendrils are encircling his torso and closing in. He puts his arm behind and around Uzi’s back, receiving only shivers in return.

“You okay?”

She nods. She’s not. The tendrils start pressing against his coat.

N wonders whether he should offer her a hug. Uzi’s hand is clamped close to her chest, eyes lost in the distance, but she doesn’t seem to object to the arm around her back. Maybe she needs it. Maybe she’d hate it.

He wraps his other arm around her, scanning for any sign of resistance, seemingly none appearing, then holds her up to his chest. Maybe she’s relaxing a little? Can’t tell. Can’t tell. Maybe it’s a mistake. Biscuits. Biscuits. Biscuits.

Uzi tugs at his coat, pulling him a bit closer. Rip. Rip. Rip. The tendrils are cutting through the coat’s cloth, one by one digging into N’s torso, wrapping like barbed wire. He breathes a sigh of relief. Little drops of oil – his own, surely – slither down his back.

“Heaven smiles above me…

“What a gift, here beeee-low”

She’s still tugging, but a bit lighter now. The tendrils’ grasp doesn’t subside. To be truthful, it hurts. It hurts a lot.

“But no one knoooows

“The gift that you give to meeee

“No one knows.”

For a while, there’s nothing. Not even the wind, or any movement or pressure or even hurt. Well, there’s one thing – a little spark of warmth.

Then Uzi speaks, voice cutting right through N’s nerves.

“I can’t see very well. I think my hair’s in the way.”

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Her hair isn’t that long.

N pulls back his right hand and retreats slightly, seeing pretty clearly that he’s right. A tendril goes up to Uzi’s face to pull a bit of hair aside, leaving little black stains all over her head. There’s a yellow nub right there, square in the middle of her forehead, glowing faintly, far fainter than it should – well, not a nub: an eye.

“I still can’t see. It’s so fuzzy…”

“It’s alright. I’ll take you to the pod.”

—---------------------------------------------------

NOTES:

First go at prose in a long time. It’s so indulgent it hurt my fingers as I wrote it and now hurts my eyes as I read it, but I hope it’s cheesy enough to be fun.

This is pretty much my take on the whole Uzi transformation idea, which funnily enough I started working on about a week before the Episode 4 teaser aired. Yeah, everyone and their mother knew Uzi was in line for some Resident Evil shit as soon as they finished the pilot, but this is MY take dammit, and I want it out there before the canon one takes precedence.

Well, “my” isn’t fully true, or really true at all. You might’ve noticed it’s pretty inspired by a delightful piece of concept art (see below) by the equally delightful @multiversal-pudding, whom I happened to come across in @nyaifyz’s discord server. Between I, the pudding in question and another fellow by the name of @fennoske we came up with a bunch of worryingly detailed ways to torture the little purple ball of anger with her own body, of which this fic is but one product.

Couldn’t have written a single word here without their hilariously cruel minds to aid me in developing this torment, so I strongly recommend checking them out (especially their take on the Solver!Uzi concept once they publish them). Hope you’ve enjoyed it.

#murder drones n #absolute solver #lord help her

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