The Obligatory Slice of Life/Background Progress Chapter.

Well. It's been a while. Folks on the other side of the 4th wall probably don't know how long, exactly, because there was a chapter break or it's a new episode or some shit, so I'll say it's been a good three months since then. Doll's 8th birthday came and went, and she celebrated at Lizzy's hab (which I knew due to meta knowledge was because she didn't want anyone to find the corpses of her parents in her own home). Both she and Uzi have been reconnecting, the former helping the latter have a social life, and the latter helping the former recover from her trauma. Both Doll and Uzi were smiling way more often, the cousins glued to the hip almost as much as Doll was glued to Lizzy's. Fuck man, it felt so goddamn satisfying and wholesome to watch. Because, like, I did this . This was me. My lasting, good impact on this world. Back to the birthday in question, Uzi made Doll a diamond-edged titanium combat knife, which I already knew would later be duplicated via the Solver and then wielded en masse via telekinesis. Oh man, that was gonna be glorious . It was my idea, but everyone pitched in to requisitions to get a new phone for Doll as well, and Uzi and I also presented her with the program to bluetooth it to her OS. Doll actually gave me a hug at that, and it was only once again abusing my overclocking that let me not freeze up at the realization that it was the first hug I'd gotten since my arrival on Copper 9.

Speaking of that program, I'd still been steadily optimizing it, and by now I'd squeezed out another 5 minutes before heat issues started to become a problem. When Uzi's birthday did roll around, I'd possibly share the program with her, not just as a present, but because it'd be super fucking useful for her, and she could probably improve it way better than I ever could. Then again, this kinda shit was easily abusable. Might keep it on me for just a bit longer. On top of that, progress on my virus idea continued to progress, and I'd come up with a second, more short term virus by now as well. That second virus was a perfect case of my maxim of "If it's stupid, but it works , it's not stupid." Case in point: drones shit. At least, workers did. Jury was still out on Disassembly Drones. But for the function of pooping itself, it took a string of code from our CPUs to actually send the command to our synthetic sphincters to open up. A string of code I could copy. And then put on a virus jack. Though I might actually be able to pull it off with just a thumb drive, considering that drones all had a USB port on the backs of our necks. Regardless of whether or not Murder Drones still had those, I wasn't at the stage of building virus jacks quite yet, but the virus itself? Make a command that will force the command to shit to go down any synthetic nervous system it can reach, self-replicating the string at every branch of our nervous system equivalents it hit and then sending it down both directions.

Practically speaking, if MDs could poop, and I jabbed them with this, it would send a simple, brute force command both up and down their nervous systems, duplicating and branching off every time it hit a junction. The command hitting their CPU's would be countermanded, obviously, but the one that managed to hit their culos would force their sphincters to open. This was of course, running on the assumptions that A: Murder Drones still had to shit like us Workers, and B: that their code was similar enough to us that the shit command would still work, but I was willing to bet that my idea was so fucking stupid that the Solver wouldn't have accounted for it when taking apart the manor drones and putting them back together as genocide robots.

The end result? Literally recreating the meme of a guy voicing over Dr Samuel Hayden from Doom 2016 and saying "Alright then, buddy . I'm going to shit yourself! " Did I just come up with and subsequently code a virus to make my foes literally shit themselves? Yes. Was I going to use it, and possibly quote that meme as I did? I sure fucking intended to. Did I have a vague idea of using it on V specifically because she doesn't wear pants? Obviously! Was this fucking hilarious to even think about? Absolutely!

Anyways, my increasingly unhinged plans to sometimes literally bullshit my way to victory aside, things were going on as normal. I solidified bonds, had chats with people, did dumb stuff on the group thread I'd made, hell, I even worked with Thad and Darren to clear up those hallways they were talking about, practicing my running and even setting up part of the pseudo-track as an obstacle course to start actually testing everything I downloaded about parkour. My first attempts were, uhhhh… there was much faceplanting involved, and Thad and Darren both laughed a lot, but at least we were technically industrial machinery; a few falls of only a couple feet max didn't leave any damage I'd actually need to go get repaired. I was definitely improving with my speed, dexterity, and general tactical assessment of movement and movement options, though, which is something I'd need to keep up with Murder Drones in the future. Small steps, but I was a machine now, and I could build skills far faster than a human, and I could already see those small steps being the start of something far more impressive in the future. I was a lazy procrastinator in my first life, but the threat of a fate worse than death and the reward of potential ageless immortality if I survive did a remarkable job at getting me off my ass and putting work in. I was rebuilding a work ethic I hadn't had in over a decade, and at this rate, by the time The Plot rolled around, I was reasonably certain I'd be locked the fuck in.

________________________________________

I'd also been meeting a couple of other side characters from canon as time went on, as well as digging into what exactly V did to the parents of those kids (in actuality despite the fact that I regretted what I learned each time, I'd go and ask Lizzy and/or Rebecca for the usually gory details). Just last week, there'd been a group project involving cracking some CAPTCHAS. Evidently, my reputation as someone who could breeze through them (human ghost in the shell, lol) had spread to the point where any group-work involving them forced Lizzy's dad to randomly assign group-mates, because otherwise everyone in the room would all argue over who got to work with me. Rather than anyone I knew, I'd been partnered with another three background characters, two of which I knew would die without intervention, and one of which was… possibly the only background, named member of Uzi's class to make it through the whole series alive.

Case in point, Trevor was a guy who had neon blue (I was really starting to wonder how much the prevalence of that color was down to it being a preference among the current generation, and how much was down to influence from the other side of the 4th wall from Glitch being too lazy to differentiate between the proverbial red-shirts) optics, and wearing a black shirt with green sleeves and an upturned collar, black boots, and a yellow hard-hat with a green stripe from front to back. As far as I knew, he really was the only named (background character) member of this class to live, most likely because for whatever reason, he didn't go on the trip to Camp 98.7. His dad had been in the WDF, up until the day of V's break-in. He'd been the third casualty that day, V slamming him into a wall upside-down, stinging his legs with her nanite acid, and then letting gravity bring him to a slow, agonizing end. His mom, also in the WDF, survived that day, but had to get several limbs replaced (which… not nearly as bad as that would be for humans, for drones, it was almost like changing clothes, albeit ones you'd wear for potentially decades unless something damaged them), and despite everything, the guy still wanted to follow in his folk's footsteps. I could respect that, and while it may have never been on-screen (much like anything involving the guy's parents) I had a feeling he probably would sign on with them after the events of canon. Dude was actually pretty friendly and well-adjusted despite everything, and I had nothing bad to say about him.

Braidon, Uzi's mind-jacking victim, and later head-exploding test subject, and the same poor sod who spent over half the series on fire, was, uh, he was a bit of a mess, and once I learned what I did, I could actually understand him forgetting Uzi's name, mostly because he'd been so traumatized that he could barely remember anyone's names. Hell, he was lucky enough to remember his own, neon-blue (again) optics blankly staring ahead half the time. V had gotten in when a cloud passed overhead while Door 1 had been open during the day for maintenance. Braidon's dad had tried to hit the emergency button to override the maintenance and shut the door, but V had shot his hand off, and then proceeded to grab him and literally tear him in half. Vertically, not horizontally, mind you. There was a lot of mechanical gore that spilled out when a drone was bisected and the wounds weren't cauterized like the guy N killed in the Pilot. Braidon's mom had been at home that day, and she and her son had survived, but only a few days later, she'd fried her own processors out of grief. Braidon, already messed up by his dad's fate, had woken up days later to find his mom's corpse with a suicide note, and had been struggling with dissociation ever since. If Uzi was still gonna mindjack someone, I'd see if I could nudge her to a different target. Maybe Sam? Still messed up, but there was a decent chance that any discrepancies noticed could not just be explained away to others as a really bad magnet trip, but even explained away as such to Sam himself. I was tempted to try and head that off entirely, but that scene seemed like the kind of practice that Uzi would need if she wanted to jack the admin privileges from Disassembly Drones in the future. Speaking of, hopefully I could prevent Solver Uzi from popping his brain-box like a grape as well. He was also dressed in a smaller version of the outfit he would die in, wearing a businessman's outfit with a black blazer, purple tie, and a white blouse, paired with purple shorts. His hardhat was a turquoise helmet with a grey vertical stripe down the middle.

Penny… well, she was definitely more interesting with actual depth to her character rather than 2 minutes of screentime followed by Doll rotating her neck way too far and then literally flattening her into a paste, that was for sure. Between the name, how she seemingly had a nice, possibly even sweet disposition, the neon-teal-green (finally, not blue!) optics, and her fate of being a robot girl that was mangled to death by someone with some degree of telekinetic powers, I had a feeling that she may have been a cheeky reference by one of the animators and/or writers to Penny Polendina from RWBY (RIP, Best Character… I also suddenly had the weirdest random thought that Penny Polendina and Tessa James Elliot would be absolute besties if they ever met). Unlike the Penny of RWBY, Penny from MD had short, brown hair, mostly covered by her black hardhat, a pair of glasses that she wore only for cosmetic reasons, and wore a flowing, ankle-length brown-and-white dress with long sleeves and green highlights to match her optics, with matching boots. Surprisingly, despite her also being an orphan, she didn't trace that status back to V. The initial disaster after the Murder Drones made planetfall killed a lot of folks, her parents included. Penny herself had been a Untrained Neural Network at the time, and her parents had both been slain in their apartment via copious use of nanite acid, one of them evidently surviving long enough afterwards to use their own melting finger to carve an arrow in the floor pointing to the drawer where they hid their kid. Whoever had been passing through the building at the time while trying to loot the place during their desperate flight to Outpost 3 had found Penny half-starved to death in a bedroom drawer, only because of the arrow and the faint whines of the UNN. Looting an impromptu graveyard they may have been, the drone (who had evidently asked to remain anonymous after their arrival to the Bunker) still had a metaphorical heart, feeding the baby drone and taking Penny with them to their ultimate destination. From what I'd heard from scuttlebutt (Lizzy and Rebecca), she was into fashion, adored designing outfits, and wanted to design dresses for drones when she grew up.

"So," I asked the three as all the kids shuffled around their seats for the group work. "How's it going?"

"Hey, uh… uh…" Braidon trailed off, and Penny and Trevor shared a "Well this is fucking awkward" look with both each other and me.

"Joseph," I offered, sounding just as uncomfortable as I felt.

"Right!" he said, "Joseph, right… Wait, didn't you…" he spaced out for a moment. "Didn't you have another… name?"

"That guy's basically dead," I said.

Trevor suddenly clapped. "Right! Changing the subject!" I was already starting to like this guy. "You got some kinda secret for how you're so good at CAPTCHAS?"

I rolled my optics, failing to hide a smirk as I looked down at the work and noted the 27 out of 64 images that had a blue balloon in them. Man, pattern recognition software PLUS previously having been a meatbag? I really did have the best of both worlds.

"I dunno," I said with a shrug, not exactly able to tell anyone that I was a human ghost in the shell. "But I ain't complaining, amico ."

"Huh," Penny remarked, "You really did pick up Italian."

"Is it that weird?" I asked.

"I don't remember any Italian drones around," Braidon mumbled.

"There weren't any major Italian communities on Copper 9 before the core collapse, and your folks weren't Italian, either," Trevor added.

"I mean," I blatantly cheated at socialization in specific and life in general by overclocking to put my thoughts together yet again, "I had a literal identity death and I've been trying to build a new identity since. I thought that it would be cool and unique." And, you know, I could instantaneously learn basically any language, and could tap into my cultural roots with literally the bare minimal effort, though I very obviously didn't say that aloud.

"I mean, it is unique," Penny said. "And I heard that Italy has some really neat fashion lines… or at least they did before the core collapse. That might have changed since then."

"Maybe one day we'll find out," I replied, not wanting to break her heart by telling her that Earth is fucking gone … not that anyone would believe me if I did , right now.

"I do like your camo patterns, though!" Penny remarked. "I compared it to photos from outside, and you did a pretty good job!"

"Thanks," I offered, genuinely happy with the compliment. I had done some research, and had used an algorithm I downloaded off the internet archives to properly design the camo patterns, having fed it photos of the outside to try and generate the optimal camo patterns. Felt kinda nice to have someone finally recognize that I put a decent amount of effort into it.

We got properly cracking on the rest of the problems after that, and I had 3 more drones I created an internal dossier for on my OS. I didn't chat with them that often, but I did talk every now and then. I might be able to leverage Trevor for something involving the WDF, Penny might be able to design camo patterns for me in the future and was just genuinely a nice person to know, and Braidon… well, I kept tabs on him, just in case. His problems… unfortunately didn't seem like something I could help with, much. I did occasionally help him refocus when he spaced out during class, but, well, it might sound callous, but despite appearances I had a pretty full schedule between managing a social life for the first time, having to devote the bare minimum effort to maintaining good grades, and preparing for the apocalypse. Braidon just didn't really offer anything of utility for me, so while I'd try to keep him alive (and preferably not on fire), I had more important things to worry about.

________________________________________

On the subject of having a social life, lunch had just started today, and everyone was just sitting down at our table when I suddenly had a completely random thought.

"Hey Uzi," I asked, "you ever feel like, in another life, you were an Eldritch Horror beyond mortal comprehension that intruded upon the dreams of humans, and we still managed to be friends in spite of not just that, but also that you never manifested in my robo-dreams specifically?"

"Who the hell starts a conversation like that?!?"

"I dunno," I replied. "I've just found that I enjoy saying unhinged shit, and that thought did pop up in my head."

"Robo-Jesus you're weird , sometimes, Joe," Uzi told me.

"And proooooooooud of it!" I enthusiastically shot back. Kelsey giggled in the background.

"So like," Lizzy started, "You all wanna hang out after school today?"

"Yeah, that sounds cool," Thad remarked.

"Maybe someone else's place though," Darren said. "We've hung out at Thad's place like the last three times."

"Oh, my place?" Lizzy perked up as she suggested.

"Maybe not," Uzi said. "Like, I actually had to recalibrate my optics when I saw your room for the first time during that party, it was that pink."

Lizzy slumped, and I interjected. "It's okay, Liz. Maybe next time." I took half a second in overclock to ponder my next words, and decided to just test the waters. "What about Doll's place?"

Doll immediately went hollow-optic'd. " N-No! " she stammered.

Lizzy flinched as well, "Yeah, her place is like, a total mess," she covered. I raised a digital eyebrow, but didn't comment. So she does know. That's interesting… "What about your place, Joe?" she deflected.

I shrugged. "I'm not opposed, but ironically, my place is actually pretty boring." And that wasn't me deflecting, I'd gotten my grubby hands on a safe that I'd since hidden under the bed in the parent's room for the gallon plus of oil I now had squirreled away, so there was no worry about anyone finding that. My house was pretty much just a place I lived in. Sure, I spent some free time watching anime and web series that weren't fully out yet in my own time but were now 1000+ years old (the rest of RWBY was fucking awesome , especially when Neo made her triumphant return as herself in Volume 12. She really was the Best Girl.), but otherwise the place was pretty damn bare-bones. Besides breaks I forced myself to take, there wasn't much personalization to the place, because I was almost always fucking busy with one form or another of apocalypse prep.

"W… what about my place?" Uzi asked, hesitation rooted in her tone. "We could… hang out there?"

"I'm down," I said immediately.

"I am, like… morbidly curious to see what kinda gremlin things you do at home," Rebecca said.

Uzi slumped. "I… I was gonna suggest we watch some pirated anime or something."

To her credit as a slowly improving individual, Rebecca did backpedal. "Sorry!"

"We can, like, try it?" Lizzy suggested, and Uzi looked up at her, clear surprise on her face. Messed up as it was, I was kinda glad Uzi still had so much trouble with facial expressions, because she didn't notice Lizzy wilt when she realized that Uzi still had so much trouble believing people actually enjoyed her presence or actually wanted to try out her interests. Though to be completely fair, Uzi had things just as bad, and more than once I'd had to pull her aside and quietly explain that having friends meant you had to do stuff you might not like that they did (such as spending two hours looking over fashion with Lizzy, or an equal amount of time gathering gossip with Rebecca), though she was catching on increasingly often as time went by.

"Really?" Uzi said, giving a hesitant smile.

"Yeah, it could be fun," Kelsey replied. "And I kinda owe you for sitting down with us to watch My Little Pony."

Darren face-planted on the table. "Please don't remind me about that." Thad leaned over to place a hand on his shoulder in solidarity.

I rolled my optics, and then put on a shit-eating grin as I leaned forwards. "I for one think that the 2628 G4 remake where they didn't freaking skittle-ify the changelings and actually dealt with the moral and societal consequences of trying to integrate a society of quasi-parasitic emotovores with the moderately hypocritically xenophobic Equestrians to be genuinely interesting," I said.

"I know!" Kelsey said. "Logically addressing the political and societal consequences of what was going on throughout the whole show while still staying true to the original G4's theme and story was why it was such a damn hit!"

" You actually liked that? " Doll asked me.

"Fitting into social norms is overrated," I said, leaning back with a shrug. "Plus the pastel ponies were funny."

Darren suddenly sat back up. "Changing the subject!" he shouted, and I started snickering. He whirled on Uzi. "What anime are we gonna watch, and will it have violence?"

Uzi blinked. "I didn't think that far, but definitely yes."

"Oh!" I said, suddenly having a hilarious idea of another breadcrumb to throw in front of Uzi. Among the myriad of anime from the early 2000s that made it to the present, now long since finished so I could enjoy getting to see all the seasons that hadn't been released back in 2025, I had a great idea to suggest. "What about the early 2000's Rising of the Shield Hero?"

Uzi blinked again, looking at me, and then her optics flickered while she did a quick search. "A freaking Isekai anime, man?"

"Trust me, that one's a classic , and it inverts all the normal cringe Isekai tropes where the protagonist starts stupidly overpowered and loved by everyone. Also." I said, "one of like, the only anime I've watched in dub as well as the sub, because Billy Kametz just freaking killed it as Naofumi before he passed."

Uzi rolled her optics. "It better be," she grumbled.

"Why the 1000 year old version, though?" Thad asked.

"Sometimes the OG is the best," I said.

Doll looked at Uzi, then me, then back to Uzi. " If Uzi thinks the genre is cringe but Joe says this one is an exception, my curiosity is piqued. "

Lizzy shrugged. "If Doll's down, I'm down."

"I can't tell if Joe's trying to set us up for a troll or if he's actually cooking," Rebecca said.

"That just means I'm living up to my chaotic neutral D&D alignment, then," I said, "so that's a compliment, and thank you!"

Rebecca sighed, and Lizzy started giggling.

"Alright," Uzi said, "We'll go give Tate no Yūsha no Nariagari a shot. But one: No Spoilers! And Two: we're watching the sub version! Watching the dub first is cringe!"

"Zi?" Thad asked. "You know we all have autotranslators, right?"

Uzi leaned over the table and poked Thad in the chest. " It's the principle of the thing! " She shouted at him in Japanese.

Everyone at the table started laughing, though I was the only one to notice Uzi flinch, looking uncertain, and even as the others started to catch onto that as well, I quietly interjected. "Laughing with you, not at you," I said, "It's just funny to see you be passionate about stuff you like."

Uzi blinked, and then started to smile herself. "Oh." She joined the laughter afterwards.

"Won't your dad get pissed that you're suddenly bringing over seven other people?" Thad asked when we started to calm down.

Uzi rolled her optics. "My dad's never home until it's super late anyways, he probably won't even realize I had friends over to begin with." She crossed her arms. "Probably doesn't even know I have friends," she mumbled. And then, in a lower tone, "Or that until three months ago, I didn't ."

Everyone else shared a glance. Thad was the only one among us who had two attentive parents (Darren had both of his, but while they cared , he was mostly left to his own devices beyond making sure his needs were met), but that kinda raised a red flag for all of us. Or well, all of us except me, since I already knew just how absentee of a parent Khan Doorman could be. Still, I kept up appearances.

Rebecca gave a nervous laugh. "Yeah, guess he's pretty busy with keeping those Murder Drones out with those doors of his."

"Don't even get me started on his stupid doors!" Uzi spat. "It's all he ever talks about ! Never," and she switched to a poor Khan impression, "'Uzi, how was your day?' or 'Uzi, I actually pay attention to what goes on in your school and heard that Chad pushed you down the stairs last week, do you need me to straighten him out?' If he even bothers to talk to me at all instead of randomly gush about freaking doors , it's 'Uzi, I came up with this amazing new hydraulic system for the doors,' or 'Uzi, did you know that automatic doors were first faked by actors hiding on the sides in the original Star Trek, but then humans liked them so much they made them real ?' or 'Why can't you be more like doors, Uzi?' and it's just… UGH!" she scoffed with disgust.

Doll raised a finger, concern clear in her optics. " Uncle… uncle Khan didn't actually say that last one, right? "

"Oh no, he totally did. Not even the first time he did it, either." Well, my opinion of Khan just dropped like a guy with cement shoes dropped into the bay. Waaaaaaaait…

"Chad pushed you down the stairs last week?" I asked.

"Yeah?" Uzi said. "At least my visor didn't crack this time." There was dead silence. Lizzy actually put her phone in her pocket as her optics locked onto Uzi.

" This time?" Kelsey asked, hands going to her mouth.

For once, I didn't overclock, and just let my mouth go before my CPU. "Want me to fuck him up?"

"Joe," Thad, being the voice of reason that was the reason I'd wanted him on-board in the first place, "You'll get suspended."

"He pushed Uzi down the fucking stairs!" I hissed. "Multiple times!"

Doll started to stand up, " Besides, you'll have to get in line! "

Uzi looked genuinely confused to see multiple people willing to inflict bodily harm on someone who messed with her, and that hurt in a sympathetic way.

"Doll," Lizzy said, grabbing her arm.

" Lizzy !" Doll protested.

"No, Dolly, we do this smart ," she insisted. I raised a digital eyebrow.

"Smart?" I asked.

Lizzy stood up. "Machiavellian. Queen. Bee." She said, pink optics set into a determined glare. "Follow me."

I shared a look with Rebecca, who shrugged, genuinely at a loss for what Lizzy had planned, and then Uzi, who looked even more confused than before. I shrugged, and moved to follow the blonde. The rest followed suit.

On the other side of the cafeteria, we came up to a bunch of 7-8 year old boys who were already acting like high-school jocks (part of me wondered if Uzi's classmates fitting high-school stereotypes was less down to drones imitating high schools as depicted in human media and more down to a general lack of parental supervision brought about by the general incompetence generations coded by humans had just resulting in a generation of kids who were mostly assholes), at the head of which was a piece of shit that did not live up to his namesake. Chad had a brown buzzcut, and a red jersey with a white "1" on it, as well as blue jeans and what a quarter second search during an overclock revealed to be Jordans on his feet (Damn, those actually made it to the 3000s. Kinda impressed). Literally a stereotypical jock bully before he was 10, you couldn't make this shit up.

He looked up at the approaching group and sneered when he saw Uzi trailing behind us. "The heck do you people want? You've been damaged goods ever since the freak contaminated you."

Lizzy looked him up and down, curling her lip and channeling her inner diva as she sneered back. "You pushed Uzi down the stairs," she spat, crossing her arms.

"And?" He scoffed standing up and getting in her face. "The heck you gonna do about it, bimbo?"

Lizzy's glare somehow got even sharper , and she shot back, "Oh, we're going straight to roasts? Tch , first off, your Jordan's are completely fake--"

I overclocked. No way . No way fucking Lizzy was actually doing this. I glanced down and cross referenced Chad's shoes with internet examples, and holy shit, they actually were fake.

Chad's left optic twitched.

"--Secondly, Chad, you have absolutely no bitches--"

Holy fucking shit, Lizzy was actually doing this.

Chad started to glare, hands clenching. I began to quietly step closer.

"--and finally, your dumb ass hasn't even thought about pirating Spotify Premium!"

Oh my fucking god, Lizzy actually just did that. That was definitely a memory to literally save. Also, Spotify actually made it to the 3000s. Cool.

"Did you just actually roast him with a thousand year old meme?" Uzi asked, almost as incredulous as I was.

Chad went to punch Lizzy in the face.

I was already close enough that the fact that my overclock was currently limited to my software didn't matter. Chad may as well have been moving in slow motion as I reached out and grabbed his wrist, catching it just centimeters from Lizzy's hollowed optics.

He looked confused at his hand being stopped, and then glanced along the hand holding his wrist to the drone it belonged to. "Hey, faccia di cazzo ," I said, false sweetness dripping from my tone. "I'm gonna give you one warning not to try that again. If you ignore that and throw the first punch anyways, I can guarantee you that I will throw the last one," I snarled at him.

Thad and Darren stepped forwards as well, and so did Uzi and Doll, while Lizzy backed up to Kelsey and Rebecca, throwing a glance at me and swallowing.

Chad yanked his arm out of my grip, some of his goons also starting to stand up. An amount of goons that actually outnumbered us. I myself was reasonably confident that between overclocking and all the martial arts I downloaded, I could 1v5 a bunch of unarmed workers my age right now, and that would actually put us at even odds, but I was less confident that a fight wouldn't end with one of us getting hurt.

"You freaks really want to start something?" He spat out.

"Do you ?" Lizzy asked. "Because if you do, I can't make any guarantees your dad doesn't find out your search history."

Chad froze. "What?" He said, slight nervousness creeping into his voice.

"Would be a real shame if he found out about what you've been watching," Lizzy trilled out.

I looked back and forth, and so did most of the rest of both sides, wanting to see where this was going.

Rebecca suddenly took a step forwards, and gave a predatory grin of her own as she slipped into her element. "I mean, human porn? Not that I care, I won't judge, but I can't imagine that your dad will be happy that you're looking up porn in general."

Chad's optics went hollow. "I don't know what you're talking ab--"

Lizzy and Rebecca both pulled out their phones, flipping to some photos of--

--the next thing I knew, I was looking away from them, couldn't recall what I saw, and had a note from myself that I couldn't remember writing telling me not to look again. Sweet mother of fuck , what the hell was Chad into that I actually erased my own memory of seeing it?

I heard several exclamations from both sides that was some variant of "Oh my robo-god!" Or "What the hell , man!"

"You fuck with Uzi again, and we post that for the whole school, shithead," Lizzy said.

Chad mutely nodded.

"By the way," I added, demented smile on my face, "I'm reasonably sure by this point that the folks who put my noggin back together didn't properly fix my morality subroutines. If I find out you assaulted any of my friends ever again, not even the Murder Drones will find your body, capisci ?"

He nodded again.

"Get out of our sight," Rebecca spat out.

Chad ran like a robot Usain Bolt.

Lizzy turned around and began to walk back to our table, and everyone mutely followed.

"Soooooooo…" I opened up. "Just leave yourself a note to not look into it first, but otherwise, I'm reminding you that you can delete your memories of whatever you saw like I did."

Two seconds of quiet, and then--

"Oh thank robo-god," Uzi said.

"Getting that the hell out of my head!" Thad exclaimed.

"What the heeeeeeell," Kelsey murmured.

" That …" Doll trailed off. " That might have been the second most traumatic thing I've ever seen ." No one was dumb enough to ask what the first was.

"How the hell do you keep a straight face knowing that stuff, Becca?" Darren asked.

"Gossip and blackmail sometimes require that you find out some real nasty stuff," Rebecca said as we sat back down at our own table.

"Isn't even the worst thing we've seen," Lizzy said, and my respect for her dramatically went up.

" How did you find out… whatever that was, by the way?" I asked.

Lizzy brushed some stray hair back and smirked. "A girl's gotta have some secrets, you know?"

Well, considering my own, "Yeah, that's fair," I conceded.

Lizzy preened. "So, we still all up for anime at Uzi's after school?"

"Oh yeah, totes," Rebecca said.

"Sure," Darren said.

"Totally," Thad agreed.

" Definitely ," Doll added.

"Yep!" from Kelsey.

"Hell yeah," I said.

Uzi grinned. "Awesome! I'm gona pirate the original Rising of the Shield Hero during class this afternoon then." She paused a moment, and then looked around at everyone. "Hey…" she looked down. "Thanks… for sticking up for me, I guess."

"You're part of my clique," Lizzy said. "That means that anyone who fucks with you fucks with me ," she added. "And I will strike the fear of robo-god into anyone who fucks with me."

Well. I was equal parts terrified and awed by what I have created.

Uzi grinned and began to chat with Lizzy about an idea to optimize her phone even more , and I let myself smile as I got absorbed in the conversation.

________________________________________

So, I know I said it before, but I feel like it bears repeating: Outpost 3 is fucking big in this universe. Really fucking big. Almost certainly bigger than canon. Definitely bigger than the average fanfic, or popular ones like Drone Fortress. Probably around the same size, or slightly smaller, than the version in the Something Twisted timeline, but very much smaller than the underground, Murder Drone proof safe haven from the Sisters timeline, packed with over a million workers who Uzi and Doll had helped evacuate from across a space larger than a continent, and who were all very much gearing up for a fight with the genocidal vanguards of the Solver above the surface under the direction of that timeline's WDF after Khan finally started actually acting like the freaking Emperor of Copper 9 that he was. Huh, kinda a bummer that I'd never know where that fic would end up going, and if that timeline's N would manage to bag V and J or not. Though maybe it was for the better that I'd never find out just how horrendously traumatized that N and J would be from seeing the Solver wearing Tessa's flayed corpse as a literal skinsuit. Don't know how, but Phoenix_749 legit managed to make that be more horrifying than that exact same thing was in canon.

But I digress. Utter failure of a father he may be, Khan knew how to build shit, and while most people would say that listening to the crazed prophetic ramblings and drawings your wife had during her trauma-caused psychotic episodes was a bad idea, building a bunker capable of weathering the vanguards of Robot Cthulhu Satan in the short years between the core collapse and the Murder Drone's planetfall was a seriously impressive feat, and didn't just save every drone within the complex, but if the timeline was on track, may very well save the universe itself. The place was big, yet still nowhere near capacity, a dark reminder of just how many died to the Sky Demons. As such, on both the very upper (note to self: once I meet Khan, ask the dude about the integrity of the ceilings on the uppermost level. I had a feeling that N just breaking straight through it on his way out in the Pilot was just an oversight on Glitch's part, but there was no reason not to ask) and very lowermost levels (that weren't connected to mining operations), there was a lot of space that was effectively abandoned, especially as you got further away from the geographic center of the colony. It was towards the periphery on one of those upper levels that I was currently venturing, an area where we had entire warehouses full of excess scrap and junk for salvaging later. A detective program I'd downloaded told me that the dust and frost cacking the floors and walls (I'd grabbed a facemask to avoid getting crap in my internals) meant that no one had been here besides myself in over 6 years, it was so remote. Which made it the perfect place to scope out a site for my future secret lair, as well as a potential secret back-door out of the Bunker. I'd been moderately concerned about something like that, but thankfully, this timeline's Khan wasn't the secretive kind of door fanatic, and the material composition of his doors were information available to the public, and therefore something I could recreate. It would take time and effort, but I could very well build my own Khan-tier airlock bulkheads on a secret door so I could slip into and out of the bunker unnoticed. Might build a second airlock as well, though, just to be safe.

Finally, I strolled to my destination, taking advantage of the multitude of additional visual spectrums or aids I'd downloaded last weekend to see in the dark, the lights having been off since no-one had been over here for over half a decade. Some cool shit, let me tell you. I went from having dry eyes and being near-sighted to having 20-15 vision, and was now able to switch between the visual spectrum, infrared, ultraviolet, thermal vision, and night-vision. I was also in the process of putting together programs for an internal passive sonar, like bats had, to make it impossible for anything that made pretty much any sound over half a decibel to get within 10 meters of me without my notice, and I'd also gotten on the early stages of planning an internal radar to track Murder Drones in the skies above me, though that would require hardware upgrades I'd have to wait to implement.

At the end of this particular hallway was a dead end, one last warehouse full of scrap metal and electronics, and that was it. The hallway also had more warehouses every few hundred feet on either side, so it was perfect for my purposes. If I could wall off the end-warehouse, unless you had the original blueprints for Outpost 3 in-hand or in your OS, you'd have no idea an extra warehouse was here. Really, an ideal location to hide a secret base. I glanced at my internal clock, and it was only just past midnight. Plenty of time to scope this place out, make sure time hadn't made it structurally unsound, and make it back to bed before I needed to be up for the day. I used my industrial grade drone strength to slide the massive door to the warehouse open enough for me to slip in, and winced as it creaked and groaned. Was gonna have to address that at some point, for sure. Strolling in, I fished out the industrial grade handheld floodlight I'd gotten from requisitions, flicking it on, and sighed, beginning a long inspection of the walls and ceilings for any cracks or other signs of erosion. Kinda hard in some of the spots where ice or frost covered the edges of the room, but after an hour of checking every single nook and cranny I could, I came to the conclusion that this place would be a very nice location to set up shop indeed.

"Right," I said aloud, voice echoing to no one in the silence of the night. "This'll do nicely." I turned to give the entrance one last once-over before I left, gaze passing over shelves upon shelves laden with scrap metal and busted electronics. "Gonna take a lot of work, but I can definitely get started this weekend."

_______________________________________

So. Another thing I should clarify for folks. When people think sci-fi, they typically think of cool shit like jetpacks, flying cars, robot dinosours that could boot-loop fuckers and then tear them apart while they're comatose, or Sick-As-Hell Magnetically Amplified Photon Convergers (sorry Uzi, it's an energy-weapon, which means that its not a railgun, its a laser). They didn't typically think about the logical end-points or evolution of current technology as it progressed to the future. I'm talking armored cars for banks that might as well be tanks on wheels, cheap, super-durable construction materials becoming commonplace, like carbon-nanotube reinforced titanium (stuff I intended to use for weapons and to build a custom frame out of later), 4k graphics becoming 64k graphics, or Console companies finally realizing that exclusives just meant you had an entire market that you couldn't tap into who weren't willing to buy your console just to play that one game. Fuck you, SONY, I should not have had to have been Isekai'd a thousand years into the future to have been able to play Bloodborne and Helldivers 2 on an Xbox.

Anyways, the whole reason I was even attempting to start constructing my secret lair at the young age of 7 was down to two things: That I could download so much info on construction, architecture, and engineering that I was confident I could have a degree in all three of those back home by now, and a very specific technology that had evolved over the past millennium. Namely, 3D printing. That shit was cool back in 2025, when Death Templer used it to print parts for the IRL maid Cyn that he took to the Glitch Expo in Vegas. In 3062? Oooooooooooooooh boy, it was fucking something else, people. Does the term "matter-printer" give you any ideas? No? Let me spell it out for you, then. You fed shit into the intake. Literally anything , from random rocks to say, entire shelves of scrap metal and electronics , and put in the size, dimensions, and material composition of what you wanted, and this thing would break that stuff down on a molecular level , reassembling the very atoms of what you fed into it, and rearranged them before printing them out into what you wanted. If you thought Uzi's very own BFG was sci-fi nonsense that super worked, this legit blew that out of the water (sorry Uzi, but it was true: If I got my hands on your laser specs, I could probably use one of these babies to print out a new one every minute ). This shit was single-handedly game-changing , and when I found out they were real here, years of stuff I thought I might not even have the time to do got condensed to months of stuff I could get ready ahead of schedule . Access to an industrial grade matter-printer meant access to industrialized levels of construction and production, all to myself.

Just… three big problems with that. Firstly, these things were big . Like, size of a semi-truck big. I wasn't moving one of the five that Outpost 3 had over to my soon-to-be secret lair, that was for sure. I could assemble one there myself, there was more than enough room for over half a dozen in that warehouse, but transporting that amount of stuff over to build one was not something I'd be able to hide. Secondly, the ones we had were monitored by the lads in requisitions 30/7 (Copper 9 had longer days than earth, and fuck me, it was weird getting used to it being 15:00 twice a day). There was no way I'd be able to use them to make some of the myriad of firearms or explosives I had planned without a lot of questions being directed my way, and my currently-seven-year-old ass was not going to be able to bullshit his way out of said questions. So, using the ones we had for my purposes was out. Thirdly, and perhaps the biggest wrench in my plans, these things ate power like a Murder Drone guzzled oil. And honestly, that analogy might be understating just how power-hungry these miracles of technology were; because one industrial grade matter-printer needed twenty fucking Gigawatts to power it for an hour. To put that in perspective, the average nuclear reactor in 2025 produced one Gigawatt per day. To power one of these back home for an hour , you'd need four hundred and eighty nuclear reactors to do so. So that meant that any plan I had to build one of these in secret for my own personal use had to overcome the additional hurdle of me needing to build something to power it , because my secret lair wouldn't be secret for very long if maintenance suddenly started asking why absolutely ridiculous amounts of energy were routinely being routed from the Bunker's own cold fusion reactors to the middle of nowhere.

Thankfully, I had come up with a workaround for all this shit, albeit a convoluted one. Namely, I did some research on scale for these things, and personal use, far less power-intensive, matter printers were a thing, and (something I was writing off as general Worker Drone incompetence) printing the parts for one of those wasn't something that folks would take note of. Get me the parts for a personal use matter printer, get a bunch of portable power cells, print a trolley to carry the shit, and use my industrial-grade drone strength to haul individual parts over at night when no-one was watching. It was a project that took me literal weeks to accomplish without notice, but something I got done nonetheless. Another thing; I briefly mentioned cold fusion reactors earlier as the Bunker's power source. Those things were way more effective (and clean) than the old fission reactors of old, with current generations capable of maintaining nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium at temperatures so mild that an unprotected human could put their hand directly on the reactor casing and find it cool to the touch. You could also build them to pretty much any scale you wanted, from something the size of a thermos that could provide enough power to keep a drone running for three centuries straight (something I definitely intended to add to my teenage frame) to the apartment-building sized reactors that powered Outpost 3, all its industrial grade matter printers, all its mining operations, and still had plentiful juice to spare. So, having downloaded enough information to fully qualify as a nuclear technician, engineer, and physicist, I set about using the normal ass power cells to power the personal use matter printer I'd assembled in my secret-lair-to-be, and got to printing everything I'd need to assemble a cold fusion reactor the size of a refrigerator to provide a basically infinite charge to the personal use printer I had. That itself took about a month of running back and forth to recharge the power cells as I went, but after quadruple checking the math, I kicked off my own personal atomic age as I turned on the reactor and connected it to my printer.

That was step one , but with step one done, I could get to step two: walling off the warehouse, constructing a secret door, disconnecting the warehouse from Outpost 3's power grid, and reconnecting it to my own reactor. Between having to fabricate various construction and engineering tools, concrete mix to wall off the warehouse, and actually building all the shit I needed to, tearing open walls and rewiring everything, that was another month of my free time and plenty of late-night hours burnt away. But when that month was done, you could no longer tell that there was supposed to be an entire extra warehouse at the end of that hallway. The secret door was also pretty genius, if I did say so. At the end of the hall was a fuse box for all the lights on the warehouses in this section. I'd conveniently scratched at all the labels until they were faded, and if the one for the warehouse that I'd hidden was flipped, it allowed you to use your foot to push in a section of the wall in by a quarter inch. To be fair, the button was near-seamless and next to the floor in the corner on the opposite side of the fuse box, and wouldn't do anything if you didn't flip that switch first, but if you did flip the switch and press the button, a 30 second timer would start. I had a panel I'd hidden in one of the side warehouses flip around, revealing a small password pad. There was exactly enough time to walk over to where the panel would be and have 10 seconds to put the password in before it flipped back to being hidden, and if you didn't know about it, it would be practically impossible to stumble upon by accident. One input of "420DoorsSuckShit" (Khan would never guess that), and on a wall a few feet to the right, a secret door would open. Was that needlessly complex and paranoid? Yes. Was it really fucking cool? Also Yes. And did I do it because I felt like showing off the engineering and electrical skills I'd shamelessly stolen off the internet? Fuck Yes. Anyways, once the secret door was closed, the fuse box would flip the switch back as well as close the fuse box itself if I'd forgotten to do so.

Step two for a secret lair was done. I had an entire warehouse worth of random shit to feed into a matter printer, a basic cold fusion reactor for power needs, and everything was hidden. Now I could get cracking on a step 3: build mining equipment to start drilling into the earth for even more matter to fuel my production needs, build a bigger reactor to fuel an industrial-grade printer, build said printer, and really kick off my industrial work. Step 4 was to remodel the place into an actual lair, reinforce the walls and ceilings, build weapons, surveillance tools to spy on Murder Drones, equipment for the surface, and start drilling a tunnel to the surface, setting up a double Khan-tier airlock as I went. Would probably aim to have the exit go into some ruined building's basement, to get plenty of room to hide it. Once that was done, some weather sensors so I could tell if the sun was out or if there was a fucking death storm going on outside. I sure as hell wasn't doing my first expeditions above ground without some sunlight to keep me safe, that was for sure.

And lastly, step 5 for my secret lair was tunneling into the earth to build more rooms, several of which would be hidden as well. Because why stop at a secret lair when I could build a secret lair within a secret lair? Or a secret lair within that secret lair within that secret lair? And I really was actually planning that. At some point, I wanted the base lair to be public knowledge so that I could use it as a base of operations, with it being an open secret that there was another hidden lair somewhere within its confines. That's where I'd be working with the inner circle I was making, and probably where I'd eventually discuss and plan future Isekai shit with them. And then I'd have a lair I'd hide from even them for my secret projects as well as planning shit that I didn't want to share because my ass was paranoid that if I told Uzi or Doll something, and the Solver possessed them, it would know that. Ergo, plans to counter the Solver specifically beyond "we have to destroy its core" would be concocted solely by myself within this third layer of secret lair. I'd probably also start putting up conspiracy boards there because the idea of actually having those and them actually being about stuff that was really gonna happen was fucking hilarious. Man, Engi from Drone Fortress would probably think I was a godsdamned lunatic, huh? To be fair, that was probably true, but I was a competent godsdamned lunatic who's crazy conspiracies about the future were actually going to happen, and that was an important difference.

But the first hurdle was done, and now I could start snowballing. I looked at the reactor as it quietly hummed, grinning as I wiped some sweat off my brow (fuck you, JCJ). I was fucking cooking, and that felt good . I had a lot of work ahead of me if I wanted to start making some serious alterations to the timeline, but I had the ball rolling and in my court, and I was actually feeling giddy as I thought about the grueling hours of prep for the apocalypse.

Just another day in the life of an Isekai Protagonist, huh?