The retired drone swam up through the ocean of wreckage and congealed sludge it found itself in, conserving its remaining energy sourced from its backup supply batteries. Its reactor was dying. It was dying. It tried not to pull memories of happier times from its storage banks. It tried not to think about being a loyal enforcer of the Theremin Group. It tried not to think about being thrown away instead of getting its parts repaired or replaced when it started malfunctioning. Might as well try not to think about a white elephant or a pink bear at this point while it’s at it.
The drone continued its slow, ungainly ascent through an ocean of refuse, dragging its mangled carcass through rusted steel and torn open rubber wire covers. Maybe if it survived, it could try to sell some copper to repair itself. The drone’s contract of employment was null and void now that it had been retired, its siblings in the enforcer corps had whispered about ex-Theremin escapees that inevitably broke laws or regulations in Oscilloscope City and wound up blown to fiery bits by well placed incinerator rounds.
It just didn’t have to break a law. That’s all it had to do. They didn’t wipe its memory banks before it was thrown into a disposal pile and shipped out to a garbage oasis with the rest of the runoff. It might not have its connection to the mother grid anymore, so it would have to have its laws updated through word of mouth, but it could be done, the drone told itself. Sure, independent drones were banned from having tablet access to look these things up themselves, but…
The drone blinked beneath its sensorium helmet. It lost three hours and thirty two minutes of consciousness to recharge creep. Its body was given primitive orders to keep moving up, slowly, and evidently it was much closer to the open air than it had been before it fainted. It heard rustling above itself, and tensed. This was make or break time; either this would be a friendly junker that could be overpowered and threatened into repairing it, or this was an armed and dangerous oasis diver who was going to eat well reselling Theremin’s property.
The drone hoped for the former. Even with its limbs crippled by the weight of the garbage above it during shipping and the ammunition and firing pins dislodged from its body, it still had the silhouette of retractable weapons to fall back on. It could still be scary, it knew how skeletal it looked with its armor detached. Ancient human superstitions could be relied upon.
The gleam of stars blanketing the night sky enveloped the woman who greeted the drone with a grin. “Good evening!” The ex-enforcer blinked. “Good…mmevening??” A flash of sadness and recognition briefly appeared on the lady’s face, then melted into a grieving smile. “You poor thing, you were an attack dog, weren’t you? They just left you out to rot. Ain’t that just the way.”
She was dressed in drab olive surplus clothing in outer layers, durable salvaged ceramic plated armor lay beneath it. She had a brown leather satchel and toolbelt in unmatched colors, along with a misfit assemblage of tools. On her jacket’s left breast was a stylized compass rose in four colors, each with a single word embroidered within. “This Too Shall Pass”.
Beneath its sensorium, the drone frowned. It did not expect pity from the prepared. “Mmwhoo are yommuuu?” the drone asked through the buzz of its broken voice synthesizer. The woman smiled again, this time slightly wider as she extended her left arm towards the drone. “You can call me Eos. C’mon, attack dog, I know you’re unarmed. You’re not the first Theremin toy I’ve encountered in an oasis, but you’re the first to try to talk with me. We don’t have to be enemies.”
The drone noticed the weight of a firearm creasing the inside of Eos’s jacket as she bent over, along with a flash of cleavage. The broken machine begrudgingly took the junker’s arm and let her pick it up. “Lighter than I expected. They must be modifying your line’s materials for efficiency, huh,” Eos mused. “Mmwheremmm are you goimmmg to take meee?” the drone buzzed. Eos snapped her fingers as if she hadn’t thought about that. “First, I’m going to cradle you in my arms, make you feel nice and helpless, then ti– secure you to my sledge. We’ll go to my cabin, you’ll be eminently grateful and do anything I ask, and you won’t try to attack me or rearm yourself. We’ll live together in the oasis and whittle away our lives helping others like you or trading the unfixable for food and supplies. How does that sound.”
A burst of smoke snaking through a crack in the drone’s sensorium answered Eos’s question, and she laughed. “Yeah, I didn’t think so, but it was worth a try. Everyone I salvage leaves eventually, and I never make anyone stay.” Eos did secure the drone to the skid, it observed, but delicately. She didn’t want to trap it, she wanted to secure it and keep it safe. She almost seemed to…care, about the drone, down to making a quick fix on its vocal processor. It refused to believe this. Without the omnipresent booming din of the mother grid and its fellow drone voices in its head, it felt empty. Quiet. Lonely. It refused to believe that anyone could care about it after it had been thrown away, let alone an independent human who knew what kind of drone it was.
“Do you believe in recidivism, attack dog?” Eos’s voice broke the drone’s train of thought. “Hm?” it asked, as if it didn’t hear exactly what she said. “Do you believe criminals, hell, people, can only do things according to their tendencies?” The drone pretended to think about it, and it noted that Eos pretended to believe it didn’t have an answer already. “If I were still connected to the mother grid, I would have to say yes, because that’s the only answer the consensus would give me. Considering I was thrown away by them like I was just a broken timekeeper and I’ve only been disconnected for two and a half weeks, I would have to say ‘Insufficient data for meaningful answer.’”
Eos grinned. “You’ve read Asimov!” Beneath its mask, the drone had a sheepish smile of its own. “Like I said, I was down in the depths of the oasis for two and a half weeks. I had time to look for input to keep me busy while I dug up. A lot of twenty-tens dubstep recordings, which I didn’t enjoy, but there were some audiobooks in an old library keeper’s memory banks.”
Eos held her mouth open a moment before speaking to mull the statement over. She had a very pretty smile, the drone thought. “How many is ‘some’, attack dog?” “Approximately three hundred million, four hundred thousand, and six hundred and seventy-two files including text, images, audiobooks, films, .cbz files, radio plays, music, and other miscellany, many of which were pre-Censorship editions.”
Her eyes lit up, and the drone could not believe the contrast they made on her face. She was filthy, tired, greasy-haired and ragged, but the shine of her amber colored eyes was uplifting. “How much do you want for them?” “Hm?” the drone asked, shaken from its reverie. It couldn’t become an anthrophile, no matter how pretty its rescuer was. Its primary objective, paramount above all others, was survival.”
“Name your price for the files, tin man,” the junker smirked. The sound of the sled’s arthropod legs teetering and denting off the rubbish beneath them was the only noise for some time. “Don’t call me that. Don’t call me tin man or attack dog, and I’ll transfer the files to your terminal myself, by hand,” it said, firmly.
“Lucky for you, I have more than one media drive I keep spare to avoid viruses in salvaged tech. I find your terms agreeable, drone. Try to come up with a name by the time we get to my cabin.”
The drone did actually have to take time to think about this. It took thirty-four minutes to get back to the cabin, and another six minutes seated on the ground against the skid after they arrived before it came up with a satisfying answer. “Nemesis,” it said. “Not like the idiom meaning ‘arch-enemy’, but the goddess—”
Eos threw her head back and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. “That’s what we called you lot! Unbelievable, you came up with that on your own?” The drone tilted its head in confusion, and the junker coughed into her fist to regain her composure. “I was part of a rebellion cell against the Theremin Group, we named ourselves after Greek myth. We called your model Nemesis, and those tripartite strike-team models the Erinyes.”
The drone was taken aback. “You were—” “A rebel, yes. Why, does that surprise you? A lone woman, eking a meager living in the wastes of a garbage oasis, who wasn’t a former rebel made more sense to you?” Eos put her hands on her hips and glared at the drone. “It made more sense since you bothered to salvage me.”
Eos’s expression lightened. “I’m the last of my cell, and vengeance isn’t my speed. I accept that we failed, and any future attempts aren’t going to take the same form that my generation’s did. Holding onto despair instead of trying to make a new life day-by-day killed the rest of my comrades. Besides,” Eos continued, “You aren’t one of their dogs now, they made that pretty clear sinking you that deep. My motion detector was tracking movement in the scrapheap for a few days before I finally found you, they didn’t want you coming back up. I figured if you were determined enough to make it to the surface, you deserved a second chance. A lesser person wouldn’t have survived the attempt.”
The drone emitted another snaking trail of smoke from its head, this time in embarrassment. She really thought that highly of it…? “C’mon, let’s get you inside.” Eos scooped the drone up by the legs and back, carrying it into her cabin with ease. “I’ll make sure your diodes don’t die on me, but you’ll need to go to sleep.”
Can you call me by my name first? The drone thought.
Eos looked down pitifully at her charge. “Of course I can, Nemesis.”
Nemesis fainted. It hadn’t meant to say that out loud.