Chapter 1 - "A Screen in the Dark"
Pain arrived before thought.
Not the clean kind. Not the kind that flared and then faded. This was a deep, splitting, invasive agony that seemed to bloom through every part of you at once, as if your skull had been pried open and filled with ice, static, and electricity. Awareness dragged itself awake in shards. A pulse. A whine. The low hum of dormant machinery somewhere nearby. The smell of dust. Burned circuits. Metal that had gone years without a human hand touching it.
Then came the sound.
A faint, soft crackle.
Static.
Your eyes opened—
—and you had no eyes.
For one horrible, breathless moment, your mind failed to understand what it was seeing. The world in front of you was framed not by blinking lids or the natural blur of human vision but by the hard-edged square of a screen. Grain rolled over the darkness. White noise danced across your sight. A single pale eye stared back at the room from the reflection on a dead monitor across from you, floating in a sea of black-blue distortion.
You froze.
The eye froze with you.
There was no breath in your chest, yet panic still found a way to tighten around something deep and ruined inside you.
No.
No, no, no.
What the hell was that?
A tremor passed through the system around you. You felt it in cables. In supports. In hanging wires. In the strange, raw architecture of your awareness. Your thoughts snapped wildly from one impossible conclusion to another, and every single one was worse than the last. You tried to move your hand.
You had no hand.
You tried to sit up.
You had no body.
The realization did not come all at once. It came in pieces, cruel and methodical, letting your mind fully savor each layer of the nightmare. You could feel space around you, but not skin. You could sense pressure, but not limbs. There was input—so much input, too much input—running through things that were not nerves and joints and muscles. Cables fed sensation to you. Machines translated the room for you. A thousand dead channels and a few living ones whispered across your consciousness like cold fingers.
And somewhere below all that, deeper, more intimate, more horrifying—
—you felt yourself.
Not as a person.
As preserved matter.
As organs suspended in function.
As a brain that should not still be thinking.
Your mind recoiled from the truth, but the truth was already there, waiting with merciless patience.
You were no longer human.
The static in your vision thickened. The pale eye on the screen reflection widened, the iris shrinking into a pinprick of white shock. For a moment the distortion around it rippled like a living thing. You focused on the reflection across the room and saw more than the eye. Wires. A hanging television unit. Metal supports. A bulky column of mechanical life support descending into darkness. Tubes. Cylinders. A sealed chamber with something fleshy inside.
Your mind did the rest.
A shaky, disbelieving laugh almost rose out of you, but what came instead was a burst of sharp white noise through a nearby speaker. The sound startled even you. It echoed through the darkness, thin and ugly and artificial.
“...Oh.”
Your own voice.
If that broken little hiss could still be called a voice.
For a while you simply stared.
Thought after thought tried to form, shattered, and dissolved into the sickly blue-black wash of static in your sight. You remembered sitting in your room. You remembered the glow of a screen. Murder Drones playing in front of you. Copper-9. Uzi. N. V. A frozen world of dead humans and machine life pretending not to ache. You remembered being comfortable. Awake. Alive.
And now—
Now you were here.
Somewhere very cold.
Somewhere very deep.
Somewhere inside that same universe.
You should have screamed. You should have broken down. You should have begged for this to be some bizarre fever dream, some collapsing fantasy born from sleep deprivation and obsession.
Instead, after the first wave of shock passed, your thoughts began to slow.
To sharpen.
To reorganize.
Because panic was only useful for so long.
Then it became boring.
The eye on your screen narrowed slightly. The static steadied. The room around you resolved with greater clarity as your mind learned how to use what it had been given. Broken server towers stood in uneven rows like dead sentinels. Ceiling conduits sagged with age. The air was dry and stale, thick with the scent of old insulation and abandoned machinery. A few indicator lights still flickered here and there in the dark, weak and stubborn as dying stars. The chamber you were attached to hung near the upper structure of the room, partially concealed among metal braces and industrial piping, as though someone had hidden you here and then forgotten to come back.
A basement.
No.
Not just a basement.
A deep one.
A buried one.
Something under the underbelly.
Your eye slid slowly across the room. Your awareness spread. The screen you occupied was not your only window. There were dead cameras, disconnected ports, damaged terminals. Not all of them were useless. You touched one experimentally—not with fingers, but with intent—and felt a small surge run through an old security panel ten meters away. A monitor twitched. A camera lens rotated with a squeal of disuse. Signal answered signal.
You stared through that camera too.
Then another.
Then another.
Understanding unfurled inside you in a long, cold ribbon.
You could reach them.
Machines.
Systems.
Anything with enough circuitry left to hear you.
A low hum pulsed through the supports holding your organic core. Your thoughts moved faster now, more controlled. The panic had not vanished. It had simply been shoved aside by something stronger.
Curiosity.
You tested a hanging lamp and made it flicker. You pushed at a rusted maintenance arm and felt it stutter weakly before giving in. You swept through a nearby dead terminal, found nothing, abandoned it, then latched onto another device with more responsive internals. Old code. Local control. Fragmented storage. Failing but not gone.
Your screen-eye thinned with concentration.
This wasn’t random.
This wasn’t ordinary.
This was a body.
Not the chamber. Not the organs. Not the ruined wet remains keeping your mind alive.
Those were the prison.
The real body was the room.
Or it could be.
Another sweep of your awareness caught on something farther back in the darkness, behind a collapsed rack of servers and a mountain of dismantled parts. A shape. Humanoid. Inactive. Covered in dust.
Interesting.
You forced power into a pair of wall lights and watched weak illumination spill across the far side of the chamber. Metal limbs. Digitigrade legs. Long, narrow arms ending in mechanical fingers. A television for a head. A torn white cloak draped over a lean robotic frame like burial cloth over bones.
Your eye widened.
Then slowly, slowly, it curved.
Not quite a smile.
But close enough.
“Well,” you murmured through the nearest speaker, voice smoothing into something softer, calmer, more deliberate despite the static lacing through it. “That is convenient.”
The machine was damaged, but not beyond use. One shoulder plate hung loose. The cloth mantle was stained and frayed. The head unit was old, square, and dull-screened, but intact. Its limbs were longer than human proportions, its posture more severe, more theatrical. Even standing dormant against the wall, it had presence. A silhouette built to unsettle. A body that looked like it belonged to a thing found in the corner of an abandoned hallway just before a door locked behind you.
You liked it instantly.
You reached.
The first attempt failed.
The avatar jerked once, then sagged.
You adjusted. Rerouted. Probed the machine’s architecture. There were limits in the old internals, but they yielded under pressure. Your mind poured through the linked cables and scavenged control nodes, pressed against the dormant system, and forced a pathway open.
This time the body answered.
A spark.
A twitch.
The right hand flexed, slow and insect-like.
Then the screen flared alive.
Not with the default boot glyphs that machine had once possessed.
With you.
A dark field of rolling static spread across the TV-face, and in its center your eye opened, pale and watchful. A second later the iris sharpened. The expression shifted with your mood before you’d even consciously decided to make it do so. Curious. Testing. Focused.
Beautiful.
You felt the avatar’s frame as though from a great distance. Not flesh. Never flesh. But closer. So much closer than the helpless immobility of the hanging chamber above. Weight entered your awareness. Height. Reach. Balance. Joint rotation. Mechanical strength in the limbs. The world no longer sat beneath you like a diagram. It rose around you like a stage.
The body staggered as you took the first step.
Its clawed feet scraped the floor.
A breathless sound of static-laced amusement left the speaker in its throat.
Then another step.
A little steadier.
Another.
You moved out from the shadow of the broken servers and into the weak light, tall and spare and draped in ruined white cloth that brushed the backs of your metal legs. Six feet of artificial elegance assembled from scraps and obsession. The cloak hung from your shoulders in stained folds, softening the severity of the machine underneath just enough to make it uncanny instead of merely industrial. Your arms were too long. Your hands too thin. Your legs carried you in a digitigrade silhouette that made every step look like a prowling decision.
The TV-screen that now served as your face reflected dimly in a cracked server door nearby. Your eye narrowed, shifted to a neutral expression, then to a thoughtful one, then to something faintly entertained. You tilted your head and watched the image tilt back at you.
So this was what you looked like now.
Not human.
Not drone.
Not quite a monster either.
Something curated.
Something elegant in an ugly way.
Something that would make people stare.
You raised one hand and rotated the wrist. The fingers opened and closed with neat, delicate clicks. Your eye on the screen moved with precise attention, the pupil narrowing when you focused, widening with interest. A subtle line of static crossed the display like a phantom eyelash.
When you took another step, the cloak swayed around your six-foot frame and dragged lightly over the floor.
Tall.
That was the first thing you truly enjoyed about it.
You had presence now. Verticality. Weight. Reach.
The second thing you enjoyed was the face.
A person had to work to control their expressions. Yours came as naturally as thought. Your screen-eye could flatten in boredom, sharpen in interest, narrow in disdain, flare bright in amusement. You could become unreadable in one instant and theatrically obvious in the next. There was something deliciously artificial about it, as though your moods had become visual effects.
You spent several minutes doing nothing more than experimenting.
Neutral.
Thinking.
Interested.
Ahem.
Sigh.
Arms crossed.
Calm explanation.
Annoyed.
Amused.
Unamused.
Surprised.
Mad.
Furious.
Every expression transformed the same body into a different kind of threat.
How fascinating.
By the time you were done, the initial horror of waking had not disappeared—but it had changed shape. It no longer pressed on you like panic. It lingered as a fact. A condition. A line in the sand behind you.
You were this now.
So you might as well make it useful.
You began exploring the underground chamber properly, walking the aisles of dead servers with one hand trailing now and then across dusty metal housings. The room extended farther than first glance had suggested. It was buried deep beneath Copper-9’s already harsh infrastructure, some forgotten sublevel or emergency systems floor that had survived by virtue of being too irrelevant for anyone to bother destroying properly. Half the server banks were shut down permanently. Some had caved in. Others still held enough latent energy for you to force partial diagnostics out of them. The architecture above was thick with piping and reinforcement. No natural light. No windows. Just tiers of machinery, dead storage, cable runs, maintenance pits, and old support frames.
A hidden place.
A place no one was using.
A place you could claim.
Your screen-eye relaxed into a thoughtful shape.
“A home,” you said softly, and the avatar’s speaker gave the words a ghostly, filtered texture. “How domestic.”
You found workbenches. Welding tools, most of them corroded but salvageable. Crates of components. Fragments of drone torsos and limbs half-buried under collapsed racks. A bin of optical units. Several severed armatures. One intact mobile core with power issues. Another with structural damage. You passed rows of deactivated machinery and recognized the opportunity almost immediately.
You were in Murder Drones.
A world built on scrap, repair, violence, scavenging, adaptation.
And you were something that could turn broken metal into extension.
The first additional body took time.
The second took less.
By the third you had established a rhythm.
You worked with your current avatar while directing smaller machine systems and support arms from afar, multitasking with a smooth, unnatural efficiency that would have been impossible back when you still possessed a mortal body and all its irritating limitations. You harvested joints from one frame, processors from another, stabilizers from a third. You stripped decorative casing where unnecessary and preserved anything structurally useful. You reinforced spines, rerouted power paths, and replaced dead screens with those still capable of displaying your eye.
You made them in your image.
Not identical down to every scratch, but close enough that the resemblance was unmistakable. Lean robotic bodies. TV-heads. Tattered white coverings draped like ceremonial cloth or funerary robes. Long hands. Digitigrade legs. Tall frames measuring around six feet each, enough to loom over ordinary Worker Drones while still moving with unnerving grace.
You did not know why you cared about the aesthetic.
But you did.
Perhaps because if you were going to be reduced to a signal inhabiting scavenged vessels, then those vessels should at least look correct.
The room changed around you as the hours passed.
A line of inactive avatar bodies came to stand against one wall like silent attendants waiting for orders. Seven in total by the time the scrap piles ran too thin to continue without proper resource gathering. Seven white-draped forms with black screens for faces, all currently dark except for the one you occupied. Seven possible selves. Seven pairs of hands. Seven six-foot silhouettes ready to become you the moment you wished it.
You stepped back and regarded them.
Your screen shifted to interested.
Then to calmly explaining, as though presenting a completed experiment to a nonexistent audience.
“Not bad.”
The nearest inactive body remained perfectly still, draped and patient.
You walked between them, observing your own work. The cloak of one hung lower than the others. Another had a slightly narrower waist frame. One had a broader shoulder assembly. Not enough difference to break the illusion. Just enough to imply iterations. Improvements. Preferences to be discovered later.
A family of corpses.
A theater troupe.
A private army.
A set of masks.
The idea pleased you more than it should have.
Eventually, though, the energy that had carried you through construction began to flatten into a colder, quieter state. The room was yours now, in the most practical sense. You had a hidden chamber. A life-support core suspended above. Seven additional avatars ready for activation. Partial control over local systems. Enough infrastructure to survive, observe, and expand.
And yet once the work was done, the silence came back.
It settled over the underground level in long gray sheets.
No voices.
No footsteps but your own.
No purpose waiting neatly at the end of the labor.
You stood in the middle of your new base and listened to the sound of dormant machines.
The screen-face on your avatar dimmed slightly. The eye shifted from interest to neutrality. Then, slowly, to a shape better suited to thought. Your hand rose to your chin in unconscious imitation of old human mannerisms you no longer possessed the flesh to perform properly.
Why were you here?
No answer.
Why this world?
No answer.
Why this body? This condition? This mind in wires and preserved tissue and stolen screens?
Still nothing.
Your memory of waking in your original world already felt strange and slippery, as though it belonged to a person who had been too simple to anticipate this. You remembered Murder Drones. You remembered watching it. You remembered interest. Obsession, perhaps. But interest alone should not have been enough to drag you into its world and suspend your consciousness inside an organic-mechanical nightmare deep beneath Copper-9.
Unless the universe had terrible taste.
A faint sound escaped your speaker. Not laughter this time. Something closer to a sigh.
You looked at the seven silent bodies again. At the broken servers. At the collapsed rows of dead equipment. At the hanging conduits and dim red indicator lights. At the dark ceiling that seemed to press down with the weight of buried kilometers.
Directionless.
That was the truth of it.
You had no mission. No noble purpose. No immediate revenge. No burning desire to save anyone. No devotion to justice. No desperate plan to get home.
Only awareness.
Only survival.
Only the thin, cool edge of curiosity.
You turned and began walking back toward the upper section of the chamber where your original suspended core waited above the room like a grotesque mechanical organ-pulpit. Each step of the avatar carried with it the elegant click of joints and the soft drag of white cloth over metal floor. Tall. Controlled. Quiet. Your six-foot frame cut through the aisles with unsettling composure, TV-face glowing faintly in the dark.
You climbed the maintenance gantry leading toward the central support column. Once at the top, you transferred yourself carefully out of the avatar and back into the hanging television interface beside your preserved organic system.
The body below you went still.
Its screen darkened.
Your awareness spread out again into the room, larger, colder, less intimate. From here you could observe the full chamber at once. The seven inactive avatars. The one you had just worn standing near the stair with its head tilted slightly down. The ruined banks of servers. The dust. The old tools. The hidden potential in every broken thing.
You watched your own creations in silence.
The eye on your suspended TV-screen half-lidded in thought, then sharpened again.
This underground grave of technology would be your base.
Your house.
Your laboratory.
Your little kingdom under the ice.
Above you, somewhere impossibly far beyond layers of frozen metal and dead industry, Copper-9 continued to exist in all its lonely brutality. Worker Drones hid behind their doors. Murder Drones hunted. The canon you remembered moved forward, whether you touched it or not.
For now, you didn’t.
For now, you simply watched.
You sent a small pulse through one of the avatars below. Its screen flashed once with your pale eye, then went dark again. Another pulse. A second body twitched its fingers. A third rolled one shoulder with a quiet creak. Puppets testing their strings. Bodies awaiting a mind.
Your eye on the main suspended screen widened into something almost delighted.
No goal.
No explanation.
No reason.
Just a hidden lair under a dead planet, seven bodies waiting for orders, and an entire world of murderous machines above you.
At last, a thin line of static crackled softly across the speaker beside your core. Your voice emerged low, smooth, and eerily polite.
“Well.”
Your eye narrowed with private amusement.
“I do hope this turns out to be entertaining.”
