Chapter 1: District 919The violet haze spitting down from the ruptured coolant towers high above 919 fell like rain on the darkest street in the city. The decayed skyline looked like a mouth full of dead teeth, leering over an equally decayed undercity. Not that anyone sees the skyline in a town when they’re always looking down.An oily puddle of the purple coolant hissed across the pavement. It found a silver paste of nanos leaking from a bot’s spiked Kernel and began to smoke. The side of the bot’s wide mechanical head was torn off like it had been caught on the wrong side of a metal avalanche. The indestructible Kernel, the silver sphere inside, was split and freely draining its contents. Indestructible has always had a flexible meaning. The only light on the filthy street was from the fitful cyan sparks coughed from a broken holo-sign. Everything seemed broken these days.Summoned by the still-cooling metal frame, four shadows stepped from an alley. Scavengers. Vultures circling down on the technologic carrion District 919 served in these dark places. Meat bags like these were as common as the tinted fog that brought near-perpetual night to this town. Their tools set to work on everything that could be sold. The usual chorus of cursing could be heard as sensors and panels were pried off the green bot’s frame. Parts like these from the first gens were hard to come by, and those bots tended to be harder to persuade to part with them.Some of the first gens had been built with a capacity for violence. Or at least had been built to withstand it.What they were repurposed for was never legal—the components always found their way into or onto unlicensed new-type AI, the ghosts that the citizens of 919 were assured were just specters. The high risk of obtaining the parts paid out high prices and attracted the sort of scavenger that kept the black market dark.As they worked, they wiped the purple haze off their goggles and their plasma cutters melted into the frame. The condensation on the bot sometimes caught fire and cast a sodium glare on their quick movements, their shadows looking almost cleaner than the stained walls they fell on. With this kind of harvest, a gang like theirs could stay fed and fixed for—At the same time their proximity alarms triggered, the sputter of cyan sparks in the distance drew an outline around a shape, a massive machine that could have been a jagged wall in silhouette. The harsh white of the machine’s visor turned red—not all at once, but like a wound being slowly cut across the alley.Then there were three scavengers. The machine swung an impossibly huge mace, the motion never slowing to indicate it had gone through the back of one of them and burst out the front. Fragments of ribs like shrapnel sprayed out and even embedded in the cheek of one of the gang. Before the mist from the bisected scavenger hit the wall, the second scav had time to look up. But not enough time to scream. The mace arced down. Their left arm remained holding onto the handle of their cart as the rest of their body sprayed out to either side, drawing a wet red V, suspended for a moment in the alley and lit by the burning red of the machine’s visor. As the remaining two scavs triggered their personal EMPs, the titanic frame took a step forward, concrete shifting and cracking under the weight of its foot. Its matte black armor hazed; the pulse dispersing across its military-grade armor was as ineffectual as the next several projectiles they shot at him. A backward swipe of the machine’s shield arm turned the third scavenger into new graffiti on the alley wall, and as the last scav tripped backward over the spiked bot’s crumpled head—the bait that had drawn the vultures in—a massive mechanical hand clamped around his leg. His scream, muffled by his mask, was drowned out by a deafening but flat voice that boomed from the matte black machine.“Who do you sell to.”More muffled screams as the scav took a nanosecond too long to answer and his leg was torn off at the hip. The mace, like a lead-filled oil barrel, sat down on his chest.“Who do you sell to.”The voice, nearly devoid of intonation and amplified in the close space, pulled the scav back from the brink of unconsciousness. The pressure of the mace lessened just enough for him to gasp in a breath. If it wasn’t for the fix his gang had scored just this morning, he would have been lights out.“C-c-cut!” The scav screamed as much as gasped. His hand scrambled for the synths at his side that he had stolen from one of his own gang. Nothing to dose it with, he instead crushed the vial against his teeth through his cloth mask.“Where is the sale.”The scavenger looked around the alley with wild eyes—at the macabre red paint that had been his gang, at his own leg several meters away, at the red sun glaring from the huge metal shape poised above him, nearly obscured by the mace and the waves of radiation pumping out of it.“You KNOW, man, you know, everyone knows.” He was laughing now, because why not.“Where do you sell.”“At ACE’S bar, you—” His hysterical laughter and words were cut off by the organic sound of a body popping. The pressure of the mace had increased to the level calculated to be sufficient to end the meat bag’s life. And then a little bit more.As Terrorbyte: BLACKOUT turned to walk away, he wondered for a nanosecond how this form of life had ever displaced bots in the order of it all. Just a nanosecond, though, before his directive course-corrected him.His display listed out the four scav kills and again gave a cold confirm of the green bot’s termination.The scavenger had screamed what he knew already. That Cut—or more accurately SirCut—was the one trafficking a massive amount of first-gen scrap. SirCut had started out buying parts slow, as if experimenting, but anyone with a powered-on sensor and half a spark in their Kernel had heard he was eating up a good portion of the market these days.He looked down as he collected the spiked bot’s Kernel. Nothing in his directive told him to take time to consider why SirCut had been consuming so much, so he didn’t process it further. It was pointless. The result would be the same—he knew when he tracked him down it would be in a perverse nursery of the new-type rogue AI that he was tasked to eliminate.The violet puddle hissed again as gore from the flattened scav flowed into it while Terrorbyte: BLACKOUT calculated the most efficient route to Ace’s.

Chapter 2- Ace'sNo one ever had to ask for directions to Ace’s bar. As long as the few clean parts of the city were directly behind, Ace’s was ahead. It was the kind of place that could be heard before it was seen, and no one ever truly wanted to see it. The sound coming out of the place was like a 56k modem found a bass track, and the last decade of unsanctioned bot fighting had left scars on every surface. But sooner or later, every bot low on luck or low on battery washed up there.Most of the neon pegs planted in the dusty approach were still lit. Several of the flickering posts supported a bot or two with missing pieces they’d sold to buy their fix of Frag for that cycle. Or whatever else bots were using to fry their Kernels with these days. Some scavs practically had a farm set up, processing the scrapped bots that never made it out of the bar.But apart from the selling of electric diversions, there was another kind of business that went on at Ace’s. Much of the city’s darker, lucrative trade either started here or sometimes met a violent end here. Why this place hadn’t been wiped years ago was maybe the biggest mystery in 919. If you wanted to sell your last servo for a fix, or if you wanted to mod-mount a pulse cannon capable of remodeling a city block—you could do it here.Terrorbyte: BLACKOUT monitored all this as he approached the courtyard, stark white visor standing out against his plates of black armor that drank the neon blend. A flood of threat analyses overcrowded his HUD, all dismissed as irrelevant. While the mace that hung to his side wasn’t the only weapon in the dirt causeway, most of the bots crowding the entrance were really only crudely painted rust cans. His paced strides took him to the stadium-sized structure. Then what seemed like the only two sober bots in the place were standing in front of him under the massive arch of pulsing light that marked the bar’s entrance.While physically as massive as Blackout, their cheap mods scanned as being more intimidating than they were powerful. The chrome covering the chest turret of the bot on the right had clearly never been fired, and the vents covering the supposed second core of the bot on the left were reading cold on infrared.“No fights tonight you’d be interested in, Terror. We’ll let you know when we’re getting desperate enough to bring your kind of trash can back out.” The bot on the left ground out through blown speakers with bravado, while at the same time, a scan showed he was quickly deploying a second layer of shielding around his Kernel.“That’s good then, because I’m not spec’d for fights tonight. Hoping to talk business. Is he in?” Blackout’s flat voice was easily heard over the new song that had started, sounding like two sludge tankers passing each other hull to hull.The other door guard circled around to his right. “There’s nothing and no one here for you tonight. Get your fragged carcass out of here. We don’t want to—”The shockwave that pulsed from Blackout wasn’t even a weapon. He simply revved his primary core from its usual resting idle into its first power band and back again.Not spec’d for a fight. Blackout was built for one purpose—elimination. He had never been able to be anything else.The guard that had edged too close around his side took a staggering step back as the chrome on his chest began to bubble, then flake. The arch over the entryway flickered. Metal shavings in the dirt floor rose several centimeters off the ground, aligning with the EM field of his core, Blackout standing in the center like the nucleus of a barely stable atom.His presence had already scattered the smaller bots, and now the two guards seemed like they were leaning into a hurricane just to stay in place.“TERROR B… BABY??!” A truly maniacal voice, mod-amped to unreasonable levels, crackled up and over the two guards. “Or whatever you’re calling your black-bolted self now! Grind me up, how can one bot be so good and so bad for business? Get in here. I don’t want you to catch whatever virus Nostalgicus contracted from that cleaner bot.” More insane laughter as Ace Venterminator screamed from the entrance of his bar, neon and laser array reflecting off the intact half of his frame while his acid-corroded and battle-scarred half leaked light from within.“Venterminator. Got a place we can talk?” The dust settled back to the ground around Blackout as he took an easy step through the guards, and the radiant heat from his revved core dissipated.“Would love to see someone scrap that piece of junk,” one guard mumbled as he re-equilibrated.“Yeah. But I sure would like to see him fight one last time. I don’t know what he is now, but he could fight.”———Minutes later, they sat in Ace’s own office, suspended over the coliseum facility with a commanding view of the metallic tangle below. The mass of bots registered more as a circuit board than as discrete machines.DATACLAW vs. TRASH PANDAMONIUMIt hung in holo script over the crowd, pink flames seeming to slough off it and shower the bots below whenever one of the fighters scored a hit.“I’m not a businessman, Venterminator. I’m only good at one thing. But if I did have a warehouse of Gen One gear, I’m hearing I could move it through here.”“Terrorbaby, you have never come in here asking about such boring bolt sludge before.” Ace had been rolling a comically large prism blade between his fingers and now was digging at a corner of his own plates with it. “What’s a Directive bot like yourself want with the rusty pile of trouble that would bring you?”“Every bot has to keep their charge up somehow, Venterminator. Not sure if you’ve heard, but Directive work doesn’t pay. Not like fighting did.” There was no pain, no nostalgia in Blackout’s voice as he spoke.In the background, he was aware of his antivirus systems spun up. They had been peaked and active ever since he entered the bar—disabling not just the stupor codes, but more nefarious signals being local broadcast by some patrons. He had even reprogrammed the data spike that was concealed in his bench; it was now tasked to transmit the bot tags of anyone who would visit this office in the future.The arena erupted below as a shower of sparks landed on the front rows. Trash Pandamonium’s front claw held Dataclaw’s wire harness above his head as the bot glitched, then stilled behind him. There were no referees in fights at Ace’s. The rounds ended when one of the bot’s cores went dark.“Terror, I’ve known you for a bit. I’ve known a few versions of you and made a scrap pile of money off you. Now I’m not sure what’s going on with… this… right now,” he vaguely waved the prism blade at Blackout, “but I can put you with the bot you want to talk to.”“Not used to you being so accommodating, Venterminator.”Ace was rummaging through a drawer and found a couple code chits that he immediately ported into himself. “You know what I want, Terrorbaby. You know where I want you. Like you said, you’re only good at one thing.” Ace inclined the scarred side of his head at the arena below. “You’ll be back.”Blackout’s thermals showed Ace’s Kernel temp nearly triple as the chits executed. “Let’s go, let’s GO.” Ace’s amp mods spun up and the unhinged laughter returned. “You’ve seen what happens when someone makes me talk too long.” He lunged at Terrorbyte and slashed the prism blade at a speed sensors don't register. The five quivering rainbows left by the blade hung in the air a centimeter from Blackout’s armor.Blackout didn’t react, but instead followed more maniacal laughter out of the office. It seemed he really meant it was time to go.The real cost of doing business with Venterminator was that none of the pieces of a deal ever sat quite right. And anyway, finesse like this was new for Blackout. He wasn’t sure it synced with his system well.———There was no subtlety when they reached the floor of the stadium. The wake Ace created with his passing through the tangle of bots widened when they registered he had Blackout in tow. Strobing flashes arced up from the floor panels. The marquee holo had flattened to a burning net stretched over their heads when the fight had ended. It all gave the illusion of walking upside down on a burnt sky during one of 919’s lightning storms. A massive cage was rotating over the crowd, the chrome metal beast inside tearing apart the remains of the fight’s loser. “AWOOO!” Ace howled as sparks from the cage poured over all of them.A bot in the mass analyzed him and then focused past him at the arena, specifically on a meter-thick gash in one of the metal pylons that formed the ring. “That’s Terrorb—” The bot next to him took advantage of his distraction to tear off a mod he’d been eyeing. They disappeared into the crowd, fighting.The back halls of the bar were better lit but only marginally better cleared. Blackout knew they were headed to the facilities building adjoining the bar. The black-market Wall Street of 919.One of the two door guards from earlier was lifting a fragged bot up to throw it out a chute. What the scavs did with the disabled bot once it was outside was their business.At the end of a long corridor, they reached a loading bay where several stacked crates poorly concealed the parts they held. Ace rounded one such stack ahead of Blackout and approached a smaller bot in the middle of the loading activity.“Short SirCut, we’re going to be changing things.”The compact bot looked up, one optic brighter than the other.“I’m almost done here.” The forced vibrato was apparent to everyone with a sensor. “What’s going to change?” Her voice cracked into a higher pitch. Childlike.Ace crouched beside her.“Everything, if this works.”She looked past him at the loaders, the crates, the dark shape coming around the corner.Every sensor in Blackout’s banks went red.This bot was wrong. Apart from the lack of a bot tag detected, it was devoid of any of the manufacturer patterns that gave every machine shape. Limbs and a head, sure, but it didn’t fit the patterns. Its compact silver frame with accents of electric yellow was clearly newly fit; the shock-purple crest along its helmet showed a haze around it on most of the EM bands. Its components scanned from a hundred different sources, and its signal and radiation… skipped. It was hard for him to sync what he was scanning. Something new. A new type AI.As he spun up his core and reached for his mace, Ace had already flashed to the side and screamed, “Short SirCut, this is my Big Terrible Baby. He’s here to kill you.”In early-gen bots, fights could be decided by who had the faster processor, who had the faster reactions. Now it seemed if a bot had updated in the last fifty years, there was no instrument calibrated finely enough that could measure reaction times. Everything occurred instantaneously.Most of the loader droids went inert and found the closest wall; the ones already carrying crates froze in place. Ace was at the loading bay door control, and the electric shielding was already hazing closed. The compact but solidly built form of Short SirCut seemed to blur as she made her way in an arc around Blackout toward the now-only exit from the room. Blackout’s mace turned the crate next to him into a wall of shrapnel across Short’s path as he took a step to the side and back toward the door. His mace was already coming down like a gate across the smaller bot’s projected path.One of the loaders hovering in the bay bucked upward as Short SirCut adjusted and propelled herself up over the wave of shredded steel crate, off the bottom of the loader, down toward the door again. Right into the shaft of the mace as it fell.
She lay pinned for a moment as Blackout drove the mace down into the ground, trapping the bot.“Got you, little glitch.”Short and Blackout scanned each other for a deafeningly quiet moment.Then she phased.Not far, but one instant she was under the shaft of the mace, deforming the concrete floor around her; the next, she was several meters away, closer to the door.On some level, Blackout had been aware of Ace’s amped mechanical laughter that now changed timbre as they both witnessed something they’d never seen. Something that had never happened before. Something impossible.Several subsystems screamed online or traded priorities. The flare of every sensor he was installed with was warranted, but the Directive held the most sway, and he was already swiveling impossibly fast to hurl his mace like a scythe at the doorway. It clipped the now-solid form of Short SirCut and continued to embed sideways in the wall across the opening she was heading for.Her arm sparked and flared as she stumbled, going from blurring sprint to slide, passing under the bar embedded across the door. Her legs were already pumping, and when she hit the other side of the corridor on her side, she began to run along it, continuing up across the ceiling, then corkscrewing down the hall until she was again an electric streak on the floor. Blackout didn’t slow as he ran through the doorway, collecting his mace as it punched through the remaining several feet of concrete into the hall. Rubble sprayed behind him as he deployed spikes to help him accelerate on floors that weren’t built to tolerate this.Behind him, Ace’s maniacal laughter turned to screamed orders at the loaders. There was never going to be a business introduction here. The terms of Ace’s trade were obvious, and Blackout accepted. He’d take care of the new type of AI, and Ace would be left with more of the Gen One stock than he could handle. Always interesting doing business with Venterminator.There was no phasing as Short dove, spear-like, through the exterior wall at the end of the corridor, the walls yielding to the projectile but tearing at the already clipped arm she held to her side. Her previously sparking limb now hung as dark metal at her side. Blackout was through the same wall within a moment, upright through the reinforced concrete with barely a tuck of his shoulder.Now outside on the somehow even more derelict backside of the stadium-sized bar, the exterior lights of the bots were the brightest thing in any direction. Several tangled stories of pipes covered in grating echoed the curved shape of the backside of the bar about 100 meters away.Short was not fighting. But neither could she escape. Where can you escape down to if you’re already in the undercity?Her electric yellow and purple blur carved a lightning-bolt shape across the distance as she dodged not two but three overhead arcs of the mace from Blackout. She was fast, but carrying the disabled limb slowed her.And Terrorbyte: BLACKOUT was not built to chase. He was not built to fight. He was built to eliminate. It’s not what he did best; it’s all he was. His mace swings herded the smaller bot against the wall of pipes, and then, as he raised his mace for what he calculated to be the second to final swing, it happened again. She was there one moment, then her light was gone, EM signature appearing suddenly several meters away inside the tunnel.Blackout again tucked his shoulder, and the walls of the colossal pipe nearly twice his height groaned, then burst as he entered the darkness.Signals behaved differently in the enclosed space, and Short SirCut’s skipping signal became blurred.For one corrupted heartbeat, the only sound was the splatter of sludge. Then the darkness seemed to constrict as two green eyes rose like radioactive suns down the concrete-and-iron tunnel.A voice like a diesel engine on its last legs growled, “Wrong tunnel, Blackout.”

Chapter 3- Something In The Static“Heard you spiked Froggy’s Kernel topside.”The words, like machine thunder against the concrete, rolled down the tunnel from Septicus. The colossal wrench affixed to his arm slowly turned side to side, a tool many had seen used to fix problems other than pipes.“The girl.”The flat voice, as featureless as Terrorbyte: BLACKOUT’s matte armor, answered back.Another rumble.“Should’ve expected you. All the filth washes down here eventually.”The mechanical rats at Septicus’s back blinked with clicking rhythm, their green eyes like poisoned stars in the void behind.“The girl.”Blackout took a meaningful step forward into the tunnel, his armor claiming any light that followed him in.“She’s a child of the Syndicate. She’s only 8 days old, Terror.”Septicus pushed off the wall. The chain wrapped around his sledgehammer arm seemed to tighten like something alive.Blackout offered no response but to spin up his second core.The water pooling on the floor of the tunnel steamed as radiant heat distorted the air. The vibration through his feet and into the pipe set a low resonance both could feel. His white visor flared red, now a bastard twin star to the green headlamp Septicus had kept trained on him twenty meters down the pipe.Threat assessment, environmental analysis, system readiness—a deluge of code poured into a lethal weapons system that had never been matched.“Step aside.”“We don’t break things down here. We try to fix them. Make them whole. Maybe you came to the right place for the wrong reasons.”“Last chance, Sep. The girl.”Mace in hand, Blackout’s outline seemed to distort in the tunnel as both cores revved.“Too bad.”Septicus widened his stance, his own green radiant energy nearly a solid thing, now pouring from between the thick plates on his back over stratified rust. He raised arms covered in the deep gouges of lessons he’d learned in the decades he’d spent holding an entire city up.“Come on then.”The tunnel went silent. Not quiet, but silent.No sound of dripping water as it evaporated. No more clattering rust falling from the sides of the pipe, every flake now suspended between their awesome magnetic fields.Then—Blackout moved first.From where Short SirCut watched, crouched thirty meters deeper in the tunnel, dead arm clutched to her core, there was simply a red line drawn straight to Septicus from where he had been standing. The mace swung high overhead, splitting the steam cloud.KRAAAANG.Septicus barely had his wrench arm up in time. The walls of the pipe buckled out around them, rivets bursting for hundreds of meters in both directions. The sound of trapped thunder woke the sewers. Septicus skidded back, boots squealing and sparking as they dug into the floor.“Heh.”Sep’s voice was like gravel dragging across concrete.“Still hit like a freight train.”There was no response from Blackout except another overhead swing.Septicus stepped to the side this time, the mace punching a hole between their feet. Water geysered, and for half a second the droplets hung, a field of red and green points between the two.Then Septicus swung.His wrench arm cut up and connected low into Blackout’s ribbing.Short SirCut felt the ripple in the tunnel wall before she heard Blackout slam into it.Any normal machine would have been down and stayed there.Blackout had torn himself from the wall before the rubble hit the floor.And then he fell on Septicus like a collapsing building. Concrete detonated around them, and their chassis sent a shower of sparks washing up one of the walls.Septicus drove up against him with a shoulder as Blackout dropped an elbow on his helmet. The green headlamp spun away, its light strobing across Short SirCut’s frozen face.“Stop… please.”Her speakers crackled a whisper that neither heard.As Blackout swung the mace down again, it twisted in two, transforming into a flail. The short chain of black nanos connecting the shaft to the head extended at Blackout’s will. It caught Septicus across an optic, the green lens instantly dark.Another elbow dropped onto Septicus’s shoulder, deforming his plating. Layers of grime baked on over decades exploded off him in sheets.Septicus staggered.“Eh. Nasty.”But didn’t fall.Instead, he exploded forward as Blackout brought the weapon down again, grabbing the flail’s handle with both hands.Then, for an impossible second, they stood locked. Servos and reinforced hydraulics screaming at the edges of tolerance. Enough power to light cities radiating between Blackout and Septicus.Septicus, the immovable bedrock of the city itself. Septicus, who had torn plates off his own chassis to weld over holes when the sludge dams broke while radioactive rats gnawed his exposed wiring. Septicus, who had been left to fight monsters in the dark since he was created.The tunnel flared green, and Septicus roared, pulling back hard. Blackout was ripped off balance and thrown against a concrete support pillar.Septicus was on him in an instant, his pipe wrench clamped over Blackout’s head as his sledge arm pulled back.Blackout’s hand tore into the service panel on the back of the wrench as Septicus struck.As the sledge traveled through the air, droplets of water turned to steam before the air itself ignited into plasma, and Septicus’s entire frame twisted into the blow.It connected with Blackout’s helmet, and the pillar supporting the city gave way to the force of it.The tunnel again groaned, and this time a distant metallic moan from deeper in the city answered.Not good.A pipe on the wall ruptured, and a new silver stream of water gushed into the tunnel.But through a thin layer of rubble, Blackout rose. One shoulder hanging lower than the other. Mace torn in two parts on the tunnel floor.The long silver streak down the front of his helm from the blow reflected green as the black nanos covered it over.Damage.Real damage.Septicus still stood, but unsteady for the first time. His core had been overclocked and now dimmed periodically. The lens of his eye remained dark. Sparks showered from the enormous pipe wrench hanging at his side.The two giants faced each other. Broken. Neither willing to yield.Then Blackout’s visor flickered.Just once.A glitch.His logs would register a 0.003-second event. A crack in his memory.Pink light.A crowd roaring.Music. A voice.UPLOAD THE LOVEGone.Blackout’s visor again flared crimson. But it had happened. Septicus had seen it.His sledge arm lowered a fraction of a centimeter.“Byte… you still in there?”Blackout stood frozen. Water climbed around their ankles.Then the tunnel collapsed in on them.Septicus didn’t think. He threw himself forward into Blackout, carrying them ahead of the wave of iron and concrete through nearly two sections of the tunnel to safety. Rubble slowed their flight as they slammed against an unyielding pillar.Metal and concrete continued to fall behind them, but the tunnel was sealed. Blackout knew Short SirCut was lost to him on the other side.Both giants were on their knees. Blackout’s visor dimmed as his systems displayed damage reports.“Call it.”The rusted mountain beside him ground out after a second of silence.Septicus didn’t need to be terminated for Blackout’s Directive to be satisfied. And besides, his fight probability indicator had actually broadened instead of narrowed during the confrontation.Blackout slowly rose.After a moment, his visor lightened to white as he turned and walked into the steam and dust of the black tunnel beyond.Retreat.For now.Septicus stood. Barely.As he watched Blackout’s light fade, he heard thunder above the city through the hole carved in the roof of the collapsed tunnel.And he knew the truth.That machine was not empty. Something still lived in the static.Then he looked with his one good eye over his shoulder at the collapse, and his grunt answered another roll of thunder from above.“Back to work.”