Worker!Drone x V

Staying still, eyes closed

Well, the horrifying program's spare parts somehow transmuted into black orbs that vanished with a flash of electricity. Despite that, you knew there were traces of code in the surrounding machines. There's no way it could have gotten that large off preying on Worker Drones for that long.

You could theoretically take the parts, extract the code, and have a slight fragment of the Solver. The code was dense anyway, as most drones had a few terabytes of data in themselves anyway.

Well, theoretically.

You took a tiny glass pane with a stain of V's nanobots and fitted it inside the bigger storage unit under your desk. It appeared that the nanobots tried disassembling everything, not just robots.

A counterpart to your own ones, being capable of creating constructs and rebuilding parts of the body. Strange.

You wondered if it was worth the time to try and counter the acidic properties of Disassembly Drone nanites. Calculating...it would certainly increase your survivability in hypothetical combat scenarios by 12%. Was it worth the time? Higher combat survival meant you would be alive for much longer, or your chances of living longer were just better, also meaning your collection of scientific knowledge would survive longer.

You sat down, letting your chair spin you and itself around as you pressed the button on a massive panel on the wall, producing a whirring noise from somewhere in the walls.

A part of the roof opened up, letting a giant circular canister drop down from the ceiling, landing with a quiet thunk. Test #12 was almost a success, with the arms and legs being perfectly replicated, and the body being slightly warped, its main shape being...off. The head was...

Completely unrecognisable. The visor was a failure, splotches of glass here and there all over its head, and the mouth was a huge maw, reminiscent of the Disassembly Drones, just without the teeth.

You could never understand how a drone's mouth worked. It could stretch, move around, all over the place. Elastic alloy? Molecular shenanigans? Best not to dwell on that. Perfectionism only served to delay.

Each disassembly drone had a unique signature in their nanobots, and you hoped to replicate J through her own signature. Primitive DNA of sorts.

At least it was an improvement over Test #1.

You tapped a button on the stasis tube, draining the liquid holding the drone in place, and opening the glass like a door. You dragged the disassembly drone's body out and placed it onto a chair. Maybe you could perfect it, like a blacksmith reshaping metal to create a sharp sword.

Hold on...what was that noise?

Your eyes widened slightly at the humming noise, moving your head to the side a few inches to dodge a point blank laser from a tiny extension of J's prototype body. The solver took over the body?! Humans were smart, but...

"Ugh..." The Solver groaned.

It copied your laser. Could this mean...each drone did not have an individual solver. It was all one program. This could be exploited for sure! And it might have used some of the matter used to build its body to create that laser. This was concerning. It was manipulating machinery that was creating it in the first place.

The body recreator should have only put the stray pieces of the Solver in the last minutes of the body's creation.

"So you are alive?"

The program tried readying its laser again, but the humming noise stopped, signifying a failure in its laser.

"Really? I brought you here and you immediately tried to kill me?" You said, judging tone in your voice.