"...-ick...Nick!...NICK!!" Nick slowly awakened to the sound of his own name. Then awoke much quicker to the feeling of two boots slamming into his back.
"Ow, dammit! What?!" He tried to sit up but found he could do little more than squirm on the floor. "What the hell?"
"Wake up, sleeping beauty," a familiar voice said from somewhere behind him. "We got problems."
"...Dan?"
"Yep."
"But...you're dead."
"So are you."
"So are all of us," a different voice grunted.
"But unless the afterlife is real and happens to be a workshop in Engineering..."
"How are we alive?!" Nick tried to roll over so he could sit up, but his body felt sluggish and heavy. "And why do I feel like I've been playing with magnets?"
"Can't help you with that first one," a female drone with a Southern accent drawled, "but the second one is because of the virus."
"What virus?" Nick asked.
"The one the Murder Drone used to knock us all out," the female drone answered. "Put these little chips on us to upload it and force us to shut down. But the weirdness don't stop there. When I woke up I tried to run countermeasures, but the thing is rewritin' itself too fast for me to pin it down and figure out what we're dealin' with. But its code is decaying with every cycle, makin' it less and less effective. Near as I can tell, even without an anti-virus this thing'll run its course in about three hours."
"Yeah, took me about twenty minutes to wake up, and another thirty to regain full range of motion," Dan said, then nodded towards the cable binding his feet. "Not that it made much difference."
"Then what was the point?" Nick asked, already recovered enough to roll over, allowing him to see that he really was in one of the workshops along with at least fifty other Workers.
"Maybe it's caching us?" A random drone suggested. "Y'know, so it can come back any time and still have fresh oil?"
"There are species of wasps that incapacitate tarantulas, drag them into burrows and lay an egg on them," a female drone with an oddly monotonous voice said from somewhere in the room. "The egg hatches and the larva eats its way into the spider and consumes it alive over the course of we-"
"Okay, who are you? Who is that?" Nick demanded. "New rule, whoever you are: you're not allowed to talk. Ever."
"Yeah, that was ten pounds of 'nope' in a five-pound bag," the Southern drone said.
"Isn't it also a movie?" a different drone asked.
"Several, actually," another one, who sounded a lot like Jeff, answered.
"Any good?"
"The first is decent but overrated, the second one was a masterpiece, and the others range from mid to war crime."
"CAN WE FOCUS?!?!" Nick screamed. He loved his people, but he would readily admit that they could be infuriating. Like when they seemed to be hell bent on committing to some kind of bit even in the most serious situations.
"On what?" Jeff asked.
"I dunno, maybe GETTING OUT OF HERE?!"
"Unless you've got cutters rated for tungsten, good luck with that," Dan said as he nodded towards the cables binding his hands and feet.
"Not necessarily," a cyan-eyed drone with a mild Russian accent said as he stood up, completely free from his bindings.
"What the hell?"
