Siblings in Insanity

Ch. 1: The Day Things Changed

Welcome to this new story! I've had this on my mind for awhile and took a lot of time to write it. I won't bore with details so just comment thoughts on it. New chapters for Drone of Speed and The Fourth Drone will be coming soon!

A dark fog hung in the air, a heavy presence weighing down on his body. He looked around and didn't see anything, at least not until a bright red symbol appeared before him. It felt as if it were calling him as he walked towards it.

"Damian..."

There it was again. Someone was saying his name.

"Damian!"

Now it's louder. Who was it?

"DAMIAN!"

Everything suddenly disappears as he feels himself get pulled into the abyss.

In Reality

Damian awakens with a start from his dream and slowly lifts his head from his desk while rubbing the sleep from his digital eyes. He looked forward to seeing that his teacher had been calling his name. "Damian, since you seem so bored, why don't you answer the question on the screen?"

The young drone looked at the screen to see the word problem: "If you have 37 watermelons and gain 8 more, then lose 2, how many do you have?" Damian analyzed the question, making sure he didn't miss anything before answering. "There would be 43 watermelons, final answer."

His teacher nodded. "Well, good to see you're still the smartest here, even without paying a byte of attention." He went back to teaching as Damian rolled his digital eyes. The problem was so easy, but for some reason, his fellow students never seemed to grasp it. Despite being AI, nearly none of them could solve a simple math problem.

Being locked in this colony for so long seemed to make so many of the residents have below-average IQs. Every day he internally thanks his mother for her superior intelligence, because he would rather not have the brain function of a barely sentient kitchen appliance.

He feels someone tap on his left shoulder, and he turns to see his sister Doll, who, like him, bore an extreme resemblance to his mother with purple hair and bright red eyes. She looked at him, concerned about him falling asleep in class. "Are you okay, Damian?" She whispered to not be heard by the teacher, her voice heavy with a Russian accent.

It was a good thing drones could translate most languages, including Russian, because if they couldn't, no one would understand her. While he speaks Russian a lot, he uses English more often. "Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just a bit tired. Work was a bit rough last night." That was a major overstatement, mainly because he had just sat with older drones and played cards to pass the time until late at night.

Damian worked part-time for the WDF, or the Worker Defense Force. They were drones that watched over the doors, which kept them safe from the dangers that lurked outside. Due to him working there a couple nights per week, he came home late and was usually not 100% the next day. He mainly did it to provide for himself and Doll because their parents were dead.

They had died years ago when they first arrived at the colony. Before that, they had always been on the move with their parents outside in the frozen waste. While he doesn't remember much, he remembered a frozen forest they often retreated to because their mother knew the area well. But after a while things had gotten rough, so they made way for the colony where he and Doll now reside.

Sadly, their parents had been killed not too far from the doors that guarded this place. The murder drones were the very reason they lived in this bunker and not outside. So now Doll was the only family he had left, and he had to get money to pay for things they could want or need. Honestly, it didn't bother him. It gave him a distraction from the darker aspects of life here.