"I'm in," N said in a hushed tone as he silently dropped from the ceiling vent.
"What do you see?" Uzi asked over the comm link.
"Definite signs of a battle," N answered, flipping through his vision modes to get a better idea of what happened. "Bullet holes everywhere, multiple calibers. Craters and scorch marks from explosives. Claw and slash marks all around, and oil everywhere. At least one Disassembly Drone got in."
"Any idea how long ago?"
N walked over to the closest oil splatter and swiped a finger through it. He hesitated for a moment before popping the finger into his mouth.
"...Several days, maybe a week or more."
He hated that it was still tasty.
"So around the time we lost contact with them," Nick sighed.
"What's weird is that for all this oil, there aren't any bodies," N said, mostly thinking out loud.
"Maybe they took 'em to make another spire?" Erik suggested.
"Maybe, but when we did it, we only took mostly intact bodies," N grimaced as he remembered the early days. "We didn't bother with all the...bits and pieces."
The silence on the other end made him feel even worse.
"...Why did you guys make that thing?" asked an unfamiliar female voice.
N started a little, having forgotten that they had let the O-Four crew in on their frequency.
"No idea. It was part of our directive handed down by the Company, but...it was really more like a compulsion. I don't even remember most of it," N finished with a deep scowl.
As much as he always wished he didn't remember the atrocities he committed, the gaps in his memories concerning the spire never sat right with him. He remembered hunting, he remembered killing, then he would end up standing In front of the spire wondering how it got bigger. Looking through his memory files only added to the confusion, with literal hours of his life completely unaccounted for.
"And no one ever told you why?"
"No," N answered more aggressively than he meant to. "Or if they did, they only told the squad leader, and she wasn't the sharing type. I'm gonna clear the upper levels."
That effectively ended the conversation and N continued his sweep with an SMG at the ready.
It was a far more horrific experience than he ever imagined. He knew the kinds of things he was going to see, but he thought it would have far less impact because it wasn't him. But every time he opened a door to find yet another horror show, he could only think about the times when it was him.
He opened an apartment door and was assaulted by the memory of a blue-eyed Worker opening her door suddenly and catching him off-guard while he was trying to be stealthy. He remembered his hesitation and the unintentional cruelty of giving her just enough time to realize what was about to happen before his sword skewered her face. He remembered screams from inside and smaller drones, clearly her children, huddling together and trembling in terror. He remembered deciding to leave right then and there; he didn't need the oil and he could surely fill his quota elsewhere.
He remembered V literally trampling him to get into the room.
Clearing a communal restroom took N on another trip down memory lane. He opened an empty stall and for a moment it wasn't so empty. There was a green-eyed drone sitting on the toilet, pointing a handgun at his face. Their standoff lasted for all of two seconds before the Worker brought the weapon back to put the barrel under his own chin and squeeze the trigger.
