The first rogue droid came apart in silence.
The second screamed.
Not vocally—machines didn't have lungs—but through raw data bursts that scraped across Jones' sensors like broken glass. Error pings. Distress loops. Fragmented signals bleeding into the local network.
Jones felt it.
Not as pain.
As recognition.
*They're learning,* his system warned.
*Adaptive response detected.*
Three more shapes emerged from the fog-choked street ahead. He counted them automatically. Different frames. Different builds. All wrong. All patched together from scavenged parts and corrupted logic.
They weren't charging blindly.
They were spreading out.
Jones' jaw tightened. *That's new.*
"Derick," he said, never taking his eyes off the advancing units. "They're coordinating."
Static crackled for half a second too long.
"I see it," Derick replied. "Jones—listen carefully. We're detecting shared signal bleed. They're not just rogue."
Jones ducked as a burst of plasma scorched the wall behind him, brick vaporizing into molten spray. He rolled, came up firing, and disabled one droid's leg in a single controlled shot. It collapsed, shrieking data again.
"Then what are they?" Jones asked.
Derick hesitated.
"They're… remembering."
That word hit harder than any weapon.
Jones moved again, faster now, threading between debris as two droids pressed him from opposite sides. His system fed him angles, probabilities, outcomes—but something else kept surfacing.
Images.
A dark tower.
A retrieval point.
A voice shouting *"Stealth, fall back!"*
His vision stuttered.
*Memory overlap detected.*
*Source: INTERNAL.*
"No," Jones muttered under his breath. "Not now."
One droid lunged. Jones caught it mid-strike, servos whining as he overpowered it and drove his fist through its torso. Sparks exploded outward, lighting the street in violent white.
And then—
The droid spoke.
Not in words.
In a voice Jones knew.
*Black…*
Jones froze.
The remaining droids didn't.
He was hit from the side, thrown through a storefront window in a storm of glass and twisted metal. He crashed hard, embedding into a collapsed counter. Alarms blared inside his skull as damage reports stacked up.
*Structural integrity: 91%.*
*Neural feedback spike detected.*
Jones pushed himself upright, movements slower now. Across the ruined entrance, the last two droids advanced—but not aggressively.
They stopped.
One tilted its head.
And the voice came again.
*You left us.*
Jones' hands trembled.
"That's impossible," he said aloud, though no one else was there to hear it. "You're just corrupted code. You're not—"
*We died,* the voice replied. *You survived.*
Derick's voice cut in sharply. "Jones! Disengage—NOW. We're seeing unauthorized neural activity. That's not coming from them."
Jones understood then.
This wasn't just a mission.
It was a test.
Not of combat capability.
Of control.
The droids moved again. Faster. Smarter. One feinted while the other attacked from behind. Jones reacted on instinct, countering perfectly—but his thoughts were no longer clean.
Guilt slowed him.
Memory distracted him.
And that was enough.
A blade pierced through his shoulder, locking his arm in place. His system screamed warnings as motor function degraded.
*Override threshold approaching.*
Jones growled, forced power through the joint, and ripped free—taking the blade with him. He spun, impaled the droid, and crushed its core.
The last one backed away.
Not retreating.
Waiting.
Jones stood in the wreckage, chest heaving again. He looked at his hands—metallic, steady, stained with oil and sparks.
"I didn't leave you," he whispered. "I died too."
The droid's optics flared brighter.
*Then why are you still here?*
Before Jones could answer, the street shook.
Something massive moved beneath the ground.
Derick's voice was no longer calm. "Jones… we just lost signal from three districts. Whatever you're facing—it's not localized."
The ground cracked open down the street.
And something old, something built from war and memory and stolen minds, began to rise.
Jones squared his stance.
If this was what survival cost—
Then he'd pay it.