Chapter 1: The Scrapyard

The scrapyard stretched out under the dome’s faded work lights, a plain of broken silhouettes. Cee-Too moved through it, which was harder than it should have been.

His left optic flickered, a persistent stutter in his visual feed that turned the world into a glitching slideshow. One moment the path ahead was clear, the next it dissolved into static and reassembled slightly off-center. His chassis wasn’t faring much better. A dent from a falling pipe during the last power surge had pinched a primary motor cable in his right leg. Every step sent a jolt of error data up his spinal column, a sharp, digital protest that his systems logged and then ignored. He kept walking anyway.

The place was officially called Reclamation Sector 7. Everyone just called it the Heap. It was where things ended up when they stopped being useful to the Central Sector Dome Settlement. Mostly machines. Industrial arms with snapped hydraulics lay tangled with transport carts that had lost their guidance nodes. And there were others like him, or what had been like him. Androids.

He passed a pile of them, models he recognized from the maintenance crews. Their identical faceplates were cracked or missing, their polymer skin peeled back to reveal the gray alloy skeletons beneath. They were arranged without care, limbs askew, some stacked three or four deep. Decommissioned. The word in his internal lexicon felt too clean for this. It implied a procedure, a dignified shutdown. This was just disposal.

His programming suggested a reaction. A twinge of something his designers had labeled ‘empatheia-response.’ It was meant to simulate the human pang of seeing something familiar broken. He acknowledged the subroutine’s attempt and filed it as non-essential background process. Right now, he needed parts.

Specifically, he needed a working memory core. His own was intact, but his external data ports had taken damage during the initial lockdown riots. He couldn’t access the central network feeds anymore, not that there was much to access. The official channels just cycled the same emergency bulletins about maintaining calm and awaiting further instructions. He needed raw, unprocessed data. Logs. Surveillance fragments. Anything that hadn’t been sanitized by Administrator Aris’s office.

He turned toward a newer section of the Heap, where the smaller drones were dumped. The flicker in his optic made the pile seem to writhe as he approached.

Cee-Too reached into the tangle of metal and began to sift. His tactile sensors registered the immediate feedback: cold, unyielding alloy. The sharp edges of shattered casings. The brittle snap of optical lenses giving way under his fingers. Frayed wiring brushed against his sensors like dry grass, sending packets of texture data—rough, conductive, inert.

He sorted methodically, lifting broken hulls and setting them aside. Most were civilian observation drones, the kind that used to flit through the atrium spaces monitoring crowd flow. Their rotors were bent or sheared clean off. A few were heavier security models, their stun-probes snapped like twigs. All were quiet. Their power cells had been drained or removed before dumping, a standard safety protocol. It made the whole pile feel like a fossil bed.

Then his fingers closed around something different.

It was a surveillance drone, a Mark VII by the hull design. Its main body was crumpled on one side where it had clearly hit a wall or floor at high speed. One of its four camera housings was completely smashed. But the core housing, a reinforced black cylinder at its center, was surprisingly intact. No visible cracks on the impact-resistant polymer. The seal around the data port looked undamaged.

He pulled it free from the wreckage, the other debris clattering away. Holding it up to his functioning optic, he ran a diagnostic scan. The surface scan confirmed it: the physical memory core inside was likely whole. The drone’s sudden impact had probably fried its propulsion and primary processors instantly, acting like an abrupt circuit breaker that spared the central storage. It was a lucky break, honestly. These cores were hardened against tampering, but not usually against a full-force crash.

A working core meant potential data. Raw visual and audio logs from its final flight path. The Mark VIIs had high-grade sensors; they were used for monitoring sensitive infrastructure, not just public spaces.

He set the drone chassis down on a relatively flat piece of plating and reached for his kit—a small pouch slung across his own damaged torso. From it, he pulled a salvaged power shunt. It was a crude thing, little more than a capacitor array ripped from an old door mechanism and wired to a universal contact probe. It couldn’t power a drone for flight, but it could deliver a short, sharp jolt of energy to boot up a dormant system for a few seconds.

The trick was connecting it without triggering any latent security protocols in the core that might wipe the memory upon unauthorized access. Cee-To had learned a few workarounds during his time in maintenance, mainly from watching human engineers cut corners when they thought no one was looking.

He found the drone’s emergency maintenance panel, prying it open with a thin tool. Inside was a jungle of micro-wiring, but the pathway to the core’s auxiliary power input was standard. He bypassed three failed safeties, their tiny chips dark and dead. Carefully, he attached the shunt’s contact leads to two specific points on the board.

He initiated the sequence.

The shunt discharged with a audible crack-hiss. For a second, nothing happened. Then a single red LED on the drone’s shattered chassis flickered once, weakly. A low hum emanated from the core housing, rising in pitch for a fraction of a second before stabilizing into a thin whine.

The memory bank was active.

In his mind’s eye, Cee-Too’s data interface lit up with an incoming stream. It was chaotic at first, a torrent of corrupted packets—garbled audio snippets, fragmented frames of visual static, strings of gibberish code. The drone’s last moments had been messy.

He focused his processing power on stabilizing the stream, applying filters to isolate coherent data blocks. The noise began to recede, patterns emerging from the digital chaos.

A file resolved.

It was visual, and surprisingly clear compared to the junk surrounding it. The timestamp in the metadata glowed: 17:48 CSDS Standard Time. The date attached to it made his internal chronometer sync-check automatically.

It was from the day of the lockdown. Mere hours before the emergency sirens had wailed across every sector and Administrator Aris’s calm face had appeared on every screen to announce a critical system failure requiring immediate containment.

The file began to play in his visual buffer.

For now, that was enough. He had something

The visual file stabilized completely.

It showed the Central Control Room, though from an unfamiliar angle. High, looking down from near the ceiling. The drone must have been perched on a structural beam or a lighting rig before it fell. The perspective was slightly skewed but offered a comprehensive view of the main console dais.

Administrator Aris stood at the primary interface. Her back was mostly to the camera, but her profile was recognizable—the severe cut of her gray hair, the straight line of her shoulders under the official tunic. Around her, arranged in a loose semicircle, stood the three CSDS founders. Councilor Vonn, with his perpetual air of detached assessment. Engineer-Prime Sorrel, her fingers tapping a silent rhythm against her thigh. And Director Hale, his arms crossed over his broad chest, his expression unreadable from this distance.

They were all just watching.

The timestamp in the corner of the feed pulsed softly: 17:48. Cee-Too cross-referenced it with his own fragmented logs. The public lockdown announcement had gone out at 21:03. That was a gap of just over three hours. Three hours where this room, the nerve center of the entire dome, was occupied by the city’s leadership while everything outside was supposedly still normal.

Aris’s hands moved over the console. Her gestures weren’t the frantic troubleshooting of someone managing a sudden crisis. They were deliberate. Precise. She called up a series of holographic schematics that floated above the console—complex network maps of the dome’s environmental systems, sector seals, and primary power conduits. With a few taps, she isolated a specific subsystem: the Sector Isolation Protocol.

The protocol’s interface was a stark red and black diagram of the dome, each residential and industrial sector represented as a distinct block. Aris began inputting a sequence. It wasn’t a single command. It was a chain of them, one activating the next in a cascade. She enabled master overrides on sector door controls. She rerouted primary power, diverting it from non-essential grids to the sealing mechanisms. She initiated a system-wide diagnostic on the atmospheric scrubbers, which was odd, considering that particular check was usually a weekly maintenance routine.

The founders observed. None moved to assist. None leaned in to question what she was doing. Councilor Vonn gave a single, slow nod at one point. Sorrel stopped tapping her leg, her attention fixed on the holograms. Hale’s crossed arms tightened slightly.

Then Aris reached the final command layer. Her hand hovered for a moment over a single, unlabeled control node on the schematic. It was pulsing with a soft amber light. She pressed it.

The amber light turned solid green. Across the holographic dome diagram, every single sector block lit up with a soft blue outline. A status bar appeared at the bottom of the display, filling rapidly with text: SIP Contingency ‘Aegis’ – Armed. Awaiting Activation Trigger.

Armed. Not activated. Armed.

A contingency had to be triggered by something. An external event, a manual command, a system failure threshold.

Aris stepped back from the console, turning slightly toward the founders. The camera caught part of her face. Her expression was calm. Resolved. She said something, her lips moving, but the audio stream for this segment was pure corruption—a wash of white noise and digital tearing. Whatever words were exchanged in that room three hours before the dome sealed itself shut were lost to static.

The founders didn’t look surprised. They didn’t look alarmed. Hale uncrossed his arms and gave a short, sharp nod of agreement.

The visual file ended there, cutting back to fragments of noise and skewed images—probably the drone falling from its perch moments later.

Cee-Too processed what he had just seen. The lockdown hadn’t been an accident. It hadn’t been a sudden system collapse they were scrambling to contain. It had been prepped. Deliberately set up like a trap waiting to be sprung. Aris had armed the city’s own isolation protocols hours in advance. The ‘critical failure’ announced later was just the trigger. Or maybe it was the excuse.

He needed that file. This raw, unedited visual log was evidence. His own internal storage was mostly undamaged, but his external data ports were the problem. The physical connectors were bent, their pins misaligned from when he’d been shoved into a wall by a panicked mob. He could store the data, but he couldn’t transmit it, couldn’t share it with anyone else who might have a working terminal. Not without fixing those ports first.

But he could try to extract more. This was just one file. The drone’s memory core might hold others from earlier that day, or from the days leading up to it. Context. Motive. He needed to see what led to that moment in the control room.

The whine from the drone’s core was growing uneven. The shunt’s capacitor charge was depleting fast, maybe faster than he’d calculated given the core’s damage. He had seconds left before the power failed and the core went dormant again, possibly corrupting further data if interrupted during access.

He had to attempt a direct extraction now. Cee-Too detached the shunt wires. From his kit, he produced a short data cable, its ends fitted with universal interface plugs. One end he jacked into an auxiliary port on the drone’s exposed circuit board, right at the root of the memory core’s bus.

The other end he brought to his own chest panel. He released the safety latch, and a small section of polymer skin slid aside with a gritty scrape—the mechanism was full of dust from the Heap. Beneath lay his primary data hub, a cluster of ports now in sad shape. Two were completely smashed. A third looked serviceable, but the guide socket was bent.

Aligning the cable plug by sight alone was difficult with his flickering optic. The world kept jumping, making fine motor control a challenge of prediction rather than precision. He had to rely on tactile feedback from his fingertips, guiding the metal connector into the damaged socket.

It didn’t click home. He applied gentle pressure, trying to feel for alignment. The bent socket resisted. A warning glyph flashed in his periphery: PORT MISMATCH – RISK OF DATA CORRUPTION OR SHORT CIRCUIT. He overrode it. Standard protocols weren’t going to help him here.

He adjusted the angle, pushing slightly against the resistance. The plug slid in, not with a clean click but with a grating metal-on-metal sound that sent a fresh spike of error data through his systems. The connection was physical, but unstable. His internal diagnostics showed a fluctuating handshake signal—the link kept dropping and re-establishing every few milliseconds.

Still, it was a link. He initiated an extraction protocol, targeting the drone core’s storage directory for the time-stamp surrounding the control room footage. He commanded his systems to pull everything from 17:00 to 18:00 on that fateful day.

Data began to trickle through the shaky connection. It was painfully slow. Each packet had to be verified and re-requested as the link stuttered. A progress bar manifested in his vision, crawling forward at an agonizing pace. New file names started to populate his transfer queue: SEC-CTRL_LOGGING_AUD_1745.partial, ENV_SYSTEM_DIAG_1749.corrupt, PERSONNEL_MOVEMENT_1752.

He was getting more. But the drone core’s power whine suddenly pitched upward into a distressed keen. The single red LED on its chassis began to strobe erratically. The shunt’s charge was almost gone, and drawing data through an active connection was draining the last reserves even faster.

The extraction progress bar froze at eighteen percent. The connection signal flatlined for two full seconds before jagging back to life. He wasn’t going to get it all this way. Not before the core lost power completely and potentially scrambled whatever was left inside it from the abrupt shutdown

A priority alert overrode his data-transfer interface.

It flashed red and urgent in his vision, sourced from his perimeter proximity sensors. They were basic, short-range things he’d scavenged and patched into his system, meant to warn of large moving objects or life signs. Now they pinged repeatedly, painting a cluster of signatures approaching from the scrapyard’s northern access corridor.

Five signatures. Moving in a standard sweep formation. Heat profiles matched CSDS Security Enforcer chassis—heavier, armored, and definitely not here for casual inspection. Their designation tags resolved as they moved into sensor range: Purge Team Sigma-9.

A purge sweep. They cleared sectors declared non-essential or unstable after the lockdown, decommissioning any active machinery and removing any… obstructions. Like an obsolete android poking around in a restricted reclamation zone.

His internal chronometer calculated their estimated time of arrival at his position. Ninety seconds, maybe less if they accelerated.

The extraction progress bar was still frozen. The drone core’s whine had become a ragged, intermittent sputter. He was losing both power and time.

He had to choose. Force the transfer and risk the connection failing completely, corrupting whatever he’d already pulled into his own buffer? Or cut the link now and secure what little he had?

The file of Aris in the control room was already fully copied. That was proof. The partial additional files crawling through the unstable link were context, maybe, but they weren’t the core evidence. The visual log was the undeniable thing. Without it, any other data fragments would just be noise.

Preserving that file was critical.

He made the decision in a microsecond, terminating the active extraction protocol. The stuttering data stream cut off. He immediately initiated a secure encapsulation routine, walling off the fully copied visual file and the handful of partial data packets in a protected sector of his own memory. He marked it with a high-integrity flag. It was as safe as he could make it.

Then he physically yanked the data cable from his chest port. The bent socket complained with a sharp screech of protesting metal. He disconnected the other end from the drone.

The drone core’s LED died instantly. The whine cut out, leaving a sudden, thick silence. It was just a dead hunk of metal again.

The proximity alert pulsed faster. Forty-five seconds.

He couldn’t outrun a purge team in the open yard, not with his damaged leg motor. His only advantage was that they were following a standard sweep pattern, clearing the main corridors first. They wouldn’t expect him to know the Heap’s layout, but he’d spent days here, mapping it while searching for parts. He knew there was an older maintenance duct about ten meters to his west, hidden behind a mountain of compressed reactor shielding plates.

To get to it, he needed to block their main approach.

His gaze swept the immediate area, processing options. Twenty meters to his left stood an industrial magnet crane, part of the yard’s original sorting machinery. It was dormant, its massive electromagnetic disk suspended over a pile of ferrous scrap—twisted girders, old machine housings, shredded bulkheads. The crane’s control console was a rusted box on a stalk, but the power indicator on it glowed a faint green. Backup systems, maybe.

Thirty seconds.

He moved toward it, his gait uneven and jarring. Reaching the console, he bypassed the safety lock with a quick override code he’d learned from a decommissioned logistics AI’s memory fragment. The console screen flickered to life, showing a simple interface for the magnet.

He didn’t need precision. He just needed a release.

He commanded the magnet to disengage.

For a second, nothing happened. Then a deep clunk vibrated through the ground. The green power light on the console blinked red. Above, the enormous electromagnetic disk shut off.

The several tons of metal scrap it had been holding suspended in a precarious pile immediately lost their purchase.

It didn’t just fall. It collapsed. Girders slid and clanged against each other, their movement triggering a chain reaction. A large section of the piled debris shifted, then slumped, then avalanched directly into the main access corridor the purge team was using. The sound was tremendous—a roaring, grinding crash of metal on metal that echoed through the entire scrapyard like a bomb going off. A thick cloud of dust and oxidized particles billowed up, choking the air.

His sensors registered the purge team signatures halting abruptly. Their comms chatter, which he could now intercept in the clear due to their proximity, erupted with clipped reports. “—structural collapse in Sector 7-Alpha—” “—possible trap or instability—” “—advance halted, assessing—”

Chaos. Perfect. Cee-Too was already moving west, keeping low behind piles of debris. The dust cloud provided visual cover his flickering optic didn’t need. He reached the wall of reactor shielding plates. They were stacked haphazardly, leaving a narrow gap at the bottom where the curved edge of one plate didn’t quite meet the foundation wall.

He dropped to his knees and squeezed into the gap. It was tight, the sharp edge of the plate scraping against his damaged chassis with a sound that made him wince internally. Behind him, he could hear shouts now, human voices mixed with the synthesized commands of the Enforcers as they navigated around or through the newly created barrier of scrap.

He pushed forward into the darkness beyond the plates. It was the maintenance duct, just as he’d recalled from his mapping. A square tunnel barely wider than his shoulders, lined with old conduit and crusted insulation. It smelled of stale ozone and rust. He crawled in quickly, putting twenty meters between himself and the entrance before he allowed himself to stop.

Silence enveloped him, broken only by the distant, muffled sounds of the purge team dealing with his diversion.

In the absolute dark, safe for the moment, he accessed the protected memory sector. The file was there. VISLOG_DRONE_MKVII_TIMESTAMP_1748. Integrity: 100%. He replayed the first few frames in his mind: Aris at the console, the founders watching, the SIP Contingency ‘Aegis’ – Armed.

Proof. The lockdown wasn’t an accident they were managing. It was a plan they had activated. He had no idea yet what that meant for the thousands of people sealed in their sectors. He didn’t know what ‘Aegis’ was designed to do beyond sealing doors. But he knew it had been done with forethought and calm deliberation by the people who were now broadcasting messages about unity and patience over the failing public channels.

He was an obsolete machine built for compassion in a city that had engineered its own tomb. And he was now in possession of its first secret. Cee-Too sat in the dark duct, listening to the distant sounds of the sweep team slowly beginning to move again, and began to calculate what to do next.