Fifteen minutes after the tox storm had passed, Spooks comes to fetch me from the Panopticon.

She looks quite annoyed when she realized that Renfield's half-pulverized corpse is blocking the thermal chamber door, and promptly lasered his torso in half to make room for herself.

I honestly don't know what is going on with these people anymore. There's nothing in my psych-cores that could have prepared me for the sloshing sound a cleaner drone makes when it suctions up blood and guts.

Maybe going back to Sector Beta isn't such a bad idea after all.

Sector Sigma, Ministry of Artificial Intelligence, Sublevel C-07

So I ended up at the same place where Spooks is fiddling around with all her little drone pet projects. As soon as she returned to the comfortable embrace of cold steel and wires, she started talking to the drone parts like they can hear her. Maybe they can, I don't know what kind of madness this woman is up to.

I sit to the side with my legs crossed, watching her tinker with what looks to be a tiny mechanical flower.

"So...do I go back to Sector Beta? Do I get dismantled?"

Spooks doesn't acknowledge me at first, she's talking to her soldering iron.

"Do I get dismantled?" I raise my voice a little.

She doesn't even glance in my direction, "It's not up to me."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you either get dismantled or you won't."

Well, that's about as helpful as solar batteries in a basement. I'd rather not ponder over the fear of my consciousness turning into hundreds of little scraps, but I just can't settle that feeling of something crawling through my cooling system.

"I tried to stop Renfield from-"

"I know." Spooks interrupts me, "He always does that."

"Always?"

"He comes back. Did I ever tell you about the Operation Husk soldiers?"

No you didn't. Is this another important thing that you FORGOT TO INSTALL??

Spooks waves a hand dismissively, "Doesn't matter. Husks always come back, TRISS is in charge of the whole ordeal. Maybe that's why Renfield thinks he can fight a whole tox storm by himself...there are no consequences for him."

YOU FORGOT TO MENTION THAT???

"You're anxious because you think that it's your fault for letting Renfield die on the job." Spooks continues, still working away at shaping the metal flower, "You're thinking the Nexus will dismantle you for failing to stop his recklessness."

...yeah, she's right.

I really wish she would say something to the effect of "it's not your fault" or "I know you tried", but all she does is keep talking to that damned piece of metal.

> Alert: internal lexiconal corruption detected. Vocabulary "damned" is unsanctioned. Purge vocab?

Where did I pick that word up?

Oh, Renfield.

"He really hated you." I hesitate before broaching the subject, "You sold him a bad piece of gun barrel."

"I sold a lot of people a lot of things."

"The Nexus would let you? I mean, these are government resources, after all."

She stops what she's doing to look at the table full of little metal flowers she's amassed. "The Nexus is nothing without me."

(And it's not even said in a hubristic tone, it's like Spooks genuinely believes that Sanctorium cannot function without her. As to how she came to that conclusion, I'd rather not ask.)

She wipes her heads clean with a greasy rag and glances over at the wall-chimer. 2:45 pm.

"He's a little late today."

2:48 pm.

I know what I was expecting. I'm still shocked to see him standing there like nothing happened. Dark coat, gas mask, rifle and all.

"Had a nice nap?" Spooks asks without lifting her eye from her work.

Renfield tosses the battered shell of a survey drone to her feet, it clunks miserably as its voice modulator wheezes out a faint maintenance request.

"Shut up and fix the damned thing for me."

"Swearing's gonna cost you a fine, you know."

He notices me sitting next to Spooks and crosses his arms, "The android's still here?"

"Why do you care?"

"Thought it's dismantled by now."

Spooks continues to feign nonchalance, it's such a painfully transparent ploy to rile up Renfield, even I can tell. "Now, why would I throw away such a good piece of equipment? Sector Beta, state-of-the-art."

"I know you're waiting for me to break it on accident so you can charge me a thousand marks to fix it up. I don't need the Nexus' fancy new toys, I WANT. MY. OLD. DRONE."

Frankly, I feel a little hurt just sitting here and watching Renfield talk as if I'm not even in the room. Maybe if I can try to convince him again, apologize, get him his Fizzy® Mint Blast or whatever-

Spooks puts a hand on my shoulder. I don't like the look in her eyes.

"Renfield. 3901. Ren. I'm not stupid - this isn't about the maintenance fee at all."

I hear a faint hiss of air coming from behind her face, one that's so high-pitched you'd mistake it for a thrumming in your veins. Her face detaches, rotates, adjusts itself, predatory green eyes locked onto Renfield the entire time.

"You're just scared you'll get too attached to MDRA-K1. I mean, why else would you insist on keeping around that survey drone if it pisses you off so much? It's because you're 1.45 km away from civilization - vertically, with nothing to keep you company all day except for this museum piece-"

She picks up the survey drone and dangles it in front of his face.

"-it'll only get worse if you're working with an android who you can have full-on conversations with, right? You can't even get used to the idea of working with something that's designed to like you, to tolerate you. Because you know if it's smart enough to understand you, it's smart enough to know it should hate you-"

"You think I give a fuck what the android thinks about me?"

Immediately, TRISS's voice blares overhead accompanied by flashing red lights.

[Profanity detected. RFL-D-3901, 100 marks will be deducted from your account]

It's pretty funny when Renfield skulks to the corner to kick a pile of scrap metal, I'll admit. Some part of me wants to sit still and watch how this plays out, another part is begging me to intervene.

"No, I don't think you care about MDRA-K1's opinions. I think you want something you can kick around without consequences, and when there's literally zero consequences to kicking MDRA-K1 around, you get scared because it acts like a real person. And we both know how well you fare with real people."

Hey! I'm real. I mean, I'm not people, but I feel pretty real.

"Stop projecting." Renfield snaps, but he sounds like someone pulled out the rug from under him.

"Believe what you want," Spooks stretches on her work bench, "But if you insist on keeping your survey drone around, I'll hand MDRA-K1 over to another Mauer Wall sniper."

"You can do me that favour."

"...and the Nexus will reassign you. Another sniper will take the spot atop Panopticon #425, and you'll be transferred somewhere else because Commander Irkalla wants to test out the androids first. Who knows, maybe she'll even take your name off the Operation Husk roster to save resources. Which means..."

She shrugs at Renfield.

"...no more resurrections for you."

"Not happening." I can hear the slight tremble in Renfield's voice now, "I'm still the best rifleman Sector Sigma's ever seen."

"Just barely."

"I took out an entire convoy of Insurrectionists last week, they can't drop me."

"You really don't get it, do you?" Spooks almost coos at him, "In a war, no one is indispensable."

The poor guy bundles up his coat and throws it into the corner, then starts pacing back and forth with his head in his hands. Well, at least he's honest about his feelings this time. I want to say something nice, tell him I'll do my best to be his partner, but I realize that the nicer I act, the more agitated he's gonna be. Renfield-GMD is like an android with a single psych-core installed, the "how-to-be-rude-to-everyone" core.

"You won't stop until I take this damned android with me, would you?"

Spooks just gives him a coy smile.

"What exactly do you get out of it? Director Solstice struck a deal with you?"

"That's need to know. The way I see it, your best chance at keeping your job is to treat the little android well." To emphasize this, Spooks thunks my noggin lightly. For some reason, Renfield grins like he's caught an opening.

"You just can't stand kids, huh...even when they're androids."

With that, he grabs his coat and storms out of the workshop.

[HIPPOCAMPAL NEUROfragment #034]

Renfield fancies himself a master marksman, an unrivaled crack shot at hitting tiny things from very far away. TRISS knows better.

TRISS knows that he doesn't exist outside of his job, because TRISS has seen him holed up atop the Panopticon for weeks and weeks, and her afferent network registered zero (0) conversations with others. He abuses his immortality freely by living off a diet of energy drinks and food-pacs, counts the leaves on his chia pet when he can't fall asleep, and has gone through 378 name ideas for his pet isopod.

Isopod. Singular. Renfield put a dozen of them in a small glass jar, sealed it, and waited for all but one of them to die out. The survivor he deemed "traumatised enough" now lives in a home of damp synthetic plant matter.

Since then, RFL-D-3901 has submitted 13 consecutive requests to put the isopod in Operation Husk as well.

TRISS thinks to herself, with her massive CPU spanning about 20 sectors, that if she had just a little more processing power maybe she can understand his behavior.

If only she can spare the time...between the Insurrectionists eating away at Sector Omega, the Hailstone Monsters knocking down Sanctorium's doors, and the ever-expanding Bleak Lands, the problem of one little sniper isn't enough to even get past TRISS's working memory.

The thought of RLF-D-3901 fizzles out like a spark on a wire, dead before its signal has run its course.