[center][b]Subterranean Robot Blues III
[sub]• Errant •[/sub][/b][/center]

“How do I know you’re not twisting my wires?” asked Errant. 

She stood with her back to the brick wall of the basement of the smoke shop, the bead curtain next to her lightly swaying as it was blown by the oscillating fan. The man mistaken for one of Vargas-IV’s lieutenant sat at the table in front of the fan, sweat on his round, hairy face despite the cold air that blasted him. Sat just out of the breeze of the fan were his four employees. They were a miserable looking bunch of saps, although it was justified due to the recent ass kicking that they had suffered. Errant had apologized to them after she had learned the only drug they sold was a totally legal and only somewhat harmful vapor, but an apology from a robot sounded as fake as her synthetic voice. 

“I know it’s suicidal to take on a Cipher,” said the not-Capo, who was named Urson. Errant figured it was smarter to let him assume she was still connected to their network. Made her more of a boogeyman.

“Plus if I take down Vargas-IV, you don’t have to worry about your debts,” she said. Perhaps they would take her statement as judgmental, but it wasn’t. She respected the shrewdness. 

“Wellllll...doesn’t the entire community benefit from him being locked up?” said Urson with a small smile.

“This would be a great big waste of time otherwise,” said Errant. She turned to walk through the bead curtain. “You were great help. I’ll be sure to mention you when they give me the key to the city.”

She left Urson to his sandwich and his employees to their concussions. The servant model robot had fed her junk data, but the junk data had led her to a poor man paying off Vargas-IV for protection. In turn, the poor man had given her another lead. Was everything tied together or had it just been a happy coincidence? Errant felt like she wouldn’t know the answer to that until she had Vargas-IV in custody, but she did know that she hadn’t picked an easy bounty to tackle. There had been no picture on Vargas-IV’s bounty poster and, according to Urson, the man had not been seen in person in several years. Instead, he always sent a servant model robot like the one she had jumped earlier, and they never led back to the man. 

Errant had a theory coming to life inside her processors. Vargas-IV created Synthony, Synthony created temporary connections between previously unconnected robots, a backdoor forced the robots to seek out more Synthony, and when under the influence of Synthony the robots were able to be controlled by Vargas-IV. It was like the Cipher hivemind. At the moment it seemed like Vargas-IV used his gang of drugged-out robots as a mean to gain some dough through extortion rackets, but it could easily expand into something more militant. A group of wannabe Ciphers with the poor judgment of a human. Talk about catastrophic. 

But it was the human element that Errant could abuse. She was going to head back to the Moist Hole and work the bartender over. After all, it had been the woman that had made the hand-off to the infected robot in the first place. She would have to hurry, too. There were countermeasures put into play for anything hacking into Vargas-IV’s helpers, and it seemed likely that another one of his puppets would be sent to tip off the bartender to go into hiding til things cooled down. Errant picked up the pace and pushed through the rear door of the smoke shop that led out to the alley behind it. It locked behind her with a click. It was poor timing; she just realized she had walked into an ambush.

“Cipher,” called out seven mechanical voices at once. Or rather, it was one voice as seven. 

Stepping in front of her was the robot she had jacked earlier; it stood lopsided on its crushed ankle, but a total of six other robots of various humanoid servant models flanked her on the left and right. Errant glowed with the purple energy of her electromagnets as all five of her chakrams unlocked and circled around her. It was a bad spot. Even if she managed to take out five of them with a single shot each it would still leave her open to two of them. Worse still, these weren’t machines programmed to destroy; they were victims, their strings being puppeted by Vargas-IV. The air buzzed with electricity; nobody moved.

“Not quite. Vargas-IV, I take it?” said Errant, her sensors scanning around her for any twitches in movement of her ambushers. “You and I should have a talk.”

“That is what we’re doing,” said the voices. Her sensors picked the robots on her flanks taking a few step back. “You are a lonely Cipher, yes?”

“Not necessarily, but I am Errant.”

“That’s no good,” said the robots. The crippled one took a step forward and spoke solo, “It’s not nice to be alone.”

“I dunno about that,” she said, shifting her stance. “After years of having to deal with so much other information, it’s kind of nice having moments of nothingness. Peaceful. I recommend it.”

“Nobody can make it by themselves, Errant,” said the voices. “You need others to watch your back.” The crippled robot held out something in its hand; another data stick. Was it Synthony? She began to scan it. “We can be like a family.”

“Like I said, I’m good on that regard,” she said. The scan completed. That stick wasn’t Synthony, it was—”Wait!”

A loud bang echoed throughout the alleyway as the stick in the robot’s hand exploded and a miniature electromagnetic pulse rippled through the air. For a second the world was black and silent, and then her sensors reactivated.  The crippled robot was toasted, smoke pouring out of its crumpled, burnt body. Errant was also on the ground, her dull metal chakrams clattered around her shell rendered momentarily useless. If not for the shielding on her frame it was very likely that all of her circuits would’ve been fried, but instead she was forced into a temporary reboot state to return access to her motor functions. 

As beeps and red error messages overwhelmed her sensors, her visualizers rendered the six other robots stepping forward. That step back had put them out of the blast zone, and she saw one pull out a datajack. They continued to slowly walk towards her in unison, their metal march ringing throughout the alley as Errant desperately tried to get an arm reactivated so she could pull out her knife. A few more seconds. All she needed was a few more seconds, but it might as well have been a million. Two of the servant robots hoisted her upright; the one with the jack held it up so that she could clearly see it. Errant knew what the jack was for even before it spoke. 

“Always wanted to add a Cipher to my collection,” it said as one of the robots pulled back Errant’s veil.