“Quin!” The voice is Star’s, as brightly cheerful as her name. “Quin, look! Look what Shag and I found!”

Quin looks up, lifts his visor. “Another heap of junk, I’m guessing.”

But the shape she pulls behind her on a ragged sheet is distinctly human, and when she lugs it into his workshop and lays it out in all its glory, it’s an android.

Quin squats down to survey the damage. The left side of the face has been stripped of its synthetic flesh, leaving a gaping eye socket from which one metal eyeball stares, unblinking and unlit. The metal skull is a sturdy alloy that seems to have stood up to its weathering, showing only faint scratching. The torso is a mess, flaps of synthskin hanging where they’ve been damn near cut away, exposing gashes and mangled metal bones beneath. Most of the wiring is cut or damaged, several of the individual parts in a bad state as well.

The right arm has been torn off at the elbow, though Star managed to find one of the same make which now lays in the android’s lap, some of the fingers bent at a drastic angle. The left leg is missing completely, but Quin guesses, with enough hard work, he can reverse-engineer it based on the right one.

He turns the android over and finds a yawning hole in the back of its head.

Quin hisses a little through his teeth as he pokes around with his finger, feeling frayed and melted wiring, shattered and snapped circuit boards—a whole lotta damage he can’t fix.

“Not worth it,” he says, straightening up. “The main unit’s pretty much shot. I’ll see if there’s anything I can salvage. Some polysynth, maybe.”

“Aw.” Star squats by the android and peers into the hole. “Well, see if you can’t pull the CPU. I bet it’s mad powerful.”

---

“Uh, hey, Quin?”

Quin works free a knot of ruined wire and looks up. “What?”

Star clears her throat and says, “So I hooked up the CPU and memory from that android, and, uh. . .Well, come take a look. You’ll see what I mean.”

He peels off his gloves and follows her into her workspace—a room messy with wires and cables, screens flashing things Quin can’t begin to understand. In the midst of the disarray is a desk strewn with noodle bowls and coffee mugs, where Star’s behemoth of a computer sits.

On screen, past a long line of commands and a bunch of stuff that’s nothing more than word vomit to Quin, is a single blinking line:

> WHERE AM I?

“I keep trying to dig into the android’s programming, but that line retypes as fast as I can delete it,” Star says, plopping into the chair. “He keeps trying to hack my OS too.”

Quin frowns. “You’re telling me you just happened to dig up a sentient android? Come on, Star. Those don’t exist.”

> I EXIST YOU BASTARD

“Oh yeah, he’s got access to my mic and camera too,” Star says casually. “It’s probably trash compared to the sensors he’s used to, but he can see and hear us.”

Quin fights back a shudder and says, “What do you want me to tell you? His body’s beyond repair, and who’s to say he wouldn’t flee right to the GA if I somehow did repair him?”

> THE HELL’S THE ‘GA’?

Star swivels her chair around to face him. “Please, can you try? You’ll have to pretty much rebuild most of him, so can’t you just disable his weapons system or add some sort of kill switch?”

> PUT A FUCKING KILL SWITCH ON ME AND YOU’LL BE DEAD BEFORE YOU BLINK

“Oh, shut up,” Star says, waving dismissively at the screen. “What’re you gonna do? You’re trapped in my computer, unless Quin can rebuild your body.”

“I’m not rebuilding a murderous android!” Quin protests. “You know how it works, Star. I fix them and you reprogram them. If this thing is sentient, that’s a ‘hell nah’ from me.”

“Yes, yes, I know, but you saw the kind of potential he has!” Star says. “We’ve never found another android with systems that complicated. And this level of intelligence. . .He must’ve been thrown out for a reason, and it wasn’t because he wasn’t up to scratch.”

> CAN WE QUIT DISCUSSING ME LIKE I’M NOT HERE?

Quin reads the words and suppresses the urge to pull the android’s cords. “What makes you think he’ll be interested in helping us? He was clearly created to fight us.”

“We should at least give him the chance.”

That shuts Quin up. It’s the one thing he can’t argue with—though he’s still nowhere near happy about the decision he’s about to make.

“Fine. I’ll see if I can fix him up. But if this leads to him running off and telling the GA about all of this, I’m blaming you.”