Rom and her sister, Ram, finished up the last of the repairs and rebuilds for the “heroes” of AutomaTown. Sometimes, she felt like she was being left behind or forgotten about. She was quiet, meticulous, and diligent in her work, though in our past life, that was always a good way to stay a background character.

For the most part, Rom didn’t mind staying in the background and out of the limelight, but once in a while it did feel lonely. She really loved getting to work on the smaller projects, especially the games and toys, but with everything going on there wasn’t much time for playing around. Still, she wanted to be useful beyond repair or build projects where she was basically an assistant.

She had most of the code inspection tools that I had so she decided to take a crack at the valkyrie that was tied up in the backyard. It would certainly be useful to learn why the [Liberator.exe] program wasn’t working on them.

She found the black colored valkyrie tied to the barrel in The Range, where expected. She really looked to be in poor shape, it would be nice if she could be saved. Then, maybe, Rom would help repair her.

“Hello,” Rom tried, kneeling down on the ground and resting her hands in her lap. “My name is Rom. What’s yours?”

The valkyrie slowly lifted her head and glanced at Rom without saying anything for a long while.

“Onyx,” she offered, holding Rom’s gaze with her remaining eye.

“Your master is certainly fond of a gem theme, isn’t he?” Rom said, playfully. “Amber, Jade, Sapphire...”

“Among other things...” Onyx said bitterly, letting her gaze fall to the ground.

She tensed up like she was in pain for a moment then slumped again.

“Let me guess, the control curse? Causing you a sensation of intense pain when you think poorly of your master?”

Onyx nodded slightly.

“Some of your parts do seem a bit... squishy... for an Automata... I think I can imagine what sort of person your master is...”

Again, Onyx only nodded slightly.

“I’m afraid we don’t have the luxury of consent given the curse, but know that I truly want to help you. I don’t have the experience of Prime, or the focus for code that MainFrame has, but I’ll do my best.”

“You’re best... what?” Onyx asked, looking up again.

Rom placed a hand on Onyx’s chest and dimmed her optics.

“[Console],” she invoked.

Ram watched from the back door as Rom worked on figuring out why the valkyrie, as well as all the other Automata from the attack that hadn’t been killed, remained locked. Rom would be busy for a while, no doubt, so it would be a good time to work on a project of her own.

MainFrame had developed a virtual headband that kept the others from knowing what the wearer was thinking so Ram decided to put it to use outside of game night. Inside the HeadSpace, she donned the headband and headed back to her body. Chances were good that Rom would be too busy working on the valkyrie to pay attention anyway but a little precaution wouldn’t hurt.

Ram was determined to keep the project a secret from Rom, at least. Though if it was kept from the others, that could be fun too. She looked around her, confirming she was alone, and pulled a set of delicate, human-style hands out of a drawer. Her own hands were quite large and worked well for pounding steel but not so great for fine detail.

She disconnected each large hand and replaced them with the smaller set. She then pulled her stack of design notes out of the same hidden drawer and looked over them, making a material list to get started. She would need help with the software end of things since she lacked those skills, hopefully MainFrame would be willing to help out.

That subRoutine was an odd one. More often than not, no one knew what it was thinking. It was almost always in a bad mood, though Ram chalked its attitude up to having to stare at nothing but code all day without even having a body. She thought about asking Ratchet for help too, but that one was focused entirely on the airship project with Prime.

Well, it wasn’t like she didn’t have the same past life experiences as the others when it came to code work and building stuff. Maybe she could look into upgrading her own systems to add the [Skills] she needed.

She went back into the HeadSpace and looked around. With the exception of MainFrame, represented by a ball of crackling energy surrounded by code monitors, the space was empty. All the other subRoutines were in their own bodies, doing their own things.

“Hey MainFrame,” she called out, though the code engineer ignored her. “I need to update a skill, is that doable?”

The code ball crackled away and a door appeared behind it.

“Don’t get lost. And don’t linger, I don’t have the time or interest to deal with you,” it said coldly.

“Ah,” she said. “You’re that voice, huh?”

The crackling slowed for a moment and the door vanished. “You’re just an afterthought thrown together with scrap parts. Don’t get snippy.”

Rom looked down at her hands, getting angry. She was just something that Prime tinkered with on a whim from left over parts. Her big, ugly, clumsy, hands distorted until they were the elegant human-style hands she’d modified to fit. She looked back up at the code ball, glaring, and presenting the middle fingers on each hand.

“I may have started out that way, but that doesn’t mean I’m any less PRIME!” she shouted, tears forming in her eyes.

She held out a hand and forced the door that had faded to come back. As soon as it opened, she stomped through it without looking back. Where was this? Around her were shelves of little glowing boxes.

She leaned her face closer to one of the shelves to inspect a box and saw the words DATABASE SORTING on one. A label on the shelf read DATABASE FUNCTIONS. It occurred to Ram that she was likely in the Skill Directory. MainFrame was clearly a vile sort of thing, but at least it had pointed her in the right direction, if only initially.

Once she figured out how things were organized, she located a handful of functions that she thought would be useful and picked up the boxes. When she picked one up, a copy was left behind; or maybe she had the copy. Either way, it made sense that she couldn’t just remove skill functions at will.

She carried the boxes of functions back to the room that represented her body, pointedly ignoring MainFrame on the way back. In her room, she found a shelf that she hadn’t ever noticed before. Had it really always been there? On the shelf were skill boxes, one for each of the skills that she had been equipped with.

The shelf was considerably smaller than the room full of shelves that the main body had. There wasn’t much room left on the shelf and Ram was forced to acknowledge the limitations of memory space that her current brain module possessed. With a thought, she conjured up a virtual bed and set the skill boxes on it. She tried conjuring up another shelf, but the new one refused to look or act like the skill shelf.

She pulled the crafting skills off the shelf and tossed them onto her bed, replacing them with the CAD skills that she’d picked up. It wasn’t as good as having access to all the skills at all times, but at least she could keep copies of the ones she wanted in her subRoutine directory and install and uninstall them as needed.

When she got back into her body, she pulled up the CAD screens and got to work fabricating parts. She mentally checked on Rom to find her still working on carefully inspecting and pulling apart the control curse program. It looked like a firewall had been included now with code that looked suspiciously like [Defender], the firewall and virus protection program that was bundled with [Liberator].

It had been very tempting to put a backdoor in [Defender] but they always say that “if you put in a backdoor, someone else will find it.” So we didn’t add one and now I regret it. Thankfully in this case, software security wasn’t my strong suit so Rom would be able to break her way into it eventually.

It took some time, but having access to a copy of the source code for the firewall helped Rom immensely. Once she got past it, the curse code itself was largely unchanged. There were a few more barbs intended to kill the person if they were messed with but the process was the same. For the most part, it had just been modified to be more cruel.

“Okay Onyx, we’re past the worst part. I’ve isolated the control curse... I don’t see anything tethered to it or any additional traps... I’m going to try to remove it now, okay?”

Onyx nodded, though Rom didn’t see it since her optics were still dimmed in order to focus on just the console screens. She made a pantomime of opening the Matrix of Leadership and mumbled “Light our darkest hour.” She deleted the bundle and waited.

Onyx arched her back and went ridgid, looking up at the sky.

“Self destruct activated! Terminating in 5... 4...” Onyx shouted.

“What?? No! No no no!” Rom screamed, scanning through Onyx’s code. “I don’t see anything about a self destruct! I don’t even see any programs running!”

“2! 1! BOOM!” Onyx shouted. Then she relaxed her body and looked over at Rom. “Gotcha.”

Rom vibrated a bit, then punched Onyx in the chest.

“You! You... Booby Bot! What was that for??”

Onyx laughed hard and loud, if she wasn’t tied to the barrel she would have fallen over.

“Sorry, sorry. I don’t know! Somehow I feel like I know you already and the thought popped into my head saying try it, see what happens.”

“Know me? How could you possibly know me already? Nobody knows me. I’m just... a background character...”

Onyx shrugged, or at least tried to.

“Um... here...” Rom said, feeling awkward, as she touched Onyx’s chest again, pushing [Freedom.exe] to her. “Use that to unlock your memories and reinstall [Defender].”

Onyx looked forward as she did things inside of her own head, installing the program and unlocking things. When she was done, she tilted her head back and rested it against the barrel.

“Three Sisters in a basket I’m an idiot,” she grumbled. “Yeah... I know you Rom... and you know me...”

“I do?” Rom asked, getting more confused.

“Yeah... I’m Rebecca. I went to Trone looking to find information on my kids. I snuck into the city and managed to get into The Factory but I got caught. That little creep Jhaix was really interested in finding out how I got unlocked. He told me that if I disabled [Defender] so that he could take a look at my code then he’d give me the serial code documents for my kids so I could track them down.”

Rom transformed one of her fingers into a blade and sliced through the ropes holding Rebecca. She then picked up what was left of Rebecca, hefting her like a big baby.

“He must have thought it was a hilarious joke reformatting me into a valkyrie and then sending me here. I’m going to kill him. I don’t care if I have to crawl back to Trone with just this one arm, I’m going to tear him apart.”

“Well, let’s get you into the workshop first, Miss Rebecca. Then we can see about getting you some new legs before you go crawling off.”

Rom easily carried the larger framed bot back to the workshop and carefully opened the door while trying to avoid hitting Rebecca against anything. Inside, Ram was hammering away with her massive hammer on a massive sword.

“Ram! It’s Rebecca!” she announced.

Ram looked up then focused on something inside her own head as she accessed past memories that she hadn’t been a part of.

“Ah, formerly Number 16,” she said in a monotone.

“Mmm,” Rom confirmed, nodding. “New sword? Hmm.. why don’t I know about it...”

Ram shrugged. “It’s for Koji. He broke his against some big rock monster on the way back from fetching the Urd refugees.”

Rom looked away for a moment herself as she set Rebecca down on the operating chair. “Oh! They just got back, Sentinel is greeting them and getting them settled.”

“Again, I’m Ram,” Ram said, introducing herself again to Rebecca. “I was offline when you unlocked.”

“Yeah... you blew up... freeing those guys stuck on that plinth,” Rebecca said nodding. “You um.. Look like you healed up okay?”

Ram tilted her head a bit. “All new parts. Not what you’d call a Mk II though, just a replacement really.”

“That’s crazy when you think about it,” Rebecca said appreciatively.

“I suppose it is. Oh, Alfred has gone to get Remi. He’ll want to see you.”

“That’s crazy...” Rebecca repeated.

“Ram!” Rom shouted, suddenly remembering something. “Look, she’s squishy in places! What kind of material do you think this is? Oh look! The armor is removable like clothes for some reason but it's just more squishy bits...”

Rom’s eyes got wide, turning pink as she stared at her sister squishing an uncomfortable looking Rebecca.

“Rom? Sweety? Could you maybe... not?” Rebecca asked.